GunnLeif Merl II 17^VIII

Russell Poole (ed.) 2017, ‘Breta saga 17 (Gunnlaugr Leifsson, Merlínusspá II 17)’ in Margaret Clunies Ross (ed.), Poetry in fornaldarsögur. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 8. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 151.

Interactive view: tap on words in the text for notes and glosses

Cf. DGB 116 (Reeve and Wright 2007, 153.169-72; cf. Wright 1988, 108, prophecies 35 and 36): ‘“candor lanarum nocuit atque tincturae ipsarum diuersitas; uae periurae genti, quia urbs inclita propter eam ruet. Gaudebunt naues augmentatione tanta, et unum ex duobus fiet”’ ‘“The whiteness of wool and the many colours it has been dyed have done you harm; woe to the treacherous people on whose account a famous city will fall.” The ships will rejoice at this great increment and two will become one’ (Reeve and Wright 2007, 152). Winchester was by Geoffrey’s time the base for a flourishing wool industry (see Leach 1900b, 134-5; Page 1912b, 36-44). For the privileges of cloth makers and their growing unpopularity see Poole (1955, 84-6). Geoffrey seems to single out the commune of the city for suspicion of potential disloyalty, against either the king or the bishop, whose vassals they would have been. Gunnlaugr focuses on the dyeing of wool, to which special privileges attached. The sentences beginning respectively candor and gaudebunt are reversed in the text of Merl as extant, and several other sentences are omitted. — [1-2]: Emended by Scheving (followed by Bret 1848-9) from ms. ‘En sætaz svndi fagna’ (refreshed). The three-fold emendation here is necessary to create sense in an incoherent passage and fits well with DGB, which describes ships, i.e. their passengers, rejoicing in the augmentation of the see of St Davids through the addition of Winchester. The conjectured reading sæti ‘seats’ (i.e. ‘sees’), construed as pl. because of the pl. verb fagna ‘rejoice’, conforms admirably to this logic. Gunnlaugr uses sund ‘sea’ as a kenning determinant twice elsewhere (II 1/2, II 31/2, the latter in the ship-kenning sundraukn ‘the beasts of burden of the sea’); for the postulated second element dýr ‘animal’, cf. kjaldýr ‘keel beast’ (I 95/6). Skj B (followed by Skald and Merl 2012) emends to sætré ‘timbers of the sea [SHIPS]’, while retaining sundi, interpreted as ‘voyage’, and explains the whole clause as ‘the timbers of the sea [SHIPS] rejoice in the voyage’. But that fits poorly with DGB.