Ormr Woman 4III/4 — nisting ‘stitching’
Skorða vas í fǫt fœrð
fjarðbeins afarhrein
nýri (sǫng nadd-Freyr)
nisting (of mjaðar Hrist).
Skorða fjarðbeins vas fœrð í afarhrein fǫt nýri nisting; nadd-Freyr sǫng of Hrist mjaðar.
The prop of the fjord-bone [STONE > WOMAN] was clothed in exceedingly clean garments with new stitching; the spear-Freyr <god> [WARRIOR] sang about the Hrist <valkyrie> of mead [WOMAN].
notes
[4] nisting ‘stitching’: This word occurs five times, only here in poetry, and always in the sense of ‘stitching, sewing’ (LP, Fritzner: nisting; cf. citations in ONP: nisting). The extended sense ‘garment’ posited uniquely for this stanza by Sveinbjörn Egilsson (LP (1860): nisting), followed by Guðbrandur Vigfússon (CPB II, 323) and Finnur Jónsson (Skj B, LP: nisting), is not warranted, since fǫt ‘garments’ can be envisaged as undergoing ‘stitching’ or ‘sewing’ to adapt them to fit the dead woman, perhaps by way of being ‘taken in’ or ‘gathered’. The case of nisting is dat. (instrumental), indicating the manner in which or means by which the corpse is conveyed into the fǫt. In previous eds it is taken as the dat. object of slǫng (ms. A). Such flexionless dat. forms start to supplant older forms in -u in the C11th or 12th (Finnur Jónsson 1901, 40-1; ANG §376).