The Etiquette of Early Northern Verse

Roberta Frank

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780268202521
• eBook ISBN: 9780268202514
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Literature

In The Etiquette of Early Northern Verse, Roberta Frank peers into the northern poet's workshop, eavesdropping as Old English and Old Norse verse reveal their craft secrets.

This book places two vernacular poetries of the long Viking Age into conversation, revealing their membership in a single community of taste, a traditional stylistic ecology that did serious political and historical work. Each chapter seeks the codes of a now-extinct verse technique. The first explores the underlying architecture of the two poetries, their irregularities of pace, startling formal conventions, and tight verbal detail work. The passage of time has worn away most of the circumstantial details that literary scholars in later periods take for granted, but the public relations savvy and aural and syntactic signals of early northern verse remain to some extent retrievable and relatable, an etiquette prized and presumably understood by its audiences. The second and longest chapter investigates the techniques used by early northern poets to retrieve and organize the symmetries of language. It illustrates how supererogatory alliteration and rhyme functioned as aural punctuation, marking off structural units and highlighting key moments in the texts. The third and final chapter describes the extent to which both corpora reveled in negations, litotes, indirection, and down-toners, modes that forced audiences to read between half-lines, to hear what was not said. By decluttering and stripping away excess, by drawing words through a tight mesh of meter, alliteration, and rhyme, the early northern poet filtered out dross and stitched together a poetics of stark contrasts and forebodings. Poets and lovers of poetry of all periods and places will find much to enjoy here. So will students in Old English and Old Norse courses.

CHAPTER 1

Rules of the Game

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

—L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between

WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT STYLE

Comparing poetries is a little like marriage: you begin by stressing mutual affinities and end up accentuating differences. As in lawful wedlock, the relationship between Old English and dróttkvætt verse encompasses stylistic mirroring and variation on multiple levels, a family resemblance reinforced by several periods of proximity and intercourse.¹ The two vernacular poetries connected, even if it was an onagain, off-again affair. Like many couples, they developed horizontal intimacies outside the immediate family. The Old English verse that has come down to us took shape within a culture of literacy; for some poems, a long-lasting attachment to Latin predecessors was an open secret.² The postpositioning of prepositions hints at an acquaintance with the ways of Latin verse.³ The earliest dróttkvætt stanzas were not immune to the charms of Carolingian poetic ekphrasis and other courtly literary forms.⁴ Both vernacular corpora weathered various forms of inequality; a range of economical, ideological, geographical, and cultural disparities all left a mark. Still, despite their distinct public personalities, the list of compatibilities confirming Old English verse and viking-age dróttkvætt as a viable pair is long.⁵

Dróttkvætt verse presents itself as lean, tight, neat, and closemouthed; Old English, as run-on, messy, and expansive. The former is notably abstruse, devious, and unnatural, committed to maximizing gain at minimal cost and energy; the latter, warm, repetitive, and seemingly open. Handbooks teach that dróttkvætt verse is recondite, occasional, subjective, arrogant, formal, convoluted, esoteric, self-conscious, self-seeking, elitist, and situation-bound, that Old English poetry is uncomplicated, narrative, objective, leisurely, expansive, and dignified, concerned with religious/heroic tradition and wisdom.⁶ One member of this couple underpays; the other overtips. Nevertheless, they manage to get along and to demonstrate good manners in the other’s presence, a familial code of etiquette based on the tenet “if you can’t be kind, at least be vague.” Frankness, relevancy, logical fullness, staid clarity, a desire to be informative: the modern conversational principles set out by Grice are rarely in sight.⁷ Meaning in both poetries is cunningly camouflaged, half-hidden within a flow of compliments, negations, weasel words, and stray observations. In each, dignity, emotional minimalism, restraint, civility, even stealthy one-upmanship take precedence over the communication of facts. Urbane detachment and politeness rule.

