> Ekki héldu þeir aftur að hausti.

Grace: "They didn't steer back until? autumn."

Alan: "at= see Zoega III (1) Prep of time at sumri hausti, vetri,
vári, next summer, etc..."

I wonder if it might be better to read this as simply "they didn't
head back in the autumn", Zoega III (1), cf. at páskum "at Easter", at
kveldi "in the evening". E.g. a Modern Icendic example from Google
shows a graph of the percentage of teachers 'sem var við störf að
hausti en var ekki við störf haustið á eftir', which the page
translates "who were working in the autumn but were not working the
following autumn." Another example is of a page of photographs of
'Tjörnin að hausti' "The Tjörn in the autumn", "...at autumn", hardly
photographs taken "next autumn"!

If I've understood this right, Zoega's definition "next summer, &c."
is just intended to be a special subset of this where 'komanda' or 'er
kemr' is understood, "in the (coming) autumn", but I don't think he's
saying that 'at' + a season name always has to have this sense of
"next..." MM & HP "that autumn" seems logical; if they've spent the
summer sailing and fighting, autumn would be the season immediately
approaching, and this accords with the fact that the next time period
mentioned is 'annat sumar' "the following summer". To me, to say
"next autumn" here might suggest that the narrative has just skipped a
year without telling us what they did "that autumn".

LN