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also appears to be alluded to with the phrase ‘að hafa nafn af’, as in riddle
9: ‘svanbrúðir hafa nafn af breiðingu’ [swan-brides have their name from
spreading]. the second group may imply etymological connections, but
they could just as well be examples of words where, without any shared lin-
guistic history, similar sounds are used to evoke certain concepts. such may
be the case in riddle 19 where we are told of the ‘snótir’ that they ‘snúa sér
margvíslega’. the author’s phrasing does not necessarily imply that ‘snótir’
is derived from ‘snúaʼ, but could merely be emphasising that the ‘sn-’
sound could elicit the writhing of these feminine wave personifications to
an attentive ear. Björn’s assessments do not generally coincide with con-
temporary ideas on the etymology of words (e.g. drykkur < drög, dráttur),
and some of his connections are difficult to interpret (e.g. naður < ár- (?)),
yet it is also the case that he does not always appear to be stating his own
convictions but those which he believes the authors of the riddles would
have held (e.g. riddle 25 ‘heldur hann öl komi af alning’).32 Ultimately, it
seems clear that for a seventeenth-century scholar like Björn, these poems
from the medieval past were deemed to be swarming with hidden mean-
ings on many different levels, not only hiding objects in a wrapping of
misleading words (as is the nature of riddles), but also hiding clues to those
objects in the hidden pasts of words and their sonorous associations.
Björn’s commentary may seem somewhat strange by today’s standards.
While his appreciation of the riddles may coincide with a modern audi-
ence’s in many aspects, his strong focus on lexical derivation or conver-
gence is not what the same audience might automatically expect to be the
focus of an excursus on riddles. for a seventeenth-century audience, how-
ever, without access to the reference materials which are at the disposal of
a modern scholar, such observations may have been much more welcome
than more philosophical or literary-critical expositions on the nature of the
riddling comparisons and the worldview which they express. We know,
moreover, that Björn had been engaged in the copying of a number of key
simply ‘vætturʼ, although based on Björnʼs comments elsewhere it seems more likely that
he is suggesting a common etymological origin of these to ‘v-ʼ words.
32 See Ásgeir Blöndal Magnússon, ed., Íslensk orðsifjabók (reykjavík: orðabók Háskólans,
1989) for some contemporary interpretations of the etymology of the relevant words.
‘Drykkurʼ for example, is naturally related to ‘drekka’ and an earlier germanic form
‘*drunki-ʼ, with no connection to ‘drátturʼ, which is related to ‘dragaʼ and an earlier form
‘*dhragōʼ.
O E D I P U S I N D U S T R I U S A E N I G M A T U M I S L A N D I C O R U M
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