Gripla - 20.12.2013, Blaðsíða 22

GRIPLA22
refer to Bragi as an ancestor of tenth-century norwegians and Icelanders,
which might place him as a native of the south-west of norway.94 Certain
loanwords in the Bragi corpus, such as lung (‘ship’) from Irish, penningr
(‘penny’) and perhaps sumbl (‘feast’) from english, and rósta (‘noise, battle’)
from french,95 fit well with the notion of a poet following itinerantly in the
train of a scandinavian leader in the middle third of the ninth century, or,
alternatively, quick to adopt lexis from some predecessor who had done so.
Haustlǫng purportedly was prompted by a shield given to the poet,
Þjóðólfr ór Hvini (i.e., from kvinesdal, Vest-Agder), by a certain Þorleifr.
this benefactor has widely been identified with Þorleifr inn spaki,96 who
lived in the first third of the tenth century, but such an identification
causes difficulties for the dating of the other Þjóðólfr ór Hvini attribution,
Ynglingatal, which is most naturally placed in the late ninth century,97 and
so should be abandoned in favour of some earlier bearer of this popular
name. We could then see Þjóðólfr as possibly a younger contemporary of
Bragi.98 Vest-Agder appears to have still had danish affiliations in the late
ninth century,99 though Þjóðólfr evidently enjoyed high social status and
close friendship with Haraldr hárfagri.100
úlfr uggason flourished, to judge from the implicit internal chronol-
ogy of Njáls saga and Laxdœla saga, in the late tenth century,101 and was an
Icelander. Húsdrápa can be seen as continuing, albeit in an altogether hum-
bler ambiance, Carolingian descriptions of pictures in notable buildings.
1940), 135–40, trans. e.o.G. turville-Petre, Saga-Book 17 (1966–9): 293–301; turville-
Petre, Scaldic Poetry, xxi–xxiii.
94 finnur jónsson, Den oldnorske og oldislandske litteraturs historie, 3 vols. (Copenhagen:
G.e.C. Gads forlag, 1920–4), 1:415.
95 de Vries, Altnordische Literaturgeschichte, 1:127.
96 Cf. turville-Petre, Scaldic Poetry, 8.
97 ‘Þjóðólfr ór Hvini: Ynglingatal’, ed. edith Marold, in diana Whaley, ed., Poetry
from the Kings’ Sagas, vol. 1: From Mythical Times to c. 1035, skaldic Poetry of the
scandinavian Middle Ages, vol. 1 (turnhout: Brepols, 2012), 6. Cf. de Vries, Altnordische
Literaturgeschichte, 1:133–4; C.d. sapp, ‘dating Ynglingatal. Chronological Metrical
developments in kviðuháttr’, Skandinavistik 30.2 (2000): 85.
98 finnur jónsson, Den oldnorske og oldislandske litteraturs historie, 1:432; Hans kuhn, Das
Dróttkvætt (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1983), 279.
99 Claus krag, ‘the early unification of norway’, in The Cambridge History of Scandinavia,
1:187.
100 finnur jónsson, Den oldnorske og oldislandske litteraturs historie, 1:432–3.
101 turville-Petre, Scaldic Poetry, 68.