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Elena Gurevich, Inna Matyushina

Skaldic poetry

Summary

Skaldic poetry, which was born and flourished in the pre-written period, is ideal material for analysing early stages in the development of verbal art. Studies of skaldic poetry do not usually take into account its historical specificity, but assume it to be a type of creative activity which is not in principle different from the art of a modern poet. Following M.I. Steblin-Kamensky, the authors view skaldic poetry as having emerged with the genesis of authored, personal poetry, i.e., as a natural stage in the evolution of literature. The development of authorship occurs as a result of the concentration of poetic effort on the form. The particular kind of formal perfection characteristic of skaldic poetry is thus an integral and crucial part of its meaning.

Personal authorship did not, however, emerge in reaction against traditionalism. Although the skalds effected a revolution in poetry, this happened essentially within a "traditional" style. Herein lies the deepest paradox of the unique literary phenomenon analysed in the book: in skaldic poetry, the observation, characteristic of archaic impersonal art, of an extremely strict canon regulating every minutest detail of composition lies side by side with a consciousness of individual authorship and a consequent striving for innovation. These innovations were not intended to reveal the individuality of the author, as in art of more recent times, but were rather conceived of as new ways of applying the canons while nonetheless minutely following them. So skaldic form is characterised by a continuous process of variation: the creativity of a skald lies in achieving variation within the limits of established traditional norms. Such fusion of traditionalism and individual authorship makes skaldic poetry a paradigm of creative activity, transitional in its very nature.

Such were the initial premises underlying this comprehensive analysis of the phenomenon of skaldic poetry. The aim was to unite a synchronic description of skaldic poetry with a diachronic analysis, in other words to write a history of skaldic poetry representing, as far as possible, everything that is known to us about the changes in its contents, stylistics and genres as stages of single evolutionary process.

Part I. The Poetry of form

Chapter 1. Poetic language. (By E. Gurevich)

To view skaldic poetry simultaneously as individually authored and at the same time as deeply traditional in its basis makes it possible to appreciate anew the peculiar nature of the poetic language created by the skalds. The central place in this language is occupied by the kenning, bi-componential periphrasis which is substituted for the noun of common speech.

Contrary to wide-spread belief, the skaldic kenning is not, like some kinds of metaphor, a free figure built according to certain structural rules. Every particular skaldic kenning is a variant on a ready-made invariant model, set by tradition. With few exceptions, the skald does not construct new kennings, but reproduces the traditional kenning in a new and sometimes very intricate verbal form invented by himself. The kind of creative activity characteristic of a skald not only permits but requires most extensive, nearly limitless, formal variation on traditional invariant models for kennings. This variation is achieved through a unique synonymity (heiti), specially created for the purpose. However the set of these invariant kennings and the number of their referents are limited.

This set of models within the tradition constitutes the integrated system of skaldic kennings, which is organised on a hierarchical principle. The composition of this system as a whole depends on the structure of the kenning as a poetic figure (the possibilities of its developing into a multi-member kenning), as well as on the conditions under which skaldic verse was created (oral improvisation) and on how it was perceived. In an analysis of the organization of the system of kennings it is necessary to give special attention to the so-called three-member kenning (tvíkennt). It can be shown that uniting two-member models into a prolonged kenning (rekit) is not a free construction, invented ad hoc through creative poetic activity, but a formation from ready-made traditional blocks, three-member kennings. In other words, the most complicated kennings remain the common property of many generations of skalds, whose individual art was directed exclusively at specific verbal embodiment.

The next part of the chapter addresses the problem of the evolution of poetic language. It attempts to trace, as far as possible, the history of particular models of kennings, in some cases together with the complete subsystems of kenning models, united by identity of referent. Kennings for "gold" are taken as an example. Attention is centered on how the tradition works. Through concrete analysis, it is possible to show that in varying particular kennings, the skalds were drawing not on an abstract impersonal scheme, but on specific precedents in poems they knew. They are creating their poetic language in direct dialogue with their predecessors.

