The ‘Wind of the Giantess’: Snorri Sturluson, Rudolf Meissner, and the Interpretation of Mythological Kennings along Taxonomic Lines

the ‘Wind of the Giantess’: Snorri Sturluson, Rudolf Meissner, and

the Interpretation of Mythological Kennings along taxonomic Lines

Judy Quinn

I. Myths and Kennings

the myths that underlie the construction of skaldic kennings are, for the most part, attested in mythographic works and mythological poetry, enabling the referent of the kenning to be deduced from the allusion to a mythological narrative encoded in the relation between base-word and determinant. So, for instance, the poet Kormákr o mundarson refers to a shield as Hrungnis fóta stallr (platform of Hrungnir’s feet),1 an allusion that is comprehensible thanks to

1 Citations of skaldic verse are from Finnur Jónsson’s Den norsk-islandske skjaldedigtning (Skj) and from the published volumes of Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages (SkP);

Judy Quinn ([email protected]) teaches Old Norse language and literature in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic at Cambridge University.

Abstract: A number of kennings in the extant corpus of skaldic poetry collocate a term for wind with a term for a giantess, the resultant referent identified by Snorri Sturluson in Skáldskaparmál as hugr, though that term is itself exemplified by Snorri in three wide-ranging lists of terms denoting desire, passion, and hostility. In his taxonomy of kenning types, Rudolf Meissner gathered together ‘wind of the giantess’ kennings and identified their referent as Sinn. A number of the examples in Meissner’s list, however, are based on Finnur Jónsson’s emended texts, necessitating a close examination of the manuscript evidence in each case. The analysis presented in this article places the ‘wind of the giantess’ kennings in the context of the well-attested kenning type ‘wind of the valkyrie’ in order to explore how the collocation of affect with a supernatural female figure appears to have operated in the skaldic imagination. While some of the examples in Meissner’s group suggest the referent ‘desire’, others seem to refer instead to ‘battle spirit’ and some simply to ‘battle’. There is very little evidence to suggest that the referent can be equated with ‘thought’ in an abstract sense, an identification that has nonetheless become a commonplace in skaldic scholarship.

Keywords: skaldic poetry, kennings, Snorri Sturluson, Rudolf Meissner, old Norse mythology, giantesses

Viking and Medieval Scandinavia, 8 (2012), 207–259 BREPoLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/J.VMS.1.103199

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Snorri’s account in Skáldskaparmál (Skmál, i, 20–22) of the god Þórr’s encounter with the giant Hrungnir in which the giant is tricked into standing on his shield on the mischievous intelligence that Þórr will approach from under the ground. The poet Bragi Boddason alludes to the same incident in his kenning for shield, ilja blað Þrúðar þjófs (Skmál, i, 69, v. 237; Skj, Ai, 1, Bi, 1) (sole-blade of the thief of Þrúðr), where the referent may be deduced from the extant narrative even though the apparent prelude, Hrungnir’s abduction of Þórr’s daughter Þrúðr, has not been preserved. The mythological power dynamics signalled by the deter minant — the predatory nature of giants in relation to ásynjur — is well attested in other mythological narratives, enabling the kenning to be resolved without the detail of the myth being known. If the myth were known, of course, we would be better able to interpret the full complexity of Bragi’s poetry and the patterns of meaning he was developing within and between kennings. While textual sources for old Norse mythology are abundant, by no means all the mythological narratives that must have been in circulation across the centuries during which skaldic kennings were generated have necessarily been preserved. This notwithstanding, skaldic kennings seem to render up their referent — if not the full complexity of their meaning — in the vast majority of cases, primarily because of the conventional nature of kenning constructions where determinants and base-words usually belong to an identifiable set of terms from which alterna-tives could be selected by the poet. In addition, the set of referents appears to have been limited, again by convention.

Bragi also referred to a shield as Ho gna meyjar hjól (Skmál, i, 70, v. 238; Skj, Ai, 1, Bi, 1) (wheel of Ho gni’s girl), the determinant derived from the myth of the Hjaðningar which is related by Snorri in Skáldskaparmál (72–73). ‘Ho gni’s girl’ refers to Hildr (the daughter of King Ho gni), a valkyrie-like figure who incites warriors to engage in battle and who has the supernatural power to resurrect the slain at the end of each day’s fighting so that they can pursue one another in everlasting combat. The range of base-words in shield kennings is broad: to Kormákr’s stallr and Bragi’s blað and hjól — all of which conjure up the flat expanse of the shield face — we may add Grettir Ásmundarson’s tjald (curtain) in his kenning for shield Hlakkar tjo ld (Skmál, i, 68, v. 231; Skj, Ai, 313, Bi, 290) (Hlo kk’s curtain).2 Hlo kk is the name of a valkyrie frequently invoked by skalds

here Skj (Ai, 82, Bi, 73). Where the verse is quoted by Snorri Sturluson in Skáldskaparmál, reference is also made to Faulkes’s edition (hereafter referred to as Skáldskaparmál and abbreviated in citations as Skmál). Unless otherwise noted, translations of skaldic verse are my own; those from Skáldskaparmál have been informed by the Glossary to Faulkes’s edition.

2 For the range of base-words used for shield kennings, see Skmál (i, 67): ‘Skildir eru kallaðir

The ‘Wind of the Giantess’ 209

(LP, s.v. Hlo kk), but with no detailed myths to her name. In her case, and in the case of the many other named valkyries who have left no narrative trace in extant mythology, it seems likely that skalds invoked their names in kennings in order to allude to another fundamental mythological dynamic — the intervention of valkyries in battle to determine who lives or dies — rather than necessarily to make reference to a detailed myth that has since been lost. In Norse mythology, the valkyrie (literally the ‘chooser of the slain’) serves as a personification of the moment of death, appearing on the battlefield to usher slain warriors to Óðinn’s hall, Valho ll. Being personified, her agency is sometimes brought into play by poets who imagine the possibility that, having appeared, she may choose to favour a particular warrior by taking his opponent with her into death. Her presence on the battlefield may therefore be invoked both to denote mortal danger and to signal potential advantage to the warrior whom she might favour. of course there is no way of knowing how many detailed myths involving valkyries might have been lost, and there may quite possibly have been particular myths about the many other figures of skaldic diction — gods, goddesses, giants, and giantesses among them — whose mythological biographies are blank entries in the preserved record: Sophus Bugge (1875, 210) argued, for instance, that myths once existed about all the sea-kings mentioned in skaldic poetry. Broadly speaking, though, two kinds of mythological kennings may be distinguished: those which refer to basic tenets of the mythology — describing Þórr as jo tna ótti (Skmál, i, 22, v. 65; Skj, Ai, 19, Bi, 17) (terror of giants) would be another example — and those which allude to specific mythological narratives, such as Þórr’s duel with the giant Hrungnir. While the incomplete nature of the mythological record means that the dividing line between these types can never be hard and fast, the distinction might nevertheless obviate the need to hypothesize myths to explain kennings which are simply drawing on fundamental aspects of the mythology, such as the inherent antipathy between the Æsir and giant-kind and the notion that supernatural female figures influence men’s fates. The conclusion arising from the analysis in this essay is that the kenning ‘wind of the giantess’ is likely to be the kind of kenning that instantiates a basic tenet of the mythology: the influence of supernatural females over men’s fates, particularly as that influence is perceived to occur when men — poets as well as warriors — find themselves in dangerous situations in which their virility is tested.

[…] sól eða tungl eða lauf eða blik eða garðr skipsins’ (Shields are called sun, or moon, or leaf or gleam or fence of the ship).

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The interpretation of the poetry of skalds who deployed mythological ken-nings involves a complex and recursive strategy of comprehension that is chal-lenging to . A skald using a kenning that alludes to a specific mythological narrative might have done so for a particular effect, an effect not necessarily produced by a kenning of the more general kind, though even a kenning such as jo tna ótti generates more complex meanings than the nominal designation ‘Þórr’. While the cognitive process cannot be simplified into discrete stages, two aspects of it may be differentiated: firstly, the identification of the constituent parts of the kenning from the syntax of the clause and the inference from them of the kenning’s referent; and, secondly, the generation of associations (including mythological ones) that the sequence and sound patterns of words and lines promote in the overall construal of the clauses in which kennings occur. The first aspect is a necessary precursor to the full apprehension of the meaning of the stanza, but in arriving at the referent of a kenning the semiotic potential of the base-words and determinants are not necessarily exhausted. Across the corpus, the degree to which deeper mythological meanings are invested in kennings may vary from kenning to kenning, stanza to stanza, and skald to skald, necessitating variable interpretive strategies, especially when so many stanzas are preserved only as fragmentary quotations. In this essay I will be treating a large number of kennings, most of which will be dealt with in isolation according to sets of base-words or determinants in order to get a sense of prevailing patterns of association, but some of them will be analysed in more detail in their verse and prosimetrum contexts to explore the ways in which more complex configurations of meaning are generated by kennings alluding to mythology.

Scholars have long puzzled over a group of kennings that follow the pattern of a base-word denoting wind or stormy weather coupled with a determinant that is the name of a giantess or troll-woman or a heiti (poetic synonym) for that kind of supernatural female figure. The terms ‘troll-woman’ and ‘giantess’ often appear to be used interchangeably in the extant corpus of mythological texts.3 The referent for kennings of this type was identified by Snorri Sturluson as hugr (whose primary sense is usually taken to be ‘mind’ or ‘thoughts’) in an elusive passage within Skáldskaparmál that will be examined in some detail later in this essay, and it was formalized by Rudolf Meissner (1921) in his systematic classification of kennings on taxonomic principles (he translates the referent as Sinn). In his category §64, Meissner gathers together over a dozen apparent instances of the kenning’s use, though he himself describes it ‘eine höchst eigentümliche Umschreibung für

3 See Schulz 2004, 24–49, for a full discussion of the terms used to denote giants and giantesses in old Norse literature and the blurred distinction between troll-women and giantesses.


animus’ (Meissner 1921, 138) (as a very strange paraphrase of animus). Sigurður Nordal wryly observed, ‘það er altítt í fornu skáldamáli að kalla hug “tröllkonu vind”, og er þeirri kenningu breytt á marga vegu, en enginn er svo fróður, að kunni að skýra hana’ (Sigurður Nordal 1933, 251) (that although it appeared to have been common in ancient skaldic practice to equate wind of the troll-woman with hugr, no-one is clever enough to explain it). Attempts were underway, however. In 1935 Dag Strömbäck (1935, 175–77) interpreted the kenning in the context of shamanism, with the troll-woman’s anima leaving her body to afflict the mind of a human. And the following year, Lily Weiser-Aal (1936, 76–78) explored the folklore dimension through later evidence of a belief that airborne disease could be carried by animate beings who breathe into the victim’s mouth to infect them. Half a century later, Lotte Motz (1988, 31–41) located a parallel from another arctic culture, arguing that meetings in the wilderness between Inuit shamans and the weather-god Sila (whose name means ‘intelligence’) are analogous to the meetings between some saga heroes and friendly trolls who offer them advice. None of these explanations has won critical favour, with recent commentary confirming the strangeness of the kenning as well as its ubiquity. Diana Whaley (then Edwards) judged it ‘probable that some myth underlies the kenning […] but it cannot be recaptured from the extant literature’ (Whaley 1982, 50). Katja Schulz concluded from her exhaustive study of giants in old Norse sources: ‘[s] o gibt es eine relativ große Gruppe von Kenningar des typs “Wind der Riesin” […] ohne daß klar ist, wie es zu dieser Verbindung kommt’ (Schulz 2004, 130) (there is a relatively large group of kennings of the type ‘wind of the giantess’ without it being clear how the connection came about), while Kari Ellen Gade has recently referred to ‘the peculiar kennings of this type in which “wind, breeze of a giantess” denotes “thought, mind, disposition”’ in the commentary on a verse from Stúfsdrápa by Stúfr inn blindi Þórðarson kattar (SkP, ii, 351). Roberta Frank reviewed the evidence in the commentary on the final verse she examined in her 1978 study of skaldic poetry, observing that while the ‘kenning for “thought, passion” is a familiar type […] why “wind of the giantess” should de signate “passion” is unknown’ (Frank 1978, 180). Frank revisited the kenning in a 1997 article, dividing the occurrences of the kenning into those that have to do with love and those that have to do with war. Frank chose to ‘begin with Venus and move on to Mars’ in her analysis of the kenning (Frank 1997, 505), a direction I will reverse in this essay since the significant comparanda for kennings with ‘wind’ as the base-word are kennings for war.

It is also in the theatre of war that a nexus is apparent linking supernatural female figures with influence over the feelings and impulses of men, with valkyries, giantesses, and troll-women being present in a significant number of

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kennings denoting battle and weapons. The corpus of kennings also indicates a blurring of the distinction between these kinds of supernatural females, giantesses and valkyries apparently sharing common ground in the semiotic space marked out by battle kennings. Accordingly, the attribute of the valkyrie — in being able to turn the fortunes of a warrior in battle — is shared to some extent by giantesses employed in martial kennings. Their ‘wind’ has the effect of enhancing a warrior’s performance in battle, his courage growing and his combat moves leading to domination. Such a trope rests on the mythological belief that female supernatural beings influenced a man’s fate, especially the timing of his death, and the appearance of these beings on the battlefield both heightens the sense of mortal danger for warriors in the depiction of battle and provides an animate figure onto which a warrior’s own battle-performance could be projected. This very sophisticated figuring of martial performance as a supernatural female figure is, not surprisingly, far from a simple or stable poetic device, and poets appear to have used it in very different ways: sometimes a giantess is equated with an axe, sometimes the wind of a valkyrie stands not just as a denominator for battle as an event or place, but for the performance of fighting itself, and sometimes the already complex idea is used metaphorically to describe tempestuous emotions off the battlefield, where aggressive and uncompromising behaviour is attributed to the influence of a troll-woman over a man’s, or woman’s, emotions — where the semiotics of war are parlayed into the language of passion.

