Kari Ellen Gade (ed.) 2017, ‘Svartr á Hofstöðum, Skaufhala bálkr 40’ in Margaret Clunies Ross (ed.), Poetry in fornaldarsögur. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 8. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 983.
‘Mun eg nú linna og láta af þessu;
vill hel sækja hvern um síðir.
Fer mier svó sem flestum öðrum,
að dauði drepr drótt og kindur.’
‘Nú mun eg linna og láta af þessu; hel vill sækja hvern um síðir. Fer mier svó sem flestum öðrum, að dauði drepr drótt og kindur.’
‘Now I’ll cease and leave off this; death will seek out everyone in the end. It shall happen to me as to most others, that death strikes people and offspring.’
Mss: Rask87ˣ(115v)
Editions: Jón Þorkelsson 1888, 235, Jón Þorkelsson 1922-7, 159, Páll Eggert Ólason 1947, 68.
Notes: [All]: Tassel-tail’s ævikviða ‘life poem’ ends with this stanza. — [5]: The line is hypometrical, with three syllables, and Jón Þorkelsson (1888) suggests moving the conj. sem ‘as’ to l. 1: fer mier svó sem ‘it shall happen to me as’. Such a construction is extremely awkward, however, because it forces a syntactic break between metrical positions 3 and 4. It is possible that a word such as nú ‘now’ (Fer mier nú svó) has been omitted.
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