Skáldskaparmál - 01.01.1997, Blaðsíða 237

Words, Words, Words
235
which way, by lifting up on the right side or the left, in the front, or, with alarming
frequency, in the back. In the Wolfenbiittel and AM Accessoria texts there are 12
women (double the number of the original saga, incidentally), who are identified
as the beloved of this or that knight, duke, or king. The descriptions of how the
mantle fits each one are fairly repetitious, although there is a kind of escalation,
the mantle lifting higher and higher and revealing holes in more and more places
until finally bursting open when tried on by the beloved of the noble Parcival.
Most of this is lost in the Stockholm text, where there are only eight women in
a slightly different order and with a shuffling of descriptions of the mantle’s fit.
This, again, is not really surprising. I’ve read Skikkjurírnur perhaps 100 times,
and I’d be hard-pressed to list the women in the right order, say whose amie they
were, and whether it was their elbow, left hip, or kneecap that was exposed.
In some cases it is possible to see some other reason for the arrangement of the
stanzas. What is in 22 and Wstanza 38 of the first ríma follows stanza 24 in S.
Both contain the word ævintýr and deal with Arthur’s habit of not sitting down
to dine until he had heard some remarkable bit of news, and it’s easy to see how
the author of the Stockholm version could have associated the two stanzas in his
mind.
It’s easy too to see how stanzas 40 and 51 in the third ríma were conflated,
since they begin with almost identical lines: Fór hún í sem fljótast má (40), and
Fór hún í sem fljótast getur (51) — the same line, with getur and a present tense
verb, is also used in stanza 23, which is found only in 22 (and is, I believe, a later
addition).
In 1.51, the only case where the couplets of a stanza are reversed, the
arrangement in S makes at least as much sense as does that of the other two:
Komnar þjóðir kynjar það
kemur þeim slíkt til orða;
öðling sat í annan stað
og ekki fór að borða.
It was mentioned above that S contained a very large number of variant
readings — there is, in fact, only a single stanza in which all three manuscripts
agree. In some two dozen cases S agrees with W, and, in about an equal number
of others, with 22. Mostly, however, S’s readings are unique, but exhibit the same
tendencies as were noted above. In the first line of the stanza just cited, 22 has
(as its third line), instead of komnar þjóðir, kóngsins hirðmenn — W is slightly
different, with kóngsins hirðin. The meaning is different, but both make perfect
sense, have the right number of syllables, and alliterate with kynjar. The only
other difference is in the last (or second, depending on your point of view) line,
where 22 and W both have a present tense verb and til borða rather than að borða.
It makes no difference whether borða is a verb in the infinitive or a noun in the