Gripla - 01.01.2003, Qupperneq 56

54
GRIPLA
bar hann til bœiar he carried to the homestead
brimsvín ÍQtuns. the giant’s surf-hogs.
Then, it would seem, an interpolator has added two lines to enhance Þórr’s
prowess:
ok holtrifa13 [read -rifo] and through every one
hver [read hveria] í gegnom. of the uphill chines.
There are good reasons to attribute 28/9-10 to an interpolator and not to
the poet. He is a very good poet indeed, with a dynamic speed in burlesque.
So, now, when he has shown in eight tight-packed lines a flashing image of
Þórr grasping the boat, tossing it ashore, loading on himself the oars, the
bucket and the two whales, then striding home to Hymir’s farm, the poet is not
going to ruin his effect by adding an inept pragmatic touch about the terrain.
We do not need it, and there is no other stanza in the poem longer than eight
lines.
Nevertheless it is interesting to note that stanza 29 opens with Ok :
Ok enn iptunn
um afrendi
þrágimi vanr
við Þór senti
And still the giant
on the subject of strength
with habitual obstinacy
bickered with Þórr
13 MS. R reads ‘holtriba’, i.e. holtrifa (see Facsimile 28, line 12, Anmærkninger 124). This
reading is not noted by editors, or by Lindblad 217 f„ as a second instance of intervocalic b
for f, as in Hárbarðslióð ‘olubaN’ (for óliúfan [kost], MS. A ‘oliyfan’). Holtrifa is hapax
legomenon, but the two elements, liolt, ‘stony, scrub-covered high ground’ and rifa, ‘cleft,
gully’, are common words. Parallel compound formations are bergrífa and bjargrifa (cf. Egils
saga 171: ' „Hér set ek upp níðstpng ... “. Síðan skýtr hann stQnginni niðr íbjargrifu ok lét
þarstanda’ (‘„Here I set up a stake of contempt...“ .Then he thrusts the stake down in a cleft
in the rock and left it standing there’). MS. A reads holtriða, also hapax legomenon. Rið
signifies ‘gallery’ ‘staircase’, ‘path along a field’s edge’; loptrið, ‘stairway to an upper room’;
cf. Fritzner s.v. rið 2, 4. The MS. A reading does not make the lines, 28/9-10, more ac-
ceptable as part of the stanza.
To make sense of 28/9-10, one could read holtrifo hveria. It seems improbable that Itverr,
‘cauldron’, which occurs nine times in the poem, would be casually used once in a topo-
graphical sense, ‘cauldron-shaped hollow’, as some editors suggest, supposing the lines to be
original to the poem (DH 236, SG 269, von See 334).