SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

126 Saga-Book of the Viking Society
below and has wondrously big claws and a terrific tail."2
But the "nickered" style is actually a style of mixed
metaphor or catacresis where the poet proceeds from
one distinct thing to another, everything being out of line,
dissonantic and baroque. Often the formation of the
kenning itself is dissonantic, thus "the blue land of
Haki" is no land but the sea. "The magic song of swords"
is of course no song, but the battle. A poet (Kormakr)
asks the king "to keep the moving meadow of the bow over
him"; now "the moving meadow of the bow" is, of course,
the hand, but meadow is land, and how is the king to keep
a whole land over the poet? And how is land to move?
Another poet (Einar skilaglam in Vellekla) addresses his
earl in this way: "Listen, earl, to the blood of Kvasir"
Now "Kvasir's blood" is, of course, the "mead of poetry"
or poetry, but how is the earl going to listen to the
seemingly quiet blood? To make matters a bit more
natural we could, of course, here demand that the word
for blood, dreyri, had its original meaning of "falling
blood". If the blood fell hard enough it could be heard.
Opposite to or contrasting with this "nickered"
catacretical style is the style which Snorri called
w)gorvingar and which we could call metaphoric style, or
a style of consistent metaphor. This style introduces
consistent metaphors throughout the stanza (or halfstanza).
Egill was a master of consistent metaphor; he
expresses the same thought as Einar Skalaglam above in
the following words: "so that the beaker of Odin (Yggr)
came pouring to everyone's ear-mouths" Obviously it
is a more natural thing (or metaphor) to drink a pouring
beaker with your ear-mouth than to listen to the mead,
which cannot be done in a natural way. In Snorri's time
consistent metaphor was much preferred to mixed
metaphor, or nygorvingar to "nickered" style, even
among the learned rhetoricians of the clergy like
2 Fornaldarsiigur Nororlanda (1829-30), II 243; Fornaldarsogur Nororlanda
(1943), I 347.