SnSt Ht 70^III

Kari Ellen Gade (ed.) 2017, ‘Snorri Sturluson, Háttatal 70’ in Kari Ellen Gade and Edith Marold (eds), Poetry from Treatises on Poetics. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 3. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 1181.

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This is the third variant of tøglag and it is called hagmælt ‘skilfully spoken’. The odd lines contain two alliterating staves and skothending, and the even lines have aðalhending.

The top of fol. 51v is partly damaged in R, and W is the main ms. for this stanza. — For other poems composed in hagmælt ‘skilfully spoken’, see ESk Hardr II^II. — [1-4]: Skj B connects the prepositional phrase of spakan mœti oddbraks ‘about the wise encounterer of the point-crash’ (ll. 1, 4) with ókveðit lit. ‘non-composed, non-recited’ (l. 3) and takes it to mean that Snorri has not used some of these metrical variants in his earlier poetry about Skúli. It is more likely, however, that Snorri boasts of having created new metres for these poems (see SnE 2007, 68). — [8]: This line concludes the split refrain in st. 68/1 (see Note to that line above). According to Snorri’s commentary, a correct refrain in tøgdrápulag ‘journey-poem metre’ should commence in the first line of the first stanza and be completed in the last line of the last stanza, i.e. the last stanza of the section of the poem comprising a stefjamél ‘refrain passage’ or ‘stef-interval’. An entire poem could contain several stefjamél with various split refrains, but, according to Snorri, all refrain passages ought to be of equal length.