The last part of the chapter is devoted to the art of the kenning. The analysis is focused on two central stylistic devices used in skaldic kennings, nykrat and nýgerving, and on how these are rated in Icelandic normative poetics. Learned poetics prefer uniformity, i.e., paradigmatic variation, or variation of the chosen kenning model, and reject the principle of diversity, i.e., systemic variation of synonymous models of kennings within a vísa. Thus poetics begin to contradict real skaldic practice, because the principle of developing multiple means of naming an object, which was embodied in the device known as nykrat (to use the terminology of Icelandic poetological compositions), is the original and ancient principle of skaldic art.

Chapter 2. The evolution of skaldic verse. (By I. Matyushina)

This chapter is devoted to the analysis of endogenous tendencies towards the canonisation of the main elements of skaldic form and towards the evolution of the canon. The difficulty in a diachronic approach lies in the fact that skaldic verse exemplifies perfection even in its most archaic variants and is characterised by extreme conservatism throughout its five centuries’ existence. Since prevailing scholarly opinion is that the evolution of skaldic canons cannot be traced, scholars have never attempted to establish how the main elements of skaldic form were created and developed.

The only specific characteristic of skaldic verse which appeared in historical time is its rhyme, hending. By analysing all surviving skaldic verses, it is possible to trace how, in the course of the ninth and tenth centuries, a detailed system of distributive rules was formed, which conditioned the phonomorphological composition and the distribution of hending.

An important aspect of this chapter is the phonological analysis of skaldic rhymes. In determining the qualitative structure of hending, a strict distinction between different phonemes and allophones of one phoneme is maintained: allophonic variants are regularly used in rhyme, whereas different phonemes, even those which are the closest in articulation, never form rhyme. The quantitative structure of hendings reflects the most important phonological oppositions (geminated : single consonants, long : short vowels etc.). The phonological division is often overshadowed by the phonomorphological. In classical skaldic verse we find a whole system of detailed and varied rules, regulating the structure of rhyme in relation to the morpheme boundary.

This system was fully formed only in the poetry of höfuðskáld. Comparison of the strict forms of classical verse with the archaic art of early skalds enables us to ascertain the main stages in the development of skaldic rhyme. The evolution of the skaldic hending is an example of the organic, internally determined development of rhyme in Old Germanic tradition. The main functional factors in the canonisation of hending in skaldic verse are: the demotivation of stress, requiring formal markers to complement alliteration, the splitting of the alliterative long line and the appearance of a new poetic unit, the short line, which needed a sound device of its own to emerge within it, and the formalisation of sound patterns, establishing phonetic identity irrespective of semantic similarity. Thus in accordance with the main factors governing the canonisation of hending in skaldic verse, its appearance is conditioned by inner changes in the structure of verse. The dynamics traced in the evolution of the canon of hending can be projected onto skaldic versification as a whole. The deviations from the classical canon characteristic of early skaldic verse are seen as illustrative of earlier steps in the general evolution of skaldic art, enabling us to follow the main stages of its development and the gradual process of regulating it. The most representative meter for this purpose is dróttkvætt, which develops historically from selection of traditional metrical variants of epic verse and towards increasing formalisation of the metrical system.

The problem of the origin of another skaldic metre runhent is approached through analysis of Anglo-Saxon poetry. The indigenous nature of runhent is further proved by the limitations of its genre, libellous verse and the so-called "head-ransom", which retain close affinity with ritual-magic genres. Runhent is considered to be not a skaldic innovation, but an archaic meter, which is why its end-rhyme did not create a revolution in Scandinavian versification, in contrast to what had happened in the rest of European poetry. The independence of skaldic verse from continental developments is demonstrated through the history of the adoption into skaldic poetry of eddic and pre-eddic metres. The retention of typologically early features and the ways in which secondary signs are developed in poems composed in these meters enable us to reconstruct the pre-history of skaldic art. An important stage in the argument lies in establishing a connection between the development of the sound organisation of eddic verse and that of skaldic verse. The origin of the sound organisation of skaldic verse is shown to lie in precisely the kind of sound repetitions which are found in the lays of the "Poetic Edda".

