Anon Vitn 21^VII

Þagnar sætan signuð;
sonr hennar rieð þenna
fylla framburð allan
fríð sannindi þannin:
‘Það vitni ber eg brúði
bjart og gott,’ kvað dróttinn,
‘áðr sem mín bar móðir;
mær hefir satt að kæra.’

Signuð sætan þagnar; sonr hennar rieð fylla allan þenna framburð, fríð sannindi, þannin: ‘Það vitni, bjart og gott, ber eg brúði,’ kvað dróttinn, ‘sem móðir mín bar áðr; mær hefir satt að kæra.’

The blessed lady falls silent; her son did validate this entire statement, the splendid truth, thus: ‘That witness, bright and good, I bear about the woman,’ said the Lord, ‘which my mother bore before; the maiden has a true [cause] for complaint [lit. to complain].’

Mss: 713(85), 721(12r)

Readings: [1] signuð: signað 721    [2] sonr: son 713, 721;    rieð: tók 721    [4] þannin: ‘þannig’ 721    [8] að: om. 721

Editions: Skj AII, 486, Skj BII, 524, Skald II, 287; Kahle 1898, 54, Sperber 1911, 28, 72, Wrightson 2001, 37.

Notes: [All]: Cf. Mar (1871, 302): Þat sama ber ek her vm sem móðir min ‘I bear the same [testimony] about this as my mother’. — [2] rieð ‘did’: Used periphrastically with infin. fylla. Tók ‘began’ (so 712) is syntactically and metrically possible. — [4] fríð sannindi (n. acc. pl.) ‘splendid truth’: Lit. ‘splendid truths’. Sperber takes this as an expression for Christ (so also Schottmann 1973, 68 and n. 13, 375). — [6] gott ... dróttinn: The internal rhyme (-ott : -ótt-) is skothent rather than aðalhent, but it probably indicates the instability of the length of the vowel preceding the consonant cluster -tt. It is unclear whether the [o:] has been already shortened to [o], and here and elsewhere the length has been retained graphemically as <ó> in dróttinn ‘Lord’.

References

1. Bibliography
2. Skald = Kock, Ernst Albin, ed. 1946-50. Den norsk-isländska skaldediktningen. 2 vols. Lund: Gleerup.
3. Schottmann, Hans. 1973. Die isländische Mariendichtung. Untersuchungen zur volkssprachigen Mariendichtung des Mittelalters. Münchner germanistische Beiträge 9. Munich: Fink.
4. Sperber, Hans, ed. 1911. Sechs isländische Gedichte legendarischen Inhalts. Uppsala Universitets årsskrift, filosofi, språkvetenskap och historiska vetenskaper 2. Uppsala: Akademische Buchdruckerei Edv. Berling.
5. Wrightson, Kellinde, ed. 2001. Fourteenth-Century Icelandic Verse on the Virgin Mary: Drápa af Maríugrát, Vitnisvísur af Maríu, Maríuvísur I-III. Viking Society for Northern Research Text Series 14. University College London: Viking Society for Northern Research.
6. Kahle, Bernhard, ed. 1898. Isländische geistliche Dichtungen des ausgehenden Mittelalters. Heidelberg: Winter.