Runic fragments of medieval Norse love poetry
On the inscribed stick N B496 from Bryggen, Bergen
(If you are only interested in the translation, see section 2.3!)
1. Find context
The presently discussed find is part of the large archæological cache of waterlogged wooden objects found at Bryggen (‘the bridge, pier’) in the Norwegian city of Bergen. Many of these objects contain runic inscriptions which reveal a high level of literacy among the mediæval townspeople. What’s more, these inscriptions frequently contain verse in the intricate Norse Scaldic style, showing that this high art form was still enjoyed in Norway for a long time after the conversion to Christianity, and had yet to become, as it later did, the exclusive property of the Icelanders.
N B496 (the runological signum of this object, standing for “Norway, Bryggen, find 496”) is a planed stick, a common medium for runic inscriptions from Bryggen. It is dated to 1300–1330 which makes it among the later finds in the cache.
2. The text
The stick has two sides, A and B, each containing a short piece of love poetry. Side A contains two alliterative long-lines in the same meter, while B contains one long-line in a meter different from that of A.
In this section I will first discuss the two fragments1 separately; I will first give the transliteration, then my own normalisation and literal translation with notes, and lastly a more idiomatic verse translation of both sides.
2.1. Fragment A
In transliteration, which I have taken from the Rundata database:
§A an ek : sua : ko^no : ma^nc : (k)(i)þa : taka : fioll ⁓ uiþ : lægiumk : sua : hugi a ⁓ ringæiþr : at : io^rþ : sprin(g)r ⁓
There are not that many ambiguities here. In my own Old Norwegian orthography, with verse lines separated:
Ann ek svá kono manns, · kíða taka fjoll víð;
lęggjumk svá hugi á · hring-Ęi*r, at jorð springr.
Literally:
‘I love so a man’s woman, the wide mountains take to shake(?);
I lay so my mind upon the ring-Eir, that the earth leaps.’
The most difficult part here is line 1b kíða taka fjoll víð ‘the wide mountains take to shake(?)’. The approximate sense is clear: the poet’s love is so strong that it can affect the mountains (just like his thought can make the earth leap in line 2), but the exact meaning is unclear due to the word kiþa. The strict meter (see section 3.1 below) gives us little wiggle room for it; we need a word that alliterates with a stressed word in line 1a (ann, kono or manns) and assonates with víð at the end of the line, but kíða ‘shake(?)’, which is what we read on the stick, is problematic since it is not an otherwise attested word. I think the best solution is to emend it to kvíða, assuming the same sense of the word as the modern Swedish cognate kvida ‘to moan, to groan’. The import would then be: “I love her so much that the mountains begin to rumble”.
Line 2b has ringæiþr, but we need to restore the older initial h- in order to get alliteration with hugi ‘mind’ in 2a, at which point we get hring-æiþr. We are now certainly dealing with a woman-kenning of the type “X of rings”, but -æiþr does not resemble any known word. The Rundata edition emends to -reið ‘chariot’, giving ‘chariot of rings [WOMAN]’—an established kenning-type in the Scaldic corpus, but I find the supposed metathesis unlikely. A cleaner solution is excising the sporadic þ, after which we get hring-Ęir ‘ring-Ęir’—a reflex of the abundant kenning-type ‘ring-goddess [WOMAN]’. This reading also receives some support from a parallel in another love poem (see section 3.4 below).
2.2. Fragment B
In transliteration. (The original side B is written in scriptio continua, so the spaces are placed by the editor to facilitate the reading. Since my interpretation differs from that of Rundata, the spaces are also placed differently:)
§B : ramen skal aþr en ek hoskge hamna huiter sum| |miol er liggr
Normalized:
Ramn skal áðr en ek hoskre hamna · hvítr sum mjoll er liggr [á fjollum.]
Literally:
The raven shall, before I forsake the wise [girl], [be] as white as the powder-snow which lies [on the mountains.]
1a ramen for ramn ‘raven’ apparently reflects a vowel inserted between the two nasal sonorants; yet it was not so audible that it hindered the assonance between ramn and hamna. Unlike in fragment A above, we do not want to restore the lost h- in ramn (< older hrafn), since this would yield over-alliteration in the a-verse. 1a hoskge is apparently a spelling error.
1b huiter reflects the insert vowel corresponding to Icelandic -ur and Old Swedish -er, but for metrical reasons we must read monosyllabic hvítr.
1b á fjollum ‘on the mountains’ is conjectured, but the line is obviously incomplete and we need an assonating word at the end. This is by far the most natural emendation, and is adopted by most editors.
