Note to Án Lv 2^VIII (Án 2)

[1-3]: In Áns rímur bogsveigis III 6/1-2 there are two lines which correspond in content to this passage (Ólafur Halldórsson 1973, 110): Vel þier selia vidi nær | vaxen laufe goda ‘It is well for you, willow-tree near the sea, grown with good foliage’. In the four-line ríma stanza in ferskeytt metre the two lines of a couplet share alliteration, whilst the two odd and the two even lines share end rhyme (abab; cf. Vésteinn Ólason 1982, 57). Since Án 2/3 is much shorter than the other lines and contains no two words that alliterate with one another, several eds emend l. 3 on the basis of the line vaxen laufe goda in the ríma (cf. Note to l. 3 below). Heusler and Ranisch and Läffler also emend the word sjó ‘sea’ to víði and thus implicitly assume that ll. 1-2 and 3-4 share alliteration on <v>, though their interpretations of víði differ. Heusler and Ranisch (Edd. Min.) treat víði as from víðir, a poetic word for ‘sea’, while Läffler (1912, 2-3, 5) understands it as the dat. sg. of víðir ‘willow’ (cf. ModGer. Weide and ModEngl. withy). Läffler argues that the scribe of 343a misunderstood víði ‘willow’ in his exemplar as the homonym víði ‘sea’ and substituted the more usual word sjó. The reconstructed line would thus read: Vel þér selja! | Stendr þú víði nær ‘It is well for you, [female] willow-tree (selja)! You stand near a [male] willow-tree (víðir)’ and would thus provide a heightened contrast between the proximity of the female and male willow trees on the one hand and the (presumed) lonely woman speaker, who longs for the man she loves, on the other (Läffler 1912, 13, 24-61). Such a reconstruction is purely hypothetical, because, as Ólafur Halldórsson (1973, 74-5, 79-80) points out, the ríma stanza cannot provide any evidence about whether the ríma poet knew the stanza from the saga in a different form from the one we know from 343a: the ríma poet doubtless changed the word sjó ‘sea’ to víði ‘sea’ to provide alliteration between ll. 1 and 2 of his stanza in conformity with the ríma metre. The ríma thus provides no adequate basis for emendation of the stanza from the saga (cf. also Note to st. 2/3 below).

References

1. Bibliography
2. Edd. Min. = Heusler, Andreas and Wilhelm Ranisch, eds. 1903. Eddica Minora: Dichtungen eddischer Art aus den Fornaldarsögur und anderen Prosawerken. Dortmund: Ruhfus. Rpt. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
3. Läffler, Leopold Frederik. 1912. ‘En kärleksvisa i Áns saga bogsveigis’. Studier i nordisk filologi 3, 1-65.
4. Ólafur Halldórsson. 1973. Áns rímur bogsveigis. Reykjavík: Stofnun Árnamagnússonar á Íslandi.
5. Vésteinn Ólason. 1982. The Traditional Ballads of Iceland: Historical Studies. Reykjavík: Stofnun Árna Magnússonar á Íslandi.
6. Internal references
7. Beatrice La Farge (ed.) 2017, ‘Áns saga bogsveigis 2 (Án bogsveigir, Lausavísur 2)’ in Margaret Clunies Ross (ed.), Poetry in fornaldarsögur. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 8. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 7.
8. Not published: do not cite ()