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stanzas (sts 16–18 in the saga), Gísli relates his dream, with some interfer-
ence of direct speech by the dream woman, marked by “kvað [woman]”,
the last stanza (st. 19) is one long speech uttered by the dream woman. It
is this last stanza that bears the clearest marks of Christian thought within
the whole corpus of Gísli’s verse, and it is reasonable to regard this particu-
lar stanza as a later addition.5
An obscure kenning: Egða andspillir
It is the second stanza of this poetic dream sequence that will be the focal
point in this article, because of a distinctive kenning in which Gísli refers
to himself as Egða andspillir ‘confidant of the Egðir’, i.e. the people of the
Norwegian district of Agder (ON Agðir). This kenning has puzzled skaldic
scholars as well as editors of Gísla saga, and no satisfactory explanation
has so far been proposed. The whole stanza runs as follows, with variants,
prose order and translation:6
Hyggið at, kvað Egða
andspilli Vǫr banda,
mildr, hvé margir eldar,
malmrunnr, í sal brunnu.
Svá átt, kvað Bil blæju,
bjargs ólifat marga,
veðrs Skjǫldunga valdi,
vetr. Nú’s skammt til betra.
5 See Fredrik Paasche, “Esras aabenbaring og Pseudo-Cyprianus i norrøn litteratur”, Festskrift
til Finnur jónsson den 29. maj 1928, ed. by Johs. Brøndum-Nielsen et al. (København: Levin
& Munksgaards Forlag, 1928), 199–205. Cf. Myrvoll, “The Authenticity of Gísli’s Verse”,
252.
6 The normalization of the stanza as well as the translation are my own, but I have been
guided by Kari Ellen Gade’s forthcoming edition of Gísli’s poetry for skaldic Poetry of the
scandinavian Middle Ages (skP), ed. by Margaret Clunies Ross et al. (Turnhout: Brepols,
2007–). Compare also Vestfirðinga sǫgur, ed. Björn K. Þórólfsson and Guðni Jónsson, 71.
The manuscripts are AM 556 a 4to (the M-version), dated to ca. 1475–1500; the S-version,
probably from the mid-fourteenth century, now lost, but copied in AM 149 fol. (1690–
1697) and Ny kgl. Saml. 1181 fol. (ca. 1780); and the fragment (B) in AM 445 c I 4to (ca.
1390–1425).
Gí SLI Sú RSSON AS E G ð A A n D s P I L L I R