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skaldic

Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages

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Note to Refr Ferðv 5III

[1] fjǫll hrynja á fyllar ‘mountains fall into the sea’: (a) Skj B interprets fjǫll fyllar ‘mountains of the sea’ as a kenning for ‘waves’. That kenning leaves a dangling prep. (á) in l. 1, which Finnur Jónsson connects with skautbjǫrn ‘sail-bear’ (l. 4; for that kenning, see Note to l. 4 below). This tortuous syntax is justifiably criticised by Kock (NN §785; see also Reichardt 1930, 249). (b) Kock himself combines á fyllar (l. 1) with skautbjǫrn (l. 4) to form the ship-kenning á skautbjǫrn fyllar ‘on the sail-bear of the sea’ (for skaut lit. ‘corner of a sail’ as pars pro toto for ‘sail’, see LP: skaut 1). That kenning is over-determined, however, because it has two determinants, skaut- ‘sail’ and fyllar ‘of the sea’ and, further, fjǫll is now rendered as ‘wave’, which Kock tries to justify on a contextual basis. (c) The only solution that makes sense is to interpret fyllar as acc. pl. of a f. noun fyllr (f. -stem) rather than as gen. sg. of a m. noun fyllr, and that has been adopted in the present edn. Fyllr ‘sea’ is otherwise attested only in the gen. sg. (fyllar; see LP: fyllr 2), which can be either f. or m.

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. NN = Kock, Ernst Albin. 1923-44. Notationes Norrœnæ: Anteckningar till Edda och skaldediktning. Lunds Universitets årsskrift new ser. 1. 28 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. Reichardt, Konstantin. 1930. ‘Beiträge zur Skaldenforschung’. ANF 46, 32-62, 199-258.

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