Date:	Early January 1844 (probably 14-15 January)
Form:	Five stanzas of eight four-stress lines in triolet-form (see below), rhyming aBaaBaBa and with the alliteration pattern 2222
Manuscript:	JS 129 fol. (facsimile KJH154-5; image) and KG 31 b V (facsimile KJH161-3; image); in both manuscripts the poem bears the title "Dalvísa."
First published:	1844 (7F27-8; image) under the title "Dalvísa" ("Valley Song"); reprinted A136-8 under the title "Dalvísur" ("Valley Stanzas")
Sound recording:	Emily Auerbach reads "Valley Song." [1:35]

Commentary:        In this sequence of exclamatory apostrophes, Jónas paints a rapturous picture of a typical rural valley in Iceland. He invokes, in the first four stanzas, the blossoms in its meadows, the waterfalls and ravines along its sides, the brooks and streams that flow along its bottom, and the cliff belts and high peaks that gird it round. In the fifth stanza he addresses the valley as a whole. It is hard to imagine a more briefly comprehensive or more artfully shaped portrait of this typical Icelandic landscape. When writing the poem, Jónas can hardly help but have had his birthplace Öxnadalur in mind; still, the portrait is firmly generic, including only features characteristic of the great majority of cultivated valleys in Iceland.¹ Moreover its air of simplicity and spontaneity is deceptive, a striking example of the "art that conceals art," for the poem has very complex and sophisticated literary antecedents.

On 13 January 1844 Brynjólfur Pétursson wrote to Jónas in Sorø, asking for a contribution to the next number of Fjölnir. "Please," he begged, "you must send us a poem if you've got one!" (BPB42). Jónas no doubt received this letter the next day or the day after and it is possible that he composed "Valley Song" more or less on the spot, in response to Brynjólfur's request.

Two manuscripts of the poem survive. The earlier of these seems to have been intended, at least initially, as a fair copy, but was then substantially (and very advantageously) revised before Jónas sent it off to Brynjólfur with the following note jotted beneath the text:

Before you read this aloud (to everyone's edification, of course!) it will be best to make a clean copy.

I want to ask you [i.e., Brynjólfur and Jónas's other Fjölnir colleagues] to commission a tune — nice, but not too expensive — to go with my poem. (KJH155)

Brynjólfur read the poem to the Fjölnir Society on 20 January and on 12 February wrote Jónas:

I made a copy of "Valley Song," as you asked me to, but I have not commissioned a tune for it. I'm afraid a tune is going to be hard to come by. Setting this poem to music will be no easy task; it will be hard to explain the text to a composer, it is so "original and distinctive" [ejendommelig og original]. When I finished reading it aloud at our meeting, everyone said it was lovely and unusual and asked me to beg you to let Fjölnir have it. And you will, nicht wahr? (BPB43-4)

The poem was published later that year in the seventh issue of Fjölnir.

The other manuscript copy is later (but probably only slightly later) than the first. It is a fair copy dated 15 January. It incorporates all the revisions in the first manuscript and its punctuation much more closely resembles the punctuation of the text printed in Fjölnir. Beneath the poem (and "Mowing Song," which follows immediately in the manuscript), Jónas has written: "By the way, it's intolerable not having tunes to which poems like this can be sung! Without such tunes, they will never become popular among the people."² Jónas evidently thought it important that a poem like "Valley Song," describing (and idealizing) the beauty of rural Iceland, should attain wide popularity among his countrymen at home, for the reason he puts into the mouth of Eggert Ólafsson in the "Lay of Hulda":

God has given more than a few
gifts to Iceland! But foolish men —
treating them with contempt — do not
tend or improve their garden plot,
loathe to admit, or realize,
they live in an earthly paradise.

"Valley Song" shows, perhaps better than any other of Jónas's poems, his genius as a formal innovator and his ability to adapt preexistent models, both foreign and domestic, to his own ends.

The starting point, in this instance, is an untitled poem beginning with the line "Tak være dig, min Sommerdal," published in 1790 by the Norwegian clergyman and folk poet Claus Frimann (1746-1829).³ It is possible that Jónas knew Frimann's poem in the original; he was familiar with other work by Frimann, having made a translation of the latter's "Lovsang" while still a student at Bessastaðir.⁴

Frimann's poem is six stanzas long.⁵ It begins with (1) a stanza addressed to a Norwegian farming valley. This is followed by four stanzas in which various features of the valley are apostrophized separately and more or less at random: (2) its woodlands, (3) the wall of mountains that surrounds it, (4) its arable land, and (5) the brook that flows through it. The final stanza (6) gives thanks to God. Frimann's poem is written in stanzas of eight lines (four alternating four- and three-stress lines + two four-stress lines + a verbatim repetition of lines 1 and 2); these stanzas rhyme aBaBccaB and have a relentlessly iambic rhythm.

