Note to Anon Pét 4^VII

[5-6]: Finnur Jónsson (Skj B) translates: dog hænger der sammen der indenfor en med lim sammenfæstet livshinde ‘yet there holds together within a membrane of life (fastened together) with glue’ (my italics). The image is certainly striking, but it is hard to think of a parallel for this rather mucilaginous collocation of membrane and glue, and (perhaps not surprisingly) the word hinna ‘membrane’ would not appear to be used elsewhere in the corpus of OIcel. poetry. Kahle (1898, 109) takes hinna (as here) as acc. pl. of hinn pron. (object of fyr innan), but renders 5-8: ‘Nevertheless it (the sick breast) holds together within these (the vices), through the prayers of Peter with the limb of life (= Christ? life itself?)’. With the image of the ‘mortar of life’ cf. perhaps Langland Piers Plowman, B-text (Kane and Donaldson 1975), Passus XIX, 323-4: And of his baptisme and blood þat he bledde on roode | He made a manere morter, and mercy it highte ‘And from the baptismal water and blood that he shed on the cross (cf. John XIX.34) he made a kind of mortar, and it was called mercy’.

References

1. Bibliography
2. Skj B = Finnur Jónsson, ed. 1912-15b. Den norsk-islandske skjaldedigtning. B: Rettet tekst. 2 vols. Copenhagen: Villadsen & Christensen. Rpt. 1973. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde & Bagger.
3. Kahle, Bernhard, ed. 1898. Isländische geistliche Dichtungen des ausgehenden Mittelalters. Heidelberg: Winter.
4. Kane, George and E. Talbot Donaldson, eds. 1975. Piers Plowman: The B Version. Will’s Visions of Piers Plowman, Do-Well, Do-Better and Do-Best. London: Athlone Press. Rpt. 1988. London: Athlone Press and Berkeley: University of California Press.