Isa Across the Norwegian and Icelandic Poems

Isa's two stanzas both take ice as their subject but read its danger quite differently in degree: the Norwegian poem calls ice the broad bridge, a genuinely useful image of frozen water making a crossing possible that open water would otherwise prevent, and adds only the gentler caution that the blind must be led across it, hazard present but manageable with care.

The Icelandic poem reads considerably harder, naming ice the bark of rivers and the roof of the wave, vivid images consistent with the Norwegian poem's own bridge like reading, but then closes with destruction of doomed men, a stark, fatalistic line with no equivalent softening in the Norwegian text, ice here read as an active danger to those already marked for death rather than a hazard the merely careless might avoid. This shift from a cautiously useful bridge to an instrument of a doomed man's destruction gives Isa one of the more pronounced differences in tone, rather than in subject, between the two poems, both agreeing on what ice is while disagreeing sharply on how dangerous it should be read as being. Dickins' 1915 edition notes this kind of shift in emotional register, shared subject read at different intensities, as at least as common between the two poems as an outright disagreement on subject such as Ur or Ass show.