landsmönnum

Landsmönnum is an Icelandic noun form meaning “countrymen” or “fellow citizens.” It is the dative plural form of landsmenn, a compound built from land (country) and menn (men). The base landsmenn denotes people of a country or nation and is common in historical and literary Icelandic.

The form landsmönnum appears in contexts where the noun phrase is governed by a preposition or verb that requires the dative case, such as after certain prepositions or in indirect-object constructions. In everyday contemporary Icelandic, landsmenn (the nominative plural) is more common when referring to countrymen in a general sense, while landsmönnum is encountered in older texts, formal writing, or quoted speech where the syntactic role demands the dative.

Semantically, landsmönnum conveys a sense of shared national or regional identity and can carry tones of camaraderie or collective appeal. The term is part of a broader Nordic linguistic tradition in which similar compounds exist across languages to denote people from the same land.

In summary, landsmönnum is a specific inflected form of a historically common word for “countrymen,” used mainly in contexts requiring the dative case and in older or more formal Icelandic prose and poetry.