Gripla - 2022, Page 388

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As a continuation of this speculation, we may also try to understand
what might have led to the three-fitt version being adapted into a four-fitt
version, where Gribba’s advice to her daughters is spread over two fitts and
is thus on an equal footing with Grobbian’s advice to his sons. The obvi-
ous guess is that an author/adaptor/scribe wished to create more balance
in the work. Barbara Correll has argued that in the act of taking on board
Scheidt’s additions and producing the three-book Latin version, Dedekind
“redresses an imbalance, seeks completion for a text,” and the adaptor
of Grobbians rímur can be imagined as having continued this process.64
Extra-literary reasons may also have played a part: bad behaviour in girls
and young women may have been seen as equally in need of correction
(through lampooning) as it was in boys and young men. Yet another liter-
ary inspiration may have come from previous works within the genre of
heilræði (good advice) literature. One of the most important of such works
was the Disticha Catonis (Distichs of Cato), which had already been trans-
lated into Icelandic in the Middle Ages as Hugsvinnsmál.65 In the sixteenth
century it retained its status, as all advanced students at the cathedral
schools in Hólar and Skálholt had to study the Latin Disticha, as laid out
in the Danish Church Ordinance of 1537, accepted at Skálholt in 1542. The
work was thus highly familiar to literate Icelanders also in the seventeenth
century, all the more so after Jón Bjarnason á Presthólum (c. 1560–c. 1634)
produced a new translation, what Halldór Hermannsson called the “Hólar
Cato,” in the early 1620s and had it printed at Hólar.66 That the Disticha
Catonis were viewed as thematically similar to (if inverted) texts about
Grobianus can be seen in the subtitle to R. F. Gent’s English translation
of Grobianus et Grobiana: “Cato Turnd Wrong Side Out.”67 The reason
64 Barbara Correll, The End of Conduct: Grobianus and the Renaissance Text of the Subject
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 118.
65 Tarrin Wills and Stephanie Würth (eds. and trans.), “Anonymous, Hugsvinnsmál,” Poetry
on Christian Subjects, ed. by Margaret Clunies Ross, Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian
Middle Ages 7 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007) 358–449.
66 See Halldór Hermannsson (ed.), The Hólar Cato: An Icelandic Schoolbook of the Seventeenth
Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1958). Note that Halldór Hermannsson
(p. xxvii) differs slightly from other more recent sources in listing Jón Bjarnason’s year of
death as c. 1635.
67 See also Dedekind’s comment in his preface (Grobianus, et Grobiana, 5v) that “forsitan et
tetricos offendent ista Catones / carmina” (maybe these poems will also offend shadowy
Catos).