Gripla - 20.12.2018, Qupperneq 160

GRIPLA160
possibility was already entertained by Ásgeir Blöndal Magnússon.70 The
premise is simple enough: the similarity of the forms *ealdorneru and aldr-
nari is so striking that it is unlikely to be due to chance. as I have argued,
it is implausible that the old Icelandic form is a norse formation or goes
back independently to Common Germanic *nazjan-; therefore, the rela-
tionship of the words in the two languages must involve borrowing from
old English to old Icelandic. obviously, this account is in accordance
with the facts of the chronology, since the old English word occurs in the
Exeter Book, a document from the tenth century. It is therefore clearly
very old, at least one or two centuries earlier than Völuspá in its preserved
form, and it could therefore be a model for old Icelandic aldrnari. Thus,
since the attestation shows that ealdorneru existed in Old English at an
early period, the timing fits an early borrowing into old norse-Icelandic.
In this connection, it is worth keeping in mind that alleged old English
loanwords are not unknown in the Edda, as McKinnell has argued, for
instance.71 It is even possible that the ‘poet’ who composed some layer of
Völuspá knew old English poetry of the tradition that produced Azarias, in
which the dative form ealdornere is arguably to be understood as an agent
noun meaning ‘lifesaver’ rather than ‘life’s salvation’.72 In this case, an an-
stem noun would be a plausible outcome within old Icelandic.
this analysis requires that both the form and the meaning of the
word in question were altered in the borrowing process, with subsequent
morphological and semantic remodeling in old Icelandic. a direct bor-
rowing of old English *-neru into old Icelandic would presumably never
have yielded a straightforward result. rather, it seems plausible that old
English *-neru was remodeled to -nari in old Icelandic, a form which is
unlikely to ever have developed regularly within north Germanic. Perhaps
the creation of -nari rather than, say, a form like *-næri (from *-nazan) with
the expected r-umlaut was in some way connected to lack of stress in the
second part of a compound.73
70 Ásgeir Blöndal Magnússon, Íslensk orðsifjabók, 659.
71 John McKinnell, “the Context of Vǫlundarkviða,” Saga-Book 23 (1990): 1–27.
72 John McKinnell, “Heathenism in Vǫluspá: a Preliminary Survey,” The Nordic Apocalypse:
Approaches to Völuspá and Nordic Days of Judgement, ed. by Terry Gunnell and Annette
Lassen (turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 95.
73 as discussed above, Ásgeir Blöndal Magnússon, Íslensk orðsifjabók, 659, remarks that the
lack of r-umlaut in -nari instead of *-næri is an argument against its Norse origin. While