Note to Anon Bjark 6^III

[8] hann vakði Baldr þeygi ‘he did not wake Baldr at all’: Or Baldr vakði hann þeygi ‘Baldr did not wake him at all’. However these words are construed, this is the reading of the majority mss against R’s Baldr þǫgli varði hann ‘Baldr the Silent defended him’. The sense of all three possible readings is unclear. A hero by the name of Baldr is not known from any Old Norse source for the legend of Hrólfr kraki’s last battle. In skaldic poetry Baldr is elsewhere the name of one of the gods, son of Óðinn and Frigg (but Víðarr is the ‘silent’ god; cf. SnE 1998, I, 19: hinn þǫgla Ás) or the base-word of a man-kenning (cf. LP: Baldr). It is possible, as suggested by Faulkes (SnE 1998, I, 189), that the Baldr of this line was originally part of a warrior-kenning or that the variant readings vakði/vakti ‘awakened’ and þeygi ‘not at all, by no means’ might be the remains of an allusion to the episode of the apparently inactive Bǫðvarr bjarki in Hrólfr’s last battle, whose body lay inert in his tent but who participated in the fighting in the shape of a bear (cf. Hrólf 1960, 118). Skj B and Skald adopt the mixed-reading version varði hann Baldr þeygi ‘Baldr did not defend him at all’.

References

1. Bibliography
2. Skj B = Finnur Jónsson, ed. 1912-15b. Den norsk-islandske skjaldedigtning. B: Rettet tekst. 2 vols. Copenhagen: Villadsen & Christensen. Rpt. 1973. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde & Bagger.
3. Skald = Kock, Ernst Albin, ed. 1946-50. Den norsk-isländska skaldediktningen. 2 vols. Lund: Gleerup.
4. LP = Finnur Jónsson, ed. 1931. Lexicon poeticum antiquæ linguæ septentrionalis: Ordbog over det norsk-islandske skjaldesprog oprindelig forfattet af Sveinbjörn Egilsson. 2nd edn. Copenhagen: Møller.
5. SnE 1998 = Snorri Sturluson. 1998. Edda: Skáldskaparmál. Ed. Anthony Faulkes. 2 vols. University College London: Viking Society for Northern Research.
6. Hrólf 1960 = Slay, Desmond, ed. 1960a. Hrólfs saga kráka. EA B 1. Copenhagen: Munksgaard.