A Poetry Machine

Abstract

Analysis of the two manuscript versions of the Second Grammatical Treatise reveals a common interest in musical performance, which is also reflected in the treatise’s tripartite division of sound, indebted to medieval music theory. Music and grammar meet in the ars rithmica, an analytical tradition devoted to syllable-counting, often rhyming kinds of poetry usually performed to musical accompaniment. The “new poetics” of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, influenced by ars rithmica, posits meter as a tool for the renewal of poetry based on the best of old traditions. The influence of ars rithmica is apparent in the grammatical treatises, and its characteristic style of analysis can be traced in Háttatal’s account of the end-rhymed runhent meter. The “poetry machine” of the Codex Upsaliensis version of the Second Grammatical Treatise, a diagrammatical representation of poetic rhyme based on the conceit of a hurdy-gurdy with letter-annotated keys, demonstrates that the interrelationship between rhyme, music, and meter was virulent in a pedagogical context in late medieval Iceland, while its manuscript link with Háttatal suggests a reading of the Prose Edda compilation as an Icelandic “new poetics.”