This chapter offers an analysis of the language, metres and forms of Old Norse poetry. It begins with a brief account of Old Norse language and related languages, and then considers the specialized language of Old Norse poetry, with its distinctive lexis and syntax, especially in skaldic verse. Compound words and kennings are discussed, followed by analysis of alliteration and rhyme in Old Norse poetry. The stanzaic form of eddic verse is described, with a detailed account of its main metres and scansions based on Sievers’s ‘five types’. Next, the forms of skaldic poetry are outlined, with an account of lausavísur or ‘loose stanzas’, and the different kinds of stanza sequences, such as the flokkr and the drápa. The primary metre of skaldic verse, dróttkvætt or ‘court metre’, is defined and illustrated, together with some of its many variations, and then attention turns to the rímur, a later form of rhyming and alliterative poetry in extended sequences of stanzas. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how metrical considerations may have affected scribal practice in the Middle Ages and have impacted editorial processes by modern scholars.

This chapter traces the history of Christian poetry in Old Norse-Icelandic from the tenth century to the fourteenth century. Beginning with Hallfreðr Óttarsson, it describes how poets began to incorporate Christian material into their verse during the conversion period in Norway, avoiding pagan imagery and developing new kennings for Christian concepts. It then discusses poetry composed by Icelandic skalds in praise of St Óláfr Haraldsson and his successors, including Einarr Skúlason’s twelfth-century poem Geisli. From the twelfth century onwards the body of Christian poetry is sizeable, and this chapter sets such important works as Harmsól, Sólarljóð and Lilja in the context of this developing poetic tradition. It also outlines the history of Old Norse-Icelandic poetry dealing with saints, including the Virgin Mary, apostles and virgin martyrs. It is suggested that the composition of poems on Christian subjects in praise of God, Christ and the saints was a continuation of the pre-Christian encomiastic tradition, with appropriate modifications of subjects, style and metres.

This chapter focuses on a major subgroup of Islendingasögur, the poets’ sagas or skalds’ sagas. While many Íslendingasögur include skaldic verses placed in the mouths of characters, in poets’ sagas the verses are attributed to and spoken by known poets, who were predominantly Icelanders. The role some of these Icelanders played as court poets to rulers of Norway is often depicted in short narratives or þættir, and is here argued to represent the beginnings of the development of poets’ sagas. Four sagas are concerned with the more personal aspects of the poets’ lives back in Iceland, and the narrative follows a distinct and repeated pattern of rivalry with another man, in some cases also a poet, who marries the object of the protagonist’s desire. These sagas, Kormáks saga, Hallfreðar saga, Bjarnar saga Hítdœkappa and Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu, are analysed in detail to highlight the centrality and similarity of the love-triangle pattern, with Egils saga displaying a vestigial element of it. Themes of love, grief and insult (nið) are discussed, and the chapter concludes by contrasting the bitterness of the poets’ rivalries with the strength of their devotion to their patrons.

This chapter focuses on the reception of Old Norse-Icelandic literature. It begins with a discussion of the definition of the term ‘reception’ and moves on to describe the beginnings of medievalism in Europe and its roots in social and political change. The relationship between nationalism and a ‘Nordic’ or ‘Germanic’ racial identity is explored, and the role of Old Norse myth in politics, ideology and propaganda is analysed. Following a survey of early modern and eighteenth-century European responses to Old Norse literature, including the work of Paul-Henri Mallet, and nineteenth-century translations of Old Norse literature and the work of Jacob Grimm, the discussion moves on to German nationalism and Old Norse, culminating in the National Socialist appropriation of Old Norse mythology and motifs. The use of medieval Icelandic literature to reconstruct a supposed pre-Christian Germanic religion is outlined, and the anti-Christian and anti-Jewish attitudes of so-called völkisch thought explained. The subsequent rise of Neopaganism throughout the world is the subject of the rest of the chapter, with special attention to the racist ideology evident in various Neopagan groups.

