Gripla - 20.12.2011, Page 91

91
The same description, the only difference being the simile employed to
make the sense of the natural explication clearer, occurs in Honorius, De
imagine mundi, Book I, chapter 58 ‘De iride. Iris quomodo fiat’:
Arcus in aere quadricolor ex sole et nubibus formatur dum radius
solis cavae nubi immissus repulsa acie in solem refringitur. Sicut
dum sol in vas aqua plenum fulget, splendor in tecto redditur. De
coelo igneum, de aqua purpureum, de aere hyacinthinum, de terra
colorem gramineum trahit.64
“The four-coloured rainbow is formed in the air by the sun and the
clouds, when the sun’s ray gets into a hollow cloud and, driven back
towards the sun, is broken and refracts. Just in the same way, as
long as the sun shines in a vase full of water, the brightness is sent
back onto the ceiling. From the sky it takes the fiery-red colour,
from water the purple, from air the hyacinth-blue, from the earth
the grassy colour.”
The many examples selected show how the allegorical interpretation
of the colours of the rainbow was part of a common stock of images, pass-
ing on from one author to the other. When we come to the Old Icelandic
sermon fragment, though, we see another pattern at work, based on a
chromatic triad.
The tradition of the three-coloured rainbow is old indeed: this had
been described by Aristotle in his Meteorologica (Meteor. III, 2–4), where
the principal colours are said to be red, green, and purple (or blue),65 even
if it is to be maintained that Aristotle’s account “was forgotten in the
West until the twelfth century, and even then it was not invested with
hidden meanings.”66 This trichromatic view, however, which had promot-
ers among the Greeks even before Aristotle, may be rooted in the very
old belief – pre-Christian, of course – that three was a sacred number.67
The description of the rainbow in Snorri’s (1178/9–1241) Edda agrees
with this view: here, the chromatic information is limited to the fiery-red
64 Cf. Honorius Augustodunensis, De imagine mundi, I, 58, in PL 172, col. 137 AB.
65 Cf. Wolf, “The Colors of the Rainbow”: 55.
66 Cf. Dronke, “Tradition and Innovation”: 72.
67 Cf. Boyer, The Rainbow, 48.
THE RAINBOW ALLEGORY