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skaldic

Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages

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Anon (Vǫlsa) 3I/4 — bjúg ‘be crippled’

Ek sé gull á gestum         ok guðvefjar skikkjur;
mér fellr hugr til hringa;         heldr vil ek bjúg en ljúga.
Kenni ek þik, konungr minn;         kominn ertu, Óláfr.

Ek sé gull ok skikkjur guðvefjar á gestum; mér fellr hugr til hringa; heldr vil ek bjúg en ljúga. Kenni ek þik, konungr minn; kominn ertu, Óláfr.

I see gold and cloaks of precious material on the guests; I am pleased by the rings; I would rather be crippled than tell a lie. I recognize you, my king; you have come, Óláfr.

readings

[4] bjúg: ‘biug’ or ‘buíg’ Flat, 292ˣ

notes

[4] bjúg ‘crippled’: All eds take ‘bing’ as the ms. reading of Flat. However, the <n> in question cannot be differentiated from a <u>, and the same is true for 292ˣ. Since all paper mss that certainly descend from Flat (cf. Introduction) read ‘biug’, we can assume that this had also been the original version. (For confusion of ‘biug/bing’, cf. Anon Sól 76/1VII and Hallm Hallkv 8/4V (Bergb 8)). Kock (NN §2359) emends to biug (normalised bjúg), f. sg. of bjúgr ‘bowed, hooked, crooked, bent’, and this interpretation is adopted here. In order to clarify the word, Kock refers to sayings such as Ger. Lieber möchte mich Gott mit Lahmheit schlagen ‘May God rather strike me with lameness’, or Swed. Så må Herren jöra mig lytt och lam, om jag juger! ‘May God make me crippled and lame if I lie’. Finnur Jónsson’s emendation (Skj B) to þing in the sense of ‘valuables, jewels’ seems less probable. Düwel (1971, 165) holds to the putative ms. reading ‘bing’ and regards the word as bingr ‘a bed, bolster’: in order to avoid telling a lie, the daughter wants to retire to her bed.

grammar

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