SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

300 Saga-Book of the Viking Society
Alviss makes his reply. The questions are all concerned
with words, with linguistic expressions used by different
beings. In stanza 9, for example, Thor asks what the
earth is called in different places, and Alviss replies: it is
called ipro by men, but fold by the lEsir; the Vanir call it
vega (ace. pl.), the giants igrcen, the elves gr6andi, and
uppregin call it aur. In the same way Thor asks the
different names for sky, moon, sun, clouds, wind, calm, sea,
fire, forest, night, seed, and ale. There seems to be a certain
plan in the ordering of the questions, in as much as they
seem to go in pairs: earth and sky, moon and sun, clouds
and wind, calm and sea, fire and forest, corn and ale.
But night stands isolated (stanza 30); its natural partner
day is missing. It is possible that the night-stanza, as
Finnur Jonsson has suggested, was originally the last,
i.e. immediately preceding the concluding stanza, 35,
which relates the fateful effect of daylight on the dwarf:
uppi ertu, dvergr, um dagaor»
The beings whose languages we are thus told about are
men, gods (or lEsir) and giants - these three occur
regularly, i.e. thirteen times and always in the same place
in the stanza: men first, gods second and giants fourth.
Alongside these three, the elves appear eleven times (ten
times in fifth position), the Vanir nine times (eight times
in third position), dwarves seven times (four times in sixth
position). The basic scheme is therefore: men -lEsir­
Vanir - giants - elves - dwarves, but this order is, as
in stanza 9 above, quite often disturbed, generally
through the introduction of new names for gods and
supernatural powers, whose relationship to the poem's
five most usual names for gods and other powers is
extremely unclear, e.g. ginnregin (20, 30), uppregin (ro),
halir (28), and i heliu, which occurs no less than six times.
• Jan de Vries, Arkiv for nordisk filologi 50 (1934), 9, divides the subjectmatter
into a primary group of cosmic terms: earth, sky, moon, sun, clouds,
wind, calm, sea, fire; and then a group of other things such as forest, night
(which, as noted, ought to belong to the primary group), crops and ale.
Roughly speaking this implies a division into natural forces, the elements, and
the means of maintaining life (ct. Maal og minne, 1918, 17).