Part of the difficulty in making sense of the kenning is the shifting semantic field of its referent across the languages of scholarship — from hugr to Sinn to ‘thought’, ‘mind’, ‘passion’ — and this range goes back to Snorri’s own lists of synonyms for hugr, which are sweeping in scope. In English the range of meaning of hugr is nonetheless better encapsulated by the single notion of ‘attitude’ rather than ‘thought’: whenever poets sought to represent a man’s hugr, whether he was a warrior or a poet or both, it seems clear they were attesting to his mettle. There is also need for caution in using Snorri’s explanations of kennings since his purpose in Skáldskaparmál is often not simply to describe past practice but to craft a new poetics. In making sense of most mythological kennings, our primary frame of reference is necessarily empirical: using the body of myths narrated in Gylfaginning and Skáldskaparmál, we extrapolate from the base-word and determinant of the kenning or string of kennings the characters in the narrative and the events within the mythic sequence that the creator of the kenning appears to have been alluding to. In some cases, Snorri or redactors of Skáldskaparmál make explicit their understanding of the mythological connections implicit in the construction of kennings, and in those instances, we have access to a secondary frame of interpretation: a partly systematic, mainly descriptive but occasionally


didactic frame of reference from the medieval period. that system does not, of course, provide us with a clear view of pre-Christian mythology: it is the work of thirteenth-century scholarship, reflecting thirteenth-century fashions of versification and the learned categorization of poetic language. We might hope that thirteenth-century scholars’ closer proximity in time to the myths underlying kennings would make their explanations reliable for our purposes, but they were not necessarily writing with our projects in mind. It is arguable that mythological connections first arising in Snorri’s mind, or in those of his circle, could have influenced practising poets as well as scribes copying out manuscripts — and almost all extant manuscripts preserving skaldic poetry post-date Snorri’s work. We therefore need to be mindful of the interpretive process that has already taken place before we even start reading a lausavísa (an independent or ‘loose’ verse) or poem assumed to be from an earlier period. Though a skaldic verse, laden with complex kennings, may have made the journey from mouth to mouth for centuries, there is no guarantee that the scribe who finally committed it to vellum might not have filtered it through his schooling in literary skáldskapr (poetics) or indeed that whoever copied the texts that are the only ones now extant of the verse did not understand it and tried to improve or ‘normalize’ it in some way. And of course, mythology was never standing still, either before the written record began or afterwards. It is a moot point to what extent the formal characteristics of dróttkvætt preserved ancient mythological kennings intact; vital words not carrying alliteration or hendingar could fairly easily be creatively recollected to reconstruct kennings and reimagine mythology. I draw attention to the circularity of the written record representing the ancient Scandinavian past to situate our interpretive position in the middle of a number of turning sets of reference, outside of which we can rarely step. And as mentioned above, there is a third interpretative frame that is active in our reading of mythology through kennings. Rudolf Meissner’s taxonomy of kennings created a kind of thesaurus of referents, a marvellously useful resource for scholars but one that presents a deceptively orderly corpus of poetic expression, especially when it comes to the tangential relationship of base-word, determinant, and referent which mythological kennings encode. Meissner was largely dependent in his classification of kennings on the editorial work of Finnur Jónsson, who was no stranger to creative emendation. As we shall see, some of the giantesses who populate Meissner’s set of kennings were conjured up during the process of editing, the wording of the actual manuscript texts sometimes having a different meaning. Unlike those composing and transmitting skaldic poetry in an oral milieu, Finnur’s frame of reference for improving the text when it did not make sense was not the mythological imaginary, but a normative system of analogous

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relations, where conformity to the constructed system is necessarily privileged. And although the very viability of expression through kennings seems to have depended for its intelligibility on a set of referents limited by convention, we also know from the poetry and from the prose contexts in which it is quoted that most skalds were spurred on to fame by the impulse to make their mark by ingenuity of one kind or another — to flex convention. In the juxtaposition of base-word and determinant, the best of them aimed to impress the audience with novel combinations that created fathomable but not transparent connections. And those connections might have involved a play on conventional expectations that went beyond inventive substitutions of base-word or determinant to the deployment of referents in relations that are themselves metaphorical, a feature of the use of the ‘wind of the giantess’ kenning as we shall see. Most kenning referents are physical objects or observable phenomena — in which category I include performances such as fighting and reciting poetry — making the referent hugr (understood as ‘thought’ or ‘mind’) unusual at the outset. There are very few abstract nouns among the more or less finite set of referents apparent across the skaldic corpus, an observation I shall return to at the end of this essay.

II. The Base-Word Vindr

In order to contextualize the mythological association between wind and gian-tesses, we need first to survey the corpus of kennings with terms for wind as the base- word. Many such kennings are attested which deliver as their referent ‘battle’:

vindr sverða ‘wind of swords’ Hallfreðr Óttarsson, Erfidrápa Óláfs Tryggvasonar 244

glymvindr Go ndlar ‘loud wind of Go ndul’ Einarr skálaglamm Helgason (Skmál)5

styr-vindr ‘tumult-wind’ Snorri Sturluson, Háttatal 596

vindr brimis ‘wind of the sword’ Sturla Þórðarson, Hákonarkviða 197

benloga vindr ‘wind of wound-fire [> sword]’ Einarr Gilsson, Selkolluvísur 128

4 Skj, Ai, 163, Bi, 154.5 Skmál, i, 67, v. 225; Skj, Ai, 480, Bi, 452.6 Skj, Aii, 68, Bii, 77.7 SkP, ii, 713; Skj, Aii, 114, Bii, 122 (where it is st. 22).8 Skj, Aii, 410, Bii, 437.


Determinants that are used with vindr to form kennings for battle include fighting, weapons (such as swords or shields), and valkyries (such as Go ndul). In all of these kennings, the idea of battle is imagined as a kind of atmospheric force — the wind of weapons or the wind of a valkyrie — having impact on warriors in its path. Each kenning generates imagined sensations, visual, aural, and tactile, that are evoked through the interaction of moving air and another force: a valkyrie sweeping past the warrior or swords slicing through the air. In the verse attributed to Einarr in Skáldskaparmál, the poet depicts a valiant warrior allowing Hildr’s sail (his shield) to take most of the impact of Go ndul’s loud wind, the kenning referring specifically to the force of an onslaught.9

The wind itself is not depicted as an animate being within battle kennings, although such an anthropomorphized conception of the wind is attested in Skáldskaparmál:

Hvernig skal kenna vind? Svá at kalla hann son Fornjóts, bróður Ægis ok elds, brjót viðar, skaði ok bani eða hundr eða vargr viðar eða segls eða seglreiða. Svá sagði Sveinn í Norðrsetudrápu:

tóku fyrst til fjúka Fornjóts synir ljótir.

(Skmál, i, 39, v. 137)

[How shall wind be referred to? By calling it the son of Fornjótr, the brother of Ægir and of fire, breaker of the tree, harmer or killer or dog or wolf of tree or sail or rigging. So said Sveinn in Norðrsetudrápa:

Fornjótr’s ugly sons first began to snow.]

While there are a number of examples of the other kind of kenning Snorri signals — picturing wind as a ravenous animal10 — the animate being Vindr does not play a role as a base-word in any kennings. Margaret Clunies Ross (1983) has argued that Snorri developed the idea of hostile weather phenomena imagined as a group of giants and systematized it in Skáldskaparmál, the giants becoming euhemerized

9 Skmál, i, 67, v. 222 (prose word-order): ‘Hraustr þengill lætr Hildar segl taka mestum Go ndlar glymvindi’; see also Faulkes’s Glossary to his edition of Skmál, s.v. glymvindr (ii, 291).

10 For example garmr fýris (hound of the fir-tree), Arnórr Þórðarson, Hrynhenda st. 10 (SkP, ii, 195; Skj, Ai, 335, Bi, 308); skaði lindis (the harmer of the lime-tree), Þjóðólfr Arnórsson (SkP, ii, 156; Skj, Ai, 382, Bi, 352); læ klungrs (destroyer of bramble), anonymous (SkP, ii, 833; Skj, Ai, 591, Bi, 592;); gandr storðar (the wolf of the land), Sturla Þórðarson, Hrynhenda 14 (SkP, ii, 697; Skj, Aii, 106, Bii, 116 (where it is st. 13)).

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in his scheme and considered to embody primary elements. Snorri’s tendency to place animated natural phenomena in families results in Vindr being described as the brother of sea and fire, but the constitution of this impressive family seems to have been particular to Snorri’s organizing mind in the formulation of his treatise and not to have been an influence on poets composing kennings involving wind and weather, most of which operate on the principle of metaphor by analogy rather than anthropomorphism.11 Where there is any anthropomorphizing of the force of battle, it is by virtue of animate determinants, such as Óðinn and the valkyries, who are imagined as generating blustery forces around them as they intervene in the fighting.

Nor is there any mention of Vindr and his brothers in the account of myth-ology in Gylfaginning (20), where an eddic stanza (Vafþrúðnismál 37) is quoted as the mythological explanation for the meteorological phenomenon of wind. The wind, Hár explains, comes from the wings of a giant in eagle form called Hræsvelgr (‘Corpse-swallower’), the name presumably conceived with reference to the physical process of decarnation.

Hvaðan kemr vindr? Hann er sterkr svá at hann hrœrir stór ho f ok hann œsir eld en svá sterkr sem hann er þá má eigi sjá hann. Því er hann undarliga skapaðr […]

‘[…] Hræsvelgr heitir er sitr á himins enda, jo tunn í arnar ham; af hans vængum kveða vind koma alla menn yfir.’

[Where does the wind come from? It is so strong that it stirs the great ocean and it fans fire, but as strong as it is, no-one is able to see it. In this respect it is wondrously formed.

‘[…]Hræsvelgr is the name of the one who sits at heaven’s end, a giant in eagle form; from his wings they say the wind comes, [blowing] over all people.’]

It is the invisibility of wind, combined with its palpable physical force, which invites speculation that a being is behind it. Beyond this citation, however, Hræsvelgr’s appearance in the poetic corpus is limited to þulur for giant-names (Skmál, i, 111, v. 418), which may, in any case, be derived from Snorri’s treatise.

11 See further Clunies Ross 1987, 128–30, and von See 1977; for the broad range of battle kennings with a base-word denoting some aspect of weather, see Meissner 1921, 178–82, §81a–d.


It can be seen then that Snorri arrives at different accounts of the phenomenon of wind in two different interpretative frames within his Edda: in a mythological context it is described as being created by a male giant in the form of an eagle, and in his account of diction Snorri attributes its generation to a giant being called Vindr. Violent winds are also associated with the onset of ragna ro k, when giants overwhelm Æsir culture.12 The perception that wind has chthonic origins is clear, and this idea may sometimes lurk behind kennings using vindr as a base-word, but in the main it is the physical qualities of wind, rather than its mythological origin, that are exploited by poets in kenning constructions.

Another eddic source, Alvíssmál st. 20, is drawn on at a later point in Skáldskaparmál (Skmál, i, 90, v. 332) where heiti for weather are listed, and here it is the aural effects of wind that are identified:

Veðr heitir hregg, byrr, glygg, hret, gjósta, vindr. Svá segir í Alsvinnsmálum:

Vindr heitir með mo nnum en vo nsuðr með goðum, kalla gneggjuð ginnregin, œpi kalla jo tnar en álfar gnýfara; heitir í Helju hlummuðr.

Veðr heitir ok gustr.

[Weather is called storm, breeze, gale, tempest, blast, wind. As it says in Alvíssmál: ‘It is called wind among men, “wanderer” among gods, mighty powers call it “neigher”, giants call it “howler”, elves “travelling crash”, and in Hel it is called “resounder”’. Gust is also a term for weather.]

The numerous synonyms for violent weather generate a wide range of ken-nings for battle in the corpus of skaldic poetry where, as mentioned earlier, an animate presence appears in the determinant, rather than as the base-word, the air of battle stirred by the being who is imagined to possess meteorological power. A frequent weather base-word in battle kennings is one which involves precipitation, preferably frozen and travelling at speed. The base-word hregg, for instance, is particularly evocative of battle force with its sense of blast or furious weather. As can be seen from the following small sample (drawn from poetry

12 Gylfaginning (14): ‘Þaðan týnir sól skini sínu ok vindar eru þá ókyrrir ok gnýja heðan ok handan’ (From then on the sun will lose its glow and winds will then be wild and rage all over the place); and Gylfaginning (49): ‘Frost eru þá mikil ok vindar hvassir’ (Then there will be a severe frost and biting winds).

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composed from the ninth century to the fourteenth), the determinants which deliver battle as the referent are weapons, the heroes of ancient legend, heiti for Óðinn, and valkyries (compare Meissner’s sub-categories §81e (1921, 183–84): α (odin), γ (Walküren), δ (Helden), ε – π (Waffen)):

hregg geira ‘storm of spears’ Þorbjo rn hornklofi, Glymdrápa 513

hregg hjo rva ‘storm of swords’ Jórunn skáldmær, Sendibítr 514

hregg borðs nadda ‘storm of snakes’ board [> shield]’ Þormóðr Bersason Kolbrúnarskáld15

hregg hjalma ‘storm of helmets’ Arnórr jarlaskáld Þórðarson, Þórfinnsdrápa 516

hregg egg ja mækis ‘storm of sword-edges’ Hallar-Stein, Rekstefja 2017

hregg hrotta ‘storm of swords’ Snjólfr18

hregg Ho gna ‘storm of Ho gni’ Vígfúss Víga-Glúmsson19

hregg Þundar ‘storm of Þundr [Óðinn]’ Þórfinnr munnr20

gný-hregg Yggs ‘loud storm of yggr [Óðinn]’ Skáld-Hallr, Brandsdrápa 521

hregg veggs Hildar ‘storm of Hildr’s (shield)-wall Grettir Ásmundarson22 [> shield]’

hregg grundar ‘storm of Hrund’s ground Snorri Sturluson, Háttatal 6123 Hrundar [> shield]’

hregg kerta Hildar ‘storm of Hildr’s candles Guðmundr oddsson24 [> swords]’

hreggsullr fúrs ‘boiling storm of Sko gul’s fire Ingjaldr Geirmundarson, Brandsflokkr 325 Sko glar [> sword]’

13 Skj, Ai, 23, Bi, 21.14 Skj, Ai, 61, Bi, 54.15 Skj, Ai, 282, Bi, 261.16 SkP, ii, 235; Skj, Ai, 344, Bi, 316.17 Skj, Ai, 548, Bi, 530.18 Skj, Aii, 396, Bii, 417.19 Skj, Ai, 120, Bi, 115.20 Skj, Ai, 315, BI, 292.21 Skj, Aii, 92, Bii, 104.22 Skj, Ai, 313, Bi, 290.23 Skj, Aii, 68, Bii, 78.24 Skj, Aii, 81, Bii, 92.25 Skj, Aii, 89, Bii, 101.


For battle kennings constructed with a wind base-word, the underlying con cept is of physical violence as a gusting of the atmosphere, a sudden disturbance of the air around a warrior. Beyond the flexibility such a wide range of expressions affords the poet needing to choose words for alliteration and assonance, battle kennings also provide figurative resources: the battle may blow in a fighter’s favour, his advantage may be suddenly lifted or just as suddenly drop, and his onslaught may hit the enemy with the force of a gale. Many battle kennings do service in larger kenning complexes (to denote ‘warrior’, for example) or simply designate the physical location of combat in locative phrases; a few, however, exploit the figurative potential of the kenning through versatile syntactic deployment. Guðmundr’s ‘furious storm of Hildr’s candles’, for instance, ‘took men by surprise’ (œst hregg Hildar kerta kom at segg jum) and Ingjaldr’s ‘boiling storm of Sko gul’s fire started to turn [against particular warriors]’ (stirðum Sko glar fúrs hreggsulli tók halla á skýra Skagfirðinga). In both cases the figurative storm whipped up by the valkyrie is the vector for the warrior’s martial success.

III. The Determinants of Battle Kennings

With the determinants weapons, heroes, heiti for Óðinn, or valkyries, battle could accordingly be denoted by all kinds of weather, from storms (él, hríð, stormr) or a gale (glygg) to gusty weather (gustr) or a favourable breeze (byrr):

él stála ‘sudden storm of steels’ Hallfreðr vandræðaskáld Óttarsson, Óláfsdrápa 2226

hríð o rva ‘blizzard of arrows’ Arnórr jarlaskáld Þórðarson, Hrynhenda, Magnússdrápa 1427

él egg ja ‘sudden storm of edges’ Þórkell Gíslason, Búadrápa 428

gustr geirs ‘spear’s gust’ anon., Óláfs drápa Tryggvasonar 1729

glygg blóðíss ‘gale of blood-ice [> sword]’ anon., Plácítúsdrápa 2330

stormr randa ‘storm of shields’ Þormóðr Óláfsson, Hrynhent poem about Árón Hjo rleifsson 431

byrr branda ‘breeze of swords’ Sturla Þórðarson, Hákonarkviða 1932

26 Skj, Ai, 164, Bi, 155.27 SkP, ii, 200; Skj, Ai, 336, Bi, 309.28 Skj, Ai, 554, Bi, 536.29 Skj, Ai, 576, Bi, 571.30 SkP, vii, 196; Skj, Ai, 612, Bi, 612.31 Skj, Aii, 347, Bii, 371.32 SkP, ii, 713; Skj, Aii, 114, Bii, 122.

