Gripla - 20.12.2009, Blaðsíða 261

261
sonar iðgiǫld
nema sialfr ali
enn þann nið
er ǫðrum sé
borinn maðr
í bróður stað.
Here the word iðgjǫld occurs in the context of egill’s contemptuous rejec­
tion of an old saying or proverb that allows one recompense, but only one,
for a lost son, namely another born to replace him. translated literally:
‘this also is said, that no one may get recompense for a son unless he him­
self begets again the descendant who will be a man born for the other one,
in the place of his brother.’16 of course iðgjǫld itself appears in Rök only as
a conjecture in l. 20, but the source verb is found in a pregnant context in
ll. 21–22 in the question hvar vari guldinn at kvanar husli ‘who was com­
pensated for by the sacrifice of a woman.’ The verb gjalda is multivalent
and the syntax debated, but the Sonatorrek parallel helps to focus on an
understanding of compensation as propagation of the family.17 While
gjalda in such a situation could refer to the ‘compensation’ provided by
revenge, iðgjǫld in Sonatorrek 17 shows that rebirth or its weaker form in
birth of a dedicated fraternal substitute will not have been far from the
minds of the members of the archaic, family­dominated societies under
discussion. Egill’s stanza shares other significant vocabulary with Rök:
sonr ‘son,’ niðr ‘descendant,’ and ala ‘to beget’ are all important words in
Rök, essential to its realization of a theme similar to that of Sonatorrek 17.
Two further words from this stanza, borinn ‘born’ from bera and bróðir
‘brother,’ are also found in Rök though in another context.
More remarkable than the lexical sharing is an illuminating syntactic
parallel. for st. 17 not only matches Rök’s locution vera borinn + dat. but in
addition shares the syntactic oddity of placing the past participle before the
subject, so that we get parallels of sense and syntax like the following:
16 I first published this interpretation, which diverges significantly from Turville-Petre 1976,
36–37, in Harris 1994, 54–55, but it goes back to a longer manuscript I circulated widely
before 1982.
17 Cf. Grønvik 1990 and Harris 2006b, 61–62.
PHILoLoGy, eLeGy, AnD CuLtuRAL CHAnGe