explanation (razo):

This poem (which has since been revised) was the result of interaction with people on the Trimarian e-list and an attempt to produce drottkvaett after somebody popped up and said “oh, anybody can write that!” Three months later we hadn’t heard a peep so I gave it a shot.

The theme of the poem was…well, I didn’t have one per se. The only line I had was “sunken ship lies silent” because I had just watched Titanic in the theater and the image of that massive ship lying there on the bottom in the dark all alone got to me. But I couldn’t really figure out where to take that concept so the line got changed to “sinking ship lies silent” and THAT took off like a bat out of hell. The trick in that situation was the same one reporters are taught to ask: Who, What, When, Why, and Where. My train of thought went something like this.

“…ok, there’s a Viking longship floating in the middle of the ocean with nobody at the rudder."

How did it get there?

There was a fight with another ship.

What happened?

They lost. Or they won, but lost a lot of crew doing it. Who knows? Does it matter? No.

So what’s happening now?

They’re sinking. Slowly. There are a few survivors but they’re pretty beat up too.

So what can the survivors see and hear?

The wind has died down, their sails are useless, there aren’t enough men to row the ship, the ship has a pretty severe leak in it, there’s a storm coming, and the survivors have figured out that they’re basically screwed. Oh, and there’s blood everywhere.

Does anybody know about them?

Not directly. Their loved ones are waiting at home but they’re getting that sense of “never going to see them again” around now.

Don’t get the idea that all these questions were answered in this much detail before I started writing…it doesn’t work that way for me. If I wrote from a script somebody handed me it would read like crap. As proof I offer “Slaughter at the Horns of Hattin” which I wrote after reading an account of the battle of Hattin. It isn’t a BAD poem per se but it just doesn’t have that oomph to it that the drottkvaett tends to. The drottkvaett comes out more spontaneously because it’s a hellaciously difficult style to write, so it isn’t just something I can crank out like I can with iambic pentameter.