Anon 732b 1III/4 — votar ‘wet’
Meyjar bað men-Týr
mætrar; sá er fágiætr;
hljótr fekk við hryggbrot
hásætrs votar nætr.
Krafti var ok konu sviftr
kauði; var hann þess trauðr;
slík gjöraz mál mjó
mærðar í skaup færð.
Men-Týr – sá er fágiætr – bað mætrar meyjar; hljótr hásætrs fekk votar nætr við hryggbrot. Kauði var sviftr krafti ok konu; hann var trauðr þess; slík mjó mál gjöraz færð í skaup mærðar.
The Týr <god> of the neck-ring [MAN] – he’s a rare one – asked for [the hand of] a splendid girl; the receiver of the rowing-bench [SEAFARER] had wet nights on account of the refusal. The wretch was deprived of strength and the woman; he was averse to this; such slight affairs get mocked in verse.
readings
[4] votar: votr (‘xptr’) 732b
notes
[4] votar nætr ‘wet nights’: The deciphered form votr (ms. ‘xptr’) is emended to restore line-length and provide concord with the f. acc. pl. nætr ‘nights’. Finnur Jónsson (1886a, 191; Skj B) originally adopted the older spelling vátar here, but the fourteenth-century form votar is required by the hálfhnept metre, in which the penultimate word in each line must be monosyllabic or consist of two short syllables. Kock (Skald; Metr. §29) emended votr nætr to an otherwise unattested cpd vátnætr, on the analogy of vátviðri ‘wet weather’, in spite of the shortness of the resultant line, and proposed that the -r in votr was introduced accidentally under the influence of the endings in the adjacent words, ‑sætrs and nætr. Kock’s intervention was scornfully rejected by Finnur Jónsson (1934a, 60), but his revision of vátar to vótar in his re-treatment of the stanza (adopting a form that would represent an intermediate stage in the sound-change vá > vo) is no more metrical than Kock’s neologism. The sense of the expression is ambiguous. Following the interpretation of hljótr hásætrs as ‘seafarer’ it may be read as a reflex of conventional poetic metaphors relating the hardship of a man’s separation from the woman he desires to the physical trials of a mariner lashed by cold waves and spray. Cf. also the hálfhnept stanza Bbreiðv Lv 6V (Eb 30), in which Bjǫrn Breiðvíkingakappi contrasts his married lover’s bed with the vásbúð ‘hardship’, lit. ‘cold, wet lodgings’ (cf. CVC: vás ‘wetness, toil, fatigue from storm’) which he endures after he is lost in a blizzard on the return trip from a visit to her house. The effect of the reference to ‘wet nights’ in Anon 732b 1 is clearly derisive, however, and Finnur Jónsson (1886a, 191; 1934, 60) interprets the expression as a scathing allusion to the ‘tearful’ (grådfulle) nights experienced by the disappointed lover. In his final edn of the stanza, Finnur Jónsson (1934a, 60) argues that the phrase undermines the man’s masculinity further by implying that he ikke kan holde sit ‘vand’ ‘cannot hold his “water”’. A parallel charge is made in the stanza inscribed in twelfth- or thirteenth-century runes on the Årdal I runestick (Run N 344VI), which pillories a man who languishes in lovesickness and stundum bleytir beð undir sér ‘sometimes wets his bed’ (NIyR IV, 129-30). It seems equally likely, however, that the expression is supposed to suggest repeated masturbation or involuntary nocturnal emissions, and ridicules the man’s sexual frustration and his lack of any satisfactory opportunity to demonstrate his virility after his rejection (cf. the identification in Gade 1989b, 61-2 of a wry reference to masturbation in the rowing imagery in Bjhít Lv 2V (BjH 2)).