SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

ANTI-NATURALISM, TOUGH COMPOSITION AND
PUNNING IN SKALDIC POETRY AND MODERN
PAINTING
By STEFAN EINARSSON
T HIS paper would hardly have been written had I not
been dealing with Icelandic poetry from its skaldic
origins to the modernists. Now the modernists reject
skaldic poetry as a dead form, a treatment which to me
seems rather unjustified, considering the fact that skaldic
poetry - apart from the sagas - is by far the most
original artistic creation of Scandinavia and Iceland. It
is, of course, true that much of the work of the modernists
or the so-called atomic poets in Iceland is more closely
related to the poetic prose of the Bible than to the Edda.
But as soon as you look at the modern pictorial arts,
whether in Iceland or abroad, you cannot help feeling that
there is a strong family likeness between the old skaldic
poetry and the rimur on the one hand and the modern
painting of Picasso (or Kjarval) on the other. It seems to
me that the skaldic poets, Picasso and Kjarval are all
animated by the same spirit, a spirit for which I would
blame neither the skalds nor Picasso and Kjarval: I should
be more inclined to consider this spirit the reason for their
artistic greatness. To this spirit I attribute the grand
obscurity in the skalds and in much of modern art, and
the marked distortion of nature both in the skaldic
kennings and in Picasso's drawing of natural objects.
Furthermore I cannot imagine more similar formal
strivings among different groups of artists than are
displayed in the preoccupation among the Icelanders on
the one hand to compose miniature stanzas of four lines
in ever more artistic form, from the old skaldic helming
to the modern quatrain, and on the other hand the interest