Gripla - 20.12.2011, Síða 81

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Most Christian references to the rainbow in the Old Icelandic literary
corpus other than our allegorical sermon fragment are also more or less
directly connected to these verses in Genesis. A case in point is Veraldar
saga, where the rainbow episode is mentioned in a very abridged version
of Noah’s story (þa var siþan senn regnbogi sva sem friþar mark a medal gvds
ok mana en eigi fyrir floðit “After that the rainbow was seen, as a sign of
the covenant between God and man, that there would never be a flood
again”)33; and where the allegorical explanation of the passage, preserved
in one of the B class manuscripts34, reads:
Flodit merker skirnar vatnit. er svo þvær alla kristnina sem flodit
þvo orkina. Kyqvendi þav ok mannkyn þat er forst j flodinv. merker
synder þær er af oss deyia j skirninne. Regnbogin er bædi hefer a
sier sævar lit og elldz. min[ner o]ss [a ogn] þa tvenna er onnvr lys-
tist j flodinv. Enn onnvr mvn lysazt j elldi þeim er ganga mvn yfir
þenn[a heim] aa doms deigi.
“The flood signifies the water of baptism, which so washes all
Christ ians as the flood washed the ark. The beasts and mankind
that perished in the flood signify our sins which die in the baptism.
The rainbow, which has in itself both the colour of the sea and [the
colour] of fire, reminds us of the terror of the second of the two dif-
ferent things that are shown in the flood. And this second one will
be shown in the fire which will go upon the world at doomsday.”35
The wider penitential context is particularly interesting here, and we
are going to discuss this trend of allegorical interpretation later in this sec-
tion and in sections V and VI, especially with reference to the easy narra-
tive and symbolic connections between Noah as a figure of Christ and the
sea voyage – of the ark during the Flood, but of any Christian vessel in the
tempest of this life as well – as an allegory of salvation through baptism
and repentance. This is relevant for our argument at first sight, since the
sermon fragment on the rainbow immediately follows two fully developed
33 Cf. Veraldar saga, ed. Jakob Benediktsson, Samfund til udgivelse af gammel nordisk
litteratur 61 (København: Luno, 1944), 13 (A text, from manuscript AM 625, 4to, c. 1300–
1325).
34 Namely the so-called B3, i.e. Holm perg 9, 4to, c. 1600–1650.
35 Cf. Veraldar saga, 80. The English translation is mine.
THE RAINBOW ALLEGORY