Anon (FoGT) 13^III

Margaret Clunies Ross (ed.) 2017, ‘Anonymous Lausavísur, Stanzas from the Fourth Grammatical Treatise 13’ in Kari Ellen Gade and Edith Marold (eds), Poetry from Treatises on Poetics. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 3. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 586.

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Stanzas 13 and 14 form a pair, and the full sense of st. 13 cannot be understood before reading st. 14, which follows st. 13 without a break in the prose text. The two stanzas illustrate another type of prosopopoeia, an address from one inanimate entity to another. The prose text introduces st. 13 thus: Frá liflavsvm lvt verðr prosopophia til líflavss lvtar sem seger i barrvk, at sior ok skǫgr bivggvz í grend, ok villdi hvꜳʀ̇ annan vpp taka. Af þi liop sandr isioínn ok eyddi sva hans yfer gang, enn logi brendi vpp allan skoginn. her er sva vm qveðit ‘From a lifeless thing prosopopeia turns to a[nother] lifeless thing, as it says in Baruch, that sea and forest lived close by one another and each wanted to take over the other. For that reason the sand rushed into the sea and so put an end to its presumption, while fire burnt up all the forest. Here poetry is spoken about this’.

According to the prose text of FoGT, the pair of stanzas, 13-14, is based upon a passage in the Apocryphal Book of Baruch. After the two stanzas have been cited, the prose text goes on to offer an allegorical interpretation of them: Skógr merker ivða enn sior challdeos. Þioðer þær, sem eyddv ʀiki challdeorum merkia sand, en gvðzpiallig [kenning] elldinn, sv er ístað kom lǫgmaals ivða ‘The forest signifies the Jews, and the sea the Chaldeans; those peoples who destroyed the kingdom of the Chaldeans signify [recte ‘are signified by’] sand, while the evangelical [teaching] which supplanted the law of the Jews signifies [recte ‘is signified by’] fire’. Paasche (1928, 199-200) identified the source of this pair of stanzas, not as from Baruch, but from the apocryphal Apocalypse of Ezra (or Esdras), usually known as 4 Ezra. A passage in ch. 4, verses 13-17 (Charles 1913, II, 565), describes an exchange between the trees of the forest and the sea, each intent upon encroaching upon and destroying the other, but each frustrated by the forces of fire and sand respectively. Paasche (1928, 200) comments that the author of the prose text may have misremembered his source, because there is a somewhat similar passage in Baruch ch. 36. Meissner (1932, 102-4), apparently in ignorance of Paasche’s article, argued that the stanzas were influenced by this very passage (Baruch II, Charles 1913, II, 500), in which Baruch has a dream vision during which a fountain beneath a vine engulfs all but one cedar tree in a forest, the cedar eventually succumbing to fire. Although there is some similarity between the Icelandic stanzas and the Baruch passage, the parallel is not exact. The source, if any, of the allegorical interpretation in the prose text of FoGT has not been identified.