Anon 732b 1^III

Meyjar bað men-Týr
mætrar; sá er fágiætr;
hljótr fekk við hryggbrot
hásætrs votar nætr.
Krafti var ok konu sviftr
kauði; var hann þess trauðr;
slík gjöraz mál mjó
mærðar í skaup færð.

{Men-Týr} – sá er fágiætr – bað mætrar meyjar; {hljótr hásætrs} fekk votar nætr við hryggbrot. Kauði var sviftr krafti ok konu; hann var trauðr þess; slík mjó mál gjöraz færð í skaup mærðar.

{The Týr <god> of the neck-ring} [MAN] – he’s a rare one – asked for [the hand of] a splendid girl; {the receiver of the rowing-bench} [SEAFARER] had wet nights on account of the refusal. The wretch was deprived of strength and the woman; he was averse to this; such slight affairs get mocked in verse.

Mss: 732b(8v)

Readings: [4] votar: votr (‘xptr’) 732b

Editions: Skj AII, 463, Skj BII, 495-6, Skald II, 271; Finnur Jónsson 1886a, 187, 191-2, Metr. §29, Finnur Jónsson 1934a, 60.

Context: The lausavísa is included among marginalia inserted below a conventional schematic plan of Jerusalem. It is preceded by a vernacular account of units of weight and currency, expressed in the same simple code as the stanza. Anon 732b 2 follows immediately.

