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GEORGE JOHNSTON What Do the Scalds Tell Us? Artifice has not at any time been a favoured word in English poetry or poetic theory, and in the latter half of the twentieth century its adjective has become a term ofabuse, meaning the opposite of sincere, candid, and spontaneous. It is thought to block the way to the subconscious, from whose depths come what used to be called inspiration. Yet wherever artifice has appeared in English verse - and I take its meaning from the Oxford Dictionary: human skill as opposed to what is natural, or, in an earliersense, the making ofanythingby art, construction, workmanshipit has informed poetry of intense feeling and sweetness of tone. Consider Gerard Manley Hopkins, Crashaw, Pearl. Milton said that poetry should be simple, sensuous, and passionate, three hard words. Simple I shall leave alone, but I shall assume in what Ihave to say that there is a passion and also a sensuality of the art- of the artifice - which, practised with care and for its own sake, is no less a passion and sensuality of what is said. It was the artificial poetry of the scalds that brought me to a proper appreciation of this passion and sensuality. The scalds, in a restritted but accepted use of the word, were the aristocratic court poets of the Viking age in Norway and Iceland, whose art continued well into the Christian centuries. Two recent books have taken scaldic poetry from the preserves of the scholars and made its art accessible to undergraduates and interested general readers. The books are Gabriel Turville-Petre's Sealdie Poetry (1976) and Roberta Frank's Old Norse Court Poetry (1978). Roberta Frank focuses her attention on the dr6ttkv",tt, which will be my concern. This favourite stanza of the scalds was one of the most complex and artificial verse forms in European poetry. Its metric was of stresses and half-stresses combined with a strict syllable count; it held to a pattern of alliteration, internal half- and full-rhyme, and interlocked syntax, and its vocabulary was made up, largely, of a highly developed poetic diction. Many questions remain unanswered as to the sources of its conventions and the scansion of its rhythms. Its use of alliteration is Germanic, as its metric also appears to be, except for the syllable count, which is more likely to be Irish. But there are unanswered questions about the Germanic metric too: was it one of stresses, quantities, or measure of time, as in music? Or it may be that the rhythms of the dr6ttkv",tt are not Germanic or any other; they may be adequately accounted for by the syllable count.' UNlVERSIT'( OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUMB 52, NUMBER 1, FALL 1982 0042-0247/8211000--0001-0008$01.5010 Cl UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS 2 GEORGE JOHNSTON These questions I shall leave to others. A translator, however, must choose a form and metric of some sort in the course of his translation. Many of the sagas have scaldic poems embedded in their texts, to give focus or authenticity, it would seem, to the prose passages in which they appear. I shall concern myself with the dr6ttkvrett stanzas in The Saga of Gisli, of which there are thirty. Gisli was a scald, and the poems are presented as his own. They lament the death of his sworn brother Vestein, praise a bond-woman, scorn his sister for putting her husband before her brother, and express his defiance of his enemies. One, a fateful poem, is a riddle that exults in his killing of his brother-in-law in revenge for the killing of his sworn brother. The strongest and most unusual poems tell ofhis dreams while he is being hunted; they give an exposition of his state of mind, something uncharacteristic of the sagas. As poems they are very affecting. How should these poems be translated? There are many problems. To begin with, the prose sense, on account of the interlocking word order in the Norse, mustbe sorted outbeforeitbecomes intelligible in English, and even then it may present alternate possibilities of interpretation. Scholars maybe divided over these and overotherambiguities and obscurities, and sometimes over differing texts. After the translator has...

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