Skírnir - 01.09.2004, Qupperneq 64

Sum mary
The art icle exa mines a legend attributed to Bis hop Jón Hall dórs son of Skál holt in
Iceland (1322–1339) in a biograp hical pi ece or þáttr on the bis hop writt en around
1350. The orig in of the legend and its possi ble signi ficance as an ex empl um is ex -
plor ed in conn ect ion with a clos ely related vari ant in the Rer um memor and ar um
libri of Francesco Petr ar ca (1304–1374), writt en (but not fin is hed) in 1343–1345.
Jón Hall dórs son was a Norweg i an Dom in ic an from Bergen who had stu died in
Paris and Bologna, and the legend at issue is supp os ed to take place in a lion-por -
tal in the cathedral of Bologna when Jón was a stu dent in the city. The pres ent art -
icle con firms that there was in fact a lion-por tal in the cathedral of Bologna at the
time. The two mar ble lions of the por tal are now kept inside the cathedral, and
there is mor eover a fair ly detailed description of the medi eval ‘porta dei le oni’ in
Leandro Al berti’s Hi stor ie di Bologna from 1540. It is furthermore sug ge sted that
the moral of the legend relies on a wordplay on Lat in mors/morsus ‘death’/‘bite’.
In Petr ar ca’s work, the legend was evident ly meant to ill u stra te a fatal lack of prov-
identia or for esight, and though the wordplay is lost in the Old Nor se vari ant and
the moral import there by obscured, the in vol vem ent of the viper asp is seems to
ref lect some sim il ar moralising in tent as the asp is was tra ditionally held to sym -
bolise men who will not attend to the word of God. The legend seems to be con-
ceived of as a warn ing to the spi ritu ally deaf or heedless, and the role of the lion-
por tal in the legend prompts the reader to recall the sym bol ism in I Pet er 5, 8: ‘Be
so ber, be vigi lant; because your adversary the devil, as a ro ar ing lion, wal keth
about, seek ing whom he may devo ur.’
marteinn h. sigurðsson348 skírnir