Thodjildur "Haukadeler" Jörundardóttir - Name spelling

According to Landnamabok, http://heimskringla.no/wiki/Landnamabogen_2 Haukadalar is a place name - the same place as where Eirik Raude originally settled with his father when they had to flee Norway.

I've unlocked the name fields - tell me when you are finished tweaking them, and I can re-lock.

This from Eric's saga:

"There Thorvald died, and Eirik then married Thjodhild, daughter of Jorund, the son of Atli, and of Thorbjorg the Ship-breasted, whom afterwards Thorbjorn, of the Haukadalr (Hawkdale) family, married; he it was who dwelt at Eiriksstadr after Eirik removed from the north."

Hermann Palsson's translation of Landnamabok says

"They made a home in Drangar, where Thorvald died. Afterwards Eirik married Thjodhild, the daughter of Jorund Atlason and Thor bjorg Ship-Breast, who by that time was was the wife of Thorbjorn the Haukadaler. Then Eirik moved house from the north down to Haukadale and cleared some land for farming."

So Haukadalur is the area where Thjodhild's mother (and so presumably Thjodhild also) and step-father live and Erik moves there from Drangar after marrying her.

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Drangar,+Iceland/B%C3%BA%C3%B0ardal...

Harald Tveit Alvestrand

I edited the name fields as per above so they are ready to be locked again.

For some reason the Norwegian version does not appear in grey below the English version when viewed in default but i am guessing this could be because the default English spelling is identical to the Norwegian version.

The name of the valley in Icelandic is Haukadalur and it's at A and B on this map: http://www.planiceland.com/map/#q=Haukadalur&x=457190&y=513...

You have found the correct place for Drangar.

Any idea what her mother's nickname "ship-breast" might imply?

The phase is meaningless to my modern English eye and Google is not at all helpful... before today i was reading it as "ship-BEAST" which i thought perhaps was a nickname that Erik had invented for his mother-in-law?? :)

Remi Trygve Pedersen, you cannot always trust Google, i found this by accident:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haukadalur#Haukadalur.2C_Sn.C3.A6fell...

It explains that the "Haukadalur" mentioned in Erik's saga is further North West than the spa resort town of the same name.

Alex, I don't know about any resort town, just know where the Haukadalur is that Eirik Raude lived in after he moved from Drangar and married Tjodhild.

You can check out the information about the historic site Eiríksstaðir where Eirik Raude lived in Haukadalur, see the link below. Snæfellsnes is the halfisland between Breiðafjörður and Faxaflói on the maplink I gave you earlier.

Please check out the map at the bottom of their page: http://www.leif.is/default.asp?sid_id=42781&tre_rod=010|&tI...

Re the ship-breast:

In the Danish translation of Landnamasaga linked to above, there's a footnote saying that the word used for Tjodhild is "knarrarbringa" - which would translate like "breast like a ship" (knarr was a type of Viking merchant vessel). I would guess "high-breasted" would not be an inappropriate translation.

The Norse text is "Eiríkr fekk þá Þjóðhildar, dóttur Jörundar Úlfssonar ok Þorbjargar knarrarbringu" - very little context for the word.

Remi, the maplink you posted doesn't work very well for my work computer (which i was using yesterday) on my home computer it works well now.
Thanks

Harald,
"high-breasted" doesn't make a lot of sense to me still.

"breast like a ship" suggests to me Dolly Parton, especially if knarr refers to the viking merchant ships as opposed to their smaller raiding ships? So "Thorbjorg the Ample" ?

Ample: adjective
3. (of a person's figure) full or broad.

I would suggest that we leave the nickname untranslated if we can't know what it actually means.

Actually looking at the Geni profile Thorbjorg "Ship-Breast" Gilsdóttir her suffix has been set by Private to show "den Barmfagre" which translates to English easily and matches my comment above.

The question is how accurate is lars' translation of knarrarbringa=den Barmfagre?

Sorry, i will keep answering my own questions :)

"Erik giftede sig så med Tjodhild, der var datter af Jørund Atlason og Thorbjørg den Barmfagre..." is from http://heimskringla.no/wiki/Landnamabogen_2 with this footnote:

"Ordet er knarrarbringa. Finnur Jónsson tolker ordet således: ”‘Knarrebringe’, med bryst som en skibstavn ɔ: højbarmet.”

which Google translates as:
The word is knarrarbringa. Finnur jónsson interprets the word thus: "'Knarrebringe', with chest like a ship stern ɔ: højbarmet."

Google cannot translate højbarmet but an online Danish dictionary is telling me (i think) that it means "with large breasts" which matches the "den Barmfagre" translation also.

My lose thoughts.
- "højbarmet." It would correspond to "high chested", big breasted, but the word beauty as in "fagra" does not fit in, "barm, byst, bringa, chest, so big or high depending on what english talking people prefer to use, would cover that,
knarrarbringa two word, knarra + bringa, the last one goes also over to the germanic and also in english word "bring", fetch, something, figuratively 1: you see someone carrying and holding something between his arm, (on the breast), when he goes and deliver it, and 2; the describing of the lifting curved movement, 3; goes in to the form, like a slope or a hill, ( there is the other kind of boat, sloop, or slup in swedish), 4 goes over to the hill formation, to describe also breast, so there it is.

