Gripla - 20.12.2011, Page 88

GRIPLA88
Again, the quoted passage is preceded by an interesting introduction
about the causes of the natural phenomenon,54 which proves that medieval
men had derived from the Ancients the right connections among clouds,
water droplets, and reflection and refraction of light rays. It can be easily
suggested that the rainbow has attracted so many writers since Aristotle’s
(384–322 B.C.) influential theories about atmospheric physics gathered
in his Meteorologica55 (I am going to return later to Aristotle’s triad of
primary colours as illustrated by the rainbow); so it is not surprising that,
among the most relevant pre-scientific achievements of the Middle Ages,
we can count some treatises on the rainbow (by Robert Grosseteste [ca.
1168–1253] and by Theodoric of Freiberg [ca. 1250–after 1310], for exam-
ple), which have caused great scholarly interest.56 But, even if a vast critical
literature exists on the subject of the rainbow as a natural phenomenon in
ancient and medieval times, which may be stimulating, it proves to be of
no or very slight relevance for our Christian allegorical investigation, and
I can easily leave it out here.57
54 Ibid., col. 278 A.
55 See in particular A. Sayili, “The Aristotelian Explanation of the Rainbow,” Isis 30 (1939):
65–83.
56 For an assessment of the true achievement of Theodoric of Freiberg’s treaty De iride, see
especially Carl B. Boyer, “The Theory of the Rainbow: Medieval Triumph and Failure,”
Isis 49 (1958): 378–390. By the same author, see also the more comprehensive historical
excursus on the explanations of the rainbow in The Rainbow: From Myth to Mathematics
(New York and London: Sagamore, 1959; repr. Princeton Univ. Press, 1987), while for a
general, estensive account of specifically medieval work on the rainbow, cf. A. C. Crombie,
Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science, 1100–1700 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1953).
57 It may be of some relevance to bring up here what Rudolf Simek (Heaven and Earth in the
Middle ages: The Physical World before Columbus [Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1996],
111) writes about how medieval authors made use of their knowledge about the rainbow:
“Despite the dominance of the allegory, the rainbow example shows that in this case both
meteorological knowledge about the storage of water in the clouds in the form of smallest
drops, as well as optical awareness (the refraction of light through water drops) were
available, even if little usage was made of this knowledge”. Any physical explanation, for
instance about the colours of the spectrum, “hardly played little more than an allegorical
role” (ibid.); for example the kind of interpretation of colour-imagery we are dealing with
“corresponds to the treatment of the animals in the Physiologus and the bestiaries where the
physical aspect was dealt with only briefly (mostly limited to the appearance and eating
habits). It also reflects the authors’ primary interest which was in the symbolism” (ibid.).
Given our Old Icelandic fragment’s manuscript context, this parallel between the rainbow
colour-imagery and the animal symbolism in the Physiologus tradition is particularly inter-
esting, of course.