Gullbúluskrá, a Multilingual Compound

Abstract

Abstract The word gullbóluskrá occurs only in ‘Sverris saga’. It is used for a letter with a golden seal from the emperor in Constantinople. Its arrival would have been at the centre of a ceremony where the envoy called it a chrysobull, a gullbúlu-skrá. As ‘Sverris saga’ was written during the king’s lifetime, one can be sure that gullbúlu- was used in the original version. The form gullbólu- may have resulted from a scribe misunderstanding the -búlu- part. The word skrá has various senses in nineteenth-century dictionaries, suggesting a development from ‘dry skin’ via ‘parchment’ to ‘document’. The meaning ‘dry skin’ is given for only a single passage in ‘Hávamál’. However, this interpretation is debatable. Krijnie Ciggaar suggests that skrá could be a loan from Greek sakra, denoting a document used in correspondence with other countries. The loss of the first vowel in sakra can be explained because the pattern sVkrV in Old Norse occurs only in a few Latin loanwords, while the pattern skrV is frequent. The unshortened form sacra for sakra is found in various stories of Western European origin. It seems that sakra reached Europe in two forms: shortened skrá in Scandinavia and as sacra in Western Europe.