Gripla - 2020, Page 96

95
Fjúk ok frost gekk alla nóttina: gó elris hundr alla þá nótt óþrotnum
kjǫptum ok tǫgg allar jarðir með grimmum kuldatǫnnum.
Snow and frost drove all through the night: the hound of the elder-
tree [the wind] howled all that night with tireless jaws and bit all
lands with cruel teeth of cold.
This personification of the wind as a hound is typical of the flowery di-
gressions in Fóstbrœðra saga. This is not, however, personification of a
general kind: elris hundr is a conventional kenning.84
As noted above, Fóstbrœðra saga is unique in embedding non-intuitive
kennings in flowery, figurative prose – or any saga prose. The fact that it
does so suggests experimentation with the possibilities of poetics without
much restraint from established conventions. The norms for how to quote
and what to do with poetry took shape gradually in the decades around
1200. Thus, for instance, sverris saga quotes two stanzas to prove a moral
point, which is a common strategy in Latin prosimetra but almost unheard
of in Old Norse.85 Among the kings’ sagas, the portions of Morkinskinna
that are likely to be original to the work display many quotations that are
of a merely descriptive character, some of which are composed in simple
eddic metres.86 The compilations Fagrskinna and Heimskringla, composed
only slightly later, avoid quotations of this type.
It seems likely that the unusual treatment of poetry in Fóstbrœðra saga
– both the mode of quotation and the use of non-intuitive kennings as rhe-
torical flowers – is a sign that it belongs very early in the tradition of sagas
of Icelanders. The flowery style is presumably due to the same factors, and
we may again compare it to sverris saga – an early king’s saga with an unu-
84 For kennings of this type, see Rudolf Meissner, Die Kenningar der skalden. Ein Beitrag zur
skaldischen Poetik (Bonn: Kurt Schroeder, 1921), 102.
85 The moral character of both quotations may be related to the particular circumstance
that they belong in speeches (sverris saga, ed. by Þorleifur Hauksson. íslenzk fornrit 30
(Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 2007), 72, 257). Stylistically, sverris saga is more
similar to Latin historiographical works than later kings’ sagas (Sverre Bagge, ‘The Old
Norse Kings’ Sagas and European Latin Historiography’, journal of English and Germanic
Philology 115 (2016): 1–38 (at 4, 11)).
86 Morkinskinna. the Earliest Icelandic Chronicle of the norwegian Kings (1030–1157), trans. by
Theodore Andersson and Kari Ellen Gade, Islandica 51 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2000), 25.
Fó STBRœÐ RA SAGA: A MISSING LINK?