Snæfríðardrápa — Hhárf Snædr^I

A single stanza is preserved as the beginning of Snæfríðardrápa or Snjófríðardrápa ‘Drápa about Snæfríðr’ (Hhárf Snædr). It calls for a hearing and announces a drápa using allusions to the myth of the mead of poetry (see Note to l. 4), and refers to a deceased woman, whom prose narratives identify as Snæfríðr (see Context). The traditional ascription to Haraldr hárfagri ‘Fair-hair’ originates with a medieval witness, Flat, and is retained here, in accordance with the policy of the SkP edition. There is good reason to believe, however, that it is purely legendary in its basis (Y. Nielsen 1908, 153; de Vries 1940, 172; Poole 1982, 127). Further, such striking similarities in content, diction, style and metre exist between this stanza and the fragments of a poem by the otherwise unknown Ormr Steinþórsson (Ormr Woman^III) that he has been credited with authorship of the stanza and of the lost remainder of Snædr in recent scholarship (Ólafur Halldórsson 1969b; Poole 1982). The stanza is in hálfhnept ‘half-curtailed’ metre, in which the final foot in each line is a monosyllable (see ‘Skaldic metres’ in General Introduction). If the ascription to Haraldr hárfagri is taken at face value, Snædr is the earliest specimen of hálfhnept extant. The distinctive placement of the alliteration of l. 1 in the third and fourth lifts, however, cannot be paralleled before the fourteenth century, except in Ormr Woman^III, where it occurs six times in six helmingar (sts 2/1, 4/3, 5/1, 6/1, 6/3 and 7/1). The stanza is preserved only in Flat (Flat) and 761bˣ (fol. 185r); 761bˣ is copied from Flat, but is cited in the Notes below since it contains Árni Magnússon’s interpretation of an obscure reading in l. 5.

References

1. Bibliography
2. SkP = Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages. Turnhout: Brepols.
3. Nielsen, Konrad. 1908. ‘En gruppe urnordiske laanord i lappisk’. In Sproglige og historiske afhandlinger viede Sophus Bugges minde, 225-31. Kristiania (Oslo): Aschehoug.
4. Poole, Russell. 1982. ‘Ormr Steinþórsson and the Snjófríðardrápa’. ANF 97, 122-37.
5. Ólafur Halldórsson. 1969b. ‘Snjófríðardrápa’. In Jakob Benediktsson 1969, 147-59. Rpt. with additions in Ólafur Halldórsson 1990.
6. Vries, Jan de. 1940. ‘Het Snjófríðlied von Harald Schoonhaar’. In De Libris. Bibliofile breve til Ejnar Munksgaard. Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 165-72.
7. Internal references
8. (forthcoming), ‘ Unattributed, Flateyjarbók’ in Diana Whaley (ed.), Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas 1: From Mythical Times to c. 1035. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 1. Turnhout: Brepols, p. . <https://skaldic.org/m.php?p=text&i=44> (accessed 23 April 2024)
10. Russell Poole 2017, ‘ Ormr Steinþórsson, Poem about a woman’ in Kari Ellen Gade and Edith Marold (eds), Poetry from Treatises on Poetics. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 3. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 323. <https://skaldic.org/m.php?p=text&i=1336> (accessed 23 April 2024)