GunnLeif Merl I 40VIII
Russell Poole (ed.) 2017, ‘Breta saga 108 (Gunnlaugr Leifsson, Merlínusspá I 40)’ in Margaret Clunies Ross (ed.), Poetry in fornaldarsögur. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 8. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 77.
Mun ‘will’
sáð ‘seed’
koma ‘come’
sinni ‘time’
ǫðru ‘a second’
útlent ‘Foreign’
yfir ‘over’
óra ‘our’
garða ‘precincts’
En ‘And’
samt ‘still’
[5] samt: sumt Hb
yfir ‘’
á ‘on’
svǫlum ‘the cool’
barmi ‘fringe’
eylands ‘of the island’
þrumir ‘remains’
ormr ‘snake’
inn ‘the’
rauði ‘red’
fær ‘gain’
hann ‘he will’
lítit ‘little’
af ‘from’
landinu ‘the land’
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Cf. DGB 112 (Reeve and Wright 2007, 147.63-4; cf. Wright 1988, 103, prophecy 6): Replebuntur iterum ortuli nostri alieno semine, et in extremitate stagni languebit rubeus ‘Our gardens will be filled again with foreign seed and the red dragon will languish at the pool’s edge’. This prophecy alludes to the restriction of British occupation to Wales, narrated in DGB XI (Reeve and Wright 2007, 280-1). Gunnlaugr replaces the symbolic pool with the literal island and appears to freely add the notion that the British king will gain little from his occupation of Wales, in a theme of land use and productivity that appears occasionally elsewhere; for other instances see Note to I 32/5-8. DGB speaks disparagingly about the British dynasties in Wales but does not address this specific point (Reeve and Wright 2007, 280-1). — [9-10]: Previous eds have placed these lines at the beginning of I 41, but they are clearly integral to the present stanza, just as they are clearly extraneous to the subject-matter of I 41. The stanza division in Hb, signalled by rubricated majuscule <F> initial in fær, is likely to be erroneous; for the reverse error, cf. I 34/9-10 and I 35/7-10.
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