Gripla - 20.12.2013, Qupperneq 228

GRIPLA228
author. extant copies, even those from the seventeenth century, are many
degrees removed from a poet’s pen. In some sense, this is just as true of
Leppalúðakvæði and many other works of the post-Reformation era; the
manuscripts preserving them, the very medium by which they are trans-
mitted, lend themselves poorly to author-centred textual criticism.42 Post-
Reformation poetry in Iceland, secular and sacred alike, flourished in a
literary culture in which the boundaries between composition, production,
reception and performance were highly fluid. Grýlukvæði is not a single
creative act at a single place and time: it is also the work of the informants
who learned the song and shared it with others, the collectors who record-
ed the words and melody for posterity and transformed oral performances
into written texts — even the editor who reconstructed the epic narrative
of Guðmundur erlendsson of fell in sléttuhlíð from the various corrupt
fragments available to him.
Attempting to extract the genesis of Grýlukvæði from the tangled web
of transmission only serves to complicate the authorial picture, opening up
possibilities of collaborative authorship even at the stage of its initial com-
position. Guðmundur erlendsson and Ásgrímur Magnússon could easily
have composed Grýlukvæði together, perhaps during one of Guðmundur’s
regular visits to Höfði, in which case Páll Vídalín and jón ólafsson are
both correct in attributing it to two different authors. Multiple authorship
— with two or more initial contributors — could certainly explain why the
narrator of Grýlukvæði seems to shift from one farm to another: in AM 147
8vo (though not in ólafur davíðsson’s edition), Grýla meets first-person
“me” at three locations before fleeing from the enigmatic skeggi.43
42 Arthur f. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell
university Press, 1995), 135.
43 on the identity of skeggi, see jón samsonarson, “Leppalúði Hallgríms Péturssonar,” 48–49.
A comic poem on the farmhand skeggi beginning with the line “skeggja átti ég að skenkja”
(Skeggjavísur or Skeggjasálmur) is printed in the 1885–86 edition of the collected works of
stefán ólafsson, to whom a grýlukvæði is also attributed. As jón samsonarson points out,
the stated policy of its editor was to include all works attributed (even tentatively) to stefán
ólafsson, and additional research would be required to confirm his authorship of Skeggjavísur.
At least one copy of Skeggjavísur (found in js 271 4to) states it to be the work of the poet jón
Guðmundsson of fell, one of Guðmundur erlendsson’s sons. An anonymous skeggi-poem
(Skeggi til Laugu skrifar og segir) in AM 441 12mo is also included in the collected works of
stefán ólafsson on the basis of its similarity to Skeggjavísur. the poem takes the form of a
love letter from skeggi to his fiancé, in which he responds to a message conveyed to him
from „Gvöndur séra“, cf. stefán ólafsson, Kvæði, ed. jón Þorkelsson, vol. 1 (Copenhagen:
Hið íslenzka bókmenntafélag, 1885), 160.