The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.1963, Blaðsíða 28

26
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Winter 1963
stanzas. Hallgrimur Petursson’s magn-
ificent Passtusalmar are fifty separate
poems in many metres, although they
all cluster around the Passion of our
Lord.
There would seem to be an histor-
ical cause behind all this. In the liter-
ature of Ancient Greece and Rome,
two metres were evolved for use in
long poems—the dactylic hexameter
for epic and philosophical poetry and
the iambic senarius for the dialogue
of drama. Each had a basic pattern of
six feet to the line but each could be
rendered infinitely varied and fluid
by quantitative substitutions and the
incessant shifting of the caesura. The
metres of the Greek and Roman lyric,
on the contrary, were as rigid as they
were intricate. Each stanza in Alcaeus
or Horace had the brilliance of a tiny
jewel but also its crystalline severity.
One could no more tell a long story
in Alcaics than one could in limericks.
One later by-product of the iambic
senarius was Italian blank verse but
the old classical line, whether iambic
or heroic, cross-fertilized with the
church Latin and Arabic use of rhyme
to produce several viable rhymed
forms in Italian that proved admirable
for narrative purposes and these were
speedily adopted in such literatures as
those of France and Germany. Such
were the Terza lima (Dante’s Divina
Commedia), the heroic couplet (Chau-
cer’s Canterbury Tales and most of
French and Restoration drama), the
ottava lima (Byron’s Don Juan) and
the rime royal (Chaucer’s Troilus and
Criseyde). Blank verse was almost uni-
versal in Elizabethan drama. All of
these metres were iambic but could be
infinitely varied in modulation.
Icelandic prosody began with the
comparatively simple alliterative mea-
sures of the Eddie poetry, but even the
Eddie poems, by choice or inward
necessity, were as brief as ballads and
gained their amazing power by con-
concentration rather than by exten-
sion. The Skaldic or court poets,
whose prosody tried to add the com-
plexity of Irish verse to that of the
Scandinavian, imposed incredibly de-
tailed patterns on Icelandic verse, pat-
terns that could be filled out only by
the use of “Kennings” twisted meta-
phorical conceits that ultimately ibaf-
flecl comprehension. It may be help-
ful to suggest that the older Icelandic
tradition was catalyzed out in the
mediaeval period into two extremes—
this lyric intricacy on the one hand
and on the other the stark simplicity
of the prose saga. In the relative iso-
lation of the subarctic North Atlantic
resolute men carried the quest of these
two absolutes out to its logical con-
clusions. But the sagas are a possession
for ever while skaldic poetry died of
its own excesses.
Icelandic poets of the past four cen-
turies have borrowed all of the metres
and stanza forms from modern Europe,
but have insisted on imposing on every
couplet the requirements of the old
alliterative rules. Their prosody re
mains, moreover, overwhelmingly tro-
chaic, probably because the postposit-
ive article makes the typical word a
trochee. This metre is splendid for
the ringing lines of a lyric but is alien
to epic and drama. It may therefore be
that the very texture of Modern Ice-
landic ordains it as an apt vehicle for
brief and sonorous poems, while its
epic and dramatic impulses must turn
to the novel and the prose drama.
d'he great chapter of Icelandic
poetry “vestan uni haf” is drawing to
a close. Failing some unpredictable im-
migrant reinforcements from the anci-
ent fatherland, another ten or fifteen
years will come to “the lay of the last
minstrel,” and literary historians will