Refr Ferðv 4^III

Edith Marold (ed.) 2017, ‘Hofgarða-Refr Gestsson, Ferðavísur 4’ in Kari Ellen Gade and Edith Marold (eds), Poetry from Treatises on Poetics. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 3. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 247.

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

This stanza is cited in Skm (SnE) and LaufE among stanzas exemplifying sea-heiti.

[1-2]: In l. 2, mss R and C read drasils (the descender on the final <s> is very faint in R and earlier eds read <l> here), and mss Tˣ and A, as well as the LaufE mss, contain two nom. forms, borðheimr ‘world of ship-planks’ and drasill ‘steed’. In order to decide which of them ought to be the subject of the sentence, one must take the case assignment and semantic structure of the verb nema into account, because the dat. brjósti ‘breast’ must be accommodated syntactically. The only example of a similar syntactic structure is found in LP: nema 5: spjót nemr hjartarótum ‘the spear strikes the heart at the roots’ (Anon Pét 38/6^VII). Hence the subject of the sentence must be the sea which strikes the breast of the ship, i.e. it crashes against the bow of the ship. This interpretation also matches the general tenor of the helmingr, which characterises the sea in this confrontation as the aggressive entity and the ship as the affected one. This is also the sense of the intercalary ‘the ship suffers distress’. Hence borðheimr ‘world of ship-planks’ (so all mss), the base-word of the sea-kenning, must be the subject of the sentence, and drasils (gen.) (so R and C) is the base-word in the ship-kenning qualifying the dat. brjósti ‘breast’. Previous eds (SnE 1848-87; Skj B; Skald; SnE 1998) take drasill as the subject of the sentence and emend borðheimr nom. sg. ‘world of ship-planks [SEA]’ to borðheim (acc. sg.) as the object. However, the semantic interpretation of nemr is problematic here. Cf. LP: nema 3, which gives the following complicated interpretation: tage imod noget (for at støde det tilbage, holde det ude) ‘receive something (in order to push it back, keep it outside)’, slightly different than the translation in Skj B: Skibet sætter sit bryst imod den stavnfurede sø ‘the ship pushes its breast against the prow-carved sea’, where the dat. brjósti cannot be accommodated syntactically.