From a distance, the underlying architecture of the two bear a resemblance, the deep framework alluded to by the twelfth-century Chinese writer Jiang Teli, whose poem on how to do plum blossoms advised: “Painting plum blossoms is like judging a horse. You go by bone structure, not by appearance.”⁸ In northern verse, these limbs are often artfully scattered. The disjointedness of the dróttkvætt stanza is notorious: within each quatrain, clauses are segmented and placed discontinuously, the sense dispersed over four lines. Old English halflines do not undergo such drastic dismemberment, but they, too, are mobile; parenthetical clauses, syntactic retroversions, and other unnatural behavior abound. Fifty years ago, T. A. Shippey pointed out that, although subordinate clauses beginning with “when,” “since,” and “after” are free to come before or after a main clause, in Beowulf such clauses almost invariably come second; the fact or emotion comes first, the explanation, cause, or time indication trails behind.⁹ The surviving stanzas of the first extant Old Norse praise-poem in regular dróttkvætt, Þorbjǫrn hornklofi’s Glymdrápa ‘Resounding-drápa’ (ca. 890), consistently and similarly subordinates the second half-stanza syntactically to the first, using conjunctions such as “before” or “when” (SkP 1.1:73–91). The cumulative effect of this stylistic habit—“they rejoiced . . . until”—seems meaningful. Nothing in life is certain until the last word is in.

The pair sometimes even lurch alike. The two poetries share a distinctive gait, one marked by twists and turns and startling irregularities of pace, their progress impeded by gaps, ruptures, and stops, by “violent and abrupt transitions.”¹⁰ George Ellis commented on the “almost unlimited power of inversion” that Old English poets employed, “a universal characteristic of savage poetry.”¹¹ Some particularly acrobatic half-lines look in two directions at once.¹² Scholars in Germany early bemoaned this poetry’s disconcerting Sprünge ‘leaps,’¹³ its Sprunghaftigkeit ‘erratic jumps,’¹⁴ and Stilwirrwarr ‘stylistic mishmash.’¹⁵ In 1875, Richard Heinzel noted a “restless energy and submerging of ideas.”¹⁶ In 1885, Frances B. Gummere described the jumpiness of Old English poetry: “There is an eternal leaping back and forth, but there is very little actual advance.”¹⁷ The avoidance of linear causality in Beowulf—its teasing flash-forwards and strategic withdrawals—is advertised in the section of Friedrich Klaeber’s edition headed “Lack of Steady Advance.”¹⁸ In 1871, Lewis Carroll had introduced an Anglo-Saxon messenger whose odd way of progressing down a path—forward, twist, pause, wriggle, leap—drew Alice’s attention.¹⁹ Arthur Brodeur conscientiously revealed the presence of “an unpleasing jerkiness of pace.”²⁰ Michael Alexander observed that “the sense often seems to dance as it advances. A sentence of any length can unfold by taking two steps forward and one step back . . . a minuet-like movement.”²¹ As one reader observed: “This is not a narrative style for the impatient.”²² Richard Lanham has called this type of sentence syntax “the running style,” a choice that “imitates the mind in a real-time interaction with the world . . . as it lurches from crisis to crisis, first tripping over one argument, then bumping into another, unbalanced and unsymmetrical,” a mind making the best of things in the moment,²³ a poetics with a turbulence warning stamped on its boarding pass.

On rare occasions the two poetries seem to be impersonating one another, making use of similar verbal fillers and idioms, the same rare words, compounds, and kennings, and displaying identical metrical quirks.²⁴ Each publicly and frequently indulges in onomastic play.²⁵ Both dress to be noticed, their glinting ornaments catching the light: here, a hint of golden moss under a firedrake, there, a burning hall or pyre, and, just beyond, mysterious underwater gleams.²⁶ Individuals in both corpora stride, sit, or speak “under helmet.”²⁷ The noun mæl ‘time’ behaves rather oddly (that is, like an adverb) in each.²⁸ The compound garræs ‘spear-onslaught’ (Mald 32) occurs once in Old English, in a viking messenger’s taunting speech; the single attestation of Norse geirrás ‘spearonslaught’ occurs in Einarr skálaglamm Helgason’s Vellekla (27/4; SkP 1.1:317), a eulogy composed for the powerful ruler of northern Norway around the same time as the Essex battle. Words for some military actions may have been time-sensitive.

