KrákÁsl Lv 5^VIII (Ragn 15)/4 — konungs ‘of the king’

readings

[4] konungs spjalli: ‘[…]’ 147

notes

[4] allnýtr spjalli konungs ‘most worthy friend of the king’: The present edn follows Kock in adopting the emended form allnýtr ‘most worthy, capable’, and understanding it as used attributively with spjalli, thus avoiding the syntactic leap from l. 1 to l. 4 that all other editorial readings make necessary. For ‘all ný’ of 1824b, Rafn (FSN), and Valdimar Ásmundarson (Ragn 1891) read allný, making one word of the 1824b reading and following it with a comma, thus presumably taking it as n. acc. pl. of allnýr ‘very new’ and as substantival and the object of segið þér in l. 1, with the sense: ‘what very new items (of news) have you to relate?’ This is how Örnólfur Thorsson (Ragn 1985) understands the word and its place in the sentence, taking it however as n. acc. sg. and accordingly emending to allnýtt ‘what very new item (of news) …’. CPB also has allnýtt, though without clarifying its place in the sentence. All other eds (with the exception of Kock) emend to n. gen. sg. allnýs, taking it as a partitive gen. (or gen. of respect) and linking it to Hvat ‘What’ in l. 1, in the sense ‘What (in the way) of news …’. The phrase spjalli konungs ‘friend of the king’ is to be taken as a courteous greeting, and the king in question as the one whose (Danish) court the messengers are entering, i.e. the currently absent Ragnarr, as opposed to King Eysteinn of Sweden. There is no need to follow Olsen (Ragn 1906-8, 206), Eskeland (Ragn 1944), and Ebel (Ragn 2003) in emending spjalli to the nom. pl. form spjallar; the 2nd pers. pl. form segið ér in l. 1 may be taken as honorific, and addressed to a single person.

grammar

Masculine: gen. sing. -s; nom. pl. -ar/-jar