Note to GunnLeif Merl I 47VIII
[3-4] byggva ... brezkum her ‘settle … with British people’: This edn follows the construal implied by Bret 1848-9, with brezkum her in the instr. dat.; similarly Merl 2012. The meaning of byggva here is ‘cause the land to become settled’ (Fritzner: byggja 5; ONP: byggja 8; cf. LP: byggva 2). Gunnlaugr makes frequent use of constructions in which a noun in dat./instr. function appears without a prep. such as með (cf. Í 63/6-7; NS §§104, 105, 108, and 110). Skj B translates less precisely as give landet til det brittiske folk ‘give the land to the British people’. Kock (NN §103) takes brezkum her in apposition to liði, evidently positing a sense ‘The lord who leads the army, the British people, will promptly settle the land’, but this is to ignore not merely the applicable sub-sense of byggva but also Geoffrey’s text, where the idea is that the land is re-settled by the original inhabitants; such a structure of variation, with the intervening adv. brátt, would be hard to parallel in Old West Norse poetry.
References
- Bibliography
- Skj B = Finnur Jónsson, ed. 1912-15b. Den norsk-islandske skjaldedigtning. B: Rettet tekst. 2 vols. Copenhagen: Villadsen & Christensen. Rpt. 1973. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde & Bagger.
- 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.
- Fritzner = Fritzner, Johan. 1883-96. Ordbog over det gamle norske sprog. 3 vols. Kristiania (Oslo): Den norske forlagsforening. 4th edn. Rpt. 1973. Oslo etc.: Universitetsforlaget.
- NS = Nygaard, Marius. 1906. Norrøn syntax. Kristiania (Oslo): Aschehoug. Rpt. 1966.
- ONP = Degnbol, Helle et al., eds. 1989-. A Dictionary of Old Norse Prose / Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog. 1-. Copenhagen: The Arnamagnæan Commission.
- Bret 1848-9 = Jón Sigurðsson. 1848-9. ‘Trójumanna saga ok Breta sögur, efter Hauksbók, med dansk Oversættelse’. ÅNOH 1848, 3-215; 1849, 3-145.
- Merl 2012 = Horst, Simone, ed. 2012. Merlínússpá. Merlins Prophezeiung. Munich: Herbert Utz Verlag.