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skaldic

Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages

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Anon (LaufE) 3III

Kari Ellen Gade (ed.) 2017, ‘Anonymous Lausavísur, Stanzas from Laufás Edda 3’ in Kari Ellen Gade and Edith Marold (eds), Poetry from Treatises on Poetics. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 3. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 639.

Anonymous LausavísurStanzas from Laufás Edda
234

text and translation

Sigrunnit kømr svanna
serkland at mér grandi;
Sólmarkar drepr serkjar
samland við mér gamni.

{Sigrunnit serkland} kømr grandi svanna at mér; {samland serkjar} drepr gamni Sólmarkar við mér.
 
‘The conquered shirt-land [WOMAN] sends the harm of women to me; the fellow-land of the shirt [WOMAN] destroys the pleasure of Sólmǫrk for me.

notes and context

The helmingr illustrates kennings for ‘women’ in which the base-word is land ‘land’ (LaufE 1979, 293): Kalla mä hanaLand sem hier er qvedit ‘She can be called … ‘land’, as is said here’.

The basic sense of this half-stanza, conveyed by the clauses kømr grandi at mér ‘sends harm to me’ (ll. 1, 2) and drepr gamni við mér ‘destroys the pleasure for me’ (ll. 3, 4), is clear, but the meaning and syntactic function of the other nominal elements are less than obvious. Finnur Jónsson (LP: Samland) observes dryly that den slags kenningerer en digters öjebliksleg ‘such kennings … are a poet’s extemporaneous play’. The kennings in this helmingr are in fact unprecedented. There can be no doubt that the word-play on the women-kennings and geographical locations was intended, and the kennings bear all the marks of having been created for the present prose context (see also the next stanza, Note to [All]).

readings

sources

Text is based on reconstruction from the base text and variant apparatus and may contain alternative spellings and other normalisations not visible in the manuscript text. Transcriptions may not have been checked and should not be cited.

editions and texts

Skj: Anonyme digte og vers [XII], C. Vers om ubestemmelige personer og begivenheder 33: AI, 600, BI, 600, Skald I, 292, NN §1235; SnE 1848-87, II, 632, III, 198-9, LaufE 1979, 293, 376-7.

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