Note to Eil Þdr 15^III

[4] tungls brásali* ‘the hall of the moon of eyelashes [(lit. ‘eyelash-hall of the moon’) EYE > HEAD]’: The phrase þrungu við tróði ‘pressed against the roof beams’ indicates that the first two words in l. 4 ought to be an expression for ‘head’. The mss offer tungls brásólar (R) ‘of the heavenly body of the brow-sun’ or tungls brásólir (W, Tˣ) ‘the brow-suns of the heavenly body’. To achieve a meaningful kenning here, the order of the determinants tungls and brá must be changed (for such inverted kennings, see Meissner 44-69), and ‑sólir (W, Tˣ) must be emended to sali, dat. sg. of salr (cf. Reichardt 1948, 376 and NN §2107, where a similar emendation to salir can be found). This results in the kenning ‘hall of the moon of the eyelashes [EYE > HEAD]’, a variation on the pattern ‘place of the eyes’. The verb þryngva ‘press’ takes the dat. (Fritzner: þryngva); hence -sali m. dat. sg. One would expect that the dat. of salr, an i-stem, would be sal rather than sali, but occasionally m. i-stems end in ‑i in the dat. (ANG §388.2). All earlier attempts to construe a meaningful kenning based on the mss’ brásólir or brásólar are problematic. Although brásólar/brásólir ‘sun of the brow’ could be a kenning for ‘eye(s)’, tungls ‘of the moon’ cannot be integrated in that kenning. Kock (NN §462) emends tungls (all mss) to tungl and takes tungl brásólar ‘heavenly body of the eyebrow-sun’ as a kenning for ‘head’. That interpretation is rejected by Reichardt (1948, 375-6), who rightly notes that tungl ‘moon’ cannot be the base-word in a kenning for ‘head’. On the other hand, tungls brá(a) ‘of the moon of the brows’ could be a kenning for ‘eye’, but that would leave sólar or sólir unaccounted for.

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. ANG = Noreen, Adolf. 1923. Altnordische Grammatik I: Altisländische und altnorwegische Grammatik (Laut- und Flexionslehre) unter Berücksichtigung des Urnordischen. 4th edn. Halle: Niemeyer. 1st edn. 1884. 5th unrev. edn. 1970. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
5. Fritzner = Fritzner, Johan. 1883-96. Ordbog over det gamle norske sprog. 3 vols. Kristiania (Oslo): Den norske forlagsforening. 4th edn. Rpt. 1973. Oslo etc.: Universitetsforlaget.
6. Reichardt, Konstantin. 1948. ‘Die Thórsdrápa des Eilífr Goðrúnarson: Textinterpretation’. PMLA 63, 329-91.