Skaldic verse was one of the few types of oral literature preserved in the same form as composed. So complex were its technical demands, that they acted as an agent of petrification. Verses and entire poems might be lost or words eroded, but, like the shards of a fired pot, the Skaldic stanzas could not easily be reshaped and reused. Thus, when we read a verse by Egil Skallagrímsson, we can be fairly sure that we have the words as Egil spoke them, sometime between 925 and 990, or as Heusler (1931:134 as cited in Hollander 1945:20) puts it, "the genuine records of a warrior society ... fresh and immediate, not second-hand and toned down by the tastes of literary authors."
In contrast to the other literatures of heathen times, almost every Skaldic verse was attributed to its composer, and authorities agree that in large part these attributions were accurate. And since many of the Skalds were notable men, their deeds were recorded in biographical sagas. Thus, while we know virtually nothing about the composers of the Eddic verse, we know a great deal about the Skalds, both as individuals and as a class.
Most of the famous Skalds were warriors, members of the landowning gentry of Iceland. [2] They lived in the heyday of Viking power, and many were men of exceptional character and intellect. They visited the courts of Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, English and Irish kings, often were accepted as members of the hirð (the king's guard of honor), and sometimes became the king's confidential advisors and ambassadors. They were noted for their independence of opinion, their frankness and self-possession, and they criticized, exhorted, and advised the sovereigns whom they served.
In the practice of their art these men were professionals and litterateurs. Their more formal and elaborate verses could not be composed, appreciated, or understood without an arduous and consciously acquired technical education. A part of their technique involved the extravagant use of the implied simile, the kenning—that is, whenever possible, the Skald refrained from calling a being or thing by its ordinary name and instead invented a name (or used an already established invention) that displayed his intimate knowledge of the mythology. For example, men might be called "Óðin's ash trees," a sword might be Óðin's grey rainbow," and a shield, "the stormy sky of the valkyrie." Similarly, the poetic art might be Óðin's gift Óðin's theft, since Óðin stole the mead of poetry from the giant Sutting and gave a part of it to men. Again, a whale might be called Boar of Viðblindi, since the giant Viðblindi drew whales out of the sea like fish; the sea was "the drink of whales," and gold, "the amber of the sea."
In addition to kennings, Skaldic verse demanded internal assonance and rhyme, whose nature and position in the line were strictly regulated. Even more complexities were added by the extreme liberty of word position, the addition of two, three, or sometimes more parenthetic sentences to a single stanza, and sentence separation. In the last mentioned tour de force, a stanza was composed by separating two sentences into syntactically unrecognizable parts which were then intertwined according to formal rule. Or a half stanza might contain two or three strands of thought "intertwined like polyphonic music or intercalated one within the other like Chinese boxes" (Einarsson 1957:55).
The artfulness and subtlety of some of the Skaldic verse cannot be appreciated without effort, and the reader will be rewarded by a perusal of Wood's (1959) interpretation of the verses that a newly christened heathen, Hallfréðr Óttarsson, recited before the zealot King Ólafr Tryggvason. On the other hand, as one struggles with these convoluted verses, one is tempted to sympathize with the Danes at the court of Harald Gormsson, who, in a fictional account (Bengtsson 1966:153-154) are pictured as listening to a Skald "with an appearance of understanding, for any man who could not understand poetry would be regarded as a poor specimen of a warrior." Still, these fictional Danes are one up on the historical Anglo-Saxon nobles who, at the court of Harald Godwinson, did in fact listen to a Skaldic nonsense poem delivered by a rapscallion Icelander named Sneglu-Hallr (Hollander 1945:212).
A great part of the Skaldic verse consisted of the recital of the more notable warlike exploits of the particular king or earl to whom the Skald wished to give honor or to whose court he was attached. Indeed, kings and warriors seem to have taken for granted that a great poem into which their deeds and name were embedded would be remembered for all time, and in this sense the Skalds functioned both as recorders and record keepers of the fame of their patrons. Skaldic verse could also take the form of a straightforward description, an exhortation, an expostulation, a magical spell, or even a satirical lampoon. (Sodomy being among the deadliest of insults, a Christian missionary to Iceland killed two men because they composed verses taunting him with having engendered nine children on the bishop [Einarsson 1957:47].) In Iceland the Skaldic art was not limited to professionals, and most men could turn out an occasional verse of the less difficult type. Even a spirited girl might compose a verse to taunt or tease a youthful warrior (Egil's Saga, Eddision 1930:92-93).
