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which gave Old Norse rísa “rise.”21 The basic sense of the word risi, then,
was one of height or altitude. This is quite distinct from jötunn which,
though also conceivably connected with notions of size, had a prevailing
sense of gluttony. Whereas the etymology of jötunn suggests a possibly
negative perception of the figures that it describes, the term risi has a de-
cidedly more “neutral” semantic value.
It is also significant that risar do not appear to have been agents of
consequence in Old Norse mythology. The earliest possible instance of
the term in extant mythological sources (and indeed in all of Old Norse-
Icelandic literature) is in stanza 14 of the tenth-century skaldic poem
Þórsdrápa, composed by Eilífr Goðrúnarson. In all editions of Þórsdrápa
produced to date, the term risi is given as part of a kenning, kvánar risa
“wives of risar,” which applies to the daughters of the jötunn geirrǫðr.22
However, it should be noted that the word risi given in these editions is
actually an emendation of the unsatisfactory manuscript reading res.23 If
this emendation is accepted as a reasonable possibility, then the word risi
was a part of the Old Norse lexicon at least as early as the late tenth cen-
tury. It is telling, however, that in early poetic material the term risi only
appears – if it appears at all – in Þórsdrápa, which is notable for its use of
obscure vocabulary. At least according to the extant Old Norse-Icelandic
corpus, risi did not possess any real mythological associations before the
Christian era. In this respect it ought to be distinguished not only from
jötunn, but also from other terms which could pertain to giantlike beings
of pre-Christian mythology, such as þurs and tröll.24 The term risi next ap-
pears in the eddic poem grottasǫngr, preserved in the Codex Regius and
Codex Trajectinus of Snorra Edda, where it refers to Fenja and Menja and
their kin.25 Risi appears once as a simplex, in stanza 12, and in stanzas 9,
21 Pokorny, Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, iii, 1152.
22 Translations of Old Norse-Icelandic texts in this paper are my own, unless otherwise
stated.
23 See Þórsdrápa, ed. and trans. by Edith Marold, in Poetry from Treatises on Poetics, Part I, ed.
by Kari Ellen Gade, Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 3 (Turnhout: Brepols,
2017), 108. All editors of Þórsdrápa to date have chosen to emend the word res in this way.
24 This is a point also made by Motz, who suggested that “the noun risi came late into
Scandinavian speech and did not denote a truly ancient spirit,” “Families,” 235.
25 See Clive Tolley (ed.), grottasǫngr. The song of grotti (London: Viking Society for Northern
Research, 2008), 1.
A PROBLEM OF GIANT PROPORTIONS