Gripla - 01.01.1990, Blaðsíða 267

NORSE-CHRISTIAN SYNCRETISM
263
rere et venenum peccatorum a nobis expellere, et cornua su-
perbiae ac pilos mundanae superfluitatis deponere, et cornua
fortitudinis contra vicia virtutum resumere.
The allegorizing and moralizing of Honorius were elaborated from the
elementary nature-observation of Pseudo-Bede in a gloss on Psalm
XXVIII (=XXIX), ‘Cervorum enim est natura singulis annis ut cor-
nua deponant, et innoventur, venenatum serpentem sine aliqua lae-
sione transglutinentes.’48 Similarly, the Sólarljóð poet may well have
constructed the resurrection scene in stanza 78 on the regenerative
power in the ‘hjartar horn,’ whichever of the aforesaid allegorical
meanings he attached to it. A relic of Christ the sun-stag, and the
scriptural medium of Christianity, this horn becomes a precious tal-
isman as it is handed on from Vígdvalinn (Peter) to the sons of Sól-
katla (Mary?), and from the dead seer to his son - in other words, as
the teachings of Christ are communicated through the Roman Church
to the faithful in Iceland, from father to son, from heaven to earth.
To recapitulate the interpretatio christiana of the sun-stag, and the
stag horn from the how, the biblical basis for it was the resurrection of
Christ and the apocryphal sequel to Matthew XXVII, 52-53, of His
raising of the dead and harrowing of hell (in Sólarljóð this sequence of
supernatural events is reversed through stanzas 55 and 78-79). In the
poet’s legendary sources of the life of St. Placitus-Eustachius and the
Physiologus, the symbolization of Christ as a stag - a stag that fights
the devil in the guise of a serpent — was already standardized, but in
carrying the interpretatio further, the poet consolidated the peripheral
solar images of light in these sources49 with the dominant liturgical and
syncretic conception of Christ as the sun. One predictable result of this
proceeding was nothing more or less than the creation of the sun-stag,
that chimera of the poetic imagination that the commentators on
Sólarljóð have hunted far and wide. Quite unpredictable, however,
was the happy inspiration of the poet to insinuate under the externals
of a Viking grave robbery the resurrection of Christ and preservation
48 In MPL XCII, col. 624 C-D. This hom-molting, be it said, is not mentioned in
the extant fragments of the Icelandic Physiologus.
49 See the quotation from Niðrstigningar saga above, p. 260, and the phrase in Plá-
citus saga (Heilagra manna sögur II, 194), ‘krossmark sólu bjartara,’ quoted by Björn
M. Ólsen, Sljð. II, p. 52.