Gripla - 20.12.2009, Síða 259

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mǫgminni, rescuing Bugge’s very early intuition with a theory based on his­
tory of the language: the earliest loss of final ­u would have occurred pre­
cisely in a compound, and the spelling with u instead of a is justified by the
u-umlaut which would have set in with the syncope of u.9 I find this a con­
vincing explanation, and in any case, mǫgminni is a great improvement
from the literary and hermeneutic point of view, establishing a nexus
between occasion and content that had been conspicuously absent.
the only line not translated in the Appendix is l. 20. In a forthcoming
article I attempt to reconstruct this damaged line; while my efforts yielded
a range of possible readings rather than a single most probable result, the
one I favor is: nu’k minni meðr allu sagi einn: huar iðgjald þa sunu aftir, fra
– which I translate freely as: “Now, speaking for myself (einn), I shall tell
a minni in conclusion (meðr allu): Who received recompense after a son’s
death, I know” (Harris forthcoming). The thematically crucial word here is
iðgjald, but the theoretical point brought out by the effort at reconstruction
confirms the validity of Leo Spitzer’s famous ‘philological circle’: every­
thing in the line depends on the whole, and the whole is comprised of 28
lines with the same part-to-whole relationship. Hermeneutic progress is
achieved by a movement back and forth between the whole and the part.
This is definitely not ‘science’ in the usual English meaning of the word,
and it provides only the remotest atoms of a larger historical point of view;
but it is interesting to me that a rescue operation like reconstruction sim­
ply exaggerates and lays bare the basic hermeneutic circle.
I will return to Rök to discuss the content and meaning of this unique
inscription, but it seems appropriate first to follow the trail adumbrated by
the word iðgjǫld. The word is drawn from Sonatorrek, egill Skallagrímsson’s
famous poem ‘the Irreparable Loss of Sons.’10 this oral poem, composed
in Iceland about 961,11 has a number of interesting features in common
with the inscription in stone from the western edge of Östergötland in the
9 Widmark 1992 [1993], 29–31; Grønvik 2003, 48–49 also offers arguments against múgr;
cf. Harris 2009, 39–40, n. 70.
10 Sonatorrek has been edited many times; I mention as especially significant: Sigurður nordal
1933, 243–57 (with the whole saga), Jón Helgason 1962, 29–38, Turville-Petre 1976, 24–41,
and jón Hnefill Aðalsteinsson 2001. I quote from jón Helgason’s edition.
11 I cannot do full justice to very recent skeptical discussion of Sonatorrek and its dating, but I
cite as two major instances Baldur Hafstað 1995 (see index and especially p. 160) and Torfi
tulinius 2004 (see index) and, as an able reassertion of the older understanding of egill,
jónas kristjánsson 2006.
PHILoLoGy, eLeGy, AnD CuLtuRAL CHAnGe