Note to Anon Nkt 2II
[1-4]: ‘One must first row far from the whale, yet come down close before it is finished’, i.e. if one wants to catch a whale, one must approach it from afar. This saying, with which the poet draws an analogy between hunting a whale and composing a long genealogical poem, refers to his intention to begin Jón’s panegyric by tracing his ancestry back to Haraldr hárfagri. His praise of the family of the Oddaverjar (people from the farmstead Oddi, southern Iceland), i.e. his homing in on the whale, begins at st. 67.