Gunnh Lv 1I/1 — Hô ‘Há’
Hô- reið á bak bôru
borðhesti -kun vestan;
skǫrungr léta brim bíta
bǫrð, es gramr hefr Fjǫrðu.
Hôkun reið borðhesti vestan á bak bôru; skǫrungr léta bǫrð bíta brim, es gramr hefr Fjǫrðu.
Hákon rode the plank-horse [SHIP] from the west on the billow’s back; the champion did not let the ship’s stems bite the surf, for the prince [now] has Fjordane.
notes
[1, 2] Hôkun ‘Hákon’: Hákon Haraldsson, later inn góði ‘the Good’. Hákon’s name is distributed between the lines using tmesis. Kock (NN §249) would emend to Hôr- … konr ‘high (i.e. famous) man’ in order to make the play on the name cleverer. (Fsk 1902-3 also adopts konr.) Olsen (1945a, 4) replies that this is unnecessary, as there are undoubted examples of tmesis in the corpus that do not involve further word-play, and r is not required by the hending, as the next word begins with r, and rhyme across word boundaries is not uncommon.