What this book is about

The subject of this book, Old Norse poetry and poetics, was one of particular importance to the Viking Age and medieval societies of Scandinavia, and nowhere was it more significant than in Iceland, from where the major part of our extant textual evidence derives. An incident, doubtless mythical, recorded in the Edda (‘Poetics’) of c.1225 by the Icelander Snorri Sturluson reveals something of the complex of ideas that underpinned traditional Norse views of poetry and poets. It concerns an exchange of verses between a troll-woman and a poet, Bragi Boddason the Old, an archetypal figure of semi-divine status and the earliest named poet whose verses have survived in written form. The troll-wife challenged Bragi to identify himself as they met in a wood one dark evening and he did so in the following verse (one of a pair of verses, in the first of which the troll-woman listed her own characteristics):

Bragi's self-definition employs a list of kennings (kenningar) or poetic periphrases for the concept ‘poet’ (given here in square brackets) and poetic synonyms (heiti) to reflect the two dominant indigenous Nordic conceptions of the art of poetry: poetry as a gift of the gods, particularly of the god Óõinn, and poetry as craft or skill (íþrótt), with the poet represented as a clever song-smith or craftsman of verse (Kreutzer 1977; Clover 1978). The analogy between a poet and a smith, which we find in many other places in Old Norse verse, is important, for it expresses technological excellence and power. The craft of the blacksmith or worker in wood or metal represented the peak of early medieval technology, so the analogy between creating clever craftwork and creating complicated, clever poetry would have held a great deal of importance for early medieval people.