Note to Anon Mhkv 29III
[8] nú skal eiga hverr, er vill ‘now anyone who wants it shall have it’: Skm (SnE 1998, I, 5) tells how Óðinn, after drinking the mead of poetry, flew back to the home of the gods, where he vomited much of his cargo into waiting vats. But he had such a fright that he voided some of the mead backwards. That part became the fool-poet’s share, and Hafði þat hverr er vildi ‘Anyone who wanted could have it’. The kenning ‘mud [= droppings] of the eagle’ for worthless poetry occurs three times in skaldic verse; at least two of these occurrences are directly dependent on Skm (see Frank 1981, 168-9). Alternatively, the sentence could refer to the fact that, unlike skalds who composed panegyrics in honour of magnates, the present poet does not dedicate his poem to any one in particular (‘anyone who wants it shall have it’).
References
- Bibliography
- Frank, Roberta. 1981. ‘Snorri and the Mead of Poetry’. In Dronke et al. 1981, 155-70.
- SnE 1998 = Snorri Sturluson. 1998. Edda: Skáldskaparmál. Ed. Anthony Faulkes. 2 vols. University College London: Viking Society for Northern Research.
- Internal references
- (forthcoming), ‘ Snorri Sturluson, Skáldskaparmál’ in Kari Ellen Gade and Edith Marold (eds), Poetry from Treatises on Poetics. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 3. Turnhout: Brepols, p. . <https://skaldic.org/m.php?p=text&i=112> (accessed 24 April 2024)