220 Judy Quinn

stormr þremja ‘storm of sword-edges’ Hallar-Stein, Rekstefja 2133

hríð klæða Hamðis ‘blizzard of Hamðir’s armour’ Hákon inn góði Haraldsson34

byrr Heðins ‘breeze of Heðinn’ Einarr skálaglamm Helgason, Vellekla 2235

él Ho gna ‘sudden storm of Ho gni’ Þórðr Kolbeinsson36

hríð Dags ‘blizzard of Dagr’ Þormóðr Bersason Kolbrúnarskáld37

byrr Þróttar ‘breeze of Þróttr [Óðinn]’ Grettir Ásmundarson38

él Svo lnis ‘sudden storm of Svo lnir Hallar-Stein, Rekstefja 1639 [Óðinn]’hríð glóða Hlakkar ‘blizzard of Hlo kk’s ember Gísli Þorgautsson40 [> sword]’él Sko glar ‘sudden storm of Sko gul’ Gizurr gullbrárskáld41

hríð Hristar ‘Hrist’s blizzard’ Einarr Skúlason, Sigurðardrápa 542

glygg Go ndlar ‘gale of Go ndul’ Snorri Sturluson, Háttatal 5943

gustr Mistar ‘Mist’s gust’ Ingjaldr Geirmundarson, Atlo guflokkr 244

stormr Hildar ‘storm of Hildr’ anon., Orms þáttr Stórólfssonar45

él Hristar ‘sudden storm of Hrist’ Einarr Gilsson, [Poem about Bishop Guðmundr] 3446

él eisu álmdrósar ‘sudden storm of the Guthormr sindri, Hákonardrápa 247 cinder [> sword] of the bow-woman [> valkyrie]’of byrr vífs odda ‘strong wind of the woman of Einarr skálaglamm Helgason, Vellekla 848 weapon-points [> valkyrie]’

33 Skj, Ai, 548, Bi, 530.34 Skj, Ai, 61, Bi, 54.35 Skj, Ai, 127, Bi, 120.36 Skj, Ai, 218, Bi, 208.37 Skj, Ai, 288, Bi, 266.38 Skj, Ai, 312, Bi, 289.39 Skj, Ai, 547, Bi, 529.40 Skj, Ai, 208, Bi, 198.41 Skj, Ai, 316, Bi, 292.42 SkP, ii, 541; Skj, Ai, 456, Bi, 424.43 Skj, Aii, 68, Bii, 77.44 Skj, Aii, 88, Bii, 99.45 Skj, Aii, 343, Bii, 366.46 Skj, Aii, 403, Bii, 427.47 Skj, Ai, 62, Bi, 55.48 Skj, Ai, 124, Bi, 118.


of the animate determinants for battle, the valkyrie is the dominant female presence, represented not just by the many named valkyries — which to some extent are analogous to the many heiti for Óðinn or the variety of named legendary heroes — but also through the description of the valkyrie’s mythological role on the battlefield as a female force controlling weapon play: álmdrós (bow-woman) or víf odda (woman of arrows). once again we find that some poets exploited the animation inherent in the kenning in their choice of verbs: Mist’s gust ‘greatly raged’ (‘knúði mjo k’), the agency of the referent stemming from the valkyrie’s imagined influence over the fighting. Another poet emphasizes the physical power of the wind in his choice of verb: Sturla’s breeze of swords ‘knátti blása baugsegl í vindi brimis’ (was able to blow at shield-boss sails [> shields] in the wind of the sword [> battle]). In Vellekla, the poet praises the warrior by observing that ‘there was no cause for him to be taunted on account of his extra strong wind of the woman of weapon-points’ (‘vasat at frýja sverða sverrifjarðar svanglýjaði odda vífs ofbyrjar í o rva drifu’). The referent of Einarr’s kenning denotes the spirit in which the warrior went into the fray, or more generally his performance on the battlefield. While the broad classification of the referents of kennings of this kind as ‘battle’ is sensible, there is nonetheless considerable stylistic and semantic flexibility in which precise aspects of battle each kenning designates, the ‘wind of the valkyrie’ serving to express both the notion of external influence over battle fortunes and the internal qualities of the fighter that bring about success — what might be termed a warrior’s battle spirit or his passion for fighting — as well as sometimes denoting the place where fighting takes place and the broader cultural phenomenon of armed conflict.

IV. The Axe Imagined as a Troll-Woman

An interesting extension of the pattern of the wind-of-the-valkyrie kenning is the figuration of a weapon itself as an animate being in a set of kennings where an axe is identified as a giantess or troll-woman of battle, either through a generic term for a giantess or the name of a giantess:49

49 The names Fála, Gríðr, Hála, and Hveðra are included among the heiti for tro llkonur in the þulur appended to Skmál, i, 112, vv. 423–25. For further examples of kennings for axe, see Meissner 1921, 147–49.

222 Judy Quinn

Hveðra brynju ‘Hveðra of the mailcoat’ Bragi Boddason, Ragnarsdrápa 1150

flagð hlífar ‘giantess of the shield’ Gísli Súrsson51

ben Gríðr ‘wound-Gríðr’ Skarpheðinn Njálsson52

Fála fjo rnis ‘Fála of the life-protector [helmet]’53 Bjarni Kolbeinsson, Jómsvíkingadrápa 4254

fjo rnis Gríðr ‘Gríðr of the life-protector [helmet]’ Einarr Skúlason, Øxarflokkr 1055

hlýrsólar Hála ‘Hála of the shield’ Einarr Skúlason56

Snorri comments on this type of kenning in Skáldskaparmál (Skmál, i, 67),57 noting:

[…] en øxar kalla menn tro llkvinna heitum ok kenna við blóð eða benjar eða skóg eða við.

[[…] and people call axes by the names of troll-women and refer to them in terms of blood or wound or forest or tree.]

At a later point in his treatment of kennings for different weapons, he remarks: ‘øx heitir tro llkona hlífa’ (axe may be called troll-woman of protective armour), providing as evidence Einarr’s kenning Gríðar fjo rnir.58 The treatise on poetics

50 Skj, Ai, 3, Bi, 3. 51 Skj, Ai, 108, Bi, 103.52 Skj, Aii, 204, Bii, 218. In the same stanza attributed to Skarpheðinn (lausavísa 27), an

axe is referred to as rimmu gýgr (giantess of conflict), Rimmugýgr also being the name used a number of times in the prose narrative of Njáls saga to describe Skarpheðinn’s axe.

53 See Faulkes’s Glossary, s.v. fjo rnir (Skmál, ii, 274).54 Skj, Aii, 9, Bii, 9.55 Skj, Ai, 479, Bi, 451.56 This half-stanza is preserved in the Third Grammatical Treatise. Finnur Jónsson (following

Jón Sigurðsson) includes it in his edition of Øxarflokkr (Skj, Ai, 479, Bi, 451). Another kenning of this type, Gríðr hjálma (Gríðr of helmets), occurs in paper manuscripts of Draumr Þorsteins Síðuhallssonar, though Reykjavík, AM 564c 4to preserves the reading ‘gudr’; see Skj, Aii, 214.

57 The Uppsala codex of Snorra Edda (UUB, DG 11) preserves the reading: ‘En geir kalla menn trollqvenna heitvm […]’ (people call spears by the names of troll-women […]); see Grape, Kallstenius, and Thorell 1977, ii, 64.

58 Skmál, i, 71, v. 245. Earlier in Skmál (i, 24), Snorri identifies Gríðr as a gýgr (giantess) who is the mother of Óðinn’s son Viðarr, exemplifying the overlap between the terms troll-woman and giantess. The names Fála and gýgr are included among the heiti for axe appended to Skmál, i, 121, v. 463.


known as Den lille Skálda clarifies the metaphor of trolldom, explaining that a troll of something is that which is able to destroy it, so fire is the troll of wood, sunshine the troll of ice, blizzards the troll of the flock, et cetera: ‘Þess tro ll er alt, sem þat má fara […] en eldr [er troll] þess, er hann eyðir, ok viðar […] skin [er troll] ísa, hríðir hjarðar’.59 And it is clear from the examples above that it is the axe’s capacity to destroy a warrior’s defensive armour which makes it so formidable in combat, and this, along with its more solid, three-dimensional surface area (compared with that of a spear, sword, lance, or arrow), probably led to its personification as a powerful supernatural being.60 That it is a female being is probably accounted for by the close association in old Norse mythology between the feminine and mortality.61 A supernatural female presence that is protective of warriors during combat is also apparent in some eddic mythological sources: the valkyrie Sigrún is described as protecting the hero Helgi Hundingsbani and his crew in a naval battle, as is a countervailing offensive female force who vies with the valkyrie to control men’s lives, the giantess Hrímgerðr bemoaning her failure to sink another Helgi’s ship because of the protective power of the valkyrie Sváva.62

When a poet deployed a kenning such as those above, the degree to which the animate presence of the giantess is invoked may vary: in some contexts, the referent ‘axe’ may quickly extinguish the evocative potential of the base-word, while in others, the semantic power of the base-word may be emphasized by the lexical or syntactic patterning of the verse. For instance, when Bragi uses the kenning for ‘axe’ in his description of the legendary battle of the Hjaðningar within a longer kenning for warrior — Viðrir Hveðru brynju ([Óðinn] of the [giantess] of the mailcoat) — Hveðra’s residual presence is probably still apparent once she has served to denote the axe which defines Viðrir as a human warrior (the kenning also magnifying the warrior’s importance by describing him in terms of the mythological conflict between the Æsir and giantkind). The giantess is certainly more difficult to shake off in the case of Gísli’s kenning within his description of a nightmare in which he is attacked by an axe-wielding warrior: hristendr hlífar flagða (shaker of the giantess of the shield). At the other end of the spectrum might

59 The treatise, which is preserved in Reykjavík, AM 748 i b 4to and Reykjavík, AM 757 a 4to, is edited by Finnur Jónsson 1931, 257.

60 For a recent survey of archaeological evidence for axes in Viking-Age Scandinavia, see Pedersen 2008, 204–07. the colloquial English term ‘battle-axe’ to describe a formidable woman is expressive of the same association, although the transfer is in the other direction.

61 See further Quinn 2006, Steinsland 1997, and Clunies Ross 1994, 229–57.62 Helgakviða Hundingsbana I (Neckel and Kuhn 1962, st. 30, 134) and Helgakviða

Hjo rvarðzsonar (Neckel and Kuhn 1962, sts 26–28, 146).

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be Skarpheðinn’s invocation of a giantess — ben Gríðr (wound-[giantess]) — brandished in a kenning by the speaker in a self-promoting account of his combat, though even here the animate nature of the base-word has the potential to bring the image to life. Both the twelfth-century Bishop Bjarni Kolbeinsson and the twelfth-century priest Einarr Skúlason refer to the axe as fjo rnis Gríðr ([giantess] of the life-protector [> helmet]), one of many expressions for an axe presented in Einarr’s poem celebrating the gift of a weapon.63 In another stanza, Einarr refers to an axe as dýr hlýrsólar Hálu (precious Hála [giantess] of the shield) and hræpolls Hrund (Hrund [valkyrie] of the corpse-pool [> blood]) (Skj, Ai, 479, Bi, 451), revealing the blurring of the categories ‘giantess’ and ‘valkyrie’ in the composing minds of skalds. In his treatise on poetic language, Málskrúðsfro ði, Óláfr hvítaskáld Þórðarson treats this example within his consideration of cacenphaton:

Hèr er exin kölluð í öðrum helmíngi tröllkona skjaldar eða valkyrja en í öðrum helmíngi sút hjálmsins, ok er svâ skipt líkneskjum á hinum sama lut, sem nykr skip-tist á margar leiðir.64

[Here the axe is called the troll-woman or valkyrie of the shield in the first helmingr (half-stanza), but in the second helmingr helmet’s affliction, and in this manner the image is changed in the same way as a fabulous monster transforms itself in multiple ways.]

While Óláfr considers such mixing of metaphors a poetic fault, the interchange-ability of the troll-woman and the valkyrie is, by contrast, unremarkable. The fundamental quality of the base-word in axe kennings therefore seems to be a larger-than-life female who has the potential to use her powers to the advantage of a warrior. A further example, from the anonymous Óláfs drápa Tryggvasonar,65 which describes in elegiac terms the massacre of Óláfr and his men, is the kenning flærð norn skjaldar (false norn of the shield),66 which connotes the unpropitious intervention of a supernatural female on the battlefield which turns battle fortune against Óláfr. The merging of the giantess with the valkyrie is also evident in a

63 For a discussion of the weapon kennings (not all of which may refer to an axe) in Einarr’s poem, see Meissner 1921, 149.

64 Quoted from the Arnamagnæan edition of Snorra Edda ( Jón Sigurðsson and others 1848–87, ii, 122).

65 Skj, Ai, 576–77, Bi, 572; see also Kock 1923, §21.66 The syntax of the clause was construed by Finnur Jónsson as ‘skjaldar norn kom flærð at

fjo rni “øksen besnærede hjælmen”’ (the axe enchanted the helmet); but the word flærð could equally be adjectival, modifying the noun norn.


kenning for axe used by Kári So lmundarson in a stanza of Njáls saga in which he refers to himself as hvessir hjálmskassa (whetter of the helmet-giantess [> axe]),67 a construction that parallels kennings for warrior which collocate a valkyrie determinant and an agentive noun derived from verbs meaning ‘to incite’.68 At the literal level, the kenning refers to the speaker’s own attitude to fighting with the axe serving as synecdoche for battle. In extended kennings of this nature, however, the semantic and mythological associations of the ‘giantess’ element can easily exceed the bounds of the metonym, Kári’s incitement of a bellicose giantess to wage war with him against others’ helmets invoking imagery that goes beyond the straightforward depiction of an axe. Similarly, while the axe kennings listed above suggest that the violent force personified by a giantess is trained on particular items of a warrior’s armoury or weaponry (his mailcoat, shield, or helmet), in other kennings, such as the following ones for ‘warrior’, the target is less specific and the metaphor is more about beneficial force than the materiality of weapons:

brjótr snerra Gjálpu ‘destroyer of the sharp o nundr Ófeigsson (Grettis saga)69 battle of Gjálp’sendir sókngífrs ‘sender of the attack-giantess’ Magnús Þórðarson70

In the first example, the formidable force represented by the giantess is over-whelmed by the valiant warrior, while in the second, the ‘giantess’ is launched by the warrior in an attack on his opponent, the focus being on the potent mo ment of release by the warrior rather than on the site of damage the assault causes at its destination. Sturla Þórðarson uses the same kenning, ‘attack-giantess’, to signify warriors’ general superiority over their opponents in battle:71

Syngja létu snarpir drengir sóknar gífr í fleina drífu.

