Gripla - 20.12.2009, Blaðsíða 176

GRIPLA176
Recently, Mats Malm (2007) has argued that most Icelandic writers’
conscious choice of a plain, pared back style, even in translations of foreign
texts, may be attributable to their awareness of classical rhetoricians’
repugnance towards what they termed “effeminate language” in contrast to
virile and manly language. As such a preference very much resonated with
an Icelandic moral preference for manliness above effeminacy, Icelandic
writers were reinforced in their preference for the former, even when the
texts they translated were of the “effeminate” variety. Ultimately, such a
case cannot be proven, but it is likely that Icelandic writers and translators
did act to domicile this aspect of the foreign within the preferred conven­
tions of indigenous style and narrative art.
In the field of poetry, however, the situation was somewhat different,
as Malm acknowledges, because poetry “was not associated with deca­
dence, effeminacy, or voluptuousness in old norse” (2007, 314–315). on
the contrary, its traditional complexity was regarded as manly and of high
status. Although, as Malm observes, there was a movement towards a
plainer style apparent in some works of the fourteenth century, like Lilja,
the claims of the Lilja poet and others like him cannot be taken at face
value. the traditional obscurities of skaldic diction conveyed through the
kenning system and fragmented word order here and in some other four­
teenth-century poetry gave way to a different kind of rhetorical complexity
along the lines Geoffrey of vinsauf recommended in his Poetria nova. the
influence of Geoffrey’s treatise is clearly apparent in several places in Lilja
(Chase 2007b, 2, 554–677).
the traditional complexity and high status of skaldic verse arguably
protected it from the stylistic simplification accorded to much prose litera­
ture, even in cases where poets were translating texts of foreign origin,
whether through the medium of an Icelandic prose version or directly from
Latin. A great deal of the religious poetry of later medieval Iceland involves
either direct translation of Latin ecclesiastical sources or translation
through the intermediary of a vernacular prose source, and includes hymns,
liturgical sequences, homilies and saints’ lives. A large number of elaborate
kenning­like phrases for God, Christ and the virgin Mary, in particular,
are calques on well-known Latin epithets for them. The extent of this
poetry’s debt to foreign sources has been partially recognised by earlier
scholars, but its full participation on its own terms in the international world