OSKAR IVAR LEVERTIN.
EN GAMMAL NYÅRSVISA.
This is an old ballad modernized by Levertin, its legendary style being rather too fantastical for present-day verse.
16. Betslet är en blomsterrad—the reins, not the bit, forming a festoon of flowers, betsel (bit) is a metonym for tyglar (reins).
20. guldsmidd is here used in two senses—"gold-mounted" and "hammered out of gold."
29. Spelt was the common variety of wheat in early times. It is still grown on poor soils in Germany and Switzerland.
35. huvut, contraction of huvudet, the t representing the definite suffix, not a consonantal change.
45. livsens, archaic for livets.
FLOREZ OCH BLANZEFLOR.
This poem is based on an old medieval ballad which was translated into Swedish as early as 1312 and, together with similar versions of Ivan Lejonriddaren and Hertig Fredrik av Normandie, formed a group of ballads of chivalry called Eufemiavisorna, Queen Euphemia of Norway having caused them to be translated into the Swedish tongue. While the source of "Ivan" appears to have been a French ballad and that of "Henrik" a German one, both belonging to the Arthurian Tales, nothing is said of the origin of "Flores," except that it was "turned into rhyme." The ballad was probably based on the Norse prose saga, "Flores ok Blankiflur," and a French redaction of the same. Critics have traced the romance back to a late Greek source. The Swedish translator is thought to have used the Old Norse prose version. A modern French version, "Floire et Blanceflor" by E. Du Meril (1856) bears close relation to the Old Swedish version. (GEETE and SCHÜCK.)
5. The line gives the title of the poem in Swedish words—blomma och vitblomma.
24. Levertin's poem, as here indicated, merely hints at the full contents of the original ballad.
ITHAKA.
The argument of the poem is found in the very title. Ithaka, according to the Odyssey, was the native island of Odysseus, to which the hero of the epic, after having taken part in the Trojan War, returned only after years of reverses and vicissitudes.
6. Herakles' stoder, Gibraltar and the high rock on the opposite coast, known in classic lore as the Pillars of Hercules.
30, 32. smekning—räkning—see SNOILSKY, Den tjänande brodern, 14-15, note.
MODERSPRÅKET.
3. Fantasos' tömmar—carrying out the classic figure of Fancy as "the wingéd horse."
8. Allusion to John 1, 1-3.
9, 11. sen—vän—an extreme form of the "Stockholm rhyme," the vowels differing both in sound and in quantity.
20. The masculine epithet ledsven, in the midst of the feminine sagoförtäljerska, följeslagerska, bikterska, trösterska, drömmerska, is somewhat disconcerting.
Babylons vimmel refers to the Babel of tongues.
22, 24. stämma—hemma—Stockholm rhymes.
34-38. Entirely in keeping with the poet's confession in these lines is the recent estimate of a critic who says: "Oskar Levertin, who was not ashamed of being a Jew, although his nature in a peculiar and fruitful way combined the characteristics of his own race with those of the race which fostered him, quite often struck the Jewish chord in his verse, yet he took a purely esthetic view of the subject, treating Jewish motifs with romantic sentimentalism; at any rate, there was no distinctively Jewish mind or creative power back of the visions and songs of this occidental skeptic and art-dreamer." (OLOF RABENIUS in Ord och Bild, XXVI, 492.)
64. stämma möte ordinarily requires med or till, thus: där döden med oss stämt möte, or, där döden oss stämt till möte.