Date:	1826-8.
Form:	One fornyrðislag strophe.
Manuscript:	KG 31 b I, where it has the title "Dalabóndinn í óþurrknum" (facsimile KJH4; image).
First published:	1847 (A15; image).
Sound recording:	Anton Helgi Jónsson reads "Dalabóndinn í óþurrknum." [0:26]

Commentary:        Not surprisingly, the weather has always been a popular subject for verse in Iceland. The present poem is Jónas's earliest surviving "weather song" (veðurvísa). It suggests very amusingly — and poignantly — the desperation of Icelandic farmers, in the days before mechanized agriculture, when hay needed to keep their livestock alive over the winter lay rotting in the fields and there was no sunshine to dry it. The image of the "goddess of drizzle" (suldanorn) scattering mist across the fields contains a witty allusion to Icelandic agricultural practice. The prayer-format of the poem, and the ironic progression in its last two lines, may owe something to an Icelandic joke about a farmer who prayed to God about his wife, his mistress, and his horse: "Dear Lord, you can take Dæsa. But let Valka live. And if you kill Rauðka, you and me are through" (5Íþs364).

Since the poem is an imaginative projection, a sort of miniature dramatic monologue, there seems little point in making guesses about when and where it was written.¹