Liver-Rhymes: A Continental Connection to Vǫlsa þáttr and the Faroese drunnur?

This article investigates the mystery surrounding the origin of the once widely popular tradition of reciting liver-themed poetry at special occasions such as weddings, beginning with the late Middle Low German Rhytmi Mensales of Johannes Junior from 1601. Not long after these liver-rhymes were printed, versions in Early New High German (henceforth ENHG) followed that either were translated directly from or closely resemble the Rhytmi Mensales in form. Numerous attestations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—primarily in High German, but also in Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Dutch—illustrate the genre's booming popularity.

Debate surrounding the origin of this genre reveals little consensus from very early on. Due likely to the relative ubiquity of High German print sources and the waning prestige of Middle Low German (MLG) at the end of the Hanseatic period, authors of later liver-rhyme compilations, Heinrich Schaeve especially, have been falsely credited as the inventors of this tradition. This debate is complicated by other factors, including evidence that Johannes Junior took a number of poems and prayers from the sixteenth-century Schoene Kuenstlike Werldtsproeke and reworked them as liver-rhymes.

Drawing from analyses of an Old Norse text, I will argue that the context of the liver-rhymes—receiving an animal organ and reciting a stanza before it can be passed on to the next person—can be traced back to a tale about the supposedly pagan, phallus-worshipping custom detailed in the late fourteenth-century Vǫlsa þáttr from Óláfs saga hins helga hin mesta, set in eleventh-century Norway. Finally, I will build upon the claim that Vǫlsa þáttr is an antecedent to the modern Faroese drunnur, which also features a phallic symbol, and I will show that liver-rhymes are even more closely connected to this latter tradition in form and context, and provide cross-cultural evidence illuminating the reasons why so many saw the liver as rhyme-worthy in the first place.

I. RHYTMI MENSALES

The Rhytmi Mensales of Johannes Junior, printed in 1601, were reintroduced to the academic world by Adolf Hofmeister as "Die Niederdeutschen Leberreime des Johannes Junior v. J. 1601" in the late nineteenth century.¹ One hundred thirty-three stanzas are reproduced in the aforementioned article, but these do not reflect the total number of stanzas in the original print from 1601. The first part includes eighty-five stanzas with the header Geistlike vnde Werldtlike Ryme van der Leuern (spiritual and worldly rhymes of the liver) and spans pages 2a through 14a, whereas the second part contains one hundred thirty-one stanzas from pages 14b through 35b, adding up to two hundred sixteen stanzas in total; page 36 is blank.² The following is a transcription and translation of the title page.³

Title Page

RHYTMI MENSALES. / Dat ys: / Ein seer lustich / vnde kortwylich Boekeschen, beyde Geistlike vnde Werldt- / like Ryme tho vinden van der Leuern, so oeuer / Dische, in Koesten, Gastbaden vnde dergelyken / Geselschoppen koenen vnde moegen gebruket / werden: So thovoern nuewerle im / Druecke geseen worden. // Nu oeuerst koertlick thosamen gestellet, vnde / in oeffentliken Drueck gegeuen / doerch / JOHANNEM IVNIOREM / Koep my balde und liſz my recht, / Kanst vth my leren rymen schlecht. // Gedruecket im Jare, 1601.

(RHYTMI MENSALES. That is: a very delightful and entertaining little book of both spiritual and secular rhymes of the liver for the table, feasts, banquets and the like, which can and may be used in social company. Never before seen in print, but now and only recently printed for the public by JOHANNES JUNIOR. Buy me at once and read me correctly; from my lessons you can learn to rhyme simply. Printed in the year 1601.)

Liver-rhymes are most often classified as Sinngedichte, "epigrams"⁴ but also as Unsinnposie, "nonsense poetry" or Scherzgedichte, "jocular poems," all of which in turn belong to the wider genre of Gesellschaftslyrik, "social verse."⁵ Hofmeister states that it is no surprise to find a tradition in which a meal or social gathering is enhanced with bits of ceremony such as singing or chants, and he claims that, certainly in...