(Sturla Þórðarson, Hrynhenda 8)72

67 Skj, Ai, 605, Bi, 605. See also Njáls saga (Einar Ól. Sveinsson 1954, 354).68 See for example hvessir Hildar (inciter of Hildr) (Skj, Ai, 404, Bi, 373); élhvo tuðr Go ndlar

(whetter of Go ndul’s storm) (Skj, Ai, 56, Bi, 49); and hvo tuðr Hildar (whetter of Hildr) (Skj, Ai, 259, Bi, 241).

69 Skj, Aii, 431, Bii, 462.70 Skj, Ai, 543, Bi, 524.71 See Meissner’s category §75d (1921, 148) where the determinant is broadened to the

semantics of battle in general.72 SkP, ii, 685; Skj, Aii, 104, Bii, 115.

226 Judy Quinn

[The keen warriors made the attack-giantess sing in the snow-drift of shafts [> battle].]

once again, attention is trained on the warriors and their mastery of weapons, the base-word of the kenning, gífr, underlining the singular supernatural force the fortunate warriors are endowed with as they engage in battle. to a certain extent this kenning corresponds to the type of axe kenning formed by a base-word that is the name of a giantess or a heiti for one (Meissner’s §75a), but it is distinctive in the way in which the metaphor is developed across the clause. The sókngífr is not hurled towards a warrior’s helmet or shield in the manner of a straightforward axe kenning; rather she is made to sing. While the singing of weapons is a conventional skaldic trope,73 when an animate base-word is the subject of the singing the potential is there for a poet to exploit the relationship between the personification inherent in the kenning and the semantic activity denoted by the verb. Sturla certainly exploits this in another of his verses when he describes battle in these terms:

Þar sighljóð syngja knáttu harða hvell hvössum munni í herför of höfuð manna Högna mans hlýrna dísir.

(Sturla Þórðarson, Hákonarkviða 22)74

[There the dísir of the sun and moon of Ho gni’s girl [> Hildr > shields > valkyries] were able to sing with a shrill mouth the clear, harsh victory-noise above the heads of men on campaign.]

Sturla’s singing sókngífr in his poem Hrynhenda might correspondingly be in ter-preted as a figurative expression for the battle vigour personified by a valkyrie rather than the term needing to be pressed into service as an axe. Another kenning

73 The following examples are drawn from SkP, ii: Arnórr jarlaskáld Þórðarson, Haralds-drápa 3 and Þorfinnsdrápa 9 (263–64 and 240–41); Einarr Skúlason, Haraldsdrápa i.2 (543–44); Einarr Skúlason, Haraldssonakvæði 1 (549); Haraldr harðráði Sigurðarson (51–52); Markús Skeggjason, Eiríksdrápa 17 (447); Óláfr hvítaskáld Þórðarson, Hrynhenda 10 (667); Sigmundr o ngull (626–67).

74 SkP, ii, 715–16; Skj (where it is st. 25), Aii, 114–15, Bii, 123.


which yokes together battle-song and a giantess and which could similarly refer to physical combat more generally rather than an axe specifically is preserved in a verse by o nundr Ófeigsson in Grettis saga:75

[…] oss stóð geigr af gýgi galdrs […] skjaldar […].

[[…] I was injured by the giantess of the shield’s song.]

By delimiting the referent — as Meissner’s taxonomy inevitably does — the more complex poetic function of some kennings may potentially be lost. This can of course be redressed by analysing each kenning in its lexical and syntactic context as here, but more often than not scholars and editors (and translators) rely on Meissner’s taxonomy to reduce the kenning to type and assume its meaning (‘axe’) is straightforward. Meissner’s careful sub-classifications (in this case, his §75a, §75b, §75c, §75d, and §75e) document the deviations from the primary collocation — sometimes the base-word is not a giantess but a valkyrie or norn, and sometimes the determinant is not part of a warrior’s defensive equipment — but those shades of meaning are often not taken into account by those inter-preting the kenning in context. Because Meissner treats all collocations of the semantic fields ‘supernatural female’ and ‘offensive action’ that could tenably be of this type as referring to an axe, the designation of the set of kennings he lists has become ‘axe’. The centripetal force set up by the taxonomy, with its accretion of examples drawn in by the dynamics of analogy, results in kennings becoming glued onto the referent in successive generations of scholarship regardless of the nuances of many of the actual citations. A similar process seems to have taken place with the classification of kennings collocating wild weather and giantesses, many of which offer a semantic trajectory towards the field of battle, sometimes denoting battle action but more often martial courage — a kind of passion for war — rather than the abstract referent ‘thought’ which is inferred from Snorri’s and Meissner’s descriptions.

Metaphorical complexity is a hallmark of the skaldic art. As he waits impa-tiently to use his sword, the skald Þórleifr Rauðfeldarson refers to himself as ‘cherry-tree of the giantess of corpses’ (heggr gífrs hræva), generating considerable dissonance of imagery to achieve an effect of potency derived from a wide-ranging armoury (the sword he holds and the figurative axe he flourishes by grace of the

75 Skj, Aii, 430, Bii, 462; Finnur identifies the kenning referent as ‘axe’.

228 Judy Quinn

mythological forces on his side).76 to collapse the semantics into the formulation ‘axe > warrior’ — necessary though that is in an initial phase of interpretation — is to lose the multidimensional play of the natural (the cherry tree), the supernatural (the giantess), and the grim outcome of it all for others (corpses) in which the poet is exulting. The piling up of images through the composition of kennings is further complicated when the voice of the poem is identifiable as belonging to a speaker from among the broad category of supernatural female beings, as is the case in a verse spoken within a dream in chap. 65 of Íslendinga saga which draws on the distinctive utterance of the prophetic vo lva: ‘viltu enn lengra?’ (do you want to know still more?).77 (According to the list of associations announced by a troll-woman who accosts Bragi in a forest on a dark night — an encounter described in Skáldskaparmál — troll-women were apparently well known for keeping company with vo lur.)78 The figure who appeared to Þorgrímr Hauksson in this dream and enjoined him to recall fighting is described as tall, smelly, and large-faced, ‘mikil ok heldr stórleit; ok þótti hónum kenna af henni þef íllan’ (Guðbrandr Vigfússon 1878, i, 280), nightmarish characteristics which might also be aligned with the general attributes of troll-women, giantesses, and valkyries in certain contexts.

Mál er at minnask mo rnar hlakkar: vit tvau vitum þat: viltu enn lengra?

(anon, Sturlunga saga)79

[It is time to recall the Mo rn [giantess] of Hlo kk [valkyrie]; the two of us know that; do you want to know yet more?]

As both feminine names are in the genitive case — one governed by the verb minnask and the other governed by the other noun — the syntax is ambiguous. By analogy with the other kennings of Meissner’s sub-category §75a, if the base-word is taken to be Mo rn, the valkyrie determinant would define the referent as ‘axe’ (‘it is time to remember the giantess of the valkyrie [> axe]’), though it might more plausibly be a less specific kenning for warfare (‘it is time to remind yourself

76 Svarfdœla saga ( Jónas Kristjánsson 1956, 176–77) and Skj, Ai, 142, Bi, 133.77 Compare the refrain of Hyndluljóð (Neckel and Kuhn 1962, sts 31, 34, 36, and 39, 293–

94) and Vo luspá (Neckel and Kuhn 1962, sts 27, 28, 33, 35, 39, 41, 48, and 62, 6–14).78 According to the tro llkona, trolls refer to her as vilsinnr vo lu (pleasant companion of the

vo lva), Skmál, i, 83, v. 300a; see also Faulkes’s Glossary, s.v. vilsinnr (Skmál, ii, 429).79 Quoted here from Skj, Bii, 152; cf. Aii, 142.


of fighting’). The referent is unmistakably martial in nature whichever track is followed, and the journey from base-word through determinant to referent is peopled by some extraordinary figures — the giantess Mo rn and the valkyrie Hlo kk80 — the pair of them leaving a residual impression that looms larger than a single weapon, especially given the description of the speaker of the verse and the authoritative idiom which she assumes. A duplication of animate determinants also occurs in the battle kenning Go ndlar bo rða naumu glaumr (the revelry of the giantess of the boards of Go ndul [> shields > axe > battle]), used by the tenth-century poet tindr Hallkelsson in his drápa for Jarl Hákon.81 In this verse the semantic collocation of revelry and two boisterous supernatural females creates a surplus of meaning beyond the material object ‘axe’, the valkyrie and giantess once released by the poet not easily restrained within the confines of the kenning again. Another tenth-century poet, Guthormr sindri, refers to battle in his poem Hákonardrápa with another form of valkyrie doubling:

drífa vífs Mistar ‘snow-drift of Mist’s woman’ (Skj, Ai, 61, Bi, 55)

Since byrr vífs odda denotes battle through a valkyrie determinant (wind of the woman of weapon-points [> valkyrie > battle]) and Mistar vinr (friend of Mist) denotes a warrior,82 the grammar of kennings would suggest Guthormr’s phrasing denotes battle by describing it as the weather of Mist’s woman, that is, the weath er of the valkyrie’s companion, presumably another valkyrie. once again a poet chooses to people the battlefield with extra female supernatural figures who are surplus to requirements for the literal meaning of the phrase. In these battle kennings the feminine modification of the association between weather and weap ons is through an imagined presence on the battlefield, of a valkyrie and possibly a giantess in the guise of an axe, their animate nature not only making the action livelier but also introducing the possibility of their volition in favouring or dooming a warrior, an aspect that is fully worked out for the valkyrie in eddic poetry, and worked out to some extent for giantesses in some fornaldarsögur.83 Both figures are terrifying if they are against the warrior, but can be a positive force if they are on his side.

80 For their broad attestation in skaldic poetry, see LP, s.v. Hlo kk and s.v. Mo rn.81 Skj, Ai, 146, Bi, 137; see also LP, s.v. nauma. For a discussion of the doubling of animate

determinants which is also evident in a number of stanzas of Snorri’s Háttatal, see Quinn 2007, 106.82 Gunnlaugr Leifsson, Merlínússpá II, 75 (Skj, Aii, 32, Bii, 39).83 See, for example, the giantesses Brana in Hálfdanar saga Brönufóstra (chap. 13); Fála in

Gunnars saga Keldugnúpsfífls (chap. 7); Hergerðr in Ásmundar saga Atlasonar (chap. 4); Mána in So rla saga sterka (chap. 6) and Skinnhúfa and Ýma in Hjálmþés saga ok O lvis (chap. 20).

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V. Snorri’s Discussion of Vindr Tro llkvinna and Meissner’s Classification

In Skáldskaparmál, in the section on kennings for different parts of the body, within the paragraph on the ‘chest’, Snorri introduces the kenning whose referent is hugr, though he does not provide any poetic citations:

Brjóst skal svá kenna at kalla hús eða garð eða skip hjarta, anda eða lifrar, eljunar land, hugar ok minnis. Hugr heitir sefi ok sjafni,84 ást, elskugi, vili, munr. Huginn skal svá kenna at kalla vind tro llkvinna ok rétt at nefna til hverja er vill ok svá at nefna jo tnana eða kenna þá til konu eða móður eða dóttur þess. Þessi no fn eru sér. Hugr heitir ok geð, þokki, eljun, þrekr, nenning, minni, vit, skap, lund, trygð. Heitir ok hugr reiði, fjándskapr, fár, grimð, bo l, harmr, tregi, óskap, grellskap, lausung, ótrygð, geðleysi, þunngeði, gessni, hraðgeði, óþveri.85

[The breast shall be referred to by calling it house or enclosure or ship of the heart, spirit or liver, land of energy, of hugr and of memory. Hugr is called affection and fondness, love, devotion, desire, longing. Hugr shall thus be referred to by calling it wind of troll-women and it is correct to use the names of whichever [troll-woman] one likes, and also to use the names of giants and then refer to it in terms of the giant’s wife or mother or daughter. These names form a special group. Hugr is also called disposition, attitude, energy, pith, resolution, memory, wit, temper, character, steadfastness. Hugr is also called anger, enmity, hostility, fury, ferocity, misfortune, grief, bad temper, passion, duplicity, insincerity, capriciousness, incon-stancy, brashness, impulsiveness, ?impetuousness.]86

It is apparent from Snorri’s description that hugr, like memory and energy, is a human capacity. The three strings of synonyms he distinguishes, however, mark out rather different semantic fields. The first, which pertains to erotic relationships (love, desire, longing), appears to be the semantic field Snorri identifies with the kenning formula vind tro llkona: (‘Huginn skal svá kenna […]’) to some extent the second and third lists present opposing characteristics (trygð and ótrygð; geð and

84 The manuscript on which Faulkes bases his text of Skmál, GKS 2367 4to, preserves the reading sjálfs (?of the self ), as does Reykjavík, AM 748 ii 4to. The word is not in the earliest manuscript of the work (UUB, DG 11) and in Reykjavík, AM 748 i b 4to, Reykjavík, AM 757 a 4to, and Utrecht, Universiteitsbibliotheek, MS no. 1374, the reading is sjafni; see Skmál, i, 149 and Edda Snorra Sturlusonar ( Jón Sigurðsson and others 1848–87, i, 191).

85 Skmál, i, 108. In the Uppsala manuscript, the rubric reads ‘her segir enn fra nygervingvm’ (Grape, Kallstenius, and Thorell 1977, ii, 77) (here more is said about extension of meaning), suggesting that, to this compiler at least, Snorri was discussing the use of extended metaphor in this section.

86 The translation is modified from Faulkes 1987, 154.


geðleysi), the second list containing temperaments that are positive, the third those that are negative. Whereas the first list specifies desire for another person, the second list might be mapped onto the attributes of a successful warrior or martial leader, although the qualities enumerated in the list are not limited to just that sphere of activity. It is very difficult to condense the semantic range into anything more specific than ‘intense reactions’ and there is little indication that thought as an abstract concept is being designated by any of the terms. The states of mind that constitute the full range of the word hugr do, however, seem to be those where cogitation can potentially turn into motivation, with action following.

Meissner relies on Snorri’s identification of hugr as the referent of the kenning type ‘wind of the giantess’ (§64) — translating it as Sinn — and observes further:

Sonst wird in der späteren Dichtung diese Kenning gemieden, unter der man sich offenbar nichts denken konnte. Daß sie in sehr alte Zeit zurückreicht, zeigt die Freiheit mit der sie von den alten Skalden im Satzgefüge gebraucht wird; so sagt Egill für ‘oft kommt mir in den Sinn’: opt kømr mér Mána *brúðar í byrvind. (Meissner 1921, 139)

[Usually in later poetry this kenning is avoided because apparently no one under-stood what it meant. But the kenning type is very old as is shown by the syntactic variety of its deployment by skalds: so Egill said ‘it often comes to mind’: opt kømr mér Mána *brúðar í byrvind.]

VI. The Kennings of Category §64

Meissner’s primary piece of evidence, however, is the result of an editorial emendment. What the tenth-century poet Egill Skalla-Grímsson said — according to the earliest manuscripts of the whole of his poem Sonatorrek, which themselves are from the seventeenth century — was that the loss of his brothers often came to him in the favourable breeze of the moon of the bear, or the bear of the moon (st. 13):87

opt kømr mér mána bjarnar í byrvind brœðraleysi hyggjumk umb,

87 Skj, Ai, 41, Bi, 35. only the first stanza of the poem is preserved in medieval codices; the entire poem is preserved in two later paper manuscripts: Copenhagen, AM 453 4to and Reykjavík, AM 462 4to. See further Clunies Ross 2010.

