Margaret Clunies Ross (ed.) 2017, ‘Anonymous Lausavísur, Stanzas from the Fourth Grammatical Treatise 12’ in Kari Ellen Gade and Edith Marold (eds), Poetry from Treatises on Poetics. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 3. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 585.
Vatn kalla mig
— vil eg efla þig,
hoddveitir — frams
hauðrfjörnis grams:
eg hreinsa alt;
eg vermi kalt;
eg birti sjón;
eg bæti tjón.
Kalla mig vatn {frams grams {hauðrfjörnis}}; eg vil efla þig, {hoddveitir}: eg hreinsa alt; eg vermi kalt; eg birti sjón; eg bæti tjón.
‘I call myself water of the outstanding king of the earth-helmet [SKY/HEAVEN > = God (= Christ)]; I want to strengthen you, gold-giver [GENEROUS MAN]: I cleanse everything; I warm what is cold; I brighten vision; I repair loss.’
Stanza 12 illustrates the second kind of prosopopoeia, when something lifeless addresses something living. After the stanza the following explanation is given: her er sagt at ǫlmvsv giǫfín kalli sik vatn kristz, ok telr vpp dygðer sinar, eggiandi manninn til milldinnar, þviat sva sem vatnit slǫkver likamlegan elld, slikt hið sama slokkver ǫlmosan synda brvna ok þvær ꜳ þꜳ̋ leið sꜳ̋l, sem vatnit bv́kinn ‘here it is said that Alms-giving calls herself the water of Christ, and enumerates her virtues, urging the man to mercy, because, just as the water quenches bodily fire, in the same way alms quenches the fire of sins and washes the soul in that [same] way as the water [does] the body’.
The metre of this stanza is a variety of runhent ‘end-rhymed’, with tetrasyllabic lines (fornyrðislag Type E) rhyming in pairs.
Text is based on reconstruction from the base text and variant apparatus and may contain alternative spellings and other normalisations not visible in the manuscript text. Transcriptions may not have been checked and should not be cited.
Vatn kalla mig
— vil eg efla þig,
hodd-veitir — frams
hauðrfjörnis grams:
eg hreinsa alt;
eg vermi kalt;
eg birti sjón;
eg bæti tjón.
Use the buttons at the top of the page to navigate between stanzas in a poem.
The text and translation are given here, with buttons to toggle whether the text is shown in the verse order or prose word order. Clicking on indiviudal words gives dictionary links, variant readings, kennings and notes, where relevant.
This is the text of the edition in a similar format to how the edition appears in the printed volumes.
This view is also used for chapters and other text segments. Not all the headings shown are relevant to such sections.