Gripla - 20.12.2012, Page 380

GRIPLA378
even with pen and paper at hand, while in the sagas there are accounts
of these poems often being composed extemporaneously and reacted to
immediately. And sometimes even more verbal trickery was involved,
as exemplified by verse 42 in Egils saga (ch. 65), where for a long time
scholars were puzzled by the last line “ek bar sauð með nauðum”,3 as the
immediately preceding narrative mentions neither sheep nor bearing. As
egill fights a duel with Atli the short, he finds that his sword will not bite
his opponent; eventually they wrestle and egill bites through Atli’s throat,
thereby killing him. He then breaks the neck of the sacrificial bull, returns
to his companions and composes a verse, in which he explains how his
sword would not bite, because of the spell that Atli had cast over it, and
how he had been forced to use his teeth. the cited line then follows. until
jón Helgason’s clever analysis (jón Helgason 1957) this line had proved
difficult to understand; the only way to make any sense of it was to take
sauð to mean not “sheep”, as elsewhere in old norse, but “sacrifice” as in
Gothic. jón Helgason, however, reordered the line as
bar ek sauð með nauðum,
by making ek into an enclitic and replacing sauð with its synonym á.
thus:
bark á með nauðum.
Because in unstressed positions there can be no long-short opposition, as
attested in the First Grammatical Treatise, this can also be read as
barka með nauðum,
so that the last two lines now read:
jaxlbróður létk eyða barka með nauðum,
which translates as: “With difficulty I let my teeth destroy his throat”.
If we view the verse from the poet’s perspective, we have a verse that
tells firstly of egil’s sword failing to bite because of Atli’s spell (lines 1–4),
and then of egil using force against his opponent (lines 5–6), and, finally,
of his destroying something with his teeth (line 7). not mentioned in
the verse thus far is the fact that egil bit through Atli’s throat. We would
expect to find the word barki in line 8 as an object with eyða. Eyða usually
governs the dative, but can be found occasionally with the accusative. Here
it is irrelevant, however, as the form would be barka in both cases. the
3 such is the text in Möðruvallabók. Ketilsbók and the Wolfenbüttel manuscript read “af”
instead of “með”, cf. finnur jónsson 1912, 57.