232 Judy Quinn

es hildr þróask nýsumk hins ok hygg at því.

[often the loss of brothers comes upon me during the favourable wind of the bear’s moon. I think about it when battle intensifies; I look out for him and focus on this.]

The general sense of the stanza, unemended, is fairly clear, even if the precise workings of the kenning in the first helmingr are not. A connection is made by the poet between the memory of his brothers beside him in battle and the inspiration his brothers continue to give him in battle — reflections that imply thought, of course, but express it elliptically. In his collection of skaldic verses (Reykjavík, AM 761a 4to), Árni Magnússon emended the word bjarnar to read hjarnan (brain),88 simplifying the metaphoric expression by chasing the bear away altogether and making explicit (‘brœðraleysi kømr hjarnan mér’) what is already implicit in the syntax (‘brœðraleysi kømr mér’). Finnur Jónsson opted for a different means of ridding the verse of the bear by emending bjarnar to brúðar (of the bride), thus artificially producing the kenning byrvindr brúðar Máni (favourable wind of Máni’s bride) and interpreting Máni — otherwise known as the personification of the moon (Vafþrúðnismál 22) — as a giant. The emendation in Finnur’s edition was also incorporated into the revised Lexicon Poeticum. The emendation of the kenning was objected to by Ernst Albin Kock in his Notationes Norrœnæ, where he argued for the retention of the manuscript text, citing a parallel for mána bjarnar in mána garms (wolf of the moon [> troll]).89 (The fact that the determinant is masculine rather than feminine is accounted for by adducing giant as a determinant in an analogous kenning, of which more below.) Kock’s line was followed by Sigurður Nordal in his Íslenzk fornrit edition of Egils saga in 1933, where the manuscript text is not altered.90 Meissner, however, had followed Finnur’s emendation in his taxonomy of kennings, confidently translating the sense as ‘oft kommt mir in den Sinn’ and classifying the expression as a ‘thought’ kenning (Meissner 1921), though the emendation necessary to introduce a fe -male determinant, brúðr, and the circularity of the argument give cause for doubt. Frank follows Kock’s text (translating the kenning as ‘bear of the wolf/moon’), maintaining the referent as hugr which she explains as follows: ‘Egill’s

88 Skj, Ai, 41; n. to st. 13.89 Kock 1926, §1034; see also Kock 1946–49, 23.90 Sigurður Nordal 1933, 251n.: ‘hér virðist því eigi óhjákvæmileg nauðsyn að breyta

orðalagi handritsins’ (there does not seem to be an inevitable need here to alter the wording of the manuscript).


kenning has as its base a single concept, that of spirit as a driving wind, and as its definer a single concept, that of chthonic existence’ (Frank 1997, 509), thereby side-stepping the issue of gender.

If the kenning is interpreted in its verse context, unshackled by Meissner’s identification of the referent, some of the difficulties noted by Kock and Sigurður Nordal recede. In relation to another skaldic verse, Anthony Faulkes (Skmál, ii, 246) has observed that bjo rn could be a heiti for a ‘bear-like warrior’, and if this sense were engaged in Egill’s stanza it would form part of the determinant for a ‘battle’ kenning with the base-word byrr. The word máni (unpersonified) occurs in a number of different kennings, its glowing quality allowing it to serve as the base-word in kennings for gold and its shape as the base-word for ‘shield’ kennings.91 Perhaps in Egill’s verse it serves to reinforce the warrior nature of bjo rn by deflecting the sense from the animal world into the arena of warfare: ‘the wind of the moon of the bear [> shield]’ would therefore function as a kenning for battle, capturing the eeriness of moonlight and the physical power of the bear which both play on Egill’s mind as he composes his eulogy. As we saw in Section II, the formulation ‘wind of a weapon’ is well attested for battle kennings and would therefore fit into conventional patterns of composition better than the other possible interpretation, ‘wind of a warrior [i.e. bear of the shield]’, since kennings for battle using wind as a base-word and invoking a warrior determinant conventionally deploy the name of a legendary hero rather than a heiti for warrior. Whichever order of determinants is taken, however, the referent seems to fall within the broad semantic field of battle. The preposition í (in) indicates a locative phrase completed by a kenning whose base-word is byrvindr, and as is the case with a number of the kennings for battle surveyed in Section III, the re ferent carries the particular sense of ‘in the rush of battle excitement’ rather than simply denoting the place where fighting takes place. In this regard the complement of the adverbial phrase does designate the poet’s mind as much as the battlefield, but in a fashion parallel to the manner in which many kennings for battle also work.

A locative phrase is also the context for another kenning in Meissner’s category, from the first stanza of Stúfsdrápa, an eleventh-century praise poem by Stúfr Þórðarson quoted piecemeal in a number of kings’ saga compilations.92 The poet reports being toasted by King Haraldr harðráði himself at a feast in Norway before the King set out for Jerusalem, and the kenning ‘wind of the

91 LP, s.v. máni. The word also functions as a base-word in sword kennings.92 SkP, ii, 350, Introduction to her edition of Stúfsdrápa.

234 Judy Quinn

giantess’ again appears in a locative construction, this time introduced by the preposition af (from):

Vissak hildar hvessi (hann vas nýztr at kanna) af góðum byr Gríðar gagnsælan mér fagna […].

(SkP, ii, 351–52; Skj, Ai, 404, Bi, 373)

Vissak gagnsælan hvessi hildar fagna mér af góðum byr Gríðar (hann vas nýztr at kanna) […].

[I knew that the victory-blessed urger of warfare [> warrior] welcomed me from the good breeze of Gríðr [axe] — he was the most useful one to know […].]

The King’s gesture confirms the poet’s sense that Haraldr is a valuable benefactor. The poem begins (if this is indeed its beginning) in medias res, and although the preceding events are not detailed, the poet’s description of being welcomed af (from) ‘the wind of the giantess’ suggests a spatial context, the location of some form of conflict. Stúfr may simply be recording his delight that the King singled him out with a toast after a successful skirmish, acknowledging that battle success came as a result of Haraldr’s qualities as war-leader. The kenning may plausibly be understood according to the pattern of wind-of-weapons kennings since, as we have seen in Section IV, the giantess Gríðr can denote an axe. For Stúfr, this stanza underlines the importance to a warrior-poet of a patron who recognizes and rewards his efforts, both martial and encomiastic, and whose battle acumen increases the odds of victory for himself and his retinue. Finnur Jónsson’s reading ‘med venligt sind’ (with a well-disposed mind), which is also taken up by Meissner, distorts the meaning of the preposition in order to conform to the perceived referent, ‘thought’, as does Gade’s translation ‘I knew [him] to welcome me with a good wind of Gríðr <giantess> [mind]’. The peculiarity observed by Gade (noted in Section I) may in fact be a product of the taxonomy in this case rather than necessarily deriving from the collocation of wind and giantesses.

Another edge to the semantics of battle is apparent in a stanza by Arnórr jar-laskáld Þórðarson in his Magnússdrápa, which describes the King’s journey from Russia back to Norway. The action of the first helmingr of st. 3 is set in Sweden, with the focus of the second helmingr shifting to Magnús’s supporters back in Norway (where according to st. 4 the kingdom had been usurped by Sveinn Álfífuson of Denmark):93

93 Whaley, Introduction to her edition of Magnúsdrápa (SkP, ii, 206–07); the text of the stanza is in SkP, ii, 211–12, and Skj, Ai, 339, Bi, 312.


[…] nótt beið ok dag dróttins dygg ferð Jaðarbyggva; fýst bað gramr í geystu gífrs veðri sér hlífa.

[…] Nótt ok dag dygg ferð Jaðarbyggva beið dróttins; gramr bað fýst sér hlífa í geystu gífrs veðri.

[[…] Night and day the worthy host of the people of Jæren awaited their lord; the prince fervently asked [them] to protect themselves in the agitated storm of the giantess.]

If, as I have argued, there is sometimes a blurring of the distinctions between female supernatural figures in kennings whose referent is battle, the agitated storm caused by such a figure in this case might well be the skirmishes of the Da nish king against Magnús’s people in Jæren, the kenning ‘storm of the giantess’ denoting warfare here. The taxonomic identification of the kenning as having the referent ‘thought’, however, leads to other interpretations. In Finnur Jónsson’s edition (Skj, Bi, 312), the phrase í geystu gífrs veðri is rendered i sit voldsomme sind (in his violent temper). The lack of an explicit object of the verb bað prompted Finnur to construe fýst as a noun, Magnús thereby appealing to his own zeal as a means of defending himself. In her edition of Arnórr’s poems, Diana Whaley emends gramr to gram (moving the prince into the accusative case) to read: ‘urgently in their troubled she-troll’s gale [> mind] they begged the prince protect them’ (‘fýst í geystu gífrs veðri bað gram hlífa sér’) (Whaley 1998, 188). Whaley notes that the phrase could refer either to the people of Jæren (‘in their troubled thoughts’) or to Magnús (‘in his raging, mighty spirit’), in both cases understanding the referent according to Snorri’s identification: ‘kennings on the pattern “wind of the troll-woman” can refer either to “mind, thought” or to “courage”’ (Whaley 1998, 189; see also SkP, ii, 212). While either reading may be plausible, they both privilege Snorri’s equation to the extent that the syntax of the extant text must be emended to make sense of the lines. Frank also emends the text and takes the referent to be hugr but interprets the poet’s meaning here as ‘battle-fury’, the prince illuminated ‘by an otherworldly force or madness’ (Frank 1997, 509).

Meissner also includes in his category two wind-of-the-giantess kennings found in the twelfth-century poem Íslendingadrápa by Haukr Valdísarson which, in context, do not fit at all easily with the referent ‘thought’ (st. 2):

[…] hamra vífs þás ho fðu hoddlógendr byr gnógan […].

(Skj, Ai, 556, Bi, 539)

236 Judy Quinn

[[I will count up the brave Icelanders] those who had sufficient wind of the woman of cliffs/hammers […].]

The word hamarr can refer to both a hammer (used as a weapon) and a rocky outcrop in the landscape, the former usage being more common in skaldic poetry (LP, s.v. hamarr). Each object modifies the identity of the woman associated with it: the ‘woman of the hammer’ would be a valkyrie and the ‘woman of the cliff ’, a giantess, rendering this kenning’s referent either hugr (wind of the giantess) or, as seems more likely in this context, ‘battle spirit’ (wind of the weapon-wife). Even if, following Meissner, the sense of ‘cliff ’ is preferred for hamarr here, the referent, in the context of Haukr’s tally of brave Icelandic fighters worthy of veneration, falls within the semantic field of ‘martial courage’ rather than ‘thought’ as an abstract concept. The wind with which these supernatural females grace warriors is a quality that marks them out as heroes, something that the capacity for thought in itself would not. St. 5 of the poem makes this even clearer:

Vasat hreggvana hyggnum hraun-Atla Þórkatli (reyndr varð rimmu skyndir rakklyndr at því) sprakka […].

(Skj, Ai, 556, Bi, 540)

Hyggnum Þórkatli vasat hraun-Atla sprakka hreggvana — rakklyndr rimmu skyndir varð reyndr at því – […].

[Clever Þórkell was not lacking in the storm of lava-Atli’s woman [> giantess] — the bold-tempered impeller of the fray had become experienced in that […].]

The adjective hygginn (derived from the verb hygg ja, ‘to think’) already encodes the capacity for shrewd strategy which might be expected of a consummate killer. to then say that Þórkell was not lacking in thought and had experience of thought would be otiose and weaken the developing theme of Icelanders’ par-ticular prowess in warfare. Accordingly, Frank considers the meaning of these two kennings to be ‘courage, fortitude’ (Frank 1997, 510). The quality which entitles Þórkell to a place in the drápa is his record as a fearless fighter, one who is no stranger to sensing the wind of the valkyrie — or giantess — about him as he launches into the fray. Both wind-of-the-giantess kennings in Íslendingadrápa are in the accusative case, indicating an attribute which can be possessed but which is not inalienable: a warrior may have a sufficient amount of it, or be said not to lack it altogether, just as in the case of Vellekla (discussed in Section III) where the poet observed that there was no cause to taunt the warrior on account of his ‘extra strong wind of the woman of weapon-points [> valkyrie > battle spirit]’.


A similar conception of a warrior having enough of the quality signified by the wind of the giantess is evident in a stanza of Guthormr sindri’s Hákonardrápa, where the kenning is again in the accusative case. The stanza is quoted in more than one prose context and presents a range of textual variants across the sources:94

[…]gerra gramr í snerru geirvífa sér hlífa, hinns yfrinn gat jo fra ósk-kvánar byr mána.

[…] gramr gerra hlífa sér í geirvífa snerru, hinn jo fra es gat yfrinn byr mana ósk-kvánar.

[[…]the prince does not defend himself in the onslaught of the spear-women [> valkyries > battle], he who, among kings, got an abundance of the fair-wind of the desired woman of Máni.]

Manuscript texts of a crucial word vary, providing the following possibilities: the fair wind of the ólskvánar, ósk-kvánar, óðs kvánar, or ósk-vænan of the moon (Skj, Ai, 63). Ólsen (1886) argued that ól meant bane, hence the final kenning is rendered ‘wife of the destroyer of the moon > giantess’, an interpretation followed by Frank (1997, 509) and Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson (1979, 180–81). Óskmey (wished-for woman) is elsewhere an expression for a valkyrie (LP, s.v. óskmey), suggesting that ósk-kván may be an analogous compound. Máni (or máni) again offers a number of interpretive possibilities:95 if the moon is understood metaphorically as a shining round object resembling a shield, the favourable breeze of the ósk-kván (valkyrie) of the shield would resolve to ‘battle’, or ‘battle spirit’ in this context. The two kennings, ‘onslaught of the spear-woman’ and ‘wind of the valkyrie’, would therefore depict a furious maelstrom of fighting out of which Hákon emerges triumphant and unscathed (not having needed to defend himself, perhaps because of the protection afforded him by the valkyries). As Frank notes, ‘the giantess in the latter circumlocution [is] congruent with and perhaps inspired by the valkyries in the former’ (Frank 1997, 509). Meissner (1921, 139), observes that the referent of this kenning is likely to be Mannesmut (manly courage), and once again the sense of the verse is more likely to be that Hákon was well endowed with battle acumen, rather than thoughtfulness.

94 Skj, Ai, 63, Bi, 56; see also the stanza quoted in Heimskringla (Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson 1979, 180n.–181n.).

95 This kenning is taken as evidence in the LP entry (s.v. máni) that Máni was a giant and that a myth about him has possibly been lost.

238 Judy Quinn

two other kennings in Meissner’s list depend on otherwise unknown words to construct a kenning that fits the taxonomic pattern of giantess-inflected weather:

Skyldak skerja foldar skíðrennandi síðan þursa týs frá þvísa þinn góðan byr finna […].

