Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1981, Page 176

oc berr hvarki /auf nema Jjorna oc firir verdaz bæde.
Hin frida unnasta min.
sva oc efter f>eim hætti ero vit.
Ei ma ec /ifa on j)in
oc ei [ju on min. (p. 66)
(“It is with us,” he said, “as with the woodbine which binds itself
about the hazel tree. Whilst these two trees remain both together
they flourish and bear their leaves; but if anyone should sunder
these trees one from the other then the hazel dies and thereafter
the woodbine and neither bears leaf but only thorns, and both
perish. Fair mistress mine, so too in the same way are we. I cannot
live without you, nor you without me.”)
Despite the faet that in the title and in the beginning and closing sentences
of the Ijod the Norwegian author translates the French chievrefueil (that is,
caprifolium = goatleaf) literally with geitarlauf, he abandons the neolo-
gism for Tristram’s words above, and uses instead the native word for
woodbine or honeysuckle, vidvindill, in which etymologically the con-
cept “to wind” is represented in both elements of the compound, al-
though only the latter would have been easily apparent to an audience.33
The choice is a felicitous one. Not only is the name comprehensible, for it
evokes the image of a common plant, but it also draws “attention to the
entwining habit of the plant, which is therefore apt as a symbol of the
union of the lovers.”34 In Norwegian the name itself suggests already
what has to be explained about the plant in French, namely that the
[chievrefueil] a la coldre se perneit/quant il s’i est laciez e prisle tut en tur le
fust s’est mis (w. 70-72 ‘the honeysuckle clings to the hazelwood: for it is
bound to it and held fast, and wound all about the wood’). In the French
text the entwining and the resultant union are suggested through the
assonance of tut en tur le fust. The Norwegian text develops the possibility
of a play on words and sound by intertwining alliteration on v-, b-, and
There is little question that the alliteration - and the form it takes - is
intentional. For example, the relationship and union of the two plants is
already suggested in the first sentence by the use of vid-:-vid for both
33 See Jan de Vries, Altnordisches etymologisches Wdrterbuch (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1961).
34 S. A. J. Bradley, “The Norwegian Prose Lay of the Honeysuckle (Geitarlauf),” The
Tristan Legend, ed. Joyce Hili, Leeds Medieval Studies, 2 (Leeds: The University of Leeds,
Graduate Centre for Medieval Studies, 1977), fn. 1, p. 40.
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