Poetry
Lilja, The Lily
Lilja
Eysteinn Ásgrímsson · 1340
Synopsis
A drápa of a hundred stanzas, addressed to the Virgin, which retraces the history of salvation: the creation of the world and the fall of Lucifer, then the life of Christ, his crucifixion and resurrection, and the Last Judgment. Twenty-five stanzas of contrition follow, in which the poet acknowledges himself a sinner and implores mercy, then the prayer and praise of Mary, mother of the Saviour.
Context
The poem is built in three parts of twenty-five, fifty and twenty-five stanzas, and its first stanza is also its last. It abandons the dróttkvætt of praise poems for the hrynhent, a metre it made so popular that it came to be called liljulag, and gives up skaldic kennings for a rapid narrative. Signed by a brother Eysteinn, it is attributed by tradition to the canon Eysteinn Ásgrímsson, an attribution that is disputed. Eiríkr Magnússon translated it into English in 1870, Knut Ødegård into Norwegian in 1980, Michel Taillé into French in 1989 and Patrick Guelpa in 2005.
Who it is for
One hundred stanzas in Old Icelandic, readable in French in the editions of 1989 and 2005.
Prizes and reception
The most ambitious and the most popular of the Icelandic religious poems until the Passion hymns of Hallgrímur Pétursson.