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skaldic

Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages

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Anon (FoGT) 4III

Margaret Clunies Ross (ed.) 2017, ‘Anonymous Lausavísur, Stanzas from the Fourth Grammatical Treatise 4’ in Kari Ellen Gade and Edith Marold (eds), Poetry from Treatises on Poetics. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 3. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 577.

Anonymous LausavísurStanzas from the Fourth Grammatical Treatise
345

introduction

The anonymous sts 4-7 all belong to the third chapter of FoGT in which the author treats the rhetorical figures of topographia, bethgraphia, cosmographia and chronographia, which all refer to aspects of the physical world. The chapter begins with topographia, or reference to a specific place, which the author exemplifies with Anon Nikdr 1. He continues with Anon (FoGT) 4-7, all of which are in dróttkvætt metre.

text and translation

Leygs svelgr, en etr eigi,
íugtanni lið manna;
ganga menn ór munni
margreftum fletvargi.

{Íugtanni leygs} svelgr, en etr eigi, lið manna; menn ganga ór munni {margreftum fletvargi}.
 
‘The bear of the flame [HOUSE] swallows, but does not eat, the band of men; men issue from the mouth of the many-raftered bench-wolf [HOUSE].

notes and context

The prose text of FoGT introduces this helmingr with the following remark: hennar f(o)stsyster er bethgraphia, er fra husi er sagt ‘her [i.e. topographia’s] foster-sister is bethgraphia, when a house is described’. After the helmingr, the author comments: her talar skalldit af smið hvssíns ‘here the poet speaks of the structure of the house’.

This stanza appears in the Y version of LaufE among kennings for a house (LaufE 1979, 358), and in a similar environment in Resen’s Edda Islandorum (RE 1665(Gg)). The text of the word íugtanni ‘bear’ in l. 2 is correctly spelled in RE 1665, but not in LaufE, where the word is given as ‘jngtanne’. — There are no problems of interpretation concerning the helmingr itself, but the rhetorical figure of bethgraphia is to date unattested in medieval rhetorical handbooks. It is not listed in either of FoGT’s main sources, the Doctrinale of Alexander of Villa Dei or the Graecismus of Évrard of Béthune. The first element of the term bethgraphia derives from Hebrew beth ‘house’.

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], D. 3. Vers af den 4. grt. afhandling 3: AII, 215, BII, 231, Skald II, 120; SnE 1848-87, II, 194-7, III, 154, FoGT 1884, 122, 244, FoGT 2004, 33, 61, 91-2, FoGT 2014, 4-5, 59.

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