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reason to believe this play had any influence on the Icelandic poem, it is
perhaps testament to a shared perception that Dedekind’s advice could
lend itself to more fully realised situational comedy.
The comparison of Grobianus et Grobiana and Grobbians rímur is made
without ruling out the possibility of intermediary steps in the process of
transmission. We know, for example, that many early modern Icelandic
translations or adaptations of continental texts are based on Danish inter-
mediaries.62 Yet while English and Hungarian translations of Grobianus
are recorded, no Danish translation is known to have existed.63 Thus it is
simplest to assume that it was either a Latin or German form of the text
which made it to Iceland. Nevertheless, since the Icelandic version is so
different from Dedekind’s second and third Latin versions, it cannot be
determined specifically which of the many reprints of these texts was the
impetus for the Icelandic work. The comment by Hálfdan Einarsson in his
Sciagraphia, mentioned above, would seem to imply that a copy of the 1564
edition published in Frankfurt was accessible in Iceland in the eighteenth
century, so this seems as likely a source as any. But while the comparison
of the Icelandic with the Latin text is interesting in general terms, it cannot
shed much light on the question of whether the three-fitt or the four-fitt
version was more original. One might, however, note that the three books
of Dedekind’s second and third versions could have inspired a three-fitt
structure. The greater space granted to the discussion of the male Grobianus
in Dedekind’s second and third versions, with only minimal discussion of
the female Grobiana, might also better match the three-fitt version with its
approximately 2:1 ratio of discussion of Grobbian to Gribba (as opposed to
the 1:1 ratio of discussion in the four-fitt version). This is by no means con-
clusive, but added to the evidence presented above concerning errors in the
opening verses of the four-fitt version, it leaves us grounds for speculating
about the three-fitt version as the more original of the two.
62 For various examples of Icelandic texts based on Danish translations or adaptations of
German works, see Hubert Seelow, Die isländischen Übersetzungen der deutschen Volksbücher,
RIT 35 (Reykjavík: Stofnun Árna Magnússonar, 1989).
63 On the bibliographical details of the English and Hungarian translations, see Milchsack,
Friedrich Dedekinds Grobianus verdeutscht, xxxii–xxxiii. Note that the Ordbog over det danske
sprog, under the entry for Grobrian, gives an example from around 1700 which shows that
Danes were by that time familiar enough with the concept of Grobianus to use the term
“grobian” as a synonym for a coarse and unpleasant individual.
GROTESQUE ADVICE