| Summary: | This work investigates the Icelandic folktale figure known as the kraftaskáld (power poet, hereafter anglicized as kraftaskald). Prominent in Icelandic folklore of the Post-Reformation period of the sixteenth through early twentieth centuries, these poets were purported to wield magic through their improvised verses, with the power to bless, curse, affect the weather, put down walking corpses, and much more. Although some kraftaskalds were anonymous, most were historical persons around whom such tales have coalesced. As a field of study, the kraftaskalds were first properly delineated by Bo Almqvist in the 1960s, but they have received relatively little attention since then; this is the first study of this length to focus exclusively on the kraftaskalds of the post-medieval period. The goal of the study is to thoroughly characterize three main aspects of this phenomenon: The first is the nature of the figure—their identities, their reputations, and the various qualities they are portrayed to have. The second is the roles that they take on in the folklore. This includes what they do with their magic and who benefits from it, which often reveals the kind of social norms that the poets (and tellers) champion in the tales, and how the tales themselves uphold the social prestige of poetry. The third aspect is the nature of their magic, including its qualitative aspects, how it compares to other Icelandic magic, how the language of the poetic spells is arranged, and how non-verbal aspects contribute to it, with a focus on the mental state of the poets. Speech act and semiotic theories are among the tools of analysis. The corpus analyzed for these purposes is a vast array of Icelandic folklore and folklore-derived material, including folktales from the major collections of Jón Árnason, Ólafur Davíðsson, Sigfús Sigfússon; folktales from numerous smaller collections; and miscellaneous material such as latter-day sagas that are based on folktales. The majority of the material is from the nineteenth-century golden age of ...
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