Poetry from Treatises on Poetics ed. by Kari Ellen Gade, and Edith Marold (review)

This is another volume (in two parts) to appear in the nine-volume series 'Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages' in progress. Since 2008 five have appeared (1, 2, 3, 7, and 8), and through the splendid website and database readers already have some access to the volumes in preparation, or can consult earlier editions of the texts yet to appear in newly edited form. Furthermore, each print edition as completed is also available online as a fully searchable electronic text.

The aim of the series is to provide a critical edition, with accompanying English translation and notes, of the entire corpus of medieval Norse poetry, excluding only the Poetic Edda and closely related poetry, and the rímur. The edition is based on the evidence of all known manuscripts of each text, and a thorough review of previous editions and commentaries. A century after the appearance of Finnur Jónsson's Den norsk-islandske skjaldedigtning, this series provides a new collected, standard edition of Norse poetry in a form accessible to the wider academic world. Indeed, one of its express aims is to make skaldic poetry available to students and scholars not only in the field of Old Norse studies, but also in disciplines such as history, archaeology, the history of religion, and comparative literature. As such it is generous in its provision of introductory and explanatory materials, and a model of clarity, from the key to the editorial structure (on the front and rear pastedowns of each volume) to the detailed lists of sigla and bibliographical references, the glossary of technical terms, and the various indexes. Texts are presented in normalized orthography, followed by a rearranged version in prose word order, and accompanied by a translation with a key to the kennings embedded within it. The economy and clarity of this system is admirable, and as with so many features in these volumes, shows how carefully the editors and contributors have thought through issues of accessibility for a wide readership.

The present volume is distinctive in its nature because of the diverse and fragmented material it must handle. It collects the poems, stanzas, and numerous fragments of stanzas, couplets or single lines cited in the prose treatises of Snorri's Edda, the Third and Fourth Grammatical Treatises, and Laufás Edda, along with the þulur, and a few other scattered items. A line or two, or a helmingr, cited in Snorri or one of the other sources, is sometimes all that survives from a particular poet's output: this is the case for example with the helmingr by an otherwise unknown poet called Steinarr, cited by Snorri to illustrate a particular kind of kenning for 'woman' (p. 384). Sometimes a fragment may survive from a known poet's work cited more expansively in a family saga or king's saga, or from a poem by a known poet otherwise lost (Einarr Skúlason's Øxarflokkr, for example, pp. 140–51). Fragments can also only tentatively be attributed to a named poet, as for example in the case of a helmingr cited by Snorri and attributed to 'Hallr', who seems to be Hallr Snorrason (pp. 228–29). In part, the volume serves as a guide to the 'lost literature' of Scandinavia, providing glimpses of so much that has not survived.

In addition to the two principal editors, no fewer than eleven other experts in the field have edited sections of the volume. Reviewers of volumes in the series up until now have acclaimed the work for its scope and for the meticulousness and acumen of the scholarship within them. This volume is no exception, and the editors are to be complimented on the way that such a disparate and sometimes intractable range of fragments has been put under the microscope of critical and editorial inquiry.