[7-8] fár flestra ýta bilar fátt ‘misfortune scarcely spares most men’: I.e. human sorrow is all but unavoidable. Bila ‘to fail, fail to appear’, is applied here to fár ‘misfortune, harm’ and hence in this context means ‘to spare’. Fátt ‘few’ may be taken as adverbial, ‘little, scarcely’, hence ‘the misfortune of most men scarcely fails’ (as in Translation above), or as an adj. qualifying fár, hence ‘little misfortune of most men fails’.