Gripla - 20.12.2015, Qupperneq 48

GRIPLA48
Þó hann æva hendr
né höfuð kembði
áðr á bál um bar
baldrs andskota.
en frigg um grét
í fensölum
vá valhallar
vituð ér enn eða hvat.
[He did not wash his hands, nor comb his head, before he bore
Baldr’s enemy to the pyre. But Frigg cried in Fensalir for valhöll’s
woe. Do you know yet or what?]
Bugge also noted that the scribe had marked for deletion only the charac-
ters o, r and r of the word vörðr, which is written in r in this way: vorþr.
the scribe had signalled the deletions by subscript dots under each of these
characters, and he did not mark þ for deletion.69 If he had wanted to do
so, he would probably have, according to his custom, written a dot below
the bow of the þ and not below its descender.70 However, vaþ Valhallar,
that is, váð Valhallar [the cloths of Valhöll], does not make sense: váð [a
piece of stuff, cloth] is used in kennings for ‘coat of mail’, with masculine
personal names as basewords, as in Högna váðir [the cloths of Högni].71
the solution was to interpret that the scribe intended the þ to be deleted
and thus read the word as vá [woe, harm, misfortune, danger].
What has not been noticed before is that a second superscript a had
been written above the bow of þ and was later scraped. this character
is very faint but it is still visible in the manuscript photographs.72 this
69 Both Håndskriftet nr. 2365 4to, ed. jónsson and Wimmer, lxv, 3 and Poetic Edda, ed. and
trans. Dronke, 1:89 have mistakenly noted that orþr was marked for deletion by subscript
dots. Perhaps they took the descender of the character þ as a dot, although the descender of
þ has usually a tail which extends to the left.
70 By comparison, see the correction to the word Niðafiöllum in f. 2r, l. 11 and the deletion of
þitt in f. 1v, l. 27.
71 Cleasby and vigfússon, An Icelandic-English Dictionary, s.v. váð. Högna váðir appears in the
poem Hákonardrápa by Hallfreðr vandræðaskáld. Den norsk-islandske skjaldedigtning, ed.
finnur Jónsson, 4 vols. (Copenhagen: gyldendal, 1912–15), 1:156 and 3:148.
72 I first used low-resolution photographs, which can be downloaded from the website of
the Stofnun Árna Magnússonar í íslenskum fræðum www.arnastofnun.is and Handrit.is;
the subscript a (over the character þ) can even be seen on this 182kB picture of f. 2r, albeit
very faintly. I then used high-resolution photographs (35.5 mB) stored on Cd-ROm by
GRIPLA XXVI. - 12.12.B.indd 48 12/13/15 8:24:29 PM