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skaldic

Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages

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Eil Þdr 23III/3 — reinu ‘land’

Verðið ér, alls orða
oss grœr of kon mœrar
á sefreinu Sónar
sáð, vingjǫfum ráða.

Ér verðið ráða vingjǫfum, alls sáð orða Sónar of kon mœrar grœr oss á sefreinu.

You must decide the gifts of friendship, as the seed of the words of Són <mythical vat> [POETRY] about the descendant of the land (= Jǫrð) [= Þórr] grows for us [me] in the mind-land [BREAST].

readings

[3] ‑reinu: ‘‑reinio’ U, ‘reyne’ B

notes

[3] á sefreinu ‘in the mind-land [BREAST]’: This breast-kenning follows the ‘land of the mind’ pattern (cf. Meissner 136-7). The choice of the base-word rein ‘strip of land between two fields’ is dictated by the metaphorical clause ‘the seed … grows in the land’, which stands for ‘the poem grows in the mind’. The determinant is sefi ‘mind’. One could expect a cpd *sefareinu given the fact that sefi is an n-stem, but the first element of the cpd can be interpreted as a word-stem (sef-) rather than as the gen. form of sefi (sefa-).

kennings

grammar

case: dat.

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