Note to Anon (Ragn) 6VIII (Ragn 36)
[6] hjört branda ‘the stag of prow-sides [SHIP]’: Brandar (nom. pl.) must refer to specific parts of a ship in this kenning, rather than standing pars pro toto for the whole ship, although Jesch (2001a, 147-8) finds no evidence of such specific usage in the earlier skaldic corpus (cf. Note to 35/5, above). Olsen (Ragn 1906-8, 220) takes brandr here as synonymous with svíri (Fritzner: svíri 2), understanding it as referring to one of the two posts at a ship’s fore-stem that were used to fasten it either to the mooring rope or to the anchor cable and could be seen as resembling a stag’s antlers. Falk (1912, 43-5; cf. Jesch 2001a, 147-9), on the other hand, sees it as referring to a triangular piece of wood on each side of the ship’s stems (see also Shetelig and Falk 1937, 358-9).
References
- Bibliography
- Jesch, Judith. 2001a. Ships and Men in the Late Viking Age: The Vocabulary of Runic Inscriptions and Skaldic Verse. Woodbridge: Boydell.
- Falk, Hjalmar. 1912. Altnordisches Seewesen. Wörter und Sachen 4. Heidelberg: Winter.
- 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.
- Shetelig, Haakon and Hjalmar Falk. 1937. Scandinavian Archaeology. Trans. E. V. Gordon. Oxford: Clarendon.
- Ragn 1906-8 = Olsen 1906-8, 111-222.