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Hymiskvitha

  Thor spake:6.[1] “May we win, dost thou think,  this whirler of water?”  Tyr spake:“Aye, friend, we can,  if cunning we are.”
7.[2] Forward that day  with speed they fared,From Asgarth came they  to Egil's home;The goats with horns  bedecked he guarded;Then they sped to the hall  where Hymir dwelt.
8.[3] The youth found his grandam,  that greatly he loathed,

    cf. Vafthruthnismol, 31, note. Hymir: this giant figures only in this episode. It is not clear why Tyr, who is elsewhere spoken of as a son of Othin, should here call Hymir his father. Finnur Jonsson, in an attempt to get round this difficulty, deliberately changed the word "father" to "grandfather," but this does not help greatly.

  1. Neither manuscript has any superscriptions, but most editors have supplied them as above. From this point through stanza 11 the editors have varied considerably in grouping the lines into stanzas. The manuscripts indicate the third lines of stanzas 7, 8, 9, and 10 as beginning stanzas, but this makes more complications than the present arrangement. It is possible that, as Sijmons suggests, two lines have been lost after stanza 6.
  2. Egil: possibly, though by no means certainly, the father of Thor's servant, Thjalfi, for, according to Snorri, Thor's first stop on this journey was at the house of a peasant whose children, Thjalfi and Roskva, he took into his service; cf. stanza 38, note. The Arnamagnæan Codex has "Ægir" instead of "Egil," but, aside from the fact that Thor had just left Ægir's house, the sea-god can hardly have been spoken of as a goat-herd.
  3. The youth: Tyr, whose extraordinary grandmother is Hymir's mother. We know nothing further of her, or of the other,

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