2. Volume Editor’s Preface

In preparing Volume VII of Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages for publication, I have incurred many debts and the volume as it stands has benefited from the knowledge and advice of many people. It has been a pleasure to work with the fifteen Contributing Editors for this volume, whose research and editing forms the basis for each of the twenty-eight poems presented here. They have answered my many editorial questions promptly, patiently and with good humour. Aside from the presence of some of them at annual skaldic symposia and editorial meetings that the project has held since 2000, all our discussions have been conducted by email and by post. It would not have been possible to produce such a collaborative edition without the internet and, of course, the electronic version of this volume is dependent on it.

Because the edition is a collaborative one, the reader will find that individual editors have imparted their own characteristics to the individual poems presented here, even though all editors have followed the general principles outlined in the project’s Editors’ Manual (Wills et al. 2005). We have certainly aimed for consistency in all basic editorial procedures, but inevitably there will be some differences of general approach which will be most apparent in the Notes sections.

My greatest debt of gratitude is to my four fellow General Editors, Kari Ellen Gade, Edith Marold, Guðrún Nordal and Diana Whaley. They have been a wonderful support at all times in what has been a long-lasting and laborious enterprise. Through the process that we call ‘quality control’, which requires all edited poems to be checked by the remaining four General Editors after the Volume Editor has worked with the Contributing Editors on each poem or set of stanzas, each of the General Editors has been able to contribute her special skills: Kari Gade in the fields of metrics, the normalisation of texts, the treatment of foreign words, and almost everything else besides; Edith Marold particularly on the subject of kennings; Guðrún Nordal, as a native speaker of Icelandic, on acceptable Icelandic prose word order and related questions of usage; and Diana Whaley on all points grammatical and syntactic, as well as on the niceties of the English translation. I should like to give special thanks to Diana and Kari for their meticulous attention to all the finer points of skaldic poetics.

I owe a special debt to Tarrin Wills, who has been a Research Associate and, more recently, Senior Research Associate, on the skaldic editing project from 2002 to the present. Aside from his superb work in developing the project’s database, web interface and data entry protocol, which allows us to generate both the hard copy text and the electronic version of the edition, Tarrin has been assiduous and consistent in his devotion to the project and its aims. He has also carried out some of the editing work himself as well as data entry and a host of other tasks. In the period 2006-7 I have also been ably assisted by two Research Assistants, Emily Baynham, who has entered a great deal of material into the skaldic database, and Melanie Heyworth, who has performed bibliographical and other checks.

In the course of preparing this edition, three Contributing Editors have found themselves unable, for personal reasons, to undertake work on some of the texts originally allocated to them, or have been unable to spend as much time as anticipated on the work of editing. I am extremely grateful to Kari Ellen Gade for taking on the editing of five poems about the Virgin Mary at short notice and to Tarrin Wills for stepping in to assist in preparing two poems for this edition, Plácitusdrápa and Hugsvinnsmál.

At various points in the course of making this volume ready for publication, I have sought specialist advice and I should like to acknowledge here the assistance provided by Anders Andrén of Stockholm University on some archaeological issues relating to Geisli, Gottskálk Þ. Jensson of the University of Iceland for assistance with the two Lat. poems Anon Eccl 1 and 2, and to Christopher Sanders, of the Dictionary of Old Norse Prose at the University of Copenhagen for advice on the meaning of several poetic words in this volume. Other debts to individuals and institutions are recorded in the Acknowledgements below and in the Notes to individual poems.

Margaret Clunies Ross,

References

1. Internal references
2. Not published: do not cite (Run^VI)
3. Jonathan Grove 2007, ‘ Anonymous, Stanzas Addressed to Fellow Ecclesiastics’ in Margaret Clunies Ross (ed.), Poetry on Christian Subjects. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 7. Turnhout: Brepols, pp. 471-5. <https://skaldic.org/m.php?p=text&i=2923> (accessed 25 April 2024)