Sol Across the Norwegian and Icelandic Poems

Sol's two stanzas both take the sun as their subject but frame its power rather differently: the Norwegian poem reads the sun as light of the world, a phrase carrying an unmistakably Christian resonance close to Ger and Hagall's own Christian framings elsewhere in the same poem, and closes by bowing to divine decree, submission to God's ordering of the world rather than any independent power attributed to the sun itself.

The Icelandic poem instead reads the sun through its own visible, active effect on the world, calling it shield of the clouds, a shining wheel and, most strikingly, destroyer of ice, an image that directly answers Isa's own harder Icelandic reading of ice as destruction of doomed men, the sun here cast as the very force that undoes winter's grip rather than as a passive light bowing to a higher power. This pairing across the two poems, ice as destroyer in one stanza and the sun as destroyer of that same ice a stanza later, gives the Icelandic poem's sequence a thematic coherence the Norwegian poem's more piecemeal Christian insertions do not build toward in the same way. Dickins' 1915 edition notes the shining wheel image as one of the more visually striking kennings in either poem, the sun's disc and its wheel like path across the sky captured in a single compact phrase.