In this chapter special attention is given to the "experimental" models of verse, which arise from the stability and perfection of skaldic canons and are an additional and consciously cultivated complication of them. Although the metrical strictness and intricacy of sound organisation preclude wider use of the same meters, it is hard to overestimate their importance for historical poetics, because through such samples it is possible to appreciate the development of the canons and to speculate on possible reasons for their demise. An important role in the destruction of skaldic form is played by linguistic changes, including phonetic processes which led to syllabic levelling, and syntactic transformations which caused the substitution of forms with suffixes by full forms, thus drowning the line with unstressed auxiliaries.

Chapter 3. Skaldic syntax. (By I. Matyushina)

The skaldic idea of poetry was based on formal intricacy and complexity of style. Working with difficult meters, refined sound patterns and convoluted syntactic ornaments, the skalds showed their originality through form. Their contributions as authors are essentially to the formal organisation of the vísa, through varying syntactic structures and combining various types of interlace patterns, but always staying within the limits of the canons.

Analysis of the types of syntactic organisation within a stanza shows that skaldic syntax is not at all chaotic but in fact very closely connected to the means of sound organisation in vísur, alliteration and rhyme. The relative frequency of the types of sentence patterning is established, as well as their function in the composition of the vísa. The difference between the syntactic organisation of an isolated vísa and drápa is analysed, and it is shown that this difference is accounted for by their particular level of canonisation, conditioned by their composition and performance.

The syntactic organisation of a vísa helps the audience to confront to best advantage its main contents: objective information, expressed in the main part of the stanza, and the subjective reaction of the skald, centered in parenthesis. Antithetic syntactic constructions thus develop into one of the main artistic devices. Syntax becomes a means of distinguishing the subjective from the objective, which makes apprehension of the vísa easier. In some cases the skalds gave preference to a specific syntactic organisation in order to strengthen the aesthetic or stylistic impact of the vísa. Syntactic organisation could also be used as a stylistic device in lyrical poetry. Trying to unravel a vísa into prose word order can sometimes not only fail to make it easier to understand but actually make it more difficult, less orally apprehensible (as in the case of "’απο κοινου"). The skalds must have perceived poetry in non-linear terms, having their own aids to the understanding of a vísa, including sentence patterning. The aesthetics of verbal art in pre-written times are manifested both in the ornamental syntactic construction of the poem and in the rhythmic organisation of complicated graphic ornament. The evolution of verbal ornament coincides with the evolution of visual linear ornament in Scandinavia. Both types of ornament presuppose simultaneous perception, which is achieved in oral performance by means of amœœan performance (cf. Steblin-Kamensky’s hypothesis of the origin of dróttkvætt).

The evolution of skaldic syntax is traced, its origin in epic syntax is established, and the syntactic organisation of fornyrðislag is analysed. An attempt is made to prove that skaldic syntax, as well as poetic language and metre, is based on the use of elements of epic verse, from which the skalds inherit a limited and regularly used set of syntactic, metrical and prosodic models. The peculiarities of skaldic syntax, distinguishing it from eddic verse in the use of interlace patterns and tmesis and making it in general more highly developed, can be accounted for by the lack of narrative intention: in contrast to epic, skaldic poetry did not have a narrative function. When the new Christian content spread into skaldic poetry and the art of narration was mastered, there arose a tendency to simplify syntax and phraseology. In poems composed in hrynhent, the main meter of Christian drápur, the word order is much closer to prose than in dróttkvætt, interlace is replaced by sequential sentences, and syntactical boundaries coincide with the ends of lines. The simplification of style, language and syntax in Christian poems is caused by the desire to accomplish a didactic aim. The simplification of syntax is also caused by a change in the material existence of skaldic poetry, its transition onto parchment. When skaldic poetry ceased to be oral, all the syntactical supports present in oral performance were shaken: mistakes by scribes in manuscripts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries testify that the skaldic syntax aimed at oral recitation begins to be less clear to an audience brought up on Christian tradition. The simplification of the syntactic organisation of skaldic verse in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries can be seen as evidence of the demise of the skaldic poetic tradition as a whole.

Part II. Old Icelandic conceptions of the poet and of poetry.

(By E. Gurevich)

The ambiguous nature of skaldic creative activity is reflected in two myths about the poet, which are apparently incompatible but actually co-existent in Icelandic society, and which are analysed in the two chapters, "The mead of poetry" and "Skald — hirðmaðr — bondi".

In the first myth, the skald was represented not as one of many, a member of the chain of tradition, unbroken from century to century, who acquired the secrets of his art through continuous dialogue with his predecessors and successors, but as unique in his way, an isolated individual chosen by Odin, the god of poetry, who presented him with a draught of the magic "drink of dwarfs", which immediately transformed him into a master verse-maker.

The "individualism" of the myth of skaldic professionalism, which established direct, unmediated relations between an Old Norse poet and his divine patron, took the skald beyond the borders of the tradition which gave him birth. (It is not surprising that our sources do not contain any information about the education of young poets or about the transmission of their art from one skald to another). At the same time, it took him in many ways beyond the borders of human society, which was inclined to see in the poet a dangerous "alien", marked by the sign of Odin and Utgard, possessing some secret knowledge and able through his art to exercise irreversible effect on those around him. This perception of the poet as a figure on the margins was embodied in the conventional image of the skald created in the Icelandic family saga, where he carries anomalous features of character and appearance.

The high degree of self-consciousness in the skald, reflected both in the poetry itself and in this first myth, fully corresponds to the individually authored nature of skaldic art. However, the deep contradiction within skaldic art, which had not yet completed the transition "from singer to poet", inevitably had an impact on the image of the skald. It is not mere coincidence that the myth about the mead of poetry, and the idea of the skald as a master verse-maker connected with that, coexisted in the same society with a myth expressing skaldic "non-professionalism". According to the second myth found in the sagas, the ability to compose verses was not a prerogative of the skald, but was available to virtually any Icelander of the epoch of the Icelandic Commonwealth. Poetic art was considered to be not only not the distinctive but even not the main occupation of the skald, who was perceived primarily as engaged in other, normal social roles, as, for example, a king’s retainer or a valiant warrior participating in raids and trading expeditions, which brought him fame, wealth, or an Icelandic bondi. If the first myth, according to which the skald was viewed as an individual author, represented a high degree of authorial self-consciousness in the Old Norse poet, the second myth was an expression of a completely different aspect of skaldic art, its traditionalism.

The concept of the skald as a non-professional is not only the consequence of the mythologising of poetic craft. Most important, the myths undoubtedly reflected the archaic structure of Old Scandinavian society, which, as in the Germanic epoch, was still divided into nobility, free people and slaves, and in contrast to the Christian scheme of three social strata (tripartitio Christiana), did not know the professional division of labour and did not draw a distinction between mental and physical occupations. The notion of íþrótt ("skill, knack"), which applied both to the ability to shoot an arrow deftly from a bow and to the ability to compose perfectly crafted verses, testifies vividly to the fact that mental and physical skills were not seen as distinct.

This is probably why the professionalism of the skald, which is reflected in the self-consciousness of the poet, as well as in public recognition of his art, still could not transform his status into that of a professional poet. In entering the king’s service and composing poems in praise of his patron, he did not become a "court poet": his social status was defined primarily by his belonging to the band of retainers, rather than by his ability to compose verses. In the same way, when the skald returned to his homeland and settled in his own estate, he appeared not as a master of verse, but first and foremost as a free Icelandic bondi, always ready to defend the honour of his kin.

Part III. Genres

Chapter 1. Praise-poetry. (By E. Gurevich)

The analysis of poetic canons and of the nature of skaldic art undertaken in Part I and Part II enables us to pass on here to investigation of the main skaldic genres. No genre reflects the paradoxical nature of skaldic art better than panegyric. It was in fact when composing praise poems, which were intended to live forever, preserving the fame both of the eulogised king and of the singer himself, that the skalds tried to show their individual artistry. However it is precisely these verses, which satisfy all the strictest canonical demands, that bear the most extensive traces of traditionalism and in particular are most abundant in "commonplaces" and topoi.

The deepest paradoxes within the skaldic system are revealed not only through analysing the distinctive content of praise-poetry, but also, to the same extent, through minute analysis of the structure of the ceremonial "big form", drápa and its essential structural component, stef. The use of stef and its most striking variant, klofastef, demonstrates the aspiration of Old Norse poets to extend the devices and the principles of the syntactic organisation of one particular vнsa to a higher level of composition, making them a means of cementing a supra-strophic unity, stefjamól. The attempt made in drápa to reach in this way beyond the autonomy and compositional completeness of each separate stanza of the poem led to the isomorphism of its main structural elements in the classical dróttkv7eth;tt vísa. By discarding the stanza, making it a part of a completely new whole, the skalds, whether they were conscious of it or not, changed the scale though not the poetic technique, because true to habit they continued to model the key components of the poem according to the image and likeness of the vísa.

However the skalds could not ultimately break out of the enclosed self-sufficiency of separate stanzas of the poem and create a linked poetic narrative: their poems are not in fact intended to be narrative in form. They are fragmentary by their very nature and not because of the conditions under which they were subsequently reflected in writing.

The second part of the chapter is devoted to the separate subgenres of skaldic praise-poetry: erfidrápa, genealogical enumeration, and shield drápa, which are viewed in their relation to the main genre of poetic eulogy, panegyric of the king. The evolution of these subgenres, which belong to the most stable and established kind of skaldic art, is discussed in so far as this is possible.

Chapter 2. Libellous verse.

Chapter 3. Love poetry.

(By I. Matyushina)

In these chapters an attempt is made to establish an affinity between the two worst-preserved of the skaldic genres, libellous verse (níð) and love poetry (mansöngr). The collection of Icelandic laws Grágás equates love poems and libellous verse, mentioning them under the same heading, "On Poetry", and prescribing the same punishment for composing both (outlawry). Not only do mansöngr and níð appear to be the only poetic compositions persecuted by the law, but also Icelandic family sagas show hostility to them and avoid any quotation from them. More importantly, the dominant function of both libellous verse and love poetry can be described as pragmatic, originating in magic. The skald possessed a peculiar, almost magical power to invoke gifts in response to his verses. Like any skaldic panegyric, a love poem requires an answering gift from the one to whom it is addressed. The skald invariably wins through his poetry the illicit affection of the addressee. Thus, like magic, mans"ngr infallibly precipitates action, which explains the hostility both of family sagas and of Scandinavian laws.

The same is true for libellous verse. The aim of níð is to convert the person who is addressed, often someone of high or leading social rank, a king, a jarl or a bishop, into níðingr, the one who is isolated or excluded from society. But the reaction to this has the same aim: the punishment prescribed by the law for níð is outlawry.

Furthermore, synchronically the two genres have many features in common. Their contextual roles in sagas concern the motivation of conflict. Their fragmentary nature and deficiency as information necessitate prose commentary. The complexity and obscurity of their language follows from the deliberate aim of concealing meaning, which is usually fictitious. Semantically, they have much in common too: their main aim is to question, attack, undermine the virility of the enemy or rival.

The functional and semantic affinity of the two genres can be accounted for by their genetic affinity. Diachronically, mansöngr and níð could have gone back to one ritual-magic genre, incantation, and they were possibly related to the eddic version of incantation which we find in the galdralag stanzas of For Skírnis. The method of internal reconstruction, which enables synchronic analysis to be used as a means of drawing diachronic conclusions, makes it possible to look back further and, taking into account an euhemeristic interpretation of the myth of the mead of poetry together with the most probable etymology of the word skáld (originally "libel" and subsequently "the composer of libel"), to view níð both as the most archaic genre of skaldic poetry and as betraying its initial function.

