Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages

login: password: stay logged in: help

Note to stanza

1. 1. Þjóðólfr ór Hvini, 1. Ynglingatal, 15 [Vol. 1, 34]

[13-16] at jarlar Fróða eylands hǫfðu of veginn vígfrǫmuð ‘that the jarls of Fróði from the island had killed the inciter of war [WARRIOR]’: Almost all eds associate eylands with jarlar Fróða ‘jarls of Fróði’. However, their views of the syntactic status of the gen. diverge. (a) Taking eylands with jarlar yields the interpretation ‘the island jarls of Fróði’ (Hkr 1893-1901, IV; Skj B; ÍF 26 and this edn). Jarlar Fróða are thus the jarls installed by Fróði as the defenders and administrators of the island. (b) Taking eylands with Fróða results in ‘the jarls of the island of Fróði’ (Noreen 1912b, 130; Yt 1925). But since Þjóðólfr’s lines characteristically constitute logical unities, it is preferable to assume a collocation of jarlar Fróða. (c) For this reason Åkerlund (1939, 98-100) takes a step further and associates eylands with vígfrǫmuð ‘inciter of war’, taking eylands as gen. object of víg-, hence ‘attackers of the island’ (so also Beyschlag 1950, 24 and Hkr 1991). However, the syntactic kenning-type vígfrǫmuð eylands does not occur in kviðuháttr (Noreen 1921, 41), and the object of víg is normally human.

