skald

The tradition & historical record

A skald, or skáld (Old Norse: [ˈskɔːld]; Icelandic: [ˈskault], meaning 'poet'), is one of the often named poets who composed skaldic poetry, one of the two kinds of Old Norse poetry in alliterative verse, the other being Eddic poetry. Skaldic poems were traditionally composed to honor kings, but were sometimes ex tempore. They include both extended works and single verses (lausavísur). They are characteristically more ornate in form and diction than eddic poems, employing many kennings, which require some knowledge of Norse mythology, and heiti, which are formal nouns used in place of more prosaic synonyms. Dróttkvætt metre is a type of skaldic verse form that most often use internal rhyme and alliteration. More than 5,500 skaldic verses have survived, preserved in more than 700 manuscripts, including in several sagas and in Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda, a handbook of skaldic composition that led to a revival of the art. Many of these verses are fragments of originally longer works, and the authorship of many is unknown. The earliest known skald from whom verses survive is Bragi Boddason, known as Bragi the Old, a Norwegian skald of the first half of the 9th century. Most known skalds were attached to the courts of Norwegian kings during the Viking Age, and increasingly were Icelanders. ¹

The word skald (which internal rhymes show to have had a short vowel until the 14th century) is perhaps ultimately related to Proto-Germanic: *skalliz, lit. 'sound, voice, shout' (Old High German: skal, lit. 'sound'). Old High German has skalsang, 'song of praise, psalm', and skellan, 'ring, clang, resound'. The Old High German variant stem skeltan, etymologically identical to the skald- stem (Proto-Germanic: *skeldan), means "to scold, blame, accuse, insult". The person doing the insulting is a skelto or skeltāri. The West Germanic counterpart of the skald is the scop. Like scop, which is related to Modern English scoff, the word skald is probably cognate with English scold, reflecting the importance of mocking taunts in the poetry of the skalds. ¹

Skaldic poetry and Eddic poetry stem from the same tradition of alliterative verse, and in Old Norse as well as Icelandic, the word skald simply means "poet" or "composer". Skaldic verse is distinguished from Eddic by characteristically being more complex in style and by using dróttkvætt ("court metre"), which requires internal rhyme as well as alliteration, rather than the simpler and older fornyrðislag ("way of ancient words"), ljóðaháttr ("song form"), and málaháttr ("speech form") metres of the Eddic poems. Skaldic poetry is also characteristically more ornate in its diction, using more interlacing of elements of meaning within the verse and many more kennings and heiti. This both assisted in meeting the greater technical demands of the metre and allowed the poets to display their skill in wordplay. The resulting complexity can appear somewhat hermetic to modern readers, as well as creating ambiguity in interpretation; but the original audiences would have been familiar with the conventions of the syntactic interweaving as well as the vocabulary of the kennings. Eddic poems are characterized by their mythological, ethical, and heroic content, while skaldic verse has a wider range of subject matter. One of the main topics was mighty kings and the deeds of courtly patrons. Eddic poetry typically includes a large amount of dialogue and rarely recounts battles; skaldic poetry, the reverse. Skalds also composed spontaneous verses reacting to events, insult verses (níðvísur) such as Þorleifr jarlsskáld's curse on his former patron Jarl Hákon Sigurðarson and the níð that provoked the missionary Þangbrandr into killing Vetrliði Sumarliðason, and occasionally love poems and erotic verse called mansöngr. ¹

A large number of the preserved skaldic verses are individual stanzas, called lausavísur ("loose verses"), often said to have been improvised. Long forms include the drápa, a praise poem consisting of a series of stanzas with a refrain (stef) at intervals, and the flokkr (similar to drápa, without a refrain), vísur 'verses, stanzas', or dræplingr 'little drápa', a shorter series of verses without refrain. There are also some shield poems, which supposedly describe mythological scenes on a shield presented to the poet by a patron. ¹

Most of the longer skaldic poems were composed by court poets to honor kings and jarls. They typically have historical content, relating battles and other deeds from the king's career. ¹

The origin story for poetry comes from a myth by Snorri Sturluson. The story depicts poetry as a liquid that takes various forms. The point of this is to show that poetry has gone through and will continue to go through change. The dróttkvætt metre appears to have been an innovation associated with a new fashion in formally more elaborate poetry associated with named poets. The metre has been compared to Irish and Latin poetic forms, which may have influenced its development. Origins in magic have also been suggested, because of the existence of skaldic curses (such as Egill Skallagrímsson's on King Eric Bloodaxe) and because there are 10th-century magical inscriptions on runestones in the metre. Since the first example of skaldic poetry of which we know is Bragi Boddason's Ragnarsdrápa from the early 9th century, some have argued that he and his associates invented it, but his work is already highly accomplished, suggesting that this style of poetry had been developing for some time. Bragi (whom many scholars consider was deified as the god Bragi) was a Norwegian, and skaldic poetry is thought to have originated in either Norway or the Scandinavian Baltic. Most of the skalds of whom we know spent all or part of their careers as court poets, either those of kings, particularly the kings of Norway, or those of jarls, particularly the Hlaðir jarls, a dynasty based in what is now Trøndelag some of whose members ruled all or part of Norway as heathens in alternation with the Christian converters King Olaf Tryggvason and King Olaf Haraldsson (Saint Olaf). They produced praise poetry telling of their patrons' deeds, which became an orally transmitted record and was subsequently cited in history sagas. One example of this is the Heimskringla by Snorri Sturlson. ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Skald”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

skald is poet in the courts of Scandinavian rulers during the Viking Age, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 11 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ²