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Ar Across the Norwegian and Icelandic Poems

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Ar Across the Norwegian and Icelandic Poems

Ar's two stanzas agree closely on subject, plenty or a good year, matching the Old English Ger stanza's own harvest reading, but the Norwegian poem develops the theme through legend rather than observation, naming Frodi, a legendary Danish king associated in Old Norse tradition with an era of such abundance and peace that gold rings were said to lie unguarded on the roads, as an example of the generosity plenty makes possible, an allusion the stanza offers as plainly as the Reid stanza's reference to Reginn, assuming an audience that already knew the Frodi story without needing it explained.

The Icelandic poem instead stays with direct agricultural observation, reading plenty through a good summer and a field grown thick and thriving, an image grounded in the visible, tangible experience of a successful harvest rather than in inherited legend, a contrast in method, mythic exemplar against direct natural description, that recurs across several of the pairs this survey has already noted, Reid included. Dickins' 1915 edition treats the Frodi reference as one of the more securely identified legendary allusions in either poem, the king and his golden age being independently well attested in other Old Norse sources including the Prose Edda, unlike some of the more obscure or unglossed images either poem offers elsewhere.

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