Arn Frag 5III
Diana Whaley (ed.) 2017, ‘Arnórr jarlaskáld Þórðarson, Fragments 5’ in Kari Ellen Gade and Edith Marold (eds), Poetry from Treatises on Poetics. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 3. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 7.
text and translation
Sæll es Sýrhallar
†seiða beinreiðar†.
… Sýrhallar es sæll … †beinreiðar seiða†.
‘… of Sýr’s <= Freyja’s> hall is fortunate … ’
notes and context
The couplet is cited to illustrate a heiti for Freyja, here Sýr, within a listing of heiti and kennings for goddesses.
(a) In the absence of further context, the interpretation of this couplet is highly uncertain, and even the Prose order and partial Translation above are tentative, since if the couplet is syntactically incomplete it is unclear where the missing words would belong. Some of the words in the lines chime with traditional attributes of Freyja: reiðar (gen. sg. of reið f. ‘chariot’, l. 2) could refer to her chariot drawn by two cats, and hallar (gen. sg. of hǫll f. ‘hall’, l. 1) to her fine hall Sessrúmnir (SnE 1998, I, 30; SnE 2005, 25) or Fólkvangr (Grí 14/1). However, seiða in l. 2 could be gen. pl. of seiðr ‘(magic) spell’ or of seiðr ‘saithe (pollack or coalfish)’, while bein (l. 2) could be the noun ‘bone’ or a form of the adj. beinn ‘straight, direct’. (b) Jón Helgason (1966a, 177-8) proposed the following solution, which assumes that the couplet is syntactically complete. Sýr-hǫll, it is argued, must mean ‘hall of Freyja’, and the hall-name Fólkvangr could mean ‘battle-plain’, and hence, by ofljóst, yield a shield-kenning on the pattern ‘land of battle’ (Meissner 169); the ‘coalfish’ (seiðr) of the shield is then a sword (cf. Meissner 154), and its wielder (reiðir, incorporating a slight emendation from ms. reiðar) is a warrior; bein- could qualify this, with the sense ‘straight, directly’. Hence, literally, ‘Fortunate is the straight-wielder of the fish of Freyja’s hall [= Fólkvangr (fólkvangr ‘shield’) > SWORDS > WARRIOR]’, i.e. ‘the warrior is fortunate’. This interpretation would assume that Arnórr here adopts a style uncharacteristic of him, since he does not elsewhere use ofljóst or anti-naturalistic images such as kennings depicting swords as fish. — The fragment is among additions to LaufE found in ms. 742x (first half of C17th). The additions are of uncertain origin but are believed to have been introduced by the writer of 742x, Björn Jónsson of Skarðsá, rather than originating in a further, now lost version of Magnús Ólafsson’s LaufE (Jón Helgason 1966a, 175; LaufE 1979, 106-7, 176). The fragment is included here among the oeuvre of Arnórr, following the ms. attributions, but there are reasons to doubt its authenticity. The couplet is not among the core material common to most mss of LaufE, and even within the shared material much is of unknown origin and of doubtful attribution. Mss 742x and the C18th 1496x, moreover, may not have independent value but may have obtained their common supplementary fragments from closely related exemplars (Jón Helgason 1966a, 175). Further, the Haðarlag metre, with its five-syllable line, is not otherwise used by Arnórr, and the couplet would also be stylistically anomalous if interpreted according to (b) above.
sources
Text is based on reconstruction from the base text and variant apparatus and may contain alternative spellings and other normalisations not visible in the manuscript text. Transcriptions may not have been checked and should not be cited.
editions and texts
Jón Helgason 1966a, 177-8; Whaley 1998, 36-7.
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