a blog by Peter Leonard
Egil Skallagrímson, one of the greatest Icelandic poets, lived a life defined by drinking, fighting and improvised verse. He had a long-running feud with Eirík Blódøx [Bloodaxe], son of Harald Hárfagri [Fairhair], the king of Norway, the details of which are recorded in Egils Saga Skallagrímssonar
His father, Skallagrím, was a poet as well and once composed a poem chiding his servants who complained about his habit of forging iron early in the morning, disturbing their sleep. This lausavísa (loose verse, a freestanding stanza) is recorded below:
Mjǫk verðr ár, sás aura,
ísarns meiðr at rísa,
váðir vidda bróður
verðrseygjar skal kveðja;
gjalla lætk á golli
geisla njóts, meðan þjóta,
heitu, hrœrirkytjur
hreggs vindfrekar, sleggjur.
In trying to translate this poem, you run into a number of problems. First are the kennings, the elaborate poetic metaphors common in Old Norse verse. Second is the amazingly convoluted word-order -- it's difficult to believe anyone could have understood the poem upon hearing it for the first time, although undoubtably they would have gotten a sense of the imagery. That having been said, here's what my class came up with:
Mjǫk verðr ár, sás aura, ísarns meiðr at rísa,
Very has early iron's tree to rise,
Tree of iron would be recognized as a kenning for a soldier, or a smith. Here it's the latter. sás is a contraction of sá es, an archaic form of sá er, or he who. (This introduces a subordinate clause which confusingly appears much later in the poem.) So we're left with:
The smith he who on wet ground has to rise very early
váðir vidda bróður
clothes of the wide one of the brother
The genitives are confusing here, so let's reorder the words:
clothes of the brother of the wide one
"The wide one" is a kenning for the sea
clothes of the brother of the sea
"The brother of the sea" is the air, wind, or sky
clothes of the wind
which is a kenning for bellow
verðrseygjar skal kveðja;
weathersucker shall demand
gjalla lætk á golli geisla njóts, meðan þjóta,
Here lætk is an enclitic form that combines the verb and first-person pronoun ek, so:
gjalla læt ek á golli geisla njóts, meðan þjóta,
resound let I on gold lightbeam's enjoyer, while they howl
We take 'gold' to be a poetic reference to metal in general. Lightbeam is presumably the glinting of metal in the forge, or possibly the glow of the coals. The enjoyer of the beam could be either the smith, or the sword itself. The bellows are the things doing the howling, or whistling.
I let resound on metal the enjoyer of the beam while they howl
heitu, hrœrirkytjur hreggs vindfrekar, sleggjur.
hot, moving shelter of the storm windgreedy, sledge
Hot here can modify either gold/metal or the bellows. The sledge, or hammer, is what the smithy "lets resound" above. The "moving shelter" probably refers to the lightweight wooden shed which enclosed a forge.
What we're left with after rearranging the words is something like:
Tree of iron must rise early
he who shall demand of the weathersucker
clothes of the brother of the sea on wet earth;
I let the sledge resound
on hot gold of the beam's enjoyer
while the windgreedy moving shelter
from the storm howls.
You could simplify it as this:
The smith must rise early to work the bellows on damp ground.
I let the hammer resound on the sword's hot metal, while the eager forge howls stormily.
For comparison, here's a translation by W. Green in 1893:
Who wins wealth by iron
Right early must rise:
Of the sea's breezy brother
Wind-holders need blast.
On furnace-gold glowing
My stout hammer rings,
While heat-feeding bellows
A whistling storm stir.
As you can see, Green aimed to duplicate, in English, the aliteration (repeating sounds at the beginning of words) which was the "rhyme" of most early Germanic poetry. Unfortunately, this makes his translation rather free and of less interest to someone trying to decode the original.
Herman Pálsson, an honest-to-goodness Icelander, came up with the following translation in 1976:
Early must the ironsmith
Arise to forge ore,
Aided by air blasting
From the blown-bellows;
Hard the hammer blows
Blazing on the hot iron
I beat, while busily
Work the wind-bellows.
Many of the words have complex connoctations. Sleggja might mean sledgehammer literally, but also imply the beating of waves on the shore where Skallagrím has set up his forge. At gjalla means to resound, but also the shrieking of birds, bringing up imagery of seagulls overhead. Goll, interepreted here as gold, could also be gollr, meaning a hawk's talon. It's likely a listener 900 years ago in Iceland would have been aware of all these different shades of meaning, and that would have helped transmit meaning, despite the poem's gramatical complexity.