Gripla - 20.12.2010, Side 40

GRIPLA40
5. The Latin Text and Meter
The correct text of the carmen Latinum at the beginning of AM 382 4to has
never before been printed. Although the editio princeps of 1776 is of high
quality, based as it is on a transcript made by Árni Magnússon after the
manuscript came into his possession, the ungrammatical conjecture in
line 18 (possint) and the mistaken and grammatically impossible double
emendation in line 21 (elingui and pingui), possibly made by the editors and
not the transcriber, sufficiently demonstrate that the editors made limited
sense of the essential part of the Latin text, in lines 16-24, while Jón
Þorkelsson and Paul Lehmann printed texts that were in fact meaningless
nonsense. In other words, the last reader who made sense of the carmen
Latinum lived over 300 years ago, or before the page on which it was writ-
ten was pierced with a sharp instrument. In the current edition, the pale-
ography of the poem is mimicked in the printed text as far as possible. The
letters ‘u’ and ‘v’ are kept distinct. However, ‘round s’ is used for both
‘long s’ and ‘round s’, and ‘r rotunda’ is represented with a regular ‘r’.
Punctuation marks have been inserted and abbreviations by the author of
the poem are presented in italics. An English translation of the poem is
presented on the right page over and against the Latin text.
Thirteen lines of the poem, 2-14, are composed of laudatory adjectives
in the vocative case, framed in by the invocations to St Þorlákr in lines 1
and 15, which also address themselves directly to the saint, Presul, thorlace
(1) … Pastor, laudande (15). In order to represent the author’s original text as
closely as possible without imposing a subjectively chosen English mean-
ing for certain words, the authors of this article have used, when appropri-
ate, cognate English adjectives that are derived from the Latin verba used
by the poet. The form perpete in line 1 is ablative of perpes, and the phrase
perpete pace is well attested in poetry. Jón Sigurðsson’s dubitation that the
word might be perpetua,73 from perpetuus, is therefore unfounded. The
word beate in line 3 was presumably read by Árni Magnússon since it was
printed by Langebek and Suhm.74 The word is now worn and difficult to
read. To Jón Helgason the middle letters e-a-t even looked like they might
be ‘o’ or ‘e’ and ‘n’, although he was unsure as he indicated by a question
73 JS 537 4to, fol. 5r.
74 Langebek and Suhm, Scriptores rerum Danicarum medii aevi, 631.