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Hagea: K vasir. 129
In the following pages I shall try to show that the
main features of this story are based upon Latin stories
concerning Orion. The three principal points to be considered
are: first, the name and birth of Kvasir; second, his death;
and third, the reason why he is here connected with the
story of the divine mead.
The name Kvasir is a very peculiar one and no rea-
sonably plausible etymological explanation antedates that of
Noreen, briefly indicated by Schiick in Studier i nordisk
litteratur- och religionshistoria, I, 1904, p. 70. According
to this analysis ”Kvasir is probably related to kväsa and to
kvasa, which in Scandinavian dialects mean ’to press the
juice out of”. These words are presumably identical with
Danish kvase} kvasse, ’knuse noget for at udtrykke saften
deraf, which Falk and Torp refer to Germanic *kvassön1
from *kvadsön. If this is correct one would, I suppose, have
to explain Kvasir as a late secondary form of *Kvassir, or
at any rate as from an ON. *kvasa, a secondary form of
*kvassa (cf. Swed. dial, kvasa, ’kvappe, skvulpe’, a secondary
form of kvassa, Falk og Torp, s. v. kvase). But neither
*kvasa noi* *kvassa can be cited from any record contempo-
raneous with the Kvasir legend l), nor on the whole, so far
as I am aware, from Old Norse. If the Germanic root is
really *kvad, it would, moreover, seem very doubtful, whe-
ther one could assume for this word a form with -ss- shor-
tened to -s- as early as this (cf. Noreen, Altisl. Gr.2, § 226,
anm. 2). I regret that I could not have seen a fuller ex-
position of this etymology, which I know only through the
meager mention by Schiick. But even if it involves no pho-
netic difficulties whatever, I think it can be shown that the
origin of the name is to be looked for in an other direction.
Let us now turn to the birth feature of the Kvasir
*) I am using the word ”legend” in this paper in the sense in which
it is used by Schiick.
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