CLAIM / COUNTERCLAIM / LIMITRECORD 607
DISPUTE
RECORD.
One scholarly question. Every attached source. The present editorial state, without pretending the last word has been written.
openestablished
What is the exact earliest surviving fjá token?
Not established here. The reviewed sources supply poem and stanza locations but no directly inspected manuscript object, exact composition date, or uncontested first-use year.
WORD UNDER REVIEWDISPUTE 607
fjá
not directly recoverable · Old Norse verb
Old Norse fjá was a verb meaning to hate. The Dictionary of Old Norse Prose classifies it as poetic and exposes zero prose citations; its glossarium links point to the early form fía and the reconstructed Proto-Germanic *fi(j)ēn-. Cleasby and Vigfússon call the verb obsolete, compare Gothic fijan and Old English feon or fjan, and locate it in Hýmiskviða 22 and Lokasenna 35, with the reflexive fjásk in Skírnismál 33. Fritzner independently gives the same three locations. The normalized verse texts preserve three different grammatical surfaces: goð fjá in Hýmiskviða, mangi fíár in Lokasenna, and Freyr fiásk in Skírnismál. Lexicon Poeticum likewise reports three poetic records, but explicitly warns that its concordance is unreviewed and that dates should be checked. These are source-reported lexical and edited-text records, not directly inspected manuscript objects, and three records in the reviewed poetic concordance are not a census of every Old Norse utterance. The finite verb became a tiny poetic fossil while its inherited participial relative fjándi became the ordinary enemy noun and accumulated 222 citations in ONP's prose corpus. Those corpus totals are not directly frequency-comparable, but the contrast makes the grammatical survival visible. The generated possible runic inscription shown by modern dictionary transcriptions is not historical evidence and is excluded. No historical sound recording exists, so the dossier does not fabricate one exact pronunciation.
01DIRECT CLAIM EVIDENCE
1 SOURCES WITH A STANCE
A citation is not a vote. Each record says whether the work supports, challenges, contradicts, or contextualizes the position—and identifies the exact locus used.
SOURCE 01supportshistorical dictionary
An Icelandic-English Dictionary — fjá
Provides locators but no exact first object or year.
Three poem and stanza locations without manuscript-object evidence- AUTHOR / EDITOR
- Richard Cleasby · Guðbrandur Vigfússon
- YEAR
- 1874
- PUBLISHER
- Clarendon Press · digital transcription
02 / EDITORIAL STATE
THE QUESTION REMAINS OPEN.
- CONFIDENCE
- established
- STATUS
- open
- LEGACY SOURCE SUMMARY
- All three attestation rows are source-reported normalized editions.
WHY NO RESOLUTIONThe reviewed evidence does not yet warrant collapsing the competing or incomplete analyses into one secure answer.