[8] guma ‘of a man’: Only R715ˣ has the gen. sg., which makes most sense and is adopted by most eds, as here. The other mss read gumi nom. sg., which could be construed ‘a man lays his body against its palm’. Tolkien, who adopts this reading (Heiðr 1960, 39 and n. 3), surmises that ‘R’s text means that the inner side of the shield is called its lófi (palm, i.e. hollow inner side of the hand)’, but there are no recorded instances of such a usage.