Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.2005, Blaðsíða 423
Bevussrfmur and Bevusar tættir
413
the Gest also includes a minstrel narrative in two recensions (the one
earlier and English, the other younger and Scots) of a famous battie be-
tween English and Scottish forces fought at Otterbum in the North of
England in 1388. Manuscripts of both recensions show division into
cantos.44 The principal witness to the younger recension, Bodleian Li-
brary MS Ashmole 48 from the middle of the sixteenth century,45 also
carries traces of an originally cross-rhymed double stanza (metrical pat-
tern 4a3b4a3b4a3b4a3b) that has been largely dissolved into single Com-
mon Metre stanzas in the course of oral transmission.46 The latter is pre-
cisely the historical development presupposed by Vésteinn Olason.
Moreover, this manuscript text displays formal features corresponding
to those of the kvædi and rimur. At the end of the first canto (Middle
English Jytte, fit) the title of the poem is quoted and the audience pro-
mised more to follow (cf. Child no. 162, st. 24; my italics):
That day, that day, that dredfull day,
the first fit here I fynde!
And youe wyll here any mor a The Hountynge a the Chyviat,
yet ys ther mor behynde.
Compare FK 104 Vilmunds kvædi, st. 32,3-4:
Fyrsti tåttur uti er,
men nogv er eftir at kvø5a,
an admittedly late Faroese example47 with which, however, may be
compared e.g. FK 1 AI Sjurdar kvædi (Regin smidur), st. 142:
44 Francis James Child (ed.), The English and Scottish Popular Ballads III (Boston 1888-
89), 39-89, no. 117, A Gest of Robyn Hode\ ibid. 289-302, no. 161, The Battie of Otter-
bum (earlier recension); ibid. 303-15, no. 162, The Hunting of the Cheviot (younger re-
cension). The Otterbum poems are discussed at length in my paper “Otterbum Revisited.
A Late Medieval Border Ballad and its Transmission,” in Sally Mapstone (ed.), Older
Scots Literature (Edinburgh 2005), 397-409.
45 On this manuscript see Michael Chesnutt, “Minstrel Poetry in an English Manuscript of
the Sixteenth Century. Richard Sheale and MS. Ashmole 48,” in Flemming G. Andersen
et al. (ed.), The Entertainer in Medieval and Traditional Culture (Odense 1997), 73-100.
46 Cf. Chesnutt (as n. 44); Olof Arngart, Two English Border Ballads, Acta Universitatis
Lundensis 1:18 (Lund 1973), 55, following Walter W. Skeat, Specimens of English Liter-
ature A.D. 1394-1597 (1887); Douglas Hamer, “Towards Restoring The Hunting of the
Cheviot,” Review of English Studies n.s. 20 (1969), 1-21.
47 See n. 22 above; FK 104 was apparently composed by Joen Nolsøe (1789-1876),
nephew of Nolsoyar-Påll and Jacob Nolsøe.