[4] liðs skjǫldunga ‘the princes’ troop’: There is no obvious reason for the plurality of princes here, for Magnús alone dominates poetry and prose, and modern eds seem to have been untroubled by the pl., translating it as sg. There is no sg. skjǫldungi of which this could be gen. sg., and a better explanation might be that skjǫldunga has a general, quasi-adjectival sense ‘fit to serve princes’, or else that the gen. pl. is used for metrical reasons. Fms 12 explains that the troops of the enemy kings are close together, but the sg. liðs tells against that.