Lokrur: Introduction

Denise Vast, Ann Sheffield, and Lyonel Perabo, October 2023

Rímur poetry is an Icelandic narrative verse form that was very popular from the 14th to the 19th centuries. There are about a thousand of these poems surviving (Colwill 2022). They are conventionally divided into medieval and modern rímur, with the division either at 1550 CE, to coincide with the Reformation, or at 1600, mainly based on phonology (Hughes 1980). After the Reformation, the church attempted to discourage their enjoyment and replace them with religious poetry. Happily, these attempts were entirely unsuccessful. (Hughes 2005)

The poems were enjoyed by all levels of society. Whether their performance context included singing or dancing has been the subject of debate (Colwill 2022), but they are best known as a popular entertainment recited on farms, alongside sagas and folktales, during the evening work period or kvöldvaka. In rural areas, this continued into the 20th century (Ólason 1915), when it was eventually displaced by radio.

Rímur were usually based on an existing story, most often a saga of some kind. Sometimes the saga has subsequently been lost, with the rímur being the only remaining record, while at other times sagas were written (or reconstituted) from rímur. Mythological material is also occasionally used: for instance, Þrymlur, one of the oldest extant rímur cycles (Colwill 2022), tells the story of Þórr losing his hammer, as found in the eddic poem Þrymskviða. Lokrur is also considered early (pre-1500), as is Skíða ríma, an original comedy which appears to have been written as a deliberate attempt to get as many deities and famous legendary characters as possible together into one gigantic bar fight. A sample verse from Skíða ríma reads:

Ubbi then fell out through the door
with eighteen hundred wounds;
he didn’t lose his life before
his lungs fell out through his groin.

 

About Lokrur

Lokrur is preserved in a vellum manuscript from the 16th century, AM 604g 4to, which contains four other rímur in addition to Lokrur: Þrændlur (“On Þrændr”), Rímur af Sörla sterka (“Rímur of Sörli the Strong”), Þrymlur (“On Þrymr”), and Völsungsrímur (“Rímur about Völsungr the Unborn”). The book containing the manuscript was sent to Árni Magnússon in 1707 by the alþing and is known as Staðarhólsbók, having originally come from Pétur Bjarnason at Staðarhóll. It has since been split up into eight separate books, all eight of which contain rímur, with the present binding dating from 1977 (Handrit.is).

Opening stanzas of Lokrur in AM 604g 4to (source: Handrit.is)

Lokrur draws its content from the story of Þórr‘s visit to Útgarða-Loki in Gylfaginning in the the Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson, but the poet has made significant changes to the framework of the story. Haukur Þorgeirsson points out that the gods are set up for a far more devastating and spectacular fall by the way they are introduced in the poem, which begins by talking about how the Æsir are victorious, Þórr always causes jötnar to silently flee, and Loki has tricks for every occasion, none of which in any way eventuates as the poem progresses. In contrast to the version in Gylfaginning, where no reason is given for the journey, Lokrur gives the story a more intelligible motivation by having Þórr decide to make the trip himself while Loki attempts to talk him out of it. This also cleverly inverts Loki’s incitement of Þórr to make the trip to Geirröðargarður, known to us from both Skáldskaparmál in the Prose Edda, and Þórsdrápa in the Poetic Edda, both of which Lokrur’s audience would very likely have been familiar with (Þorgeirsson 2018).

The poem uses kennings both to add puzzle-solving interest and to meet metrical requirements. Any character’s relationship to Óðinn is particularly useful to the poet, as it opens up the huge store of Óðinn-names to provide options for alliteration etc. It is no surprise to see Þórr referred to in these verses as Óðinn’s son or his heir, but the kennings for Loki are intriguing: in earlier, skaldic verse, Loki is called Óðinn’s friend (vinr), but in rímur he has become a servant (þjónn) or slave (þræll). Sörla þáttr in Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks, which, like Lokrur, is considered a late text compared with the skaldic verse quoted in the Prose Edda, likewise depicts Loki as Óðinn’s servant.

 

History of Rímur Translations and Scholarship

Skíðaríma (“Skíði’s ríma”) was translated by Theo Homan in 1975, Völsungsrímur by Hannah R. F. Hethmon in 2015, and Skikkjurímur (“Rímur of the Mantle”) by Matthew James Driscoll in 1999, but in general rímur have rarely been translated into English. Recent additions to this corpus are translations of Grettis ríma (‘Grettir’s ríma’) by Lee Colwill, Þrymlur by Lee Colwill and Haukur Þorgeirsson, and the first two (of four) parts of Lokrur by Ellis B. Wylie.

