Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.2005, Page 427
Bevussnmur and Bevusar tættir
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gamle Folkeviser), where versions are printed one after the other - and
largely uncorrected - on the fallacious ‘folkloristic’ premise that vari-
ants in oral poetry are not genetically determined. This treasured belief
of Svend Grundtvig’s youth certainly does not apply to memorial trans-
mission as practised in the Faroe Islands.52 As will be seen, its rejection
brings us a good deal closer to the Icelandic nmur archetype though in
some instances only to the Faroese (oral) hyparchetype.
Perhaps the most striking single result to emerge from a scrutiny of
the versions of Bevusar tættir is that B, though recorded as much as half
a century after A, occasionally preserves wording that must go back to
the Icelandic Bevussrimur but has vanished from the older of the two
Faroese records. There are six or seven examples of this:
(1) A, st. 4,3 has the expression birdu og pinu while B has bol og pinu.
Here we have the Icelandic word bol ‘damage, accident, pain’, which A
has altered to Faroese byrdi ‘burden’. In the common ancestor of A and
B the word-order must already have been *bøl og pinu, destroying the
cross-rhyme, but the archetype doubtless had *pinu og bøl (~ gølt).
(2) B, st. 20,4 reads blikna tog tå bidman todl (A has no comparable
line). As remarked by Sanders, this must contain the heiti for ‘woman’,
Icelandic pdll, in a kenning (*bloma or *blæju /;«//) referring to the
murdered earl’s wife.53 The appellation recurs at B, st. 31,2 Bevus
hugar svigarrå (!) todl where the sense is ‘the deceitful woman’ - again
meaning the earl’s wife (and Bevus’s mother). Here too A has nothing
comparable, the incomprehensibility of the original line having caused
it to be replaced by incremental repetition (compare A, st. 31,1-2 with
st. 30,3-4).
(3) B, st. 25,1 reads Litil drongur å lambaheidi where the first two
words in A are Ungur svein. In combination with the verb liggur in the
52 On the general point at issue see e.g. Jiirgen Beyer and Michael Chesnutt, “Extracts
from a Conversation with Isidor Levin,” Copenhagen Folklore Notes 1997:1-2, 2-4, here
2-3. For the revision over time of Grundtvig’s thinking about variants, a faet that has been
ignored in most Danish ballad scholarship, see Michael Chesnutt, “Svend Grundtvig. An
Essay in Favour of Biography,” in Livets gieder [...]. En vennebok til Reimund Kvideland
(Stabekk 1995), 26-34.
53 Cf. Revers saga (as n. 51), introduction cxxxvii, quoting a private communication by
Jon Helgason.