Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 2020, Blaðsíða 330

orously by Clare Downham (2004), who rejects it altogether (cf. the title of her
article, “Eric Bloodaxe – axed?”). The problem with Downham’s approach is that
she takes the Old Norse narrative sources (the sagas) at face value, not distin-
guishing between different chronological levels and developments. No serious
Old Norse scholar today would claim that everything Snorri Sturluson wrote
should be taken literally as historical fact. This does not mean, however, that it is
impossible to single out some information in the sagas that can be trusted, that
is, information that can be confirmed by contemporary skaldic poetry or other
early sources. The presence of Eiríkr Haraldsson as king in York is a case in
question, and Arinbjarnarkviða turns out to be its most important primary source.
The poem places an Eiríkr firmly in York as a king, of royal descent, and if Þor -
geir Sigurðsson is correct in one of his readings (as I believe he is), then Eiríkr’s
genealogy is traced back to his grandfather Halfdan in the poem.
Eiríkr is first introduced in the third stanza of Arbj, not yet by his name, only
as a certain (in the genitive case) “ynglings burar” ‘son of an ynglingr’, that is, a
prince. This is a typical skaldic circumlocution for a king, where he is mentioned
as a king’s son (the king is naturally also son of a king). Þorgeir, commenting on
the word ynglingr, admits that it could be a simple heiti for ‘king’, but then states
that the stanza “makes it clear that the reference is to the Swedish-Norse royal
family line of YNGLINGATAL” (p. 179). I think this is an overinterpretation, for
two reasons: First, the word ynglingr is used by the skalds about kings that in any
event cannot belong to the alleged “yngling family”, and secondly, there is nothing
in the skaldic record to suggest a link between Eiríkr Haraldsson (or anyone else
in his family) and the Vestfold kings of Ynglingatal. This link in the sagas is most
likely a twelfth-c. construction, as Claus Krag has argued persuasively (Krag
1989), although he went too far when he later questioned the authenticity of
Ynglingatal (Krag 1991). This means that the kenning “ynglings burar” in Arbj 3.2
should be translated as simply ‘king’ (and ynglings should be printed accordingly
with lowercase y).
The next stanza describes Eiríkr as a “styr-konungr / við stirðan hug / í Jór -
vík” ‘a battle king / by a firm mind / in York’ (st. 4.5–7), which places him une -
quivocally in York. Then, in the next stanza, we finally learn his name, in the
kenning “tunglskin Eiríks bráa” ‘the moon-shine of Eiríkr’s eyelashes’, that is his
staring eye, which Egill fears. Later on, Eiríkr is called both allvaldr (5.7), dróttinn
(6.4), hilmir (7.8, 8.8) and konungr (9.7), all different words for ‘king’. Most in -
teresting, however, is the way Eiríkr is mentioned in st. 12, where Egill presum-
ably is elaborating on Arinbjǫrn’s removal of the king’s anger, for which he began
to praise him in the previous stanza. The stanza is, however, only partly legible.
Þorgeir’s reconstruction reads, with translation (the number of dots gives the
estimated number of characters missing; p. 188):
Klaus Johan Myrvoll330