but there is no consensus on their age, though scholars agree that some of the poems are
older than others, and, in particular, that some of them were composed as late as the
twelfth century. The mythological poems, for instance, have been judged on whether
they seem to be thoroughly pagan (like Va fþrúðnismál), touched by Christianity (like
Völuspá), or a Christian pastiche of pagan beliefs (as some scholars believe Þrymskviða is),
but such judgements are inevitably subjective. Instead, we need to ask what it means to
say that an Eddic poem is ‘old’ (Meulengracht Sørensen 1991 ). The manuscript trans-
mission cannot with certainty be traced further back than 1200. To reach the Viking
Age, we have to assume either an untraceable early manuscript tradition, or a period
of oral transmission, or probably both. Yet it is clear that much of the material in the
Eddic poems – the stories of gods and heroes, the conceptual vocabulary, the ideologies
and beliefs – is of great antiquity. A common pool of stories and cultural knowledge
can be traced in art, iconography and other sources from before, during and after the
Viking Age, and it is from this pool that the Eddic poems drew their material. But to
argue that the poems themselves, as they are preserved, are old, would depend on an
assumption of extensive oral transmission in fixed form of poems that are actually rather
loose in their structures, which accords ill with what we know about oral poetry from
other cultures (Finnegan 1988 : 139 – 74 ). It is more likely that the Eddic poems are
reworkings, at various times, of material from the pool of ancient cultural knowledge
(Meulengracht Sørensen 1991 ). In this way, the surviving Eddic poems represent
a Viking Age cultural practice, without necessarily being Viking Age texts in their
current form.
Skaldic poetry can more easily be traced to its Viking Age origins. The term is often
used rather broadly to cover most kinds of medieval Scandinavian and Icelandic poetry
other than the Eddic poems (Fidjestøl 1993 ). Unlike Eddic poems, named after a
manuscript, the (modern) name of the skaldic genre focuses on the figure of the poet, the
skald. Whereas the anonymous Eddic poems come from an ancient, timeless and com-
mon cultural pool, skaldic verse is ascribed to a named poet and situated in a particular
historical or literary context, either the patron for whom he composed, or the occasion
for which he made his verses (although we know of some female skalds, they are very
rare, see Jesch 1987 ). The preservation of such ancillary information about skaldic verse
is related to its transmission. Unlike the Poetic Edda, an anthology, or Snorri’s Edda, a
handbook with illustrative quotations, the manuscripts which preserve skaldic poems
generally cite them in a narrative context, and in such a way as to indicate their
chronological, geographical and social context, which is often in the Viking Age. How-
ever, there is still a problem of dating.
Although skaldic verse is now accessible mostly in Icelandic manuscripts of the
thirteenth century or later, much of it purports to be a product of the Viking Age,
composed and performed in an oral context ( Jesch 2001 : 9 – 12 , 15 – 33 ). We do not know
for sure how such oral texts were transmitted, and how they survived the transition
to literacy to be preserved for posterity, though one answer was provided by Snorri
Sturluson. In the prologue to Heimskringla, he explains that he has taken his examples
from those ‘poems which where recited before the chieftains themselves or their sons’
because kvæðin þykkja mér sízt ór staði fœrð, ef þau eru rétt kveðin ok skynsamliga upp tekin ‘the
poems seem to me least likely to be corrupted, as long as they are correctly composed
and carefully interpreted’ (Aðalbjarnarson 1979 I: 7 , my trans.). This is the origin of the
idea widespread among modern scholars that the form of skaldic verse is a guarantee of
–– chapter 22: Poetry in the Viking Age––