The Christian-Latin educational tradition in Iceland

The changes in religious ideology discussed in the previous chapter affected medieval Norse poetics in five main ways: they affected the practice of poetry, that is, its actual composition, as we have seen, and they affected the theories that underlay that practice. They also heralded changes in the media through which poetry and ideas about poetry were expressed and brought about some shifts in the kinds of people who became poets and the ways in which those poets were educated in their art. We have seen that for the pre-Christian period poetic theory is largely inferential, that is, we can deduce how people conceptualised and valued poetry from several kinds of empirical evidence: from the conventional distinctions of genre, verse form and diction traditionally applied to both eddic and skaldic verse, from the internal evidence of poetic style and subject matter, and from representations in Old Norse literature, including myth, of poetry and poets. To a greater extent, after the conversion to Christianity, and particularly as the twelfth century proceeded and people began to use the new technology of writing, poetic theory became more explicit and began to take written form. Poetry and scholarship about poetry, as the quotation above implies, seemed natural bedfellows in the Icelandic tradition and were sanctioned by mythological authority. However, much of the new poetic theory was imported into Icelandic culture from the Christian-Latin educational tradition of mainstream medieval Europe, and thus several questions immediately arise: how far this foreign learning was applicable to Norse poetry; why it was applied to vernacular poetry at all and how far what we read in the poetic treatises of the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries reflects native rather than Christian-Latin ideas about poetry.