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Hollander: Jómsv. saga. 213
One detail I wish to call particular attention to is the
following. Aki, the uncle of the later Pálnatoki, is treach-
orously slain by king Harald. His brother Pálnir then
marries his bride. In the first night his wife has a dream
(H 8, 1). ”1 dreamed”, she says, ”that I was on this estate,
and me seemed that I was busy weaving a cloth. Then a
weight fell down from the middle of the woof. Then I
saw that the weights were the heads of men; and I lifted
up the head that had fallen and recognized it”. ”Whose
head was it”, asked Pálnir. ”It was the head of king Harald
the son of Gorm”. ”That is better dreamt than undreamt”,
says Pálnir. ”So it seems to me also”, says she.
The only other place where this image of the heads
of men for the weights of a loom is found is in the Dar-
radarljód: of the Njála. There it is essential, here it is
adventitious, and I suspect this episode to have been suggested
from the Yalkyrias’ song1).
Though the matter is impossible of proof there is no
doubt in my mind that the version in MS. 510 of Ingibjprg’s
dream is a later invention. I see no reason why (as af
Petersens thinks, p. XYIII) the dream as related in all the
other versions isnot as clear to us in its bearings as it was
to Pálnir and his wife: one of the weights of the woof drops
— it is king Harald’s head. It is Ingibjçrg who dreams.
Therefore it is her woof, for no one but her son from this
*) Of the 11th or 12th century. Cf. Eddica Minora p. 58: Eirikr
Magnusson, Sagahook of the Viking Club III, 1910, p. 78 f. Cf. stanza II:
That web is warped
W ith human entrails,
And is hard weighted
With heads of people;
Blood-stained darts
Do for treadles,
The forebeam’s iron-bound,
The reed’s of arrows;
Swords be sleys
For this web of war.
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