Annotated Text: Hallgrímur Pétursson, Passíusálmar

Between the medieval sagas and the modern language stands one book that is read aloud, in full, on the radio every Lent: Hallgrímur Pétursson's Passíusálmar ("the Passion Hymns," composed around 1656–1659), fifty hymns meditating on Christ's suffering. For a learner they are a gift, because they sit exactly at the hinge of the language's history. The grammar is almost entirely modern — a 17th-century Icelander's syntax is essentially yours — yet the devotional register preserves a handful of older forms that everyday speech has dropped: the dignified plural pronouns vér / oss / yður ("we / us / you"), the optative (wish) subjunctive of prayer, and the free-standing article. Those forms did not die; they retreated into church, ceremony, and elevated prose, where you still meet them. This page reads the opening stanza of the first Passion hymn and, alongside it, the beloved funeral hymn Allt eins og blómstrið eina that the early editions printed with the Passíusálmar — a hymn sung at virtually every Icelandic funeral to this day. (The literary/archaic register as a system: register/literary-archaic; the wish-subjunctive: verbs/subjunctive-wishes.)

Part 1 — Passíusálmur 1, opening stanza

This single stanza shows the whole profile: modern grammar, archaic register.

The optative subjunctive: hjálpi til = "may it help / let it help"

Line 3 is a wish, and Icelandic marks wishes with the subjunctive: hugur og tunga *hjálpi til — "let mind and tongue lend their help," or "may mind and tongue help." The verb is *hjálpi, the present subjunctive of hjálpa ("to help"), not the indicative hjálpar. This is the optative subjunctive — a free-standing subjunctive expressing a wish or exhortation, with no governing að or ef. It is the grammar of prayer and blessing: Guð *blessi þig "(may) God bless you," **lifi konungurinn "long live the king," **komi þitt ríki "thy kingdom come." Modern conversation rarely forms wishes this way any more — it prefers *megi ("may") + infinitive or a plain imperative — so the bare optative hjálpi reads as elevated and liturgical. (Wishes and the subjunctive: verbs/subjunctive-wishes.)

The archaic devotional pronouns: vér and oss

The second half of the stanza turns to the congregation, and it does so in the old plural pronouns. Skulum *vér allir… — "*we shall, all of us…" — uses vér ("we"), and the closing line sem drottinn fyrir *oss auma leið — "which the Lord endured for *us wretched ones" — uses oss ("us," the oblique of vér). Modern everyday Icelandic says við ("we") and okkur ("us"); vér and oss survive only in church, hymns, formal proclamations, and the "royal/editorial we." (Historically við/okkur were the dual "we two," which took over as the ordinary plural while vér/oss retreated — the same story told on pronouns/dual-and-number.) The complete archaic set is worth fixing:

Otherwise: modern grammar

Strip those register-markers and the stanza is grammatically modern. Herrans pínu ég minnast vil — "the Lord's passion I wish to recall" — is ordinary Icelandic: Herrans genitive ("the Lord's"), pínu the object, and minnast ("to recall") governing the genitive as it still does (minnast einhvers), with vil ("I want") taking the bare infinitive. The verb-second order, the cases, the suffixed article — all are exactly today's. That is the headline: a literate 17th-century Icelander wrote in your grammar. The distance is register, not language. (Compare the much larger gap an English speaker faces between modern English and 17th-century English; Icelandic simply did not move.)

Part 2 — Allt eins og blómstrið eina (the funeral hymn)

The early editions of the Passíusálmar appended Hallgrímur's funeral hymn, Allt eins og blómstrið eina — "just as the single flower" — still sung at almost every Icelandic funeral. Its opening stanza is one long simile, and its later stanzas are a model of the faith-formula register.

The simile frame: eins og = "just as / like"

The whole stanza is governed by (allt) eins og — "(just) as," "exactly like" — the standard Icelandic simile/comparison conjunction. Eins og introduces the vehicle of the comparison (the flower that grows and is cut), and the tenor (human life) lands in the last line: líf mannlegt endar skjótt — "human life ends quickly." The structure is eins og [flower grows… is cut down], [so] líf mannlegt endar skjótt: as the flower, so the life. Eins og is built from eins (genitive of einn "one," here "in one [same] way") + og ("and/as"); it is the everyday word for "like/as" and also fronts comparative clauses (hann er stór, eins og faðir hans "he is big, like his father"). (Comparison conjunctions: conjunctions/comparison.)

Two small grammatical notes confirm the closeness to modern Icelandic: upp vex is vaxa "to grow" with the particle fronted (modern vex upp), and af skorið verður is a passive (verða + past participle, "is cut off"), both entirely current constructions. The vocabulary item frjóvgun ("fruitfulness, fertilisation") and the contracted spelling blómstur "flower" are the only flavour of age.

Faith-formulae: parallelism and the dative of the experiencer

A later, equally famous stanza is the believer's defiance of death:

The first two lines are a chiasmus: Ég lifi í Jesú nafni / í Jesú nafni ég dey — "I live in Jesus' name / in Jesus' name I die" — the phrase í Jesú nafni mirrored around the verbs, with the second line's fronted í Jesú nafni triggering V2 (…nafni *ég dey, but with the verb second as the metre allows). Line 3 hides a quiet but important point: Þó heilsa og líf mér hafni* — "though health and life forsake me." The verb hafna ("to reject, forsake") takes its object in the dative: mér ("me," dative). And line 4 uses the older negative adverb ei ("not," = modern ekki): *hræðist ég dauðann ei* — "I fear not death," with hræðist the middle voice of hræða ("frighten"), so "I am frightened," and dauðann the accusative object ("death," dauði + suffixed article). (The archaic ei and the elevated register: register/literary-archaic.)

Notice the concessive Þó … hafni: þó ("though, although") pulls its verb into the subjunctive hafni (not indicative hafnar), because a concession presents its content as conceded/hypothetical, not asserted — the same wish-and-hypothesis logic that drives the optative in Part 1.

Common Mistakes

A bare subjunctive with no að/ef in a devotional or ceremonial text is almost always an optative wish ("may…/let…"), not an indicative statement.

Do not mistake vér / oss for errors or unknown words: they are the archaic plural pronouns, fully alive in liturgical register. vér = við ("we"), oss = okkur ("us").

The dative pronoun mér is the object of a dative-governing verb, not the subject. And after þó ("though") the verb is subjunctive (hafni), marking the concession.

Key Takeaways

• The Passíusálmar (c. 1659) sit at the hinge of the language: the grammar is almost fully modern, but the devotional register preserves older forms — proof of how stable Icelandic has been.
• The register keeps the optative (wish) subjunctive of prayer: hjálpi til "let it help," Guð blessi þig "(may) God bless you," with no governing að/ef.
• It keeps the archaic plural pronouns vér / oss / vor ("we / us / our") and þér / yður ("you (pl.)"), where everyday speech uses við / okkur / okkar and þið / ykkur — alive today only in church and ceremony.
• The funeral hymn Allt eins og blómstrið eina is one long simile framed by eins og ("just as / like"): as the cut flower, so human life. Its faith-stanzas show chiasmus, the dative-governing hafna ("forsake"), the concessive þó
  • subjunctive, and the archaic negation ei (= ekki).
• Strip the register-markers and the syntax is today's Icelandic — the distance from Hallgrímur is register, not language.
• Sources: Passíusálmur 1 (text after the Árni Magnússon Institute Passíulykill) and Allt eins og blómstrið eina (standard public-domain text), both by Hallgrímur Pétursson (1614–1674).