in Scandinavia as they were in Ireland, and probably in Homeric Greece, an öre of gold was the price of a slave. The passage from the life of St Finnian given at once shows that an ounce of gold was the regular price of a slave in early Ireland, and probably a good Scandinavian scholar could soon find similar evidence for the value of the old Norse slave.
The meaning and derivation of the term örtug have been much discussed. It occurs in the forms örtog, örtug, ertog, œrtug. Cleasby’s Lexicon makes nothing out of the first part of the word, but takes the second part (-tog -tug = tugr = 20), because örtug had the value of 20 penningar, though tugr means 10. But as a matter of fact there were, as we saw above, 240 penningar in the mark, and therefore there were 10 penningar in the örtug. Holmboe8 goes more deeply into the origin of örtug. He says, “As á, pl. œr, signifies a ewe, and tug-r as a derivative of ten both by itself and in compounds signifies ten, ertug seems originally to have signified 10 ewes, just as the weight ertug betokens the weight of 10 peningar, and peningr itself also means a sheep. It may be regarded as questionable to assume the plural œr to form the first part of the compound, yet œr must at an early period have been used in the formation of compounds, since both the folkspeech of Norway has the form œr-saud-ewe, sheep, technically a ewe-with-lamb, and the folkspeech of Denmark has œr lam in the sense of ewe-lamb9.” Another suggestion is that örtug comes from arta = a pea-formed knob, so that örtug = örtu-vog, the weight of a pea.
The objection to this would be that the pea would weigh 13·5 grs. Troy, which seems far too much.
In spite of the philological difficulty in making örtug = 10 ewes, it is very remarkable that this value corresponds so accurately with the value of a cow, which I independently found for it. I have already pointed out that 10 sheep were the usual value of a cow. So it was at Rome in 451 B.C.