Gripla - 20.12.2004, Side 261

Gripla - 20.12.2004, Side 261
A NEW EDITION OF BISKUPA S¯GUR 259 There is much of interest in these texts for the cultural historian, too. The differing attitudes of the bishops to music and poetry is fascinating, for example. While on his foreign travels in Denmark St Jón has a dream in which he sees King David playing the harp, music he subsequently recreates on a harp for King Sveinn (ÍF XV:186–87). When he returns to Denmark for his consecration he impresses with the beauty of his singing, which is said to sound more like an angel’s than a man’s (ÍF XV:197). Less endearing, but no doubt saintly, is Jón’s refusal to listen to love poetry and his forbidding the young Klængr fiorsteinsson to read Ovid after overhearing him doing so (ÍF XV:211–12). Hungrvaka, however, describes Bishop Klængr as ‘it mesta skáld’ (ÍF XVI:34) and St fiorlákr appears to have been highly appreciative of the finer things in life: he drank strong drink without it ever being seen to take hold of him and is said to have enjoyed stories, songs, poems, wise con- versation, and dreams — but not plays (fiorláks saga A, chapter 16). His nephew, Páll Jónsson, returns to Iceland from England an accomplished and learned poet and musician (ÍF XVI:298). In Norway, on the other hand, Laurentius is told to stop composing verse and to study canon law instead ‘e›r veiztu ei quod versificatura nihil est nisi falsa figura?’ (ÍF XVII:240) When he takes up his office as bishop he forbids the singing of polyphony on the grounds that it is leikaraskap (ÍF XVII:375–76). With the involvement of foreign missionaries and foreign archbishops in Icelandic affairs these texts illustrate the interaction between European and Icelandic cultural traditions in medieval Iceland. This interaction will have been promoted by the education of so many bishops abroad: Ísleifr Gizurarson in Herford, Germany (ÍF XVI:6), Gizurr Ísleifsson in Saxland (ÍF XVI:14), St fiorlákr in Paris and Lincoln (ÍF XVI:52), and Páll Jónsson in England (ÍF XVI:297–98). A reading of these volumes also highlights the significance of what might be called the ‘lost Latin literature’ of medieval Iceland. Four Latin fragments witness to a Latin vita et miracula of St fiorlákr which probably pre-dates the earliest vernacular version. These fragments are here printed at the end of ÍF XVI with a parallel translation into modern Icelandic by Gottskálk Jensson (pp. 341–64). The fragments hint at just how much we do not know about the texts that failed to survive the Icelanders’ precocious preference for writing in their vernacular language. Latin texts of which not even fragments now sur- vive also figure prominently in the introductions to these volumes, particularly in discussion of Björn M. Ólsen’s views on the contents of Gunnlaugr Leifs-
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