Fjolsvinnsmal or The Lay of Fjolsvinn is the second of two Old Norse poems which comprise the Svipdagsmál, The Lay of Svipdag. In the first poem, Svipdag enlists the aid of his dead mother, Groa, a witch, to assist him in the completion of a task set by his cruel stepmother.
At the commencement of Fjolsvinnsmal, Svipdag has arrived at a castle on a mountain top. There he encounters a giant watchman who rudely tells him to begone, Fjolsvith.
Fjolsvith is one of the names of the principal of the gods of Asgard, Odin. Fjolsvith tells him to go away, while asking him his name; Svipdag wisely conceals his name.
A game of question and answer riddles ensues, wherein Svipdag learns that Mengloth lives in the castle guarded by the Fjolsvith, and that the castle may not be entered by any save one: Svipdag. He gives his true name and the gates are opened and Mengloth greets her saviour.
The Challenge: Prove Housman Wrong The Old Norse narrative sequence "Svipdagsmal", comprising two poems "Grougaldr" and "Fjolsvinnsmal" together about 1500 words long, survives in 47 manuscripts known to me. These manuscripts were written in Iceland, Denmark and Sweden between 1650 and 1830.
The Data I have computer files of every agreement and disagreement on every reading of 44 of the 47 manuscripts (the other three are not important), generated direct from my computer collation of these manuscripts in my doctoral work (see my articles in *Literary and Linguistic Computing* 4 (1989) 99-105, 174-81).
This data is available in two ASCII files, one containing all the data for "Grougaldr", the other for "Fjolsvinnsmal".