Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1999, Page 253
VIII “VinSandin foma”
233
On the basis of a comparison between Germanic languages, Olåfr is
aware that this phenomenon has to be explained as the result of a lin-
guistic development. The opposite of prothesis is in his terminology
auferesis:
[...] tekr hon af upphafi or5s staf e5a samstpfu, sem f)å at v sé tekit af
f jjessu nafni vrungv, Jwlat J)y5erskir menn ok danskir hafa v fyrir r I
Jressu nafni ok mgrgum p5rum, ok [3at hyggjum vér fomt mål vera, en
nu er ^at kallat vinSandin5 forna I skåldskap, Jmat Joat er nu ekki haft
I norænu måli.6
(It removes the beginning from a word or a syllable, as when v is re-
moved from this word vrpngu, because the Germans and the Danish
have v in front of r in this word and many others. We believe this to be
archaic language, and we now call it the old vinSandi in poetry, be-
cause it is no more used in the Norse language.)
According to Bjbm Magnusson Olsen (1884: 327; 1894: 45) vindandi is
ultimately derived from the rune name vend.
Modem linguistics confirms Olåfr’s view, that w- was lost before -r in
West Nordic, while it was retained in East Nordic (as it still is in certain
eastem Norwegian dialects, cf. Eklund 1991). According to standard
grammars the shift took place in preliterary times, but in a general man-
ner it is naturally improbable that this happened suddenly in all relevant
words everywhere in the West Nordic area.7 Speakers of Old Norse are
therefore likely to have known some word-forms with vr-, even if they
did not belong to their spoken language, but they may have regarded
them as dialectisms, or - like Olåfr hvltaskåld - as archaisms.
In runic inscriptions in the older futhark the only word in wr- are
forms of the word writan, all written with wr-, the latest example appar-
5 Codex Wormianus: vmdandin, AM 748 4to: vindandin (ed. Bjom Magnusson Olsen
1884: 87).
6 Ed. Finnur Jonsson 1927: 62.
7 Bjom Magnusson Olsen disagrees: “Nu må telja j)aS vist, a5 611 jiau or5, sem birjubu å
vr hafi mist v-iS um sama leiti” (1894:44), but in view of the poetic evidence as well as the
geographical distribution of the forms I find this highly improbable.