A common origin would not imply the historical identity of the two genres or that they shared the same tradition for centuries. The fates of mans"ngr and níð appear to have been different, as can perhaps be proved by the hypothetical final stages of their evolution, which took them eventually beyond the domain of skaldic poetry and included them into different poetic systems, rímur and the verses of the so-called "strong skalds" (kraftaskáld). The reconstruction of the origin of genres and this later perception of them from the point of view of different cultural codes provide respectively the initial and the final points for our analysis, in which we interpret the modifications of genres as typological stages.

Our use of the terms mansöngr and níð extends beyond the limits set by the skalds and the authors of the sagas. We tentatively attribute to mansöngr and níð the poems conforming to the image of these genres created by the immediate context in the saga, which may explain the meaning of a surviving fragment or comment on the conditions of its composition and the effect it had on the addressee. Skaldasögur, epic poetry and Old Scandinavian laws form a synchronic context for the two skaldic genres, and their hypothetical typology is traced, not as an aim in itself but as a possible way of establishing the laws of the evolution of individually authored poetry and its transformation into lyric. But only in skaldic poetry can we observe the full process of the conception and birth of lyric poetry in Europe.

Part IV. Skaldic poetry after Christianisation. (By I. Matyushina)

This part is devoted to the analysis of the changes in the subject matter, poetic language and style of skaldic verse which took place after the spread of Christianity and of writing, and after the Scandinavian countries joined the mainstream of European culture. After the Christianisation of Scandinavia a change of literary taste gradually took place, as a result of which the dominating position of panegyric in skaldic poetry, and hence the stability of the whole tradition, was undermined. Primary attention is given to the effects of Christianisation on the conditions in which skaldic praise-poetry existed and to the development of a new content for panegyric, which led to the destruction of the form.

Chapter 1. The poetry of the transition period: from the ninth to the beginning of the twelfth century.

Chapter 2. Catholic drápur of the twelfth century.

These chapters are concerned with the gradual transformation by Christianity of the content of praise poems. The new content brought with it a simplification of language and verse, including a decrease in the number of kennings containing the names of pagan gods and in the number of interlaced and interwoven sentences. An analysis is offered of the important structural transformations which took place after Christianisation and of the reforms in the metrical system (dróttkvætt ousted by hrynhent). Attention is also paid to the means by which the art of narrative was developed in Christian poetry. The art of composing a linked narrative was mastered by skaldic poetry when it absorbed the tales of popular European saints, that is, about the twelfth century. The main problem confronted in these chapters is how skaldic poetry, with its deep roots in pagan mythology, could adjust itself to Christian themes and language.

Chapter 3. Christian poetry at the demise of skaldic tradition in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

In this chapter an attempt is made to analyse the mechanisms adopted by skaldic poetry in order to assimilate the new content. It shows how mythological allusions seeped back into dróttkvött when the new faith had become so deeply established that the skalds had no reason to continue avoiding pagan mythology. By that time these allusions had lost any religious or ritual sense and become nothing but picturesque detail or poetic commonplace. The unique conservatism of skaldic tradition is manifested in the revival of mythological kennings and heiti, which began to be used even more frequently two centuries after Christianisation than they were during the first. At the beginning of the twelfth century, during the so-called Sturlung Renaissance, the phraseology of pagan myth was revived, and an interest in the past manifested in literary antiquarianism characterised the epoch in general. The subject which again became fashionable in panegyric was narrative about the heroes and events of the pagan past, and epic meters began to be used, e.g., fornyrðislag, the meter of old heroic verse. The old heroic and mythological verse itself was collected and put onto parchment. The poets of this time not only knew and extensively used the textbook of skaldic art, Snorra Edda, but also called their poetry "Eddic rule".

