Anon Phoenix 1^III

R. D. Fulk (ed.) 2017, ‘Anonymous Poems, Poem about the Phoenix 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. 1257.

text and translation

notes and context

In a description of paradise, it is said that the phoenix travels from there to Egypt, staying there fifteen weeks, and when it arrives, throngs of birds of all sorts sing to it. When the Egyptians hear this, they come from all directions and speak these words.

The Old English text corresponding to the poem (as edited by Blake 1964, 94-9, from whose edn this and the following quotations derive) reads as follows: Hāl bēo þū, fenix, fugele fægerest. Feorren þū cōme. Þū glitenest swā rēad gold, ealra fugela king, fenix gehāten ‘Greetings, Phoenix, handsomest of birds. You have come from afar. You glisten like red gold, king of all birds, called “phoenix”’. The Old English homily is apparently a translation from Latin (see Förster 1920, 64-5), and because it uses the word cristal ‘crystal’, whereas the Old Icelandic prose passage uses the latinate kristallus, Blake (1964, 97) argues that the Old Icelandic text is translated from the (unattested) Latin source rather than from the Old English. Yet there is no scholarly agreement about whether the source of the Old Norse text was Latin or English (see, e.g., Larsen 1942 and Helgi Skúli Kjartansson 2015, 276-8), and it has even been argued that the Old English text is translated from Old Norse (Yerkes 1984). Though Yerkes rightly concedes that it is improbable that the Old English text should have been translated from Old Norse (especially given the difference in the date of the mss), his reasons for thinking it possible are not inconsiderable, given that the Old English text uses the terms carlfugol ‘cock, male bird’ and cwenfugol (or cwenefugol) ‘hen, female bird’, corresponding to karlfugl and kvenfugl in the Old Icelandic text, given that carl is not a word otherwise attested in Old English, and neither the Old English cognate ceorl (with one possible exception: ceorlstrang ‘strong as a man’ in a late glossary) nor cwen-/cwene- is commonly used as a sex-differentiating prefix in Old English (Yerkes 1984, 26; see also Helgi Skúli Kjartansson 2015, 277 and n. 12). However, there are good internal reasons to believe that the Old Icelandic prose is translated from some version of the Old English, given certain similarities in form. The Old English homily is to a great extent composed in alliterative prose, and although the Old Icelandic text is not, in certain passages it adopts expressions with equivalents in the Old English that can be explained plausibly only as motivated by the alliterative form. For example, the Old Icelandic text twice refers to the bird as fagri fenix ‘handsome phoenix’, where fagri is hardly required by the sense of the passage but corresponds to fæger ‘beautiful’ in the Old English version, in which it serves the alliterative form. Likewise, the Old English homilist says of the bird, Hē is mycel and mǣre swā se Mihtige hine gescōp ‘He is large and splendid, as the Mighty one made him’, in which the latter clause has the appearance of a cheville, composed merely to fulfill the alliterative requirement, though it is taken over in the Old Icelandic version: hann er harðla mikill ok undarligr at skepnu svá sem Guð skóp hann ‘he is very large and wondrous in form, as God made him’. In the expression gull rautt ‘red gold’ (on which see below, Note to l. 4) rautt also seems to have been adopted from the Old English text, as ‘red’ is not a usual descriptor for gold in Latin texts. That the Egyptians’ greeting to the bird takes the form of verse in the Old Icelandic text of course also suggests that the Old English homily was the model. — [1]: The line is of Type C, though it is unusual for a syntactic break to appear between the lifts, as here. Helgi Skúli Kjartansson (2015, 275 n. 1) would read Fénix for Fenix ‘Phoenix’, given the length inherent in the Latin diphthong oe. The vowel is long, however, neither in OE fenix (as shown by the metre of the Old English poem The Phoenix) nor (etymologically) in ModIcel. fönix. The length of the vowel in the Old Icelandic word cannot be determined from the metre of the poem, and the word is not listed among the entries in Old Norse dictionaries, including ONP. The word fenix is not a proper noun: the prose text has, for example, En þá er sá inn fagri fenix flýgr upp … ‘But when this handsome phoenix flies up …’. The word is capitalised here in the poem in direct address. — [2]: The line is not a normal verse type, comprising just three metrical positions. It might be scanned as belonging to Type E if secondary stress were accorded the second syllable of hingat ‘here’ (literally ‘hither’), though that would be most unusual. Yet Suzuki (2014, 138-41) identifies 21 lines in the Poetic Edda with the same structure (e.g. Vsp 29/2 (NK 7) hringa oc men ‘rings and necklaces’) and explains them as a catalectic variety of Type A1. — [3]: The line will scan as metrical Type C2 if allr ‘all’ is given its modern value allur. Final -r became syllabic c. 1300. — [4]: Metrically, the line is a catalectic Type C, a type favoured in odd lines, though Suzuki (2014, 105 n. 82) finds 23 examples in even lines in the Poetic Edda, as opposed to 47 in odd. It should be noted that the corresponding words in the Old English passage (swā rēad gold) show the same structure, amounting to just three metrical positions. The inverted word order of gull rautt ‘gold red’ is best explained as poetic, probably adopted to place gull in the first lift of the line, the only proper alliterating position in an even line. By contrast, the reading swā rēad gold ‘like red gold’ in the Old English text is an arrangement acceptable in alliterative prose but not in poetry. — [6]: The word ertu ‘you are’ must be fully stressed, as is in fact demanded by Kuhn’s first law, which states that a particle such as this must be stressed if it is displaced from the first drop of the clause (Kuhn 1933, 8). Similar stress may be found on a clause-medial verb in the Poetic Edda, even with alliterative precedence vis-à-vis a following noun, as in HHj 9/7-8 (NK 143) enn á valbǫstu | verpr naðr hala ‘but a serpent winds its tail on the sword-guard’. The line is nonetheless metrically peculiar, as normally the copula is too weakly stressed to receive such treatment in the Poetic Edda, in which the copula is never stressed when line-initial. Comparable treatment of the copula, however, does occur in late stanzas in the fornaldarsögur. Lines of Type A1 with a light second lift do occur in the Poetic Edda (e.g. Sigsk 13/14 (NK 209) sǫknuð mikinn ‘bitter loss’) at a rate of 83 instances, 46 of them in even lines, according to Suzuki (2014, 36), though most of his examples would probably be scanned by other metrists as representing Type A2k (e.g. Sigsk 18/6 (NK 210) herbaldr lifir ‘army-bold one lives’), with a light second syllable for an expected heavy. Alternatively, the line might be read ert konungur, Type D3, like Vsp 17/6 (NK 4) lítt megandi ‘feeble’ (lit. ‘capable of little’).

readings

• [3] allr: om. 764
• [6] ertu konungr: konungr ertu 764

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.

• AM 194 8° (194 8°) — 7v/16 - 7v

  kom heíll fenix ·hingat til landz | þu gloar allr sem gull rautt allra fugla ertu konungr

  (RDF)

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• AM 764 4° (764) — 1r/26 - 1r/27

  Kom heill, Fenix,
  hingat til lands!
  Þú glóar
  sem gull rautt;
  allra fugla
  konungr ertu .

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