Bjbp Jóms 24I/8 — snertu ‘short attack’
Sigvaldi bað sína
sóknstranga vel ganga
— hann varat samr á sáttir —
sveit Hákuni á móti.
Haralds arfi klauf hjálma
hildarǫrr ok skjǫldu;
framm gekk hann fyr hlífar
hart nakkvara snertu.
Sigvaldi bað sóknstranga sveit sína ganga vel á móti Hákuni; hann varat samr á sáttir. Hildarǫrr arfi Haralds klauf hjálma ok skjǫldu; hann gekk framm hart fyr hlífar nakkvara snertu.
Sigvaldi bade his attack-strong band advance strongly against Hákon; he was not willing for settlement. The battle-keen heir of Haraldr [= Sigvaldi] split helmets and shields; he pressed forward strongly before shields in a certain short attack.
readings
[8] snertu: ‘sn[…]’ R, sínum 65ˣ, ‘sn(er)t(v)’(?) RCP, snertu RFJ
notes
[8] nakkvara snertu ‘in a certain short attack’: (a) Snerta in prose means ‘a short stretch of time or place’, i.e. a short time or distance (Fritzner: snerta 1, 2); in poetry it most often means a sharp, relatively short attack, or a whole battle (LP: snerta 1, 2), and the sense ‘attack’ is appropriate here. Nakkvara snertu makes a f. acc. sg. phrase which appears to be quasi-temporal and used adverbially, cf. expressions such as fara dag ok nótt ‘to travel day and night’ (NS §98a). (b) Jvs 1879 notes that the abbreviation at the end of the word is unclear but that the reading is not ‘sinnum’. Fms 11 prints sinnum ‘at times’, dat. pl. of sinn ‘time’; so also Wisén (1870, 82). This is grammatically incompatible with the preceding word nakkvara ‘some, a certain’, which must be m. acc. pl. or f. acc. sg. Sveinbjörn Egilsson’s gloss nokkrum in Fms 12 equates this with dat. pl., but this is doubtful.