Ormr swings his beam like a hreytispeldi

hreytispeldi

Source term: hreytispeldi; 'bull-roarer' (Helgi; Faulkes)

hreytispeldi: 'flung slat', from hreyta 'to throw, fling' and speldi 'small slat of wood'.

In the fourteenth-century Icelandic tale of Ormr Stórólfsson, Earl Eiríkr sends sixty men against Ormr, who has no weapon but a wooden beam. He swings it around himself like a hreytispeldi, so that no one dares come near. The word means a flung slat, and the Icelandic philologist Helgi Guðmundsson identified it as the bullroarer: a thin strip of wood whirled on a cord, which the saga's audience evidently knew as a boys' toy. Anthony Faulkes, editing the tale, judged that the bullroarer reading fits the scene exactly.

Ormr hafde ekki uopna nema asinn ok ueifde honum vm sig sem hreytispelldi

Ormr had no weapon but the beam, and swung it around himself like a hreytispeldi.

Orms þáttr Stórólfssonar, Flateyjarbók I (1860), p. 532, quoted in Helgi Guðmundsson, 'Hreytispeldi,' Gripla 3 (1979), p. 224.

Particulars

Object

A thin wooden slat swung around the body on a cord.

Function

A children's toy in fourteenth-century Iceland, known from a saga simile.