Egill and Ǫlrún in Early High German

Abstract

Wolfgang Beck (2017) has offered an extended criticism of the inter pre­ tation of the apparently metrical Pforzen inscription proffered most ful­ somely by authors such as Edith Marold (1996, 2004) and Robert Nedoma (1999, 2004a) concluding: “all that can be said with any certainty is that the Pforzen inscription contains two pre­Old High German personal names in a context that cannot be further elucidated.” The key to interpreting the verb­final inscription on the late­sixth­century Pforzen buckle, how ever, is generally recognised to be how to explain the appearance of the allit er­ ating names Aigil and Ailrūn paired by the conjunction andi ‘and’ in the in scrip tion’s first line. Associated by scholars such as Marold and Nedoma with the Old Norse heroic pair of Egill and Ǫlrún, both of the Pforzen names seem to evidence a palatal development in their first syllables — the under lying Germanic roots for the relevant themes of the Old Norse pair­ ing appear to be *agil­ and *al­, not *aigil­ and *ail­. Claimed by Mar tin Findell (2012, 193) to be “unmotivated” (cf. Nedoma 2004b, 163–65), pala­ tal develop ments of this kind are attested in the earliest Old High Ger man glosses and are consistent with the palatalisation or Mouillierung theory of i­umlaut associated most strongly with Wilhelm Scherer (1868, 144 f.). As Stefan Sonderegger (1979, 302–04) explains, spellings of this kind have been traditionally taken as evidence that i­umlaut developed in Old High German through palatalisation of root vowels rather than vowel harmony: “The oldest umlaut graphemes of Old High German show not infrequently digraphic spellings ae, ei, ai for the i­umlaut reflex of a. In this we see an indication of an earlier, intermediate stage ai, ae > ei, ee > e” (trans. Krygier 1998, 151). Jacob Grimm (1840, 104) and Wilhelm Scherer (1868, 144) were first to point out that the earliest Old High German indications of i­umlaut include digraphic spellings such as St Gallen