Note to Anon Lil 98VII
[All]: The skald cannot completely free himself of the aesthetic that elegant poetry (vandan óðinn) requires hulin fornyrðin ‘obscure archaisms’, which hinder understanding (dvelja skilning), but he firmly states his own intent to strive for light and clarity (Lie 1952, 78). This st. has sometimes been regarded as a rejection of the use of kennings, but as Meissner (1922, 48-9) points out, the kennings of the poetry of post-conversion Iceland were simple and presented no obstacle to understanding. The impediments to clarity were rather kennings that presented images irrelevant to or in disharmony with the theme of the poetry, and the unnatural w. o. that the use of kennings often necessitated. Foote comments (1982, 123): ‘We may pause to note how this condemnatory st. is dunhent (i.e. with anadiplosis); has end-rhymes aaaa bbbb, where a and b are themselves half-rhymes; has the usual obligatory internal rhymes in each line; has an internal rhyme sequence and a semantic repeat in lines 4 and 5 ... so that in spite of the regular syntactic break between them the two helmingar are intimately linked; and has more music in the last couplet, which has an extra half-rhyme and full rhyme (-breyt-, veit-, heit-) as well as the expected ones (tal, vil-, Lil-). This is a tour de force by which Eysteinn demonstrates how artful poetry can be without recourse to esoteric language’.