Skald

So, just to let you know, everyone here has heard the name Hrothgar Spirlong.

He is the most venerated Skald in the Western North, and he's just yielded the floor to a young one, someone from the Ravenar's crew who has come from what must have been a heroic tale.

Yeah, this guy's the Harvey

Weinstein of, you know, Viking era.

It's a difference in...

Young

Skald.

If you're supposed to be a Skald, why don't you Skald ever is the thing.

It was fortunate for me that these last two editions appeared before I began my work.

Professor Jonsson provided me with an excellent text and, second in value only to this, with an index and an invaluable Icelandic prose rephrasing of the Skaldic verses.

I regret exceedingly that the highly technical nature of Hattatal forbids translation into English.

There are, to be sure, more or less, usually less, accurate translations into Scandinavian and into Latin.

in the year of our lord's incarnation eight hundred eighty two the thirty-fourth of king alfred's life the above-named army steered their ships up into france by a river called the meuse and there wintered one year in the same year alfred king of the anglo-saxons fought a battle by sea against the pagan fleet of which he captured two ships having slain all who were on board and the two commanders of two other ships, with all their crews, distressed by the battle and the wounds which they had received, laid down their arms and submitted to the king.

In the year of our lord's incarnation, 883, which was the thirty-fifth of King Alfred's life, the aforesaid army went up the river called Skald, Shelt, to a convent of nuns called Kundogh, Konda, and there remained a year.

in the year of our lord's incarnation eight hundred eighty four which was the thirty-sixth of king alfred's life the aforesaid army divided into two parts one body of them went into east france and the other coming to britain entered kent where they besieged a city called in saxon rochester and situated on the eastern bank of the river medway before the gate of the town the pagans suddenly erected a strong fortress but yet they were unable to take the city because the citizens defended themselves bravely until king alfred came up to help them with a large army then the pagans abandoned their fortress and all their horses which they had brought with them out of France, and, leaving behind them in the fortress the greater part of their prisoners, on the arrival of the king, fled immediately to their ships, and the Saxons immediately seized on the prisoners and horses left by the pagans, and so the pagans, compelled by stern necessity, returned the same summer to France.

In the same year, Alfred, king of the Anglo-Saxons, led his fleet, full of fighting men, out of Kent to the country of the East Angles for the sake of plunder, and when they had arrived at the mouth of the river Stour, immediately thirteen ships of the pagans met them prepared for battle.

Of the written prose sources he drew upon, he only mentions Ari the Learned's book.

Probably, as it seems to us because in the statements of that work he had as implicit a faith as in the other sources he mentions and found reason to alter nothing therein while the sources he does not mention he silently criticizes throughout rejecting or altering them according as his critical faculty dictated before snorri's time there existed only separate disjointed biographical monographs on norwegian kings written on the model of the family sagas of iceland snorri's was a more ambitious task discerning that the course of life is determined by cause and effect and that in the lives of kings widely ramified interests national and dynastic came into play he conceived a new idea of saga-writing the seed of cause sown in the preceding must yield its crop of effect in the succeeding reign this the writer of lives of kings must bear in mind and so snorri addresses himself to writing the first pragmatic history ever penned in any teutonic vernacular the heims kringla the evidence for snorri's authorship of heims kringla is not conclusive but figfusson's demonstration is accepted by most scholars we may safely assume apart from the general tendency of the external evidence that one and the same author must have written the histories and the prose edda a comparison of the names of skalds and skaldic poems mentioned in both works will show that the author of each had a wide acquaintance with the conventional poetic literature of scandinavia particularly of iceland and that if we suppose two distinct authors both men had almost precisely the same poetic equipment each of the works under consideration begins with a rationalization of the odinic myths and reveals an identity of attitude toward the ancient faith furthermore the careful reader will be charmed with the sinewy style of both the heims kringla and the edda and will be obliged to admit the close similarity between them in structure and in expression finally figfusson has shown that they exhibit occasionally a remarkable identity of phrase the prose edda is undoubtedly by snorri it is preserved in three primary manuscripts codex regius early fourteenth century codex wormianus fourteenth century named from ole worm from whose hands it passed in seventeen oh six into the hands of arni magnussen and codex upsaliensis about thirteen hundred perhaps a direct copy of snorri's own text this last manuscript and also the arnamagnean vellum number seven forty eight which preserves a portion of the text testify unmistakably to snorri's authorship the codex even gives in detail the subjects of the three divisions of the book these three divisions but for the evidence of the manuscripts might seem to afford ground for assuming plural authorship the first part the gylfaginning or beguiling of gylfi is an epitome of odinic mythology cast in the form of a dialogue between gylfi a legendary swedish king and the triune odin snorri though a christian tells the old pagan tales with obvious relish and often in the enthusiasm of the true antiquary rises to magnificent heights ever and again he fortifies his narrative with citations from the poetic edda the great treasure-house of scandinavian mythological and heroic poetry one passes from gylfaginning to skaldskaparmal with very little shock in spite of the great difference in subject and treatment which the author has attempted rather skillfully to modulate through a second dialogue the questioner this time is one egir and replies are made by the god bragi famed for eloquence and the gift of poetic expression this intermediate dialogue called bragarreidur or bragi's discourses strikes the key-note of the entire book and really reconciles the first section to the second and third whose dissimilarity to gylfaginning had led some scholars to believe that one or the other is not snorri's work the god relates several adventures of the aesir of the same character as those recounted in gylfaginning and concludes with a myth concerning the origin of the poetic art from this point on barely maintaining the fiction of the dialogue snorri makes his work a treatise on the conventional vocabulary and phraseology of skaldship for the guidance of young skalds the third section of the edda is the hattatal or enumeration of meters and combines three separate songs of praise one on king hakon a second on skuli bardsson the king's father-in-law and most powerful vassal and a third celebrating both each of the hundred and two stanzas of the work belongs to a distinct metric type or subtype and between stanzas snorri has inserted definitions occasionally longer notes or comments we are now in a position to see the purpose and the artistic unity of the prose edda the entire work is a textbook for apprentice poets gylfaginning conceived in the true antiquarian spirit supplies the mythological and legendary background which in the christian age that had superseded the vivid old heathen days a young man might not know or might avoid do not lose sight of these splendid tales of the fathers snorri by implication says to the youthful bard but remember always that these old legends are to be used to point a moral or adorn a tale and not to be believed or to be altered without authority of ancient skalds who knew them belief is sin tampering with tradition is a crime against scholarship The second and third sections, Skaldskaparmal and Hattatal, offer the rules of composition, and drive them home by means of models drawn in the one case from acknowledged masters of the craft, in the other by the example of a complete Skaldic trilogy, the work of a man who was accepted by his own time as a worthy successor of Bragi, Kormaker, and Einar.

