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skaldic

Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages

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Refr Ferðv 5III/1 — fjǫll ‘Mountains’

Hrynja fjǫll á fyllar;
framm œsisk nú Glamma
skeið vetrliði skíða;
skaut bjǫrn Gusis nauta.

Fjǫll hrynja á fyllar; nú œsisk vetrliði skíða framm skeið Glamma; bjǫrn nauta Gusis skaut.

Mountains fall into the sea; now the bear of planks [SHIP] rushes forward on the race-course of Glammi <sea-king> [SEA]; the bear of the gifts of Gusir <legendary king> [ARROWS > = Ǫrvar-Oddr] shot.

readings

[1] fjǫll á: ‘fio[…]’ B, ‘fioll a’ 744ˣ, fljótt á C

notes

[1] fjǫll hrynja á fyllar ‘mountains fall into the sea’: (a) Skj B interprets fjǫll fyllar ‘mountains of the sea’ as a kenning for ‘waves’. That kenning leaves a dangling prep. (á) in l. 1, which Finnur Jónsson connects with skautbjǫrn ‘sail-bear’ (l. 4; for that kenning, see Note to l. 4 below). This tortuous syntax is justifiably criticised by Kock (NN §785; see also Reichardt 1930, 249). (b) Kock himself combines á fyllar (l. 1) with skautbjǫrn (l. 4) to form the ship-kenning á skautbjǫrn fyllar ‘on the sail-bear of the sea’ (for skaut lit. ‘corner of a sail’ as pars pro toto for ‘sail’, see LP: skaut 1). That kenning is over-determined, however, because it has two determinants, skaut- ‘sail’ and fyllar ‘of the sea’ and, further, fjǫll is now rendered as ‘wave’, which Kock tries to justify on a contextual basis. (c) The only solution that makes sense is to interpret fyllar as acc. pl. of a f. noun fyllr (f. -stem) rather than as gen. sg. of a m. noun fyllr, and that has been adopted in the present edn. Fyllr ‘sea’ is otherwise attested only in the gen. sg. (fyllar; see LP: fyllr 2), which can be either f. or m.

grammar

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