Craftsmen and Wordsmiths: An Investigation into the Links Between Material Crafting, Poetic Composition and Their Practitioners in Old Norse Literature ...
In his first verse, the precocious poet Egill Skallagrímsson declares ‘eigi mun þú finna betra þrevetran óðarsmið mér’ (‘you will not find a better poetry-smith of three years than me’). Such metaphors are highly conventional in the skaldic poetry of the Viking Age and beyond. However, the link betw...
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English |
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Apollo - University of Cambridge Repository
2020
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| Online Access: | https://dx.doi.org/10.17863/cam.55496 https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/308409 |
| Summary: | In his first verse, the precocious poet Egill Skallagrímsson declares ‘eigi mun þú finna betra þrevetran óðarsmið mér’ (‘you will not find a better poetry-smith of three years than me’). Such metaphors are highly conventional in the skaldic poetry of the Viking Age and beyond. However, the link between the composition of verse and the construction of material objects was regarded as a topic of particular importance by Scandinavian poets such as Egill. In fact, connections between poets, craftsmen, their arts and their products resonate across the corpus of Old Norse literature—not only in skaldic metaphor, but also in historical, mythological and saga material. To judge by the frequency of their appearance in this literary corpus, these connections were clearly considered to be highly significant in Viking-Age and medieval Scandinavia. Nevertheless, they have received little attention in scholarship to date. This thesis investigates the nature and extent of the links between poets and craftsmen, and between ... |
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