Relations between Verse and Prose

In the Introduction I drew attention to the way that skaldic poetry is almost always cited piecemeal as part of a prosimetrum, even though some of it at least probably already existed in the form of longer poems before being placed into a prose context. I speculated there that the main reason why saga writers broke up their poetic sources into chunks was to take advantage of the capacity of written prose to articulate an extended narrative, in which events and their protagonists could be treated sequentially. The ability of saga writers to adopt such a mode of citation was greatly enhanced by the eight-line stanzaic form of much skaldic poetry, especially in the court metre dróttkvœtt, and the capacity of the stanza to be further divisible into a four-line helmingr or half-stanza and even a two-line couplet (fjórðungr). More often than not stanzas and half-stanzas were syntactically discrete, a quality that made it much easier for them to be woven into the fabric of the prosimetrum as self-contained units.

When these self-contained units were used by writers of kings’ sagas and other historical works to corroborate the achievements of their royal or aristocratic subjects, it was normal for the poetic citations to occur usually in close proximity to the events described in the prose text. The same is true of the way in which poetic examples (dœmi) are cited in the Icelandic treatises on poetics: the writer describes a kenning type or rhetorical figure, and quotes one or more skaldic examples straight afterwards to provide evidence of his description. So, for example, Snorri Sturluson follows his statement about how to compose kennings for battle in Skáldskaparmál [The Diction of Poetry] (‘Hvernig skal kenna orrostu?’) with seven poetic examples, mostly half-stanzas, although two are couplets. A good many of these are by named poets, introduced by short phrases such as ‘Sem kvað Einarr skálaglamm’ [As Einarr Tinkle-scales said] or ‘Svá sem hér’ [As here] and ‘Ok enn þetta’ [And then this], the last two examples being anonymous and the first of them not being syntactically complete.