Gripla - 20.12.2018, Qupperneq 49

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[on the nature of man and his blood
Man has in himself the likeness of the four elements, and this can
be noted in the blood from the veins of a man, if it remains for a
while in a cask, it has four colours. uppermost is red blood, like
fire, and hot and dry by nature. next is red-brown blood, like air
by its moisture and heat. undermost is Melancholea, black blood,
like earth in colour, and dry and cold by nature. then there is
phlegm, like water, moist and cold by nature, and it surrounds the
blood like the great oceans flow around the globe of the earth. But
if the blood-liver is cut, the water that men call vari flows instead,
just like the oceans flow between countries.]
Vindician’s Letter also includes a section in which the nature of each hu-
mour is described as a combination of dry, moist, cold or hot. the dif-
ference is, though, that the microcosmic link between each humour and
the corresponding element – which appears, for example, in Bede’s and
other writings as described above – does not appear in the Letter. Neither
does the idea of the different stratum of the humours, and how it can be
seen if the blood is kept in a bowl for a while. However, the Hippocratic
treatise Nature of Man offers us the idea by informing us that “καὶ τοῖσιν
ἀποσφαζομένοισι τὸ αἷμα ῥεῖ πρῶτον θερμότατόν τε καὶ ἐρυθρότατον,
ἔπειτα δὲ ῥεῖ φλεγματωδέστερον καὶ χολωδέστερον” [and when men are cut,
the blood that flows is at first very hot and very red, and then it flows with
more phlegm and bile mixed in it].63
It is noteworthy that this seems to echo in an unusual way a dramatic
scene in Bandamanna saga (c. 1300).64 at the end of the saga, the complex
and shady Óspakr Glúmsson bursts into the house of the man who has now
married his beloved wife, Svala, and stabs him to death. the killing is an act
of jealousy, as Óspakr himself explains in a verse before leaving the scene
63 Nature of man, vi. 39–41. the work is now usually attributed to his student Polybus, fifth
century bce. the edition used here is Hippocrates, Nature of Man, trans. by William
Henry Samuel Jones, Hippocrates, 10 vols, Loeb Classical Library 150 (Cambridge, Ma:
Harvard university Press, 1931), vol. VI, 1–41. trans. Jones, ibid., 19.
64 Estimated to be composed c. 1300, the oldest manuscript fragment from c. 1350, see
Vésteinn Ólason, “family Sagas,” A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Cul-
ture, ed. by rory Mcturk (oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 114.
HUMORAL THEORY IN THE MEDIEVAL NORTH