Skaldic verse

Snorri contributed much to the image, prestige, and authority of poets in Old Norse vernacular literature. However, he did not originate or conclude this lionization of poets and poetry in the culture, and those who came before and after him also played their parts in establishing a robust and impressive written reputation for the poets. From almost the beginning, Old Nose vernacular literature would gradually come to exalt poets and poetry in many domains. These domains would include grammar, historic factuality, prestigious origins, mythology, narrative uses, runes, and magic. To show that, this essay surveys key Old Norse works over a two hundred year period. The works considered here have been chosen because they deal with poetry and poets in a wide variety of ways, and they are notable or represent significant developments in Icelandic literature.

Snorri à beaucoup contribué à l'image, au prestige et à l'autorité des poètes dans la littérature vernaculaire en ancien norrois. Cependant, il n'est ni l'instigateur ni le dernier chantre de cette glorification des poètes et de la poésie dans la culture, et ses prédécesseurs et successeurs jouent également un rôle dan l'établissement d'une réputation solide et impressionnante pour les poètes. Presque dés son commencement, la littérature vernaculaire en ancien Norrois exalte les poètes et la poésie dans de nombreux domaines. Ces derniers incluent la grammaire, la véracité historique, les origines prestigieuses, la mythologie, les usages narratifs, les runes et la magie. Afin de démontrer cela, cet essai passe en revue les travaux littéraires en ancien norrois sur une période de deux cent ans. Les oeuvres étudiées ici ont été choisies car elle adressent la question des poètes et de la poésie de manières variées et représentent des développements significatifs dans la littérature islandaise.

Although it is commonplace in scholarship today to talk about a ‘system’ of kennings or ‘kenning system’, critical discussion has tended to take the qualification ‘system’ for granted and left this topic unexplored. The present paper presents a study of extended kennings which reveals that the systemic network of kennings have different referents. It shows that kennings for MAN/WARRIOR are at the center of this network.

Skaldic poetry or court poetry differs significantly from other schools of Medieval European poetry. Scandinavian court poets, using complex literary techniques and various metres, composed verses on the events they witnessed or heard of from worthy witnesses. Along with this, they served kings and praised them – or blamed, being a part of an extremely interesting relationship. This essay shall very briefly explore the features and genres of Skaldic poetry, and analyse the role of the court poets in Old Scandinavian society. It shall focus on Norsk-islandske skjaldedigtning (Skj) anthology put together by Finnur Jónsson, which is the most entire and thorough collection of skaldic verses, Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla, and various sagas about skalds.

In this article, the author attempts to sift out from Old Norse (ON) written sources the early Viking Age terms for ship types and to link them to actual ships and ship depictions from that period. The author argues that knǫrr, beit, skeið, kjóll, askr, and elliði were the main ship types of the early Viking Age in Scandinavia, at least in the west, and that knerrir referred during this period to warships like Oseberg and only later to cargo ships like Skuldelev 1. ‘A ship with a backwards curved stem’ seems to have been the original meaning of knǫrr. Kjólar were heavy, all-round ships like Gokstad, the author argues, and beit were very early ships with angular stems known from depictions. Skeiðar were low, narrow ships like Ladby. Askar were also very early, small, light ships with stitched planking, whereas elliðar were combined inland / sea vessels, originally Eastern  European.

This article proposes that the oft-dismissed Sneglu-Halla þáttr (Tale of Sarcastic Halli) is not simply a series of virtuoso vituperations peppered with sexual-cum-barnyard humor, nor “a series of episodes that could have been arranged otherwise as well,” but a text that repays close attention, both for original audiences as well as for scholars of Old Norse-Icelandic literature. I argue that its eponymous hero establishes his social position at the royal Norwegian court by ensconcing himself within a sustained series of allusions to myths of the Norse god Loki, while framing his peers, and even his superiors, as the sexual deviants, low-lifes, and numbskulls of a déclassé “folktale” world. Sneglu-Halla þáttr thus presupposes considerable literary connoisseurship, detailed knowledge of the Norse mythographic tradition, and a consciousness of high and low genre that reflects concerns of shifting social classes and political powers in thirteenth and fourteenth-century Iceland. Ultimately, I leverage this reading to articulate a reappraisal of medieval Icelandic narrative prose—most often lauded for its “realism," "straightforwardness," and "objectivity”: I offer that this deceptively “simple” tale adheres to the same aesthetic principles of complexity, ambiguity, and allusiveness that characterize the Skaldic poetry that is its ostensible subject.

