Note to SigHálf Lv 1^VIII (Hrólf 1)

[3] lundar ‘trees <men>’: Marked as corrupt in CPB II, 361, but taken in the translation there as a nom. pl. (‘branches’, with limum einum translated as ‘mere shrub twigs’). It is understood in a similar way in NN §116, where Kock rejects Lundar, the reading in Skj B (Skjoldungernes, Lunds-kongens, hele slægt ‘the Skjǫldungs’, the Lund-king’s, whole family’), on grounds of the parallelism of lundar lofðungs and ætt Skjǫldunga, and the suitability of connecting an ambiguous lundar ‘trees, men’ with limum ‘branches’; Kock defends lundar as a kenning base-word without a determinant. This view is adopted here, and lundar is taken as nom. pl., in preference to taking it as a gen. sg., ‘all the family of the princely tree of the Skjǫldungar’. In either case the general meaning, that the (male) Skjǫldungar have been reduced to two mere boys, strictly viewed, is at odds with the prose of the saga, in which, as in other Scandinavian sources but not in the Old English tradition, Fróði too is a Skjǫldungr, the brother of Hálfdan.

References

1. Bibliography
2. Skj B = Finnur Jónsson, ed. 1912-15b. Den norsk-islandske skjaldedigtning. B: Rettet tekst. 2 vols. Copenhagen: Villadsen & Christensen. Rpt. 1973. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde & Bagger.
3. NN = Kock, Ernst Albin. 1923-44. Notationes Norrœnæ: Anteckningar till Edda och skaldediktning. Lunds Universitets årsskrift new ser. 1. 28 vols. Lund: Gleerup.
4. CPB = Gudbrand Vigfusson [Guðbrandur Vigfússon] and F. York Powell, eds. 1883. Corpus poeticum boreale: The Poetry of the Old Northern Tongue from the Earliest Times to the Thirteenth Century. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon. Rpt. 1965, New York: Russell & Russell.