Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1981, Blaðsíða 168
(He was not entirely confident that he would be granted security.
When they entered, the fair lady was sitting on a red silk quilt.)
The play on sound can extend beyond alliteration to assonance and
rhyme. The latter is the least effective poetic device in the translated
romances precisely because it occurs so sporadically; even in Parcevals
saga, in which rhyme occurs primarily to terminate chapters, the practice
is not consistent.25 Mottuls saga ends on a rhyming couplet, presumably a
copyist’s contribution:
Nu endisk hér Mottuls saga;
en Jiér lifid heilir marga goda daga. Amen.
(Now Mottuls saga ends here; and may you live happily for many
good days. Amen.)
In Tristrams saga end rhyme is used sparingly but where it occurs, the
effect is to enhance and emphasize the content. End rhyme is only one of
various techniques selected by Brother Robert to render a passage, or an
entire scene or episode as euphonious - rhythmically and acoustically - as
possible.26 Appropriately enough Tristram’s message to the queen - the
name Isond does not appear - in Geitarlauf ends on a couplet:
Ei ma ec lifa on |)in.
oc ei {m on min. (p. 66)
(I cannot live without you, nor you without me.)
Parcevals saga contains more examples of end rhyme than any of the
other riddarasogur. The short verses, especially at the end of chapters,
have been termed “rather unfortunate attempts to imitate the verse of
25 Only chapters 4-8 and 11-16 end with rhymed verse. There is none in the five chapters
of Valvens påttr. On rhyme in Parcevals saga, as well as for examples from other riddara-
sogur, especially those treated here, see Gustaf Cederschiold, Fornsogur Sudrlanda,
Lunds Universitets Årsskrift, XVIII (Lund, 1884), pp. V-VI; also, Jon Helgason, “Norges
og Islands digtning,” Nordisk Kultur, VIII, B, ed. Sigurdur Nordal (Uppsala: Almqvist &
Wiksell, 1953), pp. 159-60.
26 See Schach, “The Style and Structure of Tristrams Saga, ” pp. 83-85, for a discussion of
rhyme in ch. 23 of the saga.
154