Skald

A skald, or skáld (Old Norse: [ˈskɔːld]; Icelandic: [ˈskault], meaning "poet"), is one of the often named poets who composed skaldic poetry, one of the two kinds of Old Norse poetry in alliterative verse, the other being Eddic poetry. Skaldic poems were traditionally composed to honor kings, but were sometimes ex tempore. They include both extended works and single verses (lausavísur). They are characteristically more ornate in form and diction than eddic poems, employing many kennings, which require some knowledge of Norse mythology, and heiti, which are formal nouns used in place of more prosaic synonyms. Dróttkvætt metre is a type of skaldic verse form that most often use internal rhyme and alliteration.

More than 5,500 skaldic verses have survived, preserved in more than 700 manuscripts, including in several sagas and in Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda, a handbook of skaldic composition that led to a revival of the art. Many of these verses are fragments of originally longer works, and the authorship of many is unknown. The earliest known skald from whom verses survive is Bragi Boddason, known as Bragi the Old, a Norwegian skald of the first half of the 9th century. Most known skalds were attached to the courts of Norwegian kings during the Viking Age, and increasingly were Icelanders. The subject matter of their extended poems was sometimes mythical before the conversion to Christianity, thereafter usually historical and encomiastic, detailing the deeds of the skald's patron. The tradition continued into the Late Middle Ages.

The standard edition of the skaldic poetic corpus, Den norsk-islandske skjaldedigtning, was edited by Finnur Jónsson and published in 1908–1915. A new edition was prepared online by the Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages project and began publication in 2007.

The word skald (which internal rhymes show to have had a short vowel until the 14th century) is perhaps ultimately related to Proto-Germanic: *skalliz, lit. 'sound, voice, shout' (Old High German: skal, lit. 'sound'). Old High German has skalsang, 'song of praise, psalm', and skellan, 'ring, clang, resound'. The Old High German variant stem skeltan, etymologically identical to the skald- stem (Proto-Germanic: *skeldan), means "to scold, blame, accuse, insult". The person doing the insulting is a skelto or skeltāri. The West Germanic counterpart of the skald is the scop. Like scop, which is related to Modern English scoff, the word skald is probably cognate with English scold, reflecting the importance of mocking taunts in the poetry of the skalds.

Skaldic poetry and Eddic poetry stem from the same tradition of alliterative verse, and in Old Norse as well as Icelandic, the word skald simply means "poet" or "composer". Skaldic verse is distinguished from Eddic by characteristically being more complex in style and by using dróttkvætt ("court metre"), which requires internal rhyme as well as alliteration, rather than the simpler and older fornyrðislag ("way of ancient words"), ljóðaháttr ("song form"), and málaháttr ("speech form") metres of the Eddic poems. Skaldic poetry is also characteristically more ornate in its diction, using more interlacing of elements of meaning within the verse and many more kennings and heiti. This both assisted in meeting the greater technical demands of the metre and allowed the poets to display their skill in wordplay. The resulting complexity can appear somewhat hermetic to modern readers, as well as creating ambiguity in interpretation; but the original audiences would have been familiar with the conventions of the syntactic interweaving as well as the vocabulary of the kennings.

Eddic poems are characterized by their mythological, ethical, and heroic content, while skaldic verse has a wider range of subject matter. One of the main topics was mighty kings and the deeds of courtly patrons. Eddic poetry typically includes a large amount of dialogue and rarely recounts battles; skaldic poetry, the reverse. Skalds also composed spontaneous verses reacting to events, insult verses (níðvísur) such as Þorleifr jarlsskáld's curse on his former patron Jarl Hákon Sigurðarson and the níð that provoked the missionary Þangbrandr into killing Vetrliði Sumarliðason, and occasionally love poems and erotic verse called mansöngr. Hallfreðr Óttarsson and especially Kormákr Ögmundarson are known for their love poetry.

A large amount of Eddic poetry has been preserved in the Codex Regius manuscript. Skaldic verses are preserved in a large number of manuscripts, including many sagas, and some skaldic poetry, including prophetic, dream, and memorial poems, uses the simpler metres. Medieval Scandinavians appear to have distinguished between older and more modern poetry rather than considering skaldic verse as a distinct genre.

Compositions done without preparation were especially valued, to judge by the sagas. Egill Skallagrímsson is supposed to have composed his Höfuðlausn in one night to ransom his head. King Harald Hardrada is said to have set his skald, Þjóðólfr Arnórsson, as he was walking down the street, to compose two stanzas casting a quarreling smith and tanner through the choice of kennings as specific figures first from mythology and then from heroic legend. It is not common though that skaldic verse are a spur of the moment thing.