The Poetic Genesis of Old Icelandic Literature

Mikael Males

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783110642377
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book assesses the importance of poetry for the Old Icelandic literary flowering of c. 1150–1350. It addresses the apparent paradox that an extremely conservative form of literature, namely skaldic poetry, was at the core of the most innovative literary and intellectual experiments in the period. The book argues that this cannot simply be explained as a result of strong local traditions, as in most previous scholarship. Thus, for instance, the author demonstrates that the mix of prose and poetry found in kings' sagas and sagas of Icelanders is roughly contemporary to the written sagas. Similarly, he argues that treatises on poetics and mythology, including Snorri's Edda, are new to the period, not only in their textual form, but also in their systematic mode of analysis. The book contends that what is truly new in these texts is the method of the authors, derived from Latin learning, but applied to traditional forms and motifs as encapsulated in the skaldic tradition. In this way, Christian Latin learning allowed for its perceived opposite, vernacular oral literature of pagan extraction, to reach full fruition and to largely replace the very literature which had made this process possible in the first place.

1 Metre and Rhyme

This chapter gives an overview of metrical developments from the ninth century down to Snorri (d. 1241) and is one of two chapters to provide a background to the following chapters on grammatical literature and prosimetrical narrative. This long-term view makes it possible to see how gradual developments in the tenth through eleventh centuries gained momentum until poetics were reshaped into a formalized field of study in the twelfth. By the second half of the twelfth century, much of the foundations for the following literary developments had been laid; the next step was that of composing grammatical treatises and sagas, to be treated later in the book.

In order to include only changes that may be indicative of the poets’ own perceptions of poetry, the study is restricted to highly marked features that the poets are likely to have been aware of themselves. As we shall see, such features were later discussed by Snorri, and they were also the object of conscious elaboration to create pseudonymous poetry for local historical narrative. They thus have bearing on the formative process of Old Icelandic literature in general. Furthermore, a focus on these features makes it possible to discern clear lines of development which previous research has not comprehensively described.

Old Icelandic poetics had no concept that exactly corresponded to metre. The closest equivalent, generally translated as ‘metre’, is háttr, meaning ‘mode’ or ‘way’. As Kristján Árnason has argued, this designation was largely based on the context and function of a given form (‘the court way’, ‘the old way’, ‘the Greenland way’, etc.).¹ On a formal level, the term háttr could encompass all systematically recurrent features, such as line length, catalexis, rhyme and even diction. Unlike classical and modern definitions of metre, the Old Icelandic concept was not so much based on measure as on social and literary functions and the systematic recurrence of any given feature. Even though changes occurred and outside influences were felt during the period under study, the basic perception of the háttr was retained. In this book, I use the word ‘metre’ for ease of reference, but the reader should be aware of the conceptual discrepancies lurking under the surface of this familiar term.

As noted in the Introduction, Old Icelandic poetry is generally divided into eddic and skaldic poetry, where eddic poetry is generally anonymous and has relatively simple metre and diction, whereas skaldic poetry is typically composed by named poets and exhibits complex metre and diction.² My analysis, here and with few exceptions throughout the book, will focus on skaldic poetry, partly because this was the medium where poets proved their stylistic mettle, but also because skaldic poetry is more securely datable than eddic poetry and allows for a study of diachronic developments. Even more importantly, skaldic poetry was the centre of gravity for many of the intellectual developments described in this book, and thus for the genesis of Old Icelandic literature at large.

More precisely, the kind of poetry under study here is so-called dróttkvæðr háttr (courtly metre), or simply dróttkvætt, and dróttkvætt-based metres.³ Dróttkvætt is highly regularized, which makes it possible to follow the development of several features over time. The more flexible eddic metres (fornyrðislag, málaháttr, ljóðaháttr and, for the present purposes, kviðuháttr) lack internal rhyme, and they underwent more restricted changes in the course of the poetic tradition than dróttkvætt-based metres. They do not, therefore, lend themselves nearly as well to the study of conscious changes in the modes of composition, and they will be left out of the metrical survey.

I turn now to the constituent features of ‘classical’ dróttkvætt, and this description will form the starting point for the following analysis. In dróttkvætt, the smallest metrically self-contained unit is the couplet, whereas a half stanza is four lines and a full stanza is eight. A line has six metrical positions (which in practice tends to mean six syllables) and always ends in a trochee. The distribution of alliteration and internal rhymes in a classical couplet can be exemplified by the first two lines of the stanza on the Karlevi stone (late tenth century):

Folginn liggr hinn’s fylgðu

flestr vissi þat – mestar

He, whom the greatest [deeds] followed, lies hidden. Most people knew that.

