Note to Þul Women 1III
[1] braut es svarri ok sæta ‘the haughty woman and the grass-widow are away’: The U variant sværa ‘mother-in-law’ for sæta ‘grass-widow’ is probably not correct, because it transfers the skothending from the initial position in the line (-aut : ‑æt-) to the second stressed syllable (svarri), thus violating the strict order in the distribution of rhyming syllables in the odd lines of this stanza. That may support Konráð Gíslason’s assumption (Nj 1875-89, II, 900) that svarri replaced another designation for ‘haughty woman’, namely, svanni ‘lady’ (thus the original reading of the line could have been Braut es svanni ok sæta). Otherwise it is impossible to explain why the former heiti appears twice in the same stanza (cf. svarri l. 7: snót ok svarra).