Note to EirRagn Lv 3^VIII (Ragn 13)

[3-4]: These lines raise the question of who is meant by the mjó mær ‘slender maiden’ to whom Eiríkr bequeaths his rings. Is it Áslaug, as some have thought, or some unknown, unnamed figure? (a) Most previous eds apart from those of CPB and Kock leave open the question of the slender maiden’s identity and the present ed. adopts the same position. (b) Finnur Jónsson (Hb 1892-6, 460) adopts Hb’s reading ‘meirr’, i.e. meir ‘(ever)more, hereafter’ in l. 3 (cf. Kock, to be discussed in (d), below), and takes the adj. mjó ‘slender’ in l. 4 as f. nom. sg. and substantival, giving the meaning ‘she, the slender one (hun den slanke) may have my belongings hereafter’. (c) In Skj B, however, Finnur adopts from 1824b the reading mær ‘maiden’ in l. 3 and from Hb the reading mjó (in place of mik, 1824b) in l. 4, taking mjó here, f. nom. sg., as an attributive adj., and producing the meaning ‘that the slender maiden may have my rings’. (d) Kock (NN §1455) adopts the Hb readings meir ‘hereafter’ and mjó ‘slender’, and emends Áslaugu in l. 4 to Áslaug um, thus making Áslaug nom., supplying a pleonastic um to fill out the line, and giving the meaning ‘that the fair (slender) Áslaug may have my rings hereafter’. The emendation seems unjustified, however; the oblique case of Áslaugu is sufficiently marked and syntactically out of place in l. 4 to suggest a syntactic link with an earlier part of the half-stanza.

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. 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.
5. Hb 1892-6 = Finnur Jónsson, ed. 1892-6. Hauksbók udgiven efter de Arnamagnæanske håndskrifter no. 371, 544 og 675, 4° samt forskellige papirshåndskrifter. Copenhagen: Det kongelige nordiske oldskrift-selskab.