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A-History-Of-Old-Norse-Poetry-And A HISTORY OF OLD NORSE POETRY AND POETICS A HISTORY OF OLD NORSE POETRY AND POETICS Margaret Clunies Ross D. S. BREWER © Margaret Clunies Ross 2005 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Margaret Clunies Ross to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 Thanks are due to the Australian Academy of the Humanities, Canberra, for a financial subsidy granted to the author towards the publication of this volume. First published 2005 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge ISBN 1 84384 034 0 D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ross, Margaret Clunies. A history of old Norse poetry and poetics / Margaret Clunies Ross. p. cm. Summary: "Guide to and description of the medieval poetic tradition in Scandinavia" – Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-84384-034-0 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Old Norse poetry – History and criticism. 2. Poetics – History. I. Title. PT7170.R67 2005 839.6'1009–dc22 2004025181 This publication is printed on acid-free paper Typeset by Word and Page, Chester Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge contents Acknowledgements vii Editorial Note viii Abbreviations x 1. Introduction: The Old Norse Poetic Corpus 1 2. An Indigenous Typology of Old Norse Poetry 1: Technical Terms 29 3. An Indigenous Typology of Old Norse Poetry 2: Genres and Subgenres of Skaldic Verse 40 4. Circumstances of Recording and Transmission: Poetry as Quotation 69 5. Old Norse Poetic Aesthetics 83 6. The Impact of Christianity on Old Norse Poetry 114 7. Poetics and Grammatica 1: The Twelfth Century 141 8. Poetics and Grammatica 2: The Edda of Snorri Sturluson 157 9. Poetics and Grammatica 3: The Third and Fourth Grammatical Treatises 185 10. The Icelandic Poetic Landscape in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries 206 11. Conclusion 232 Appendix: Snorri Sturluson’s View of Figurative Language 236 References 246 Index 273 list of tables 1. Names of verse forms in Háttatal 168 2. The chapter headings of Málskrúñsfræñi, according to MS A 194 3. The native technical terms given in Málskrúñsfræñi and their Latin equivalents 197 4. Snorri Sturluson’s terms for categories of poetic diction 239 vi acknowledgements The idea of writing a book on the combined and related themes of Old Norse poetry and poetics came to me while I was on exchange at the Univer- sity of Bonn during the winter semester of 2000–1, substituting for my colleague Rudy Simek, who took my place at the University of Sydney. I had chosen to give a sixteen-week lecture course on this subject and, as I prepared my weekly lectures, I came to realise that there was no one book that covered both topics, although there are some that deal with Old Norse- Icelandic poetry. Further, as I had already started to plan the new edition of the corpus of skaldic poetry with my colleagues Kari Gade, Guñrún Nordal, Edith Marold and Diana Whaley, it seemed an opportune time to write a book accessible to specialists in the field and to non-specialists and students, taking stock of advances in our understanding of the nature of Old Norse poetry and poetics and the most recent research in those fields. In addition, I wanted to express some of my own ideas on these subjects, many of which I have been thinking about off and on over many years. I should like to thank my students in Bonn for giving me the stimulus to write the lectures that were the precursor to this book, and for continuing to attend my lectures µ in some cases for the full sixteen weeks µ on topics that are complex and sometimes abstruse. I should also like to pay tribute to my University of Sydney honours and postgraduate students of recent years, particularly Anna Hansen, Kate Heslop, Tarrin Wills and Kellinde Wrightson, for the opportunity to work with them and, in three cases, super- vise their doctorates on poetry and poetics. Other thanks are due to the Australian Research Council for awarding me a Discovery Grant which has allowed me to conduct research in better libraries overseas than I have at home, though I must also express my gratitude to the Interlibrary Loan staff and facilities at Fisher Library of the University of Sydney for their excel- lent service at all times. I am also grateful to the University of Sydney for awarding me a full year’s Special Studies Leave in 2003, which has allowed me to write this book in peace, and to spend a term as a Visiting Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, for which I express my gratitude to the Warden and Fellows, especially to the Dean of Visiting Fellows, Martin West. In the later stages of writing up, Kate Heslop helped me to track down various bibliographical references. vii editorial note The Icelandic alphabet Readers familiar with Old Norse-Icelandic will find this paragraph un- necessary, while it is essential preliminary reading for those without a knowledge of the language. The Roman alphabet was used for writing Old Norse, except for a small number of vowels and consonants. Two symbols, ã (upper case Ã) and ñ (upper case Ñ), represent the sounds written th in English; ã occurs in word-initial position, while ñ is found in medial or final position. The following vowels and vocalic ligatures will also be encountered: æ represents a front vowel (approximately equivalent to the a in English hat); ø and œ are approximately equivalent to the œu in French œuf; õ is similar to the ou in English bought. Y and ÿ are short and long rounded front vowels, like the u in French pur or ü in German für. Accent marks over vowels indicate length; vowel length is important, as signified by minimal word pairs, distinguished only by the length of the vowel, e.g. goñ, ‘a god’, góñ, ‘good’ (masculine accusative singular). Citation of Old Norse-Icelandic textual material Titles of Old Norse texts are given in normalised Old Icelandic, approxi- mated to early-thirteenth-century usage, and translated into English on their first mention only; thereafter only the Icelandic title is given, unless the first mention has been much earlier in the book. The same treatment is accorded to nicknames and other Old Norse appellations. All continuous texts quoted in the book are accompanied by an English translation. Quota- tions from Faulkes 1987 restore the Old Icelandic forms of proper names, where Faulkes has Anglicised them. Personal names of medieval people or saga characters are given in their normalised Old Norse-Icelandic form. This means that names are pre- sented with nominative inflections, if applicable, e.g. Egill (not Egil), Eiríkr (not Eirík or Eric). The same applies to the names of modern Icelandic scholars, where the appropriate Modern Icelandic forms of their names are given. Because most Icelanders of the present day have no surnames, it is conventional to refer to them by their first name after first mention (so Finnur for Finnur Jónsson) and, in bibliographies and indices, viii editorial note to list them alphabetically by first name rather than patronymic. Place names are also presented in Old Norse nominative form, e.g. Borgarfjõrñr, but, if there is an accepted English equivalent, that name is also given in parentheses, e.g. Vík (Oslofjord area). Conventions for the presentation of poetic texts All citations of poetry more than one verse line in length are set out as verse. All emendations to texts are indicated by italics. The Old Norse texts are always accompanied by an English translation below the verse or set of verses. Quotations of verses from skaldic poetry also have a Prose word order set out below the cited verse and before the translation in order to help the reader follow the often fragmented order in which interpretation of words and word groups must proceed. The Prose word order is omitted for eddic poetry and for some skaldic poetry where the word order is uncom- plicated.1 Within the translations of skaldic verses the reader will often find capitalised words enclosed in square brackets. Following the conventions established for the forthcoming new edition of the skaldic corpus (Whaley et al. 2002: 41–5, available on the web at http://skaldic.arts.usyd.edu.au), these capitalised words represent the referents of kennings, two-element periphrases for nouns that are not actually mentioned in the texts them- selves. An example cited in Chapter 1 contains a kenning for a woman, who is said to be vitr Vôr víra (‘intelligent Vôr ¼goddess½ of wires’). When he mentions ‘wires’ the poet has in mind twisted silver wires used in jewel- lery. The goddess-name Vôr (whose meaning is indicated using angle brackets) stands for the woman, whose real name is not given, and the whole periphrasis, ‘goddess of wires’, forms a kenning for a woman whom the poet has set his heart on. In the translation this information is encoded thus: ‘Intelligent Vôr ¼goddess½ of wires [woman] .
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