Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1979, Page 35

Fjöðrum fenginn 15
the idiom is ‘very happy, exultant’. Halldór Halldórsson argued that fjöörum
fenginn was the original form and fjöörum feginn the result of folk-etymology. He
referred to the fact that the past participle of verbs accompanied by a dative noun
very often means ‘endowed, provided, supplied, furnished, surrounded, covered’
with something. Thus, he assumed that fjöðrum fenginn originally meant ‘fur-
nished with feathers’, used about birds. The semantic change, the metaphor, would
then be most natural.
In the present article the author tells the story of how he came across the Old
English phrase feðrum bifongen ‘clad with feathers’, which exactly corresponds to
the East Icelandic fjöðrum fenginn and definitely confirms Halldór’s hypothesis.
In short, the author translated fjöðrum fenginn into Old English with respect to
the syntactic construction and looked up the words bifön/befön and feðer in Bos-
worth and Toller’s dictionary. FeÖrum bifongen occurs in the poem of the Phoenix
0. 380), the symbolic bird.
It is interesting to note that this apparently young and regional Icelandic idiom,
fjöðrum fenginn, has, to our knowledge, no single relative in the other Germanic
languages with this only exception in the Phoenix, which is probably written in the
second half of the 8th century. The question of borrowing from Old English into
Icelandic is touched upon and rejected as a remote possibility. Most likely the Old
English feðrum bifongen and the Modern (East) Icelandic fjöðrum fenginn go back
to a common ancestor which has Iost its unstressed prefix, bi-, in Proto-Nordic
according to a well-known rule.
In any case, fjöðrum fenginn, though only documented in modern times, is a
very old phrase, and it should be emphasized that the same is true for a number of
words and phrases in Modern Icelandic as has been proved repeatedly through the
word collection of the Icelandic Dictionary of the University of Iceland.