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: | Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis |
| Language: | English |
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University of Cambridge
2019
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| Online Access: | https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/308409 https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.55496 |
| 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 poetic composition and material crafting. It investigates both what the origins of these connections were, and what they suggest about the artisans and creative processes concerned. This thesis begins by establishing precisely which poets and craftsmen form the focus of this investigation. As these figures appear in a large variety of different sources, it is also important to discuss the different categories of evidence considered in this thesis, and to confront any difficulties involved in their use. The first chapter proceeds by considering the links between poets, craftsmen, their arts and their products which are made in skaldic poetry. In the second chapter, skaldic poetry, sagas and archaeological material are analysed to build a picture of the links between historical poets and craftsmen working in late Viking-Age Scandinavia. This chapter considers the similar ways in which these figures interacted with the political elite, and the correspondences between the creation, dissemination and use of their ... |
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