[1] hafreiðar ‘of the sea-chariot’: The base-word of a ship-kenning, with hlunns ‘of the slipway roller’ as determinant. Because haf- ‘sea’ makes the kenning overdetermined (‘chariot of the slipway roller’ would be sufficient), eds have sought to interpret haf- as derived from the verb hefja ‘raise’ in the sense ‘lifting, moving up and down’ (so LP: 1. hafreið and SnE 1998, II, 299). However, hafreið occurs once elsewhere (ÞTref Hrafn 5/6V) clearly in the sense ‘sea-chariot’ (probably a kenning for ‘ship’), so the more obvious sense has been retained here. Kock (NN §428) emended hafreiðar to hôreiðar ‘of the high chariot’, but there is no ms. support for this emendation.
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.
- SnE 1998 = Snorri Sturluson. 1998. Edda: Skáldskaparmál. Ed. Anthony Faulkes. 2 vols. University College London: Viking Society for Northern Research.
- Internal references
- Judy Quinn (ed.) 2022, ‘Eyrbyggja saga 35 (Þormóðr Trefilsson, Hrafnsmál 5)’ in Margaret Clunies Ross, Kari Ellen Gade and Tarrin Wills (eds), Poetry in Sagas of Icelanders. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 5. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 470.