SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

Skaldic Poetry and Modern Painting I29
shock the beholder. For the old skalds were probably
just as great individualists as the modern artists, poets
and painters, and just as proud of their art. This
individual pride is obvious from the striking fact that of
all early Scandinavian artists the skalds alone succeeded
in committing their names to posterity.
If you look for obscurity and dissonance in modern
literature, you will probably find plenty of examples to
match the obscurities, the dissonances, the mixed
metaphor and even the unnatural word order in skaldic
poetry. A page in James Joyce's Ulysses, not to speak
of his Finnegans Wake, is hardly any easier to read than
a stanza in P6rsdrdpa, reputed to be the hardest poem in
skaldic poetry. I even have my doubts whether some of
our modernist Nobel-prizewinners, like T. S. Eliot and
William Faulkner, are any easier to read than most
skaldic poetry. T. S. Eliot has written only a compara"
tively small corpus of poetry; nevertheless, he can
seemingly not be read, even by university students, unless
a sizable commentary does for him what Snorri Sturluson
did for skaldic poetry with his Edda. The German critic
and literary historian Hugo Friedrich says about him: 4 .
Die Deutungen die sein lyrisches Werk durch die Kritik:
erfahren hat gehen bis zur Unvereinbarkeit auseinander. Nur
in einer Hinsicht herrscht Ubereinstimmung : das dieses von
Absonderlichkeiten erfiillte Werk eine Bannkraft ausiibt dank
seines Tones.
Whoever looks at modern literature or art may be able
to discern two tendencies in its formal aspect, one
preferring the chaotic and formless, the other striving for
hard and fast composition. The chaotic form or formlessness
strives for a complete volcanic-like eruption of the
subconscious mind or of pent-up feelings. An eruption
of feeling marks the German expressionists, whose shrill
cries in literature have hardly anything corresponding in
skaldic poetry, but whose rough and uncouth lines iri
pictorial art may certainly have parallels in the mixed
• Hugo Friedrich, Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik (1956), 145.