05

Appendix 5

Sem Snaebjoern krad: > Hwatt kveda hraera Grotta > hergrimmastan skerja > ut fyrir jardar skauti > Elyudrs niu brudir; > ther er, lungs, fyrir laungu > lid-meldr, skipa hlidar > baugskerdir ristr bardi > bol, Amloda mólu > Her er kallat hafit Amloda Kvern.

Gollancz (Hamlet in Iceland, p. xi) retranslated his translation into Old Norse so that the original and the nolens volens interpreting translation might be compared. The retranslation runs thus: kveda niu brudir eyludrs hraera hvat hergrimmastan skerja grotta ut fyrir jardar skauti, thaer er fyrir longu molu Amloda lid-meldr; baugskerdir ristr skipa hlidar bol lungs bardi. Elton translates the passage:

“Men say that the nine maidens of the island-mill (the ocean) are working hard at the host-devouring skerry-quern (the sea), out beyond the skirts of the earth; yea, they have for ages been grinding at Amlodi’s meal-bin (the sea).” [1]

Rydberg, too, offers a translation:

“It is said, that Eyludr’s nine women violently turn the Grotte of the skerry dangerous to man out near the edge of the earth, and that those women long ground Amlode’s lid-grist.” [2]

In spite of the trickiness and the traps of the text Gollancz tries to solve the case; in fact, he tries too frantically (p. xxxvi): “The compound ey-ludr, translated ‘Island-Mill,’ may be regarded as a synonym for the father of the Nine Maids. Ludr is strictly ‘*the *square case within which the lower and upper Quernstones rest,’ hence the mill itself, or quern.”

With this we wish to compare O. S. Reuter’s explanation: “ludr = Mühlengebälk (dän. Luur = das Gerüst zu einer Handmühle)” (Germanische Himmelskunde, p. 239; he also includes a drawing of the mill). On p. 242, note, he renders the lines of Skaldskap. 25: “Neun Schärenbraute rühren den Grotti des Inselmühlkastens (eyludr) draussen an der Erde Ecke (ut fyrir jardar skauti),” adding: “Das (kosmische?) Weltmeer ist als ‘Hamlets Mühle’ gesehen.” At least he thought, even if within brackets and with a quotation mark, of “cosmic” – Rydberg is the only one who has grasped this point completely.

“Ey-ludr,” Gollancz continues, “is the ‘island quern,’ i.e., ’the grinder of islands,’ the Ocean-Mill, the sea, the sea-god, and, finally, Aegir. ‘Aegir’s daughters’ are the surging waves of the ocean; they work Grotti ‘grinder,’ the great Ocean-Mill (here called ‘skarja grotti,’ the grinder of skerries, the lonely rocks in the sea), ‘beyond the skins of the earth’ or perhaps, better, ‘off yonder promontory.’ The latter meaning of the words ‘ut fyrir jardar skauti’ would perhaps suit the passage best, if Snaebjörn is pointing to some special whirlpool.” Non liquet: neither Aegir = eyludr, nor the nine maidens = waves, whether surging or not.

As concerns “off yonder promontory” which sounds ever so poetical and indistinct, see J. de Vries: [3] skaut n. Ecke, Zipfel, Schoss, Kopftuch, eig. “etwas Hervorragendes” . . . Dazu skauti m. “Tuch zum Einhüllen,” ae. sceata “Ecke, Schoss, Segelschote.” fyr. praep. praef. “vor,” durch, wegen, trotz, für . . . – lat. prae “voran, voraus,” lat. prior “der frühere” – which tells us either nothing at all or, if we take “prior” for the proper translation, tells us the whole “story” by means of one single word; in the same manner as the mere fact that the pillars of Hercules were “fyr,” called the pillars of Briareos, and before that time, the pillars of Kronos.

We stick, however, to Gollancz for some more lines. “The real difficulty,” he says, “in Snorri’s extract from Snaebjoern is . . . in its last line; the arrangement of the words is confusing, the interpretation of the most important of the phrases extremely doubtful. ‘Lid-meldr’ in particular has given much trouble to the commentators: ‘meldr,’ at present obsolete in Icelandic, signifies ‘flour or corn in the mill’; but the word ‘lid’ is a veritable crux. It may be either the neuter noun ’lid,’ meaning ‘a host, folk, people,’ or ship, or the masculine ‘lidr’, ‘a joint of the body.’ The editors of the Corpus Poeticum Boreale read ‘meldr-lid,’ rendering the word ‘meal-vessel’; they translate the passage, ‘who ages past ground Amlodi’s meal-vessels = the ocean’; but ‘mala’, ’to grind,’ can hardly be synonymous with ‘hraera’, ’to move,’ in the earlier lines, and there would be no point in the waves grinding the ocean. There seems, therefore, no reason why meldr-lid should be preferred to lid-meldr, which might well stand for ‘ship-meal’ (sea-meal), to be compared with the Eddic phrase ‘graedis meldr,’ i.e., sea-flour, a poetical periphrasis for the sand of the shore. Rydberg (Teutonic Mythology (1907), pp. 570ff. = pp. 388-92 in the 1889 edition), bearing in mind the connection of the myth concerning the fate of Ymer’s descendant Bergelmer, who, according to an ingenious interpretation of a verse in Vafthrudnismal ‘was laid under the millstone,’ advanced the theory that ’lid-meldr’ means ’limb-grist.’ According to this view, it is the limbs and joints of the primeval giants, which in Amlodi’s mill are transformed into meal . . . Snorri does not help us. The note following Snaebjoern’s verse merely adds that here the sea is called “Amlodi’s kvern’. "

In a note Gollancz adds that in some other manuscript he found the version: “Here the sea is called ‘Amlodi’s meal’ " (Amloda melldur), and concludes: “No explicit explanation is to be found in early Northern poetry or saga. ‘Hamlet’s Mill’ may mean almost anything.” It is not as bad as that. Moreover, Gollancz (p. xvii, note) detected more relevant figures of speech in the four lines cited below which he ascribes to Snaebjörn: “The island-mill pours out the blood of the flood goddess’s sisters (i.e., waves of the sea), so that (it) bursts from the feller of the land: whirlpool begins strong.”

svad or fit jar fjoetra,

flods asynju bolde

(roest byrjask roemm) systra

rytr, eymylver snyter.

To which he adds: “In no other drottkvoett verse does eymylver occur: cp. eyludr above.”

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1. Saxo Grammaticus,* *Danish History, p. 402.

2. Teutonic Mythology, § 80, p. 568.

3. Altnordisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch (1961).