örnefni

Two placenames this Friday, because the body is different-seeming in different countries, and different countries make different bodies visible. I am still imagining the last of Finn's champions reciting dindsenchas to Patrick, pointing to where the body of Anu pushes through the sod and making the old boy blush, but I am thinking of another country.


hnakki

English has nape, which is a good word and a good place, but hnakki is a larger domain. It is the nape, and the back of the neck, and higher up the back of the head than you expect it to be. Were you to have eyes in the proverbial back of your head, they would be on your hnakki, but if you did not, and if you were deprived of sight, as in a fog, someone (perhaps even Snorri) might say that you saw no better with your eyes than with your hnakki.

Etymologically, it is the same word as neck, of course, but unlike neck it is exclusive of the front of the head-pillar, the throat. When you lose your seat riding and fall onto the neck of your mount, it is the hnakki of the horse you fall upon. The mane sprouts from the hnakki, that muscular arch. The untried rider fearing a fall in the other direction grabs for the mane, tugging thereby at the hnakki. Perhaps in general the hnakki is where you wind your fingers in the hair and tug.


hálsakot

Háls is neck, the head-pillar, the narrow joiner or the constricted passage. On the body, it is both the inside, the part you might soothe with boiled sweets, and the outside, ticklish-skinned. In the mountains, high ridges connecting peaks may be called háls. So might bottlenecks real or metaphorical.

Kot is a small place, a tiny farm or the house upon it. English has the same word, though we think of the bed called cot more than the parcel of land on which stands the cottage dwelt in by the cotter. A cotter may not even own that land, no yeoman or stórbóndi he, but he has some form of leave to stay there, at least for a time.

Seeing the word hálsakot, then, you might imagine a cotter in his wee house high up on the slope of narrow mountain or near a pass, smoke rising from the chimney into the clear air. But hálsakot is the hollow between the collarbone, the crest of the trapezius, and the neck. I do not know an English word for this place.