GunnLeif Merl I 47VIII/3 — her ‘people’
‘Sá mun lofðungr, es liði stýrir,
brátt brezkum her byggva jarðir.
Mun sáð tekit snáks ins hvíta
endr ór órum aldingǫrðum.
‘Sá lofðungr, es stýrir liði, mun brátt byggva jarðir brezkum her. Sáð ins hvíta snáks mun tekit endr ór aldingǫrðum órum.
‘The lord who leads the army will swiftly settle the lands with British people. The white snake’s seed will be taken once more out of our orchards.
notes
[3-4] byggva ... brezkum her ‘settle … with British people’: This edn follows the construal implied by Bret 1848-9, with brezkum her in the instr. dat.; similarly Merl 2012. The meaning of byggva here is ‘cause the land to become settled’ (Fritzner: byggja 5; ONP: byggja 8; cf. LP: byggva 2). Gunnlaugr makes frequent use of constructions in which a noun in dat./instr. function appears without a prep. such as með (cf. Í 63/6-7; NS §§104, 105, 108, and 110). Skj B translates less precisely as give landet til det brittiske folk ‘give the land to the British people’. Kock (NN §103) takes brezkum her in apposition to liði, evidently positing a sense ‘The lord who leads the army, the British people, will promptly settle the land’, but this is to ignore not merely the applicable sub-sense of byggva but also Geoffrey’s text, where the idea is that the land is re-settled by the original inhabitants; such a structure of variation, with the intervening adv. brátt, would be hard to parallel in Old West Norse poetry.