Stahlgewitter again: hairsplitting galore

[Rebing@t-online.de (Rebing)]

Bertil, thank you for pointing out that EJ himself believes that he got "Stahlgewitter" from 
the saga of Egil. (1) This might be another step towards the solution of our problem. So 
far, two possibilities seem to be ruled out definitely. First, "Stahlgewitter" was not taken 
from the Edda (because Egilsson's authoritative LEXICON does not list any such kenning in 
the EDDA). Second, though EJ might have found it in Egilssaga, he could not have found it in 
Niedner's translation of this text in the Thule series.
 
Niedner translates "thrumo stala" in Lausvisa 18 of Egil with "attack" (angreifen). This is 
not a faulty translation. On the contrary, Niedner is an ingenious translator. He manages to 
render the complex form of the scaldic verses in German. This is quite a feat because of the 
complex rules the scalds followed when writing their poems. Rule One says: you must have two 
words alliterate in one line (Stabreim), and another word at the beginning of the next line 
must show the same alliteration. (This rule is less strict than it sounds because all vowels 
are regarded as alliterations per se.) Rule Two: in each line there must be an interior 
rhyme (Binnenreim). Here are the Icelandic and German versions of that stanza in question 
with the above formal requirements marked: the alliterations in upper case letters, the 
interior rhymes underlined (if the underlinings do not show on your screen please open the 
attached Word document)

Valkostom hlothk Vestan
Vang fyr merkestanger
Ott vas El thats sottak
Athgils blaom nathre;
hathe Ungr vith Ungla
Aleifr thrumo stala;
Helt, ne Hrafnar sulto, 
Hringr a vapna thinge. 

(A rough translation into English:
In the west I covered the fields with heaps of corpses, the fight was furious, I killed 
Adgils with the blue snake (= name of Egil's sword). Young Aleif raised a thunder(storm) of 
steel against the Angles. The ravens did not stay hungry, and there was work for Hring in 
the battle.) 

The scalds, having thus fettered themselves with those and other rules (though, as the above 
example shows, the rules were not always strictly adhered to) did not write sentences 
following the patterns of ordinary spoken language or those of the matter-of-fact narrative 
of the actual saga story. What they produced were clusters of words whose meaning had to be 
deciphered and could not be taken in at one glance. Because of this difficulty, the modern 
editors of the Icelandic texts usually add prose versions of the scaldic stanzas in their 
footnotes. 

The artistry of this poetry lay in the choice of kennings and in the dexterity with which 
the formal rules were obeyed. So a translator may quite legitimately decide to focus on 
rendering faithfully the formal traits. In order to achieve this he has to make concessions 
as regards other aspects of the text - the old translator's dilemma: traduttore - traditore. 
Niedner did quite well in rendering the alliterations and interior rhymes in German:

Machtvollen Muts liess fallen
Mann ich vorm banner. 
Ehernes spiel! stets weher 
Adgil Biss Blau-natter.
drängten Eng die Angeln
Aleif Anzugreifen!
Heiss ward's - raben kreisten --
Hring beim waffenthinge.

However, in order to achieve the feat of having analogous alliterations and interior rhymes 
in his German text, he had to abandon the ideal of translating all nouns by nouns, verbs by 
verbs, etc.. He resorted to translating "stala thruma", a kenning composed of two nouns, and 
meaning " battle" or "attack ", by the one verb "attack". So there is no "Stahlgewitter" in 
Niedner's translation. Honi soit qui mal y pense. 

All this means simply that we have to look for some other translation of Egilssaga in which 
EJ found in fact "Stahlgewitter" in the German rendering of the stanza quoted above. There 
exist, as far as I could find out with the help of my friend Heiko Uecker of the 
Germanistisches Seminar Bonn (who also taught me the rules of scaldic poetry), the following 
translations before Niedner:

1)  Friedrich de la Motte-Fouqué (1813)
2)  Karl Lachmann (1816)
3)  Ferdinand Khull (1888)
4)  Arthur Bonus (1907)

Bonus's ISLÄNDERBUCH was quite popular in his time. There are several reprints, an edition 
for young people and even a special edition printed in Switzerland for the benefit of German 
prisoners of war as vol. 15 of the "Bücherei für deutsche Kriegsgefangene". Does this 
indicate that in WWI the Icelandic sagas were so popular at the front that it seemed 
appropriate to make sure that even those German soldiers who had the bad luck to be taken 
prisoners of war could read them? And that Leutnant Jünger, known as a fighter and a 
bookworm, might have carried his Bonus in his field pack? 

So the posting of my next instalment of this saga of the hunt for a word will depend on how 
fast interlibrary loan is in Nordrhein-Westfalen....

(1) Im Wagen erfuhr ich von Erdmuthe einige Islandwörter; die Sprache ist bildhaft wie bei 
den Skalden -- bei einem, ich glaube: Egil, fand ich "Stahlgewitter" bald nach dem ersten 
Weltkrieg. (SIEBZIG VERWEHT I, p. 511, 3.8.68)

Günter Rebing


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