Gripla - 01.01.1977, Qupperneq 37

EDDA
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this name, though the title ‘Skálda’ is sometimes found; but this is most
often applied to Skáldskaparmál or the Grammatical Treatises on their
own.5
The word ‘Edda’ is found in two other contexts in medieval Icelandic;
in both cases it appears in the text in manuscripts that contain Snorra
Edda. Rígsþula is preserved only in AM 242 fol. (Codex Wormianus),
written in the middle of the fourteenth century, though the poem itself
may be much older. In this poem Edda is the name of the woman on
whom Rígr begot the race of thralls.6 Since the poem goes on to tell how
Rígr begot free men on Amma (‘grandmother’) and noblemen on Móð-
ir (‘mother’), it would seem that the poet took Edda to mean ‘great-
grandmother’ (and Ái, the name of her husband, to mean ‘great-grand-
father’). Secondly, edda appears in some manuscripts of Skáldskapar-
mál among the heiti for woman.7 The Utrecht manuscript, AM 748 I
4to (written in the early fourteenth century), and AM 757 4to read
‘heitir ok móðir, amma, þriðja edda’. AM 748 II 4to (written about
1400) does not have the first four words, the Codex Regius does not
have the first three, and the sentence is entirely lacking in the Uppsala
manuscript and Codex Wormianus (the quotation in Guðmundur
Andrésson’s dictionary, ‘Móðir heitir eiða, amma onnur, edda en
þriðja’, is unreliable;8 it is possible that he took it from a part of Codex
Wormianus that is now lost, but the words are not in Magnús Ólafs-
son’s Edda, which reproduces a lot of the material from that manu-
script). In the account of the descriptions of man in Skáldskaparmál, it is
stated that one may describe a man as someone’s ‘foður eða afa; ái er
hinn þriði’ (thus the Codex Regius and the Utrecht manuscript; AM
748 I and II both have ‘heitir’ instead of ‘er’; 757 omits the last three
words, and in Codex Wormianus and the Uppsala manuscript ái begins
5 See Edda Snorra Sturlusonar 1848-87, III iv; Edda Snorra Sturlusonar 1931,
P- iv; Ole Worm’s Correspondence with Icelanders, ed. Jakob Benediktsson, Bib-
liotheca Amamagnæana VII, Copenhagen 1948, pp. 10/3 and 42/25-6; Jón Ólafs-
son of Grunnavík in British Museum MS Egerton 642, fol. 13.
6 Edda, ed. G. Neckel and H. Kuhn, I, Heidelberg 1962, p. 280.
7 Edda Snorra Sturlusonar 1931, p. 190.
8 Lexicon Islandicum, ed. P. H. Resen, Havniæ 1683, p. 57. Resen prints eina
for eiða, but the manuscript copy of the dictionary (Junius 120 in the Bodleian
Library, Oxford) has eida.
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