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where it occurs as a heiti for fire, alongside other terms such as eimr and
eimi.3
according to the traditional interpretation, the word aldrnari means
‘fire’, i.e. ‘the one who maintains life’ (see Lexicon poeticum, discussed
below). another idea is that it refers to the ‘tree of life’ or the ‘world tree’
askr Yggdrasils. It is clear that this is a compound whose first part is the old
Icelandic word aldr ‘age, life’, derived from the verb ala ‘rear’ which has
cognates in related languages, e.g. alan ‘rear’ in old English; in that lan-
guage there is also the noun ealdor, aldor ‘life, age’. It is unclear, however,
how the second part of the word, -nari, is to be understood. It is usually as-
sumed that it is a masculine an-stem formed from the verb næra ‘nourish’,
meaning ‘the one who rears, nourishes, supports; nourisher’.
the goal of this article is to reexamine the word aldrnari. the word
is compared to old English *ealdorneru, *aldorneru ‘life-salvation, life’s
safety, refuge, asylum’,4 which has been argued to mean ‘the one who
saves life, lifesaver’ in the particular context of the poem Azarias (see
section 3.2). I hypothesize that the old Icelandic word corresponds to
the old English one, and that it is an early loanword from old English,
albeit morphologically and semantically remodeled in old Icelandic. thus,
in this case -nari would not be derived from the verb næra ‘nourish’ but
adopted from old English *-neru ‘salvation, saving’; the latter is formed to
the Old English verb nerian ‘save’ which has related forms in other West
Germanic languages and Gothic (nasjan ‘save’) but apparently not in old
Icelandic. the meaning of aldrnari argued for here would then be ‘the one
who saves life, lifesaver’, just as in the context-specific case of the old
1300–25), Codex Wormianus (aM 242 fol., ca. 1350), and Codex trajectinus (traj 1374,
ca. 1600). for the dating of the manuscripts, see Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog: Registre
(Copenhagen: Den arnamagnæanske Kommission, 1898), 432–97.
3 Den norsk-islandske skjaldedigtning. A. Tekst efter håndskrifterne. B. Rettet tekst, ed. by Finnur
Jónsson (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1912–15), vol. aI, 684, vol. BI, 674–5. “anonymous
Þulur: Introduction,” ed. by Elena Gurevich, Poetry from Treatises on Poetics 2. Skaldic
Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages, vol. 3, ed. by Kari Ellen Gade and Edith Marold
(turnhout: Brepols, 2017), 449–663.
4 the nominative singular of these forms is not attested in the old English sources, but it
can confidently be conjectured on the basis of the grammatical properties of the relevant
words, as will be discussed in section 3. In accordance with common practice, reconstructed
forms are marked with an asterisk, irrespective of whether they are assumed to have existed
at a historical stage (e.g. old English) or at a prehistoric stage (e.g. Proto-Germanic).