Gripla - 2022, Síða 74

GRIPLA72
in Iceland is the daughter of Ǫnundr sjóna “the sighted”; her name is Dalla
and is drawn from Irish dall ‘blind’. Thus what might be called the center
of mental gravity shifts from reason to intuition and insight, and perhaps
from measured thought to impulse, as will be reflected in Kormákr’s
character. But first, on his arrival in Iceland Ǫgmundr is granted land by
Miðfjǫrðs­Skeggi. He sets about building a house by marking out the ex-
terior dimensions in order to lay, within, a foundation of gravel. The saga
continues:
Þat þá Ǫgmundr, mældi grundvǫll undir hús. Þat var þeirra
átrúnaðr, ef málit gengi saman, þá er optar væri reynt, at þess manns
ráð myndi saman ganga, ef málvǫndrinn þyrri, en þróask, ef hann
vissi til mikilleiks; en málit gekk saman ok þrem sinnum reynt.7
The general sense of this passage has been well enough understood by
commentators and translators,8 but (1) an apparent redundancy has not
been “honored” in all modern renderings; (2) there is the chronic ques-
tion of the subject of verbs in the absence of nouns or pronouns; and (3)
some semantic equivalences are questionable, e.g., mál is translated as
“measuring rod” on the basis of the putative synonym málvǫndr, which
occurs later in the text. In one sense mál means only ‘measure, the act of
measuring, mark (as indicative of measurement)’,9 although the Dictionary
of Old Norse Prose offers instances of mál as ‘speech, organs of speech,
voice, account, poem, poetry; matter, affair, case, dispute; time, point in
time, meal-time’.10 The semi-ritualized use of demarcating hazel rods and
pegs returns to the discussion below in the context of dueling, but here we
7 Kormáks saga, ch. 2, 205.
8 E.g., Kormáks saga Ǫgmundarsonar, in Isländersagas, ed. by Klaus Böldl, Andreas Vollmer,
and Julia Zernack, 4 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 2011), 3:55–126; Kormak’s
Saga, trans. McTurk; La Saga de Kormak, trans. by Frédéric Durand (Caen: Heimdal,
1975); The Sagas of Kormák and The Sworn Brothers, trans. by Lee M. Hollander (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1939).
9 All uses are ultimately traceable to Proto-German, *mēla- ‘measure, amount’; Etymological
Dictionary of Proto-Germanic, ed. by Guus Kroonen (Leiden: Brill, 2010), s.v. mēla 3. Cf.
Old English metian, ‘to assign due measure; to moderate’, Old High German mezzōn, ‘to
moderate’.
10 Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog = A Dictionary of Old Norse Prose, ed. by James Knirk et
al. (Copenhagen: Den Arnamagnæanske Kommission, 1989–), s.v. mál, noun, 1–3.