2.3. Idiomatic verse translation
Having discussed both sides I offer the following idiomatic verse translation—the verse of which, I freely admit, is not perfectly regular. Yet in this way, I hope, it may in some give the reader a feeling of the original.
A.
1 So I love another’s wife
that mountains wide do start to weep;
2 I focus so my thoughts upon
that Eir of Rings, that Earth doth leap.B.
1 Ere I forsake the girl, the raven must turn
as white as the snow that lies on the peaks.
I feel like this is a fitting place to mention that the Norwegian translation found in Rundata is unfortunately flawed. The editors make mistakes that reveal a lack of acquaintance with some of the subtler parts of Old Norse grammar, and break the sense of the poetry.
Most egregiously they translate line 2 of fragment A as “[Noble] woman (ring-wagon), we love each other as if the world were exploding.”2 The underlying mistake is clear; they read lęggjumk ‘I lay my’ as a first person plural form. The correct analysis is that lęggjumk hugi á ‘I lay my mind upon’, i.e. ‘I think about, meditate upon’, is equivalent to ek lęgg hugi mér á, with -umk being the clitic form of the dative singular first person pronoun mér ‘me’, which is typically used for inalienable possession (especially of body parts), in this case of hugr ‘mind’.
With this true reading in place we clearly see the highly personal expression of the poet, who is lamenting his lonesome yearning for a married woman—a common motif in Norse love poetry (see further section 3.4 below).
3. Notes on the text
3.1. Meter
The two fragments differ metrically, but both meters rely on a combination of alliteration and assonance, and may thus be termed Scaldic. Due to the shortness of the fragments, any metrical description must needs be somewhat uncertain.
To the reader unfamiliar with alliterative poetry I highly recommend first reading my short post Basics of Germanic and Norse alliterative poetry.
The meter of fragment A resembles drótt-kvę́ðr meter, with the following differences:
The a-verses only have one alliteration rather than two,
every line has an ethel-hending, that is, full internal rhyme between both consonant and vowel, and the last stressed syllable always carries the assonance.
Unlike drótt-kvę́ðr (and fragment B) the last stressed syllable is not followed by an unstressed syllable. This gives a much “hackier” sound when read aloud, and results in the lines having five positions or syllables instead of six (the words kono, taka and hugi are resolved, and thus count as one “syllable” each).
The closest parallel to its meter is hálf-hnept (‘half-curtailed’), known from the two canonical Norse “metrical keys”—poems serving as encyclopedias of sundry meters. hálf-hneppt is found in slightly different forms in stanza 77 of Snorre Sturleson’s Hátta-tal ‘Tally of Meters’ and stanza 49 of Hátta-lykill ‘Key of Meters’ by Earl Rainwald and Hall Thurarnson. There also survive six half-stanzas from an otherwise lost love poem composed by poet Wyrm Stanthurson, all in hálf-hnept (albeit of higher technical quality than the present fragment) which might indicate that it was thought a particularly measure suitable for the genre.
The meter of fragment B is easier. It is simply a form of hryn-hendr (‘flowing-rhymed’) meter, a form of drott-kvę́ðr meter with two extra syllables, known from stanzas 62–64 of Hátta-tal and stanzas 31–2 of Hátta-lykill.
It must be said with regard to both fragments that their meter is much more irregular than the examples from the metrical keys, which were after all composed by professional poets.
3.2. Linguistic features
The inscription, though composed in what is still basically classical Old Norse, does show several important uniquely Norwegian sound changes.
fn > mn: ramn ‘raven’, hamna ‘forsake, abandon’ (< hrafn, hafna)
hr- > r- (sporadically): the carver consistently writes r, but for metrical reasons we must restore h in A/2b ring- (but, also for metrical reasons, keep the younger form ramn in B/1a.)
merger o, ǫ > o: hoskre ‘wise’, kono ‘woman’ : jorð ‘earth’, mjoll ‘powder-snow’ (< horskri, konu : jǫrð, mjǫll)
-rsk- > -sk-: hoskre ‘wise’ (< horskri)
Inserted vowel -e- (sporadically): huiter ‘white’ (< hvítr), contrasting with áðr, liggr. In any case we must read hvítr for metrical reasons.
3.3. Style
Both fragments beautifully express the poet’s yearning for an already married woman. What they lose in metrical deficiencies, they certainly make up for in strength of imagination.
