Note to Anon (Ragn) 1VIII (Ragn 16)
[5-6]: Rafn (FSN) follows 1824b here, and so does the present ed. Previous eds apart from those of CPB, Valdimar Ásmundarson (Ragn 1891) and Kock (NN §3285), do not seem to have been troubled by the absence of internal alliteration in l. 5. CPB has œng spiꜵll … ꜵnnor … enn nýjari … ‘no news fresher …’ (sic); Valdimar emends as follows: engi spjöll vitum önnur | enn nýjari ‘we know of no (other) still more recent tidings …’, while Kock, retaining the 1824b reading of l. 6, emends in NN §3285 þung ‘heavy’ to ung ‘young’ in l. 5 and reads æ in l. 6 as ei ‘not’, thus: ‘of young (i.e. recent) tidings we know not of others more recent …’; in Skald, on the other hand, he retains the reading þung and replaces vitum with eigum (‘we have no [other] heavy tidings that are more recent …’), here accepting æ (l. 6) as having negative meaning; see the next Note. Metrical irregularity is sufficiently frequent among the stanzas of Ragn to justify acceptance of 1824b’s text here.
References
- Bibliography
- FSN = Rafn, Carl Christian, ed. 1829-30. Fornaldar sögur nordrlanda. 3 vols. Copenhagen: Popp.
- Skald = Kock, Ernst Albin, ed. 1946-50. Den norsk-isländska skaldediktningen. 2 vols. Lund: Gleerup.
- NN = Kock, Ernst Albin. 1923-44. Notationes Norrœnæ: Anteckningar till Edda och skaldediktning. Lunds Universitets årsskrift new ser. 1. 28 vols. Lund: Gleerup.
- 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.
- Ragn 1891 = 2nd edn (pp. 175-224) of Ragn as ed. in Valdimar Ásmundarson 1885-9, I.
- Internal references
- 2017, ‘ Anonymous, Ragnars saga loðbrókar’ in Margaret Clunies Ross (ed.), Poetry in fornaldarsögur. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 8. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 616. <https://skaldic.org/m.php?p=text&i=81> (accessed 27 April 2024)