[All]: The subject of the kenning in ll. 1-2 and the speaker of ll. 3-8 is the riddari (26/1) Porphyry (last mentioned in sts 26-8), who, after Maxentius has had his wife put to death, attempts to persuade him to convert to Christianity. This fails and he and his followers are martyred too. In the prose text the substance of sts 39-41 are the subjects of long speeches between Maxentius and Porphyry (Unger 1877, I, 418-19; Wolf 2003, 134).