SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

The Languages of Alvissmcil 30 r
One can also ask what is meant by dsa synir (r6) and
Suttungs synir (34). The former appear in stanza r6
together with goo, which in all probability is synonymous
with asir, and the occurrence of Suttungs synir (34), which
one would expect to refer to the giants, does not prevent
them from appearing in their usual place in the same
stanza.
However, such small incongruities can be ignored for
the moment. The poem's most important and interesting
aspect remains obvious enough, i.e. that the poem hinges
on the notion of separate languages for gods and other
supernatural beings (giants, dwarves, etc.). Parallelsprincipally
the notion of a divine language, divorced from
that of men - have been found elsewhere: in Greek
(Homer), Old Indian and Celtic. 3
Do the different languages in Alvissmcil have any special
characteristics? Without doubt there is a clear distinction
between the language of men on the one hand, and
the languages said to be those of the gods, giants, etc., on
the other. The words of men are throughout the
common prosaic names that are still used today: ipro,
himinn, mdni, sol, sky, vindr, logn, calm, seer (a phonetic
variant of sjor), eldr, fire, vior, timber (here meaning
'forest'), noti, bygg, barley, (still thus in Modern Icelandic
and Norwegian, Swedish bjugg), pl.
The words said to belong to the language of the gods,
giants and others, are not normally found in the
colloquial language, at least not with the same function
as they have in the poem - and we ought perhaps to
remind ourselves with due caution that our knowledge of
the early colloquial language comes from a limited number
of texts. The words of the gods and supernatural powers
for the most part belong higher up the stylistic scale.
They are of different types. Some of them are true
3 H. Giintert, Von der Sprache der Goiter und Geister (1921); C. Watkins,
Language of Gods and Language of Men: Remarks on some Indo-european
Metalinguistic Traditions (ed. J. Puhvel, 1970).