CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

POETRY IN THE VIKING AGE

Judith Jesch

L

ong before the Viking Age, Scandinavians liked to remember their dead by erecting
large stones in their honour, sometimes with an inscription carved in runes, some-
times decorated, sometimes both. These could be further embellished by formulating
the inscription, or part of it, in verse. One such stone, from Tune in Østfold, Norway,
dated to around 400 , is for a man called Wo ̄durı ̄da. Despite the difficulties of inter-
preting this early inscription, it is clearly in verse, and records that a man called Wiwa
made the monument, and that three daughters held a funeral feast for the deceased
(Naumann 1998 : 697 – 8 ; Spurkland 2005 : 35 – 42 ). Other kinds of important messages
could also be embellished by the use of verse forms. One of the gold drinking horns
found at Gallehus, in Denmark, from the fifth century, had a runic inscription recording
who made it. On this fine piece of craftwork in the most precious metal, the maker’s
simple inscription is appropriately couched in verse form (Naumann 1998 : 702 – 3 ;
Spurkland 2005 : 21 – 5 ):

ek Hlewagasti Holtija horna tawido ̄

I, Hlewagastir son of Holtir, made the horn.

(Spurkland 2005 : 22 )

This poetic line is in fornyrðislag (‘the metre of old sayings’), the standard alliterative
long line used throughout the Germanic-speaking world, and also found in the
mythological and legendary poetry collected in the late thirteenth-century Icelandic
manuscript of the Poetic Edda, while the Tune inscription is recognisably in ljóðaháttr,
another metre also found in the Edda, both suggesting a remarkably long-lived
continuity of poetic form. The Viking Age falls in the middle of the eight centuries
that separate the Tune and Gallehus inscriptions from the medieval Icelandic
manuscript. In formal, metrical and linguistic terms, the poetry of the Vikings is thus
just a slice of a much longer history of Scandinavian poetry that can be traced
from at least ad 400 to around ad 1500 (Fidjestøl 1997 ; Gade 2000 ; Clunies Ross
2005 ).
Studying Viking Age poetry involves making a number of assumptions about it from
indirect evidence. Despite the Scandinavians’ familiarity with runes, their poetry in