Gripla - 20.12.2012, Page 379
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When his oversight in respect of the possible edo etymology was
drawn to his attention Liberman (1997) devotes two pages to summarizing
faulkes’s article and then refutes it on the grounds that snorri’s audience
would have known too little Latin to understand the pun.
Liberman’s rejection of the edo etymology seems precipitate. It was not
necessary for snorri’s readers to understand the word’s etymology in order
for the author to use it. It was sufficient that he himself found it pleasing,
and his pleasure will have been shared by others who either recognised
the play on words or had it pointed out to them. Indeed, this was my own
experience on reading faulkes article; “of course”, I said to myself.
Perhaps, indeed, the word edda is even more of a pun than has been
suggested, for not only might it have been coined as a parallel to kredda
but it could even derive directly from it. Kredda is a loanword from oe
crēda, the vernacular form of Latin credo. Both crēda and credo are nouns,
meaning originally either the Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene Creed. As old
norse had no intervocalic single /d/, this had to be replaced by either /dd/
or /ð/, and, as in stedda from oe stēda, it became /dd/. the oe ending –a
was retained as it fitted neatly into the on declension system. the mean-
ing of kredda developed into “superstition, illogically held belief”, probably
replacing an intermediate phase when it meant “belief (in general)”, but we
may assume that the original meaning was “creed”, in the sense of a summ-
ary of the Christian belief. If we create the equation
kredda = kristin trú,
or with an abbreviation
kredda = kr. trú,
removal of the letters kr produces
edda = trú.
In this way edda signifies a summary of non-Christian belief, a definition
that accords well with the mythological part of the Snorra-Edda.
this hypothesis may seem far-fetched and unlikely to have been
generally understood. But we have to realize that the Edda was intended
for poets working within and familiar with the complicated rules of
skaldic poetry. they probably knew quite a few poems by earlier skalds
and were thus no strangers to the mental agility required to decipher and
appreciate such verse. unusual vocabulary, unfamiliar word-order and the
use of complex kennings served to make the poetry difficult to under stand,
AnotHeR InteRPRetAtIon of tHe WoRD EDDA