This interesting statement opens the Old Icelandic law code Grágás’s discussion of poetry. While most of this section concerns defamation and the various penalties exacted for its practice, a modern reader may wonder why it begins by stating that a man has no right to compose either defamation or praise. Why mention praise here, which is laudatory of its subject? Why should a man not have an inherent right to compose it? The answer lies in one of the main themes of this book, that in Old Norse, and particularly Icelandic, society, poetry was never value-neutral and so was never free from an illocutionary or perlocutionary effect. Praising someone, just as much as blaming him, required social sanction and needed to be measured and appropriate. Praising someone inserted the poet into a particular social space, and also projected a particular social image of the poem's subject into society at large. This was as true of the situation at the Norwegian court as it was of that at an important man's farm in Iceland or of an individual's self-promotion or defence of his own actions. And poetry with Christian subject matter was not exempt from the social dynamic that bound a poet and his subject either, the difference being that God was its ultimate subject, though voicing praise of God in poetry often entailed the support and permission of powerful secular rulers or clergy.

In one sense the self-presentation of the poet and author Sturla þórõarson in Sturlu þáttr, discussed in Chapter 10, provides a fitting note on which to conclude this book because it reinvigorates in a written medium the concept of the clever and eloquent Icelandic skald of the Viking Age, a poet who entertains his elite Norwegian audience with ease and vigour, not to speak of a little manipulation. We have seen, from a great many different kinds of evidence, how highly this aspect of the poetic art was valued in medieval Iceland, and presumably, at least in the early centuries, in Norway as well.