Um orðið járn í fornnorrænu og forsögu þess

Útdráttur

In Old Norse the word for ‘iron’ had two forms, íarn and iárn, besides ísarn. The form íarn is a borrowing from Old Irish. By accent shift and contraction it changed into iárn. This form is Common Nordic. Only a few relics of the disyllabic form are preserved in poetry. In scaldic poetry (Dróttkvætt) there are four examples of rhymes like arnar : iárne, which have been interpreted as evidence for the form iarn (with a short a) in Old Norse. The use of the word in such rhymes is, however, best explained by the assumption that the long a has undergone prosodic shortening before the consonant cluster rn or the rhyming is ‘imperfect’ in the sense that the vowel length is not the same in both of the rhyming syllables (or, more accurately, stems). In this connection it should be taken into account that very few words could form a ‘perfect’ rhyme with iárn, due to the rarity of the sound sequence árn. It has been maintained that the East Nordic languages demand the Old Norse form iarn, but that is a misunderstanding.

In the First Grammatical Treatise the form iárn was written <eárn>. The author discusses this writing but has difficulties supporting it with arguments. He refers to poetry where, according to his statement, the disyllabic form was pronounced with an initial e and not i. This pronunciation is not original. The Nordic people who borrowed the Old Irish word iarn perceived its articulation as [ijarn]. Since the word early suffered contraction in normal speech, in the 12th century it was no longer known how the disyllabic form had previously been pronounced.

The reason why the author preferred to write words like iárn and iór with e than with i, i.e. eárn, eór, is graphemic. In the first half of the 12th century forms like féar, séa, séom and tréom were contracted to fiár, siá, sióm and trióm. The author knew many examples of both uncontracted and contracted forms and was well aware that iá and ió often came from éa and éo, resp. Graphic conservatism caused many to write the contracted forms as if they were uncontracted. And since the semivowel [j] of rising diphthongs like iá and ió was often written e, this manner of spelling could become generalized so that all rising diphthongs beginning with [j], regardless of their origin, were affected by it. The author of the First Grammatical Treatise apparently followed this conservative manner.

The Germanic and Celtic words for ‘iron’ are most probably connected with Skr. iÞirá- ‘strong, powerful, quick, fast’ and Gk ƒerÒj / ƒarÒj / rÒj ‘vigorous, strong, holy’ and denoted ‘the strong (metal)’, i.e. the hard metal in comparison with other metal types (esp. bronze). The morphological relationship of these words is as follows: IE *h1ish2-ró- ‘strong, powerful, quick, etc.’ (Skr. iÞirá-, Gk rÒj) → *h1ish2-eró- ‘id.’ (Gk ƒarÒj, which later changed into ƒerÒj, the Celtic river name Isarā, the Ogam Ir. man’s name IARI (Gen.), OIr. íaru ‘weasel, squirrel’ < *isarōn-) → *h1ish2-er-nó- ‘id.’ (Proto-Celt. *isarno-) → *h1é¼sh2-er-no- (Proto-Germ. *eisarna- > *īsarna-). The difference between the stem forms in Celtic and Germanic is to be explained by recognizing that Proto-Celt. *isarno- originally was an adjective meaning ‘powerful, strong’, whereas Proto-Germ. *eisarna- was a substantive derived from the same adjective by means of accent shift and v¨ddhi. In fact, it is uncertain how old this derivation is, and therefore it would be more cautious to describe it as follows: adj. *(h1)is(h2)arnó- → subst. *(h1)é¼s(h2)arno-.

The Old Irish word which the Nordic people borrowed developed from Proto-Celtic in the following way: *isarnon > Prim. Ir. *iharnan > *eharnan > *earna > OIr. iarn.

It is uncertain whether ON ísarn is a Germanic inheritance or a borrowing from West Germanic.