LIKE A BRIDGE OF STONES

1 7 0 Y L I K E A B R I D G E O F S T O N E S R O B E R T A F R A N K ‘‘Art is long,’’ noted Longfellow, picking up and running with a tag current in the middle of the first millennium b.c.e. Poetry perpetuates , writers keep suggesting, but so do rabbits and Google sites. The first volume of the reborn Yale Review (1911–12) contains an ad touting the toughness of the India paper on which the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica was printed. Readers are instructed to take a page of the encyclopedia, fold it, tie it into knots, pass it through a small ring, crumple it into a tight ball, open it up, apply ‘‘a few strokes from a hot iron,’’ and watch it emerge from its torments whole and unblemished. (I recommend trying this in the Starr Reading Room of Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library.) The Yale Review, transformed a century ago this month, is also a survivor, around whom close friends have gathered to reminisce about what the journal has meant and still means to them. A birthday needs a cake – something easy to chew and digest, not too rich or sweet, perhaps discreetly spiked to lift spirits . Nothing heavy or cloying: a one-hundred-year-old does not want to be reminded of the downward pull of gravity or the threat of arteriosclerosis and poor circulation. A concoction low-cal and low-keyed and not too flaky might do the trick. 1 7 1 R Icelandic court poets tra≈cked in survival, o√ering undying publicity to open-handed patrons. These Viking-age skalds were smart about praising. And they boast, like any ambitious manufacturer , about the durability of their product. Such professional selfconsciousness predates by at least a century the outbreak of poetic pride observable in Latin verse of the eleventh century and later. One tenth-century skald compared the process of composing an ode to erecting a sturdy stone cairn in a field: ‘‘I have built up a not-eager-to-be-broken [= strong, solid] praise-pile that will stand for a long time [= for all ages] in the home-meadow of poetry.’’ His generous friend had sustained him in life; he will sustain him in memory – forever. (The more loot apparently, the more litotes.) Another early skald wryly declared that his praise poem would be ‘‘slow-forgotten,’’ meaning ‘‘remembered for all time.’’ Enduring fame was worth a lot. Because Norse princes were subject to nervous breakdowns and homicidal fits when su≈cient praise was not forthcoming, it is not surprising that the greater part of Viking-age court poetry involved commemoration and celebration. Háleygjatal, a genealogical poem composed around 985, lists the ancestors of the last great pagan ruler of Norway and relates how some met their deaths. The skald begins in the mythic past with Odin and ends in contemporary Hálogaland: ‘‘We [= I] have produced again a feast of the gods [= poem], praise of the prince, like a bridge of stones.’’ The poet builds a stone causeway connecting the living to the dead, a two-way corridor that will outlast time. Coincidentally, Swedish archaeologists have just uncovered (18 May 2011) a twohundred -foot-long row of standing stones, running in a straight line toward the sixth-century burial mounds at Old Uppsala. Skaldic verse was an oral art form, rigid, demanding, dependent on the concept of a fixed text. It was composed by professionals and memorized for formal delivery. In a culture in which literacy was restricted, the very fact of inscribing verse masked it under a second code, making it more unbreakable. Engraving a stanza on stone was equivalent to placing it in a deep freezer for words. Three thousand Viking-age runic inscriptions, mostly memorial, survive on stone, the majority in present-day Sweden. But only one preserves a skaldic stanza in court meter. This verse epitaph was carved around 1000 near Karlevi, a town on the southwest of 1 7 2 F R A N K Y the long, thin, flat island of Öland in the Baltic; the stone...