The Ygg and I

[jamesenge]

Today I’m thinking about Weird water and eggs.

Snorri says that the first root of Yggdrasil comes down in Ásgarð and that next to it is the Pool of Weird. The Norns come out to it each day and splash some of its holy water onto Yggdrasil to keep it from rotting—a perennial danger for the sacred ash tree, so Snorri tells us.

The Norns at the foot of Yggdrasil
by Johan Egerkrans

How holy is that water?

En þat vatn er svá heilagt at allir hlutir þeir sem þar koma í brunninn verða svá hvítir sem hinna sú er skjall heitir, er innan liggr við eggskurn.

—Snorri, Edda: Gylfaginning 16

“And that water is so holy that everything which comes into the fountain becomes as white as the membrane called skjall which lies next to the eggshell.”

I translated hvítir as “white” above, because everyone does, and the dictionaries say that’s right, and the Norse word is cognate with English white, but I still think it’s wrong here. If you’ve ever managed to pluck part of the shell off an egg without breaking the membrane beneath, you’ve opened up a cloudy kind of window into the egg. And skjall is also used of a membrane stretched over a frame to create a window. So “translucent” might be a better way to translate hvítir here.

A pool that makes stuff become translucent or transparent: that’s an intriguing idea. I’m going to steal it for a story at the next opportunity and I urge everyone else to do so.

My eye was also caught by eggskurn. The egg part is “egg”, of course, but I was interested to learn that this was loaned into English from Old Norse, the English forms (ǣg > ey/ay) being displaced by the Norse one in the Middle English period, maybe because the ME forms are too easily confused with other words, e.g. aye or eye.

“Give me an ay, eh?”

“Aye, sir!”

“No, the round kind of ey.”

“You want me to rip out my eye?”

It would take forever to cook something with this kind of backchat going on.

The skurn part means “shell” and it’s akin to the Old Norse word skera “to cut”. The English word shell goes back to the same PIE root *skel– “cut”. The same sharp root also yields scale, shale, shoal, skoal (from a kind of drinking bowl), shield, scalp, skill (another ON borrowing, I guess referring originally to someone’s ability to separate issues or things), school (a division), cutlass, and shelf (a split piece of wood).

The Latin word for school, ludus, means “play”. The English word is a military term referring to the division of an army. Etymology is not destiny, but I wonder if this is one reason early education in the English-speaking world is often so dull and regimented. (I’m not knocking teachers. But the system needs to be knocked around a little; kudos to those who are doing that.)

[originally posted over on Facebook, but ported over here now that Faceplace is increasingly a den of iniquity and fascism]

Mirrored from Ambrose & Elsewhere.