Into the Silence: The Nordic World as Encapsulated in Skaldic Poetry

By Johanna Weissing

University of Wisconsin–Madison

Words, after speech, reach

Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,

Can words or music reach

The stillness, as a Chinese jar still

 Moves perpetually in its stillness.¹

In any attempt to study and understand a culture, one must take into account the material and artistic products of that culture, including its architecture, tools and traditions of music, and visual art. Perhaps the aspect of a culture that conveys the greatest insights into the internal workings of the society that produced it, however, are its words. Language, through oral traditions or written literature, provides people with a means of discussing, reflecting upon, and preserving those things most important to them. Language becomes particularly important when studying an ancient society whose material culture has left little in the way of archeological finds and whose daily habits and social customs would thus be largely left open to conjecture without written documentation. Such is the case with the culture of the Scandinavian peoples from the age of migrations through the early Middle Ages. As the Scandinavians built primarily in wood, it is not possible to analyze their material culture in the same way that one can study ancient Greek society, for example, with its substantial archeological record. However, the Scandinavians had long memories, and much regarding their history and social customs was written down in the early Middle Ages after the introduction of Christianity and writing, especially in Iceland. Literate Icelanders committed to vellum many stories and poems that had circulated for generations in Scandinavian oral tradition, and it is these poems in particular that are the focus of this paper. As a condensed and focused form of language, poetry can convey not only the history, stories, and legends of a people, but even more fundamentally, it encapsulates the ideas and ideals of that people and provides the reader or listener with a view of their culture in concentrated form.

Poetry from early medieval Scandinavia has traditionally been divided by scholars into two genres: eddic and skaldic. Eddic refers particularly to the poems found in the so-called Elder or Poetic Edda, a collection of poems, some dated as early as the ninth century, which are contained in the late thirteenth century manuscript of the Codex Regius.² The designation ‘eddic’ has been extended to poems from other manuscripts that share certain features with the poems in this anthology. The stanzaic poems of the Codex Regius are characterized by their treatment of the Norse gods, mythology, and legendary heroes of old. They make use of several different meters, including ljóðaháttr (song meter), often used in didactic mythological poems; málaháttr (speech meter); and galdralag (spell meter), often used in poems dealing with gnomic or proverbial wisdom, such as the Hávamál.

The most common meter found in the Elder Edda is fornirðislag, or ‘old story’ meter, which is comprised of alliterative lines of no fixed syllable number divided with a cesura. Fornirðislag is derived from a common Germanic meter and has counterparts in the poetic traditions of other languages, including Old High German and Old English, although the length of a line in fornirðislag meter is generally much shorter due to the syncope of unstressed syllables, a phenomenon unique to Scandinavian among the Germanic languages.³ In addition, many of the characters commemorated in eddic poems can be found in other Germanic traditions. For example, the smith Vǫlundr, whose story is related in Vǫlundarkviða, is also known in German legend, where he is called Wielant, and in Old English he is called Weland.⁴

The terms eddic and skaldic have been challenged by some scholars in recent years as being inadequate, as there is some overlap between the two categories and it is sometimes unclear to which genre a poem belongs.⁵ For example, while dróttkvætt (court meter) is the most common meter used in skaldic poetry, fornirðislag is also frequently used.⁶ Other meters generally identified as skaldic are likely derived from fornirðislag, including runhenda (end rhyme), which uses the same alliterative patterns as fornirðislag but makes use of end rhyme instead of internal rhyme, as the name implies.⁷ The boundary is indeed unclear at times, especially as regards the use of various meters.

However, one can make certain broad distinctions between the categories. The poems tend to be found in different genres within the Icelandic corpus. Aside from the Elder Edda, eddic poetry is most often found in fornaldarsǫgur (the mythical-heroic sagas), in which it comprises most of the poetry quoted. Skaldic poetry tends to be the dominant form found in konungasǫgur (kings’ sagas) and Íslendingasǫgur (the sagas of Icelanders), to name a few.⁸ Again, in contrast to eddic poems, whose authorship is anonymous, skaldic poems are most often the work of a known poet.⁹ The two genres also deal with different topics. While eddic poems are concerned with events in a hazy, undefined, and thus mythical age long past, skaldic poems generally deal with contemporary events, sometimes experienced by the poet himself, and they often sing the praises of a great military leader or king.

