Note to ESk Eystdr 1^II

[3] mágrenni (m. dat. sg.) ‘the seagull-feeder’: Retention of the nom. mágrennir ‘seagull-feeder’ forces a fourpartite first l. (vru, sogns, með, sára), in which sogns sára ‘of the fjord of wounds’ and vru með ‘were (stationed) with’ belong to two different clauses (so Skj B; ÍF 28). Such a construction is otherwise unattested in the corpus of skaldic poetry. Kock (NN §955; Skald) emends mágrennir (m. nom. sg.) ‘seagull-feeder’ (l. 3) to mágrenni (m. dat. sg.), fekksk (3rd pers. sg. pret. indic.) ‘was captured’ (l. 3) to fæst, sup. of the adj. fár ‘few’, and máttigr (m. nom. sg.) ‘powerful’ (l. 4) to máttigra (m. gen. pl.). He suggests the following reading: Fæst átta tigir máttigra manna vru staddir með mágrenni sogns sára, syni Maddaðar ‘At least eighty powerful men were stationed with the seagull-feeder of the fjord of wounds, the son of Maddaðr’. However, the emendation of máttigr ‘powerful’ to máttigra creates an unmetrical l., since a l. of this type cannot begin with a trisyllabic cpd; see Gade 1995a, 118-21.

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. Skald = Kock, Ernst Albin, ed. 1946-50. Den norsk-isländska skaldediktningen. 2 vols. Lund: Gleerup.
4. NN = Kock, Ernst Albin. 1923-44. Notationes Norrœnæ: Anteckningar till Edda och skaldediktning. Lunds Universitets årsskrift new ser. 1. 28 vols. Lund: Gleerup.
5. Gade, Kari Ellen. 1995a. The Structure of Old Norse dróttkvætt Poetry. Islandica 49. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
6. ÍF 26-8 = Heimskringla. Ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson. 1941-51.