Note to ÚlfrU Húsdr 11III
[4] felldu mar ‘killed the steed’: The meaning of the verb fella is ambiguous, because it can mean ‘kill’ or ‘fell’. If the reading hjalmeldum ‘with helmet-fires [SWORDS]’ (so Tˣ, 2368ˣ) is chosen, the meaning of fella must be ‘kill’, i. e. ‘felled by swords’. Hence, Óðinn’s companions killed the horse (cf. Höfler 1952c, 360). Because it is not likely that they killed the horse of the giantess, one must assume that it was another horse which was killed as a sacrificial animal in the context of the funeral. This horse could be the heilagt tafn ‘the holy sacrifice’ of st. 10 (about horse sacrifices at funerals, see Note to ll. 2, 3 there). The order of the helmingar in this stanza suggests that the launching of the ship and the killing of the horse were carried out either simultaneously or one after the other. Snorri (Gylf, SnE 2005, 46), however, appears to have understood marr ‘steed’ as the giantess’s mount and therefore he took felldu in the sense ‘knocked down, toppled’, because it would make little sense for the gods to kill the mount of the giantess whose help they needed. In Snorri’s account it is not clear whether the giantess is riding a wolf or a horse (ibid.): En er hon kom ok reið vargi ok hafði hǫggorm at taumum þá hljóp hon af hestinum, en Óðinn kallaði til berserki fjóra at gæta hestsins, ok fengu þeir eigi haldit nema þeir feldi hann ‘And when she came riding on a wolf and had a viper as reins, she jumped off the horse, and Óðinn summoned four berserks to guard the horse, and they could not hold on to it unless they knocked it down’. The vacillation between wolf and horse as the mount of the giantess could have been prompted by the well-known topos of giantesses riding on wolves (cf. the picture on the stone of Hunnestad 3 (Sk 56) and the kenning type ‘mount of the giantess’ for ‘wolf’, Meissner 124-5). Another possibility is that also in Húsdr (in a lost stanza) Hyrrokkin came riding a wolf as depicted by Snorri. In his prose account of Baldr’s funeral, Snorri needed to change ‘wolf’ to ‘horse’ to integrate st. 11/5-8, where marr can only mean ‘horse’.
References
- Bibliography
- 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.
- SnE 2005 = Snorri Sturluson. 2005. Edda: Prologue and Gylfaginning. Ed. Anthony Faulkes. 2nd edn. University College London: Viking Society for Northern Research.
- Höfler, Otto. 1952a. ‘Das Opfer im Semnonenhain und die Edda’. In Schneider 1952, 1-67.
- Höfler, Otto. 1952c. ‘Balders Bestattung und die nordischen Felszeichnungen’. Anzeiger der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, philosophisch-historische Klasse 88, 343-72.
- Internal references
- (forthcoming), ‘ Snorri Sturluson, Gylfaginning’ in Kari Ellen Gade and Edith Marold (eds), Poetry from Treatises on Poetics. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 3. Turnhout: Brepols, p. . <https://skaldic.org/m.php?p=text&i=113> (accessed 26 April 2024)
- Edith Marold with the assistance of Vivian Busch, Jana Krüger, Ann-Dörte Kyas and Katharina Seidel, translated from German by John Foulks 2017, ‘ Úlfr Uggason, Húsdrápa’ in Kari Ellen Gade and Edith Marold (eds), Poetry from Treatises on Poetics. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 3. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 402. <https://skaldic.org/m.php?p=text&i=1492> (accessed 26 April 2024)