In his Dialogues with the Viking Age, Vésteinn Ólason says, “[Skaldic] poetry is characterised by extreme simplicity of subject matter and world view and an almost infinite variety of expression made possible through its formal rules.”¹⁰ In fact, the feature that most clearly defines skaldic poetry is this adherence to strict rules of form. Stanzas consist of eight lines divided into two helmingar (halves) of four lines each, which generally express a complete thought. Each line has six syllables, three stressed, three unstressed, and ends in a trochee (a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable). The form also requires the use of internal half-rhyme, or skothending (assonance) in the a-line, followed by aðalhending (full internal rhyme) in the b-line.¹¹ The following poem about the death of Óláfr Tryggvasonr, taken from Fagrskinna, provides a good example. The italicized syllables denote rhyme: half-rhyme in the a-lines—in which postvocalic consonants agree, but the vowels do not—and full-rhyme in the b-lines, in which both vowels and the consonants following are identical. Denoted in bold, the alliteration typical of skaldic verse can also be seen in this stanza, tying together each pair of a- and b-lines:

Norðmanna hygg ek nenninn (a)

—nú er þengill fram genginn, (b)

dýrr hné dróttar stjóri— (a)

dróttinn und lok sóttan; (b)

grams dauði brá gœði (a)

góðs úfárar þjóðar. (b)

Allr glepsk f<r>iðr af falli (a)

flug<s>tyggs sunar Tryggva. (b)¹² 

[I think the undaunted lord of Norwegians (is) finally overcome. Now the noble lord is departed: the ruler of troops sank down. The death of the good ruler broke the well-being of no few nations. All peace is destroyed by the fall of the son of Tryggvi, reluctant to flee.]

In order to accomodate these requirements, skaldic poets had little regard for normal prose word order. Again, this can be illustrated with the preceding poem, which runs as follows when re-stated as prose in the Old Norse:

Hygg ek neninn dróttin Norðmanna und lok sóttan—nú er þengill dýrr fram genginn, stjóri dróttar hné—dauði grams góðs brá gœði úfárar þjóðar. Allr f<r>iðr glepsk af falli flug<s>tyggs sunar Tryggva.

In addition, subject and object nouns are often referred to using special poetic words called heiti and complicated, multi-level metaphors referred to as kenningar. Understanding the kennings requires an extensive knowledge of Norse mythology, because while one could translate a phrase correctly as, for example, “the strong drink of giants,” it requires a familiarity with the myths to understand that this circumlocution simply means “poetry.” In contrast to the more straightforward word order and vocabulary of eddic poetry, the unusual syntax, specialized vocabulary, and constant use of kennings referring to mythology renders skaldic poetry difficult to unravel and understand. Because of this, it was even in its own day the poetry of the elite, developing primarily in the courts of the powerful kings and jarls in Norway, where it was practiced by highly trained skalds.¹³

Unlike eddic poetry, which shares some features with other Germanic poetic traditions, skaldic poetry is unique to Scandinavia and has no counterparts in other Germanic languages. The form is thought to have originated in ninth-century Norway, possibly with the poet Bragi Boddason the Old, the earliest skald whose poetry survives in writing.¹⁴ It is curious to note that the Norse god of poetry also bears the name Bragi. In her History of Old Norse Poetry and Poetics, Margaret Clunies Ross says, “The rise of Bragi as a divine or semi-divine figure seems particularly associated with the ascendancy of skaldic poetry as the dominant kind of poetry in Norway and its colonies during the Viking Age. Most scholars who have written about this subject have come to the conclusion that Bragi… is a deified form of Bragi Boddason inn gamli.”¹⁵

As Clunies Ross mentions, the art of skaldic poetry was carried by Norwegians throughout the Northern world and was practiced in the Viking colonies. Skaldic poets could be found among the earls of Orkney and, most famously, among the farmer-chieftains of Iceland. Iceland was settled in the ninth century, about the time that skaldic poetry was growing popular in Norway, and the developing art was something that the settlers brought with them. Lacking material for arts such as wood and metal working, which were so highly developed in their homeland in Norway, the Icelandic people turned their attention instead to developing their facility with language, an area in which they excelled. The practice of skaldic versifying was to become in large part the province of educated Icelanders for the next five centuries, during which time they provided most of the prominent court poets for foreign kings in mainland Scandinavia and the British Isles. Many are remembered, along with their poetry, to this day.

