I see no one has responded to my other two posts on this subject.
Whine...sniffle. ;-(

Ok, now that I know my UTF-8 was causing problems for other, I'm going to
attempt this with ISO-8859-1. Please let me know if this comes through
grabled. If I don't get a response this time, I guess I'll give up on this
topic for now.

Here's my latest go at it. I've attempted to collect all the relevant
entries from Zoëga into a single page which you can find here:

http://www.speakeasy.org/~hattons/norse/havamal-002.html

The following was copied from a usenet post. I'd be interested to know what
others make of it:

2.
Gefendur heilir!
Gestur er inn kominn!
hvar skal sitja sjá?
Mjög er bráður
sá er á bröndum skal
síns um freista frama.

Take a look at the lyrics of this song:
http://www.davemcnally.com/lyrics/TheMoodyBlues/TopRankSuite.asp

Notice how two thoughts are interleaved? One sentence is spoken in
fragments at the end of each verse. This is a technique used in Norse
poetry. I don't understand it well, but this might be the kind of thing we
have going on here.
(See E.V. Gordon's _Old Norse_ 2nd ed., Page xli "Another difficulty which
skaldic poetry presents to the modern reader is in the complicated order of
words. The skalds were accustomed to interweave strands of sentences, giving
first a part of one, then a part of the other, then reverting to the
first....")

The first two lines are fairly clear:

Hail to the Hosts!
A guest is come in!

Now the 'sjá' could be a demonstrative pronoun.

Demonstrative pronoun:

http://www.usingenglish.com/glossary/demonstrative-pronoun.html

"This; that; these; those; none and neither are Demonstrative Pronouns that
substitute nouns when the nouns they replace can be understood from the
context. They also indicate whether they are replacing singular or plural
words and give the location of the object:"

Perhaps this pronoun is precedent to the following verse. If so, we might
read it as

Where shall we seat this person (who...)?

He in much haste
who goes near the brands,
whoes luck shall be tried.

In this I'm suggesting 'á bröndum' belongs with 'um' from the subsequent
line. I guess that would require a phrase such as 'á bröndum um' to be
acceptable Old Norse. It would mean "(go) to the fireside". I'm also
suggesting that 'skal' goes with 'síns freista frama.' I'm then relying on
Zoëga's "freista síns frama, to try one's luck". I have not analyzed all
the case agreement, or the likelyhood of the first sentence being
implicitly integral to the next. This is just a suggestion.

This would mean we have two phrases as follows: 'Mjög er bráður sá er á
bröndum um' and 'skal síns freista frama'. I originally thought the part
about whoes luck shall be tried aluded to the chance he took on entering in
the first strophe. I'm starting to think it simply means 'Where should you
seat a guest? One who runs over to the fireplace, who should hope he'll be
lucky (that you can take a hint.)'
--
STH
Hatton's Law: There is only One inviolable Law.