Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1981, Page 188

196
A note on Lilja
»Hoc ideo ne forte per hoc moriamur.« Ad illud
»Forte« minus fortem credentem vidit; et inde
Fortior his illam vicit
on Eysteinn’s equally ingenious adnominatio in Lilja 16/7—8, 17/
1—2:
»At eigi viS lífs af leiðum
lettliga hrqpum á dauSans stettir.«
Lettliga fann f>ar ljósa váttan
lettleika í svaranna reiki.
As recognised by Fritzner and Schottmann, but by hardly anybody
else, the word lettliga in 16/8 translates forte and is a calque on
MHG lihte, cf. modern (viel) leicht [ne forte = eigi .... lettliga).23)
In 17/1 the word has its usual sense of »easily« and answers to
nothing in Geoffrey, while in 17/2 lettleiki refers to Eve’s »Let-
sindighed, Mangel paa Alvor«24) and could be set against Geoffrey’s
minus fortem credentem. (The word framt 17/3 can be equated with
fortior in line 1472, though the pun is not maintained by it.)
Of course in an age of florilegia, schoolmasters’ dictation and
pupils’ repetition, Eysteinn might have come to know Geoffrey’s
poem only in fragments and only at some distant removie. But in
many ways it makes sense to think he was brought up on the
Poetria nova and all it typified in early fourteenth-century educa-
tion. First, there is the known popularity of Geoffrey’s work.
Second, there is the acknowledged easy mastery of Eysteinn’s rhe-
toric. The style is »maske noget udvendigt retorisk«, Jón Helgason
has said,25) but that perhaps expresses a modern and not a medieval
misgiving, and present-day students of medieval rhetoric tend to
stress that the influence of a book like Geoffrey’s was pervasive,
the result rather of assimilation and long schooling than of sporadic
encounter and incidental imitation.26) Whether Eysteinn knew the
Poetria nova entire or in extracts, the connection confirms what
we should expect on general grounds, namely that his »Vertraut-
heit mit der lateinischen Dichtung« (otther than liturgical) was
gained from manuals, excerpts and exercises and not from leisurely