Word.ws English Dictionary

fornyrðislag

fornyrðislag noun: an Old Norse alliterative verse form used largely in the Poetic Edda, consisting of two lifts per half-line.

Noun

fornyrðislag (uncountable)

  1. An Old Norse alliterative verse form used largely in the Poetic Edda, consisting of two lifts per half-line.
    • In return, I hope to send you, if I can lay my hands on it (I hope it isn't lost), a thing I did many years ago while trying to learn the art of writing alliterative poetry: an attempt to unify the lays about the Völsungs from the Elder Edda, written in the old eight-line fornyrðislag stanza.1967, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, Letter 295

Origin of fornyrðislag

Learned borrowing from Old Norse fornyrðislag.

Questions about fornyrðislag

What does fornyrðislag mean?
Fornyrðislag means an Old Norse alliterative verse form used largely in the Poetic Edda, consisting of two lifts per half-line.
What part of speech is fornyrðislag?
Fornyrðislag is a noun.

Words near fornyrðislag in the dictionary

  1. fornixes
  2. Fornjot
  3. Fornovo di Taro
  4. Fornwalt
  5. Fornwalts
  6. fornyrðislag
  7. forodesine
  8. forold
  9. Foronda
  10. Forondas
  11. Foroohar

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fornyrðislag (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “fornyrðislag.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/fornyr%C3%B0islag. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.