[1, 3] fimm tega marka ‘fifty marks’: Lit. ‘five tens of marks’; an enormous sum. Fidjestøl (1984b, 62) calculates that this equates to 25 pounds of high-quality silver, or the value of about 200 cows. The minor emendation of acc. pl. tigu to gen. pl. tega suggested by Kock (NN §786) is necessary since gjǫld ‘(re)payment’ takes the gen. of the thing for which recompense is made (LP: gjald 1). For the root vowel in tega, see ANG §395 Anm. 3.
References
- Bibliography
- 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.
- Fidjestøl, Bjarne. 1984b. ‘“Har du høyrt eit dyrare kvæde?”: Litt om økonomien bak den eldste fyrstediktinga’. In Fidjestøl et al. 1984, 61-73. Rpt. as ‘“Have You Heard a Poem Worth More? A Note on the Economic Background of Early Skaldic Praise-poetry’. In Fidjestøl 1997a, 117-32.
- ANG = Noreen, Adolf. 1923. Altnordische Grammatik I: Altisländische und altnorwegische Grammatik (Laut- und Flexionslehre) unter Berücksichtigung des Urnordischen. 4th edn. Halle: Niemeyer. 1st edn. 1884. 5th unrev. edn. 1970. Tübingen: Niemeyer.