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skaldic

Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages

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Egill Frag 1III

Margaret Clunies Ross (ed.) 2017, ‘Egill Skallagrímsson, Fragment 1’ in Kari Ellen Gade and Edith Marold (eds), Poetry from Treatises on Poetics. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 3. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 66.

Egill SkallagrímssonFragment1

text and translation

Vrǫngu varrar Gungnis
varrar lungs of stunginn.

Vrǫngu … {varrar Gungnis} … varrar lungs … of stunginn.
 
‘Awry … the lips of Gungnir <spear> [SPEAR-BLADES] … of the wake of the longship … pierced.

notes and context

See Introduction.

The metre is dunhent ‘echoing-rhymed’ (cf. SnSt Ht 24). — It is impossible to give a definitive sense of this couplet, as it probably lacks a nom. subject and a finite verb, hence no connected prose order or translation of the whole couplet has been attempted here. Skald (cf. NN §844C) constructs one but this requires three words to be emended and cannot be considered as more than speculative. It is possible, as Björn Magnússon Ólsen (TGT 1884, 199) suggests, that the repeated varrar (or várar) in each ms. is a result of textual corruption. On the other hand, the couplet may employ a deliberate play on words with the same form but different meanings (homonyms), and that is how the lines have been interpreted here. It is also curious that two of the words in this couplet, Gungnis ‘of Gungnir’ and lung ‘longship’, also appear in a couplet by Bragi Boddason (Bragi Frag 4/1-2) cited in the very next section of TGT (1884, 87).

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: Egill Skallagrímsson, [8]. Ubestemmeligt brudstykke 47: AI, 60, BI, 53, Skald I, 33, NN §§844C, 2157A; SnE 1848-87, II, 132-3, 415, TGT 1884, 21, 86, 199, TGT 1927, 61, 100.

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