I was recently home and shown a cup that my grandfather must have gotten in Europe in the 1930s. It’s horn-shaped, silver, and bears the mark of a Norwegian silversmith who died in the late 1930s.
There’s an inscription around the rim that I am trying to translate, but google translate and the like help with the words but not the syntax.
The inscription reads:
Suttungs mjöd sorg betvinger og skjald skalb bringer.
My best translations so far:
Suttungs mjöd - Suttung’s mead - “the best drink at the feast of the Gods”; the mead of poetry; drinking it turns men into poets or wise men
sorg - Grief, sorrow
betvinger - subjects (verb), monitors
og - and
Skjalda - bards or poets (shield?)
skalb - (to?) (shall?) (must?)
bringer - brings
Can anyone help put it all together?
IANA Norse linguist, but is it something like “Suttung’s mead relieves sorrow and will bring poetry”?
Geez, that makes it sound like a patent medicine, doesn’t it? albeit a rather peculiar one. Not quitting my day job to translate the Sagas any time soon.
Your inscription is not in Old Norse. It is in modern Norwegian. Old Norse was used around the same time as Old English, over a thousand years ago, and was primarily written with runes.
As has been pointed out it’s modern Norwegian, if somewhat archaic. Either you or the silversmith (or both) have made a mistake though, as I’m relatively certain it should be
Suttungs mjöd sorg betvinger og skaldskab bringer.
The closest literal translation would be something like:
Suttung’s mead reins in sorrow and brings poet-hood.
ETA: I did a quick search and found it’s a traditional inscription and often has the even more archaic and quaint spelling “skialdskab”.
Are you certain that it says skalb? I think it should be skab. Then it would read more like “skjald-skab” which is (very literally) “bard-ness”. (comp: gal-skab = mad-ness). Skjaldskab can refer to the poetic art or to the poetry itself. See here for reference to the same line on a similar object.
(I think it is Norwegian and not Old Norse).
Perhaps something like “Suttung’s mead conquers grief and gives (brings) the verses of the bards” (Or: booze makes you forget your sorrows and makes a poet out of anyone)
Did the old spelling use an umlaut instead of a “slash” on the “o”? I first assumed it was Swedish when I saw that, although the vocabulary was obviously Norwegian on further inspection.
ø and ö were used more interchangeably in Norwegian in the past, and the umlaut is still common in cursive handwriting. It’s what I learned in school nearly 30 years ago, although I write ø even in handwriting these days.
I’ve seen plenty of examples of inscriptions or material made or printed in Norway 100 years ago or so that uses ö rather than ø. It’s dwarfed by the material using ø, but was indeed more common than now.
Based on that I wouldn’t be amazed if a Norwegian silver-smith in the 1930s used an ö rather than an ø in an inscription. Assuming pharman transcribed it accurately and the inscription was made at the time. If the typos are part of the inscription I’d start thinking about an inscription made by someone unfamiliar with Norwegian.
On this however I retract my statement. We did use just a single '-like diacritic mark.