This chapter concludes with an analysis of one of the most famous medieval poems, the Catholic drápa "Lilja", in which all the main tendencies latent in Christian poetry of the ninth to the thirteenth centuries are present: the elements of lyric which had already appeared are enhanced, skaldic metres are transformed, and all the specific features of the skaldic style are absent. The process by which skaldic poetry acquired a non-traditional content was completed: the skaldic form was completely deformed by the new content. Skaldic verse, which arose from the need to influence an actual situation by the magic "bound" word (bundit mál) and to commemorate real contemporary facts by raising them to the level of high eternal poetry, was finally destroyed from within by the acquisition of the new Christian content.

Part V. The poetics of rímur. (By I. Matyushina)

The last part of the monograph is devoted to the analysis of how, at the demise of the skaldic tradition, its meters, its new structural units, its conventional phraseology, kennings and heiti, and its characteristic syntax appear to be involved in the creation of a new specifically Icelandic genre, rímur.

Rímur, rhyming epic poems, gained popularity in Iceland in the fourteenth century and, like skaldic poetry, remained the favourite genre for five centuries. Basing an analysis on the whole system rather than on isolated elements of rímur, it is possible to show that their formal hypertrophy is typologically related to skaldic poetry. The syntactical and the metrical organisation of rímur is genetically linked to skaldic tradition. The phraseology of rímur, kennings and heiti, were inherited from skaldic poetry as ready-made blocks. The strengthening of formal hypertrophy in rímur, resulting from the use of unoriginal contents borrowed from the sagas or romances, was accompanied by complete loss of the archaic unity of verse and language: the form fully estranged from a concrete language developed into a technical device. In contrast to skaldic poetry, rímur successfully assimilated European plots, but this assimilation did not conflict with the complicated, intricate form, which was traditional but severed from linguistic content and therefore universal. The analysis of the genre of rímur here is not an end in itself but part of the main aim of the book, representing all that is known about skaldic poetry as one evolutionary process. Rímur are seen within an extended historical perspective, which reaches beyond the boundaries of skaldic poetry and relates it to a new poetic art.

Skaldic poetry with its formal hypertrophy did not arise from a desire on the part of the new generation of poets to oppose their creative efforts to epic art, which had exhausted itself, but from a need, which the epic poetry could not meet, to give lasting value to the present. Whereas epic poetry could only "speak" about events of modern history through the language of analogy, the skalds made them the sole content of their verses. The two poetic systems were destined to coexist closely for centuries without ever losing their respective subjects, except that towards the demise of the tradition the skalds began to trespass on the domain of the past which had not previously been theirs.

The poetics of rímur is the only "heir" of the skaldic tradition. It is no exaggeration to claim that nothing in skaldic poetry, neither its genres, themes, plots, style, nor the principles of its unique experimentation with poetic form and "structural-linguistic" manipulations with the linguistic sign, was used by world literature, which remained unaware of all skaldic achievements. However, the importance of skaldic tradition for historical poetics is hard to overestimate. Skaldic poetry represents something that cannot be observed anywhere else in European literature, a pre-written art which is at the same time personal. The formal experiments of the skalds allow us to observe the full cycle of literary development from the very beginning to the very end. Skaldic history takes us from the birth in magic and ritual of the elements of form and the genres themselves, through their canonisation and fulfillment in classical skaldic poetry with its roots in pagan mythology, to their total abandonment in the Christian poems; from the magic pragmatics of skaldic libel, to the aesthetic expressiveness of skaldic proto-lyric; from the myths of the poet as both chosen by Odin and skaldic "non-professional", to the parodies on ancient mythology in rímur.

The poetic discoveries made by the skalds did not become part of the history of world literature, in the same way as the Viking discovery of Vinland never became the discovery of America for world civilisation. However, their oral poetry, imprinted in a highly skilled individually-authored form, remains forever immortalised in the memory of succeeding generations.