Gripla - 20.12.2011, Page 96

GRIPLA96
three colours, that is of purple, of sulphur and of fire. By these three
colours it signifies three meanings: two past, which have gone by;
the third, which is to come. By purple colour it signifies the flood;
by sulphur-colour it signifies the fire which came upon Sodom;
by fiery-colour it signifies the fire which is to come on Judgement
Day.”
The colour description of the rainbow is here very close to the one
preserved in Old Icelandic homiletic tradition. The three colours are the
same, given that color purpureum is usually assigned to the water element
in Patristic writings (so in Isidore and Honorius of Autun, as we have
seen). The anagogical interpretation of the trichromatic rainbow is also the
same, with the two past biblical events (Noah’s flood and the distruction
of Sodom and Gomorrah) and the single, focal event to come in Christian
history, that is, Doomsday.
In the Old Icelandic text, relevance is given to God’s terrible wrath as
the direct cause of the punishment inflicted on or in store for men because
of their evil-doing, and this homiletic explanation is missing in the Latin
text. But both elaborations of the theme must be evidently drawn from a
common tradition, which joined the rainbow colour-imagery to the basic
elemental opposition water/fire, easily used by the Church Fathers with
regards to the doctrine of baptism. Of course, no point is made here about
any hypothesis of direct derivation of the Old Icelandic sermon fragment
from one or more of the Latin passages I have selected; rather, I would
suggest that any medieval Christian preacher could have access to this com-
mon tradition also in the North. That Iceland represented no exception,
being well in tune with the Western exegetical tradition, has been already
demonstrated for other homiletic topics,88 and this was also the case with
penitential discipline, as I have proved elsewhere.89
This last point is, in my opinion, especially relevant for setting our
sermon fragment against its proper cultural background, the most strik-
ing feature of the Old Icelandic rainbow allegory lying in its prominent
penitential implications. Bede’s last quoted passage from his comment on
88 Cf. above, note 1 and its context.
89 Cf. Carla Cucina, “Il pellegrinaggio nelle saghe dell’Islanda medievale,” Rendiconti dell’Acca-
demia Nazionale dei Lincei. Classe di Scienze morali, storiche e filologiche, ser. 9, vol. 9: 1 (1998):
83–155. See also below, note 105 and its context.