Skaldic versifying has its roots in an oral culture. The Scandinavians had a runic writing system, but its uses were limited from a practical point of view and it was primarily used for short messages and burial markers. Thus, Scandinavian history, mythology, laws, and poetry were handed down orally from generation to generation. As Guðrún Nordal acknowledges in her lecture Skaldic Versifying and Social Discrimination in Medieval Iceland, “We know frustratingly little of the way skaldic verse was communicated or understood in an oral, pagan culture.”¹⁶ It is possible, however, to infer some of its social functions. Margaret Clunies Ross says that “poetry and medieval Norse attitudes towards it developed first in an oral society and many signs are displayed of a close relationship between poetic genres and social interactions.”¹⁷ Vésteinn Ólason argues that in Iceland, poetry and storytelling went hand in hand and that together they “played an important part in preserving oral traditions, whether from the pre-settlement period or from the first centuries after settlement.”¹⁸

With regard to skaldic court poetry specifically, Ólason says that its oral preservation most likely occurred within the context of stories told about the kings and jarls memorialized in the poems. In fact, the most important function of skaldic poetry and the reason it was composed in the first place was to do just this: praise and immortalize the great military and political leaders of the day. Again, Clunies Ross points out the multitude of Old Norse terms for poems of praise and blame, and argues that these “point to one of poetry’s main social purposes, to serve as a public endorsement of the dominant values of early Norse, especially Norwegian, court society and the figure of its ruler, in particular, as a leader in war, a tough fighter himself, and a generous rewarder of his personal entourage.”¹⁹ In this sense, skaldic poetry was a highly effective form of propaganda, as it continues a millennium later to shape our opinion of the historical figures it commemorates.

At root, this connection between poetry and social norms was based on the high regard that the Scandinavians had for the power of words. As many have noted with regard to the sagas (to take an example slightly younger than skaldic poetry, but one springing from the same cultural source), the style of writing is forthright and direct, and characters communicate what they have to say as succinctly as possible. Words were seen as something to be used sparingly and with thought and care, as they could have powerful effects in the real world. As Ólason says,

The hypersensitivity of saga characters to what other people say often seems remarkable to the modern reader. The explanation lies in the faith placed in the power of the word and, at the same time, in the importance attached to what is said about people in a society which relentlessly measures the deeds and status of men, and which assigns honour or dishonour on the basis of such judgements…The potency of verse has its roots in [this] same belief in the power of the word…but nowhere is this power more clearly in evidence than in poetry.²⁰

A case in point is the issue of mansǫngskvæði (love poetry) and nið (slander poems), which were banned by law in Grágás (a medieval Icelandic legal code) and were punishable with full outlawry. Interestingly, this was a punishment greater than the partial outlawry often dealt out in cases of manslaughter. It was believed that such poems had “powers akin to sorcery,” and that mansǫngskvæði was in fact “capable of turning a woman’s affection to a particular man, without her knowledge and often against her will.”²¹ While this is an extreme example of belief in the power wielded by words, it nevertheless helps to explain the important place held in pre-Christian Scandinavian society by the skalds and their verses, which were viewed as a commodity to be paid for in gold. Because of the requirements of the form, skaldic poetry was easy to memorize and difficult to alter, and thus could define a man’s reputation for good or ill as long as the verses about him were remembered and understood.

Regardless of the lack of information with respect to the social customs surrounding the communication of skaldic poems in their original context, they were a firmly established part of Scandinavian culture by the time Christianity was introduced, and with it, writing. The transformation of Scandinavian society from an oral to a written culture differed from similar scenarios in other parts of Europe in that elsewhere, writing—which was almost always in Latin—generally superseded the local oral traditions in the vernacular. The fact that traditional Norse poetic forms survived the transition is important and worthy of serious consideration, particularly since they not only survived orally for many years concurrently with written texts, but they entered into the new Scandinavian literary culture, becoming canonized in the process. In fact, they exerted a considerable influence on the development of vernacular literary traditions, especially in Iceland. Nordal points out that “skaldic and eddic poetry are the only known literary genres to have been transmitted from an oral culture and adapted to a written one.”²² She says:

The apparent continuity and consistency in skaldic versifying belies the radical social and cultural changes that took place over a five-hundred year period; changes that in themselves might seem to undermine the very foundations of skaldic verse-making and weaken its attraction and function in society. But not so. The strong and elevated position of skaldic verse in a Christian culture comes as a surprise, and we need to ask why verse firmly rooted in pagan myth held its own in the face of Christian Latin learning, even becoming the preferred medium for deeply religious poetry in the twelfth century, and how it redefined its role in the newly Christianized culture.²³

Nordal goes on to propose an answer to these questions, arguing that the survival and acceptance of skaldic verse in Catholic Iceland was based on the use of skaldic poems in the formal education offered at schools such as the one at Skálaholt.²⁴ While not much is known about the details of the curriculum in such schools, Nordal explains that, as with schools of the time elsewhere in Europe, the study of grammatica was central. In continental schools, this subject was taught primarily through the study of Classical authors, especially the poets, from whom students would learn how to analyze language and use it well. Nordal structures her argument around the life of Einarr Skúlason, an Icelandic priest from the first half of the twelfth century who was educated at Skálaholt. He went on to become one of the foremost court poets of his day, composing skaldic poetry in honor of his patrons as well as specifically Christian poems such as Geisli, a drápa (a long skaldic poem with refrains) composed in memory of St. Oláfr and in honor of the miracles attributed to him after his death.²⁵ Over the course of his career, Einarr served a number of continental Scandinavian rulers in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark.

Nordal argues that through Einarr’s participation in the old oral poetic tradition, he, along with other learned Icelanders of his time such as the First Grammarian, contributed to the acceptance of Norse poetry as a substitute for the study of the Latin poets. Skaldic poems in particular were well suited for this purpose, as their strict rules of meter and alliteration placed them on a plane of linguistic sophistication on par, at least as educational tools for Icelandic students, with Vergil and Ovid. Nordal asserts, “Our earliest sources seem to suggest that the theoretical analysis of language and composition included in the study of grammatica was from the very first period applied to Icelandic vernacular literature and to this end skaldic poetry proved the only fitting genre.”²⁶ In addition, this genre was particularly well suited to the work of the First Grammarian, who cites skaldic poems twice. The rigid requirements of internal rhyme and assonance provided him with examples for explaining the particularly complex nature of the Old Norse vowel system and allowed him to make suggestions for an orthography that would more accurately represent it. Nordal says, “Our twelfth-century sources are too scarce to allow us to determine whether their view of the pagan indigenous tradition was accepted by the whole learned community as early as the mid-twelfth century.”²⁷ Nevertheless, the twelfth-century movement exemplified by Einarr and the First Grammarian served to legitimize the Norse poetic tradition, and by the thirteenth century skaldic poets and their verses were widely known and well respected.

Inevitably, the poetry of the skalds assumed a different role after being absorbed into Christian written culture, and this role was summarized and defined to a large extent by none other than Snorri Sturluson, who was born in 1179, probably about twenty years after the death of Einarr Skúlason. Snorri’s Prose Edda is divided into four parts, the first of which “places Old Norse pre-Christian myth and religion in the context of medieval Christian explanations for pagan beliefs.”²⁸ The second part, called Gylfaginning (the tricking of Gylfi), provides a summary of the Norse mythology necessary for understanding kennings. The third, Skáldskaparmál (Poetic Diction), deals with the various types of kennings, and the fourth, Háttatal (List of Verse Forms), exemplifies over one hundred different variations of skaldic verse form. Throughout this work, but especially in Skáldskaparmál, Snorri makes use of skaldic poetry as examples to illustrate his discussion of verse form and as sources to support his historical claims.

