Íslenzk tunga - 01.01.1965, Page 66

64 HALLDÓR HALLDÓRSSON
i.e., ‘the standstill comes into somebody’s heart’, in other words ‘the
heart stops beating’.
6) The variant lijarta e-s gjörir slall and the corresponding Old
French and English phrases have already been discussed.
7) As regards the variant e-r drepr stall at gera e-t it is not only
the question of permutation, but also of the fading of the metaphor
and what I shall term ‘the detachment’ from the original context.
These phenomena I have discussed elsewhere80 and illustrated with
instances of other Icelandic phrases. Drepa slall in this variant simp-
ly has the meaning ‘lack courage’.
8) Last we must discuss the variant slál er drepið úr e-m, which
is very interesting. This phrase has a double origin. On the one hand
it is derived from the impersonal construction stall drepr ór hjarta,
where drepr has a passive meaning and is thus equivalent to er drep-
inn. On the other hand stál has been borrowed from some other
phrase, most probably slappa stálinu í e-n, where stál through per-
mutation has the meaning ‘courage’. Stappa stálinu í e-n ‘to infuse
somebody with courage’ is a metaphorical phrase derived from the
manufacture of arms, in the same way as the Swedish verb stal-
sálta.81
The variant stál er drepið úr e-m thus properly means ‘the courage
is knocked, i.e., is driven away, from somebody’ or in other words
‘somebody loses heart’.
Universily of Iceland,
Reykjavík.
80íslenzk orStölc (Reykjavík 1954), 19—20 and 56—60.
81 For the origin of this phrase, see ibid. 27—28.