Gripla - 01.01.2000, Síða 182

180
GRIPLA
SUMMARY
In the seventeenth century, it became fashionable in the leamed circles of northem
Europe to compose poetry on the occasion of weddings, funerals, and other events in
people’s lives. This poetic fashion came to Iceland with men retuming from their
studies abroad, and with books these leamed men brought with them to their
homeland. The remembrance (the personal elegy) was the most popular of these
genres in Iceland, written to honor deceased men and women of high social standing.
Although most of the major Icelandic poets of the seventeenth century wrote poetry
within this genre, literary historians have for the most part ignored it, and generally
regarded remembrances to be of limited value from artistic point of view. The main
reason for this attitude is the fact that very few poems of this type have been
published, while a great number of them are preserved in manuscripts in the Icelandic
National Library and the Amamagneana Institute.
To a certain extent, remembrances seek their content and stmcture to the rhetoric
tradition (primarily to the branch called genus demonstrativum), which the poets
learned in the Latin schools of their time. The discourse is, however, based on the
ideas of Lutheran orthodoxy pertaining to “the worthy life” and “the good death” of
the elect. The poets emphasize certain facts about the dead person’s life and praise his
or her character, especially in the light of Christian virtues. The poems moum the sub-
ject, and grieve over the tragic loss for his or her loved ones, region, or country. Often
they describe the hour of death in detail, and then it designates the life of the dying
person in a nutshell. The moumers are consoled, at the same time as they are encour-
aged to consider their own life and death.
This article argues that the remembrance had both a social and religious function.
Its major component is praise of the exemplary person, whose life should serve as a
paradigm for others. Most prominent in this respect are his or her Christian virtues,
excellent marriage, calling, pursued with care and concem, and his or her conduct at
the time of death. But, at the same time as the poet constructs a memorial over the
deceased, and praises him or her as a model for others, his rhetorical aim is to
convince those who moum that the deceased has reached Paradise and there the reader
will, if God allows it, meet again the one he grieves.
Hagamel 40
107 Reykjavík
thorunn@akademia.is