Notes: [All]: The encrypted ms. text reads as follows: ᴍfzkbr bbð mfntzr mætrbr sb fr fbgkætr. hlkptr ffkk xkð hrzɢg brpt hbsætrs xptr nætr krbpti xbr pk kpnx sxkptr kbxði var hann þess trbxðr slik gkprbz mbl mkp mærðbr k skbxp færð. An original uncoded o has been corrected to the code-letter p in the form brpt (for -brot, l. 3). Decryption and expansion produces the following raw text before normalisation and re-punctuation: meyjar bað mentyr mætrar sa er fagiætr. hljotr fekk við hrygg brot hasætrs votr nætr krapti var ok konu sviptr kauði var hann þess trauðr slik gjoraz mal mjo mærðar i skaup færð.  — [1]: Finnur Jónsson (1886a, 191) detects a failure of rhyme, but it is possible that a non-consonantal skothending is intended on the long vowels ‑ey- and ‑ý- in meyjar : Týr, allowing for the non-participation of the inflectional endings (cf. Kuhn 1983, 80; Gade 1995a, 32-3). — [1] men-Týr ‘the Týr <god> of the neck-ring [MAN]’: Kennings referring to the bearers of precious adornments are unusual in that they may designate both men and women. Those with the determinant men (‘neck-ring, torque, necklace’) apply more commonly to women (Meissner 400, cf. 279, 413). Clunies Ross (1973b, 79-82) has noted that some formulations connecting men with various kinds of rings in Old Norse verse involve puns on ‘anus’ that demean their male referents by identifying them as submissive to sexual penetration. The disparaging content of the stanza as a whole encourages the view that some suggestion of unmanliness might be intended here. — [2] sá er fágiætr ‘he’s a rare one’: Lit. ‘he is rarely obtained’. An ironic expression of admiration, perhaps marking the negative insinuation of the antecedent cpd men-Týr ‘the Týr <god> of the neck-ring’ (l. 1). In his early edn, Finnur Jónsson (1886a, 192) translates the phrase as den sjældne mand ‘that rare man’ (cf. LP: fágætr), which he reads in a wholly positive light. In Skj B he reinterprets the phrase as an expression of open disapprobation; the revised translation, han opnår sjælden meget ‘he seldom achieves much’, is incorrect. — [3, 4] hljótr hásætrs ‘the receiver of the rowing-bench [SEAFARER]’: Alternatively, ‘the receiver of the high seat [GUEST]’: The polysemy of hásætr, through its morphological variant hásæti, underlies the cutting humour of the stanza, which associates the experiences of disappointment in love on land and the hardship experienced by a mariner in heavy seas. The lexical ambiguity arises from the homonyms of hár m.: the adj. ‘high’ and the noun ‘oar-port’. While hásætr m. usually designates the ‘high seat’ in a house, allotted to the most honoured guests, the variant form hásæti n. also refers to a humble ‘rowing-bench’ (lit. ‘oar-port seat’) on a boat or ship (see Fritzner: hásæti; cf. Finnur Jónsson 1886a, 191-2; LP: hásætr). There are therefore two possible contrasting referents for the kenning: a ‘guest’ who has been given the seat of honour in a domestic setting on land, and a ‘seafarer’ in his station at the oars. The votar nætr ‘wet nights’ (l. 4) experienced by the subject on the rejection of his wooing seems initially to disambiguate the sense of the kenning, supporting the reading ‘seafarer’. The spurned suitor is figured as having taken his place not in the seat of honour at the home of the woman he desires, but at the rowing-bench. The ambiguity of the expression hljótr hásætrs mockingly invokes the positive outcome for which he had longed, even as it resituates the unsuccessful lover as a weary rower who plies his oar night after night in tumultuous seas. Parallelisms between the emotional pain of lovesickness and the physical hardships of a sea-voyage in skaldic verse conventionally provide the basis for expressions of complaint or steadfastness by a lovelorn poet (e.g. Hfr Lv 26^V (Hallfr 32); KormǪ Lv 35-9^V (Korm 54-8); VíglÞ Lv 9^V (Vígl 12)). Here, however, the figure offers a further opportunity for defamation of the rejected suitor. The allusion to the votar nætr ‘wet nights’ that follow his disappointment develops a superficially innocuous metaphorical connection between grief and surging waves, but the phrase also contains a scurrilous double-entendre (see Note to l. 4 below). — [3] hryggbrot ‘rejection’: Lit. ‘back-breaking’. This is an unusual medieval occurrence of an expression well known in Modern Icelandic, referring to the rejection of a lover or suitor (Finnur Jónsson 1886a, 192; Mörður Árnason 2010: hryggbrot; cf. CVC: hryggbrotinn ‘broken-backed’). Here the expression sustains the polysemy of the stanza by simultaneously signifying the figurative hurt inflicted on the suitor, and the toil of the seaman, bent in physical activity (on which see further Note to l. 4 below). Cf. l. 5, which associates the outcomes of the man’s rejection and his nocturnal exertions: var sviftr krafti og konu ‘[He] was deprived of strength and the woman’. — [4] votar nætr ‘wet nights’: The deciphered form votr (ms. ‘xptr’) is emended to restore line-length and provide concord with the f. acc. pl. nætr ‘nights’. Finnur Jónsson (1886a, 191; Skj B) originally adopted the older spelling vátar here, but the fourteenth-century form votar is required by the hálfhnept metre, in which the penultimate word in each line must be monosyllabic or consist of two short syllables. Kock (Skald; Metr. §29) emended votr nætr to an otherwise unattested cpd vátnætr, on the analogy of vátviðri ‘wet weather’, in spite of the shortness of the resultant line, and proposed that the -r in votr was introduced accidentally under the influence of the endings in the adjacent words, ‑sætrs and nætr. Kock’s intervention was scornfully rejected by Finnur Jónsson (1934a, 60), but his revision of vátar to vótar in his re-treatment of the stanza (adopting a form that would represent an intermediate stage in the sound-change vá > vo) is no more metrical than Kock’s neologism. The sense of the expression is ambiguous. Following the interpretation of hljótr hásætrs as ‘seafarer’ it may be read as a reflex of conventional poetic metaphors relating the hardship of a man’s separation from the woman he desires to the physical trials of a mariner lashed by cold waves and spray. Cf. also the hálfhnept stanza Bbreiðv Lv 6^V (Eb 30), in which Bjǫrn Breiðvíkingakappi contrasts his married lover’s bed with the vásbúð ‘hardship’, lit. ‘cold, wet lodgings’ (cf. CVC: vás ‘wetness, toil, fatigue from storm’) which he endures after he is lost in a blizzard on the return trip from a visit to her house. The effect of the reference to ‘wet nights’ in Anon 732b 1 is clearly derisive, however, and Finnur Jónsson (1886a, 191; 1934, 60) interprets the expression as a scathing allusion to the ‘tearful’ (grådfulle) nights experienced by the disappointed lover. In his final edn of the stanza, Finnur Jónsson (1934a, 60) argues that the phrase undermines the man’s masculinity further by implying that he ikke kan holde sit ‘vand’ ‘cannot hold his “water”’. A parallel charge is made in the stanza inscribed in twelfth- or thirteenth-century runes on the Årdal I runestick (Run N 344^VI), which pillories a man who languishes in lovesickness and stundum bleytir beð undir sér ‘sometimes wets his bed’ (NIyR IV, 129-30). It seems equally likely, however, that the expression is supposed to suggest repeated masturbation or involuntary nocturnal emissions, and ridicules the man’s sexual frustration and his lack of any satisfactory opportunity to demonstrate his virility after his rejection (cf. the identification in Gade 1989b, 61-2 of a wry reference to masturbation in the rowing imagery in Bjhít Lv 2^V (BjH 2)). — [5-6]: If hann ‘he’ in l. 6 is ignored as an extrametrical scribal addition, the couplet reads: ‘[He] was deprived of strength and the woman; the wretch was averse to this’. — [7] mjó ‘slight’: Lit. ‘thin’. Kock (Skald; Metr. §29) suggests emending mjó to mjúk ‘soft, gentle’, in order to restore skothending, although this is less appropriate semantically (cf. Finnur Jónsson 1934a, 60). Emendation of slík ‘such’ (n. nom. pl. adj.) to svá ‘thus’ (adv.) would be a preferable alternative.  — [8] gjöraz færð í skaup mærðar ‘get mocked in verse’: Lit. ‘get brought into the mockery of panegyric’, a nice oxymoron. For the use of mærð as a broad term for skaldic verse, as well as praise in general and encomiastic poetry in particular, see Kreutzer (1977, 49-52).

