Note to Anon Phoenix 1^III

[All]: The Old English text corresponding to the poem (as edited by Blake 1964, 94-9, from whose edn this and the following quotations derive) reads as follows: Hāl bēo þū, fenix, fugele fægerest. Feorren þū cōme. Þū glitenest swā rēad gold, ealra fugela king, fenix gehāten ‘Greetings, Phoenix, handsomest of birds. You have come from afar. You glisten like red gold, king of all birds, called “phoenix”’. The Old English homily is apparently a translation from Latin (see Förster 1920, 64-5), and because it uses the word cristal ‘crystal’, whereas the Old Icelandic prose passage uses the latinate kristallus, Blake (1964, 97) argues that the Old Icelandic text is translated from the (unattested) Latin source rather than from the Old English. Yet there is no scholarly agreement about whether the source of the Old Norse text was Latin or English (see, e.g., Larsen 1942 and Helgi Skúli Kjartansson 2015, 276-8), and it has even been argued that the Old English text is translated from Old Norse (Yerkes 1984). Though Yerkes rightly concedes that it is improbable that the Old English text should have been translated from Old Norse (especially given the difference in the date of the mss), his reasons for thinking it possible are not inconsiderable, given that the Old English text uses the terms carlfugol ‘cock, male bird’ and cwenfugol (or cwenefugol) ‘hen, female bird’, corresponding to karlfugl and kvenfugl in the Old Icelandic text, given that carl is not a word otherwise attested in Old English, and neither the Old English cognate ceorl (with one possible exception: ceorlstrang ‘strong as a man’ in a late glossary) nor cwen-/cwene- is commonly used as a sex-differentiating prefix in Old English (Yerkes 1984, 26; see also Helgi Skúli Kjartansson 2015, 277 and n. 12). However, there are good internal reasons to believe that the Old Icelandic prose is translated from some version of the Old English, given certain similarities in form. The Old English homily is to a great extent composed in alliterative prose, and although the Old Icelandic text is not, in certain passages it adopts expressions with equivalents in the Old English that can be explained plausibly only as motivated by the alliterative form. For example, the Old Icelandic text twice refers to the bird as fagri fenix ‘handsome phoenix’, where fagri is hardly required by the sense of the passage but corresponds to fæger ‘beautiful’ in the Old English version, in which it serves the alliterative form. Likewise, the Old English homilist says of the bird, Hē is mycel and mǣre swā se Mihtige hine gescōp ‘He is large and splendid, as the Mighty one made him’, in which the latter clause has the appearance of a cheville, composed merely to fulfill the alliterative requirement, though it is taken over in the Old Icelandic version: hann er harðla mikill ok undarligr at skepnu svá sem Guð skóp hann ‘he is very large and wondrous in form, as God made him’. In the expression gull rautt ‘red gold’ (on which see below, Note to l. 4) rautt also seems to have been adopted from the Old English text, as ‘red’ is not a usual descriptor for gold in Latin texts. That the Egyptians’ greeting to the bird takes the form of verse in the Old Icelandic text of course also suggests that the Old English homily was the model.

References

1. Bibliography
2. Blake, N. F., ed. 1964. The Phoenix. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
3. Förster, Max. 1920. ‘Der Inhalt der altenglischen Handschrift Vespasianus D xiv’. Englische Studien 54, 46-68.
4. Helgi Skúli Kjartansson. 2015. ‘Vísan um fönix: Örlítil viðbót við forníslenskan kveðskap’. Gripla 26, 275-85.
5. Larsen, Henning. 1942. ‘Notes on the Phoenix’. JEGP 41, 79-84.
6. Yerkes, David. 1984. ‘The Old English and Old Norse Accounts of the Phoenix’. Journal of English Linguistics 17, 24-7.