(Skj, Ai, 74, Bi, 64)

[From now on, ski-runner of the earth of skerries [> seafarer], I ought to find your wind of the giants’ [?] to be good […].]

this tenth-century lausavísa by Eyvindr Finnsson skáldaspillir, quoted in Fagrskinna (Bjarni Einarsson 1985, 180–81) and Heimskringla (Haralds saga gráfeldar, in Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson 1979, 202–03), has caused scribes considerable difficulty across the centuries: among the manuscript readings of the word which is crucial to the kenning’s determinant are tys, tóls, kaus, bæs, and bæn, from which a reading which provides the necessary feminine quality to the determinant must be chosen if the kenning is to fit the taxonomic pattern. (The internal rhyme provided by some but not all of the variants in this case is also a factor in the editorial reconstruction of the line.) Heimskringla preserves the readings tœs and týs, Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson explaining in his edition of the work that the kenning þursa tœs byrr was ‘doubtless hugr, and tœs must be the genitive form of a word which meant woman (or suchlike)’.96 An otherwise unattested neuter noun tý, meaning ‘help-mate’ is also hypothesized, providing the interpretation of the helmingr ‘I should find your attitude towards me to be good from now on’.97 The reading in Fagrskinna, with the otherwise unknown base-word tóls, is similarly interpreted with reference to Snorri’s scheme, the meaning of the word deduced to be ‘wife’. In this case, the scaffolding provided by Snorri and Meissner provides the editor with a confidence in meaning deduced according to taxonomic principles that philological evidence cannot, Bjarni Einarsson claiming the referent of the kenning þursa tóls byrr to be ‘without doubt hugr, even though [the word] tóls is unintelligible’.98 He arrives at the same paraphrase of the clause

96 ‘eflaust: hugur, og mætti tœs vera eignarf. orðs, er merkti: kona (eða því líkt)’ (Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson 1979, 203); see also Kock 1926, §1041D, and Frank 1997, 507, who follows the reading þursa tœs byrr.

97 ‘Ég ætti […] héðan í frá að finna hug þinn (til mín) góðan […]’. (Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson 1979, 203n.)

98 ‘þursa tóls byrr er án efa: hugur, enda þótt tóls sé óskiljanlegt’ (Bjarni Einarsson 1985,


as Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson — mirrored in Alison Finlay’s translation ‘I ought to find favour in your fair wind of the giant’s lady [> mind/thoughts]’ — although to produce the locative phrase (‘in your thoughts’) (Finlay 2004, 77), the syntax of the manuscript texts needs to be distorted.

In its prose context, the stanza is a reaction by the poet to a rather unusual situation. Eyvindr is forced by the King to give him a valuable ring his father owned — an inversion of the usual direction of wealth transfer between poet and patron — and in the first helmingr he expresses his not unreasonable hope that he will receive some kind of benefit from the King in return. This is a fine example of the complex bartering of advantage skalds trade in, with particularly high stakes in this case. Eyvindr attempts to counter the real power of the King, who can demand tribute (or the poet’s life) as well as dispense favour, with the brio of his rhetoric. The literal meaning of the clause is ‘from now on, king, I ought to find your breeze of the giants’ [something] to be good.’ The word týs is widely attested in the kenning corpus as the genitive form of the noun týr (a god or the name of the god týr), usually in kennings for warrior, where it can be modified by, say, a valkyrie name: Hristar týr or Heðins meyjar týr.99 The word þurs, which denotes giant-kind, is rare in the skaldic corpus, but common in eddic diction (LP, s.v. þurs). Although it is generally modified to refer specifically to giantesses (þursa meyjar, for instance), perhaps the whirlwind of associative semantics generates from the collocation þursa týs byrr a sense similar to that produced by the wind-of-the-valkyrie’s-hero kennings, which denote battle, martial courage, or battle strategem. the syntactic construction within which the kenning is placed is unusual and is perhaps best interpreted with reference to the other examples in the accusative case. A court poet had reason to hope his leader’s war strategy would be successful, for his own sake on the front line as well as for the king’s, and perhaps Eyvindr is expressing this desideratum elliptically in notifying the King of his high hopes. The modification of byrr (which seems already to encode the notion of a favourable force) by the adjective góðr reorients the perception of advantage to the skald’s perspective without the referent necessarily being reduced to ‘thoughts’. In line with some of the kennings discussed earlier, it is possible that the referent here denotes the King’s fighting spirit with the concomitant advantage that lends to members of his retinue.

100n.); see also Finlay 2004, 77: ‘The sense can be deduced because kennings of the type “wind of the giantess”, meaning “mind, thought”, are common, although their basis in mythology is not understood.’

99 For further examples, see Meissner 1921, 273, and LP, s.v. týr.

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two further kennings in Meissner’s category §64 are cast in the nominative case. one, from Þjóðólfr Arnórsson’s runhent poem about Haraldr Sigurðarson which Meissner classifies as having the referent ‘thought’, might similarly refer to courage or even simply to battle.100 The stanza is only preserved in Skáldskaparmál, with some interesting differences between manuscripts of the text:

Vex Óleifs feðr vex: eykr (U) járnsaxa veðr járnsaxa: járnso xu (U) harðræðit hvert svát hróðrs es vert.

[With every determined act, the storm of iron-swords [> battle] increases for Óláfr’s father so that it is worthy of praise poetry.]

The literal meaning of járnsax, a compound of járn (iron) and sax (short sword), is iron-sword, a kind of weapon. Járnsaxa, the genitive plural form, produces the kenning ‘storm of iron-swords [> battle]’, a reading proposed by Sveinbjörn Egilsson in the mid-nineteenth century ( Jón Sigurðsson and others 1848–87, i, 462–63). The word Járnsaxa occurs elsewhere as the name of a giantess,101 the text of the Uppsala codex (járnso xu veðr) providing the kenning ‘storm of the giantess’, and this reading is preferred by Finnur Jónsson who translates the referent as mod (courage). Anthony Faulkes retains the ‘majority’ reading (járnsaxa) but reads it as a proper noun, the otherwise unattested name of a giant, Járnsaxi, interpreting it as follows: ‘Járnsaxa veðr = thought, courage, though usually the kenning should contain the name of a troll-wife’ (Skmál, ii, 484). Whaley, on the other hand, prefers the Uppsala text, translating the helmingr ‘His gale of Járnsaxa <giantess> [mind] increases every tough exploit for Óláfr’s father [= Haraldr] […]’.102 Despite the awkwardness such an interpretation brings to the sense of the verse, Whaley dismisses Sveinbjörn’s simpler reading, apparently on the basis that ‘“giantess’s wind” for “mind” is a well-known kenning pattern’, as evidence for which she cites Snorri’s identification, Meissner’s classification, and

100 Skmál, i, 82, v. 293; SkP, ii, 105–06; and Skj, Ai, 368, Bi, 338. See also Frank 1997, 510, where the kenning is construed in the accusative case: ‘Every difficulty increases the hugr of Óláfr’s father […]’.

101 She is identified as the mother of Þórr’s son Magni (Skmál, i, 22); see also Hyndluljóð 37 (Neckel and Kuhn 1962, 294) and LP, s.v. Járnsaxa.

102 See Whaley’s notes to her edition for a detailed consideration of the possible syntactic arrangements the text lends itself to (SkP, ii, 105–06). In my translation of the helmingr I have followed the syntax proposed by Faulkes in his Glossary, s.v. harðræði (Skmál, ii, 302).


Gade’s note on Stúfr’s verse (quoted above in Section I). It may be a well-known pattern in taxonomic works and editorial commentaries to derive the referent ‘mind’ from the kenning, but it was not necessarily the referent that was in the minds of skalds as they composed verse using kennings involving weather and giantesses (or indeed giants).

The kenning bergstóra hregg (storm of the mountain-ruler) is also mentioned in Meissner’s category, although he suspected it was verderbt (corrupted) and that it was therefore doubtful whether its referent was ‘thought’ at all (Meissner 1921, 139). The kenning occurs in a stanza by the thirteenth-century Icelander Gizurr Þorvaldsson, quoted in Íslendinga saga, spoken after his vengeful murder of some of those responsible for burning down his farmstead:

[…] bergstjóra gleðr báru blikstríðanda síðan hregg, en hafnak muggu heldr, síts Kolbein feldum.103

[…] bergstjóra hregg gleðr síðan báru blikstríðanda, en hafnak heldr muggu síts Kolbein feldum.

[[…] storm of the mountain-ruler [> battle] then gladdens the harmer of the wave’s gleam [> generous man], but I have abandoned sadness (or mist/Mist) since Kolbeinn has been murdered.]

to this poet, the deteminant ‘giant’ appears to work as effectively as ‘giantess’ as a means of conveying the meaning of the kenning in terms of the broad field of the referent ‘battle’. Indeed the masculine inflection of the determinant emphasizes the martial fury — Gizurr expressing his own jo tunmóðr (giant-fury) — in his retaliation against the burners.104 once again, the evidence suggests that kenning construction was not as rule-bound as the impression a taxonomic classification promotes. The word mugga carries both a meteorological meaning (a kind of still mistiness, with no movement of air) and a metaphorical one (melancholy), but it is perhaps the former sense which is activated by the internal rhyme which sets up a striking contrast between mugga and hregg (furious storm). The atmospheric turbulence of stormy weather is the very opposite of the still air characteristic of

103 Skj, Aii, 99, Bii, 111; see also Guðbrandr Vigfússon 1878, ii, 174, who follows the Reyk jar fjarðabók reading.

104 Compare Frank 1997, 511, who construes the syntax differently, ‘the hugr of the generous man is then gladdened indeed’, and takes hugr to mean ‘spirits, mind’.

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misty, muggy weather, highlighting the disparity between the storming warrior and the inaction of the quiet peace-keeper, a role Gizurr eschews.

The stanza is poised in the prosimetrum of Íslendingasaga in the interlude after the vigilante killings before legal proceedings begin, a phase during which Gizurr turns from violent recrimination to formal prosecution of his case. During this phase, the shift in his temperament is presented as something of a mystery even to Gizurr himself,105 which opens the possibility that the stanza might also express his change of heart. (Assuming, that is, that the stanza was the work of Gizurr and was composed in this period, and that it was then drawn on by the compiler of the saga in forging his narrative account.)106 Instead of mugga working with hregg as a contrastive metaphor (weather both within the kenning and outside it representing the warrior’s attitude to combat), the word could perhaps be a pun on the word mist, the name of the valkyrie whom Gizurr might be picturing himself forsaking as he turns from his killing spree towards legal resolution. In the preserved rendition of the events, the recitation of the stanza is staged at the end of the return journey from the killings and is reinforced by a companion stanza by Páll Þorsteinsson, underlining the vindictive nature of the mission, a context that supports the interpretation of mugga as a contrastive metaphor for Gizurr’s bellicose declaration. It is possible, however, that the word mist could have been polyvalent in renditions of the stanza in other prosimetric configurations.

Because the kenning does not fit the wind-of-the-giantess mould precisely, it has caused some scholarly consternation. It certainly seems hard to construe the sense of the lines with the referent of the kenning taken to be ‘thought’. Finnur Jónsson suspected the referent was ‘battle’ or perhaps ‘thought’107 — Gizurr’s mugga interpreted as sørgmodigheden (melancholy) — and the Lexicon Poeticum entry under bergstjóri reflects the uncertainty: the kenning ‘seems to mean “mind” but that is elsewhere described as “giantess’s wind, storm”; otherwise what we have here might be an inaccuracy or a word might also have been lost’.108

105 Guðbrandr Vigfússon 1878, ii, 176: ‘Gizurr sagði svá síðan sjálfr, at hann kvazk eigi vita hvat Hrafni hefði hlíft á þeim fundi, þvíat hann kvazk ein-ráðit hafa áðr fyrir sér, at meiði hann at nokkuru, blinda eðr gelda’ (Gizurr himself said afterwards that he did not know what had protected Hrafn at that meeting because he had previously been determined to harm him in some way, either castrating him or blinding him).

106 on the stages of composition and the preservation of Sturlunga saga, see Guðrún Nordal 2010. I am grateful to Vicky Cribb for discussing with me these lines in the context of the saga.

107 Skj, Bii, 111: ‘kampen (el. sindets?)’.108 LP, s.v. bergstjóri: ‘synes at måtte betyde “sind” men dette omskrives ellers som “jætte-

kvindens vind, storm”; enten foreligger her en unöjagtighed eller også er ordet forvansket’. In


Kock took this kenning as evidence that kennings in the form ‘wind of the giant’ could mean battle without needing a feminine determinant at all, using Egill’s kenning (which he interprets as ‘wind of the giant’) as support (Kock 1923, §185; Kock 1926, §1034). In their 1946 edition of the saga, Jón Jóhannesson, Magnús Finnbogason, and Kristján Eldjárn take the construal of the kenning in an altogether different direction: they identify the mountain-ruler as the giant Suttungr and his ‘precipitation’ as the mead of poetry ( Jón Jóhannesson, Magnús Finnbogason, and Kristján Eldjárn 1946, i, 500, 605). In their interpretation it is poetry which gladdens Gizurr and frees him from the drungi (drowsiness) that mugga represents.

There are a handful of instances in Meissner’s category §64, all within stanzas about a woman the poet desires, where the metaphor describing the influence of supernatural females is transferred from the theatre of war and is staged within the confines of an individual’s emotions, and in this small group, ‘passion’ or ‘turbulent thoughts’ is a plausible denomination of the referent. The tenth-century poet Kormákr o gmundarson feels the effects of supernatural female forces when he catches sight of the lovely feet of his femme fatale, Steingerðr:

Nú varðk mér í mínu (menreið) jo tuns leiði (réttumk risti) snótar ramma ást fyr sko mmu […].109

Nú varðk mér ramma ást í mínu jo tuns snótar leiði; menreið réttumk risti fyr sko mmu […].

[Now a powerful love has overwhelmed me, in my leading wind of the giant’s lady [> passionate thoughts]; the necklace-chariot [> woman] just extended her instep towards me […].]

The adverbial phrase í jo tuns snótar leiði, modified by the possessive pronoun mínu is locative, and seems to denote the poet’s mind, or a space within himself.110 The base-word leiði, in the sense of ‘a leading wind’, is not used elsewhere in the

keeping with this interpretation, Lexicon Poeticum’s entry on mugga follows the description of the primary sense of humidity with a secondary sense derived from this instance: ‘tunghed i sind, nedslåethed, hafna m-u, være (blive) oprömt’ (heaviness of thought, dejection; to abandon mugga [is] to become upbeat).

109 Skj, Ai, 80, Bi, 70. See also Kormáks saga (Einar Ól. Sveinsson 1934, 207–08) and Frank 1997, 505, where the fourth line of the helmingr is edited as follows: ‘rammaðst [sic] fyr sko mmu’.

110 See Einar Ól. Sveinsson 1934, 207n.: ‘jo tuns snót: tröllkona; leiði (byr) hennar: hugur’.

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kenning corpus,111 though it adds to the sense of Kormákr’s thoughts being irresistibly drawn towards Steingerðr by an elemental force. In the second hel-mingr, Kormákr’s characterization of Steingerðr’s feet — ‘þeir fœtr fald-Gerðar munu optarr verða mér at fári an nú’ (those feet of the headdress-goddess will bring harm to me more often than just now) — draws together the idea of unwilling seduction with that of mortal danger. Imagining seductive power as the updraft of a giantess is perhaps not so different a notion from poets’ ambivalence to the valkyrie who is at once erotic saviour of the warrior and beautiful emissary of death. Just as the valkyrie personifies the loss of a warrior’s self-determination — and her wind the battle tumult in which his fate is executed — so the giantess personifies unlikely, or socially troubling, desire — and her wind the turbulent emotions experienced by the afflicted lover. The poet, caught up in tempestuous emotions, describes the site of his emotional battleground in terms that parallel those used by warriors of actual battlegrounds, the giantess lurking in one sphere, the valkyrie in the other. The locative nature of the referent fits with Snorri’s description of hugr as housed in the chest, and the kenning clearly belongs to the special category (‘Þessi no fn eru sér’) Snorri describes which is aligned with the semantic range set out in his first string of synonyms: ‘affection and fondness, love, devotion, desire, longing’.

Another late tenth-century skald suffering from the same affliction uses a wind-of-the-giantess kenning in the context of frustrated desire, though the syntactic function of the kenning is not locative and describes a more complex metaphorical idea. to complicate matters, the text of the stanza by Hallfreðr vandræðaskáld Óttarsson varies across manuscripts. In chapter 4 of Hallfreðar saga, the poet finds out that Kolfinna, the woman he desires, is to be married to another. He reacts by reciting a stanza, the second helmingr of which is as follows (the text is from Flateyjarbók):

[…] síð mun Surts of bíða, svá geta menn til hennar, kvánar byrr af kyrri Kolfinnu mér rinna.112

[…] síð mun Surts kvánar byrr of bíða rinna mér af kyrri Kolfinnu; svá geta menn til hennar.

111 The word is used by skalds outside of kennings (for example Skj, Bii, 56), as well as being frequently used in the sense of a ‘grave’; see LP, s.v. leiði.

112 Einar Ól. Sveinsson 1934, 147; see also the editions of Hallfreðar saga by Bjarni Einars-son: 1953, 36; 1977, 31.


[[…] slowly will the breeze of Surtr’s woman manage to rid me of calm Kolfinna — such do men plan for her.]

The Mo ðruvallabók text of the stanza does not have a wind base-word at all (its reading of line 3 is: ‘kvánar kyrs af keyri’), requiring editors to switch between base-texts mid-stanza (Einar Ól. Sveinsson 1934, 147n.). to construct a satisfac-tory determinant to create a ‘wind of the giantess’ kenning also required, in Finnur’s view (Skj, Bi, 157), emendation of biða to beiði (to form the kenning ‘breeze of Surtr’s petitioning-woman’), with both the Flateyjarbók reading and this emendation adopted by Meissner in his classification of kennings. Einar Ól. Sveinsson left bíða as an auxiliary verb in his edition of the saga and took the wind base-word from Flateyjarbók, construing the kenning’s referent as ‘a man’s thoughts’ (1934, 147n.). Whaley’s translation follows this edition: ‘Slowly will it happen (so do men plan for her) that my breeze of Surt’s bride [> mind, thought] turns from serene Kolfinna’ (Whaley 2002, 78), a more elegant translation than the literal one above which is aimed at bringing out the complex currents of mean ing across the syntax. The poet does not use a possessive pronoun (as Kormákr does) but chooses to stage the process of emotional affliction within himself as the object of rinna, a verb denoting movement: to flow, to drain, to dissolve. The complex verbal group, mun bíða rinna, seems to have the sense here that the object will undergo flushing out. When collocated with the base-word byrr, the image is one of having fixed thoughts blown away, like cobwebs, except that the whole conceit is modified by síð — the process will only happen very slowly, which may be taken to mean it will not happen at all if Hallfreðr has his way. The determined nature of his attachment to Kolfinna — aptly described by Frank (1997, 506), as ‘the still centre around which the skald’s mind revolves’ — has been internal ized, the giantess’s breeze agitating his thoughts but unable to deter him from pursuing the unattainable. While the tempestuous hypothesis the poet explores is contained within his mind, by voicing it as he does in the presence of his rival the force of his devotion is staged as a mighty battle against chthonic forces: Hallfreðr’s devotion to Kolfinna is so strong that, at a very literal level, even the powerful in -fluence of giantesses would take aeons to erode his love. translating this complex poetic ex pression into a simplex referent, while acknowledging the complexity of the lexical collocations and the syntax, is hardly possible. The poet appears to be inverting the trope as it appears in Kormákr’s verse, the tempestuous affliction projected onto a giantess and her influence over men’s behaviour figured here as not strong enough to deter him from his attachment to Kolfinna.

two similar kennings are found in an anonymous verse recorded after a þula of heiti for woman at the end of the text of Skáldskaparmál in the Uppsala

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codex of Snorra Edda (UUB, DG 11, 44r), before the scribe begins, overleaf, the text of The Second Grammatical Treatise. We can be confident that this scribe knew of Snorri’s identification of the referent of the kenning (having penned the description on leaf 39r) and perhaps he may even have composed the stanza himself:

Stendr þats stórum grandar, sterkviðri mér Herkju í hneggvero ld hyggju hefk stríð borit víða; þar kømr enn, ef una ítr villdi Bil skaldi at blíðr grœr Gríðar glaumvindr í sal þindar.113

Herkju sterkviðri, þats stórum grandar, stendr mér í hneggvero ld; hefk víða borit stríð hyggju; ef ítr Bil villdi una skaldi, þar kømr enn at blíðr Gríðar glaumvindr grœr í þindar sal.

[The strong gale of Herkja [> passion], that which harms greatly, blows through my heart-world [> chest]; far and wide I have carried strife of thought. But if the glorious Bil [woman] wanted to love the poet, it still might happen that the pleasant shrieking wind of Gríðr [> passion] might grow in the diaphragm’s hall [> chest].]

The translation is of the manuscript text and treats Bil as a heiti for woman.114 Finnur Jónsson, following Konráð Gíslason, emended villdi to falda — to produce the kenning for woman, Bíl falda (goddess of headdresses) — as a consequence of which the form of the verb una has to be emended to ynni.115 The meaning of the unemended text, however, is fairly clear: in the two halves of the stanza, the poet contrasts unrequited and the prospect of requited love, one harmful and the other pleasant, but both imagined as the powerful uprush caused by a giantess.116 The kenning is in the nominative case in both instances, the subject of the verbs

113 Grape, Kallstenius, and thorell 1977, ii, 87; see also Skj, Ai, 601, Bi, 601. Finnur Jónsson classifies the verse among anonymous poetry, probably from the twelfth century (Skj, Bi, 597–601: ‘C: Af vers om ubestemmelige personer og begivenheder’).

114 Compare LP, s.v. Bil.115 Konráð Gíslason 1892, 75–76; see also Frank 1997, 507, who carries over the

emendations of una and villdi.116 In his rettet version of the stanza, Finnur translates the two referents as et sind and et

blidt sind (a feeling and a sweet feeling) (Skj, Bi, 601), while Meissner refers to them as ‘gute’ and ‘schlechte stimmung in der Brust’ (good and bad moods) (Meissner 1921, 139).


granda (to harm), standa (to stand, or remain), and gróa (to grow) demonstrating its figurative flexibility. The poet of this verse conceives of the referent not as an anatomical space (that notion is expressed by two other kennings for ‘chest’) but as a force affecting a person’s feelings, in a manner very similar to the rush of battle excitement experienced by warriors who sense the wind of a valkyrie around them. In the Upsaliensis pair of examples, then, the kenning ‘wind of the giantess’ clearly refers to passionate love for a woman.

After Finnur Jónsson’s and Rudolph Meissner’s monumental works were completed, a further example of this kenning type was discovered. In the summer of 1959, a rune-stick with a dróttkvætt stanza inscribed on it was unearthed in the Bryggen excavations, datable by the ash layers to before 1248. Aslak Liestøl published a transcription of the runes, with a transliteration that was accompanied by edited versions of the verse by Wolfgang Krause (middle text below) and Jón Helgason (right-hand text below) (Liestøl, Krause, and Jón Helgason 1962).117

Fell til fríðrar þellu Fell til fríðrar þellu Fell til fríðrar þellu fárleghrar m(é)r árla fárleghrar m(é)r árla fárlegrar mér árla fiskáll festibála fiskáls festibála fiskáls festibála forn byrhamar norna forn byrr hamar-norna. forn byrr hamarnorna. þæim vihdi hevir þundar þæim lundi hefr þundar þeim mundi hug þundar þornlúðrs iolun búðar þornlúðrs Nio run búðar þornlúðrs jo lunbúðar gloumar gýghiar touma gloum<a> gýghiar touma gaumárr gýgjartauma galdrsfastlegha haldet galdrs fas(t)liga haldet. galdrs fastlega haldit. omnia vincit amor et nos cedamus amori.

The striking fusion of a dróttkvætt stanza with a Latin quotation from Virgil’s Eclogue 10, ‘Love overcomes everything and let us abandon ourselves to love’, establishes the context as both learned and relating to love poetry. As the italicized words in both editions show, the text of line 5 is difficult to understand (and lacks rhyme in the otherwise regular rétthent composition).118 The syntax of the first helmingr (with just the addition of the nominative ‘r’ to byrr in line with the nominative form of the adjective forn) is more straightforward:

117 See also the editions by Frank: 1978, 179–81; 1997, 507–08.118 Following Krause’s text of line 5, Frank has proposed the following translation for the

second helmingr: ‘to that warrior the wind [noisy steed of the giantess’s reins (wolf ) of the tree (mast) of the mackerel-abode’s (sea’s) cradle (ship)] held fast’ (Frank 1997, 508).

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Árla fell m(é)r forn byrr hamar-norna til fríðrar fárleghrar þellu fiskáll festibála

[Early on, the ancient breeze of the cliff-norns [> passion] turned for me towards the beautiful, dangerous pine-tree of the fixed flame of the fish-channel [sea > gold > woman].]

Given the context of frustrated desire and the characterization of the woman as both beautiful and dangerous, the kenning seems to be drawing on the same con-ventions of expression as the kennings of Kormákr and the poet of the Uppsala-Edda verse, where a powerful supernatural force, personified as female, affects the poet’s mind, and this is a further instance of the special category of kenning observed by Snorri (though it might well have been composed after he had desig-nated it as such).

I noted earlier that the word hamarr can mean both a hammer or a rocky outcrop, the norn associated with either sense providing the possible referents ‘valkyrie’ or ‘giantess’, though as we have also seen, to some extent norns, giantesses, and valkyries all share the same conceptual territory in old Norse mythology and skaldic lexis, to the point where in some poets’ hands, they seem interchangeable. For disciples of Snorri’s poetics, however, the equation vindr tro llkvinna = hugr (ást) may have become categorical, with troll-women presiding in the metaphorical sphere of battles of the heart and valkyries dedicated to the field of martial combat itself, making the sense of hamarr here likely to be ‘cliff ’ in order to render the referent ‘passion’. Whoever the rune-carver was (Liestøl speculates that it may have been the poet himself, making this an extremely rare ‘autograph manuscript’), he was clearly well versed in both Latin poetry and dróttkvætt and, given the dating of the rune-stick and the cultural contact between Iceland and Bergen during this period, may have been aware of Snorri’s poetic treatise. In addition to his Latin quotation from a classical author, the poet’s use of the adjective forn — in the sense of ‘the old (pre-Christian) culture’ — sets up a sophisticated set of overlapping frames of reference for his meditation on troubled passion which might be paraphrased and glossed as follows: ‘powerful forces turned my thoughts to this dangerous love which cannot be resisted, as both the skaldic tradition and the Latin masters attest’.

Jón Helgason interpreted the stanza with reference to Íslendingadrápa 2 (discussed in Section VI), deriving ‘Sinn’ as the referent of forn byrr hamarnorna on the basis that that is the referent of hamra vífs byrr. But as noted earlier the arc of reference in that case depends on whether the sense of hamarr is regarded as a weapon or a rocky outcrop; the breeze of the woman of the hamarr could be either ‘battle spirit’ or ‘martial courage’. The fit with the kenning in the runic verse is therefore far from close, and Jón Helgason needs to qualify the terms


considerably: ‘Med sinn menes her kjærlighet, som kan kalles forn fordi den har eksistert fra urtiden’ ( Jón Helgason 1962, 104) (mind here means love, which can be called ancient because it has existed since the earliest times). The use of forn is in fact more likely to describe the supernatural female determinant rather than the resolved referent. In order to secure his interpretation, however, Jón cements the equation forn byrr hamarnorna = sinn = kjærlighet by making a radical emendation in line 5 to introduce the word hugr (see his edition in the right-hand column above) in order to reinforce his interpretation of the kenning.

The collocation of the kenning’s base-word with the verb falla demonstrates the kenning’s figurative versatility — like the wind, the influence of giantesses can drop or lift — as does its syntactic deployment in the nominative case. Meissner implies that the syntactic variety of the kenning’s attestations indicates the antiquity of the kenning, but it might also be regarded as characteristic of its complex relationship with mythology throughout its history. Because what is signified by the kenning — passion in the context of personal relationships and various aspects of the performance of combat in political relationships — is so semantically labile, the figurative potential of the collocation of giantesses and a disturbance of the atmosphere is considerable.

I mentioned in Section V that Snorri does not provide evidence of the kenning type when he proposes it but there is one anonymous stanza (Skj, Ai, 183, Bi, 173), at the end of the long series of examples of kennings for poetry (Skmál, i, 14, v. 41), that Meissner includes in his set of kennings with the referent hugr:

Enn er kallaðr skáldskaprinn far eða lið dverganna: líð heitir o l ok lið heitir skip. Svá er tekit til dœma at skáldskapar er nú kallaðr fyrir því skip dverga, svá sem hér segir:

‘Bæði á ek til brúðar bergjarls ok skip dverga sollinn vind at senda seinfyrnd go tu eina.’

[Poetry is called the dwarfs’ vessel or lið: lið is a word for ale and a word for ship. This is now the basis for calling poetry ‘ship of dwarfs’, as it says here:

‘I have ready both swollen wind of rock-jarl’s bride and slow-to-disappear ship of dwarfs [> poetry] to send along the same path.’]

Kock (1926, §1098) construes brúðr as not belonging to the kenning at all. Instead he explains it as describing the recipient of the stanza, which is sent til brúðar, ‘to the woman’; he argues that since Egill’s kenning in Sonatorrek is taken to mean ‘thought’ without it having a feminine determinant, the same can apply

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here, berg jarls vindr denoting ‘thought’. The analogy is a false one, however, since the identification of ‘thought’ as the referent of Egill’s kenning derives from an emendation and the referent of the unemended text is more likely to be ‘battle’, as was explained in Section VI. Finnur Jónsson edits the verse among tenth-century anonymous fragments, construing the referent of vindr brúðar berg jarls as ‘fired-up thoughts inspired perhaps by love’,119 and Anthony Faulkes (Skmál, i, 163) also speculates that the stanza might come from a love-poem. The identification of the referent as belonging to Snorri’s special category (‘passion’) is more plausible than Meissner’s larger catch-all category of ‘thought’ since the composition of poetry requires thought a priori, and just as in Íslendingadrápa 5, it would seem redundant for a poet to advertise that he has a poem ready to deliver as well as his thoughts. Given that the context of the whole stanza (and the larger poetic composition the helmingr might once have formed part of ) is unknown, it is possible that the referent might have belonged to the sphere of martial courage instead, the poet warning his addressee that his influential verses will long be remembered, as will his readiness for a fight. In this instance, then, the referent could be either ‘passion’ or ‘courage’.

