[4] fella (m. gen. pl.) ‘of the fellers’: Following Sveinbjörn Egilsson (SnE 1848-87, III), Möbius (SnE 1879-81) and Konráð Gíslason (1895-7) construe this as an unattested adv. (= ferliga ‘terribly’), and Kock (NN §2184) takes it as a verb, as part of an asyndetic construction gella, fella translated as skrälla, fälla ‘crash, fell’, but the transitive verb fella makes little sense here (we would expect the intransitive falla ‘fall’; see SnE 2007, 64). Fellir m. ‘feller’ is an agent noun from the weak verb fella ‘fell, kill’ and the word is not uncommon as a base-word in kennings (LP: fellir).
References
- Bibliography
- SnE 1848-87 = Snorri Sturluson. 1848-87. Edda Snorra Sturlusonar: Edda Snorronis Sturlaei. Ed. Jón Sigurðsson et al. 3 vols. Copenhagen: Legatum Arnamagnaeanum. Rpt. Osnabrück: Zeller, 1966.
- 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.
- Konráð Gíslason. 1895-7. Efterladte skrifter. 2 vols. I: Forelæsninger over oldnordiske skjaldekvad. II: Forelæsninger og videnskablige afhandlinger. Copenhagen: Gyldendal.
- SnE 2007 = Snorri Sturluson. 2007. Edda: Háttatal. Ed. Anthony Faulkes. 2nd edn. University College London: Viking Society for Northern Research.
- SnE 1879-81 = Möbius, Theodor, ed. 1879-81. Hattatal Snorra Sturlusonar. 2 vols. Halle an de Saale: Verlag der Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses.