 Gunnar's Holm |
 Texts and Commentaries |
 To Mr. Paul Gaimard |
|---|
Title page of Jónas's translation of Ursin. |
The solar system. |
A star cluster. |
The Andromeda nebula. |
| Date: | Summer (July/August?) 1837 (see KJH309). |
| Form: | Eleven fornyrðislag strophes (the second of which is expanded). In the original, "a kind of assonance is noticeable at the end of the lines; whether this artistic device is conscious or unconscious is open to question (SW36)." |
| Manuscript: | ÍB 13 fol., a draft of the last five strophes (facsimile KJH71-2; image). |
| First published: | 1843 (6F35-7; image) where it has the title "Alheimsvíðáttan." |
Commentary: The poem is based on "Die Größe der Welt," a youthful work (1778?) by the German poet Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), though Jónas insists in his subtitle that it is only the "idea" (hugmynd) of Schiller's poem that he has borrowed. Schiller's original reads as follows:1
Die der schaffende Geist einst aus dem Chaos schlug,
Durch die schwebende Welt flieg ich des Windes Flug,
Bis am Strande
Ihrer Wogen ich lande.
Anker werf', wo kein Hauch mehr weht
Und der Markstein der Schöpfung steht.Sterne sah ich bereits jugendlich auferstehn,
Tausendjährigen Gangs durchs Firmament zu gehn,
Sah sie spielen
Nach den lokenden Zielen,
Irrend suchte mein Blik umher,
Sah die Räume schon — sternenleer.Anzufeuren den Flug weiter zum Reich des Nichts,
Steur' ich muthiger fort, nehme den Flug des Lichts
Neblicht trüber
Himmel an mir vorüber
Weltsysteme, Fluten im Bach
Strudeln dem Sonnenwandrer nach.Sieh, den einsamen Pfad wandelt ein Pilger mir
Rasch entgegen — "Halt an! Waller, was suchst du hier?"
""Zum Gestade
Seiner Welt meine Pfade!
Seegle hin wo kein Hauch mehr weht,
Und der Markstein der Schöpfung steht!"""Steh! du seegelst umsonst — vor dir Unendlichkeit!"
""Steh! du seegelst umsonst — Pilger auch hinter mir! —
Senke nieder
Adlergedank dein Gefieder,
Kühne Seeglerin, Fantasie,
Wirf ein muthloses Anker hie."" (1SWN102)
Jónas was no doubt attracted to Schiller's ode in the first place because of its religio-philosophical awe at the vastness and limitlessness of the universe and because it gave poetic expression to fields of study (astronomy and cosmology) that were of intense personal and professional interest to him. "For my own part," he would write in 1842, "I take joy in contemplating the heavens, for the sake of knowledge, and delight, and consolation." A brief account of the origin of the universe — in terms of the nebular hypothesis of Kant and Laplace — formed an important part of his 1835 Fjölnir essay "On the Nature and Origin of the Earth"; in the same number of Fjölnir appears a brief article about Halley's comet that he wrote in collaboration with Konráð Gíslason (1F175-6); and in the years 1840-2 he would go to a great deal of trouble making and publishing a painstaking Icelandic translation of A Popular Introduction to Astronomy (Populært Foredrag over Astronomien) by the Copenhagen mathematician and astronomer Georg Frederik Krüger Ursin (1797-1849).2 Indeed, it is possible that Jónas's decision, in the summer of 1837, to translate Schiller's "Die Größe der Welt," was stimulated by the publication (or forthcoming publication) of Ursin's book, which appeared that same year (1837, dated 1838). The fruits of Jónas's study of astronomy are clearly evident in "The Vastness of the Universe," which conveys an impression of astronomical and cosmological knowledge far in advance of Schiller's.3
When Jónas read "The Vastness of the Universe" to the Fjölnir Society on 4 February 1843, he said it was longer than its German original and therefore could not be classified as a "translation" (32Eim270). Indeed, Schiller's poem has been very considerably expanded; Jónas's adaptation contains almost half again as many words as Schiller's original.4 Moreover its form has been radically altered: with one exception, Jónas has recast each of Schiller's five stanzas (asclepiadean strophes with added rhyme) into two strophes of fornyrðislag (Schiller's fifth stanza has been expanded into three strophes).
Jónas could hardly have written this poem, or his friends have read it, without the eddic Þrymskviða playing about the fringes of their consciousness (see RGL119-20).
1 For commentary on the sources, meter, and philosophico-religious background of Schiller's poem, see 2SWNIIA94-6.
2 Ursin's book — a very fine nontechnical introduction to its subject, as Jónas was quick to recognize — was a reworking, for a wider audience, of a series of popular lectures Ursin had delivered in Copenhagen and other Danish towns.
3 And which — in its dignity of expression — is light years away from the astronomical passages in Njóla, the long philosophical poem by Björn Gunnlaugsson, Jónas's mathematics teacher at Bessastaðir. Björn's fifty-seventh stanza may be taken as a particularly salient example:
Just as crowds of cod and plaice
caper in the ocean,
God has filled the gulf of space
with galaxies in motion.Sem þá mest er síldum af
í söltum þorska lautum,
alt eins morar uppheims haf
ótal vetrarbrautum.
"Oh how Icelandic!" Konráð Gíslason might have said.
4 A partial list of Jónas's expansions and alterations is given by Kjartan Rúnar Gíslason (SW36). Some of Jónas's changes serve to make the astronomical statements in the poem more precise and/or accurate. For example, whereas Schiller's stars go their "thousand-year way" through the firmament, Jónas's "run a race of a thousand ages."
Schiller never makes explicit the identity of the pilgrim "whom the creating spirit once flung out from Chaos". But since this pilgrim goes with the "flight of light," it is tempting to identify him with light itself and to see the Biblical account of the creation (Genesis 1) as underlying Schiller's account. Jónas certainly thought this was the case and has made everything much more explicit: his speaker is "the spark of light [geisli] whom God's creating hand once flung out from chaos." To this extent Kjartan is correct in claiming that Jónas's poem (unlike Schiller's) "bears strongly marked Christian features." But his theory that the "travelling image" in strophe 7 is Christ seems very strange indeed (see RGL120-1).
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