References

1. Bibliography
2. Skj B = Finnur Jónsson, ed. 1912-15b. Den norsk-islandske skjaldedigtning. B: Rettet tekst. 2 vols. Copenhagen: Villadsen & Christensen. Rpt. 1973. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde & Bagger.
3. Skald = Kock, Ernst Albin, ed. 1946-50. Den norsk-isländska skaldediktningen. 2 vols. Lund: Gleerup.
4. Meissner = Meissner, Rudolf. 1921. Die Kenningar der Skalden: Ein Beitrag zur skaldischen Poetik. Rheinische Beiträge und Hülfsbücher zur germanischen Philologie und Volkskunde 1. Bonn and Leipzig: Schroeder. Rpt. 1984. Hildesheim etc.: Olms.
5. LP = Finnur Jónsson, ed. 1931. Lexicon poeticum antiquæ linguæ septentrionalis: Ordbog over det norsk-islandske skjaldesprog oprindelig forfattet af Sveinbjörn Egilsson. 2nd edn. Copenhagen: Møller.
6. CVC = Cleasby, Richard, Gudbrand Vigfusson [Guðbrandur Vigfússon] and W. A. Craigie. 1957. An Icelandic-English Dictionary. 2nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon.
7. Gade, Kari Ellen. 1989b. ‘Penile Puns: Personal Names and Phallic Symbols in Skaldic Poetry’. Essays in Medieval Studies: Proceedings of the Illinois Medieval Association 6, 57-67.
8. Gade, Kari Ellen. 1995a. The Structure of Old Norse dróttkvætt Poetry. Islandica 49. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
9. Kreutzer, Gert. 1977. Die Dichtungslehre der Skalden: Poetologische Terminologie und Autorenkommentare als Grundlage einer Gattungspoetik. 2nd edn. Hochschulschriften: Literaturwissenschaft 1. Meisenheim am Glan: Hain.
10. Finnur Jónsson. 1886a. ‘Lønskrift og lejlighedsoptegnelser fra et par islandske håndskrifter’. In Kålund et al. 1884-91, 185-94.
11. Fritzner = Fritzner, Johan. 1883-96. Ordbog over det gamle norske sprog. 3 vols. Kristiania (Oslo): Den norske forlagsforening. 4th edn. Rpt. 1973. Oslo etc.: Universitetsforlaget.
12. Kuhn, Hans (1899). 1983. Das Dróttkvætt. Heidelberg: Winter.
13. Metr. = Kock, Ernst Albin. 1933. ‘Ett kapitel nordisk metrik och textkritik’. ANF 49, 279-94.
14. Finnur Jónsson. 1934a. Tekstkritiske bemærkninger til skjaldekvad. Det kgl. danske videnskabernes selskab. Historisk-filologiske meddelelser 20.2. Copenhagen: Levin & Munksgaard.
15. Clunies Ross, Margaret. 1973b. ‘Hildr’s Ring: A Problem in the Ragnarsdrápa, Strophes 8-12’. MS 6, 75-92.
16. NIyR = Olsen, Magnus et al., eds. 1941-90. Norges innskrifter med de yngre runer. Norges indskrifter indtil reformationen. 2. afdeling. 6 vols. Oslo: Norsk historisk kjeldeskrift-institutt.
17. Mörður Árnason, ed. 2010. Íslensk orðabók. 5th rev. edn. Reykjavík: Forlágið.
18. Internal references
19. Judy Quinn (ed.) 2022, ‘Eyrbyggja saga 30 (Bjǫrn Breiðvíkingakappi Ásbrandsson, Lausavísur 6)’ in Margaret Clunies Ross, Kari Ellen Gade and Tarrin Wills (eds), Poetry in Sagas of Icelanders. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 5. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 463.
20. Alison Finlay (ed.) 2022, ‘Bjarnar saga Hítdœlakappa 2 (Bjǫrn Hítdœlakappi Arngeirsson, Lausavísur 2)’ in Margaret Clunies Ross, Kari Ellen Gade and Tarrin Wills (eds), Poetry in Sagas of Icelanders. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 5. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 62.
21. Diana Whaley (ed.) 2022, ‘Hallfreðar saga 32 (Hallfreðr vandræðaskáld Óttarsson, Lausavísur 26)’ in Margaret Clunies Ross, Kari Ellen Gade and Tarrin Wills (eds), Poetry in Sagas of Icelanders. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 5. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 912.
22. Edith Marold (ed.) 2022, ‘Kormáks saga 54 (Kormákr Ǫgmundarson, Lausavísur 35)’ in Margaret Clunies Ross, Kari Ellen Gade and Tarrin Wills (eds), Poetry in Sagas of Icelanders. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 5. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 1120.
23. Kate Heslop (ed.) 2022, ‘Eyrbyggja saga 4 (Þórarinn svarti máhlíðingr Þórólfsson, Máhlíðingavísur 2)’ in Margaret Clunies Ross, Kari Ellen Gade and Tarrin Wills (eds), Poetry in Sagas of Icelanders. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 5. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 417.
24. Klaus Johan Myrvoll (ed.) 2022, ‘Víglundar saga 12 (Víglundr Þorgrímsson, Lausavísur 9)’ in Margaret Clunies Ross, Kari Ellen Gade and Tarrin Wills (eds), Poetry in Sagas of Icelanders. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 5. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 1429.
25. Jonathan Grove (ed.) 2017, ‘Anonymous Lausavísur, Lausavísur from AM 732 b 4° 1’ in Kari Ellen Gade and Edith Marold (eds), Poetry from Treatises on Poetics. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 3. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 1248.
26. Jonathan Grove (ed.) 2017, ‘Anonymous Lausavísur, Lausavísur from AM 732 b 4° 2’ in Kari Ellen Gade and Edith Marold (eds), Poetry from Treatises on Poetics. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 3. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 1251.