whether harps were commonly used in Scandinavia in the early Middle Ages), while
those in ljóðaháttr (including the monologues) involved dramatic presentation. Indeed,
several of them seem to imply movement and living gesture (especially Skírnismál,
which not only involves movement but the carving of magical runes, something that
one cannot expect a good Christian scribe to have dreamed up for actual performance).
This leads to the natural questions of the possible setting and background of these
works. Of course, the fornyrðislag poems could have been performed anywhere, although
one can expect an indoor setting. As for the dialogic poems and monologic poems
mainly in ljóðaháttur, it is interesting to note the fact that several of them (Fáfnismál,
Sigrdrífumál, Skírnismál and Hárbarðsljóð) largely take place outside in a liminal setting,
while others (Va fþrúðnismál, Grímnismál, Lokasenna and probably Hávamál) are all
deliberately set inside a hall, something that provides an additional religious context if,
as I have argued elsewhere, the hall building itself had a potentially microcosmic sym-
bolism in pagan times (the roof being the sky, held up by ‘dwarfs’, while the chieftain
sitting in the high seat between the tree-like high-seat pillars has the role of the goði/goð:
see further Gunnell 2004 ). Indeed, it is hard to ignore the strong ‘initiatory’ ritual
elements of Grímnismál, Va fþrúðnismál, Fáfnismál and Sigrdrífumál.
In short, it would appear that in the ljóðaháttr poems of the Poetic Edda we have the
earliest extant ‘dramatic’ works in northern Europe. There is good reason to consider
whether the form of works such as these might originally have some connection to those
archaeological finds and foreign historical accounts implying ritual dramatic activities,
such as the Torslunda matrices, the Oseberg tapestry, the horned and sometimes
dancing figures found in Birka, Ekhammar, Finglesham and Sutton Hoo, the felt animal
masks found in Hedeby harbour, Adam of Bremen’s talk of a ‘theatrum’ at Uppsala, and
the accounts of masked Varangians in skins dancing a Christmas gothikon for the emperor
in Constantinople (see Gunnell 1995 : 36 – 80 ).
NOTE1 The words most commonly used with poetic performance are þylja (‘to recite or list’)
and kveða, which might mean chanting, or some heightened form of speech. Readers are
recommended to listen to the recent experiments into the ‘music’ and performance of the
Edda undertaken by the medieval music ensemble Sequentia, who have attempted to present
the works as they might have sounded in the thirteenth century: Sequentia Edda ( 1995 ):
Deutsche Harmonia Mundi 05472 77381 2 ; and The Rhinegold Curse ( 2001 ): Deutschland
Radio and Westdeutscher Rundfunk; Marc Aurel edition MA 20016. On the question of
music and song, see also Harris ( 2000 a, 2003 , 2004 , forthcoming).
BIBLIOGRAPHYFinnegan, R. ( 1977 ) Oral Poetry. Its Nature, Significance and Social Context, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Foley, J.M. ( 2002 ) How to Read an Oral Poem, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Gísli Sigurðsson ( 1998 ) ‘Inngangur’, in Gísli Sigurðsson (ed.) Eddukvæði, Reykjavík: Mál og
menning.
Gunnell, T. ( 1995 ) The Origins of Drama in Scandinavia, Cambridge: D.S. Brewer.
——( 2004 ) ‘Hof, halls, goð(ar) and dwarves: an examination of the ritual space in the pagan
Icelandic hall’, Cosmos, 17 ( 1 ): 3 – 36.
–– Terry Gunnell––