Fragment A has very fine poetic parallellism. The poet’s love is so mighty as to move mountains; his thought so strong as to shake the earth. Fragment B has a classic example of Norse poetic adynaton; just like ravens will never turn snow-white, so too the poet, he steadfastly declares, will never give up his love for the woman.
3.4. Parallels
The fragments belong to a widely attested genre of Norse love poetry, or man-sǫngvar ‘girl-songs’. Closest at hand is inscription N B644, also from Bryggen. The first half-line is the same as A/1a:
a^n ek sua ⁓ kono mans at mer ⁓ þyki kaltr æltr ⁓ en ek em uinr ⁓ ui`f´s þæsu^a
Ann ek svá kono manns · at mér þykki kaldr ęldr;
en ek em vinr vífs þęssa.‘I love so a man’s woman, that fire seems cold to me;
but I am a friend (or lover?) of this wife.’
B644 dates to ~1185 and is thus over a century older than B496, which hints at a widespread tradition of love poetry.
A/2b closely resembles part of a loose stanza by the Icelandic C10th poet Cormac, here lines 3–4:
heldr vilda ek hǫlfu, · hring-Ęir, at marr spryngi
(sparða’k jó, þann’s ǫ́ ttum, · alllítt), an þik gefna.‘I would twice as rather, O Ring-Eir, that the horse ran itself to death
(I hardly spared the horse I used), than that thou were wedded.’
It is interesting that the same combination of hring-Ęir and the verb springja ‘to bound, leap; (of an animal) to die of exhaustion’ is found in both places, but it may ultimately be coincidental.
Norse poets expressing their yearning for a woman is common. Take Cormac’s expression: þrǫ́ mun-a oss of ę́vi eldask ‘my yearning will not fade for a lifetime’, or Saint Anlaf Haraldson’s þręy’k of aldr ‘I yearn through my lifetime’. I will now give three full stanzas which I find beautiful. More citations can be found in Bjarni Einarsson’s 1961 book Skáldasögur, pp. 23-37.
The first is by the legendary Ane the Bow-bender, who is supposed to have spoken the following stanza in reference to his brother—although it fits very well as a stanza of yearning spoken by a woman:
Vęl þér, sęlja; · stęndr sę́vi nę́r
laufguð harla vel.
Maðr skękkr af þér · morgin-dǫggvar,
en ek at þegni þręy. (Nǫ́tt sem dag.)‘It is easy for thee, willow! thou standest near the sea
blessed with plenty leaves.
One shakes off from thee the morning dew,
but I yearn for a thane. (Night as day.)’
The second is very similar, and also contrasts calm and unchanging nature with the poet’s troubles. It is from Skírnis mǫ́l (‘The Speeches of Shirner’) in the Poetic Edda, where the God Free (Fręyr) is lovesick over the ettin-woman Gerd (Gęrðr). His servant Shirner asks what is troubling Him, and He answers:
Hví of sęgja’k þér, · sęggr inn ungi,
mikinn móðtrega?
Því at alf-rǫðull · lýsir um alla daga
ok þęygi at mínum munum.‘Why should I tell thee, O young man!
of my great grief of heart?
For the Elf-Wheel [SUN] shineth every day,
and no ways to my delight.’
The third is a loose stanza by Norwegian king Magnus Barefeet composed in reference to his rejection by an emperor’s daughter by the name of Mightild (ON Męktildr, probably Matilda, daughter of King Malcolm III of Scotland).
Hvat’s í heimi betra · —hyggr skald af þrǫ́ sjaldan;
mjǫk ’s langr, sá’s dvelr drengi, · dagr—an víf in fǫgru?
Þungan ber’k af þingi · þann harm, es skal’k svanna
—skręytask męnn á móti— · minn aldri-gi finna.‘What’s better in the world—the poet seldom forgets his yearning;
long is that day which men delays—than dainty women?
I carry from the assembly that heavy care, that I never shall
—men adorn themselves for meetings—meet my little swan [= Mightild].’
Let us finally note that all of these examples long predate the 14th century—indeed some may be as old as the 9th century. The carver of B496 was thus following in a fine tradition of poetic yearning established by his ancient forefathers some 5 centuries prior, or more—by those ancestors in whose good company, let us pray, he now rests. For as the Anglo-Saxon poet put it: Þæs ofer·éode · þysses swa mæg. ‘That passed away, so may this.’
The word “fragment” should not be taken to mean that the inscription is incomplete, but rather simply that these are very short pieces which may have belonged to longer, oral, compositions.
Norwegian: [Høye/fornemme] kvinne (= ring-vogn), vi elsker hverandre slik at jorden sprenges.