T. V. Toporova. On the Manifestation of the Second Person in the Mythological Lays of the Elder Eddа (pp. 896–908)
Author
T. V. Toporova (The Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences)
Keywords\n the Elder Edda, second person pronouns
Pages\n 896–908
Summary\n
mythological lays of the Elder Edda. The concept of “you” (2 Pers. Sg. Pron.) cannot be regarded in isolation, as it implies the presence of “I” (1 Pers. Sg. Pron.) and refers to the act of communication and its participants (addresser and addressee). We shall analyze the chronotype “you” from this standpoint. Our goal is to identify the Eddic contexts in which the second person singular pronoun occurs, to make typological and comparative commentaries and to reconstruct the source (or linguistic protosituation) of the emergence of this phenomenon. On the basis of Eddic material, one can make the principal conclusion that absolutely all the mythological lays of the Elder Edda crystallizing around the creation myth take the form of dialogues and so the domain of “you” cannot be represented in them. Moreover, the study of this material uncovers a number of interesting laws: a) One can measure the “dialogicity” of these lays as a function of the number of occurrences of second person pronouns; b) One can concretize the content of the dialogue: its main theme is cosmogony and cosmology, i.e., information about the origins and structure of the universe, while its goal is obtaining knowledge or teaching (transmitting knowledge); c) One can reconstruct the protosituation in which the dialogue on cosmogonic themes arises: it is a ritual competition in supreme wisdom. The price to pay for defeat may be the life of one of the participants, while victory is equated with the recosmization of the universe and the consolidation of stability and harmony; d) One can describe the nature of the denotatum “you” that, one the one hand, serves to designate one of the participants of the dialogue and, on the other, appeals to the public. Summing up, one can say that the dialogue genre determines the particularities of the domain of “you” in the mythological lays of the Elder Edda, including the distribution of second person pronouns, their functions, and their semantics, as well as their relation to the chronotype “I”.
References\n
Steblin-Kamenskiy M.I. Starshaya Edda [The Elder Edda]. Starshaya Edda. Drevneislandskie pesni o bogakh i geroyakh [The Elder Edda. Old Icelandic songs about gods and heroes]. A.I. Korsun (transl.), M.I. Steblin-Kamenskiy (ed. and comm.). M.; L., 1963. (In Russ.)
Toporova T.V. O vzaimodeystvii povestvovatel'nykh planov v «Rechakh Vysokogo» [Interaction of narrative aspects in The Ballad of the High One]. Skandinavskie yazyki. Diakhroniya i sinkhroniya [Scandinavian languages. Diachronic and synchronic studies]. Moscow, Izd. Centr RGGU, 2001, vyp. 5, pp. 143-171. (In Russ.)
Klaus von See. Die Gestalt der Hávamál. Eine Studie zur eddischen Spruchdichtung. Frankfurt/M.: Athenäum Verlag, 1972.
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