Translator's Note

Composed at some point in the thirteenth century, Sólarljóð (“The Song of the Sun”) fuses two important medieval European genres: wisdom literature and visionary Christian poetry. Starting with a series of moralistic stories rooted in the lived experience of medieval Icelanders, the poem eventually gives way to arresting, mystical imagery: apocalyptic visions of the sun cast as a fearsome deity, followed by Dantean descriptions of hell’s torments, before finally ending with the promise of heaven. The poem is, at its heart, a warning to those living on earth, recounted by a speaker who is revealed to be a dead man a third of the way through the poem, just before the extract presented here. The portion I have selected for translation focuses on the famous stanzas covering the speaker’s overwhelming vision of the sun, which acts as a harbinger of both terror and revelation. In Christian tradition, the sun was also closely associated with Christ and his redemptive power; as Ephesians 5:14 has it: Surge qui dormis, et exsurge a mortuis, et illuminabit te Christus (‘Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light’).

Sólarljóð was written in a form of Old Norse metre known as ljóðaháttr, a verse form in which each stanza is four lines long. Lines one and three consist of four stressed syllables each, two or three of which alliterate, while lines two and four have three stressed syllables, only two of which alliterate. (Note that in the Old Norse edition presented here, the odd lines are formatted as two separate half-lines, giving the impression of six line stanzas.) The number of unstressed syllables varies according to the line. As a rule of thumb, stressed syllables consisted of what we think of as “content” words like nouns and adjectives, while unstressed syllables were “function” words. My own translation keeps the four-line stanzas and uses a somewhat constrained free verse, in that I aim for three or four stressed syllables per line to give a sense of the succinctness of the original’s verse style. I pay special attention to the aural soundscape, making extensive use of alliteration on stressed syllables both within and between lines, as well as assonance. To take the first stanza of my translation as an example:

I saw the sun, true star of day,
drop down to the dinning earth,
elsewhere I heard the gates of hell,
groaning, heavy.

Sól ek sá,
sanna dagstjörnu,
drúpa dynheimum í;
en Heljar grind
heyrðak ek á annan veg
þjóta þungliga.

The effects of alliteration can of course vary depending on context. For example, in the Old Norse original presented above, you can see that the final line alliterates the words þjóta and þungliga, which serves to emphasise the sensory qualities of hell’s entrance. In my translation, I choose instead to thread alliteration of g and h across the final two lines, with the addition of assonance between heard, hell, and heavy. Here, I hope to give the impression of the oppressiveness of the sound of the gates.

Note: The Old Norse version is taken from the text of the Skaldic Project, edited by Carolyne Larrington and Peter Robinson, and which includes an excellent introduction.

Nik Gunn

In the Classroom