Old Norse poetry: how the Vikings viewed the world

Old Norse poetry such as Óttarr’s, in other words, gives us access to a perspective on the Viking Age from the Vikings themselves. Such poetry is full of journeys and battles, dominated by charismatic war-leaders who wield weapons, conquer lands, and share out treasure to their followers.

What did the Vikings use poetry for?

The stereotype of the Vikings as great warriors derives largely from this self-image that was cultivated by their poets. But that is by no means the only subject matter that we find in this body of verse. In the Viking Age, poetry was used to tell mythological stories about the gods and their cosmos, celebrate special occasions, woo prospective lovers, insult rivals, and commemorate everything from a generous gift to a well-decorated interior.

Composed in the Old Norse language, Viking poetry is the great under-used resource for exploring and understanding the early medieval Scandinavian world. Only in such poetry, and in the less eloquent corpus of runic inscriptions, can we hear the Vikings speak for themselves. Given that their actions and ideas have predominately been mediated to us through texts produced by their victims – in places such as England and France – its value cannot be overestimated. And the value of the verse is by no means purely historical. This is powerful and even dizzying poetry, marked by verbal ingenuity, imaginative invention and sheer, varied humanity.

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Old Norse poetry was oral: it was composed without writing, recited publicly at social gatherings, received through the ear, and transmitted through memorisation. It was only decades or even centuries later that it was committed to writing, especially in Iceland, in the later medieval age of literacy.

Oral poetry is different from literate poetry in multiple ways. To compose oral poetry, you have to learn linguistic and metrical systems, and internalise a repertoire of potential words and phrases and formulae. The oral poet also has to command the attention of a public audience, not all of whom may be connoisseurs of such an art form. And you have to appeal to the ear, with arresting sound patterns and memorable locutions.

Two types of Old Norse poetry: eddic and skaldic

Viking poetry has customarily been divided into two main types, called ‘eddic’ and ‘skaldic’. These terms are modern rather than medieval ones, but they act as helpful labels for a distinction that seems to have been recognised by the Scandinavians themselves.

Eddic poetry was anonymous, easy to understand, mythological or legendary in content, and composed in a metre very similar to that used in other Germanic poetries (such as the Old English Beowulf). Most of the eddic poetry that we have is preserved in the Codex Regius manuscript, so named because it was gifted to the King of Denmark, having been discovered in Iceland by Brynjólfur Sveinsson, bishop of Skálholt, in the 17th century.

This collection of poetry has come to be known as the Poetic Edda, and contains 29 poems. These include tales about the beginning and the end of the Norse cosmos, poems that tell stories of the gods Odin and Thor, and ones dedicated to heroes such as Sigurd, who killed the dragon Fafnir and claimed his cursed gold for his own.

Skaldic poetry tended to be composed for specific events or patrons, and it is often attributable to named poets whose itinerant careers can be reconstructed. We know that Óttarr the Black composed not only for Óláfr Haraldsson of Norway, but also for a Norwegian magnate called Dala-Guðbrandr, for the Danish monarchs Swein Forkbeard and Cnut the Great, and two Swedish kings as well. We also know something of Óttarr’s family background: he was an Icelander, and probably the nephew of Sigvatr Þórðarson, the pre-eminent poet of the early 11th century.

Skaldic poetry was, then, an international medium. It can also be connected to historical facts – named poets, datable poems and known locations – in a way that is rare for early medieval poetry. It was composed in a dense, intensive style, and poets both drew on communal traditions and endeavoured to outshine each other with ingenious innovations.

Óttarr’s poem for Óláfr Haraldsson is called Höfuðlausn or Head-Ransom (later traditions claim that the poet had offended the king, and had to save his skin, or ransom his head, by composing a praise-poem). It begins with both a call for hearing and an assurance of the poet’s own excellence: “Listen, noble king with your retinue, to the memory of the dark one (ie Óttarr), because I know how to compose.”

Eddic poetry was anonymous, easy to understand, mythological or legendary in content... Skaldic poetry tended to be composed for specific events or patrons, and it is often attributable to named poets

As the example of Óttarr suggests, skaldic poets were not noted for their modesty. A famous 10th-century skald, Egill Skalla-Grímsson, came to the court of King Eric Bloodaxe in York and declared that he “carried poetry to the fields of England”, as if the country had been hitherto lacking in such a prestige item.

The first two lines at the start of this article read in Old Norse: Atgöngu vannt, yngvi, / ætt siklinga mikla. Although skaldic poetry alliterates like other early verse (here, At-, yng- and ætt alliterate with one another as they all start with vowels), it also shows a number of other demanding features not found in poetry such as Beowulf. These include a precise counting of syllables (six to each line) and a bravura pattern of internal rhyme. There is a specialist vocabulary to draw on – here yngvi is a poetic term for ‘king’ or ‘ruler’ – and a system of metaphors called ‘kennings’, whereby a ship can be the ‘reindeer of the ocean’, or a sword can be the ‘lightning of battle’.

Elsewhere in his Head-Ransom, Óttarr praises the king as the “feeder of the ospreys of the wound-sea”: the wound-sea is blood, the ospreys of blood are carrion birds, and the feeder of the carrion birds is therefore the king as warrior, generously despatching a pile of enemies as the sign of a good day’s work.