In a poem from the 1020s, the skald Óttarr svarti refers to the ancestors of the Norwegian king Óláfr Haraldsson (ruled ca. 1015–30) using the hapax legomenon þjóðskjǫldungar ‘great-kings’ (Hfl 20/2; SkP 1.2:766); an identical compound, Þeod-Scyldingas, occurs in Beowulf 1019a, and nowhere else in Old English.²⁹ Shared origins in Germanic can be assumed for the parallel poetic compounds ON þjóðkonungr and OE þeodcyning ‘king of a people, king (over wide dominions)’; common ancestry need not, however, exclude later cultural reinforcement.³⁰ The Old Norse epithet occurs in purportedly early eddic and dróttkvætt verse, but was used with special vigor by court poets composing in the first half of the eleventh century, skalds such as Sigvatr, Þórarinn loftunga, Þormóðr Kolbrúnarskáld, and Arnórr Þórðarson;³¹ the Old English compound occurs fifteen times in poetry (eight of these in Beowulf), and twice in (poetic) prose. Words come in and out of fashion. The apparent popularity of þjóðkonungr during the reigns of Óláfr Haraldsson, Cnut the Great, and Magnús the Good may have had something to do with changing attitudes toward rulership and with the intimacy of Norse– English geopolitical relations during that period.³²

The occasional syntactic parallels puzzle. When Sigvatr praises around 1027 a hero who terrifies jarls (Sigv Erlfl 9/3; SkP 1.2:640), he uses the transitive weak verb œgja ‘to terrify’ with an understood but unstated object (“them”). When the Beowulf poet describes Scyld’s rule-by-terror over neighboring tribes, he employs the related transitive weak verb egsian ‘to terrify,’ again without a stated direct object: egsode eorl ‘the hero terrified [them]’ (Beo 6a).³³ In a subsequent half-line, lange ahte ‘[he] long possessed, had’ (Beo 31b)—with presumed reference to a kingdom or nation—the verb again seems to lack a direct object. Sigvatr’s short sentence víkingar ǫ΄ttu ‘the vikings possessed’—with understood reference to a destroyed building—appears to be a similar kind of ellipsis (Sigv Víkv 10/6; SkP 1.2:549).³⁴ There are likenesses in imagery too. When the poet of the Old English Andreas envisages waves as hills, hills as heads, a storm as an assault by armed warriors, and a flood as an after-hours mead party, he seems to be echoing familiar dróttkvætt conceits or kennings.³⁵ Sometimes the two corpora flirt openly, as when the Old English poet of Exodus calls God’s shielding pillar of cloud a net, board, cloud, sail, and tent in rapid succession (71–85), standard base words in Old Norse shieldkennings.³⁶ Nordicisms have been located not only in the viking messenger’s speech in The Battle of Maldon,³⁷ but also in the description of raven (“chooser of the slain”) and eagle (“grey plumaged, white-tailed war-hawk”) in Exodus and The Battle of Brunanburh.³⁸ Still, proof remains elusive: one reader’s skaldic shorthand is another’s synesthesia.³⁹ Chronology, too, is often a mug’s game. One scholar argues for the influence of the Old Norse Bjarkamál on the Old English Maldon while another drags the former poem, kicking and screaming, into the twelfth century.⁴⁰

We probe with wonde...

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Conventions
• Making an Entrance
• Chapter 1 Rules of the Game
• Chapter 2 Secrets of the Line
• Chapter 3 Accentuating the Negative
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index