SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

Skaldic Poetry and Modern Painting 125
of the modernists in France (Cezanne, Picasso, Braque) in
composing pictures that preferably should be composition
alone, or composition in the abstract, however that
composition might be arranged and using the most
insignificant and nondescript materials assembled from
everywhere. The product of the cubist painters is
comparable to the art of the hringhenda and slettubond
poets in Iceland. Finally one must mention the play on
words or homonyms which Snorri calls ofijost, "too easy
to understand". Modern painters call it visual punning;
Maurice Grosser says that all modern art is full of it.
This type of painting has even spread to Iceland.
Kjarval's 'Sterling [a boat] in the fog' is an example:
there is nothing to see but fog.
It is also true that I would hardly have written this
article had I not read 'Nature and un-nature (or a-nature)
in skaldic poetry', by Hallvard Lie.! Lie thinks that the
style of the skaldic poetry is un-natural (or a-naturalistic)
because it was designed to describe in the shield-poetry
the primitive, a-naturalistic and magic-laden art which
the Norwegians and Scandinavians in general then
imposed upon their art objects, household goods, and
ships, the animal-ornament style, in which the animals
were not animals drawn from nature but long complexes
of hands and lines with dragon or griffin heads and dragon
claws or grips where the artistic form demanded knots in
the drawing. To imitate this complex plastic ornament
the skalds primarily used kennings as dissonantic and
un-natural as possible; kennings which Snorri called
"nickered" and Olafr hvitaskald finngalknao or "homocentaurized",
for all the hoofs turn the wrong way on the
"nicker", which in Beowulf is a water-monster and in
Iceland a horse living in lakes or the sea. But the
finngdlkn or homoceniaur is thus described: "Looking
towards the head she is like a human being, but an animal
1 "Natur" og "unatur" i skaldekunsten (Avhandlinger utg. av det norske
Videnskaps-Akaderni i Oslo. Hist. fil, kl. I957. No. I).
c