Scop - Scop, scopf, and scold: The Art of Verbal Insulting

Scop, scopf, and scold: The Art of Verbal Insulting

Not coincidentally, while skop became English scoff, the Old Norse skald lives on in a Modern English word of similarly deprecating meaning, scold. There is a homonymous Old High German scopf meaning "abuse, derision" (Old Norse skop, meaning "mocking, scolding", whence scoff), a third meaning "tuft of hair", and yet another meaning "barn" (cognate to English shop). They may all derive from a Proto-Germanic *skupa.

The association with jesting or mocking is, however, strong in Old High German. There is a skopfari glossing both poeta and comicus and a skopfliod glossing canticum rusticum et ineptum and psalmus plebeius. Skopfsang on the other hand is of a higher register, glossing poema, poesis, tragoedia. The words involving jesting are derived from another root, PIE *skeub- "push, thrust", related to English shove, shuffle, and the Oxford English Dictionary favours association of scop with that root. The question cannot be decided formally, since the Proto-Germanic forms coincided in zero grade, and by the time of our surviving sources (from the late 8th century), association with both roots may have influenced the word for several centuries.

It is characteristic of the Germanic tradition of poetry that the sacred or heroic cannot be separated from the ecstatic or drunken state, and correspondingly crude jesting (compare the Lokasenna, where the poet humorously depicts the gods themselves as quarrelsome and malicious), qualities summed up in the concept of *wōþuz, the name-giving attribute of the god of poetry, *Wōdanaz.