2. The Poetry in this Volume

Kari Ellen Gade 2017, ‘The Poetry in this Volume’ in Kari Ellen Gade and Edith Marold (eds), Poetry from Treatises on Poetics. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 3. Turnhout: Brepols [check printed volume for citation].

The poetry edited in this volume is quite diverse. The poetic citations include fragments of mythological information, extracts from poems praising the valour and generosity of historical rulers, praise to Christ, the Virgin Mary and other saints, descriptions of battles and sea voyages, laments about unattainable love and homage to deceased friends and relatives; one fragment (EBrún Lv) even sheds light on such a mundane every-day task as purchasing shoes. The corpus consists of poems, stanzas, half-stanzas, couplets and single lines cited within the prose environments of Snorra Edda (SnE), the Third and Fourth Grammatical Treatises (TGT; FoGT) and the seventeenth-century Laufás Edda (LaufE) (on these works, see Sections 4.1 and 4.2 below). Also edited here are freestanding poems and stanzas, such as the þulur, the versified lists of poetic synonyms (heiti) appended to SnE; the twelfth-century clavis metrica Háttalykill inn forni ‘the Old Key to Verse-forms’ (RvHbreiðm Hl); the anonymous Málsháttakvæði ‘Proverb poem’ (Anon Mhkv) recorded in ms. R of SnE; one encrypted and one macaronic stanza (Anon 732b 1-2) transmitted in ms. AM 732 b 4° (c. 1300-25), as well as a fourteenth-century stanza about the Phoenix bird (Anon Phoenix), possibly a translation from late Old English or Early Middle English (or from a lost Latin text).

The poetry in this volume, like most of the skaldic corpus, is preserved in prosimetrical works, yet it is usually cited for different purposes than the stanzas and poems with prose environments edited in other volumes of SkP. In the kings’ sagas and the sagas of Icelanders, for example, stanzas are cited primarily for their content, whether they are extracts from long compositions serving to authenticate the narrative or are lausavísur ‘freestanding stanzas, loose stanzas’ uttered by one of the characters as an integral part of the events described in the prose, or as a comment on them. The poetic citations in the grammatical and poetic treatises, on the other hand, are usually embedded in the prose to illustrate features of poetic language (kennings and heiti), rhetorical and grammatical figures, or metrical peculiarities. With some exceptions (see below), the medieval authors of the treatises were not interested in what information the stanzas conveyed at the textual level; rather, their focus was on the manner in which this information was conveyed.

As a result of their illustrative function, the poetic citations are often fragmentary; if the feature to be exemplified was present in one poetic line or a couplet, it was unnecessary to cite the whole stanza or helmingr, as the following example from TGT (TGT 1927, 43; Arn Frag 7) shows: Um stafa-skipti verðr barbarismus, sem Arnórr kvað: Sumar hvern frekum erni. Hér er hvern sett fyrir hvert til þess at hending haldiz í dróttkvæðum hætti … ‘Barbarismus results from substitution of letters, as Arnórr said: Sumar hvern frekum erni “Every summer to the greedy eagle.” Here hvern replaces hvert so that the hending is maintained in the dróttkvætt verse-form …’. In this particular instance, the line illustrates that the letter <t> in hvert (n. acc. sg.) ‘every’ is replaced by <n> in hvern (m. acc. sg.) ‘every’ to form aðalhending with erni ‘eagle’ (-ern : ‑ern-), but the line itself provides no information about the circumstances that prompted the composition of the stanza to which it belonged or the event the stanza described and commemorated (see Notes to Arn Frag 7).

This brief poetic citation, like others, may well be an imitation of similar snippets of poetry given as illustrations in the Latin exemplars used by Óláfr Þórðarson, the author of TGT, and some of the anonymous stanzas and fragments could have been composed by him (see Introduction to TGT). It is also likely that most of the anonymous poetry in FoGT, in which the poetic citations are usually longer than those in TGT, was composed by the author of that treatise or someone close to him (for a detailed discussion of the poetry in FoGT, see FoGT 2014, xlv-lvi). Sometimes the author gets rather carried away expounding the theological or symbolic significance of various cited examples, however, such as his excursus on þokumenn ‘fog men’ (see Anon (FoGT) 30 Context and Note to [All]) or the very long exposition of Anon (FoGT) 37 on homophesis (see Note to [All] there).

The tendency to brevity of poetic citation is particularly prominent in TGT (see Introduction to TGT) and in Snorri’s Skáldskaparmál (Skm). The latter’s focus is on poetic language, and the mythic or legendary frameworks provided in the prose to explain the formation of the kennings tend to contain stanzas or half-stanzas in which one or more poetic periphrases illustrate a specific kenning pattern, as the following section on kennings for the goddess Jǫrð, literally jǫrð ‘earth’, shows (SnE 1998, I, 35): Hverning skal jǫrð kenna? Kalla Ymis hold ok móður Þórs, dóttur Ónars, brúði Óðins, elju Friggjar ok Rindar ok Gunnlaðar, sværu Sifjar, *gólf ok botn veðra hallar, sjá dýranna, dóttir Nattar, systir Auðs ok Dags. Svá kvað … ‘How shall Jǫrð be paraphrased? To call [her] Ymir’s flesh and mother of Þórr, daughter of Ónarr, wife of Óðinn, rival of Frigg and Rindr and Gunnlǫð, mother-in-law of Sif, floor and bottom of the hall of storms, sea of the animals, daughter of Nótt (‘Night’), sister of Auðr and Dagr (‘Day’). Thus spoke …’. Then follows a series of six half-stanzas (Eyv Lv 9/5-8^I, Hfr Hákdr 7, 8, ÞjóðA Frag 5^II, Hfr Hákdr 6, ÞjóðA Sex 3/1-4^II) exemplifying kennings for Jǫrð ‘Earth’, with brief prose links identifying the poets.

