GunnLeif Merl I 59^VIII

‘Mun hann byskupa         borgum skrýða
ok helgan stað         hefja margan.
Tígnar borgir         tvær pallío;
gefr hann þýjum Krists         þægjar hnossir.

‘Hann mun skrýða byskupa borgum ok hefja margan helgan stað. Tígnar tvær borgir pallío; hann gefr þýjum Krists þægjar hnossir.

‘He will endue bishops with cities and elevate many a holy place. He will honour two cities with the pallium; he will give acceptable treasures to the servant-women of Christ.

Mss: Hb(52r) (Bret)

Editions: Skj AII, 30, Skj BII, 36, Skald II, 22; Bret 1848-9, II, 59 (Bret st. 127); Hb 1892-6, 280; Merl 2012, 172-3.

Notes: [All]: Cf. DGB 114 (Reeve and Wright 2007, 149.102-4; cf. Wright 1988, 105, prophecy 17): Renouabit namque beatorum sedes per patrias et pastores in congruis locis locabit. Duas urbes duobus palliis induet et uirginea munera uirginibus donabit ‘For he shall rebuild the homes of the saints throughout his lands and place shepherds in appropriate places. He will dress two cities in two pallia and give virginal gifts to virgins’ (cf. Reeve and Wright 2007, 148). ‘Shepherds’ here equates to bishops (cf. Note to II 16/5). Whether Geoffrey means a renewal of the pallia held by York and Canterbury or the bestowal of pallia on two new sees is unclear. — [1-2]: In this edn the ms. reading borgum ‘cities’ (not refreshed) is retained. The resulting sentence reads: hann mun skrýða byskupa borgum ‘he will endue bishops with cities’, with byskupa construed as acc. pl., corresponding to DGB’s pastores ‘shepherds’. Extended uses of skrýða relating to appurtenances other than clothing are characteristic of ‘learned style’ and are attested in Fritzner: skrýða and ONP: skrýða. Also to be noted is Geoffrey’s use of induet ‘will dress’ in the immediate context, skrýða being the standard translation for Lat. induere (ONP: skrýða). To present meritorious persons with a city has its purported precedent in Arthur (DGB IX 157: Reeve and Wright 2007, 214-15) but in Geoffrey’s time would have been especially appropriate when a prelate was the recipient. Episcopal migrations from small sequestered villages to the major urban centre in the diocese had been set in train in 1049-50 and were accelerated by Archbishop Lanfranc’s council at London in 1075; thus the bishops of Lichfield, Selsey and Sherborne were called on to move their seats to the appropriate towns of Chester, Chichester and Salisbury respectively (Barrow 1956, 61; Stenton 1965, 227). Remigius, the first post-conquest bishop of Lincoln, maintained a seat at Stow St Mary, a few miles north-west of Lincoln, without a seat in Lincoln itself, whereas the second bishop, Robert de Bloet (1094-1123), acceded to the new rules by taking up residence in the city proper. Of his successors, Bishop Alexander, Geoffrey’s patron, used land granted by Henry I (Woodfield and Woodfield 1981-2, 1) towards an ‘aggrandisement’ of the complex of cathedral, palace and precinct (Coulson 2003, 199). Geoffrey’s talk of placing bishops in appropriate places seems to chime in with these developments, cf. the commentary in congruis locis, in metropolitanis civitatibus ‘in appropriate places, in metropolitan cities’ (Hammer 1940, 419). Gunnlaugr’s choice of phrasing makes the idea of episcopal distinction somewhat more explicit and brings the language closer to an Arthurian presentation of an entire city rather than merely land within it (for a later instance of this motif see Kalinke 2009, 227). Bret 1848-9, followed by subsequent eds, interprets ms. borgum as borg um, with um construed as the completive particle with inf. skrýða ‘endue’ and byskupa construed as gen. pl. The sense is then taken to be ‘he will adorn the city of bishops’. — [1] hann ‘he’: Again a reference to the strong Norman king first mentioned in I 56. — [6] pallío ‘with the pallium’: Latin 2nd declension ablative sg. Compare Note to I 56/2. — [7] þýjum Krists ‘to the servant-women of Christ’: This phrase probably translates the uirginibus ‘to virgins’ of Geoffrey’s text. The word virgo ‘virgin’ is a common expression for ‘nun’ in the C12th (Freeman 2015, 268). Finnur Jónsson (LP: þý) considered Gunnlaugr may have had female saints in mind, but he could equally have been thinking of nuns. — [8] þægjar hnossir ‘acceptable treasures’: The identical phrase appears in the undatable fragment Anon Stríðk 1^III. Whereas Gunnlaugr’s usage of the adj. is in accord with its standard meaning of ‘acceptable [in the sight of God or God’s servants]’ (cf. I 54/4), the more general sense of ‘delightful’ has been proposed for the latter poem, with its decidedly secular and irreverent tone; but possibly the standard sense of þægr is operative there as well and the poet can be seen as engaged in a travesty of the moral ethos that it embodies.

References

1. Bibliography
2. Skald = Kock, Ernst Albin, ed. 1946-50. Den norsk-isländska skaldediktningen. 2 vols. Lund: Gleerup.
3. LP = Finnur Jónsson, ed. 1931. Lexicon poeticum antiquæ linguæ septentrionalis: Ordbog over det norsk-islandske skjaldesprog oprindelig forfattet af Sveinbjörn Egilsson. 2nd edn. Copenhagen: Møller.
4. Fritzner = Fritzner, Johan. 1883-96. Ordbog over det gamle norske sprog. 3 vols. Kristiania (Oslo): Den norske forlagsforening. 4th edn. Rpt. 1973. Oslo etc.: Universitetsforlaget.
5. ONP = Degnbol, Helle et al., eds. 1989-. A Dictionary of Old Norse Prose / Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog. 1-. Copenhagen: The Arnamagnæan Commission.
6. Hb 1892-6 = Finnur Jónsson, ed. 1892-6. Hauksbók udgiven efter de Arnamagnæanske håndskrifter no. 371, 544 og 675, 4° samt forskellige papirshåndskrifter. Copenhagen: Det kongelige nordiske oldskrift-selskab.
7. Bret 1848-9 = Jón Sigurðsson. 1848-9. ‘Trójumanna saga ok Breta sögur, efter Hauksbók, med dansk Oversættelse’. ÅNOH 1848, 3-215; 1849, 3-145.
8. 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.
9. Wright, Neil, ed. 1988. The Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth. II. The First Variant Version: A Critical Edition. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.
10. Coulson, Charles. 2003. ‘The Castles of the Anarchy’. In Liddiard 2003, 179-202.
11. Barrow, G. W. S. 1956. Feudal Britain: The Completion of the Medieval kingdoms 1066-1314. London: Edward Arnold.
12. Freeman, Elizabeth. 2015. ‘Gilbert of Hoyland’s Sermons for Nuns: A Cistercian Abbot and the cura monialium in Twelfth-Century Lincolnshire’. Cistercian Studies Quarterly 50, 267-91.
13. Kalinke, Marianne E. 2009. ‘The Arthurian Legend in Breta sögur: Historiography on the Cusp of Romance’. In Margrét Eggertsdóttir et al. 2009, 217-30.
14. Merl 2012 = Horst, Simone, ed. 2012. Merlínússpá. Merlins Prophezeiung. Munich: Herbert Utz Verlag.
15. Stenton, Doris Mary. 1965. English Society in the Early Middle Ages. Rev. edn. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
16. Woodfield, Charmian and Paul [Woodfield]. 1981-2. ‘The Palace of the Bishops of Lincoln at Lyddington’. Transactions of the Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society 57, 1-16.
17. Hammer, Jacob. 1940. ‘A Commentary on the Prophetia Merlini (Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, Book VII)’. Speculum 15, 409-31.
18. Internal references
19. 2017, ‘ Unattributed, Breta saga’ in Margaret Clunies Ross (ed.), Poetry in fornaldarsögur. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 8. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 38. <https://skaldic.org/m.php?p=text&i=125> (accessed 25 April 2024)
20. Margaret Clunies Ross (ed.) 2017, ‘Anonymous Poems, Stríðkeravísur 1’ in Kari Ellen Gade and Edith Marold (eds), Poetry from Treatises on Poetics. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 3. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 628.