Logr Across the Norwegian and Icelandic Poems

Logr's two stanzas both take water as their subject but each draws on a landscape distinctive to its own poem's likely place of composition: the Norwegian poem reads water as a waterfall spilling from a mountainside, an image fitting Norway's own famously steep, fjord cut terrain, and pairs this with a second, seemingly unconnected line about gold ornaments, a juxtaposition of wild water and wrought treasure without a stated logical link between the two, comparable to Ass's own unexplained transition between images elsewhere in the Norwegian poem.

The Icelandic poem instead reads water through an eddying stream and a broad geyser, a term whose very origin traces to Iceland's own distinctive geothermal landscape, before closing with an image of the ground or land of fish, a kenning for the sea or a fish rich body of water fitting Iceland's heavily fishing dependent economy. This landscape specific divergence, Norwegian mountains against Icelandic geothermal terrain, is among the clearest cases in either poem of the surrounding physical environment of each poem's likely composition shaping the specific imagery chosen for an otherwise shared rune subject, a pattern Dickins' 1915 edition notes as broadly consistent across several of the stanzas describing landscape or weather.