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skaldic

Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages

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Anon (FoGT) 32III

Margaret Clunies Ross (ed.) 2017, ‘Anonymous Lausavísur, Stanzas from the Fourth Grammatical Treatise 32’ in Kari Ellen Gade and Edith Marold (eds), Poetry from Treatises on Poetics. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 3. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 609.

Anonymous LausavísurStanzas from the Fourth Grammatical Treatise
313233

text and translation

Það saung og í gröf geinginn
grundu huldr til stundar
enn með iðran sannri
öðlingr til refsingar:
‘hugþekka mun hlakka
hróðrslungin loftunga,
mána valdr hinn mildi,
mín riettvísi þína.’

Öðlingr, huldr grundu til stundar til refsingar og geinginn í gröf, saung það enn með sannri iðran: ‘hróðrslungin loftunga mín mun hlakka hugþekka riettvísi þína, {hinn mildi valdr mána}.’
 
‘The king, covered with earth for a time as punishment and gone into the grave, yet sang that with true repentance: ‘my eulogy-encircled tongue of praise will exult your beloved righteousness, merciful ruler of the moon [= God].’

notes and context

The stanza illustrates the rhetorical figure termed euphemismos, which is defined in FoGT as gott vm skiptí stafa í orðinv, sem david settíExultatfyrerexaltat’ ‘a good exchange of letters in the word, as [when] David replaced exaltat [“exalts”] with exultat [“exults”]’.

The second helmingr of st. 32, which is in dróttkvætt metre, is a very clever rendition into Icelandic of the Latin text of Ps. 50.16 Et exultabit lingua mea justitiam tuam ‘And my tongue will exult your righteousness’. A version of the quotation from the psalm is given in the Doctrinale (Reichling 1893, 176, ll. 2615-16) as an example of euphemismos. After the stanza, the prose text explains that the verb hlakka ‘cry out, rejoice, exult’ is used here instead of the more common hefja upp ‘raise, exalt’ in order to replace a less prestigious with a more prestigious word. — [1-4]: The sense and syntactic arrangement of the words in the first helmingr have been the subject of some editorial differences. It is assumed here, with Björn Magnússon Ólsen (FoGT 1884, 282) and Longo (FoGT 2004, 142-3 and 210-11), that the first helmingr represents the Biblical King and Psalmist David as a penitent sinner, who died and spent time in the grave as a punishment for his sins before being released at the Last Judgement. The second helmingr is then represented in direct speech as what he sang from the grave in praise of God’s righteousness. For the common medieval representation of David as a type of the penitent sinner, see Gamlkan Has 48-9VII and Notes to those stanzas.

readings

sources

Text is based on reconstruction from the base text and variant apparatus and may contain alternative spellings and other normalisations not visible in the manuscript text. Transcriptions may not have been checked and should not be cited.

editions and texts

Skj: Anonyme digte og vers [XIII], [C]. D. Religiøse og moraliserende vers af den 4. grammatiske afhandling 8: AII, 164, BII, 181, Skald II, 95; SnE 1848-87, II, 230-3, III, 161, FoGT 1884, 141-2, 282-4, FoGT 2004, 50, 74, 142-3, FoGT 2014, 34-5, 121-2.

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