[5-6] vildit varla ‘hardly wanted [that]’: The enclitic -t and varla lit. ‘hardly’ (or by litotes, ‘at all’) produce a double negative; cf., e.g., Gizsv Lv 1/1. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson (ÍF 27) suggests that vildi ‘wanted’ would be more correct. Jón Skaptason (1983, 249-50) takes varla ‘hardly’ as a form of varliga ‘cautiously’ and construes it with haldisk vǫrðr á fjalli, giving ‘let the king keep cautiously to the mountains’, but this is not justified.
References
- Bibliography
- ÍF 26-8 = Heimskringla. Ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson. 1941-51.
- Jón Skaptason. 1983. ‘Material for an Edition and Translation of the Poems of Sigvat Þórðarson, skáld’. Ph.D. thesis. State University of New York at Stony Brook. DAI 44: 3681A.
- Internal references
- Diana Whaley (ed.) 2012, ‘Gizurr svarti (gullbrárskáld), Lausavísa 1’ in Diana Whaley (ed.), Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas 1: From Mythical Times to c. 1035. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 1. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 818.