Note to Þhorn Harkv 23I
[10] hældræpir ‘who deserve kicking’: Lit. ‘heel-strikable, worthy to be struck with the heel’. Sigfús Blöndal (1927-8) suggests a pun on the alternate meaning ‘reaching to the heels’ in conjunction with his proposal that the caps have comically long peaks or tassels. Flo (1902, 69) takes the word to mean ‘one who hops or dances on his heels’ and similarly Kershaw (1922, 87) translates ‘skipping’. ÍF 29, 64 adopts the reading heldræpir ‘who may be dispatched to death/the realm of the dead’ in the FskA transcripts and interprets it to mean réttdræpir, i.e. ‘who may be killed without legal offence’ (similarly Magerøy 1963, 86). This analysis was first proposed by Benedikt Gröndal, as reported by Sueti (1884, 32-3).
References
- Bibliography
- Flo, Rasmus J., trans. 1902. Gamle skaldar og kvad. Oslo: [n. p.]. First printed 1901 in SoS 7, 145-69, 261-78, 309-26, 389-405, 468-82.
- ÍF 29 = Ágrip af Nóregskonunga sǫgum; Fagrskinna—Nóregs konungatal. Ed. Bjarni Einarsson. 1985.
- Kershaw, Nora, ed. and trans. 1922. Anglo-Saxon and Norse Poems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Magerøy, Hallvard, trans. 1963. ‘Haraldskvedet’. In Haugen 1994, 82-6.
- Sueti, Friedrich. 1884. Ueber die auf den König Haraldr Hárfagri bezüglichen Gedichtfragmente in der norwegischen Königschronik Fagrskinna. Leipzig: August Press.
- Sigfús Blöndal. 1927-8. ‘Some Remarks on the Haraldskvæði 23’. APS 2, 59-65. Rpt. as ‘Nokkrar athugasemdir við Haraldskvæði’. Skírnir 103 (1929), 129-38.