SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

The Languages of Aloissmdl
composition of Aloissmdl (and it would therefore be of
the typefuni,jold, barr, veig). Is this a correct evaluation
of the word? The Icelandic sunna could be a loan-word,
and a relatively young loan-word at that.
Aloissmdl is the only poem of the Edda in which sunna
occurs. Apart from this isolated case the Edda only has
s61, which is found approximately thirty times. In the
poetry of the skalds, s61 - a very common word in
kennings - reigns supreme up to about A.D. 1000. The
oldest examples of sunna are found in I>6rarinn I>6r6lfsson's
M dhliOingavisur from the 980s and in a lausavisa by Biorn
Hitdcelakappi (who died in 1024). Of the few remaining
examples one is found in a pula in Snorri's Edda and the
rest in religious poetry." As far as is known, the only
prose work where sunna occurs is Rimbegla (c. lI87), and it
is worth noting the context: sunna heitir s61 ok er vio hana
kendr dr6ttinsdagr (the sun is called sunna, and the Lords'
day [Sunday] is named after it).
In continental Scandinavia the word sunna is, as far
as I am aware, completely unknown. That the word is
missing from written sources does not, of course, say very
much. More important is the fact that the word is not
certainly attested in a single Norwegian, Swedish or
Danish place-name," an absence all the more striking
because s61 is extremely common in place-names, e.g.
Swedish Solberg, Solberga, and older Norwegian S61berg(ar),
S6Iheim(a)r. Admittedly in his etymological
dictionary Hellquist makes use of a suggestion by Erik
Modin that Sdnjjiillet, "Harjedalen's most popular peak",
preserves an Old Norse sunna, 'sun'. But the mountain's
name is pronounced in the local dialect in such a way
that derivation from a form in Sunnu- is out of the
question."
• Some examples included in Lexicon poeticum are uncertain, cf. E. A. Rock,
Notationes norrcena: (I923-44), §§ 622, I235, I966.
1 None of the place-names in Sunn- in Norske Gaardnavne is interpreted with
reference to subst. sunna.
8 Cf. ]. Reitan, Vemdalsmdlei (I930), 49.