Although it is not impossible that Jónas knew Frimann's poem in the original, it seems probable that the immediate impulse for writing "Valley Song" came from reading the bravura Icelandic translation of it by Jón Þorláksson, "Excellences of the Land" ("Landkostirnir").⁶ Jónas had taken a close look through Jón's collected poems in the winter of 1841-2, three years before writing "Valley Song". Jón's translation of Frimann's poem is extremely close to its original, following it line by line and docilely reproducing its Norwegian landscape without making any effort to adjust the picture to Icelandic actuality. The rhythm is fundamentally trochaic, now, with anacrusis and dactyllic substitution on the Icelandic pattern, and with addition of the obligatory alliteration.

When Jónas set about recasting this poem, he retained its basic format (a series of exclamatory apostrophes addressed to the different features of an agricultural valley) but made a number of radical changes. For one thing, he eschews the repetition of first person possessive adjectives that he found in his original, thus producing a much more universal poem.⁷ For another, he does away with the formulaic expressions of gratitude ("þökk sè þèr") to all the individual physical features of the valley and dispenses altogether with the final stanza of gratitude to God.⁸

More important, Jónas embarks on a thoroughgoing redeployment of individual items in Frimann's original. This redeployment may be represented graphically as follows:

This rearrangement (and sometimes reconceptualization) achieves two goals: (1) total Icelandicization of the content of the poem (for example, Norwegian trees become Icelandic flowers), and (2) the creation of a series of apostrophes that follow one another in a sequence that is not only logical but climactic as well. It begins with small-scale local features towards which an observer looks down (flowers), proceeds to middle-size features such as waterfalls and brooks (toward which an observer looks with more or less horizontal gaze), and concludes with the macro-features of the landscape, its surrounding mountains (toward which an observer looks up). The series concludes, logically enough, with an address to the valley as a whole. As already noted, Jónas does not reproduce Frimann's sixth stanza, consequently gratitude to God no longer plays an explicit role in the poem. But no doubt it is implicit throughout.

None of what has been said hitherto, however, touches on the most remarkable innovation in Jónas's poem. The stanza-form used by Frimann (in his original) and Jón Þorláksson (in his translation), with the first two lines of each stanza repeated verbatim at the end, apparently struck Jónas as being so close to triolet form⁹ that he decided in his transformation of the poem to use triolet stanzas, thus introducing the triolet into Icelandic literature half a century before its effective introduction into English by Robert Bridges.

In his decision to adopt this form, Jónas was almost certainly inspired by "Küssen will ich, ich will küssen" (1831), a poem in triolet stanzas by the German poet and natural scientist Adelbert von Chamisso. Jónas made an Icelandic translation of this poem of Chamisso's at about the time he wrote "Valley Song."¹⁰ Chamisso's first stanza is a good example of strict triolet form:

Recasting Frimann's poem (and Jón Þorláksson's translation) in triolet stanzas meant writing four-stress lines throughout, observing a much more demanding rhyme scheme (two instead of three rhymes per stanza), and repeating the first line of every stanza verbatim as its fourth line. And that is where the potential problem arose: verbatim repetition was not possible without infringing the rules of alliteration, since double alliteration, compulsory in odd lines (like the first line of each stanza), is forbidden in even lines (like the fourth). Jónas solved this problem in two different ways, sometimes (1) altering, in the fourth line of a stanza, the word in its first line that had provided the second stuðull, so that it no longer participated in the alliteration (this was his procedure in stanzas 2 through 5), or (2) using the first line's non-alliterating stressed syllable as the headstave in the fourth line (in which case, in order to avoid overalliteration [ofstuðlun], he had to change — in the fourth line — the word containing the first alliterating syllable of the first line; this was his procedure in stanza 1).¹¹ The solution devised by Jónas here —partly forced upon him, of course, if there was to be any hope of writing triolet stanzas in Icelandic — was brilliant, since the slight variation of the first line in every fourth line enabled him to avoid the greatest danger facing practitioners of the triolet form: its tendency toward otiose, mechanical repetition.¹²

There is a prior English translation of the first two stanzas by H.M.S. in Íslenzk þjóðlög. Icelandic Folksongs (Edinburgh: R. W. Pentland, [n.d.]), pp. 12-4.

Bibliography:        Sveinn Yngvi Egilsson discusses the prosodic features of this poem at some length (Bbk71-5).