SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

Skaldic Poetry and Modern Painting 1.37
in modern painting when the futurists try to introduce
time and movement into their pictures.
In touching upon surrealist painting and skaldic
poetry, we found that both could be interpreted in the
light of dreams. It seems to me that in cubist painting
we may have a closer approximation to the working or the
mechanism of the kennings than in any other painting
form. You can look upon cubist painting as made up of
abstract lines and more or less concrete representation of
the subject matter. Similarly, the kennings can be
looked upon as being always made up of two things, an
abstract base word (prop) and a concrete defmer. In
other words, you have the same polarity between abstract
and concrete both in skaldic poetry and in cubist painting.
In a great many cases the abstract base in skaldic poetry
is a nomen agentis or the name of a doer, like "ring-giver,
-thrower, -spender", who is being concretely defined by
the object of his doing, the rings, the gold, the treasure.
Incidentally, most verbs in skaldic poetry are embedded
in these nomina agentis, so that the style of the poetry is
eminently a style of nouns, another definitely un-natural
and unprosaic trait of the style. In still other cases we
have names of trees as abstract base words, masculine or
feminine, according to whether it is a name for a man, or
a woman, a warrior or a lady. You can thus call man an
ash, a maple or a grove of trees and define him by his
fighting, his weapons, his ships. You can call woman an
oak, log or willow and define her by her finery, such as
necklaces, bracelets, finger-rings (d. above on Dali's
vanity-case breast picture), or you can define her as
a beer-spending hostess, or a giver of wine and mead.
This use of tree names as a basis for kennings seems more
abstract than most bases and is extremely peculiar and
mysterious, unless it might be connected with the
World-tree cult of the Scandinavians. That such a cult
existed seems certain not only from the well-known Eddie
myth of the Ash of Yggdrasill and Adam of Bremen's