EirRagn Lv 2VIII (Ragn 12)/8 — illa ‘badly’
Munat eins konungs efni,
svá at ek vita dæmi,
á dýrra beð deyja
til dagverðar hrafni.
Mun blóði þá bróður
ok bráð yfir gjalla
bræðra beggja slíta
blár, þó at illa leyni.
Efni eins konungs munat, svá at ek vita dæmi, deyja á dýrra beð til dagverðar hrafni. Þá mun blár slíta blóði bróður ok gjalla yfir bráð beggja bræðra, þó at illa leyni.
Not a single future king, as far as I know [any] examples, will die on a more glorious bed as breakfast for the raven. Then the black one will consume the blood of [my] brother, and scream above the raw flesh of both brothers, even though it conceals badly [what it is doing].
notes
[8] þó at leyni illa ‘even though it conceals badly [what it is doing]’: The emendation of leyni ‘conceals’ to launi ‘pays a reward’ gives awkward sense in the context (but cf. launa illa (of a raven) in st. 14/7-8). The retention here of leyni ‘conceals’, itself not altogether easy to accommodate in the context, syntactically and semantically, may however be justified as follows: previous eds who have emended here to launi have clearly assumed that poetic licence, the exigencies of metre, and the semantic context as viewed by each of them, justify the understanding of launa here as having an absolute, intransitive, sense, i.e. ‘(pay a) reward’ without the acc. object (referring to the occasion for the reward) or the dat. object (referring to the person rewarded) that the verb might be expected to have; these are presumably to be understood by the listener or reader. The same justification can, however, be used here for the reading leyni. The verb leyna ‘conceal’ might be expected to have a dat. object referring to what is concealed and an acc. object referring to the person from whom it is concealed, but need not have either if the meaning is clear from the context, as previous eds clearly take objectless launa to be. The present ed. adopts the reading leyni and translates þó at leyni illa as ‘even though it [thus] conceals badly [what it is doing]’, with ‘it’ referring to the raven.