Do all the poems have a lot of kennings in them
please, " the hawks perch" I have seen used - for the left wrist, -
logical - and the "Goddess of the Arm" for your good (or bad) lady, do the
poetry-people know of this, I seek enlightenment on this point for I love
kennings and like to look for them in translations we are now
doing.
Freya's Tears for Gold is my favourite, and I have seen
Humakt's (sp) Swans for Ravens, but who was Humakt.
> What does this mean: "Þegar hafa borist allnokkur
kvæði en lengi má > gott bæta!" Is it that there´s always room
for more poems, or every > possibility that someone can improve on the
ones they´ve got? > I also found the variant 'alltaf má gott bæta'.
The contexts > seem to be that even if things are good, there's always
"room > for improvement", or some way in which things could be
better. > But I might be jumping to conclusions here.
You are
exactly right. You could translate the phrase with "there's always room
for improvement" and it would, I hope, capture the slightly ambiguous
original text. They probably mean "there's always room for improvement in
the number of poems we receive".
The winning poem was written by
Einar Kolbeinsson, a
farmer.
------------------------------------------------ Prinsinn
af Wales - Kveðja frá íslensku þjóðinni
Norðan úr hafi hvar nákaldir
vindar, nauða við gluggann um síðkvöldin löng, flytjum við dýrðar- og
fagnaðarsöng, því fljótlega marka skal endalok syndar.
Ástleitni
mennina áfram mun teyma, ofsögum þetta er tæplega sagt, og nú verður
brúðkaup með pompi og pragt, en pínlegum ágalla skulum við
gleyma.
Þjóðin leggst ekki í þvermóðsku og fýlu, þó allir viti að
staðan er sú, að prinsinn sem eignast í alvöru frú, aldrei mun ganga
til drottningarhvílu.
Verðandi konungur heimsveldishirðar, af
hetjuskap sannlega axlar þær
byrðar! ------------------------------------------------
This is a
dactylic sonnet. There's anacrusis in lines 4, 7, 8, 11 and 14. There's
no vowel elision. There's no over-alliteration or other metrical
faults.
> Hnísu söltum sultu > (svanr gat Nikuz)
skatnar > (hold, hlenni logs ennis) > hundmargir í
grundum.
The third line has alliteration on the first two
syllables. I still haven't found an example of that anywhere. The rest
seems fine. There's an 'aðalhending' instead of a 'skothending'
in line 3 but that's not serious.
Maybe we could swap 'hlenni' and
'logs' like this:
"Hnísu söltum sultu (svanr gat Nikuz)
skatnar (hold, logs hlenni ennis) hundmargir í grundum."
This
would make the third line Type D1. The first line is clearly Type
A. The second line has to be Type A too, I think. But the third
syllable is short, which might be a problem. We could "fix" it by
substituting another name for Óðinn - say, "Óðinn", but that would hurt
the rhyme a bit. The fourth line is Type E, although 'í' makes for a
somewhat crappy metrical foot.
This type business is arcane lore,
though. Very few people know it and even fewer claim to understand it.
But anyone interested in poetry can identify wrong
alliteration.
> Svanr Nikuz, hlenni logs ennis, gat
hold. > Hundmargir skatnar sultu í söltum grundum Hnísu.
The
swan of Óðinn [raven], the thief of the fire of the forehead [eyes], got
some flesh. Extremely many warriors perished in the salt grounds of
the porpoise [sea].
The imagery is evocative. I like "hlenni logs
ennis", is it an original
idea?