Nordal asserts that it was this interest in skaldic poetry that led to the development of a vernacular literary culture in Iceland in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. She says, “There is an unequivocal tie between the art of the skaldic poet and the vernacular prose writings of the thirteenth century.”²⁹ This connection is amply illustrated in many saga genres, including the sagas of Icelanders and the kings’ sagas, which preserve a large number of skaldic verses. In this context, they appear to serve various functions. It is likely, as Snorri indicates, that skaldic poems were often a part of the oral tradition surrounding the story being committed to writing, and that the poems were thus used as authenticating devices to support and illustrate the veracity of historical claims. This is especially the case in the kings’ sagas. In a literary form that did not tend to dwell on the interior, emotional life of its protagonists, the verses also function on the narrative level as an acceptable medium through which saga characters can be portrayed as expressing their emotions. As a rhetorical device, skaldic verse is also used to add emphasis to important moments in the narrative.³⁰

Skaldic poetry lasted as a living tradition in Scandinavia for five hundred years, a time span that encompassed radical changes. From its origins in the oral culture of the Viking Age in the ninth century, through the advent of Christianity and the introduction of writing, skaldic poetry held its own, displaying a notable resilience and ability to adapt along with the culture that produced it. Although in the end the written culture replaced the oral culture and skaldic versifying as a living tradition disappeared, the fact that it survived as long as it did is startling. The Romantics of the nineteenth century despised the art of the skalds, saying that “nothing could be more artificial” than its formal, stylized mode of expression.³¹ Fortunately, this view has disappeared, and skaldic poetry once again holds a place of honor for its historical and literary value. It is a poetry that demands much training and patience, with its difficult syntax and strange idiom, but it is a purely Scandinavian art form that succeeds in capturing the essence of the society out of which it grew, emphasizing its values of heroism, courage, and loyalty, and embodying a respect for language and a delight in word play that can only be characterized as remarkable. In so doing, skaldic poetry gives voice to a bygone age and, in a rare and arresting way, rewards the persistent reader with a glimpse of a culture now long gone.

 

Bibliography

A New Introduction to Old Norse, Part II: Reader, Edited by Anthony Faulkes. Exeter: Short Run Press Limited, 2007.

Chase, Martin. Introduction to Eddic, Skaldic, and Beyond: Poetic Variety in Medieval Iceland and Norway, Edited by Martin Chase. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014.

Clunies Ross, Margaret. A History of Old Norse Poetry and Poetics. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2005. 

Eliot, T.S. Collected Poems. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1936.

Nordal, Guðrún. “Skaldic Versifying and Social Discrimination in Medieval Iceland.” The Dorothea Coke Memorial Lecture in Northern Studies. University College London: The Viking Society for Northern Research, 2001.

Ólason, Vésteinn. Dialogues with the Viking Age: Narration and Representation in the Sagas of Icelanders, Translated by Andrew Wawn. Reykjavik: Heimskringla, 1998. 

 

Endnotes

¹ T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1936), 219.

² Margaret Clunies Ross, A History of Old Norse Poetry and Poetics (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2005), 21.

³ Ibid.

⁴ Ibid., 7.

⁵ Martin Chase, introduction to Eddic, Skaldic, and Beyond: Poetic Variety in Medieval Iceland and Norway, ed. Martin Chase (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 1-6.

⁶ Clunies Ross, 21. 

⁷ Ibid., 22.

⁸ Ibid., 10-11.

⁹ Vésteinn Ólason, Dialogues with the Viking Age: Narration and Representation in the Sagas of Icelanders, trans. Andrew Wawn (Reykjavik: Heimskringla, 1998), 38.

¹⁰ Ibid., 40.  

¹¹ Clunies Ross, 23.

¹² A New Introduction to Old Norse, Part II: Reader, ed. Anthony Faulkes (Exeter: Short Run Press Limited, 2007), 71. 

¹³ Clunies Ross, 104.

¹⁴ Ibid., 34.

¹⁵ Ibid., 105.

¹⁶ Guðrún Nordal, “Skaldic Versifying and Social Discrimination in Medieval Iceland,” The Dorothea Coke Memorial Lecture in Northern Studies (University College London: The Viking Society for Northern Research, 15 March 2001), 3.

¹⁷ Clunies Ross, 29.

¹⁸ Ólason, 42.

¹⁹ Clunies Ross, 40.

²⁰ Ólason, 121-129.

²¹ Clunies Ross, 41.

²² Nordal, 16.

²³ Ibid., 3.

²⁴ Ibid.

²⁵ Clunies Ross, 49.

²⁶ Nordal, 5-6.

²⁷ Ibid., 6.

²⁸ Clunies Ross, 161.

²⁹ Nordal, 8.

³⁰ Ólason, 125.

³¹ Chase, 6-7.