Note to Þhorn Harkv 2^I

[8] of bjarga ‘of a cliff’: In the pl., bjarg ‘rock’ is used in a collective sense to mean ‘precipice, cliff’: see CVC: bjarg. Here it is gen. pl., hence á horni bjarga ‘on the edge of a cliff’. The next syllable is problematic. (a) The FskA transcripts read ‘-um’, which is here taken as the expletive particle, normalised to the more archaic of; this appears before nouns, though more commonly before verbs (LP: of C). All the ms. readings, ‘horni vin-’, ‘hormum’ and ‘bormum’, are readily understood as due to copyists’ misdivisions of the minims of horni um. The form ‘hormum’ is presumably for hǫmrum ‘crags’, the reading adopted by Wisén (1870, 49), following LP (1860): hausreyti. (b) Previous eds, following the FskB transcripts, generally read vinbjarga, which LP: vinbjǫrg defines as klipper ved (omgivende) eng(e) ‘rocks with (surrounding) field(s)’. The first constituent of the cpd would then be vin f. ‘meadow’, a word common in Norwegian place names (see Jón Helgason 1946, 134-5). Kershaw (1922, 83) adopts the vin- reading, but it is not represented in her translation, ‘as he sat on a jutting ledge of rock’; similarly Magerøy (1963, 82): som sat høgt på eit berg. Von Friesen (1902, 66-9; so Noreen 1926, 163) would emend to vindbjarga ‘wind-rocks’, which he interprets as a kenning for ‘clouds’.

References

1. Bibliography
2. LP = Finnur Jónsson, ed. 1931. Lexicon poeticum antiquæ linguæ septentrionalis: Ordbog over det norsk-islandske skjaldesprog oprindelig forfattet af Sveinbjörn Egilsson. 2nd edn. Copenhagen: Møller.
3. LP (1860) = Sveinbjörn Egilsson, ed. 1860. Lexicon poeticum antiquæ linguæ septentrionalis. Copenhagen: Societas Regia antiquariorum septentrionalium.
4. CVC = Cleasby, Richard, Gudbrand Vigfusson [Guðbrandur Vigfússon] and W. A. Craigie. 1957. An Icelandic-English Dictionary. 2nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon.
5. Kershaw, Nora, ed. and trans. 1922. Anglo-Saxon and Norse Poems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
6. Noreen, Erik. 1926. Den norsk-isländska poesien. Stockholm: Norstedt.
7. Wisén, Theodor, ed. 1870. Úrval af norrænum fornkvæðum handa hinum bókmennta-iðkendum. Lund: Berling.
8. Friesen, Otto von. 1902. ‘Om några fornvestnordiska vers’. ANF 18, 62-75.
9. Jón Helgason. 1946. ‘Haraldskvæði’. Tímarit Máls og menningar, 131-46.
10. Magerøy, Hallvard, trans. 1963. ‘Haraldskvedet’. In Haugen 1994, 82-6.