Abstract
The Old Norse name of the thunder god has the monosyllabic form Þórr in the extant manuscripts. However, one Eddic poem, Hymiskviða, and one skaldic poem, Þórsdrápa, have verses which metrically indicate a disyllabic form with a short first syllable, hypothetically restored as *Þóarr, *Þóurr, *Þonarr or *Þunurr. The existence of such a disyllabic form has been dismissed by recent editors who have resorted to conjectural emendations for the line in Þórsdrápa and mostly ignored the problem in Hymiskviða. When the metrical question is examined in detail, it becomes apparent that there is a great deal of evidence for a disyllabic form. Crucially, Hymiskviða is demonstrably a metrically rigorous poem and both its occurrences of the name Þórr are consistent with a disyllabic form and inconsistent with a monosyllabic form. It is implausible that this is a coincidence. In this case, as in many others, Old Norse poems give us information about linguistic forms which had gone out of use long before the extant manuscripts were written. This is important testimony on the transmission and preservation not only of skaldic poetry but also of Eddic poetry.
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Notes
The presence of hiatus forms in skaldic poetry is a long-standing dating criterion, see e.g. Gade (2001, pp. 52–53). The newer contracted forms are dominant after ca. 1150, which indicates that verses with such forms are unlikely to have been composed by the authors of the sagas (Myrvoll 2020, 224–225).
To be sure, in verse 9.5 the R reading may be better. The A reading faðir is likely a trivialization of the rare word frí. The verse is metrical if the archaic hiatus form *fríi is restored.
Neidorf (2016, 55–56) similarly studies three-position verses in manuscripts of Old English poetry. He notes that in cases where there is more than one manuscript witness, they will regularly fail to agree on a three-position verse.
Light stems like son- are permissable in this position even with the nominative -r added. This is what we would expect here since the same is true for Craigie’s law.
I am here assuming that the disyllabic form is inherited but it is not totally out of the question that such a form might be borrowed from a West-Germanic language. The Norse poets were zealous collectors of synonyms and might have found it useful to have, say, an Anglo-Saxon version of the name of Thor in their repertoire. Even if Lindroth were right that the Germanic form was *Þunraz and that the o in Old English Þunor was a svarabhakti vowel it would still be possible to have Old Norse Þunurr by way of borrowing and adaptation from English. It seems unlikely, however, that such a borrowed poeticism would have undergone the complex phonetic and analogical developments necessary to explain the entire situation.
The form *Þonorr can be regarded as equivalent to *Þonurr since Old Norse has no distinction between o and u in unstressed syllables.
“Navnet þórr synes engang at have hedt þonorr eller lignende, i lighed med f. ex. þinorr gollorr jöfurr. Derpå synes on at være blevet til ó … måske uden at ordet strax ophörte at være et dissyllabum.” (Konráð Gíslason, 1889, p. 322).
The form *Þonarr was used by Sievers (1885, p. 42).
The form *Þóarr appears to have first made it into print in Þorleifur Jónsson’s edition of the Prose Edda in 1875, p. 97.
I have included asterisks here but the reconstructed forms were also restored by analogy at a later stage.
Note, however, that the traditional explanation for Old Norse duplets such as fell/fjall and berg/bjarg is that the form without breaking is derived from the dative singular, a very common case for geographical features or toponyms. Here there is convincing and direct evidence for the role of the dative (Hoff, 1949, pp. 200–201).
Suzuki (2014, p. 115) classifies this as an A verse due to putative alliteration on þar but it seems to me that classifying it as a D4 or E verse makes for a more natural rhythm, especially in light of Kuhn ‘s law of sentence particles.
Conceivably the sequence could be read as Þunurr þyr oss, “Thor, rage [in] us!”, invoking the idea that the gods dwell within human warriors (see Finlay, 2012). The verb þyrja, “rush, rage” occurs in Old Norse poetry and can be used of weather (“veðr þyrr” – the weather rages, Háttatal 20) and metaphorically of battle: “Stálhrafna lætr stefnir / styrvind of sik þyrja”—{The impeller {of prow-ravens}} [SHIPS > SEAFARER] makes {tumult-wind} [BATTLE] rage around him (Háttatal 59, Gade, 2017, p. 1168).
To be sure, there is some evidence for early contraction of identical or similar vowels in Eddic poems and skaldic poems in Eddic meters (Fidjestøl, 1999, pp. 249–250).
A caveat is necessary on the runic evidence. Some early runemasters are reluctant to use the same rune twice in a row. It is not inconceivable that *Þóurr might be spelled þur rather than þuur.
My warm thanks to Klaus Johan Myrvoll, Þorgeir Sigurðsson, Mikael Males, Helgi Skúli Kjartansson, Leonard Neidorf, Jón Axel Harðarson and Guðrún Þórhallsdóttir for many helpful and informative comments on earlier versions of this paper.
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Þorgeirsson, H. The Name of Thor and the Transmission of Old Norse poetry. Neophilologus 107, 701–713 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-023-09773-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-023-09773-w