SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

Skaldic Poetry and Modern Painting I27
his nephew, Olafr hvitaskald, Consistent metaphor
(n-jgorvingar) was also found in the variation of
fornyroislag called kviouhdttr, earliest found in the
Ynglingatal by I>j656lfr of Hvinir. This poem probably
embodies the spirit of the earliest ancestral cult in
Scandinavia (Sweden). You did not have to know the
mighty deeds of your ancestors, only their names, their
mode of death, and their burial place. That sounds
almost like a martyrology. Perhaps their names were not
anyless potent than the names of thesaints. The "nickered"
or mixed metaphor style is first found in Bragi Boddason's
shield-poetry, the Ragnarsdrapa which is composed in
drottkucett, the skaldic meter par excellence. So there is
no doubt that this unnatural skaldic style is found in
poems which are imitating the a-naturalistic primitivistic
and magical ornamental sculptures of the Scandinavians
- in the same way as Picasso imitated primitive Negro
sculpture in the first years of our century. Neither the
Scandinavian ornament carving nor the Negro sculpture
had any perspective, as was not to be expected, since
perspective was developed by the Renaissance and
considered natural until Cezanne and Picasso began to
violate it at the beginning of the modern period.
But it is not the violation of perspective which primarily
ranges Picasso's style with the "nickered", catacretical
style of the skalds. It is rather, as his biographer tells
us,
the unbounded liberties that he chose to take with human
form. . The Cubist method of describing an object simultaneously
from more than one viewpoint had induced Picasso
as early as 1913 to inscribe a profile on a head seen in full face.
In 1926 the ideal was carried further in painting of violently
distorted heads in which the recognizable features - eyes,
mouth, teeth, tongue, ears, nose and nostrils - are distributed
about the face in every position, with the bold line of a profile
making a central division of the head. In some cases the eyes
appear on the same side of the face, in others the mouth takes
the place of an eye - every permutation is tried, but
miraculously the human head survives as a unit powerfully
expressive of emotion. 3
3 Roland Penrose, Picasso (I959), 235.