Gripla - 20.12.2018, Page 152

GRIPLA152
the old Saxon word lífnara ‘leibesnahrung’ (in Heliand), and gives further
references to old Icelandic nara ‘dwindle’ and næra ‘nourish’.44 Ásgeir
Blöndal Magnússon provides somewhat more detailed information on
the word, adding that while the etymology of -nari is not entirely clear,
aldrnari may be a loanword from West Germanic:
...orðið minnir á fe. ealdorneru ‘athvarf, björgun’ og fsax. lífnara
‘næring’; hugsanl. to. [= tökuorð].45
[the word is reminiscent of old English ealdorneru ‘refuge,
salvation’ and old Saxon lífnara ‘nourishment’; conceivably a
loanword.]
Ásgeir further observes that if aldrnari is not a loanword but a norse
formation one would have to assume that the lack of r-umlaut in -nari
(instead of *-næri) was due to diminished stress in the second element of
the compound.
In her commentary on Völuspá 54, referred to above, Dronke, citing
Grein,46 presents the old English forms *ealdorneru and *feorhneru (al-
ready discussed by earlier scholars such as Müllenhoff), as well as *lífneru
‘support of life, food’. the last of these three words corresponds almost
exactly to old Saxon and old Low German lífnara ‘sustenance’ and old
High German líbnara ‘victus, alimonia’, which suggests that it has roots in
old West Germanic.47
44 Jan de Vries, Altnordisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 405. Pace de Vries, Guus Kroonen,
Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 392, claims, that old Ice -
landic nara ‘dwindle’ is unrelated to næra ‘nourish’, having an altogether different etymo-
logy.
45 Ásgeir Blöndal Magnússon, Íslensk orðsifjabók, 659.
46 Sprachschatz der angelsächsischen Dichter, ed. by C. W. M. Grein (Heidelberg: Winter, 1912),
243.
47 Bosworth and toller, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, 640. It is clear that *-neru, which only
occurs in compounds, is a feminine ō-stem. nonetheless, the umlaut of the root vowel
of both *-neru and (ge-)ner may suggest that these were originally i-stem nouns in Old
English, which adopted early the endings of ō-stems (see Campbell, Old English Grammar,
242, on the former). However, this assumption appears somewhat problematic given that
the Continental West Germanic forms (old Saxon lífnara and Old High German líbnara),
discussed in the main text, are ō-stem nouns showing a root vowel with no umlaut.