is clear both from their brevity, and the difficulty of deciding whether individual
inscriptions are in verse or not (Hübler 1996 ).
This easy familiarity with poetry continued after the Viking Age, as can be seen from
the verse fragments carved for instant consumption on throwaway sticks of wood
preserved in the waterlogged Bryggen area of medieval Bergen, in Norway (Liestøl
1974 ). These, too, are very like the poetry found in medieval Icelandic manuscripts,
both Eddic and the kind that is usually called skaldic (see below). Like the Icelandic
manuscripts, the runic poetry from medieval Bergen is mainly from the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries, and shows affinities with contemporary manuscript culture. While
there are strong indications of the continuity of poetic forms from before the Viking Age
until well after it, the actual contemporary evidence for the poetry of the Vikings is thus
limited to a small number of runic inscriptions, mainly on memorial stones.
For a fuller appreciation of the range and variety of this poetry we have to turn to
the later written evidence from medieval Iceland. The flowering of literary culture
there began a century or so after its conversion to Christianity and the subsequent
introduction of writing, using the roman alphabet and the technology of pen, ink and
parchment. An important part of the Icelanders’ literary activity involved the recording
and preservation of ancient oral traditions: historical, mythological and poetical (Quinn
2000 ; Whaley 2000 ). While works like Íslendingabók and the sagas of Icelanders stressed
the novelty and distinctiveness of Iceland and its literary culture, the poetry often
stressed its own antiquity, and historical and cultural ties with the Scandinavian home-
land, especially Norway. A vast quantity of poetry of many different kinds is preserved
in Icelandic manuscripts from the thirteenth century onwards (Clunies Ross 2005 ).
Much of this poetry was composed at the time of writing, or at least in the literate
period from the twelfth century onwards. Yet it is also clear that a substantial proportion
of the poetry preserved in medieval Icelandic manuscripts has its roots in the Viking
Age, and that some of it may even be an accurate and faithful reproduction of the oral
poetry of the Vikings. The main problem is to identify which medieval Icelandic verse
originates in the Viking Age, and to determine how faithfully it reproduces its oral
antecedents.
It is usual to divide medieval Icelandic poetry into two main categories, labelled
‘Eddic’ and ‘skaldic’ (Gunnell 2004 ; Whaley 2004 ). Like most binary divisions, this
categorisation is an oversimplification of a large, diverse and chronologically extensive
corpus. Nevertheless, these categories are useful for thinking about the possible Viking
Age origins and contexts of poetry, and its transmission into the literate period.
Eddic poetry takes its name from a manuscript now generally referred to as the Codex
Regius of the Poetic Edda (though it has borrowed this name from Snorri’s Edda, also
an important medieval source for ancient poetry). The Codex Regius was produced in
Iceland in the 1270 s and is a collection, or even an anthology, of twenty-nine poems of
the kind we now call Eddic (Neckel and Kuhn 1983 ; Larrington 1996 ; Hallberg 1993 ).
These poems have subjects from myth and heroic legend, and are in a variety of metres
including fornyrðislag and ljóðaháttr, as noted above. They differ from other early
Germanic poetry in being stanzaic, but there is some similarity, even overlap, of subject
matter. They employ a wide variety of narrative, discursive and even dramatic stylistic
techniques, and the tone ranges from the scurrilous to the high serious and visionary.
The interest and variety of this collection suggest that it is just a sampling of a much
richer literary tradition. The Codex Regius is not the first collection of this particular
–– chapter 22: Poetry in the Viking Age––