There is one more particularly illuminating example from Meissner’s list from a verse in the fourteenth-century Harðar saga Grímkelssonar, which is brought into the taxonomy purely as a result of Finnur’s emending hand — he changes a valkyrie into a giantess for the purpose — and is not an example of the kenning formation ‘wind of the giantess’ at all:

Hinn er mestr í manna minnum hafðr, sem ek inni, harmr í Hlakkar stormi hunnmargra Þorbjargar […].120

Hinn harmr sem ek inni í Hlakkar stormi Þorbjargar er mestr hafðr í hunnmargra manna minnum […].

[That sorrow in Þorbjo rg’s storm of Hlo kk, which I relate, is the greatest in many men’s memories […].]

The stanza is spoken by the eponymous hero Ho rðr and is preserved in the only medieval manuscript of the whole saga (Reykjavík, AM 556a 4to, from the late fifteenth century), in which the reading is straightforward (Hast 1960, i, 139).

119 Skj, Bi, 173: ‘Både har jeg (af elskov?) optændte tanker og digte […]’.120 Þórhallur Vilmundarson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson 1991, 34; Skj, Aii, 447, Bii, 478.


In the rettet (corrected) text of the stanza, however, Finnur Jónsson changed the word Hlo kk to Herkja — with no manuscript support — in order to make the evidence conform to the kenning type ‘wind of the giantess’, and Meissner reproduces the emended text.121 The most recent editor of the saga, Þórhallur Vilmundarson, retains the manuscript text but observes that a valkyrie name has been wrongly used in place of a troll-woman name, since, as it stands, ‘storm of the valkyrie’ ought to be a battle kenning.122 But perhaps it is a battle kenning working in a figurative way, since the locus for Þorbjörg’s extreme sorrow is her embattled mind, her troubled memories of past humiliation preventing her from ridding herself of embittered feelings. The preceding saga prose describes it thus: ‘Mun mér aldri sá harmr ór brjósti gangi’ (This sorrow will never leave my heart). As we have seen from previous examples, the transfer of an expression for physical combat into the realm of human feelings is not in itself surprising; what is striking in this example is the interchangeability of valkyries and giantesses to express the motif. The kenning in this case suggests that, at least to this poet, either super natural female figure may represent the powerful external forces that affect the emotions of a person and may be used in tandem with a wind base-word to ex press the referent ‘tumultuous thoughts’. Interestingly in this case, the subject is not a warrior or a poet but a woman, and the stimulus for the raging emotions is not love, or honour in battle, but social pride. It is difficult to establish whether the broadening of semantic catchment is innovative or inheres in the figure from the beginning; the other stark instance of interchangeability was from the twelfth-century poet Einarr Skúlason (discussed in Section IV).123 Evidence from the eddic poem Hamðismál may be germane here, although eddic poetry is notoriously difficult to date with any precision. In stanza 15 of the poem (which is nonetheless conventionally regarded as one of the oldest in the corpus), when the brothers Hamðir and So rli unsheath their weapons to kill their half-brother Erpr, their act is said to be at mun flagði (to the delight of the giantess). That a giantess may light up with joy at the prospect of a man’s death just as a valkyrie does suggests that, from an early point in the tradition, either supernatural female could participate in the conceit. Using the fact that the determinant is

121 Meissner 1921, 139 annotates the emendation with an asterisk, an acknowledgement that is lost in some scholarship; Lotte Motz, for instance, provides as evidence for her argument the equivalence between the kenning Herkju stormr and the referent ‘mind’ (Motz 1988, 31).

122 Þórhallur Vilmundarson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson 1991, 34n.: ‘Hlakkar (valkyrju) stormr: ætti að vera orrustukenning, en verður hér að merkja hugur; valkyrjuheitið er þá ranglega notað í stað tröllkonuheitis, en hug mátti kenna svo að kalla “vind tröllkvenna”, sjá Skáldskaparmál.’

123 Compare Frank 1997, 512, on the issue of originality and codification.

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the name of a valkyrie rather than a troll-woman as a basis for dating the verse in Harðar saga Grímkelssonar as late — as Þórhallur Vilmundarson does (Þórhallur Vilmundarson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson 1991, xix) — only muddies the issue.

VII. Conclusion

Although I hope to have demonstrated that the complexity of each of these kennings requires careful interpretation in context, the findings of this analysis may nonetheless be summed up — in crude taxonomic terms — as follows. of the sixteen instances of the kenning type ‘wind of the giantess’ that have been examined,124 five can be interpreted as referring to battle in a manner which is analogous to the semantic functioning of ‘wind of the valkyrie’ kennings (veðr gífrs, veðr járnso xu, byrr Gríðar, byrvindr mána bjarnar, and hregg bergstjóra — the latter two (‘wind of the shield’ and ‘storm of the mountain-ruler’) not belonging to the basic set except through emendation or interpretation by analogy); and a further four — all in the accusative case — seem to refer to what might be termed ‘battle ardour’ or ‘courage’ (byrr hamra vífs, hregg hraun-Atla sprakka, byrr þursa týs, and byrr mána óskkvánar, the latter two readings, it must be noted, derived from problematic manuscript texts).125 Five of the kennings refer to ‘ardour’ in the specific context of erotic attraction, two of them from the work of tenth-century poets, though preserved in manuscripts from after 1300 (byrr Surts kvánar and leiði jötuns snótar) and three which in all likelihood post-date Snorri’s work (vindr Gríðar, viðri Herkju, and byrr hamar norna). one anonymous helmingr extant only as a quotation within Snorri’s Skáldskaparmál preserves the kenning vindr brúðar berg jarls whose determinant may be ‘ardour’ in either a martial or erotic sense; the lack of context does not permit closer definition (nor is the date of the stanza ascertainable). Finally, the kenning stormr Herkju is a ‘wind of the giantess’ kenning used metaphorically to depict a woman’s troubled thoughts.

The corpus of kennings therefore supports Snorri’s proposition that vindr tro llkvinna = hugr in the sense of sefi, sjafni, ást, elskugi, vili, or munr, although the kenning type clearly extends beyond the specific context of love and generates referents that are closely related to those of the ‘wind of the valkyrie’ kennings.

124 Meissner 1921, 138–39, collects together fourteen citations (noting that bergstjóra hregg is doubtful); compare Frank 1997, 502, n. 52, who counts seventeen examples in fifteen stanzas or half-stanzas.

125 Compare Frank 1997, 504: ‘whenever the kenning [wind of the giantess] appears in verse likely to be correctly attributed to a tenth- or eleventh-century skald […] its meaning is something like “battle-fury”’.


Just as the wind of the valkyrie could signify either the place of battle or a warrior’s performance in battle, so the wind of the giantess seems to have signified either the battlefield or a warrior’s battle spirit. to some poets formulating kennings, the categories of valkyrie and giantess seem to have been interchangeable while to others the particular connotations of either figure are exploited. Meissner’s catch-all category, however, based on the type of base-word and type of determinant, forces a single referent onto all of them against the nuanced workings of the individual kennings in context. Furthermore, the practice of emending texts to fit the type can be seen to have distorted the body of evidence considerably. In his discussion of hugr in Skáldskaparmál, Snorri was probably drawing on his knowledge of the topos of star-crossed skalds invoking the wind of troll-wom en as a means of expressing the force of their erotic attraction to unattainable wom -en. His prescription, however, that poets using the motif should form the ken-ning using the name of any giantess or the name of any giant’s wife, mother, or daughter, reveals his zeal for systematizing what were in fact much looser conventions. Names of giantesses (Gríðr and Herkja) are employed by the poet of the Uppsala-Edda’s stanza and a named giant (Surtr) is used by Hallfreðr; but it is only giants’ wives who are deployed in kennings of this type.126 There are no mothers and daughters of giants on the record in this kind of expression. The majority of the kennings under consideration are in fact formed by determinants which are nouns (brúðr berg jarls, jo tuns snót, gífr) or kennings (hamra-víf, hamar-norn) rather than mythological names.

The semantic reach of the two lists of synonyms for hugr in Snorri’s passage goes some way to ex plain ing the close relationship of erotic danger and martial jeopardy in the minds of skalds, a relationship that is underpinned by the notion that in either circumstance, a supernatural female figure might be imagined as af -fecting a man’s fortunes. It may be helpful in this regard to contextualize Snorri’s usage of the word hugr in the passage from Skáldskaparmál by looking at his usage elsewhere in the Edda and usage in other mythological texts. Snorri describes the legendary hero Sigurðr, for instance, as the greatest of war-kings in ancestry, strength, and courage (‘Sigurðr var ágætastr allra herkonunga af ætt ok afli ok hug’) (Skmál, i, 46) and reports that the giant Hrungnir dared Þórr to fight a dual with him as a test of courage (hugraun) (Skmál, i, 21). The poet Einarr Skúlason refers to a king’s heart swelling up in battle, bulging with courage (hugþrútinn) (Skmál, i, 91, v. 336; Skj, Ai, 480, Bi, 452), while o nundr in Grettis saga taunted warriors

126 The name Gríðr also occurs among those kennings whose referent is not ‘passion’ (in Stúfr’s verse). In my tally I am excluding the hypothesized giant names Máni and Járnsaxi; the kenning hraun-Atli represents a different form of expression which is not covered by Snorri’s formulation.

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for having a greater capacity for talk than action (hygg jandi) (Skj, Aii, 431, Bii, 462), by which he means turning courageous thoughts into fighting. While hygg jandi is listed by Snorri as a heiti for vit (intelligence) in Skáldskaparmál (Skmál, i, 109), the word seems more particularly to describe the zone of the mind where mental reaction prompts physical action. Huginn is also the name of one of Óðinn’s ravens,127 and in the contests described in Gylfaginning (40–43) between Þórr and Útgarðrloki, one of the unbeatable opponents is called Hugi. In both cases, however, the thought that is conceptualized is non-human: Huginn the raven is a projection of Óðinn’s thought and Hugi, the giant’s. Snorri explains in Gylfaginning that one of the challenges Þórr’s party faced was a running race between Þjálfi and the boy called Hugi. After soundly beating Þjálfi in three races (increasing his winning margin in each), Útgarðaloki explained that Hugi was in fact the power of his own mind, whose speed Þjálfi was unlikely to be able to compete with: ‘þat var hugr minn, ok var Þjálfa eigi vænt at þreyta skjótfœri hans’ (Gylfaginning 43). The sense of hugr here, which the young runner personifies, is the mental capacity to outsmart a competitor, of being able to stay ahead of the field and indeed increase one’s lead during the stages of the competition. It also carries the sense of staying power, a capacity which the young wolf cub Fenrir so feared the Æsir would mock him for lacking that he insisted that one of the gods pledge his hand as guarantee that the bonds placed on him were not inescapable: ‘En heldr en þér frýið mér hugar’ (Gylfaginning 28). The young wolf ’s enjoinder that his hugr not be mocked expresses much the same sentiment as Einarr Helgason and Haukr Valdísarson do when they invoke the wind of the giantess to signify a warrior’s resolute bravery in the face of extreme danger (as discussed in Section VI).

The mode of personifying abstractions which is apparent in the story about Hugi — and which is also evident in Þórr’s wrestling match with elli (old age)128 — is akin to the classical figure of allegory. Such a rhetorical figure, however, does not seem to have motivated kenning construction to any significant extent. (Nor, interestingly, did the Christian concept that a person’s spirit (andi) is linked to breath.)129 Almost all kenning referents are material objects (ships, weapons, gold), living things (gods, animals and people, including parts of their bodies),

127 Gylfaginning 32–33; see also Faulkes’s Glossary, s.v. Huginn (Skmál, ii, 480).128 Gylfaginning (43): ‘ok engi mun verða ef svá gamall er at elli bíðr, at eigi komi ellin o llum

til falls’ (and there has never been anyone who grows old enough to experience old age whom old age does not get the better of in the end).

129 See LP, s.v. andi, and the discussion of the image of wind throughout Frank 1997.


or natural phenomena (land, sea, summer, night) (Meissner 1921, ix–xi). An extension of the category of observable phenomena, such as fire (Meissner’s §10), rain (§12), or springtime (§22), are those kennings denoting observable activities, such as battle (§81) or the recitation of poetry (§100).130 That poetry is conceived of as a performed activity as much as an abstraction is born out by the verbs it is the subject of: it is offered, heard, received and, in its metaphorical state as a liquid, it flows, swells, resounds, and echoes.131 The versatility of kennings for poetry derive from the richness of the myth telling of its origins as well as the semantics of its base-words, many of which denote a liquid.132 The fluid nature of the image behind the base-word furnished poets with a highly versatile metaphor, and the same versatility is apparent in the wind-of-the-giantess kennings whose base-words similarly denote fluids: the force of air-currents in the atmosphere. While the kennings of the type ‘wind of the giantess’ do not denote ‘thought’ in an abstract sense, they do express the idea that human thought processes, to the ex -tent they can be projected back from people’s reactions, might be explained as the effects of powerful supernatural forces.

Philological systems of classification such as Meissner’s have made important advances in the fields of old Norse mythology and poetics, but as we have seen, at least one of his categories which is supported by uncertain evidence has been reinforced by scholars in successive generations, perhaps reassured in the ensuing decades of the twentieth century by structuralism’s reassertion of interpretation based on types and sub-types. Any investigation which seeks to illuminate the con -ceptual world behind old Norse mythology as it is expressed in skaldic poetry, however, must first of all establish the evidence of the manuscripts themselves rather than relying solely on editions presenting emended texts. Wariness also needs to be exercised in relation to the systematizing impulse itself which can produce distortions in the accumulated body of evidence since analogy with one emendation can be used to provide a rationale for further emendations. Further-more, there is need for caution in regarding the construction of kennings as entirely normative, despite their deeply conventional nature. Far from being a fixed system of equivalences, the dynamic process of alluding to myths or details

130 See also Meissner’s category ‘Varia’ (§105) which includes some expressions for abstract ideas, though they tend to be formulated in very physical terms. ‘Death’, for example, is expressed as andrán (breath-robbery), lífs grand (life’s injury), or aldrslit (the snapping off of life).

131 See Skmál, i, 12–14, vv. 26–39, for examples of the range of verbs used with kennings for poetry.

132 For a discussion of the metaphor, see Frank 1981 and Quinn 2010.

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of mythological narratives through the creation of kennings produced a highly variegated body of expressions. While some strong patterns are evident among the kennings collected together as category §64, there are enough nebulous patches to inspire a more delicate mode of interpretation than that stemming from an understanding of kenning composition as a system of mechanical substitution.

Kennings yoking together giantesses and wind are likely to have been expressive of a fundamental mythological dynamic: that supernatural female figures have the power to affect men’s lives. The situations in which poets imagined moments of affect, however, are many, the strength of the meteorological effect variable, and the implied attitudes of the giantess or troll-woman to her subjects diverse. The mythology generated possibilities that resonated and amplified in the minds of poets who engaged the semiotic potential of the collocation ‘wind of the giantess’ to great effect. Any project to order the body of evidence along taxonomic lines must avoid the risk of assuming that mythological ideas were cast out into a space that was acoustically dead.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the anonymous assessor for Viking and Medieval Scandinavia for their comments on this article and to Stefan Brink for inviting me to the ‘Myth and Theory in the old Norse World’ conference at the University of Aberdeen in october 2009, where the first version of this research was presented. I would also like to thank Carolyne Larrington and Emily osborne for discussing aspects of the subject with me in the intervening years.


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Documents

The ‘Wind of the Giantess’: Snorri Sturluson, Rudolf Meissner, and the Interpretation of Mythological Kennings along Taxonomic Lines