Dear James,
First of all, I apologize for the long delay between posts; I've been swamped with work, immigration business, and all sorts of stupid shit. I deeply enjoyed reading about the Not-Deer, and since that time we've had a few great discussions about Internet culture/folklore, cryptids, and other "esoterica of the past and future".
In light of my busy schedule, I'm not able to satiate you with anything overly analytic, I just hardly have the time for all that critical thinking. Instead, I thought I'd share with you, in what I hope to be an entertaining way, a most basic crash-course on the art of the skalds, that is, the prosody and metrical whimsies of skaldic poetry.
As you know, scholars of Old Norse-Icelandic literature divide the poetry of the medieval North into two broad "genres" (or really, corpora), eddic poetry and skaldic poetry. The reasoning behind the division rests mostly in the questions of authorship, context (including manuscript preservation status, eddic poems mostly, but not exclusively, found in the Poetic Edda), and metrical form, although some distinctions between the two types are apparent in their inventories of figurative language and subject matter. In general, eddic poems are mythological or heroic in content and metrically simpler than their skaldic counterparts. For example, the reflex of the shared alliterative verse common to all North-West Germanic languages is called fornyrðislag (lit. "old story meter") in Old Norse, and boasts a metrical pattern very similar to that found in Beowulf (alliterating sounds bolded below, caesurae omitted):
Hljóðs bið ek allar helgar kindir, Hearing I ask from all the tribes
meiri ok minni mögu Heimdallr. greater and lesser, offspring of Heimdallr
viltu at ek, Valföðr, vel fyr telja Corpse-Father, you wished me well to tell
forn spjöll fira, þau er fremst um man. living beings' ancient stories, those I
remember from furthest back.
(first stanza of Völuspá; trans. from Larrington 2014)
Ða se ellen-gæst earfoðlice Then the great monster in the outer darkness
þrage geþolode, se þe in þystrum bad, suffered fierce pain, for each new day
þæt he dogora gehwam dream gehyrde he heard happy laughter loud in the hall,
hludne in healle; þær wæs hearpan sweg... the thrum of the harp....
(86a-89b of Beowulf, trans. from Chickering 2006)
Notice that vowels alliterate with all other vowels; in Old Norse, the clusters sp, st, and sk also only alliterate with words bearing the exact same cluster. There are a couple of other rules (incl. syllable restrictions, stress placements, etc.), but in general these are quite lax in eddic meters such as fornyrðislag when compared with the more demanding skaldic meters.
The most famous and certainly well-attested skaldic meter is called dróttkvætt ("court meter"), from drótt ("retinue, host, king's men"). The name conjures some of the characteristics of skaldic poetry as a "genre": it includes typically short poems composed by named poets (in constrast to the anonymous eddic poems) in court or aristocratic settings, often as praise-poetry or panegyrics.
Skaldic poets worked within a much more taxing set of metrical strictures than poets composing in other formats, and this sort of prosodic black-art is not found anywhere outside Scandinavia, probably originating around the beginning of the Viking Age. Snorri Sturluson's Edda was intended as a manual for the composition of such poetry, both in the instruction of content, including kennings, and in stylistic matters. The mathematical and aural beauty of this verse-form cannot be captured by describing it, but I hope that my brief breakdown of its structure can at least help you better appreciate the craft of the ancient poets of the North.
A standard dróttkvætt stanza has 8 lines, in contrast with often shorter eddic stanzas (see above, where the stanza has 4 lines; Old English poetry is not stanzaic), and each set of 4 stanzas comprises its own syntactic unit, such that one stanza is composed of two halves, each of 24 syllables. Skaldic poets were required to incorporate alliteration, internal rhyme, and intricate stress patterns into each set of lines. To illustrate, let's start with an example. This stanza is from Egils saga, and is spoken by the eponymous warrior-poet at the court of the English king Æthelsan (who, incidentally, would have probably struggled to discern the full meaning of the verse). He speaks this verse after the king hangs an arm-ring on the point of his sword out to Egill, and Egill likewise uses his sword to retrieve it:
Hrammtangar lætr hanga
hrynvirgill mér brynju
Höðr á hauki troðnum
heiðis vingameiði;
ritmœdis knák reiða
ræðr gunnvala bræðir
gelgju seil á galga
geirveiðrs, lofi at meira.
