SnSt Ht 18^III

Kari Ellen Gade (ed.) 2017, ‘Snorri Sturluson, Háttatal 18’ in Kari Ellen Gade and Edith Marold (eds), Poetry from Treatises on Poetics. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 3. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 1123.

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

As st. 17 above. The antitheses occur only in the even lines. Both the refhvǫrf constructions and the content of the stanza are explained in the accompanying prose commentary.

The headings are xi. háttr ‘the eleventh verse-form’ (Tˣ(49r)) and ǫnnur refhvǫrf ‘the second fox-turns’ (U(47r)). — The words containing the antitheses are the following: heldr ‘holds’ (taken as 3rd pers. sg. pres. indic. of halda ‘hold’ rather than as the comp. adv. heldr ‘rather’) : slitnar ‘is ended’; dul ‘concealment’ : vitni ‘testimony’ (rather than vitni ‘wolf’) (l. 2); skelfr ‘shaking’ (taken as an adj., m. nom. sg., rather than as 3rd pers. sg. pres. indic. of the verb skjálfa ‘shake’) : harðr ‘hard’; taka ‘take’ : varða ‘defend’ (l. 4); hollr ‘loyal’ : gramr ‘unfriendly’ (taken as an adj., m. nom. sg., rather than as the noun gramr ‘lord’); rekinn ‘driven away’ (rather than ‘inlaid’) : framðan ‘advanced’ (l. 6); svalr ‘cool’ : brandr ‘fire’; dugir ‘benefits’ : grandar ‘injures’ (l. 8). — [5-6]: As they stand in the mss, these lines read fal (hal W, fall U) látið her hvítan | hollr gramr rekinn framðan, i.e. hollr gramr, látið hvítan rekinn fal framðan her ‘loyal lord, you let the white inlaid spear-socket (‘man’ W, ‘fall’ U) be advanced to (or: for) the army’ which makes no sense in the context. The reading lætr of her (so earlier eds) is taken over from the prose commentary (SnE 2007, 13): Ok <í> þriðja fjórðungi er svá, at hollr gramr of her lætr framðan fal hvítan rekinn ‘And in the third couplet it is so, that the loyal lord makes the white inlaid spear-socket advance above the army’.