Occasionally Skm incorporates longer narrative poems or parts of such poems in a manner somewhat reminiscent of the prosimetrum in the kings’ sagas, because myths and legends that are narrated in some detail in the prose, such as Þórr’s fight with the giant Hrungnir, are followed by a section of a mythological poem (here, Þjóð Haustl 15-20) that narrates and documents the same mythical event. In fact, most of the preserved longer skaldic poems with mythic and legendary content are transmitted in SnE, either as larger blocks (Bragi Rdr, Bragi Þórr, Eil Þdr, Þjóð Haustl; it is possible that some of these poems are later interpolations; see SnE 1931, xxi-xxiii) or split up and distributed as separate stanzas in various places of the prose text (ÚlfrU Húsdr). These poems are important skaldic supplements to the mythic and legendary poems of the Poetic Edda; they are among the oldest monuments in the skaldic corpus and provide invaluable information about Old Norse myth, legend, poetic language, metrics and linguistics.

Among the different parts of SnE, Snorri’s Háttatal (SnSt Ht) occupies a unique position (see Introduction to SnSt Ht). Like the other parts of SnE (Gylf; Skm), this section also has a prose component, but the poem itself is the centrepiece. Rather than the poetry providing illustrations of the poetic diction discussed in the prose, the prose in the Ht part comments on metrical and linguistic aspects of the poetry. The older Orcadian (?) Hl is not transmitted within a prose framework, and the prose commentary on Ht often explains metrical peculiarities exemplified by both claves metricae ‘keys to metrics’. Although Ht contains metrical variants that were clearly invented or systematised by Snorri, the poem, along with the commentary, offers a unique insight into Old Norse metrics and poetic composition, and it complements the other parts of SnE devoted to poetic diction, kenning patterns, and their mythic and legendary frameworks. As a joint encomium to the young Norwegian king Hákon Hákonarson and his uncle and regent, Skúli jarl Bárðarson, Ht itself has not been held in high esteem by scholars, but the poem sheds interesting light on the political situation in early thirteenth-century Norway and Iceland, and also on the personal and political aspirations of the poet himself, Snorri Sturluson (see Wanner 2008, 94-118).

The þulur, versified lists of heiti (poetic synonyms) appended to mss R, Tˣ, C, and A, B of SnE in two redactions of different length, have no accompanying prose (for a detailed discussion of the þulur, see Introduction to Anon Þulur). These lists provide a wealth of synonyms and names for gods and goddesses, sea-kings, dwarfs, giants and giantesses, for men and women, for various types of weapons and ships, for different species of animals, wild and domesticated, fish, birds and reptiles, as well as the names of rivers and fjords and terms for land, fire, heavenly bodies etc. (see the enumeration of categories in Introduction to Anon Þul as well as Clunies Ross 1987, 84-5). While some of these heiti are late learned additions to the þulur, many are undoubtedly of rather high antiquity and they occur in the earliest eddic and skaldic poetry (see the discussion in Clunies Ross 1987, 86-7). These lists advance our understanding of early West Norse poetics, and they also shed light on later learned developments, from the thirteenth-century SnE to the antiquarian interest that prompted the compilation of Magnús Ólafsson’s seventeenth-century LaufE, in which heiti from the þulur are systematised in sections ordered alphabetically from A to Þ (LaufE 1979, 253-311, 328-402).

Structurally, the layout of the present volume adheres to the principles of other SkP volumes by dividing the poetry into ‘Poetry by Named Skalds’ and ‘Anonymous Poetry’. As far as the poetry by named skalds is concerned, it was impossible to use chronology as an overarching structuring principle, as in SkP I-II, because, in many cases, nothing is known about the identity of a poet or his floruit (see Section 9 below). Nor was it possible to group the poems and stanzas attributed to named skalds according to the texts in which they occur (SnE, TGT, FoGT, LaufE, etc.) because different stanzas by a single skald are sometimes transmitted in different prose works (e.g. ESk Lv 7-9 in SnE and LaufE, ESk Lv 10-11 in TGT, ESk Lv 12 in W and LaufE, ESk Lv 13 in FoGT and LaufEand ESk Lv 14-15 in LaufE). In the present volume, the poetry by a named skald is therefore edited in one place, and the skalds are ordered alphabetically by first name. The anonymous poems and stanzas are grouped under the work or works in which they appear (chronologically: SnE; TGT; FoGT; LaufE). The freestanding poem and stanzas, Anon Mhkv and Anon 732 b 1-2, are edited at the end of the volume, as is Anon Phoenix.

Because of the policy of SkP to edit the poetry from the kings’ sagas (SkP I-II), sagas of Icelanders (SkP V) etc. in separate volumes, it is inevitable that some of the stanzas which occur in these sagas and are also transmitted in the grammatical and poetic treatises are published in other SkP volumes. That is also the case with stanzas that are transmitted only in the grammatical and poetic treatises but have been assigned to longer poems, the bulk of which are found in the kings’ sagas (e.g. Eskál Vell^I, Eyv Hál^I, Glúmr Gráf^I, ÞjóðA Sex^II, etc.). Below is a list of those stanzas and the volumes in which they appear.

References

1. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages – a New Edition

3. How to use this Edition

subsections
. Poetry from the treatises on poetics not published in SkP III

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2. The Poetry in this Volume

References

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