Ep. 89: From Waterford to Norway with poet David Toms

what can you do? So you've spoken about your various influences on your last poetry collection, Northley, which are really wide ranging.

I was reading a little bit about it and you mentioned an interest in a few different types of poetry.

So you said Anglo-Saxon poetry, Scaldic poetry and Saga poetry.

And so these are like... you know, terms that maybe people wouldn't be familiar with.

I mean, Anglo-Saxon, probably they would, but Scaldic and Saga poetry.

What are those like for the average listener? And how did you feel that collection married all of those three things?

Yeah, so the Scaldic thing, there's a really great corpus, basically.

I think it actually, it might be the University of Aberdeen has it.

And they have a huge online corpus of basically every Scaldic phrase.

And the interesting thing about Scaldic poetry is that it's this very, very particular, and a bit like the Beirutic tradition in Ireland, where...

You know, the whole point was that being a poet was a particularly skilled kind of craft.

And so you have to like really hothouse yourself to learn, you know, how to create these formulations, how to make the formulations, how to use them, how to reuse them often in the same.

And the Scaldic thing is kind of similar.

I mean, there's obviously, you know, specific things about it that might be unique to it that aren't comparable.

But there's a lot of things that are comparable in that respect.

And so you have this huge corpus.

I mean, maybe the most famous one, I think, actually, is one that Heaney used in his translation of Beowulf to describe the sea as the Whale Road.

And Whale Road is a great English... version of a kind of a skaldic kind of turn of phrase that, you know, it's this kind of compound word thing where you take, you know, and it's a different way of thinking about the ocean because we think about it on the top level on the surface, whereas, you know, it's the whale road and that's, you know, it's this whole other network of transport and travel of the whales.

And so that's, you know, it's a really evocative way of thinking about the world.

So it's a

Scandinavian form of like as in it's specific to the region that you're in now.

Yeah, I mean, it very much belongs to kind of, I suppose, what we would maybe broadly term the North Sea world.

You know, this kind of, you know, the Orkney, Shetland, what would have during particularly maybe the Viking period and the early medieval period would have been sort of the world of kind of Viking kingdoms and later Anglo-Saxons and that kind of thing.

So it's very much kind of shaped by...

I guess, island communities or like coastal communities in the North Sea kind of and its peripheries and so on, whether it's the Faroes and whatever.

what can you do? So you've spoken about your various influences on your last poetry collection, Northley, which are really wide ranging.

I was reading a little bit about it and you mentioned an interest in a few different types of poetry.

So you said Anglo-Saxon poetry, Scaldic poetry and Saga poetry.

And so these are like... you know, terms that maybe people wouldn't be familiar with.

I mean, Anglo-Saxon, probably they would, but Scaldic and Saga poetry.

What are those like for the average listener? And how did you feel that collection married all of those three things?

Yeah, so the Scaldic thing, there's a really great corpus, basically.

I think it actually, it might be the University of Aberdeen has it.

And they have a huge online corpus of basically every Scaldic phrase.

And the interesting thing about Scaldic poetry is that it's this very, very particular, and a bit like the Beirutic tradition in Ireland, where...

You know, the whole point was that being a poet was a particularly skilled kind of craft.

And so you have to like really hothouse yourself to learn, you know, how to create these formulations, how to make the formulations, how to use them, how to reuse them often in the same.

And the Scaldic thing is kind of similar.

I mean, there's obviously, you know, specific things about it that might be unique to it that aren't comparable.

But there's a lot of things that are comparable in that respect.

And so you have this huge corpus.

I mean, maybe the most famous one, I think, actually, is one that Heaney used in his translation of Beowulf to describe the sea as the Whale Road.

And Whale Road is a great English... version of a kind of a skaldic kind of turn of phrase that, you know, it's this kind of compound word thing where you take, you know, and it's a different way of thinking about the ocean because we think about it on the top level on the surface, whereas, you know, it's the whale road and that's, you know, it's this whole other network of transport and travel of the whales.

And so that's, you know, it's a really evocative way of thinking about the world.

So it's a

Scandinavian form of like as in it's specific to the region that you're in now.

Yeah, I mean, it very much belongs to kind of, I suppose, what we would maybe broadly term the North Sea world.

You know, this kind of, you know, the Orkney, Shetland, what would have during particularly maybe the Viking period and the early medieval period would have been sort of the world of kind of Viking kingdoms and later Anglo-Saxons and that kind of thing.

So it's very much kind of shaped by...

I guess, island communities or like coastal communities in the North Sea kind of and its peripheries and so on, whether it's the Faroes and whatever.