Note to Arn Þorfdr 21II
[6] á kløkkva saumfǫr ‘on the pliant nail-row’: (a) Saumfǫr, lit. ‘stitch-row’, the row of nails along each strake, is recorded in ON prose although not elsewhere in poetry, and it occurs in ModIcel. It is kløkkr ‘pliant’ in the sense that it gives with the motion of the ship in heavy seas. Lie (1954, 158-9 and n. 7) took saumfǫr as a pars-pro-toto expression for ‘ship’ here, which may be justified since, as Jesch points out (2001, 140), it is the wood rather than the nails that give pliability. (b) The R702ˣ variant ‘rvmspo᷎r’ is obscure, though rúm n. is a compartment of a ship, the space given to each pair of oars.