Russell Poole (ed.) 2012, ‘Eyvindr skáldaspillir Finnsson, Háleygjatal 13’ 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. 212.
Jólna sumbl
enn vér gôtum
stillis lof
sem steinabrú.
Vér gôtum enn {sumbl jólna}, lof stillis, sem steinabrú.
‘We [I] have produced once more a feast of the gods [POETRY], praise of the ruler, like a bridge of stones.’
The helmingr is used to exemplify jólnar as a heiti for ‘gods’.
[1] sumbl jólna ‘a feast of the gods [POETRY]’: In this unusual kenning the determinant is gen. of jóln (n. nom. pl.), a term for the gods associated with the feast of Yuletide (jól). There may be an allusion to the beginning of the myth of the poetic mead, where the gods meet for a feast. Kock (NN §2305) suggests that jólna sumbl belongs to a previous clause, contained in a lost helmingr, and Faulkes (SnE 1998, I, 207) mentions this as a possibility. — [4] sem steinabrú ‘like a bridge of stones’: Like the reference to a feast in l. 1, the comparison to a stone-built bridge aligns the production of the poem with another communal function of great social importance, and poem and bridge are artifacts both enduring and commemorative (on bridges, see Sawyer 2000, 134-6). In the ancestral religion as well as early Christianity, bridges could constitute not merely physical passages from the place of settlement to the graveyard but also symbolic passages from the living to the dead, and commemorative rune-stones were customarily erected in the vicinity (Lund 2005, 129).
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.
Jolna svmbl en vær | gatvm stillis lof sem steina brv.
(VEÞ)
þolnar at
enn vér gôtum
stillis lof
sem steinabrú.
†iǫlna†
enn vér gôtum
stillis
sem steinabrú.
Jǫlna svmbl ænn ver gátvm stillis sem stæina brv́ .
(VEÞ)
Use the buttons at the top of the page to navigate between stanzas in a poem.
The text and translation are given here, with buttons to toggle whether the text is shown in the verse order or prose word order. Clicking on indiviudal words gives dictionary links, variant readings, kennings and notes, where relevant.
This is the text of the edition in a similar format to how the edition appears in the printed volumes.
This view is also used for chapters and other text segments. Not all the headings shown are relevant to such sections.