Gripla - 2022, Blaðsíða 366

GRIPLA364
it only in passing.4 The facts that it is based on a foreign work and that
it could be considered didactic in nature have probably not helped, since
original Icelandic writings and narrative ones have long received more
attention. An edition (critical or popular) of this work, generically on the
borderline between conduct literature and satirical writings, would make
it much easier for scholars to include this poem in their discussions of
Icelandic literature, but no such edition exists.
In light of this absence, my purpose here is to pave the way for future
work by shedding light on the origins of Grobbians rímur through a nar-
row focus upon the first four of the eight fitts commonly gathered under
that title, which I shall refer to as the core Grobbians rímur (the final four,
I refer to as continuations).5 These original four fitts (fitts I–IV in what
follows) are normally attributed to a single author, but this, I will argue, is
by no means certain. The four continuations, each an individual fitt, which
later came to be appended to the core Grobbians rímur, are connected with
five different writers, the earliest of whom was born c. 1648 and the latest
in 1713.6 Thus it is highly unlikely that in the original conception of the
work there was any plan to collaborate with these later authors, and it is
defensible to look at the earliest four fitts as a single independent unit.
In what follows, I will look at a variety of features of these core
Grobbians rímur and consider what they might reveal to us concerning
4 Hailing from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it is unsurprising that they are not
mentioned in Björn K. Þórólfsson, Rímur fyrir 1600 (Copenhagen: S. L. Möller, 1934) or
Jón Þorkelsson’s Om digtningen på Island i det 15. og 16. århundrede (with the exception of a
single reference to one of the continuations in the context of explaining kennings for the
name “Þorsteinn”). Perhaps more surprising is their absence from Sir William Craigie,
Sýnisbók íslenzkra rímna, 3 vols. (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1952). The rímur are
mentioned briefly in Óskar Halldórsson, Bókmenntir á lærdómsöld 1550–1770 (Reykjavík:
Hið íslenska bókmenntafélag, 1996), 21; also in Sigurður Nordal, Samhengi og samtíð
(Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka bókmenntafélag, 1996), II:106–7; also in Böðvar Guðmundsson
et al., Íslensk bókmenntasaga II (Reykjavík: Mál og Menning, 1993), 478–79; also in Stefán
Einarsson, Íslensk bókmenntasaga, 874–1960 (Reykjavík: Snæbjörn Jónsson, 1961), 230.
5 These four are “first” chronologically and always precede the continuations in those
manuscripts which include both. A study of the entire tradition is beyond the scope of a
single article.
6 The five authors associated with the later fitts are Jón Sigurðsson lögsagnari (c. 1685–1720),
Vigfús Jónsson (also called Leirulækjar-Fúsi; c. 1648–1728), Brynjólfur Halldórsson (1676–
1737), Árni Böðvarsson (1713–76) and Þorsteinn Jónsson (eighteenth century). Finnur
Sigmundsson, Rímnatal, expresses doubts about two of these attributions (Jón Sigurðsson
lögsagnari, II:95; Brynjólfur Halldórsson, II:29).