of poetry’.^44 That carpentry is the particular craft in view appears in two
passages from the tenth-century poet Egill Skallagrímsson and another from
the twelfth-century poet Hallar-Stein:
Easily smoothed by my voice-plane are the praise-materials [timbers] for Thori’s son,
my friend, as they lie selected in twos and threes on my tongue.
I carry forth from the word-shrine praise’s timber leafed with utterance.
I have smoothed with poetry’s plane, painstaking in my work, my refrain-ship’s
beak.^45
The vigour of the imagery in Nordic literary theory is further demonstrated
in a passage from the thirteenth-century work by Óláfr Þórðarson
Hvítaskáld known as the Third Grammatical Treatise (16 f.):
Paranomeon [parhomoeon] is when several words have the same initial letter, as in
sterkum stilli styriar væni. This figure is much used in the art of eloquent speech that is
called rhetoric, and it is the first principle of that poetic form that holds Norse
versification together, in the way that nails hold a ship together that a craftsman
makes and that otherwise goes in loose order, timber from timber: so too this figure
holds the form together in versification by means of those staves that are called props
and head-staves.^46
The ship of songThe most elaborate objects made by joiners in early times were firstly boats
and ships, from at least the Mesolithic period, and secondly wheeled vehicles:
block-wheel wagons from sometime before 3300 and spoke-wheeled
chariots from around 2000. Both ships and chariots appear figuratively in
Indo-European traditions in connection with poetic activity. But just as in the
real world these artefacts, once made, tend to be valued as means of transport
rather than just as fine specimens of carpentry, so in poetry they are repre-
sented not so much as things the poet makes as conveyances to travel on.
Let us first consider ships.^47 In a hymn to the As ́vins the twin gods beyond
the sea are invited to ‘come in the ship of our mindings/songs to reach the
opposite shore’ (RV 1. 46. 7); the perfected hymn is imagined as the convey-
ance that will enable them to come into the worshippers’ presence. Another
(^44) Skáldsk. 10; Durante (1960), 237 = (1976), 172 f.
(^45) Egill, Arinbiarnarkviða 15; Sonatorrek 5. 3 f.; Hallar-Stein in Skáldsk. 47 (st. 203).
(^46) Cf. Gerd Kreutzer, Die Dichtungslehre der Skalden (2nd edn., Meisenheim 1977); S. N.
Tranter in Tristram (1991), 255–9; W. Sayers, ‘Scarfing the Yard with Words: Shipbuilding
Imagery in Old Norse Poetics’,Scandinavian Studies 74 (2002), 1–18.
(^47) Cf. Durante (1958), 8 f. ~ (1976), 128 f.; for Greek, Nünlist (1998), 265–76; for Latin poets,
E. J. Kenney in N. I. Herescu (ed.), Ovidiana (Paris 1958), 206.
40 1. Poet and Poesy