Herv Lv 3^VIII (Heiðr 16)

Hannah Burrows (ed.) 2017, ‘Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks 16 (Hervǫr, Lausavísur 3)’ in Margaret Clunies Ross (ed.), Poetry in fornaldarsögur. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 8. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 374.

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

[1-3]: Given that Hervǫr intends to disguise herself as a man, these lines are problematic in terms of sense, though the implication may be that she will bind up her hair to conceal it (Heiðr 1960, 11 n. 1). Skj B emends to Skal skjótliga | af skǫr búa | blæju líni, translating Hurtigt skal slör-linet bort fra mit hoved ‘Quickly must the linen veil be taken from my head’. This suggestion gives good sense, that she is shedding her feminine trappings, and af could have been misread as of and rendered um by later scribes, but búa af is not attested in the sense ‘take off’, and no other eds have adopted this suggestion. — [1-2] skal ‘[I] must’: This could alternatively be understood as an impersonal construction: ‘My hair must quickly be dressed’. — [5-6]: The interpretation here takes er as introducing a rel. clause, referring to því (l. 5), i.e. ‘much depends on [the fact] that both shirt and cloak shall be cut for me’. Alternatively, því could refer to the statement in the first helmingr (about the dressing of the hair), with er meaning ‘because’, with the sense ‘Much depends on me dressing my hair, because…’.