Note to GunnLeif Merl I 70^VIII

[2] Valbreta ‘of French Britons’: Meaning ‘Bretons, Armoricans’, in apparent contrast to Kornbreta (gen. pl.) ‘Cornish Britons’ in l. 6. Emended by Scheving (as reported in Bret 1848-9) from ms. valbreka (not refreshed). Confusion between letters c and t is not uncommon and this emendation gives excellent agreement with Geoffrey’s text, since the phrase fjǫllum Valbreta corresponds neatly to Armorici montes. For the formation, compare Kornbretar ‘Cornish Bretons’ (cf. II 16/2), paraphrasing Geoffrey’s Cornubiae. Both may have been nonce-terms devised by Gunnlaugr, but Val- ‘French’ was a long-established element in the cpd Valland ‘France’, properly ‘Normandy and the lower Seine region’ (Foote 1975, 69) but extendable to other regions (cf. Sigv Víkv 6^I, Note to l. 5). Bret 1848-9 and Skj B (the latter followed by Skald and Merl 2012) retain the ms. reading and explain it as part of a kenning fljót valbreka ‘river of the corpse-wave [BLOOD]’. In Bret 1848-9, ll. 1-2 are translated Fjelden hæver Valflodens Ström ‘the stream of the corpse-flood raises the mountains’ (cf. Skj B and LP: fljót). But this does not sit well with Finnur’s construal of yppir as impersonal (cf. LP: yppa) and altogether the sense is both inferior in itself and discrepant from the Latin, which has nothing to say about rivers raising mountains. For discussion of evident errors in Hb see Introduction.

References

1. Bibliography
2. Skj B = Finnur Jónsson, ed. 1912-15b. Den norsk-islandske skjaldedigtning. B: Rettet tekst. 2 vols. Copenhagen: Villadsen & Christensen. Rpt. 1973. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde & Bagger.
3. Skald = Kock, Ernst Albin, ed. 1946-50. Den norsk-isländska skaldediktningen. 2 vols. Lund: Gleerup.
4. 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.
5. Foote, Peter G. 1975. ‘Aachen, Lund, Hólar’. In Les relations littéraires Franco-Scandinaves au moyen âge: Actes du Colloque de Liège (avril 1972). Bibliothèque de la Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres de l’Université de Liège 208. Paris: Société d’Editions ‘Les Belles Lettres’, 53-75. Rpt. in Foote 1984a, 101-20.
6. Bret 1848-9 = Jón Sigurðsson. 1848-9. ‘Trójumanna saga ok Breta sögur, efter Hauksbók, med dansk Oversættelse’. ÅNOH 1848, 3-215; 1849, 3-145.
7. Merl 2012 = Horst, Simone, ed. 2012. Merlínússpá. Merlins Prophezeiung. Munich: Herbert Utz Verlag.
8. Internal references
9. Judith Jesch (ed.) 2012, ‘Sigvatr Þórðarson, Víkingarvísur 6’ in Diana Whaley (ed.), Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas 1: From Mythical Times to c. 1035. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 1. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 541.