Gripla - 20.12.2009, Blaðsíða 170
GRIPLA170
tion of many poems in honour of apostles, saints, and, above all, the virgin
Mary (Clunies Ross ed. 2007; jón Helgason 1936–38). If the Reformation
had not come to Iceland in 1550, this strain of vernacular piety may well
have continued beyond the sixteenth century.
The Third and Fourth Grammatical Treatises are witness to an
Icelandic appropriation of Latin poetic and rhetorical culture which is
almost certain to have taken place in the schoolroom and the monastery.
They reflect a knowledge of Latin grammar and rhetoric, and, to varying
degrees, of the thirteenthcentury poetria nova, and they show the appro
priation of these interpretative frameworks and their application to
Icelandic poetics (Clunies Ross 2005, 185–205). Some of the figures they
recommend may be found in use in Christian skaldic verse of the thir
teenth and fourteenth centuries (Clunies Ross ed. 2007, 1, lv). the fact
that many of the figures of Latin poetics did not fit well with indigenous
skaldic diction (tranter 2000, 144–147) does not detract from the ideo
logical assertion of a translatio studii in these works and does not necessar
ily imply a subordination of indigenous poetics to that of the Latin school
room. Óláfr Þórðarson, following the lead of his uncle Snorri Sturluson in
the Prologue to the latter’s Edda, boldly claims that poetry in old norse
and poetry in Latin and Greek operate according to the same principles
(Björn M. ólsen ed. 1884, 60). Whereas Snorri had used the theory of
euhemerism to explain how the human Æsir, who represented themselves
as gods, migrated to Scandinavia from Troy, bringing classical culture with
them and imposing it on the hapless natives of the north, óláfr sees
knowledge and learning coming northwards in the more conventional
manner of the literate transmission of cultural knowledge in manuscript
books, in his case via the writings of the grammarian Donatus.
Strategies of Appropriation
In theory, medieval Icelandic texuality could be seen to exist on a continu
um whose poles are, respectively, dependence on and independence of
non-Icelandic texts and cultural influences. At one end would lie almost
complete – or apparently almost complete – independence, a condition in
which a text reveals no perceptible outside influence, completely indige