Cookies on our website

We use cookies on this website, mainly to provide a secure browsing experience but also to collect statistics on how the website is used. You can find out more about the cookies we set, the information we store and how we use it on the cookies page.

Continue

skaldic

Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages

Menu Search

Anon (FoGT) 20III

Margaret Clunies Ross (ed.) 2017, ‘Anonymous Lausavísur, Stanzas from the Fourth Grammatical Treatise 20’ in Kari Ellen Gade and Edith Marold (eds), Poetry from Treatises on Poetics. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 3. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 596.

Anonymous LausavísurStanzas from the Fourth Grammatical Treatise
192021

text and translation

Hætta verðr á hættu,
hæting ef böl rætir;
ást er nær að næra;
nú er vær konan færi.
Skeind tekr æðrin æðaz;
æðr deyr, þá er br …

Hætta verðr á hættu, ef hæting rætir böl; nær er að næra ást; nú er vær konan færi. Skeind æðrin tekr æðaz; æðr deyr, þá er br …
 
‘To take risks leads to danger, if threatening plants misfortune; it is better to nourish love; now placid women are fewer. The scratched vein begins to become angry; the eider duck dies when …

notes and context

Stanza 20 follows immediately after st. 19 with no intervening prose text, nor any following gloss.

As with the second helmingr of st. 19, the poet’s desire to pair umlauted vowels (ligatures) with long non-umlauted vowels in the uneven lines seems to have largely gone by the board, in favour of the maintenance of a particular ligature in both lines of a couplet. In l. 2, even though etymologically hæting (from hót ‘threat’) and rætir (from rót ‘root’) are [ø:] ligatures, they would have become [æ:] after c. 1250. Similarly in ll. 3-4, næra and vær have etymologically [ø:] ligatures, but will have fallen together with original [æ:] ligatures, here nær and færi, by the mid-C13th. Again, the ligatures in ll. 5-6 are either of [ø:] (æðaz l. 5) or [æ:] origin (æðr ll. 5 and 6). — Although st. 20/6 breaks off before it is complete, the final letters obscured by a hole in W, there is no evidence that the scribe was intending to add two further lines to complete the stanza, as it is clear that this stanza completes the chapter of FoGT on euphonia, and the next line on p. 115 begins a new chapter of the treatise with a capital letter.

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.

editions and texts

Skj: Anonyme digte og vers [XIII], D. 3. Vers af den 4. grt. afhandling 14: AII, 216-17, BII, 234, Skald II, 121, NN §2357; SnE 1848-87, II, 218-19, III, 158, FoGT 1884, 134, 269-70, FoGT 2004, 43, 69, 120-2, FoGT 2014, 22-3, 98-101.

Close

Log in

This service is only available to members of the relevant projects, and to purchasers of the skaldic volumes published by Brepols.
This service uses cookies. By logging in you agree to the use of cookies on your browser.

Close

Stanza/chapter/text segment

Use the buttons at the top of the page to navigate between stanzas in a poem.

Information tab

Interactive tab

The text and translation are given here, with buttons to toggle whether the text is shown in the verse order or prose word order. Clicking on indiviudal words gives dictionary links, variant readings, kennings and notes, where relevant.

Full text tab

This is the text of the edition in a similar format to how the edition appears in the printed volumes.

Chapter/text segment

This view is also used for chapters and other text segments. Not all the headings shown are relevant to such sections.