Sléttubönd
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In traditional Icelandic poetry, sléttubönd is a type of ferskeytt, more precisely a quatrain with a strict rhyming scheme and a fixed number of syllables. It follows the standard pattern of Icelandic poetry between the late Middle Ages and the early 20th century (still frequently employed today) where two stressed syllables in each odd-numbered line alliterate with the first stressed syllable of the following line. The form's defining characteristic is that its words constitute a valid quatrain also when read in the inverse order, making sléttubönd a type of palindromic verse. Sometimes, such a reading also causes the meaning to be reversed (intentionally), see the “Dóma grundar…” example below.
In his 1882 article, “On Old Icelandic and Norwegian Poetry”,[1] Benedict Gröndal calls sléttubönd the most “precious” of metres (the Icelandic term dýr—‘dear’—often being used to designate poetry using convoluted forms which aim for elegance but sometimes tend to be laboured.) He also states that sléttubönd is an invention of relatively recent date, “likely unknown to the older poets”. Writing in 1950, Björn K. Þórólfsson similarly asserts[2] that the first sléttubönd quatrains are found in the rímur of Þórður Magnússon á Strjúgi, who was active in the late 16th century.
In the cited article, Gröndal summarizes the characteristics of the verse form as follows (p. 158):
- A sléttubönd quatrain contains 14 words, all disyllabic except that lines 1 and 3 each end in a monosyllabic word.
- All words rhyme within the quatrain, with the exception of:
- the penultimate word of each of lines 1 and 3;
- the first word of each of lines 2 and 4.
- The words of a quatrain thus structured can be re-ordered and read in at least 16 different ways without disrupting its alliteration scheme or syntax, while still being meaningful.
