Note to Eskál Vell 8I
[1]: (a) Almost all interpreters, including the present ed., have accepted the division of the line Mart varð él, áðr, Ála ‘many a storm came about, before, of Áli’; cf. Reichardt (1928, 154-5). (b) Kock (NN §396, followed by Ohlmarks 1958, 366) suggests a simpler solution in which él ‘storm’ is translated as ‘battle’ and Ála collocates with austrlǫnd ‘the eastern lands’ in the following line as a kenning for Norway. But Ála must be the determinant of the battle-kenning, because él alone is not known to signify ‘battle’; see LP: él. The kenning austrlǫnd Ála is also unlikely (see Reichardt 1928, 154-5; Reichardt 1930, 241). (c) Kuhn (1929b, 201), also seeking to avoid a tripartite line, attaches Ála to lauks randar ‘leek of the shield’, the determinant of rœkilundr ‘tending tree’, but that similarly creates an overdetermined kenning while leaving él ‘battle’ without a determinant.
References
- Bibliography
- NN = Kock, Ernst Albin. 1923-44. Notationes Norrœnæ: Anteckningar till Edda och skaldediktning. Lunds Universitets årsskrift new ser. 1. 28 vols. Lund: Gleerup.
- 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.
- Kuhn, Hans (1899). 1929b. Review of Konstantin Reichardt. 1928. Studien zu den Skalden des 9. und 10. Jahrhunderts. Leipzig: Mayer & Müller. GGA, 193-202. Rpt. in Kuhn (1899) 1969-78, I, 421-9
- Reichardt, Konstantin. 1928. Studien zu den Skalden des 9. und 10. Jahrhunderts. Palaestra 159. Leipzig: Mayer & Müller.
- Reichardt, Konstantin. 1930. ‘Beiträge zur Skaldenforschung’. ANF 46, 32-62, 199-258.
- Ohlmarks, Åke. 1958. Tors skalder och Vite-Krists. Trosskiftestidens isländska furstelovskalder, 980-1013. Stockholm: Geber.