GunnLeif Merl I 47^VIII

‘Sá mun lofðungr,         es liði stýrir,
brátt brezkum her         byggva jarðir.
Mun sáð tekit         snáks ins hvíta
endr ór órum         aldingǫrðum.

‘Sá lofðungr, es stýrir liði, mun brátt byggva jarðir brezkum her. Sáð ins hvíta snáks mun tekit endr ór aldingǫrðum órum.

‘The lord who leads the army will swiftly settle the lands with British people. The white snake’s seed will be taken once more out of our orchards.

Mss: Hb(51v) (Bret)

Readings: [7] órum: ófám Hb

Editions: Skj AII, 28, Skj BII, 33, Skald II, 21, NN §103; Bret 1848-9, II, 55 (Bret st. 115); Hb 1892-6, 280; Merl 2012, 163.

Notes: [All]: Cf. DGB 113 (Reeve and Wright 2007, 147.73-4; cf. Wright 1988, 103, prophecy 9): Restaurabit pristinis incolis mansiones, et ruina alienigenarum patebit. Germen albi draconis ex ortulis nostris abradetur ‘They [the people from Normandy] will restore the original inhabitants to their dwellings, and the ruin of the foreigners will be plain to see. The seed of the white dragon will disappear from our gardens’ (Reeve and Wright 2007, 146). Gunnlaugr appears to have worked from a source ms. that contained the reading albi draconis ‘of the white dragon’, characteristic of the Ω group of mss (Reeve and Wright 2007, 147); see Introduction. With the phrase Sá lofðungr, es stýrir liði ‘The lord who leads the army’ Gunnlaugr makes more explicit reference to William the Conqueror than does Geoffrey. Geoffrey’s notion of a Breton resumption of residency in Britain may be owed in part to an awareness that William brought over a large Breton contingent as part of his army, with the support of the Breton aristocracy (cf. Stenton 1971, 594). Many Breton lords and their followers were given lands in England during the two decades after the Conquest (Stenton 1971, 629). — [3-4] byggva ... brezkum her ‘settle … with British people’: This edn follows the construal implied by Bret 1848-9, with brezkum her in the instr. dat.; similarly Merl 2012. The meaning of byggva here is ‘cause the land to become settled’ (Fritzner: byggja 5; ONP: byggja 8; cf. LP: byggva 2). Gunnlaugr makes frequent use of constructions in which a noun in dat./instr. function appears without a prep. such as með (cf. Í 63/6-7; NS §§104, 105, 108, and 110). Skj B translates less precisely as give landet til det brittiske folk ‘give the land to the British people’. Kock (NN §103) takes brezkum her in apposition to liði, evidently positing a sense ‘The lord who leads the army, the British people, will promptly settle the land’, but this is to ignore not merely the applicable sub-sense of byggva but also Geoffrey’s text, where the idea is that the land is re-settled by the original inhabitants; such a structure of variation, with the intervening adv. brátt, would be hard to parallel in Old West Norse poetry. — [7] órum ‘our’: Emended in this edn from ms. ófám ‘not few’ (refreshed). Cf. the Latin; also garða óra (I 40/4), translating ortuli nostri. — [8] aldingǫrðum ‘orchards’: Elsewhere in poetry found only in Anon Pl 24/7^VII.

References

1. Bibliography
2. Skj B = Finnur Jónsson, ed. 1912-15b. Den norsk-islandske skjaldedigtning. B: Rettet tekst. 2 vols. Copenhagen: Villadsen & Christensen. Rpt. 1973. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde & Bagger.
3. Skald = Kock, Ernst Albin, ed. 1946-50. Den norsk-isländska skaldediktningen. 2 vols. Lund: Gleerup.
4. NN = Kock, Ernst Albin. 1923-44. Notationes Norrœnæ: Anteckningar till Edda och skaldediktning. Lunds Universitets årsskrift new ser. 1. 28 vols. Lund: Gleerup.
5. LP = Finnur Jónsson, ed. 1931. Lexicon poeticum antiquæ linguæ septentrionalis: Ordbog over det norsk-islandske skjaldesprog oprindelig forfattet af Sveinbjörn Egilsson. 2nd edn. Copenhagen: Møller.
6. Fritzner = Fritzner, Johan. 1883-96. Ordbog over det gamle norske sprog. 3 vols. Kristiania (Oslo): Den norske forlagsforening. 4th edn. Rpt. 1973. Oslo etc.: Universitetsforlaget.
7. NS = Nygaard, Marius. 1906. Norrøn syntax. Kristiania (Oslo): Aschehoug. Rpt. 1966.
8. ONP = Degnbol, Helle et al., eds. 1989-. A Dictionary of Old Norse Prose / Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog. 1-. Copenhagen: The Arnamagnæan Commission.
9. Hb 1892-6 = Finnur Jónsson, ed. 1892-6. Hauksbók udgiven efter de Arnamagnæanske håndskrifter no. 371, 544 og 675, 4° samt forskellige papirshåndskrifter. Copenhagen: Det kongelige nordiske oldskrift-selskab.
10. Bret 1848-9 = Jón Sigurðsson. 1848-9. ‘Trójumanna saga ok Breta sögur, efter Hauksbók, med dansk Oversættelse’. ÅNOH 1848, 3-215; 1849, 3-145.
11. Reeve, Michael D., and Neil Wright. 2007. Geoffrey of Monmouth. The History of the Kings of Britain. An Edition and Translation of De gestis Britonum [Historia regum Britanniae]. Woodbridge: Boydell.
12. Wright, Neil, ed. 1988. The Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth. II. The First Variant Version: A Critical Edition. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.
13. Stenton, F. M. 1971. Anglo-Saxon England. 3rd edn. Oxford: Clarendon.
14. Merl 2012 = Horst, Simone, ed. 2012. Merlínússpá. Merlins Prophezeiung. Munich: Herbert Utz Verlag.
15. Internal references
16. 2017, ‘ Unattributed, Breta saga’ in Margaret Clunies Ross (ed.), Poetry in fornaldarsögur. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 8. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 38. <https://skaldic.org/m.php?p=text&i=125> (accessed 7 May 2024)
17. Jonna Louis-Jensen and Tarrin Wills (eds) 2007, ‘Anonymous Poems, Plácitusdrápa 24’ in Margaret Clunies Ross (ed.), Poetry on Christian Subjects. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 7. Turnhout: Brepols, pp. 196-7.