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or thereafter) with both Grobianus and Grobiana. The 1552 three-book
version had chronological precedence but was quickly replaced with the
1554 three-book version, and it is the latter which ended up being the basis
of the many future reprints and translations and thus has precedence as
regards impact and influence.
It is perhaps easier to compare Grobianus et Grobiana with Grobbians
rímur by focussing on some of the differences between the Latin and
Icelandic works. We can start with the fact that Dedekind’s text does not
make a character out of the narrator. Grobianus is the name attached to
the work, appearing on the title page, but thereafter barely mentioned. The
narrating voice, rather than being Grobianus, seems to be Dedekind him-
self (or a construction thereof). He reels off advice and anecdotes but never
takes on much of a personality of his own. Thus we cannot see Grobianus
as a fully rounded father in the way that Grobbian is in the Icelandic text.
Comments by the narrator, discussing the father or master of the addressee
in third person, also make it explicit that the narrator is not one and the
same as the father or master of the addressee: “si te cogatur pater expectare
uel hospes” (if your father or host is forced to wait for you) – as opposed
to something along the lines of “if I am forced to wait for you, my son.”57
Dedekind’s Grobianus is, in this way, to be identified with the address-
ee rather than the speaker. The addressee, male throughout the majority
of the work, is never given a name (as are Grobbian’s sons and daughters)
nor associated with a specific vice. We get very little sense of who the ad-
dressee is as a person: he is more of an everyman, although usually treated
as young and at times explicitly called “boy,” e.g. “surge, puer, reseraque
fores venientibus” (get up, boy, and open the doors for those who are
arriving).58 Some of the advice is specifically directed at a servant, as in
this quotation from the start of Book II: “convivas exhilarare queas: sed
tanquam famulum, cui non est plena potestas, et qui domini cogitur esse
manu” (you might be able to gladden dinner guests, but as a servant, who
does not have full power and who is obliged to be subject to a master).59
But at other times the advice is for one who is the dinner guest himself
57 Friedrich Dedekind, Grobianus, et Grobiana. De Morum simplicitate, libri tres, Ingratiam
omnium rusticitatis amantium conscripti (Frankfurt: Chr. Egenolphus, 1554), 26v.
58 Dedekind, Grobianus, et Grobiana, 27v.
59 Dedekind, Grobianus, et Grobiana, 40v.
GROTESQUE ADVICE