Old Norse poetry is, by tradition, divided into two types, Eddic and skaldic. Most of the surviving Eddic poetry is preserved in one manuscript, the Codex Regius, which was discovered in an Icelandic farmhouse by Bishop Brynjolfr Sveinsson and presented to the Danish king in 1662. This contains some twenty-nine poems on heroic or mythical subjects, which seem to derive from the world of pagan and pre-Christian legend, and which accordingly excited enormous interest from the time of their first publication. They are in a variety of meters, but much is in fornyrthislag, the Norse version of the common Germanic alliterative meter found also in Old English, Old Saxon and Old High German poems. The poems were quoted or paraphrased heavily by Snorri Sturluson in his work on Old Norse mythology written in the 1220s for the use of young poets, and which is generally known as the Prose Edda, and as a result the collection was early known as the Poetic Edda, a name now too well-established to be changed. It is not clear, however, what "Edda" means: it can mean "great-grandmother," it may be connected with the Icelandic center of Oddi, where Snorri lived for a time, but most likely is it a word derived from Latin edere, "to compose," and so exactly parallel with kredda, or Creed, from credere, to "believe." The Eddic poems, it should be said, are immensely powerful but also relatively accessible and translatable, as in W.H. Auden's versions.
Meanwhile and by contrast, there is a much larger body of skaldic poetry, amounting to over 5000 stanzas and half-stanzas. Some of this has been preserved as complete poems, but most are now lausavisur, "loose verses," quoted in many different contexts within other works, especially sagas (though sagas also contain some, but not much, poetry of "Eddic" type). Skaldic poetry is by all accounts immensely difficult, not readily accessible at all. Its meters are highly demanding, employing syllable-count, rhyme, internal rhyme and half-rhyme; fractured syntax is normal, much admired, and also rule- bound in complex ways; and the poetry relies heavily on metaphorical allusions to pagan myth and legend, which explains why Snorri Sturluson thought it vital for young poets to be instructed in the topic. It is also, in the English-speaking world, little-known and little-read. In the background of Professor Clunies Ross's work here is the immense project on which she and her colleagues and associates are engaged, of producing a nine-volume collective edition of this poetry to replace Finnur Jonsson's Den norsk-islandske skjaldedigtning, now almost a hundred years old.
The work reviewed here is accordingly deliberately and successfully encyclopaedic, and no scholar, even a specialist, will read it without learning something. The account of Eddic poetry reminds us, for instance, that besides the poems of the Codex Regius there are at least six others, complete and incomplete, scattered through various manuscripts, with another handful incorporated into legendary sagas, including the outstanding Hlothskvitha, or "Battle of the Goths and Huns." Besides Eddic and skaldic poetry, there is also a corpus of poems in runic inscriptions, many of them quite recently discovered, not at all well-known, and not yet assimilated to standard literary- historical accounts: of these there are some 70+ stanzas. Furthermore, when it comes to skaldic poetry, notice has to be taken not only of Snorri's relatively-familiar accounts in his Prose Edda, which include a treatise "On the Language of Poetry" and "An Account of Meters" as well as his brilliant mythical compilation "The Deluding of Gylfi," but also of the four "Grammatical Treatises" known in Icelandic (with a fragment of a fifth). "Grammatical" is these titles has the wider meaning of Latin grammatical, and includes rhetorical arts as well as orthography and grammar itself: they are also treatises on the art of poetry, which devote considerable attention to meter and to the traditional Norse poetic figures of speech. They form, as Professor Clunies Ross says, the largest corpus of comment on indigenous poetry to be found in any medieval European vernacular.
After an introduction on "The Old Norse Poetic Corpus," Clunies Ross's next two chapters form "An Indigenous Typology of Old Norse Poetry," concentrating first on "Technical Terms" and then on "Genres and Subgenres of Skaldic Verse." The technical terms include the various established meters, the words for different kinds of poetic synonyms, and the words for different kinds of poem. Many of the terms and genres are actually defined by the Icelandic treatises mentioned, but some are not: one has to deduce from the titles that drapa means "a long poem with a refrain," flokkr "a long poem without a refrain," and so on. It has long been evident that a nith is a libel, though for obvious reasons not many of these survive. Other titles do not state a genre, but may imply it and in any case attract the attention immediately, like the Bersoglisvisur or "Plain-spoken Verses" attributed to Sighvatr Thortharson and criticizing King Magnus for his harsh treatment of the farmers who rebelled against his father Olafr Haraldsson (St Olaf), or the Sendibitr or "Biting Message" sent by the female poet Jorunn Skaldmaer to King Halfdan the Black. Meanwhile it takes a creative use of modern typography to be able to show on the page which syllables are to take skothending or half-rhyme and which athalhending or full-rhyme, not to mention "juxtaposed syntax," of which Snorri says, not entirely pellucidly, skal orthtak vera forn minni, "the arrangement of words must be old traditions." The author here is clearly working according to a layout and terminology which will be standard in the projected nine-volume edition of the skalds, with quotations given first as poetry, then in normal Norse prose word-order, and then translated, with explication of kenningar inset in capitals.
There is then the issue of the "loose verses," made important by the habit of Icelandic writers of quoting bits of poems within sagas. Can some of them, for instance, be re-assembled to re-create complete or near-complete poems, as with the verses about Bjorn "Champion of the People of Hitardal"? And if the saga-writers knew complete poems, why did they so regularly chop them up? One argument is that "loose verses" fall into two rough types, "authenticating" verses, which the saga- writer uses just to prove that what he is saying is true, and "situational verses," which may be a vital part of the story--like, for instance, the stanzas in which Gisli Sursson obliquely confesses that he is the murderer of Thorgrimr Thorsteinsson. Clearly the saga would not work without these stanzas, but that may imply that they were made up by the saga-writer precisely so as to fit the narrative. By contrast Snorri Sturluson says in a famous passage that one can rely on the essential truth of verses in praise-poems composed to be recited in front of the rulers being praised, for if these were false and known to be false they would not be praise but mockery: an interesting thought, not least because it has rarely occurred to sycophants and prince-pleasers in later ages.
Just as vital is the issue of the durability of the skaldic poetic tradition, which as Clunies Ross points out (and ignoring the whole issue of the possibly immense age of some Eddic fragments) lasted a good five hundred years from first record to last, and furthermore, despite its strong verbal dependence on pagan myth, was able to absorb "The Impact of Christianity" and even transmute it. Hallfrethr Vandraethaskald, or "troublesome poet," has left a fragmentary record of his reluctance to give up paganism and accept Christianity, studied recently by Diana Whaley, one of the new skaldic team. Clunies Ross notes that one can even see Snorri quietly bowdlerizing a pagan allusion to the creation of the world, without showing any urge to drop or delete the poem in which it is embedded. The volume closes with a long account of the "Grammatical Treatises" mentioned above, including the Hattalykill or "Key to Meters," with commentary on the learned Latin sources which, like the new religion, were being adopted into what was clearly a powerful, resilient and much-loved native tradition.
Clunies Ross closes with a chapter on "The Icelandic Poetic Landscape in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries," which eventually included also the new form of the rimur, or ballads. Vernacular poetry, she points out, retained its high intellectual value within Norse and Icelandic culture from pagan times through Christian conversion and into the later Middle Ages, while its continuing composition, determined preservation, and high level of conscious commentary also demonstrate marked national pride. She believes both the value and the pride to be thoroughly justified, and, with her associates in the skaldic editing project, is set on making the importance of the corpus poeticum boreale evident once more to the English-speaking scholarly world.