Anon Sól 78VII/1 — Arfi ‘Heir’
Arfi, faðir einn ek ráðit hefi,
ok þeir Sólkötlu synir
hjartarhorn, þat er ór haugi bar
inn vitri Vígdvalinn.
Arfi, ek einn, faðir, ok þeir synir Sólkötlu, hefi ráðit hjartarhorn, þat er inn vitri Vígdvalinn bar ór haugi.
Heir, I alone, the father, and the sons of Sólkatla, have interpreted the hart’s horn which the wise Vígdvalinn carried out of the burial mound.
notes
[1] arfi ‘heir, son’: The convention of a father addressing his son is frequent in wisdom poetry, as in Hsv 1. The dead father’s heir(s) are also the audience of the poem; ‘father’ may also denote a priest and his son(s) the congregation as Njörður Njarðvík (1991, 102) notes. Under what circumstances, whether in a dream or in a vision, the father narrates the poem to his son is never made explicit, but the notion of occult wisdom being revealed to a young man by his senior male kinsmen is found in ON myth, as well as in stock motifs of fornaldarsögur.