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3. the old English (and other West Germanic) analogues
to aldrnari
In their dictionary, under the entry aldr-nari, Cleasby and Vigfússon state
that this is a masculine noun and a poetic name of fire. Moreover, they
include for comparison an old English (“a. S.” or anglo-Saxon) form
ealdornere, translating it into Latin as nutritor vitae ‘nourisher of life’,
exactly as Sveinbjörn Egilsson did with aldrnari in his Lexicon poeticum.40
although Cleasby and Vigfússon do not comment on it, ealdornere is in
fact the dative form of a word whose nominative is unattested. In the
Anglo-Saxon Dictionary of Bosworth and toller (Supplement), we find
the entry ealdorneru, with its meaning given as ‘life-salvation, life’s safety,
refuge, asylum; vitæ servatio, refugium’.41 See also the entry ealdorneru
in the DOE: ‘life’s safety, asylum, salvation’. this is a feminine ō-stem
noun,42 occurring only three times in old English sources, once in the da-
tive singular and twice in the accusative (see the discussion in 3.2 and 3.3
below).43 It should be noted that the Latin translation nutritor vitae of the
old English form in Cleasby and Vigfússon does not match the meaning
given by Bosworth and toller and the DOE, and must be considered er-
roneous.
In the entry -nari in his old norse etymological dictionary, Jan de
Vries remains silent on the old English parallels, but compares the form to
40 Cleasby and Guðbrandur Vigfússon, An Icelandic-English Dictionary, 12; Sveinbjörn
Egilsson, Lexicon poeticum, 8.
41 Joseph Bosworth and t. northcote toller, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, Based on the Manu-
script Collections of Joseph Bosworth, 4th ed., Supplement by t. northcote toller, with re-
visions and enlarged addenda by Alistair Campbell (oxford: oxford. university Press,
1972), 168. In this article, dictionary entries are not marked with an asterisk if this is not
done in the relevant dictionaries.
42 alistair Campbell, Old English Grammar (oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 242.
43 In the main volume of Bosworth and toller, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, 229, the entry form
is given as ealdorner, aldorner. accordingly, the second part of the compound would be the
same as the simplex ner (and the prefixed gener), which is a neuter noun with a genitive in
-es (see section 3.5). But in the Supplement, this has been corrected to ealdorneru, aldorneru.
apparently, the correction was made on the basis of the examples presented in section 3.3,
showing that the forms must be feminine ō-stems rather than neuter a-stems (see 3.1).
these corrected forms are the ones found in other old English dictionaries, including John
R. Clark Hall, A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, 2nd ed. (new York: Macmillan, 1916), 83,
and the DOE. the source of the confusion seems to be the fact that the words *-neru and
ner are identical in the dative singular.
ALDRNARI