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Drottkvaett for Dummies: The Simplified Documentation

In order to understand Viking poetry it is required that the casual reader understand poetry, both what it is, and written in its most simplistic form.

 

Po●et●ry: (n): 1. the art of rhythmical composition, written or spoken, for exciting pleasure by beautiful, imaginative, or elevated thoughts. 2. literary work in metrical form; verse. 3. prose with poetic qualities.(1)

 

The poetry most English-speaking people are familiar with is written in the style of iambic pentameter.

 

Iambic: 1575, from L. iambicus, from Gk. iambikos, from iambos "metrical foot of one unaccented followed by one accented syllable."(2)

 

Pentameter: a line of verse consisting of five metrical feet.

 

Therefore iambic pentameter is lines of poetry written in five groups of two syllables, the first one being unstressed, the second one being stressed.

 

This is easily seen in William Shakespeare’s plays, a stanza of which is reproduced for clarity.

 

Wherefore rejoice? What conquest brings he home?
What tributaries follow him to Rome
To grace in captive bonds his chariot wheels?
O you blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!

 

Reproduced with emphasis added for further clarity, we can easily see how this poetry is meant to be read.

 

Wherefore rejoice? What conquest brings he home?
What tributaries follow him to Rome
To grace in captive bonds his chariot wheels?
O you blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!

 

Casual readers will see “O you” at the beginning of the last line and think that the accents shown are incorrect. This is actually use of a poetic concept labeled anacrusis.

 

Anacrusis: an unstressed syllable or syllable group that begins a line of verse but is not counted as part of the first foot.(3)

 

An easily recognizable example of this is from the national anthem of the United States which begins “O say can you see”. The use of anacrusis in the song causes the familiar pronunciation of “O-oh say can you see / by the dawn’s early light”, et cetera.

 

The casual reader may surmise that an inordinate amount of time is being spent on a poetry form having little or nothing to do with Viking drottkvaett, but it is important to understand what makes drottkvaett so difficult where other poetry forms are so much easier to write.

 

In short, drottkvaett has a sharply limiting set of rules which do not work well in the English language. First, drottkvaett uses trochaic trimeter as its rhyme scheme, which means that one line of a stanza has only six syllables, and instead of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, drottkvaett requires a metrical foot composed of one stressed syllable followed by one unstressed syllable. This forces anyone writing drottkvaett to use short, guttural words under normal circumstances, and further, many of the words in the English language are not suitable for use in trochaic form by virtue of the fact that they follow iambic lines, i.e., unstressed syllables followed by stressed syllables. Thus it takes a clever poet to use English words in a Viking poetry form at all.

 

Second, drottkvaett uses alliteration (words that start with the same sound) for its rhyming style. This is because drottkvaett was meant to be performed orally, and when a Viking poet wanted to get the attention of his audience, he quite often had to shout over the general brouhaha of conversation, eating, et cetera. Alliterative sounds are easier to repeat and therefore stand a chance of cutting through the background noise and attracting one’s audience. Written drottkvaett can, and usually does, look quite silly on a page. Only in its spoken form does it look or sound correct. So, when writing drottkvaett, not only does the prospective poet have to find short, guttural words to use, he has to find multiple short, guttural words, many starting with the same letter.

 

Drottkvaett requires two alliterative words in the first line paired with one in the second line. It also requires that the end of the second and fourth lines rhyme. There is a further “strongly recommended” usage of half and whole rhyming which is sometimes possible to accomplish but is out of reach of the poet that has not made a career out of this style of poetry, much like a casual baseball player cannot hit a pitched ball very often, if at all.

 

Third, drottkvaett highly encourages the use of kenning, which is defined as “a conventional poetic phrase used for or in addition to the usual name of a person or thing, esp. in Icelandic and Anglo-Saxon verse, as 'a wave traveler' for 'a boat.'"(4) Other examples include

 

Sea-plow = a ship
Sea-plow’s furrow = the wake of the ship
Earth of sea-plow’s furrow = the ocean
Tyr’s teeth = spears (Tyr, the Viking god of War)
Ran’s robes = sails (Ran, Viking goddess of drowned sailors, among other things)

 

Fourth, technically speaking, drottkvaett was usually created to honor either a specific person, or the deeds of a specific person, in hopes of being granted a reward. Recall, if you will, that this poetry was spoken or shouted. Shouting about generalities like war and winter and hunting would not likely have captured anyone’s attention, or at least not in sufficient degree to earn any sort of reward. (Indeed, the actual meaning of “drottkvaett” is generally agreed as any of a series of variants on “lordly speech”, “king-praising”, “for recitation at court.”)

 

Taken together it is obvious that anyone who sets out to create Viking drottkvaett is up against a stiff set of rules that make it exceedingly difficult to turn out even halfway-decent poetry. The Norse admitted that drottkvaett was extremely difficult, even for them.

 

The requirements of this verse form were so demanding that occasionally the text of the poems had to run parallel, with one thread of syntax running through the on-side of the half-lines, and another running through the off-side. According to the Fagrskinna collection of sagas, King Harald III of Norway uttered these lines of dróttkvætt at the Battle of Stamford Bridge; the internal assonances and the alliteration are bolded:

 

Krjúpum vér fyr pna, 
(valteigs), brǫkun eigi, 
(svá bauð Hildr), at hjaldri, 
(haldorð), í bug skjaldar. 
(Hátt bað mik), þar's mœttusk, 
(menskorð bera forðum), 
hlakkar íss ok hausar, 
(hjalmstall í gný malma).

 

(In battle, we do not creep behind a shield before the din of weapons [so said the goddess of hawk-land {a valkyrja} true of words.] She who wore the necklace bade me to bear my head high in battle, when the battle-ice [a gleaming sword] seeks to shatter skulls.)

 

The bracketed words in the poem ("so said the goddess of hawk-land, true of words") are syntactically separate, but interspersed within the text of the rest of the verse. The elaborate kennings manifested here are also practically necessary in this complex and demanding form, as much to solve metrical difficulties as for the sake of vivid imagery. Intriguingly, the saga claims that Harald improvised these lines after he gave a lesser performance (in fornyrðislag); Harald judged that verse bad, and then offered this one in the more demanding form. While the exchange may be fictionalized, the scene illustrates the regard in which the form was held.(4)

 

Therefore it can, hopefully, easily be seen that when I write drottkvaett I’m up against a set of rules that make it slow going. Further complicating matters is the fact that I have to be motivated to write it at all, or else I feel like I’m just writing advertising copy. Iambic pentameter I can churn out pretty quickly, and work on fixing it later; drottkvaett I have to be inspired for. Thus you can (hopefully) see, in the examples of drottkvaett I’ve written, they’ve all been about something I either directly experienced, or that I was able to put lots of effort into imagining.

 

Regards,
Jonathan Blackbow
4/30/2007

 

NOTES
1. Modern Language Association (MLA): "poetry." Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Random House, Inc. 30 Apr. 2007. <http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/poetry>.

2. Modern Language Association (MLA): "iambic." Online Etymology Dictionary. Douglas Harper, Historian. 30 Apr. 2007. <http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/iambic>.

3. Modern Language Association (MLA): "anacrusis." Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Random House, Inc. 30 Apr. 2007. <http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/anacrusis>.

4. Fagrskinna Finlay, Alison (editor and translator) (2004). Fagrskinna, a Catalogue of the Kings of Norway. Brill Academic Publishers. ISBN 90-04-13172-8.