Gamlkan Has 54^VII/2 — minn ‘my’

notes

[2-3] … bana: B is very badly damaged, and traces of only one letter and a superscript re abbreviation are visible (fol. 13r, ll. 45-6). The 399a-bˣ copyist was able to read only one further letter in the second word ‘…ana’. Reconstruction of this word thus relies on this reading and on the fact that initial <b> is required for alliteration. Other eds have made valiant attempts to reconstruct the missing text here, which is likely to comprise two words. Sveinbjörn Egilsson (444ˣ and 1844) postulates sárr es minn hugr þinni | bana. He is followed by Kempff and Finnur Jónsson (Skj B), who construes Slu þinni veittak benjar fyr bana hættiligar synðir, sættir bragna kyns; sárr es hugr minn ‘I dealt wounds to your soul by means of my deathly dangerous sins, reconciler of the kindred of heroes; my soul is wounded’. Rydberg (1907, xxiii) rejects this interpretation on the grounds that the remaining traces of the text will not sustain it. He asserts (1907, 29 n. 9) that he once was able to read a number of letter forms no longer visible in 1907, and reconstructs the text sarr er minn tregi varri bana, construing veittak várri slu hættiligar benjar bana fyr synðir; minn tregi es sárr ‘I dealt our [my] soul dangerous death-wounds because of [my] sins; my grief is bitter’. Sveinbjörn’s reconstruction requires þinni to be construed with slu, as in Finnur’s prose arrangement. The continuation of the theme through the st., however, suggests that, as in the second helmingr, the injured soul here is not likely to be Christ’s, but rather that of the sinner-narrator, who refers to himself in the 1st pers. throughout.

grammar

Pronouns and determiners: Possessive