Forgotten Ground Regained
ISSN 2996-6353
INTRODUCTION
Old Norse poetry, like the poetry of the other ancient Germanic languages, was written exclusively in alliterative verse. But Old Norse poetry is distinct. Except for small variations, every Old English or Old High German poem had the same form. But the Viking skalds developed dozens of different forms and deployed them for a variety of purposes – some for heroic lays; others for song; some for magical spells, and still others for praising the courage and generosity of kings.
This differentiation in form may have had several causes: the development of a class of professional skalds seeking the patronage of noble and especially royal courts; exposure to Old Irish or Old Welsh poetry, where a multiplicity of forms was well established; the simplification of Norse word-forms, compared to other Germanic languages, which made it easier to count syllables rather than relying solely on the alliterative pattern to define the meter. But two developments are the most important: first, the shift from stichic poetry (with no formal organization or pattern across lines) to stanzaic patterns, with different rules for different stanza types, and second, a shift in the treatment of lines. In Old English poetry, a line consists of two half-lines. In Old Norse, half-lines are treated as lines in their own right. This means that most Old Norse forms are built from lines with two or at most three stresses.
The short lines of Old Norse, combined with other features of the language, make Old Norse poems sound compressed and telegraphic – haiku-like, if translated word-for-word. This effect is hard to carry over into modern English; often either rhythm or grammar suffers. This feature of the verse, combined with the Old Norse love of kennings, creates a gnomic, riddling effect. Depending on the stanza type, the basic template of alliterative verse could be supplemented with internal rhyme – whether slant rhyme or true – and a hundred other devices, lovingly catalogued by Snorri Sturluson, author of the Poetic and Prose Eddas.
English is in many ways the opposite of Old Norse: prolix where Old Norse is terse, rigid where Old Norse is flexible, and flexible where Old Norse is rigid. Imitating Old Norse poetry is thus an exercise in transposing poetic patterns across a linguistic gulf. But the exercise is worth it. It is a discipline that creates meaning and energy out of the tension between language and form. In this issue, you will get a chance to see what kinds of creativity comes out of it.
During the Middle Ages, Old Norse changed little in Iceland, where it became modern Icelandic, and Norse poetic forms have persisted in Iceland until the present day. But Icelandic absorbed the influence of Latin Catholic culture and added end-rhyme to the poetic mix. This resulted in a family of forms called, in Icelandic, rimur – alliterative verse stanzas with well-defined rhyme schemes. Between Old Norse and Icelandic, we can find a wealth of poetic forms to imitate, if we so choose.
Here is a quick recapitulation of the basics of Old Norse versification. Each line is a phrase, with two or three stresses, following a predominantly falling (most often, trochaic) rhythm. There are always at least three syllables in a line (usually four). Two-stress lines come in pairs, joined by alliteration. The first line in each pair contains two alliterating stresses, or lifts, called props. They must alliterate with the first stress in the next line. That stress is called the head-stave. Three-stress lines sometimes pair with other lines in the same manner, but sometimes they appear alone, with two of their three stresses alliterating, depending on the stanza form chosen. Norse poetry sometimes allows extra unstressed syllables, as in Old English, but much more sparingly; and in many stanza types the number of syllables is fixed. In the most demanding forms, such as drottkvaett (courtly meter), there are additional requirements – for instance, in dróttkvætt, which only uses three-stress lines, lines alternate between slant and full internal rhyme. The resulting sound can be described as more like the piano than the fiddle: precise and fluent, with every note standing out, clear and distinct.
I have arranged the poems more or less in order from loose, impressionistic, to stricter imitations of Norse forms (except for the last two poems, which imitate Icelandic rimur). Along the way, I provide copious notes to orient the reader to the forms illustrated. The issue also contains three articles. The first, Rahul Gupta’s “‘Not Unless Bound with a Chain’: An Introduction to Dróttkvætt” not only describes dróttkvætt but situates it within the context of Norse religion and culture. The second describes the discovery of another early revivalist, Arthur Sale. In the third, Robert Rickard reviews the recent scholarly conference on alliteration in poetry and cultural history at the University of East Anglia (September 1st, 2025).
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