description
Gamli kanóki ‘canon Gamli’ (where the name Gamli, ‘the old one’ may itself be a nickname) is best known as the author of the poem
Harmsól ‘Sun of Sorrow’, which is explicitly ascribed to him in a marginal note at the beginning of the poem on fol. 12r, l. 42 of the sole surviving ms.,
AM 757 a 4° (B):
Harmsol er gamle orti kanoke ‘
Harmsól, which canon Gamli composed’. Gamli is also mentioned by name in
Jóns saga postula (
Jón4), where the author of the prose text prefaces the quotation of four sts from Gamli’s
Jónsdrápa with the information:
Annan mann til óðgirðar signaðum Johanni nefnum vér Gamla kanunk austr í Þykkvabœ, hann orti drápu dyrligum Johanni ‘As the second man to have composed a poem to blessed John we [I] name canon Gamli in the east at Þykkvabœr, he composed a
drápa to S. John’ (
Jón4 1874, 510). In a remark before the fourth st. Gamli is referred to as
bróðir Gamli ‘Brother Gamli’ (
Jón4 1874, 511). Þykkvabœr was an Augustinian monastery in south-eastern Iceland founded in 1168; Gamli was thus an Augustinian canon (or canon regular) of this community. His
floruit can be inferred from the date of the foundation of Þykkvabœr as being in the mid- to late C12th.