The odd line has two alliterations (f : f), placed freely in two of the three stressed positions.⁴ The even line has one alliteration (f), binding the lines together, and falling on the first position. The penultimate syllable of each line carries the second member of an internal rhyme pair called a hending (pl. hendingar), whereas the first member of the rhyme can be found in various positions in the line.⁵ The rhymes are on one syllable only. Odd lines have half rhyme – skothending – where vowels are different but the following consonants (one or more) are identical (olg : ylg). Even lines have full rhyme – aðalhending – where both vowels and consonants are identical (est : est).⁶

Classical dróttkvætt was itself the product of an evolution. In the earliest skaldic poetry, the rules given above were not strictly adhered to. Some odd lines might lack hendingar, and some even lines might have only skothendingar and thus be less metrically marked than normal. There would sometimes be a light syllable or two before the alliterative syllable in even lines (anacrusis or onset). The opening half stanza from Bragi’s Ragnarsdrápa may serve as an example. Hendingar are in italics, onset in bold:

Vilið Hrafnketill heyra,

hvé hreingróit steini

Þrúðar skalk ok þengil

þjófs ilja blað leyfa.⁷

Do you, Hrafnketill, wish to hear how I shall praise Þrúðr’s thief’s [the giant Hrungnir’s] footsoles’ leaf [shield], grown with bright colours, and the ruler.

Here, the first line lacks hending where one would expect skothending, whereas the second has aðalhending, as would normally be expected (ein: ein). The third line again lacks hending, and the last has skothending where one would expect aðalhending. The only line which conforms to the normal hending pattern – the second – is deviant in another respect, since it has onset in hvé. The /h/ in hvé does not count as alliteration, since the word does not carry stress. As a result, each line exhibits licences that later poetry would increasingly disallow. Although the stricter kind of dróttkvætt seems to have become the norm by the turn of the millennium at the latest, early examples of the lax, archaic variety remained familiar through transmission. As we shall see below as well as in Chapter Four, such archaic poetry eventually became important in the shaping of a historical awareness of stylistics.

A fundamental precondition for the following discussion is that some poetry can be attributed to a poet or at least to his time with an acceptable degree of certainty, whereas other poetry cannot. The most fundamental criterion here is the distinction between authenticating and situational verses in the sagas, to use Diana Whaley’s now common terminology for a distinction first suggested by Alois Wolf in 1965 and further developed by Bjarni Einarsson in 1974.⁸ When poetry was used to authenticate the historical narrative, authenticity seems to have been important to medieval Icelandic authors. Such authenticating quotations are typically introduced with the words svá segir N. N (as N. N. says) or the like. When it was used for dramatic, emotional or decorative effect, by contrast, authors seem not to have necessarily asked questions about authenticity. These situational quotations are typically introduced with words like þá kvað N. N vísu (then N. N recited a stanza). Bjarni Einarsson’s distinction is discussed in Chapter Four. I there test it against the body of pseudonymous poetry, and it is found to hold up well as a source-critical tool in texts treating the period after the settlement of Iceland (after c. 870–874).

The development outlined below is based on poetry that can be considered reliable according to this distinction, and it should be noted that quotations from Skáldskaparmál figure prominently. Bjarni Einarsson does not discuss Skáldskaparmál, but that text almost exclusively uses authenticating quotation, and there are no indications that Snorri composed any of the poetry himself. As we shall see in Chapter Three, his method appears to have been one of creative interpretation, and this speaks against the idea that he would have composed the poetry that he needed himself: if he had, he would presumably not have had to display such creativity in arriving at his interpretations. This impression is corroborated by Heimskringla, where he clearly added no poetry of his own (see below pp. 241–43). Skáldskaparmál thus appears to be an unusually reliable source even within the authenticating group. When unreliable poetry displays features that are only to be found much later in reliable poetry, the assumption is that the unreliable stanzas in question are not authentic, if no particular circumstances indicate the contrary. Using this rule of thumb reveals clear lines of development, although full justice cannot be done here to each doubtful stanza here.

1.1 The Eleventh Century

In the eleventh century, the laxer kind of dróttkvætt was no longer productive but had been replaced by the strict variant. Dróttkvætt was also used as a basis for the development of new metres through alteration of the length of the line. The line could be contracted or extended to four, five or eight positions, rather than the ordinary six. I would suggest that alteration of the length of the line was the main parameter of conscious metrical innovation before...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• A Note on Translations
• Introduction
• 1 Metre and Rhyme
• 2 Diction: Mythology, Wordplay, Metaphor and Tmesis
• 3 Grammatical Literature
• 4 Prosimetrical Narrative
• 5 Poetry, Language and Snorri’s Edda in the Mid-Fourteenth Century
• 6 Conclusions
• Appendix: Texts by the Wormianus Redactor
• Bibliography
• Index