Note to Gestumbl Heiðr 35^VIII (Heiðr 82)

[4] börk viðar ‘the bark of a tree’: Editors have struggled to work out the substitution here, not helped by the fact that the R and H redactions have different solutions: í hamra ‘into the crags’ in R and í klóm sér ‘in his claws’ in H. There are no recorded instances of hamarr meaning ‘bark’ or anything else associated with trees. Following H, the eds of CPB (CPB I, 92) emend to í björk kviðar ‘in the birch of the belly’, as a kenning for talons, but this is improbable as a kenning-type (elsewhere talons are called stems or thorns of the feet, not the belly; see Meissner: 142-3) and fails to provide a homonym. Kock (NN §2363) suggests that the pun in the riddle is not on viðr ‘wood’ at all, but on viða ‘mast’ or ‘high deck’, and that the H redaction’s response is the correct one, the pun in the answer being on kló ‘claw’ and kló ‘clew (of a sail)’, with the ‘bark of the ship’ being a kenning-like description of some part of the outside of a ship. There are tempting aspects to this theory, but the correspondence is not exact.

References

1. Bibliography
2. NN = Kock, Ernst Albin. 1923-44. Notationes Norrœnæ: Anteckningar till Edda och skaldediktning. Lunds Universitets årsskrift new ser. 1. 28 vols. Lund: Gleerup.
3. Meissner = Meissner, Rudolf. 1921. Die Kenningar der Skalden: Ein Beitrag zur skaldischen Poetik. Rheinische Beiträge und Hülfsbücher zur germanischen Philologie und Volkskunde 1. Bonn and Leipzig: Schroeder. Rpt. 1984. Hildesheim etc.: Olms.
4. CPB = Gudbrand Vigfusson [Guðbrandur Vigfússon] and F. York Powell, eds. 1883. Corpus poeticum boreale: The Poetry of the Old Northern Tongue from the Earliest Times to the Thirteenth Century. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon. Rpt. 1965, New York: Russell & Russell.