SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

Saga-Book of the Viking Society
My comparison of skaldic poetry and modern art has
come to an end. I hope to have shown what I set out to
show: first, that the principle of un-natural distortion is
just as alive and potent an artistic striving in skaldic
poetry and medieval Icelandic rlmur as it is in modern
art, whatever the reasons for it in each art form; second,
that strivings for a tough hard composition are just as
vigorous in skaldic poetry and in the modern Icelandic
quatrain as they are in some modern art, notably cubist
painting; and third, that the will to punning, riddling,
and parody is just as prominent in skaldic poetry and
especially in the medieval rimur, later on, as it is in much
modern painting.
Given such great similarities between skaldic verse and
modern art in method and in their strivings after form,
we must still try to answer the question: Is skaldic poetry
great poetry or inferior art? Our greatest Icelandic
scholar and critic, Sigurtiur Nordal, has answered this
question in the negative. According to him, skaldic
poetry is so difficult and uninteresting that it is read only
by misled schoolboys and dry-as-dust Icelandic scholars.
I would not dare to disagree. But I do not think that he
has ever tried to compare skaldic poetry with modern art.
Neither do I know how high he might value the paintings
of Picasso, although I know he likes the modernist
paintings of the Icelander Kjarval. But lWf(' is the rub.
Noone until the modernist painting period could hope to
have any possibility of understanding skaldic poetry with
the help of his own artistic principles. It was a different
matter with the simple almost classical art of the sagas
which were appreciated, first by the romantics, then by the
realists of the nineteenth century. The great scholar
W. P. Ker compared their art to Flauberts, and now they
have won world acclaim. Two great scholars of the
twentieth century, one German and the other American,
translated skaldic poetry into their native idiom, but
neither compared it with modern art. Hallvard Lie was