More than any of the other creators of the quasi-secular literature, the Skalds were naively and consistently interested in themselves. They always speak in the first person and rarely omit a reference to themselves. The greatest of the Skalds, Egil Skallagrímsson (ca. 910-1000), begins his equivocal eulogy of King Eirík Bloodyaxe (Hollander 1945:76-77) by describing how he (Egil) came to the king's house. He opens his poem in praise of his friend Arinbjörn by stating that he, Egil, is quick to praise worthy deeds but will not fawn on false greatness. Then, in the process of praising Arinbjörn for standing by him in trouble, he gives us a detailed picture of his (Egil's) personal appearance. He tells us that he is not handsome, that his ugly head and his eyes are wolf grey, and that he has shaggy eyebrows. Of how Arinbjörn, the subject of his poem, looked, we learn nothing.
Unfortunately the technical complexity of these works renders them very difficult to translate and even more difficult to interpret. We may, however, gain some impression of the intensely personal usage to which the Skaldic art could be put from the tale of one of Egil's finest poems, the Sonatorrek (literally, "the difficult vengeance of sons"). Like most of the other Skaldic verse, Egil's poetry has been preserved by incorporation into a saga, which in this particular case is one of the most complete and reliable life histories in the literature. We learn that from early childhood Egil was contentious, selfish, stubborn, resourceful, reckless, and extremely jealous of his rights. He pays off every score made against him, often with interest. His avarice is pictured as extraordinary even for his day and age. If he cannot get proper restitution without delay, he sulks like a child. Or, if he is truly frustrated, as when King Eirík deprives him of his wife's inheritance, he flies into a maniacal rage and turns his knowledge of sorcery against his foes. In later middle age, this man, who has almost always "had his own way," suffers an injury for which there appears to be no payment. One of his sons dies of a fever and, shortly thereafter, another, a promising youth of seventeen, is drowned. After the burial, the saga tells us, Egil returns to his house, locks himself in his bed-closet and refuses to speak, eat, or drink.
On the third day, Egil's daughter manages to trick him into breaking his resolution and coaxes him into composing a eulogy for his son. Egil says that he does not know if he can do this, "but try I shall." (The following translation is taken from Hollander [1945:90-98].)
Egil begins by describing the difficulty of expressing his emotions in poetic form:
Tardily takes
my tongue to move,
and to stir
the steelyard-of-song: [3]
hopeless is't
about Odin's theft, [4]
hard to draw
from the heart's-fastness!
He pictures the devastated state of his kin:
Grim the gap
which the gale did tear
in my sib's
serried ranges—
unfilled aye
and open will stand
the breach blasted
by the breaking sea.
Then, in a furious outburst, he vents his rage on his son's "slayer", the sea-god, Aegir, and challenges the "ale-smith," the maker of the foaming billows, to battle:
If my suit
with sword I could press,
all over
for the ale-smith were it:
could I kill
the storm's kinsman,
Aegir's might
I would meet as foe.
But Egil knows that he cannot hope to meet the gods face-to-face and that his kin's lost must go unavenged:
But strength to cope
I could not muster,
so meseemed,
with my son's slayer:
soon will it be seen by all
how helpless
the hoary warrior.
In several stanzas he then pictures his loneliness. His brother is dead; he has no friends; he trusts none of the "self-seeking, base-minded men of Iceland," who, he asserts, are so low that they would accept wergeld from their brother's slayer rather than kill him:
Often I
in anguish think,
left alone, of my lack of brothers—
cast about
when battle rages,
look around
and would like to knowwhat bold man
would band with me,
stout-hearted,
in stress of danger ...Hard to find
a friend to trust
anywhere
in all Iceland:
caitiff wretch
would wreck his kindred,
barter off
his brother for rings.
He then turns upon Óðin, the god of warriors and skalds, whom he had "trusted as true-hearted," but who, he reasons, has betrayed him:
Well I stood
with the strife-abettor,
trusted him
as true-hearted,
until he
turned upon me,
the gallows'-lord [5]
the giver-of-victory.
