The image of the poet

The definition of a skald conveyed in Bragi Boddason's verse Skáld kalla mik, quoted at the beginning of Chapter 1, indicates that there were two fundamental ways in which medieval Scandinavians conceptualised poetry: on the one hand as a divine gift in the form of an intoxicating drink, and, on the other, as a craft or skill, an íþrótt, that is, an accomplishment of human intelligence. These two ways of understanding the genesis and nature of poetry were unlikely to have been viewed as contrastive or contradictory in their eyes, although they may seem so to us. In fact, a comment that occurs at the end of Snorri Sturluson's account of the myth of the origin of the mead of poetry in Skáldskaparmál (a myth to which I will shortly return), reveals that divine inspiration was considered unlikely to fall to someone who did not already possess the ability to compose poetry:

The first sentence of this quotation clearly indicates that Óõinn, divine possessor of the source of poetic inspiration, the poetic mead, did not give this intoxicating substance to everyone indiscriminately; rather, he gave it only to those people who already possessed the skill which enabled them to compose poetry. This formulation implies that, for human poets, the skill was primary and needed to be in place before the divine gift was conferred, the reverse of the modern Western concept of inspiration, which almost certainly owes its genesis to Christian and classical rather than Germanic models.

The poet as craftsman

I shall first consider how medieval Scandinavians conceptualised the skills involved in composing poetry.