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Gylfaginning were based, do not explicitly mention them. Could Völuspá 5
be the source for the celestial horses cited in Gylfaginning? As noted above,
the myths in Gylfaginning overlap and are irreconcilable at some points;
these contradictions, however, are not in Vafþrúðnismál, which was pre-
sumably the source for parts of the narratives in Gylfaginning. Accordingly,
the unaltered lines throw a different light not only on the mythological
traditions recorded in R, but also on the composition of Gylfaginning.
Er mær sýdyz – er mér sýndiz
In modern editions based on R, stanza 32 of Völuspá (f. 2r, ll. 4–6), which
deals with the killing of Baldr by the mistletoe hurled by Höðr, appears in
this way:
Uarð af þeim meiði
er mær syndiz
harmflꜹg hęttlig
hꜹþr nam sciota.
baldrs broðir uar
of borin snęmma
sa nam oþins sonr
ein nęttr uega.
[from that plant, which seemed delicate, came a sorrowful shaft: Höðr did
fling (it). the brother of Baldr was born early. He, Óðinn’s son, one night
old, did slay.]
In the second line, the word mær is interpreted as an uncommon form of
the adjective mjór ‘thin, slender, delicate’.42 However, as the word is writ-
ten in r with the letter m and the abbreviation sign for er, a superscript
open loop,43 it can therefore be interpreted as mér, the first-person sin-
42 Adolf Noreen, Altisländische und altnorwegische Grammatik (Halle: niemeyer, 1923), §§
430, 437, 295, 298–89. Noreen does not give examples but they can be found in sophus
Bugge, ‘Sjældne ord i norrön skaldskab’, Tidskrift for philologi og pædagogik 6 (1865): 94–
97.
43 see, for example, the diplomatic edition in Konungsbók Eddukvæða: Codex Regius, ed.
guðvarður Már gunnlaugsson et al. (reykjavík: Lögberg, 2001), 96.
sCRIBAL PRACtICes ANd tHRee LINes IN V ö L U S P Á
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