Divine verse: gods and giants in Viking poetry

Norse gods don’t fight battles as often as kings such as Óláfr Haraldsson. Yet they, too, have their problems and in Viking poems are constantly at odds with their enemies, the giants. The giants (or jötnar in Old Norse) of mythology are not fairy-tale creatures – they are instead depicted as having social structures similar to that of the gods themselves, and can communicate eloquently. It is not uncommon for a god (particularly Odin) to find himself in a wisdom contest with a giant, as in the poem Vaþrúðnismál or Vafthrudnir’s Sayings.

Here, Odin and the giant Vafthrudnir set their wits against each other and ask and answer questions about the Norse mythical world, its origins and cosmology. For example, Odin asks Vafthrudnir about the beginnings of the world, inquiring: “Whence came the Earth / or the sky above?” to which Vafthrudnir answers that: “Of the flesh of Ymir / was the Earth shaped, / and cliffs of his bones, / the sky of the skull / of the hoar-frost-cold giant, / the sea of his sweat.”

The violent destruction of the primordial giant Ymir’s body to create the Earth is attested in a number of other Old Norse sources, including the eddic poem Völuspá (The Seeress’s Prophecy), which is the first poem in the Poetic Edda.

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The wisdom contest format allows us to observe not only the authority of Odin – he always wins – but also to learn about the Viking cosmos and world-view as the contestants ask and answer their questions. Viking poetry is often competitive, and insults can loom large, as part of the honour and shame culture of the early medieval world. The eddic poem Lokasenna or Loki’s Quarrel is full of insults of sexual indiscretion. Among the cutting accusations that Loki hurls at the other gods is the suggestion that the wife of the martial Tyr has borne Loki’s child, and he says to the war-god that “not an ell nor a penny / have you ever had for this / injustice, wretched one”.

So not only has Tyr been cuckolded by Loki, but he also hasn’t received any compensation for the offence. Tyr has not done what would normally have been considered the manly thing in this culture and taken vengeance on Loki, thus rendering this insult doubly shameful.

Competition also features in verses by a female poet called Steinunn Refsdóttir. Composing in late 10th-century Iceland, in the last years of paganism there, Steinunn used her verse to brag that a missionary’s ship had been destroyed by the power of Thor. The god, she said, broke “the bison of the place of the gull” (ie ship), after Christ “did not protect” it. Here, poetry gives us an insight into religious rivalries in the age of conversion. In a head-to-head comparison between the vigorous Thor and the ineffective Christ, Steinunn declares a clear win for the former.

Viking humour and tragedy within the verse

A different sort of rivalry can be found in verses attributed to two other Icelandic poets who were competing for the attention of the same woman, and used poetry as the medium through which to pursue their long-running feud. One of them, Björn Arngeirsson, insulted his opponent by accusing him of being a rusilkvæðr (‘rubbish poet’) whose mother became pregnant through swallowing a hrognkelsi or lumpfish. In response, the rival poet, Þórðr Kolbeinsson, responded that Björn was “removed from truth and wisdom” and could produce only hvítmál (‘white or cowardly speech’).

So Viking poetry could be low and lampooning as well as lofty and panegyric. And as these verses suggest, such poetry also enables us to access Viking humour. The poet Sigvatr, Óttarr’s uncle, composed a set of Austrfararvísur (Verses on a Journey to the East), a comic travelogue about all the misfortunes that befell him on a diplomatic mission to Sweden. These included blisters on his feet, leaking boats and excessively cumbersome luggage.

Viking poetry could also transport its audience into the realms of tragedy. Norse poets understood love and loss just as keenly as we do and expressed those feelings in poignant verse. Among the tragic figures of the Norse legendary corpus is Brynhild. Stripped of her role as a Valkyrie when she falls in love with a man on the battlefield, Brynhild is later tricked and manipulated into marrying a man she doesn’t love.

Heartbroken and furious, she orchestrates the murder of the one who wronged her and sets herself alight on a pyre. As she recounts the wrongs done to her and predicts devastation to come, the dying Brynhild addresses her husband, saying: “I call many things to mind, how things went against me / when you dealt me the wounds of betrayal; / deprived of desire I was while I lived.”

Norse poets understood love and loss just as keenly as we do and expressed those feelings in poignant verse

Brynhild was certainly no stranger to pain, but her suffering is matched by that endured by Gudrun, the wife of the dragon-slaying Sigurd. Gudrun is the grand tragic heroine of eddic poetry, and in her last moments she recounts the many losses she has endured. These include waking up in the blood of her husband, who has been killed in bed beside her, and the death of her daughter Svanhild, who was falsely accused of infidelity and murdered by her husband.

Gudrun describes her daughter as being sem væri sœmleitr / sólar geisli (“as fine to look at as a ray of sun”), and laments that “it was the hardest of my harms, / when the shining-white hair of Svanhild / they trod into the mud under the hooves of the horses”. The stark contrast between the shining gold of her daughter’s hair and the dull brown of the mud makes this mother’s lament all the more unbearable.

Although its content may often have been bloody and brutal, Viking poetry was a complex and ornate art form, the verbal equivalent of exquisite medieval jewellery or sculpture. And in such poetry, we encounter the Vikings in their own words. It is a remarkable body of verse. Although there is certainly poetry that portrays Vikings as violent and war-hardened, there are also many examples of Old Norse poetry that convey emotion, humanity and even vulnerability.

Alicia Maddalena and Matthew Townend are members of the Department of English and Related Literature, and the Centre for Medieval Studies, at the University of York

This article first appeared in the June 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine