Note 43 — The Greenland Ballad of Atli

The manuscript reading of lines 1–2, involving a metrical error, is: “In the house came the word | of the warring without, / Loud in front of the hall | they heard a thrall shouting.” Some editors assume a gap of two lines after line 2, the missing passage giving the words of the thrall. The manuscript marks line 3 as the beginning of a stanza, and many editions make a separate stanza of lines 3–5, some of them assuming the loss of a line after line 3. With the stanza as here given, line 5 may well be spurious.