Up to this point in the poem, Egil has catalogued his wrongs and expressed his fury, agony, and helplessness. Now, however, like a good arbitrator, he fairly states the other side, listing the special gifts given him by Óðin:
Not bow I
to the brother-of-Vili, [6]
the great god,
with gladsome mind;
|yet Mim's friend [6]
to me hath made
for all harm
these high amends:
the Goth's friend [6]
hath given me
one fault-free
unfailing skill,
and that mind
which made for me
frank foes aye
of the false-hearted.
Thus, he concludes, though Hel, the goddess of death, waits for him, he will abide her coming
Gladly though,
and ungrudgingly,
with light heart ...
The saga tells us: "Egil regained his spirits as he went on composing the poem: and when he had finished it he recited it to... the members of the household. Then he rose up out of bed and seated himself in the high-seat," that is, he resumed his position as head of the house.
This poem seems to be a desperate and passionate claim for self-respect. Egil, if we can understand him at all, believes that he has suffered a terrible wrong, a wrong which he cannot right by any means available to him. In this situation he must either die or find some means of bringing his self and the world to a proper state of balance. Or, in Old Icelandic legal terminology, he must convince himself that "the difference has been paid." If we add to this the interpretation provided by the saga, the poem may be viewed as a justification of Egil's decision to live. The saga tells us that he had resolved to starve himself to death. Through no fault of his own, he had broken this resolve. Thwarted in his attempt to die with honor, he had to find a convincing defense for living with honor.
Thus, the Sonatorrek, in addition to being a remarkable example of self-expression, may be viewed as a kind of legal debate and self-judgment. The poet himself argues both sides and then acts as doomsman. The case against the gods is stated: they have robbed Egil of his kin. Next the case in favor of the gods is stated: Óðin himself has given Egil "one fault-free unfailing skill," that is, he has made Egil a perfect Skald, and he has given him the ability to expose false-hearted men. Then Egil, as judge, decides that in spite of his grief, he and his friend Óðin are even. He may hold up his head and live "gladly" and "light-heartedly," as a warrior should, until the goddess of death comes for him. (Perhaps we may gain some idea of the extraordinary value placed upon the Skaldic art by the fact that a man like Egil here asserts that it is equal in price to his own son.)
In Chapter 3 we remarked that the enchanted literature gave us a picture of a world in which all animate things moved with energy. In our discussion of the law, we noted that the greater part of the law was devoted to regulating the movements of extremely active men and that many of the legal concepts were conceived in terms of action. Now, in the early Skaldic verse we find an art form that is literally a verbal motion picture. Each tightly involuted little stanza is like a flash of lightning that casts a dazzling and momentary illumination upon each detail of a swirling scene.
For example, this is how Thjóðólfr of Hvinir pictured the god Thór driving his chariot through the heavens (Hollander 1945:47):
Flamed the firmament
with fiery lightnings, and all
lands below the hail did
lash, before Ull's kinsman [7]
as galloping, the goat-bucks—
gaped the earth on sudden—
hauled the wheelèd wain of
Hrungir's foeman [8] thurs-ward.
Equally notable is Egil Skallagrímsson's description of a storm at sea (Turville-Petre 1953:42-43):
The angry troll of tree-trunks
the tempest's chisel wieldeth,
around the bull of bow-sprits
beats a file of breakers;
the freezing wolf of forests
files the swan of the sea-god,
grinds the beak of the galley,
grimly batters the forecastle. [9]
The Skalds' photoflash technique is, of course, ideally suited to their favorite theme: the description of battles. Spears and swords flash, arrows swarm, blood streams, corpses fall in piles, ravens and wolves gorge, in patterned and repetitive orgies of violence and death (Hollander 1945:69):
Was lifted sword
'gainst linden-board [l0]
around the lord
as rushed he for'rd.Was heard the roar
of raging war
as flowed wound-gore
on far-off shore.
