Ferskeytt

Ferskeytt (literally 'four-cornered') is an Icelandic stanzaic poetic form. It is a kind of quatrain, and probably first attested in fourteenth-century rímur such as Ólafs ríma Haraldssonar. It remains one of the dominant metrical forms in Icelandic versifying to this day.[1]

Ferskeytt comprises odd-numbered, basically trochaic lines with four stresses in the pattern / x / x / x /, alternating with even-numbered trochaic lines with three stresses in the pattern / x / x / x. In each line, one unstressed syllable may be replaced with two unstressed syllables. Stanzas are normally of four lines, and rhyme aBaB. In the first line, two heavily-stressed syllables alliterate with the first heavily-stressed syllable of the second line, and so on in the usual alliterative pattern of Germanic alliterative verse.[2]

An example of the form is this verse by Jónas Hallgrímsson, with a translation into the same metre by Dick Ringler.[3] Alliteration is emboldened and rhyme is italicised:

Hóla bítur hörkubál,
hrafnar éta gorið,
tittlingarnir týna sál,
tarna' er ljóta vorið!

Hillsides raked by raging frost,
ravens eating offal,
buntings giving up the ghost —
God, this spring is awful!

There are many variations on ferskeytt, whose common principle is that they are quatrains with some kind of alternate rhyme. A poem in this metre is called a ferskeytla ('four-cornered [poem]'). Metres which share these properties belong to the ferskeytluætt ('ferskeytla-family').[4]

References
  1. Vésteinn Ólason, 'Old Icelandic Poetry', in A History of Icelandic Literature, ed. by Daisy Nejmann, Histories of Scandinavian Literature, 5 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), pp. 1-63 (pp. 55-59).
  2. Richard Ringler, Bard of Iceland : Jónas Hallgrímsson, poet and scientist (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), §III.2, http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/Jonas/Prosody/Prosody-II.html.
  3. Richard Ringler, Bard of Iceland : Jónas Hallgrímsson, poet and scientist (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), §III.2, http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/Jonas/Prosody/Prosody-II.html.
  4. Richard Ringler, Bard of Iceland : Jónas Hallgrímsson, poet and scientist (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), §III.2, http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/Jonas/Prosody/Prosody-II.html.
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