Few scholars have studied rímur due to earlier researchers considering them to be lurid and degenerate popular entertainment, useful only for studying phonological development or extracting the plots of lost sagas. Holding them to the literary standards of the terse and “realistic” family sagas, rather than to those of the legendary and mythological material from which the rímur often drew, critics such as Sigurðar Nordal and the authors of the nationalistic journal Fjölnir denounced the poems as artless and exaggerated (Colwill 2022). Using Lokrur as a case study, Haukur Þorgeirsson has examined these criticisms and demonstrated that they do not hold water. For example, with regard to exaggeration, he points out that the Gylfaginning original includes a jötunn so large that Þórr and his companions can spend the night in his glove and that Hymiskviða mentions a jötunn with nine hundred heads. He sees the plot differences between Snorri’s account and Lokrur as deliberate and purposeful, and he concludes that the rímur poet has shown considerable artistry in their handling of the material (Haukur Þorgeirsson 2008).

The present translation follows Finnur Jónsson’s text in Fernir Forníslenskir Rímnaflokkar, with the original manuscript checked for clarification where necessary. Rather than note all of Finnur’s emendations to the manuscript text, we have added comments only when we have rejected an emendation or a reading of the manuscript. The translation follows the nominative forms used in, or implied by, the manuscript wherever possible. For instance, we refer to the thunder-god as Þór, rather than the earlier (and possibly more familiar) form Þórr.

 

Technical Considerations (Poetics)

Rímur can be extremely long, and they are almost always broken up into sections called “fitts”. Each fitt has at least one opening and closing stanza which declares that poetry is beginning or ending. In addition, the fitts typically have introductory sections known as mansöngvar (love poetry), which become very long in the later rímur. In these introductions, the poet addresses his audience, usually a female one, and the verses can be dedicatory and may praise women, talk about love, or simply remind listeners where the story broke off in the previous section. Additionally, the poet may voice various complaints such as the trials of old age, their struggles with composition, the poor quality of their poetry, or their terrible track record with the ladies (Kuhn 1990-3).

Rímur poetry employs both alliteration and end rhyme. It also uses the system of kennings (allusive references, often based on mythological knowledge, such as calling a sword a “wound-flame” or warriors “trees of battle”) inherited from skaldic poetry, though not to the same degree nor always in the same manner. In contrast to the convoluted syntax typical of skaldic poetry, kenning components in rímur were usually kept together, making them easier for the audience to understand and multi-part kennings were rare. The rímur-poets also invented new kennings (Hughes 2005). Rímur also inherited heiti (alternative names) from skaldic verse: for instance, the names Loki, Loptur, and Lóður are used interchangeably in these poems. As a result, the rímur provide our best evidence for identifying the mysterious god Lóðurr, one of a trio responsible for creating humans in the eddic poem Völuspá, with Loki (Haukur Þorgeirsson 2011).

Alliterative verse has a deep history among speakers of Germanic languages, the family to which which Icelandic belongs, but end rhyme had previously been fairly rare in Icelandic poetry. The stanza forms of rímur are thought to be modelled on the Latin ecclesiastical poetry common throughout Europe by the 12th century (Hughes 2005), though the number of different forms proliferated greatly over time. The most common metre used in rímur is ferskeytt, which has four-line stanzas with an abab rhyme scheme and a 7/6/7/6 syllable count. It became traditional for the first fitt of a rímur cycle to be in ferskeytt, with the metre of each subsequent fitt different from the previous one (ibid.). Lokrur’s use of ferskeytt for fitts 2-4, along with the very short mansöngvar in the poem, are features which show its early composition among rímur.

 

Technical Considerations (Language)

In addition to the variable spelling expected from manuscripts produced before standardisation of the Icelandic language (Wylie), rímur also show its linguistic development (Jónsson 1896). In the 19th century the Icelandic language was standardised, and a good deal of the natural development it had undergone was undone in order to make it more closely resemble the language of the sagas (Bernharðsson 2018). This deliberate reversal by a cadre of litterati gives a misleading impression that the language had undergone little change over time. For instance, Lokrur features spellings such as geingu and leingi, which reflect the development of vowels into dipthongs before ng. The standardisation process returned the spellings to the more archaic gengu and lengi, which are still used today (ibid.).

 

Postscript: The Rune Kennings

Although not present in Lokrur, a particularly interesting feature of rímur, especially after 1600 (Senra Silva 2010), is the use by the poets of rune kennings to conceal personal names, either their own or that of the lady the poem was dedicated to, in the closing verses. The rímur poets were not the first to use runes to encode names in this way: a 12th-13th century runic inscription found in Norway (N A104) is our earliest example (ibid.). However, by the middle of the 17th century, antiquarian interest in old alphabets and secret codes was resulting in the production and circulation of numerous manuscripts containing so-called málrúnir (‘speech-runes’). These kennings for the rune names are best known from the Icelandic Rune Poem manuscripts, which provide a handful of examples for each Younger Futhark rune that were likely drawn from a larger stock of such kennings (Page 1988). For example, the r-rune is named Reið (‘ride/riding’) and designated by the kennings sitjandi sæla (‘sitting bliss’), snúðig ferð (‘swift journey’), and jórs erfiði (‘horse’s toil’). These kennings give poets the opportunity to write “horse’s toil” and mean ‘the letter r’. By stringing a number of these kennings together, a name can be spelled out, and sometimes this was done as an anagram (Ólason 1915).

Kennings for the r-rune from SÁM 66 (source: Handrit.is).

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