Search results for "Old Frisian"
showing 9 items of 9 documents
Kidnapping the Frisian
2017
The several sources documenting the events of the Viking Age in Frisia Magna emphasise the dramatic aspects of the Northern invasions. However, seen from a wider perspective, the Frisian-Scandinavian relations appear to be multifaceted and at times ambiguous. A number of Old Frisian law texts refer to the Viking practice of capturing and enslaving Frisian men, forcing them to fight on their side, and even sharing spoils with them. A Frisian who undergoes such an experience is called skalk, ‘servant, slave’, a sort of high-ranking servant. He enjoys special rights and even privileges. Such ambiguous status seems the result of the peculiar and not always straightforward interactions between F…
Theological and doctrinal texts in the Old Frisian Thet Autentica Riocht
2015
The Frisian literary corpus is composed mostly by legal texts. However, interspersed in the law manuscripts, various texts of different nature are occasionally attested, several of which are of religious content. Among them, worthy of consideration are a number of short pieces devoted to theological and biblical topics, such as those contained in the so-called Thet autentica Riocht (fifteenth century): the Seven Virtues of the Mass, the Seven Things that God hates, the Ten Signs in the Host, the Three Unforgivable Sins, as well as a piece devoted to the benefits of confession. These texts share features with the Five Keys to Wisdom, a brief didactic treatise preserved in the First and Secon…
Glossing the Old Frisian Psalter: Pragmatics and Competence
2014
The essay takes into examination the interlinear glosses in Old Frisian in the fragment of Psalter in ms. Groningen, Universiteitsbibliotheek 404. This is the oldest medieval Frisian fragmentary codex to survive and contains verses of Psalms XVII, XXVII, and XVIII, accompanied by glosses in the vernacular. This essay is the first lengthy study specifically devoted to the typology of the glosses themselves and their peculiarities (within the field of interlinear glosses). On close inspection, the OF glosses show a large internal coherence and individual quality. As far as the lexicon is concerned, the glosses feature a series of words belonging to the juridical lexicon, whereas other word-ch…
‘Old Frisian krocha: Setting Fire with a Coal Pan’
2017
TheBrokmerbrefand the Emsigo Compensation Tariff concerning arson provide a number of occurrences of the wordkrocha, otherwise unrecorded in Old Frisian, in the meaning ‘coal pan’. Yet the Modern Frisian dialect words denote different sorts of cooking pots, either earthen or metal, and apparently do not support the specialized meaning of the Old Frisian. Coal pans were quite common in medieval times, however, and the legal provisions under examination provide both homely and lively descriptions of arson, possibly based on actual cases. Medieval iconography of the devil as an arsonist—portrayed with a coal pan in his hand—assists the interpretation ofkrocha, which goes back to Richthofen, an…
Glimpses of the Hereafter in the Late-Medieval Thet Freske Riim
2014
The article analyzes a passage of the narrative poem Thet Freske Riim, one of the few non-legal texts preserved in Old Frisian. The passage in question is a digression describing the Joys of Heaven and the Horrors of Hell, which so far has attracted little attention in the scholarly literature on medieval accounts of the hereafter. The representations of the afterlife and its realms circulating in Medieval Europe draw inspiration from a wide body of both orthodox and apocryphal literature on ecstatic dreams, of which one of the most influential work is the Visio Sancti Pauli or Apocalypse of Paul. The study aims to identify – in the examined passage – themes and features of otherworldly lit…
Old Frisian skalk: A ‘Servant’ or a ‘Rogue’?
2017
The Old Frisian wordscalc, scalch, schalcis usually used in the sense of ‘servant, slave’. However, the word evidences a pejoration in meaning, being also attested in the Frisian written tradition in the sense of ‘ill-mannered person, villain, a bad guy’. The investigation of the occurrences ofskalk–along with a comparison of its Germanic cognates–will allow us to draw a picture of the semantic development of this word from medieval times to the Modern stage of the Frisian language. In the author’s opinion, the negative connotation ofskalkas an offensive epithet is the final result of a range of different causes, whose origin should be searched both in Frisian-Scandinavian contacts during t…
The Criteria for the Formation of a Frisian Runic Corpus Revisited
1998
The Frisian corpus of runic inscriptions consists of about twenty items, some of which are very short, while other present several problems of legend and interpretation. On the other end, it is undeniable that the Frisian runic inscriptions constitute a uniform corpus with a recognizable identity that can be pinpointed through a series of specific criteria. In the present paper I enter the debate about the origin of the Frisian runic inscriptions, analysing the geographical, linguistical and epigraphic criteria identified by the previous research, providing whenever possible further and new elements, in order to strengthen the foundations of the Frisian runological tradition.
Le iscrizioni runiche sullo sfondo della cultura Frisone altomedievale
2000
The study offers a critical edition of the Old Frisian runic corpus, together with a linguistic and philological analysis of the inscriptions examined, also in the light of their context of occurrence,
Levelling Of I-Umlaut in Classical and Post-Classical Old Frisian Nouns
2022
The paper discusses and evaluates the extent of i-umlaut levelling in classical (ca. 1300–1400) and post-classical (ca.1400–1550) Old Frisian nouns. In terms of the methodology, the main goal of the analysis is to identify the quantitative relation between the incidence of i-umlauted and umlautless root vowels in the nominal declension paradigms. In order to understand and assess the process of levelling of i-umlaut in Old Frisian, three aspects that may have had an impact on the presence or absence of i-mutated vowels are taken into account, namely: the presence of the i-mutation trigger *-ī and *-j and *-i, the establishment of whether i-mutation is noticeable in the entire paradigm or it…