Commentary:        Lying in his tent one rainy morning, Jónas heard his horse Baldur making water outside. This was followed by a cloudburst.

The poem was composed during Jónas's trip around Snæfellsnes and is found in an undated letter to Konráð Gíslason that begins: "In Hrauk ['The Heap,' Jónas's name for his tent], near Bjarnarhöfn, sometime in August 1841." After transcribing the poem Jónas continues: "What would you expect but a poem of this kind when I woke this morning in my sleeping bag to find the reindeer skin rotting from days of continuous downpour so that hair was shedding all over me (its hair, you understand, not mine). Outdoors things are — as you can well imagine — gloomy etc. But I can't stay in the farmhouse because the sýslumaður's wife is continually giving birth. To one and the same baby, of course. God help her, poor thing!" (2E90-1)

The sýslumaður in question was Sigfús Skúlason (Schulesen) (1801-1862) and it was his wife Ingibjörg who was having such a hard time delivering their son (Hans Árni). Later in Jónas's letter we are treated to a news flash and told that the baby has now been born. Since the baby's birth is known to have taken place on 16 August (see 2D365), it is evident that Jónas began the letter that same morning. It was the fourth consecutive day of "continuous heavy rain" (2E385) which made it impossible for Jónas to continue his travels and confined him to his tent. He was bored and irritated and there was nothing better to do than lie in his damp sleeping bag and construct complex sléttubönd verse in his head.

Here is a literal translation of Jónas's original:

Shadow-Baldur, outside alone,
pours forth vapid beer,
thunder-wielder, by no means slow,
opens heaven's sluices.

Jónas may have called the horse Skuggabaldur ("Shadow-Baldur") because it is outside the tent, therefore not directly visible.² But he is also making a pun: in ordinary usage, skuggabaldur was the name for a well-known folklore creature, the offspring of a male cat and a female fox (or dog).³

Jónas calls the subject of lines 3-4 skrugguvaldur ("thunder-wielder"). Konráð Gíslason and Brynjólfur Pétursson took this as a reference to "Jupiter, god of thunder" (A198), but it seems equally likely that Jónas has Thor in mind.⁴ At least this interpretation has the merit of keeping the poem's mythological allusions confined to one pantheon.