Poetry from the Kings' Sagas 2: From c. 1035 to 1300 (review)

This is the continuation of the series Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages. I wrote about the previous volume, devoted to Christian skaldic poetry, in JEGP, 108, 550-54, and my general view of the series and suggestions about the content and style of the publication can be found there. Suffice it to repeat that, in my opinion, the project is admirable and the execution all but irreproachable. Poetry from the Kings' Sagas has not only been edited by Kari Ellen Gade: she wrote nearly everything in those one thousand odd pages. Two other major contributors are Diana Whaley and Judith Jesh.

The front matter takes up 107 pages and contains a welcome list of technical terms, a bird's-eye view of the texts mentioned in the volume (manuscripts and editions), and the main facts about the poets who occupied the throne. This is followed by a section on skaldic meters, poetic diction, and normalization. The format of the commentary is familiar from the previous volume. Each poem is preceded by the biography of the skald if he happened to die uncrowned (otherwise, reference is given to "Royal Biographies" in the introduction; quite often very little or nothing is known about the poet). After the stanza has been rewritten in prose with a direct word order and translated into English, the historical context is explained: what happened, where, and to whom. "Notes" deal with textual difficulties and previous attempts to solve them, emendations (obviously corrupt lines, meter, grammar), and the details not covered in the section on the "context."

In the eleventh and the twelfth century, every Scandinavian and especially every Icelander of distinction aspired, felt almost obliged, to become a skald. Being a monarch or a jarl, a superb archer, and a renowned womanizer was not enough. An urge for composing and reciting vísur ran in the families like a hereditary disease. Apparently, mastering the technique that amazes and confuses us did not require a superhuman effort. The genre, in addition to imparting information, served as a channel for expressing praise, longing, jealousy, anger, or contempt, but only the skill mattered. Wandering among the descriptions of the hungry beasts and birds of battle, "horses of the sea," and the wearers of golden trinkets, we can barely distinguish geniuses from imitators. After all, a notorious plagiarist seems to have been a great skald. The skalds were ambitious people and did not conceal their names; the section on anonymous poetry, if we disregard Nóregs konungatal (by Snorri?) is minuscule.

The remarks that follow may perhaps be of some benefit in the editors' future work. I would like to repeat my objection to abbreviated words like st. for stanza, w. o. for word order, and C11th for 11th century, the more so as, for instance, Stanza 1 regularly occurs alongside st. 1. I also hope that more attention will be paid to skaldic poetry as poetry, as literature. At the moment, the contributors did not move far beyond registering an occasional pun (including the use of ofljóst) or a hapax. Once in a while, a deliberate pairing of two kennings (p. 111), "a wittily concise reference to ravaging Scotland with fire and the sword" (p. 246), or damning with faint praise (p. 277) is mentioned. But on the whole, the commentators remain philologists (in the best sense of this word), and the texts they interpret are, as a rule, just "texts" to them. I realize that too little preparatory work has been done on the grammatical stylistics of the skalds (however, see p. 205 on the abrupt transition from the plural to the singular). By contrast, the interplay of base words in kennings has been examined, and some more specific ideas on the "unnaturalness" of skaldic poetry have long since become known to specialists. Here is part of the...