Anon Phoenix 1^III

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

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

Welcome, Fenix, here to this land! You shine all over like red gold; you are king of all birds.

Mss: 194 8°(7v), 764(1r) (Enc)

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

Editions: ; AÍ I, 5, Rafn 1850-2, II, 398-9, 443-4, Konráð Gíslason 1860a, 408, Blake 1964, 98, Helgi Skúli Kjartansson 2015, 275-6.

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.

Notes: [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’).

References

1. Bibliography
2. AÍ = Kålund, Kristian and Natanael Beckman. 1908-18. Alfræði íslenzk: Islandsk encyklopædisk litteratur. 3 vols. SUGNL 37, 41 and 45. Copenhagen: Møller.
3. NK = Neckel, Gustav and Hans Kuhn (1899), eds. 1983. Edda: Die Lieder des Codex Regius nebst verwandten Denkmälern. 2 vols. I: Text. 5th edn. Heidelberg: Winter.
4. ONP = Degnbol, Helle et al., eds. 1989-. A Dictionary of Old Norse Prose / Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog. 1-. Copenhagen: The Arnamagnæan Commission.
5. Konráð Gíslason, ed. 1860a. Fire og fyrretyve for en stor deel forhen utrykte prøver af oldnordisk sprog og literatur. Copenhagen: Gyldendal.
6. Kuhn, Hans (1899). 1933. ‘Zur Wortstellung und -betonung im Altgermanischen’. BGDSL 57, 1-109. Rpt. in Kuhn (1899) 1969-78, I, 18-103.
7. Rafn, Carl Christian, ed. 1850-2. Antiquités russes d’après les monuments historique des Islandais et des anciens Scandinaves. 2 vols. Copenhagen: Berling.
8. Blake, N. F., ed. 1964. The Phoenix. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
9. Förster, Max. 1920. ‘Der Inhalt der altenglischen Handschrift Vespasianus D xiv’. Englische Studien 54, 46-68.
10. Helgi Skúli Kjartansson. 2015. ‘Vísan um fönix: Örlítil viðbót við forníslenskan kveðskap’. Gripla 26, 275-85.
11. Larsen, Henning. 1942. ‘Notes on the Phoenix’. JEGP 41, 79-84.
12. Suzuki, Seiichi. 2014. The Meters of Old Norse Eddic Poetry. Berlin: de Gruyter.
13. Yerkes, David. 1984. ‘The Old English and Old Norse Accounts of the Phoenix’. Journal of English Linguistics 17, 24-7.
14. Internal references
15. Not published: do not cite ()
16. Not published: do not cite ()
17. Not published: do not cite ()