Anon (FoGT) 28^III

Margaret Clunies Ross (ed.) 2017, ‘Anonymous Lausavísur, Stanzas from the Fourth Grammatical Treatise 28’ in Kari Ellen Gade and Edith Marold (eds), Poetry from Treatises on Poetics. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 3. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 604.

Interactive view: tap on words in the text for notes and glosses

This stanza is presented as the sole example of a rhetorical figure called in FoGT antiposora (Lat. antipophora, from a Greek word meaning ‘reply to a supposed objection’). It is defined in FoGT as ef maðr svarar þeim lvtvm, sem maðr byzt at kiæra á hann ꜳ þingi ok stendr vpp bvinn at segia framm sǫkina, enn seger æigi ‘if a man responds to those things that [another] man prepares himself to charge him with at the assembly, and stands up ready to declare the case, but does not speak’.

Stanza 28, in dróttkvætt metre, illustrates FoGT’s definition of antipophora to the extent that both prose explanation and stanza represent men engaged in legal disputes at an assembly. In the first helmingr, the speaker seems to be warning another man against bringing a charge against him, on the ground that he has changed from being compassionate to, presumably, taking a hard line in response. In the second helmingr he issues a barely veiled threat that if the other man proceeds to lay charges against him, that man will face financial ruin. This is not very close to the prose explanation of the figure (but see FoGT 2004, 205), and far from the basic sense of the Latin figure, which involves making an anticipated response to a tacit objection (cf. Reichling 1893, 176, ll. 2607-9; Wrobel 1887, 7, l. 79).