Note to Án Lv 5VIII (Án 5)
[All]: According to Ólafur Haldórsson (1973, 81), this stanza originated as a riddle about a rainbow and a billow on the sea in calm weather, presumably because there are similarities in diction between it and some of the riddles in Heiðr and because ll. 3-4 and 8 may carry double meanings (see Notes to l. 3 and l. 8 below). Ólafur suggested that the author of the saga may have been inspired by the word ferfaldr ‘fourfold’ (l. 4) in the original stanza (where it would refer to the colours of the rainbow) to invent the motif of Án’s four layers of clothing. This hypothesis is attractive but cannot be verified. It is more likely that some of the terms used in the stanza to refer to the young women draw on associations with riddles for natural phenomena in order to play on the basic (common noun) sense of the name Drífa.