Commentary:        Bjarni Vigfússon Thorarensen (b. 1786), the Deputy Governor of northern and eastern Iceland, died unexpectedly of a stroke at his residence at Möðruvellir in Hörgárdalur in the night between 24 and 25 August 1841. Along with Jón Þorláksson, he was one of the two most important poets of the generation before Jónas. Jónas had admired Bjarni's work immensely, and studied it carefully, during his school years at Bessastaðir, and his own earliest poetry is deeply influenced by it. Bjarni was a loyal ally of the Fjölnismenn, supporting them in their effort to re-establish the Alþing at Þingvellir. He and Jónas came to know each other fairly well and had great respect for each other's work (see 2BTL328-9).

"Once you sat merry among us," Jónas addresses Bjarni, "admired and loquacious":

Men here below will remember
how many you gladdened.

A pleasant light is thrown on these words by Benedikt Gröndal's report that

Bjarni was a great one for partying. . . . After becoming Deputy Governor he was often obliged to attend weddings up there in the north. It was his habit to wear his uniform during the ceremony and the first part of the banquet. Then he would disappear, coming back in ordinary formal dress and saying: "The Deputy Governor asked me to bid you all goodnight" — after which he would join in the revelry like everyone else. (4BGR293)

In the single strophe of fornyrðislag with which this poem once began, and which Jónas later cancelled, he tells us that Bjarni had promised to write an elegy on him, if Jónas should die first, which — given Jónas's chronic ill-health — may well have seemed likely to both men:

You promised to write
a poem in my honor,
should I gain the harbor
of heaven before you. (4E160)

Hence the suddenness of Bjarni's death, only 55 years old, came as a terrible shock. Jónas received the news on 28 or 29 August when he was travelling in Húnavatnssýsla and reached Möðruvellir in time to attend Bjarni's funeral on 4 September (and perhaps to read this poem at it). "I had promised Deputy Governor Bjarni to visit him if I got as far as Möðruvellir," he wrote Finnur Magnússon, "and I arrived just in time to see him lowered into his grave" (2E100).

In a letter to Japetus Steenstrup written later that same year (5 November), Jónas described the poem's origin and reception:

Bad luck continues to dog me. On 28 August, for instance, on the road to Reykir in Húnavatnssýsla, I ran into a courier who told me of the sudden death of Bjarni Thorarensen the Deputy Governor. Later that same day, on horseback, I composed a poem, and not a bad one. But people are persecuting me on account of it, saying I have insulted "future generations" — the idiots!

Here is what happened. Bjarni Thorarensen fought for establishing the new Alþing at Þingvellir, but the majority voted in favor of Reykjavík and their opinion prevailed. Now what I wrote was: "I'm glad the owls won't make fun of the eagle, who otherwise might have had to sit — in his painful old age — watching a coal-black 'parliament of ravens' perched on humps of lava, instead of a parliament of hawks on the cliffs, etc." (You know what a "parliament of ravens" is like, don't you, my friend!). . . .

This is what they're making such a big fuss about. And I know all too well that our wise and mighty government is putting it in the scales, to weigh against my modest merits. But enough of this. (2E117)

Appropriately enough, Jónas's elegy on Bjarni is composed in a form that Bjarni seems to have invented and used in three of his own elegies. Only the year before, in 1840, he had used it in an elegy on Sveinn Pálsson which is five strophes long, like Jónas's poem, and shows a number of similarities in content as well as diction. Bjarni also used it in a love poem, "Kiss me again" ("Kysstu mig aftur"), published in Fjölnir in 1837, which Jónas cited — and the form of which he imitated — in a poem of his own written probably in 1843. Had Bjarni lived to write an elegy on Jónas, as he had promised, he would probably have employed this form. So it is appropriate — and poignant and ironic too — that Jónas should have used it instead to commemorate Bjarni.

The bird imagery introduced in Jónas's first strophe is sustained throughout the poem and the comparison between souls soaring to heaven and birds going south for the winter is worked out consistently and effectively. Bjarni is called an eagle because he was a poet. Owls are birds that hate light, whether literal or metaphorical. The "birds of ill omen" who "sit brooding above our house gables" are ravens as prophets and messengers of death (see 1Íþs616). "Ravens' councils" (hrafnaþing) are notorious for being accompanied by "great racket and screeching" (see 1Íþs614 and 4Íþs8). Bishop Steingrímur Jónsson thought that this stanza, "where owls, eagles, ravens, and hawks are all described," was the most successful part of Jónas's poem (GR29).

Bjarni Þorsteinsson provides a traditional tune to which the poem can be sung (Íþl566).