ShÞ Frag 1III
Kari Ellen Gade (ed.) 2017, ‘Skáldhelgi Þórðarson, Fragment 1’ in Kari Ellen Gade and Edith Marold (eds), Poetry from Treatises on Poetics. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 3. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 351.
text and translation
Megut jarna fet fyrnask;
friðarskepjandi miðjum.
{Fet jarna} megut fyrnask; friðarskepjandi miðjum.
‘The steps of iron-weapons [WOUNDS] cannot be forgotten; peacemaker … the middle. ’
notes and context
The couplet is cited as an illustration of heiti (kennings) for ‘wounds’.
The couplet is too fragmentary to allow for an interpretation. The first line, which contains the kenning for ‘wounds’ (fet jarna lit. ‘steps of irons’), is fairly certain, but l. 2 cannot be construed to make sense as it stands. Finnur Jónsson (Skj B) gives friðar skepjandi … miðjum, which is translated as fredstifteren … ‘the peacemaker …’. Kock (NN §1124A) takes miðjum as dat. pl. of mið ‘fishing ground’ (rather than as dat. pl. of the adj. miðr ‘middle’) and translates friðar skepjandi miðjum as a form of address: o, du fiskevattnens skydd! ‘oh, protector of fishing grounds!’. In view of the incompleteness of the fragment, that interpretation is not persuasive. Further, mið ‘fishing ground’ does not appear to be a n. ja-stem (cf. Fritzner: mið 3, which lists the dat. pl. forms miðum and miðunum). Based on the syntax of the two lines, they seem to form ll. 3-4 of a couplet (with l. 3 as an intercalary independent clause), and the missing two lines must have provided the syntactically necessary elements to make sense of the words in l. 4.
sources
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.
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