The Old Norse Gerundive

Friday December 6, 2013 at 14:15 – 16:00 (HF: 372)

“… þá er þat skýrandi.”

Especially in literature translated from Latin, Old Norse employs a form similar to the present participle in order to translate the Latin gerundive (Ekki er kristnum manni meir flýjanda en ofmetnaðr from Nihil magis Christiano vitandum est quam superbia – “Nothing should be avoided by a Christian more than pride”). While this gerundive is morphologically identical to the present participle, the semantics of the two differ drastically: the latter is active and factual while the gerundive is passive and deontic, i.e. it does not say what something is doing, but what must or can be done to something. In a typical construction the gerundive is used as a predicative with the copula (e.g. sjá kynning […] er nemandi – “this knowledge must be acquired”).

The syntax and inflectional behavior of this gerundive construction is not always as straight forward as in this case, and different constructions occur. They cannot always be easily told apart and appear to be influenced by other deontic, passive and impersonal constructions. I will present those different constructions and try to shed some light on their usage and distribution.

Robert K. Paulsen, PhD scholar in Old Norse (norrøn filologi) at LLE. He has his master’s degree from the University of Freiburg, and took up his PhD position at the University of Bergen 1 August 2013.