Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1981, Blaðsíða 184

192
A note on Lilja
bring much light with them. I may, for example, remark that Lilja
20/1, on the result of the Fall, Remman brast af rót í kvistu, is
doubtless an echo of Gregory the Great on the same matter: Unde
nunc quoque humani generis rami ex hac adhuc radice amaritudinem
trahunt, but since few books were better known than the Moralia
and this particular passage is quoted in commentaries on Genesis bv
Pseudo-Bede, Hrabanus, Angelomus of Luxeuil — and how many
more? — we are not much better off as a result.13) It is another
matter if use of a specific source can be observed in Lilja — as,
with greater boldness, I shall now propose is possible. And perhaps
this mouse of information that has strayed into ithe amateur source-
hunter’s net will, if set free, lead us some way into the labyrinth
of Eysteinn’s eloquence, even far enough to catch a glimmer of a
»geistesgeschichtlicher Schluss« at the centre of it.
It is not a rare or recondite work that Eysteinn seems to have
known — and that is as it should be. Of the half-dozen »preceptive«
works on poetic composition made between about 1180 and 1280
Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Poetria nova, written about 1210, has been
declared »the most popular« and it survives in over 200 manu-
scripts.14) In his poem of some 2100 lines Geoffrey teaches by
precepts and illustrations, the former mostly derived from authority,
the latter his own exercises. Among these are for example a com-
plaint on the death of Richard I and a summary of the »snow-
child« tale, but the notable ones for our purpose are a discourse on
the fall and the redemption, and another which begins with papal
responsibilities but moves on to the fall of Lucifer, the temptation
and fall of Eve and Adam, and the redemption. As Schottmann
remarks in passing, Geoffrey’s exercises show just how popular
the »Heilsgeschichte« was as a subjeot for poetic treatment.15)
Geoffrey’s chief source was the Ad Herennium, the famous hand-
book of rhetoric that was generally but mistakenly attributed to
Cicero.18) The first of his discourses on the history of salvation
exemplifies all the figures of diction covered in Ad Herennium IV
19—41 ( and in strictly the same order); the second illustrates the
figures of thought, again following the sequence of the definitions
in Ad Herennium IV 47—69. Lines 1139—44 contain an illustration