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Trohetsvisan and Chaucer's Lak of Stedfastnesse 285
of Venus Chaucer bemoaned his difficulty in imitating
Graunson because of the scarcity of rhyme in English. 7
Would he have submitted himself to the same discipline
of rhyme if Lak of Stedfastnesse were intended as an open
statement to his king? Chaucer's comment in Venus may
well have been made within the mediseval modesty
conventions however and I leave further speculation aside
for the present.
There are further differences between Trohetsvisan and
Chaucer's poem. In the presentation of content the brief
personifications of abstract ideas in Chaucer become
simply-extended allegorical pictures in some of the verses
of Trohetsvisan. And where Chaucer speaks of many
virtues and vices the Swedish poem confines itself mainly
to a discussion of the overthrow ot Fidelity by its opposing
vices.
Yet there is similarity of content and the same general
attitude and purpose which makes a medisevalist suspect
that the poems may be of the same genre and compels
general reading in other similar poems before conclusions
are drawn about either as individual pieces.
The impetus for this comparative study however came
for me from an illuminating scholarly paper on Trohetsvisan
by Karl-Ivar Hildeman in his book, Medeltid pd vers
(1958),9 and I draw largely on this essay for comment on
the Swedish poem.
It is scarcely an inspiring poem but it has received notice
mainly because it appears in the same manuscript (B 42
of the Royal Library Stockholm) as Frihetsvisan (The
Song of Freedom), a poem with clear historical reference
And eke to me it ys a gret penaunce,
Syth ryrn in Englissh hath such skarsete,
To folowe word by word the curiosite
Of Graunson, flour of hem that make in Fraunce (11. 79-82).
8 Sec E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (trans.
\Y. R. Trask, 1953), Excursus II, 407-13. 'Devotional Formula and Humility'.
on the 'modesty' of medizeval writers; and note that Chaucer produced common
rhyme-schemes for the separate verses of all of the ballades certainly attributed
to him.
• 'Trohetsvisan och dess genre'. Hildemau, op, cit., II6-152.