The Color Grey in Old Norse-Icelandic Literature

I

In their seminal work, Basic Color Terms, the linguist-anthropologists Brent Berlin and Paul Kay analyzed the color terms of close to one hundred of the world's languages, belonging to a variety of linguistic families and/or groups.¹ They challenged the thesis of relativism in the encoding of color and advanced an alternative hypothesis, arguing that there was a universal inventory of eleven basic color terms, located in the color space where English speakers place the most typical examples of black, white, red, orange, yellow, brown, green, blue, purple, pink, and grey. Comparing the vocabularies of languages possessing fewer than these eleven categories, they demonstrated that basic color terms do not appear at random in the diachronic development of a language, but in an invariable seven-stage sequence illustrated below:

The scheme is to be interpreted as follows: all languages possess basic terms for the black and white foci; if a language contains three terms, then it contains a term for red; if a language contains four terms, then the fourth term will be either yellow or green; if a language contains five terms, then it contains terms for both yellow and green; if a language contains six terms, then it contains a term for blue; if a language contains seven terms, then it contains a term for brown; and if a language contains eight or more terms, then it contains a term for purple, pink, orange, grey, or some combination of these. Berlin and Kay concluded that "color lexicons with few terms tend to occur in association with relatively simple cultures and simple technologies, while color lexicons with many terms tend to occur in association with complex cultures and complex technologies (to the extent that complexity of culture and technology can be assessed objectively)."²

Old Norse-Icelandic has eight basic color terms (svartr, hvítr, rauðr, grœnn, gulr, blár, brúnn, and grár (gránn), making it an early stage VII language.³ For lack of data, it is, of course, impossible to assess precisely the evolutionary sequence of these terms, but it is noteworthy that an examination of Snorri Sturluson's use of color terms in Gylfaginning reveals not only a limination of color terms to include only a handful (svartr, hvítr, rauðr, grár, and grœnn),⁴ but also an introduction of color terms, beginning with black (svartr) and ending with green (grœnn) that matches the evolutionary sequence proposed by Berlin and Kay with the notable exception only of grár.⁵ Obviously, there is no way of knowing Snorri Sturluson's reasonings behind this order, but it is tempting to speculate that in some way he tried, through his use of color terminology, to give expression to what Berlin and Kay call "a relatively simple culture" and bring his readers close to seeing the world through the eyes of his and their pagan forebears, as these pagans described it in their myths and legends.⁶

According to Berlin and Kay's temporal-evolutionary order, grey (grár) would have been among the last terms added to the Old Norse-Icelandic basic color lexicon. This order is contradicted by Snorri Sturluson, and, indeed, Berlin and Kay's placement of grey, the only achromatic basic color term added from stage II onwards in their stage VII of language development, has been called into question. Stanley R. Witkowski and Cecil H. Brown note that "four of their seven error cases involved the premature appearance of gray" and comment that "[e]vidence adduced since then . . . shows, many more exceptional cases, so many, in fact, that gray is now considered a 'wild card' color . . . which can be encoded at any point after the early stages."⁷

It is the aim of this article to demonstrate through linguistic categorization the objects about which the hue adjective grár is used and to determine on the basis of its frequency in a selection of texts whether for Old Norse-Icelandic one should place grey in the later stages or assign it to the early stages...