Knarr, probably a onomatopoetic word that mimics the sound that wooden boat creates when it sails in the water, knarrarbringa, cargo ship. Wow, she had breast like a cargo ship, let's call her that! Not likely,
- Her breast were so big that they sounded like the ship when she walked!, Not likely, but it could have been a word for a certain harness, breastplate, maybe somewhat resembling the cargo ship knarrarbringa,
thus given name to that armour, and also given a double meaning as a pun, to a woman with big breast.

So it seems to be that she was a "big" woman, i wonder if people used the nickname when talking to her?

Can you take a look at how i have set up the various language tabs Thorbjorg "Ship-Breast" Gilsdóttir for her names and nicknames. I think i am close but it all a bit of guess work.

Alex Moes the word "høybrystet" (high-breasted) is actually part of Norwegian to this day (although now regarded as old-fashioned). Yes, it would be the Dolly Parton look.

Learned something new while searching for it: In Old Norse, the expression "high-breasted horse" meant a gallows. Very poetic language (and I have not even an inkling of why that should be).

In accordence to Heimskringla-Landnamaboken 2 (94) is the suffix "den Barmfagra" correct

Hello Lars, thank you for replying. I found out the same thing myself by searching around enough.

Harald, builders use what in English is called a sawhorse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sawhorse#/media/File:Sawhorse.svg not much of a leap from there to calling a gallows a horse.

MP for Jorund Ulfsson?

MP: Done! I MPed the large-breasted one too :-)

In current Norwegian the sawhorse is called a saw-stool (sagkrakk). Languages change....

now that you mention it my father called it a saw-stool (or was it saws-tool?) rather than a saw horse!

If Jorund's father Ulf leaves Norway after the battle of Hafrsfjord (what is the current guesstimate 875?) then Jorund must be born after 880 (i've seen 881 with no source).

Thorvald and Erik come to Iceland in 962(?) after which Thorvald dies and then Erik gets married to Thjodhild who is living with her mother and stepfather (suggesting Jorund is dead?) then by about 970 Leif is born.

So Thjodhild and Erik are born c940? Jorund dies not long after and Thjodhild and Thorbyorg go to live in Haukadalur for 25 years until Erik shows up.

So Ulf c855, Jorund c881, Thjodhild c940 and Leif c970 makes sense, even if it is only a guess.

Need to check if Herfinnur Þorgilsson is the father of Gils "skeiðarnef" Herfinnsson, https://is.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gils_skei%C3%B0arnef.

Google translate really struggles with Icelandic :(

Gils skeiðarnef nam Gilsfjörð milli Óláfsdals og Króksfjarðarmúla; hann bjó á Kleifum. Hans son var Heðinn, faðir Halldórs Garpsdalsgoða, föður Þorvalds í Garpsdal, er átti Guðrúnu Ósvífursdóttur.

"Gils skeiðarnef had Gilsfjord between Olafsdal and Króksfjarðarmula; he lived in Kleifum.

Gils son was Heðinn the father of Halldór Halldórs Garpsdalsgoða who was the father of Thorvald in Garpsdal.

Thorvald(?) married Gudrun Ósvífursdóttir."

I think

"So it seems to be that she was a "big" woman, i wonder if people used the nickname when talking to her?"

"the Busty"? If the original sources doesn't mention anything about her breast size, we should not use it at all, she might have own a cargo ship, she might have been born on such a ship, she might have had a harness that looked like a boat, or were very broad/wide over the chest, we do not know. But I do see that you act like little boys in a sandpit.

"skeiðarnef" sounds like a place name - Cape Skeithar.

Ulf: "Knarrbringa" is definitely (as far as any translation is definite) a reference to breast(s).

Is it? I earlier wrote that Knarrbringa could be interpreted as "cargo ship", "cargo ship" consists of two word, so does knarr-bringa, first word describes the type of boat, the second word the purpose, in this case delivery. To have a nickname, that is what it is, as knarrbringa, would thereby indicate that she had a joint to either the ship itself, or had a attribute resemblance that refered to that sort of ship, here you all got stuck in this second elucidation, that it must have been her breast that was that resemblance, based on what? Just maybe a later misinterpretation.

Can you give me any other example where the use of the word knarrbringa actually points to a clear definition of breast, big or small on a woman?

The word knarr, or actually knorr, does not contain any information of why or how that word was constructed, theoretical it could be based on the timber itself that the boat was built with, or the method, like a "knotted oak" boat, for example, or as I explained in my lose thoughts above, based on the sound that typical boat made in the sea.

The word "bringa" have several meanings, actually one of them could also be translated to the boats bow i.e the prow visible above the water, hence over to the figurehead as a carving, typically a bust or a full-length figure set at the prow of an sailing ship, the initial use of this word in this meaning would be "back" or " ridge", "bringa and back" are also related to the word describing human body parts.

If you all misses it, my point is that we only should use the "Knarrbringa" as it is, without any interpretations or tranlations, because that would likely mean to create a meaning to her nickname that might not have been the intention.