Note to GunnLeif Merl I 38VIII
[All]: Cf. DGB 112 (Reeve and Wright 2007, 147.61-2; cf. Wright 1988, 103, prophecy 5): Erit miseranda regni desolatio, et areae messium in fruticosos saltus redibunt ‘There will be grievous desolation in the kingdom and the threshing-floors for harvest will revert to fruitful glades’ (Reeve and Wright 2007, 146). This passage would make better sense if in infructuosos ‘in unfruitful’, the reading of ms. H of the First Variant Version were adopted (Wright 1988, 103), thus correcting an obvious haplography. This is done by e.g. the Anglo-Norman decasyllabic translation: lande senz fruit ‘fruitless scrub’ (Blacker 2005, 35) and Alain de Flandres (Wille 2015, 128). Implicitly, at least, Gunnlaugr’s skógar ‘forests’ are unfruitful: it is unclear whether he knew such a reading or has rationalised the text on his own initiative. Geoffrey explains in DGB XI that the famine and plague are so severe that the Saxons cannot survive in Britain any better than the Britons (Reeve and Wright 2007, 278-9). Gunnlaugr interweaves motifs from the source passage corresponding to I 36.
References
- Bibliography
- Reeve, Michael D., and Neil Wright. 2007. Geoffrey of Monmouth. The History of the Kings of Britain. An Edition and Translation of De gestis Britonum [Historia regum Britanniae]. Woodbridge: Boydell.
- Wright, Neil, ed. 1988. The Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth. II. The First Variant Version: A Critical Edition. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.
- Blacker, Jean, ed. 2005. ‘The Anglo-Norman Verse Prophecies of Merlin’. Arthuriana 15, 1-125.
- Wille, Clara, ed. and trans. 2015. Alain de Flandres, Prophetie und Politik: die Explanatio in Prophetia Merlini Ambrosii des Alanus Flandrensis. Lateinische Sprache und Literatur des Mittelalters 49. Bern: Lang.