SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

Saga-Book of the Viking Society
As the painter is limited to the four corners of his
painting, so the poet is limited to the four lines of his
half-stanza: both have their unit of composition, the
skaldic half-stanza is really a miniature. I have described
the regular sound-frame composition of the poet, but just
as the painter throws in several nondescript objects to
fill his still-life composition, so the poet throws in distorted,
perhaps catacretical, kennings as well as irregularities in
word order to fill his stanza. The skald often uses a
keystone word to complete the sense of his stanza.
We saw at the beginning of the paper that Hallvard Lie
thinks catacretical kennings were formed in imitation of
un-natural wood-carving styles. But Finnur Jonsson
thought that they arose from the demands of strict
composition within the skaldic helming or the modern
(rimur) quatrain. It is interesting to observe that
Maurice Grosser also attributes distortion in modern
pictures to the strict composition. But it may well be
that Maurice Grosser is over-emphasizing the effect of
composition on distortion in paintings. Why not take
into account the burning revolt of the artists against
"waking reality, common sense and reason" - as well as
their desire to shock the public?
At this point one might add one more unnatural trait
in the skalds which has a curious parallel in modern
painting. The composition of the skalds is often quite
similar to snapshots for there is very little time movement
in it; usually the sentence ends with the half-stanza or
helming; the second half-stanza may be co-ordinate or
subordinate, but to carry sentence structure from one
stanza to another as the author of the sacred Pldcitusdrdpa
does, in order to tell his story, is extremely odd in skaldic
poetry. Professor Lie notes this stagnant character of
skaldic poetry, contrasting it with the swift flow of the
Eddie poetry. He thinks this style results from the
skald's imitation of the static pictures on the shields. A
similar anti-naturalism, though of opposite nature, arises