The verb which governed thann must then be áfellr, that is to say, the verb fellr united with the preposition á. But in that case á is not the substantive á, a river, a running water, and thus the river which falls from the east around venom dales has its source in an error.
Thus we have, under this supposition, found that there is something that fellr á, falls on, streams down upon, him who seduces the wife of another. This something must be expressed by a substantive, which is now concealed behind the adverb austan, and must have resembled it sufficiently in sound to be transformed into it.
Such a substantive, and the only one of the kind, is austr. This means something that can falla á, stream down upon; for austr is bail-water (from ausa, to bail), waste-water, water flowing out of a gutter or shoot.
A test as to whether there originally stood austr or not is to be found in the following substantive, which now has the appearance of eitrdala. For if there was written austr, then there must, in the original text, have followed a substantive (1) which explained the kind of waste-water meant, (2) which had sufficient resemblance to eitrdala to become corrupted into it.
The sea-faring Norsman distinguished between two kinds of austr: byttu-austr and dælu-austr. The bail-water in a ship could be removed either by bailing it out with scoops directly over the railing, or it could be scooped into a dæla, a shoot or trough laid over the railing. The latter was the more convenient method. The difference between these two kinds of austr became a popular phrase; compare the expression thá var byttu-austr, eigi dælu-austr. The word dæla was also used figuratively; compare láta dæluna ganga, to let the shoots (troughs) run (Gretla, 98), a proverb by which men in animated conversation are likened unto dælur, troughs, which are opened for flowing conversation.
Under such circumstances we might here expect after the word austr the word dæla, and, as venom here is in question, eitr-dæla.
Eitr-dæla satisfies both the demands above made. It explains what sort of waste-water is meant, and it resembles eitr-dala sufficiently to be corrupted into it.
Thus we get á fellr austr eitrdæla: "On (him who seduces another man's wife) falls the waste-water of the venom-troughs." Which these venom-troughs are, the strophe in its entirety ought to define. This constitutes the second test of the correctness of the reading.
It must be admitted that if á fellr austr eitrdæla is the original reading, then a corruption into á fellr austan eitrdala had almost of necessity to follow, since the preposition á was taken to be the substantive á, river, a running stream. How near at hand such a confounding of these words lies is demonstrated by another Völuspa strophe, where the preposition á in á ser hon ausaz aurgom forsi was long interpreted as the substantive á.
We shall now see whether the expression á fellr austr eitrdæla makes sense, when it is introduced in lieu of the dotted lines above: