ABSTRACT
Gamli kanóki, an Old Icelandic skaldic poet, is known as the author of a dnfpa in the hrynhent meter on St. John the Apostle, of which four stanzas are quoted in Jóns saga postola IV (“Litla-Jóns saga”), and of the dràpa Harmsól (“Sun of Sorrow”) in the dróttkvaett meter, which survives in its full length (sixty-five stanzas). Of Gamli himself, nothing is known, except that, according to the Jóns saga postola, he was a canon “austr i kyckabe” (“east in t>ykkvaba»r”), an Augustinian cloister founded in 1168. The saga quotes from Gamli’s Jónsdràpa between a quotation from Nikulās Bergsson (d. 1159) and another from Kolbeinn Tumason (d. 1208). Paasche took this ordering as an indication of chronology, implying a dating of this poem between 1168 and 1208. According to Skard, this date is corroborated by a comparison between Gamli’s poetry, on the one hand, and Leidarvtsan and similar poems that seem to have influenced it, on the other.
