SnSt Ht 68^III

Kari Ellen Gade (ed.) 2017, ‘Snorri Sturluson, Háttatal 68’ in Kari Ellen Gade and Edith Marold (eds), Poetry from Treatises on Poetics. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 3. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 1180.

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

This stanza opens the third section of the poem (it þriðja kvæði lit. ‘the third poem’) with stanzas in ‘lesser verse-forms’ (smæri hættir), many of which are nonetheless found in encomiastic poetry. The metre is tøgdrápulag ‘journey-poem metre’. It is a regularised metre with four metrical positions (and with licensed resolution, neutralisation and elision as in fornyrðislag), with one alliterating stave in the odd lines and the main stave in the even lines fixed in initial position. The odd lines may contain internal rhymes (skothending; see ll. 3, 5, 7), and the even lines have aðalhendingar in positions 1 and 3.

For the name of this metre, see also RvHbreiðm Hl 25-6. For a discussion of this metre, as well as tøglag ‘journey-metre’ (st. 69) and hagmælt ‘skilfully spoken’ (st. 70), see Section 4 of the General Introduction in SkP I and Introduction to Þloft Tøgdr^I. — [1]: The line is part of a split refrain (klofastef) which is concluded in st. 70/8: Skúli varð fremstr | skjǫldunga ungr ‘young Skúli became the foremost of lords’ (for a poem in tøglag with a similar refrain, see Sigv Knútdr 3/1^I, 6/8^I, 7/1^I, 9/8^I, 11/4^I). The missing parts of the klofastef are indicated in Prose and Translation as ‘…’. — [4]: The rhyme snœrð- : mærð does not involve identical vowels, and earlier scholars have therefore postulated a variant form mœrð (see LP: mærð; SnE 2007, 67), but there are no early examples of this rhyme (only here and in ESk Geisl 21/2^VII, where the reading appears to be corrupt). Hence this could be an early manifestation of the change œ > æ or at least indicate an instability in the pronunciation of the vowel. That change is otherwise dated to shortly before 1250 (see ANG §120).