on 5/31/02 12:04 PM, jesse glass at [log in to unmask] wrote:
> I agree with Dave about Deor and Wulf and Eadwacer. I did a translation of
> the latter and it's up at a site from the University of Iowa. The very
> first line is problematic...and actually, if I recall correctly, Deor also
> has that line about "Wieland be wurman" or something or other that scholars
> have debated for decades.
Hi, Jesse--nice to hear from you and hope your health problems of a few
months back have eased up. Re "wurman," oral trad debates invariably revolve
around sounds unheard or sights unseen and sometimes both in the case of
radical shifts of accent, say. A colleague of mine at NCSU once witnessed an
exchange between a lost little boy and the mall security people who were
trying to reconnect him with his mother. When one of them pointed to a
female shopper and asked, "Is that your mama," the little boy looked skyward
and replied "whirr?" (Something maybe only a southerner could have
understood as "where"!) As my students like to say--for lack of an essay-
opening line--"since the dawn of the age of man..." blah blah blah--C
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