This thesis aims to demonstrate that, through use of literary genre, vocabulary, and emphasis of detail, the authors of Christian skaldic verse in the twelfth to fifteenth centuries continually reshaped a specific set of representations for Christ to suit each poem’s individual purpose, its audience, and the literary tastes of the periods in which they were written. In order to show how Christ’s portrayal changes over time and according to each poem’s overarching purpose, I have selected the following five Christian skaldic poems and made each the focus of a chapter: Einarr Skúlason’s Geisli, Gamli kanóki’s Harmsól, and the anonymously-composed poems Leiðarvísan, Líknarbraut, and Lilja. Within each chapter I provide an overview of the poem, selecting stanzas that highlight features of Christ that are prevalent or striking in some way, and analyse how these representations not only influence the poem itself, but also shape perceptions of Christ’s relationship with humanity. Each chapter leads to an overall consideration both of the image of Christ as this has been represented, and of the degree to which this has been influenced by biblical and patristic writings, Old Norse literature and culture, or by a combination of these elements. In the concluding chapter I identify the prevailing representations of Christ throughout these five poems, dividing these characterisations into five categories: Christ as Warrior Chieftain, as Healer and Abundant Nourisher, as Legal Authority, as Beguiler, and as Light. I assess the changing importance of each of these representations over time and in these poems, in order to enable a better understanding of the changing images of Christ in the medieval skaldic corpus and how these may reflect locally specific perceptions of Christ.

An edition and commentary for 'Húsdrápa' ('eulogy on the house') of Úlfr Uggason, dating this poem to c. 995. Published in 'Image, Word, Text: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Literature and its Insular Context in Honour of Éamonn Ó Carragáin', ed. Alastair Minnis and Jane Roberts, Studies in the Early Middle Ages, 18 (Turnhout, 2006), 369-404.

The lay begins with a dialogue between Óðinn and Frigg (Vm 1-4), where Óðinn declares his desire to have a contest of wisdom with Vafþrúðnir, while Frigg warns her husband of the dangers of such an endeavour and wishes him good luck. Vm 5 sees Óðinn move from his world to the giant world of Vafþrúðnir, and the protagonists exchange greetings in Vm 6-10. Then the giant decides to test the knowledge of the newcomer and does so in Vm 11-18, while Óðinn gives answers, so that in Vm 19 Vafþrúðnir expresses his satisfaction and proposes exactly the contest that Óðinn desires, with the prize for the winner being the head of the loser. Óðinn then begins, in his turn, to question the giant, and does so in two series of questions that differ in the first halfstanzas, the refrains. The refrain of the first part, Vm 20-42, is a slightly varying pattern with numbered questions; the refrain of the second part, Vm 44-54, is uniform, and questions remain unnumbered. Vm 54

The article deals with a particular class of "extra" elements in skaldic kennings for man which feature either a heiti for wolf/raven or a subordinated kenning for the same. Such extra elements form tight semantic groups with core notions of either "hunger" or "damage", they may form a compound word with the baseword or appear as separate wordforms. As they cannot be basewords themselves, there arises a question as to whether the kennings for man they are encountered in are true kennings. The article aims to demonstrate that these are, in fact, true kennings and that such extra elements must be treated as components always forming a formal compound word with the baseword, even if they appear in the verse as separate wordforms and are distanced from the baseword by one or several other words.

This paper presents a pilot study on 340 metrically situated battle-kennings. The pilot study was intended to assess whether kennings might become metrically entangled or metrically bound semantic formulae beneath the lexical surface texture of dróttkvaett poetry. The paper presents an introduction to the pilot study, its background, methods, test corpus and the information it produced. Theoretical frames for considering language in oral poetry, formulaic language and metrical entanglement are introduced to advance from observing the recurrent use of battle-kennings in certain metrical positions to regarding these as outcomes of the generative use of semantic formulae. Demonstrating formulaicity then reciprocally provides a context for assessing lexical variation in entextualizing the kennings. The
paper concludes with a discussion of how the evidence of the pilot study relates to the way poets generated verses, whether in reflective composition or in more immediate situations.

