[7] spôn ‘wood-chip’: The exact nature of the entertainment is disputed. Kock (NN §1506) sees here an allusion to antics of the sort that he himself apparently had seen fire-eaters engage in: they would pass wood-shavings through (of) flames without setting them on fire (and see following Note). Accordingly, he rejects the collocation brennanda spôn ‘burning wood-shaving’ of Skj B (and here) and instead construes brennanda with eld ‘fire’. But the resulting syntax is uncharacteristic of the poem (Jón Helgason 1946, 141). Sigfús Blöndal (1927-8) would emend to brennandi spǫnn ‘burning pails’, in reference to bowls of scalding hot wine carried round the fire or (less convincingly in the Viking Age) to liquor flambé .