Laudator Temporis Acti

Tom Shippey, Laughing Shall I Die: Lives and Deaths of the Great Vikings (London: Reaktion Books, 2018), p. 96, with notes on p. 320:

Rowe, by contrast, accepts that Reginherus may well have been the original of Ragnar, not yet known as 'Lodbrog'.³⁰ Noting the accounts that say that he was struck down by disease, once specified as dysentery, she adds the speculation that the unfortunate effects of dysentery — unstoppably loose bowels — may have been the cause of his nickname.³¹ This is a theory one has to reject! If Ragnar had been famous for fouling his trousers, one can be sure that his loyal comrades, filled with Bad Sense of Humour, would not have called him anything as polite as loðbrók, or 'hairy-breeches'. They would have come out with something much ruder, perhaps dritbrók, which I forbear to translate.

30 [Elizabeth Ashman] Rowe, Vikings in the West, p. 32. She rejects, however, the idea that there ever was an actual person called Loðbrók, or that the attacker of Paris could have been the father of Irish Ímair, p. 134.

31 Ibid., pp. 165–6.

ONP: Dictionary of Old Norse Prose, s.v. drit sb. n.:

shit, excrement

Labels: noctes scatologicae