Ergi (noun) and argr (adjective) are two Old Norse terms of insult, denoting effeminacy or other unmanly behaviour. Argr (also ragr) is "unmanly" and ergi is "unmanliness"; the terms have cognates in other Germanic languages such as earh, earg, arag, or arug.
Ergi in the Viking Age
To accuse another man of being argr was called scolding (see nīþ) and thus a legal reason to challenge the accuser in holmgang.[citation needed] If holmgang was refused by the accused, he could be outlawed (full outlawry) as this refusal proved that the accuser was right and the accused was argr.[citation needed] If the accused fought successfully in holmgang and had thus proven that he was not argr, the scolding was considered what was in Old English called eacan, an unjustified, severe defamation, and the accuser had to pay the offended party full compensation. The Gray Goose Laws states:
There are three words—should exchanges between people ever reach such dire limits—which all have full outlawry as the penalty; if a man calls another ragr, stroðinn or sorðinn. As they are to be prosecuted like other fullréttisorð and, what is more, a man has the right to kill in retaliation for these three words. He has the right to kill in retaliation on their account over the same period as he has the right to kill on account of women, in both cases up the next General Assembly. The man who utters these words falls with forfeit immunity at the hands of anyone who accompanies the man about whom they were uttered to the place of their encounter.[1]
Although no runic inscription uses the term ergi, runestoneVg 67 in Saleby, Sweden, includes a curse that anyone breaking the stone would become a rata, translated as a 'wretch', 'outcast', or 'warlock', and argri konu, which is translated as 'maleficent woman' in the dative.[2] Here argri appears to be related to the practice of seiðr[3] and represents the most loathsome term the runemaster could imagine calling someone.[4]
In modern Scandinavian languages, the lexical root arg- has assumed the meaning "angry", as in Swedish, Bokmål and Nynorskarg, or Danisharrig. Modern Icelandic has the derivationergilegur, meaning "to seem/appear irritable", similar to Bokmål ergre, meaning "to irritate". (There are similarities to the Germanärgerlich, "annoying, annoyed", and Dutchergerlijk, "irritating" and ergeren, "to irritate".) In modern Faroese the adjectiveargur means "angry/annoyed" and the verbarga means to "taunt" or "bully". In modern Dutch, the word erg has become a fortifier equivalent to English very; the same is true for the old-fashioned adjective arg in German, which means "wicked" (especially in compounds as arglistig "malicious" and arglos "unsuspecting"), but has become a fortifier in the Austrian German. The meaning of the word in Old Norse has been preserved in loans into neighboring Finnic languages: Livonian ārga, Estonianarg and Finnisharka, both meaning "cowardly".
^Sørenson, Preben M.; Turville-Petre, Joan (transl.) (1983). The Unmanly Man: Concepts of Sexual Defamation in Early Northern Society. Studies in Northern Civilization. Vol. 1. Odense University Press. p. 17. ISBN87-7492-436-2.