A needed transition from the literary to the technical portion of the book is supplied by Bragaridur, which narrates in the same spirit as Gilfaginning further useful tales, and concludes with a mythological account of the Skaldic art.

Even the prologue, which many scholars consider spurious, is an integral part of the work, a fact established by Snorri's single address in the character of the author to beginners.

In this apostrophe he refers to the prologue.

In 1907, Professor Jónsson produced an Icelandic edition, which forms volume 41 of the Íslendinga Zugur, published at Reykjavik.

It was fortunate for me that these last two editions appeared before I began my work.

Professor Jónsson provided me with an excellent text, and, second in value only to this, with an index and an invaluable Icelandic prose rephrasing of the Skaldic verses.

Lagertha was a famous shieldmaiden mentioned in the sagas as a woman who fought alongside her husband Ragnar Lothbrok.

Scholars debate whether all of this is historically accurate, or whether it was embellished to some extent by the Skalds, but the weight of the evidence suggests that female warriors did exist within Viking society, even if they did not make up the majority of fighters.

Here is a detail about Viking weapons that is both practical and rather macabre.

Weapons were given names.

Once again, worth mentioning that while Norse paganism and Germanic paganism are very, very similar and definitely share roots, there could be differences between what the Anglo-Saxons did and what the Norwegians and Danes who inhabited Iceland did.

There are two later cases after Bede that do mention Yule in the context of deities and holidays, and those are of course Snorri's account as well as the account of 10th century Skald.

Oh god, I'm gonna butcher this.

Evend Finsen.

Snorri, officially, in writing the Prose Edda, was seeking to preserve the stories of the Icelanders so that Icelandic poetry would not die out and could be maintained.

This is why he has the Gylfaginning, which is the main body of the Prose Edda, that describes the different myths in prose form and gives context, names, common kennings, and all kinds of other similar guideposts and rundowns that allow someone to get a grasp of what it is that the Skalds are talking about.

And then the Skaldasparmal, or the Skaldic Manual, which describes the rules of Icelandic poetry, which are derived from the broader body of Nordic poetry.

The final section, the Hatatal, describes the verse forms that are used within this literary form.

I know so.

Well, at his northern courts, he employed traditional Norse poets, the Skalds.

These Skalds composed epic, blood-pumping verses that celebrate his violent conquests and physical dominance.

Oh, wow.

And crucially, they freely utilized pagan mythology to do it.

It wasn't until the fifth death that they first caught sight of the beast.

He is the first to refer to it as a dragon, an old Skaldic word from ancient mythology.

It speaks of a great winged serpent which breathes fire, sometimes called wyverna or wyvern.

The veracity of these creatures has been hotly debated, but there is evidence of a virus common among reptiles which causes excessive growth and mutations, including wings and unusual glandular formations in the mouth and throat, which enable the projection of acids, bases, propellants, toxins, and other hazards.