Let's start with syllable count: each line has six syllables, three of which demand stress. In Old Norse, stress always falls upon the first syllable of a word; in compounds, a secondary stress occurs in the second part. Furthermore, a distinctive feature of dróttkvætt is the mandatory trochaic pattern of the final stress, i.e., the final two syllables must have a stressed-unstressed pattern. If we underline our stress patterns in this stanza, we can see these rules in action:
Hrammtangar lætr hanga
hrynvirgill mér brynju
Höðr á hauki troðnum
heiðis vingameiði.
Rítmæðis knák reiða
ræðr gunnvala bræðir
gelgju seil á galga
geirveðrs, lofi at meira.
You may have already noticed, but the lines alliterate as well. The division is somewhat similar to the pattern we see in the fornyrðislag stanza above, except instead of half-lines alliterating, dróttkvætt alliterates between full-lines. Lines alliterate in pairs here, with the odd lines requiring two alliterating syllables and the even lines a single alliterating syllable that matches with the previous odd line. The first syllable of the even line must alliterate, and only stressed syllables can take part in the fun. Let's use bold for alliteration:
Hrammtangar lætr hanga
hrynvirgill mér brynju
Höðr á hauki troðnum
heiðis vingameiði.
Rítmæðis knák reiða
ræðr gunnvala bræðir
gelgju seil á galga
geirveðrs, lofi at meira.
One last element forms the essential core of a dróttkvætt stanza: internal rhyme (for end-rhyme, like in Modern English, the variant runhent meter can be used, in which Egill also composed). In each line, the second-to-last syllable (which, remember, needs to be stressed) always rhymes with the stem of another word that occurs in the same line, but unlike alliteration, this rhythmic feature does not necessarily cross line boundaries. Even lines require full rhymes, but odd lines tolerate half rhymes (i.e., when the same consonants surround a different vowel). Using italics for rhymes:
Hrammtangar lætr hanga
hrynvirgill mér brynju
Höðr á hauki troðnum
heiðis vingameiði.
Rítmæðis knák reiða
ræðr gunnvala bræðir
gelgju seil á galga
geirveðrs, lofi at meira.
The picture is getting complex now. There's an obvious mathematical beauty to be found here: 48 syllables per stanza, 24 stressed syllables, 12 alliterating syllables, 8 full-rhyming syllables and 8 half-rhyming syllables, etc. But these requirements (especially those final trochaic rhyming syllables and the initial alliterative syllables on even lines) are exceedingly strict. How could skalds achieve poetic expression and still play by the rules? I won't go into too much detail--in truth I've only scratched the surface with this description above--but skalds circumvented and exploited these metrical requirements with widespread use of heiti and kennings and a very liberal approach to Old Norse syntax. Need an alliterative syllable but the word you're trying to use doesn't fit? Just use a heiti, a poetic synonym (and often a very arhaic one, at that; this phenomenon occurs in English verse as well, just look how many old-timey words we have for woman). Need to fill some space and circumvent a metrical snafu? Boy, do we have kennings for you! Have you got all the metrical criteria fulfilled, but your sentence is sorta hard to parse? No problem, form over function, vinr. That last point is an exaggeration, but the skalds regularly abused syntax and word order in abnormal ways, all to serve a higher metrical purpose. I don't want to present this as a sort of flaw; often, the syntactic obstacle courses and puzzles that skalds lay out in their poems provide qualities to the performance, nothing short of masterful. Pauses and gaps in syntax mimic the lulls between alliterations, thoughts and phrases lie uncompleted until their constituents bridge a metrical gap--all of these limitations, as we might call them, allow the poets a range of expression and artistry on a level that has to be dissected to be believed. I hope this short exposé has, in some small way, contributed to your appreciation of that fact.
And of course, I wouldn't leave you high and dry without a translation of Egill's verse like that:
The god of the armor [= warrior, i.e. Æthelstan] hangs
a jangling snare [= ring] upon my clutch,
the gibbet of hunting birds [= arm],
the stamping-ground of hawks [= arm].
I raise the ring, the clasp that is worn
on the shield-splitting arm,
on to my rod of the battle-storm [= sword],
in praise of the feeder of ravens [= warrior, Æthelstan].
(from Sagas of Icelanders, trans. Bernard Scudder 1997)
Bestu kveðjur,
Matt
P.S. Sorry for any formatting screw-ups :/
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