''Den vises sten'' ('the philosopher's stone', an editorial title for a text unnamed in its manuscript) is a fourteenth-century Swedish poem about the
Philosopher's Stone
The philosopher's stone or more properly philosophers' stone (Arabic: حجر الفلاسفة, , la, lapis philosophorum), is a mythic alchemical substance capable of turning base metals such as mercury into gold (, from the Greek , "gold", ...
.
Form
The poem is in a
metre
The metre (British spelling) or meter (American spelling; see spelling differences) (from the French unit , from the Greek noun , "measure"), symbol m, is the primary unit of length in the International System of Units (SI), though its prefi ...
uniquely complex for medieval Swedish literature. The poem comprises twelve verses, each of 13 lines,
rhyming
A rhyme is a repetition of similar sounds (usually, the exact same phonemes) in the final stressed syllables and any following syllables of two or more words. Most often, this kind of perfect rhyming is consciously used for a musical or aesthetic ...
AABCCBDEDEFFE; most lines have four stresses and either
masculine or
feminine rhymes, but lines 3, 6, 8, 10, and 13 (i.e. rhymes ''b'' and ''e'') have three stresses and feminine rhymes.
[Stephen A. Mitchell,]
Spirituality and Alchemy in ''Den vises sten'' (1379)
, in ''Lärdomber oc skämptan: Medieval Swedish Literature Reconsidered'', ed. by Massimiliano Bampi and Fulvio Ferrari, Samlingar utgivna av Svenska fornskriftsällskapet, serie 3: Smärre texter och undersökningar 5 (Uppsala: Svenska fornskriftsällskapet, 2008), pp. 97-108. .
Content
The poem relates the characteristics of a wondrous stone, which can endow people with wisdom and strength, restore people's health (including curing blindness, deafness, and lameness), and even raise people from the dead. The poem is much concerned with how the ''mestare'' ('master, scholar') who holds it must keep it from the clutches of his enemies. The poem uses the stone as an allegory for God's love and the prospect of salvation it can bring.
Stephen A. Mitchell has argued that the poem demonstrates fourteenth-century Sweden's up-to-date engagement with Continental trends not only in Christian mystic literature but also in alchemical writing.
(He also suggests that ‘the poem seems to allude to pagan mythological and heroic motifs (i.e. the stories of
Askr, Embla, and
Brynhildr
Brunhild, also known as Brunhilda or Brynhild ( non, Brynhildr , gmh, Brünhilt, german: Brünhild , label=New High German, Modern German or ), is a female character from Germanic heroic legend. She may have her origins in the Visigoths, Vis ...
)’,
but this has not been accepted as certain.
Alaric Hall
Alaric Hall (born 1979) is a British philologist who is an associate professor of English and director of the Institute for Medieval Studies at the University of Leeds. He has, since 2009, been the editor of the academic journal '' Leeds Studies ...
review
of ''Lärdomber oc skämptan: Medieval Swedish Literature Reconsidered'', ed. by Massimiliano Bampi and Fulvio Ferrari, Samlingar utgivna av Svenska fornskriftsällskapet, serie 3: Smärre texter och undersökningar 5 (Uppsala: Svenska fornskriftsällskapet, 2008)
''Leeds Studies in English'', 40
(2009), 153-55 (p. 155).)
Provenance
The poem occurs in one manuscript, UUB C 391, which was produced in 1379 in the milieu of
Sturkarus Thurgili, a monk of
Vadstena monastery. It is one of only two Swedish rhymed poems to be preserved in a manuscript of the same century as it was composed.
Editions
* Geete, Robert (ed.),
Den vises sten: En hittils okänd rimdikt från 1300-talet, efter en upsalahandskrift från år 1379', Småstycken på forn svenska, andra serien (Stockholm: Svenska fornskriftsällskapet, 1900).
References
{{Alchemy
14th-century poems
Medieval literature
Swedish poetry