![]() ![]() (In this example, and those that follow, diagonal strokes above lines indicate stressed syllables.) 10 9 He makes use of this strophic form more frequently than any other. Jónas was intimately familiar with it, not only through the work of his immediate predecessors and contemporaries but through the medieval classics of the Poetic Edda (which he had studied with great care and which his own poems frequently cite). It is the immediate descendant of the older stichic poetry and has enjoyed uninterrupted currency in Iceland for a thousand years, from the days of the Scandinavian settlement in the ninth century until the late nineteenth century, when its practice more or less lapsed. There are two basic types of eddic strophe, fornyrðislag ("the manner of the old utterances") and ljóðaháttur ("the style of songs").įornyrðislag (pronounced FORT-near-this-lahg) is the more ancient of the two types. 7 Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda was compiled in the early thirteenth century as a handbook for poets who wanted to keep this poetry alive and continue to work in its traditions. ![]() Skaldic poetry was composed in extremely elaborate types of strophes, is almost always attributed to named poets, and can be regarded as a species of occasional poetry that was produced to celebrate memorable events or to be recited on important contemporary occasions. The other type is known as skaldic (or scaldic) poetry after its chief practitioners the skalds, many of whom were semi-professional poets at the courts of the Norwegian kings. Eddic poetry was composed in simple types of strophes, was always anonymous, and generally consisted of narrative or dialogue poems about the pagan gods of Scandinavia (Óðinn, Þórr, Freyr, etc.) or the great legendary heroes of the Germanic Migration Period (Sigurður, Brynhildur, etc.). One type is known today as eddic (or eddaic) poetry, after the so-called Poetic Edda (a collective name for poetry of this kind). In fact those settlers brought with them two distinct styles or types of strophic poetry. 5 The transformation was more or less complete by the time written records begin and it was oral poetry of the strophic type that was carried from Norway to Iceland in the ninth and tenth centuries by the country's earliest Scandinavian settlers. In Scandinavia, however, for reasons that have never been fully understood, this ancestral stichic poetry came to be articulated in strophes already in preliterate times. Beowulf (from eighth-century Anglo-Saxon England) and the Hildebrandslied (from eighth-century Germany) are both stichic. ![]() In earliest Germanic times, this traditional oral poetry seems to have been stichic, not strophic, i.e., it was through-composed like modern blank verse, not broken up into strophic or stanzaic units. These forms are the descendants of the ancient oral poetry practiced by all pre-literate Germanic peoples and mentioned by the Roman historian Tacitus as early as ca. Strophic FormsĪbout half of Jónas's poetry is composed in strophic forms without end-rhyme. Formal Features of Jónas Hallgrímsson's Poetry and the Present Verse Translations 1. ![]()
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