Skaldic Poetry

Abstract

Skaldic poetry was one of the most significant literary products of the Western Middle Ages and among the most complex. It probably originated among Scandinavian poets at the courts of Norwegian kings and jarls during the ninth century and was intended as a means of celebrating the highlights of the rulers’ careers in an oral poetic medium. The term skald (later skáld) was applied to such court poets. In the Middle Ages, from c. 1200, written prose texts incorporated some of the compositions of earlier skalds into their authors’ histories of the kings of Norway and the rulers of Denmark and Orkney. The earliest skalds were Norwegian, but the skaldic art was practiced in most of the Viking Age Norwegian colonies, particularly in Orkney and in Iceland. During the course of the eleventh century, Icelandic skalds came to dominate the field and their role as royal encomiasts continued until the later thirteenth century. Even though the Conversion to Christianity forced the originally pagan skalds to modify the diction of their poetry with its allusions to the old gods, skaldic verse came to be used in medieval Iceland in a wide range of literary settings. From the early thirteenth century, it was incorporated into the new prosimetrical saga genre, with its various subgenres, which included kings’ sagas, sagas of Icelanders (also called family sagas), contemporary sagas about Icelanders living in the thirteenth century, and bishops’ sagas. From the mid-twelfth century, skaldic meters and skaldic diction came to be used in Iceland for the poetry of Christian devotion and continued for this purpose until at least the end of the fourteenth century. The dominant skaldic meter was dróttkvætt (court meter), based on the Old Norse version of the common alliterative verse-form (termed fornyrðislag, or “old story meter”) used by all early medieval societies that spoke Germanic languages. Dróttkvætt offered a tight metrical frame within which each line of a normally eight-line stanza consisted of six syllables and six metrical positions, with the cadence of each line always comprising a long-stemmed stressed syllable that carried internal rhyme, followed by a short, enclitic unstressed syllable. Lines were linked in pairs by both internal rhyme and alliteration. In terms of diction and syntax, skaldic poetry has riddle-like qualities, suited to an elite audience. It makes use of a rich vocabulary of poetic near-synonyms, called heiti, and a store of conventional periphrastic noun phrases, or kennings, which refer to a subject indirectly by means of a set of substitute terms, as in meiðr hjaldrs (“the tree of battle,” [WARRIOR]). The kenning referent, here given in capitals, is to be understood by the audience from their knowledge of a set of conventional parallels, in this example between men and trees of masculine gender.