Most readers of Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla would agree that his prologue, from which the prologue to Óláfs saga Helga was later derived, seeks to defend the truthfulness of his poetic sources, which are not only Skaldic eulogies but also long narrative poems including the Ynglingatal of Þjóðólfr of Hvinir. On the strength of what Snorri says here, this poem, datable to c. 890, is held to be the eulogy of its dedicatee, the apparently then still living King Rǫgnvaldr Óláfsson of Vestfold. However, the mockery both latent in the word skáld, and so clear in this poem, rather rules that definition out, and it looks as if Snorri himself is being less than truthful in what he says. He misrepresents Ynglingatal as a eulogy similar in aim to the other genealogical poem from Norway which he introduces in the same passage, Eyvindr's Háleygjatal (c. 985). My essay will suggest that Snorri had to align Ynglingatal with this poem for the sake of his Ynglinga saga, which is both the foundation of Heimskringla and the work to which his prologue is really addressed. Moreover, I argue that reinventing Ynglingatal in this way was a step which had already been taken, more than a hundred years earlier, by the ambitious Ari Þorgilsson in his now lost Konunga aevi. I conclude that Snorri fills out his prologue's second half with a biography of Ari because the words with which he describes Ynglingatal and Háleygjatal are those of Ari himself.

The Old English poem 'The Battle of Brunanburh' celebrates a battle won by English forces in the 930s fighting against an invading army of Vikings and Irish/Scots at a place that is almost surely to be identified as modern Bromborough, at the base of the Wirral. In addition to making a studious display of conventional Old English poetic diction, the poem includes a number of words or phrases suggestive of skaldic influence. While enumerating these, I discuss the poem as an expression of a hybrid type of court poetry that English poets cultivated in a tenth-century Anglo-Scandinavian context.

This article explores patterns of language use in oral poetry within a variety of semantic formula. Such a formula may vary its surface texture in relation to phonic demands of the metrical environment in which it is realized. Metrically entangled kennings in Old Norse dróttkvætt poetry provide material for a series of case studies focusing on variation in realizing formulae of this type. Old Norse kennings present a semantic formula of a particular type which is valuable as an example owing to the extremes of textural variation that it enables. Focus will be on variation between two broad semantic categories in expressing the formula’s consistent unit of meaning that are otherwise unambiguously distinct: proper names for mythological beings and poetic terms for weapons and armour. This article introduces an approach to kennings as semantic formulae and includes an illustrative case study on kennings meaning ‘battle’ in the last three metrical positions of a dróttkvætt line. The case study is simultaneously used to demonstrate the degree of integration of mythological proper names in the poetic register. This article contains only the first case study of a series. It provides foundations for examining variation in the associative links exhibited by names of mythic beings as a category according to the metrical positions in which a battle-kenning is realized, as will be discussed further later in this series. In additions to insights into how language was used in the practice of this tradition, this study highlights that mythological names could be used in the poetry for purely metrical reasons without linking to the name's mythological significance.

The two interpretations of the poetic coda on the rune-stone Östergötlands runinskrifter 31 are criticized and a compromise using elements of both is offered. Parallels for all readings are sought among runic inscriptions and traditional literature. Sonatorrek 4 supports the new interpretation with an elegiac topos. As a whole the new interpretation and its parallels contribute to a literary understanding of memorial stones.

This short paper returns briefly to the old question of whether the Old Norse dróttkvætt meter could have been trochaic.  The purpose of the paper is not to demonstrate the proposition as either true or false, but rather to situate it in analogical comparison with the culturally adjacent Finnic trochaic tetrameter.  Comparison is of interest because the conventions of metrical stress in the Finnic meter are counter-intuitive to modern ideas about poetic meters, with the possibility that the elocution of dróttkvætt may have been as well.