Authorities agree that the Skaldic verse is one of the most eye-oriented literatures in the world. By and large the Skalds rely on the physical senses which relate man to what the modem psychologists call the "real world." They trust their "physical" senses rather than their intellect, emotions, or insight. By placing primary emphasis on complex technique the Skalds come close to transforming poetic expression into something a man can manipulate with his hands. They seem, as one scholar puts it, to hew out their work in a state of intense and deliberate concentration on externals, rather than let it well forth impulsively from within themselves.
Though the Skalds may describe their own feelings, they rarely speak of the feelings of another individual. They seem to have no interest in any emotions but their own and they are concerned primarily with man's visible and tangible accomplishments and his demonstrable successes. But though one may justly characterize the Skalds as incapable of "taking the role of the other," one cannot call them dispassionate or unemotional. Any manifestation of tumult, noise, or fury fascinates them. But they subject these violences to a curious kind of restraint, and try to depict a raging sea, a battle, or their own emotions and passions through the medium of an exquisitely controlled art form involving the utmost in technical discipline. Thus, we may not be surprised that a Viking, like Egil, produced so impressive a picture of a storm at sea. But I, at least, am greatly impressed by the fact that he managed to do this and remain within so rigid and binding an art form. Again, in the Sonatorrek, Egil's despair, fury, and loneliness are, for me, raised to awesome heights when I consider that he was able to produce this effect with language so abstruse and indirect that it may not have been fully comprehensible even to his contemporaries.
Whether the Vikings themselves admired the Skaldic art because of its emphasis on controlled energy and tightly reined passion we can only guess. The saga writers, however, suggest that in heathen times the ideal individual was capable on the one hand, of tremendous outbursts of passion and, on the other, of an extraordinary self-rule or self-control.
We know that Egil Skallagrímsson laid an effective curse on King Eirík Bloodyaxe in Skaldic verse, that the heathen Skalds derived their poetic gifts from Óðin, the god of sorcerers, and that many Skalds considered themselves the particular "friends" of Óðin. The question arises, did the differences of Skaldic verse and the power and influence which many of the Skalds obtained at the courts of kings and earls of the Viking Age derive from the fact that being a Skald was virtually the same as being a formidable sorcerer? [11]
We have a great deal of evidence of how the most gifted of the Skalds were regarded by their fellow men either abroad or at home in Iceland. We also have a great deal of evidence of how warrior peoples, like the Indians of the Plains, treated their warriors and their most powerful and revered medicine men or "doctors." Members of both societies seem to have taken it for granted that promising and enterprising young men were by nature aggressive, contentious, impulsive and proud. Young men were not expected to become conventional and "law-abiding" until they married and had dependents for whom they were responsible. Thus, when Ogmund went a-viking and returned home "with fame and much wealth" his father thereupon declared, "that Ogmund was not likely to win more fame in forays and I shall get you for wife Helga, the daughter of Earl Fr6thi" (Kormáks Saga, Hollander 1949:13). In brief, for the most part, the skalds behaved and were treated much more like ideal-typical warriors than like professional or semi-professional magicians.
I emphasize this rather obvious point because I think that the Skaldic verse tells us much more about the world view of warriors than about the view of either a magically oriented or a disenchanted folk. Indeed, it seems to have been the most transcendental of the literary forms of Scandinavia, since it was invented by genuine heathen, then practiced and brought to its climax by heathen, half-heathen and ambivalent newly baptized Christian warriors, after which it fell into a declines and then, two centuries later, was revived and nourished anew.
One may suggest that it represents another of the relatively sophisticated aspects of the late Viking culture—another facet of the process which turned some warriors into "godless" men, and led others to develop and refine their code of ethics.
I am also inclined to see the record keeping of the Skalds as more an expression of a warrior culture than as an index of naiveté or sophistication. As the Maya priests and Babylonian astrologers attest, records can be kept as assiduously and accurately by members of a magically oriented society as by persons who are thoroughly disenchanted. The important point is that the Skalds flourished because they recorded the noteworthy and largely military achievements of kings who expected that through these verses their fame would remain alive. That the efforts of the Skalds provided the historians of a more prosaic age with invaluable though sketchy historical data is, perhaps, a joke on the kings. But the fact that the deeds of the Viking kings are remembered because of the labors of modern historians is, perhaps, a joke on the historians.
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Last Modified 3 May 2000
Comments to Manny Olds, oldsma@pobox.com