Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages is an extraordinary contribution to the study of skaldic poetry. It will, when complete, supersede the previous corpus editions of skaldic poetry by Finnur Jónsson and E. A. Kock.
Skaldic poetry is a difficult poetry both because of its use of elaborate kennings and other types of speech units, which depend on a detailed knowledge of Norse mythology to decipher, and also because of the elaborate and convoluted syntax of the poetry. It was created by poets who were expected to know a wide range of meters, would be expected to create poetry for many different kinds of occasion quickly, and would be able to perform it. Skaldic poetry was primarily a court poetry, though some of the poems, such as Egill Skallagrimsson’s “Sonatorrek,” a poem on the death of his beloved son, reveal that the poetry could be used in less formal settings to express personal feelings.
The poems in this edition are presented chronologically by period, and within each period, by author. Each poem has an introduction, which is followed by its text. The editors have chosen to normalize the texts to the period in which the texts were supposedly written (cvi-cvii); because these normalizations “are not regarded as emendations” by the editors, “they are therefore not marked as such in the [texts]” (cvi). This means, unfortunately, that it is not easy to determine how a text has been emended through its normalization. The normalized text of each stanza of the poems is followed by a rewriting of that stanza into prose, a translation, and finally a thorough philological analysis. There is some attention to the context of the poetry; skaldic poetry, for the most part, occurs in specific circumstances in the Icelandic sagas, and thus having it in an edition like this, where that context is lost, can pose problems for understanding the poems. As its saga contexts make evident, skaldic poetry was often an improvised and performed poetry, and thus it is curious that little attention is given to this aspect of the poetry in this edition.
One of the main controversies in the study of skaldic poetry has been whether or not the poems are the products of the time they were supposedly written, or the work of the saga writers in whose works the poems appear, who wrote from the thirteenth century on, and who knew how to imitate the verse of earlier times. There is no clear answer to this problem; on the one hand, preservation of such texts, with their many archaisms, is not unusual in folk tradition, while on the other, we also know of traditions, like the possibly related Irish bardic tradition, where the meter and style of bardic poetry were so rigid that the poetry produced across the six hundred or so years of bardic poetic production looks the same. In choosing to normalize the poems to the periods they supposedly originated in—which often are periods from which we otherwise have no literary texts—the editors come down strongly in favor of one side in the controversy, but they also misrepresent the texts of the poems in doing so. This normalization thus keeps this edition from being definitive.
However, even though the texts as presented in this edition are not definitive, Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages will be the standard edition of skaldic poetry for some time.
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[Review length: 566 words • Review posted on April 23, 2014]