Marm Lv 7VIII (Hálf 12)/2 — kvett ‘a piece of meat’
Kalt vatn augum en kvett tönnum,
lérept líki, lát mik aptr í sjó.
Dregr mik engi í degi síðan
maðr upp í skip af marabotnum.
Kalt vatn augum en kvett tönnum, lérept líki, lát mik aptr í sjó. Engi maðr dregr mik síðan í degi upp í skip af marabotnum.
Cold water for the eyes and a piece of meat for the teeth, linen for the body, put me back into the sea. No man will pull me then by daylight from the depths of the ocean up into a ship.
notes
[2] kvett ‘a piece of meat’: There has been much discussion about the meaning of the word kvett: Konráð Gíslason (1866c) suggests the reading kveitt, p. p. of an otherwise unknown verb *kveita used as an adj. (attributive to the n. noun vatn ‘water’ in l. 1) meaning ‘lukewarm, tepid’. Both Skj B and Skald adopt the form kveitt, Finnur Jónsson translating it as kuldslåt ‘lukewarm’. Fritzner (1885) reads kvett as kvætt, explaining it as an otherwise unknown Old Norse noun denoting ‘resin, tree-gum’ (ModDan. kvade) allegedly chewed by people in Scandinavia in the old days; Konráð Gíslason (1885) is mainly a reply to Fritzner’s criticism of Konráð Gíslason (1866c). Eiríkr Magnússon (1895) points out that in Modern Icelandic there is a noun kvetti ‘lean whale meat’ and suggests the meaning ‘piece of (whale) meat’ for kvett.