The article concludes with observations concerning Finnic and Germanic cultural exchange at the level of lexicon, folklore genres, folklore narratives and mythology, and its probable relationship to initial stress in Germanic and alliteration being a central metrical feature of vernacular poetries of precisely these groups in Europe.  Within this context, the article suggests that it may not be accidental that dróttkvætt (which differs from the common Germanic epic tetrameter) and the Finnic tetrameter are both alliterative, syllable-counting meters with rules governing the syllabic quantity of lexically stressed syllables, and therefore the possibility that long-term cultural adjacence has also impacted other aspects of the metrics of one or both cultures poetic systems in addition to alliteration.

"Parallels of the Poetic form of Maironis in Hungarian Romanticism comparing with the Czech literature.
Maironio poetinių formų paralelės vengrų romantikų kūryboje
The main innovation in the 19th century romanticism was the paying attention to the folk poetry and the folk songs, therefore poets tried to follow the metrics of the folk songs and use national folk motives. However, these folk-focused and national character of the romantic poetry did not require to replace the cultivation of the Greek-Latin verse forms that was the main characteristic phenomenon in the Classicism. The point is that the structure of the language is determining the development of the particular literature, too. For the Hungarian is very suitable both for the Greek-Latin quantitative metrical poetry as for the tonic metric, too. The same is true of the Lithuanian. Therefore, it can be drawn a parallel between Maironis and Hungarian Berzsenyi. The latter wrote odes in classical metrum, although with purposes of the national awakening. The glorified past as the battles with Tatars and Turks are expressed with mythological metaphors borrowed from the Greek religion and written in strophes of Sappho and Alkaios. It can be compared with the well educated clergyman Maironis, who knew well the classical Greek literature and uses its motives in his poetry, too. – Another parallel is the structures of the national anthems and non-official hymns, too. The past battles in the Hungarian Hymn by Kölcsey (structured in very srick strophic forms) can be compared with the Vytautas Didisis (The Great) in the „Tautiska daina“ by Maironis (in the double-cadenced strick strophe-structure, too) and another parallel is the using of the motives of national corps and flowers. (Ruta, in the Tautiska daina and wheat and vine-grape in the Hungarian Anthem). Moreover, the gratest Hungarian Romantic poet, Vörösmarty – who wrote very classical epos on the Hungarian ancient history in classical Greek metric, then odes and elegias on the national history then on the flourishing and tragical way of the 1848 revolution–, wrote the „second anthem“ on Hungarians, so-called Szózat (Speach, sermon) which was very parallel with Maironis‘s Tautiska daina. – In a consequence, the author of this paper try to demonstrate that the Romanticism was a fluent following of the Classicism in those literatures, which ones were written in rich-in-rposodic languges, such as Lithuanian and Hungarian. The Czech language and literature is to be taken into consideration because this is the only Slavic languages which distinguish between the long and short vovels, therefore, the following of the classical metric poetry is very possible in Czech (instead of imitation of these by syllabotonic verse in Russian, Polish and English or German literatures). – In a result, national Romanticism and was combined with the living Classicism in the Lithuanian and Hungarian literatures, and these excellent poets as Maironis and Hungarian Berzsenyi could grasp the language opportunity and enriched their literatures as their language were very rich. 
"

В докладе анализируется строфа "karlfolk ok sva jarla" из "Откровенных вис" скальда Сигвата Тордарсона (ок. 995-1045) в свете параллелей с англо-саксонской формулой "ge ceorle ge eorle". Представляется, что тема взаимовлияний англо-саксов и скандинавов в области социальных воззрений требует дополнительных исследований.
This paper analyses skald Sighvat Thordarson's stanza "karlfolk ok sva jarla" from his "Bersoeglisvisur" in connection with the Anglo-Saxon formula "ge ceorle ge eorle". It appears that there's a need for further research on the mutual influences of the Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians in the sphere of the social views.

This is a report of research presented at the conference Song and Emergent Poetics: Oral Traditions in Performance, held 21st–24th November 2013 in Kuhmo, Finland. An article based on the conference presentation is forthcoming. Comments are therefore welcome.