A Legendary Ancestry for Poets: Skáldatal in Heimskringla and Edda Manuscripts , in 'Filologia germanica - Germanic Philology' 4 (2012), pp. 67-89 (original) (raw)
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The Role of the Skalds in Old Scandinavian Society
Skaldic poetry or court poetry differs significantly from other schools of Medieval European poetry. Scandinavian court poets, using complex literary techniques and various metres, composed verses on the events they witnessed or heard of from worthy witnesses. Along with this, they served kings and praised them – or blamed, being a part of an extremely interesting relationship. This essay shall very briefly explore the features and genres of Skaldic poetry, and analyse the role of the court poets in Old Scandinavian society. It shall focus on Norsk-islandske skjaldedigtning (Skj) anthology put together by Finnur Jónsson, which is the most entire and thorough collection of skaldic verses, Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla, and various sagas about skalds.
Skaldic Verse-Making In Thirteenth-Century Iceland: The Case of the Sauðafellsferðarvísur
Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 4, 85-131 , 2008
This article examines an exchange of skaldic verses between a number of Icelandic chieftains, landholders and semi-professional poets, reported to have taken place in a period of political crisis in western Iceland in 1229. The surviving sequence, preserved in Sturla Þórðarson’s Íslendinga saga, constitutes an unparalleled example of extended verse-capping in medieval Icelandic narrative writing. The historical context of these verses and their narrative treatment in Íslendinga saga are considered in detail, and some new readings of the verse material and the political relationships they disclose are proposed. The verses are shown to illuminate the continuing value of skaldic performance as an instrument of social and political leverage in thirteenth-century Iceland, and the stimulatory function of competitive posturing in skaldic discourse. The analysis presented here suggests the need to revise some recent propositions concerning the supposed clerical and scholastic co-option of skaldic poetics in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Further stanzas composed in the period 1229–32 perpetuate the agonistic pattern developed in the initial sequence, and the narrative framing of these later compositions is shown to embody conspicuous ambivalence to the adversarial ethics underlying the continuing exchange.
Norse-Icelandic Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages - an electronic edition
2001
Wills is an ARC-funded Research Associate on the project, with special duties in connection with the electronic edition. Several of the editors have obtained, or are in process of obtaining, research grants to produce this edition. I have myself had ARC funding for 5 years now, and wait to hear whether I have been successful in obtaining another grant. The Australian Academy of the Humanities has adopted the project for endorsement by the Union académique internationale (UAI) in Brussels, and the UAI has this year accepted the project as no. 60 in its list of supported projects. There are now 41 scholars from 10 countries (
New Norse Studies: Essays on the Literature and Culture of Medieval Scandinavia, 2015
This article proposes that the oft-dismissed Sneglu-Halla þáttr (Tale of Sarcastic Halli) is not simply a series of virtuoso vituperations peppered with sexual-cum-barnyard humor, nor “a series of episodes that could have been arranged otherwise as well,” but a text that repays close attention, both for original audiences as well as for scholars of Old Norse-Icelandic literature. I argue that its eponymous hero establishes his social position at the royal Norwegian court by ensconcing himself within a sustained series of allusions to myths of the Norse god Loki, while framing his peers, and even his superiors, as the sexual deviants, low-lifes, and numbskulls of a déclassé “folktale” world. Sneglu-Halla þáttr thus presupposes considerable literary connoisseurship, detailed knowledge of the Norse mythographic tradition, and a consciousness of high and low genre that reflects concerns of shifting social classes and political powers in thirteenth and fourteenth-century Iceland. Ultimately, I leverage this reading to articulate a reappraisal of medieval Icelandic narrative prose—most often lauded for its “realism," "straightforwardness," and "objectivity”: I offer that this deceptively “simple” tale adheres to the same aesthetic principles of complexity, ambiguity, and allusiveness that characterize the Skaldic poetry that is its ostensible subject.
Old Norse Women's Poetry: The Voices of Female Skalds
Modern Language Review, 2013
The rich and compelling corpus of Old Norse poetry is one of the most important and influential areas of medieval European literature. What is less well known, however, is the quantity of the material which can be attributed to women skalds. This book, intended for a broad audience, presents a bilingual edition (Old Norse and English) of this material, from the ninth to the thirteenth century and beyond, with commentary and notes. The poems here reflect the dramatic and often violent nature of the sagas: their subject matter features Viking Age shipboard adventures and shipwrecks; prophecies; curses; declarations of love and of revenge; duels, feuds and battles; encounters with ghosts; marital and family discord; and religious insults, among many other topics. Their authors fall into four main categories: pre-Christian Norwegian and Icelandic skaldkonur of the Viking Age; Icelandic skaldkonur of the Sturlung Age (thirteenth century); additional early skaldkonur from the Islendingaso...