Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.2005, Page 422
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Michael Chesnutt
lad-making in the islands in the first place. Though we possess no texts
of rimur that can be classified as direct models for extant ballads, this in
no way rules out an evolutionary relationship of the kind suggested, for
a great many Icelandic rimur must have been lost in the course of the
centuries.41 A hindrance to research along these lines has been the incli-
nation of scholars - in particular Icelandic scholars - to assign the bal-
lad stanza historical priority over the oldest form of rimur verse, the
cross-rhymed fers key tt stanza (metrical pattern 4a3b4a3b). On that view
cross-rhyme would have been superimposed by Icelandic poets on the
Common Metre stanza imported from Western Europe.42 It is, however,
also conceivable that the Common Metre stanza emerged by simplifica-
tion of an antecedent cross-rhymed form. Long ago Sir William Craigie
pointed out that the Late Middle English minstrel ballad in Common
Metre offers a formal parallel to Icelandic rimur divided into indepen-
dent cantos (and by implication to Faroese kvæd i with the same struc-
ture); this observation has been elaborated upon by Mortan Nolsøe and
Vésteinn Olason, who both discem English influence on the stanzaic
narrative poetry of Western Scandinavia in the late Middle Ages,
though they deduce radically different historical scenarios due to the
last-mentioned scholar’s more extensive knowledge of Middle English.
While Mortan Nolsøe sees multi-episodic rimur in ferskeytt metre as a
development from the multi-episodic West Scandinavian ballad in
Common Metre, and the latter in its tum as a descendant of the multi-
episodic English minstrel ballad in Common Metre, Vésteinn Olason
treats rimur and the Common Metre ballad as independent derivatives
of a genre attested considerably earlier in England, the romance in
cross-rhymed stanzas.43
Vésteinn Olason’s solution is doser to the mark than that of his Far-
oese colleague. Sir William Craigie’s analogue to the long stanzaic nar-
ratives of Iceland and the Faroes, the ‘outlaw ballad’ or Gest ofRobyn
Hode preserved for posterity in early Tudor prints, is not in faet the only
relevant example. The volume of Child’s ballad anthology containing
41 See further §§ 4-5 below regarding the lost Icelandic Bevussrlmur.
42 See e.g. Bjom K. Porolfsson (as n. 38) 45-46 and Jon Helgason, “Norges og Islands
digtning,” Nordisk Kultur VIII, Litteraturhistorie, B. Norge og Island (Stockholm etc.
1953), 3-179, here 168; also William Craigie, The Romantic Poetry of Iceland, Glasgow
University Publications 85 (Glasgow 1950), 6-7.
43 William A. Craigie (ed.), Synisbok tslenzkra rimna I (London etc. 1952), xvi, 285;
Nolsøe (as n. 36) 91-92; Vésteinn Olason (as n. 12) 63-68, 73-78.