Homilies and other texts of Christian instruction form an important part of Old Norse-Icelandic literature and give unparalleled insight into the religious worldview of medieval Icelanders and Norwegians. This chapter traces the development of this corpus, beginning with the first Norse encounters with Christian book culture in the conversion period and the earliest examples of book-production in Norway. It surveys evidence for the character, frequency and context of preaching in Iceland and Norway, including descriptions of sermons in such literary texts as Sverris saga. It discusses the most important repositories of sermons and homilies from this period, including the Icelandic Homily Book and Norwegian Homily Book. Finally, it considers Christian instruction and clerical training more broadly in the Old Norse world, looking at vernacular adaptations of theological primers and treatises translated from Latin, such as Elucidarius, Alcuin’s treatise on virtues and vices, and the Dialogues of Gregory the Great, and closing with discussion of the exempla (dœmisögur) associated with Jón Halldórsson, bishop of Skálholt.

The mythology of Scandinavia as the inspiration for a significant amount of Old Norse poetry, from pre-Christian times and on into the Christian period, is the subject of this chapter. It begins with a critical analysis of the main mythological poems in the first twenty leaves of the Codex Regius: Þrymskviða, Hymiskviða, Lokasenna, Skírnismál, Alvíssmál, Vafþrúðnismál, Hárbárðsljóð, Grímnismál, Völundarkviða and Hávamál, before moving on to consider Völuspá, the poem which opens the collection. The discussion then considers the ways in which mythological thinking also informs some of the poems in the so-called ‘heroic’ section, the Helgi poems, the Sigurðr poems, and poems such as Helreið Brynhildar. Eddic poems from outside the Codex Regius, such as Hyndluljóð, Baldrs draumar and Grottasöngr, are also discussed. Particular attention is paid to metre, poetic language and kennings, and mythological references in skaldic poetry are also described.

The subject of this chapter is Grágás, the compilation of the laws of Iceland in the Commonwealth period. The chapter begins by outlining the court structure of Iceland and the fundamentals of legal procedure, briefly discussing the importance of law to the conversion narrative in Íslendingabók and its account of the first decision to put Iceland’s laws into writing. It describes the distinctive concepts and customs which underlie the legal system of medieval Iceland, looking at the role of the búi (neighbour) in legal procedure, and explaining the key concepts of helgi (the right of inviolability), grið (domicile, or household attachment), vígt (the right to kill or to avenge a wrong with impunity), and the problem of dealing with ómagar (dependants). The chapter argues that the laws and sagas are often mutually informing and demonstrates how fundamental an understanding of law is to the interpretation of the Íslendingasögur. It gives numerous examples of how the laws can be used to help elucidate the sagas, and uses the sagas to reveal the importance of law and legal knowledge in medieval Icelandic society.

This chapter focuses on the heroic poems of the Poetic Edda. It begins by considering the date of the manuscript and the poems it contains, and goes on to offer a definition of the term ‘heroic’ in the context of eddic verse. There is an outline of the historical and legendary contexts of this poetry, and of the material in Völsunga saga, in which heroic poems are also preserved. Comparisons are made with heroic material in Das Nibelungenlied. The history of the Völsungs as narrated in the saga is recounted, and its relation to the individual heroic poems in the Edda explained. Hlöðskviða, or ‘The Battle of the Goths and Huns’, is also discussed, and the chapter moves on to more eddic-style poems set in Viking Age Scandinavia and preserved in fornaldarsögur, some as broadly whole poems, such as ‘The Waking of Angantyr’ or ‘The Riddles of Gestumblindi’, and others as sequences of verse dialogue dramatizing a particular moment in a hero’s life, such as the verses in Ketils saga hængs. The chapter ends with a discussion of summative poems which mark a hero’s end, pre-eminently ‘Hjálmarr’s Death Song’ in Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks.

This chapter deals with the processes of conversion and Christianization as they are explored in Old Norse literature, focusing on skaldic verse composed in Norway and Iceland in the tenth and eleventh centuries. It begins by discussing the poetry of Hallfreðr Óttarsson vandræðaskáld as a representation of a poet’s experience of conversion, through looking at the poems Hallfreðr composed for the pagan Norwegian ruler Hákon jarl and the Christianizing king Óláfr Tryggvason. It then considers the prominent role played by skaldic verse in the conversion of Iceland, in which skaldic poems gave voice both to pagan resistance and to Christian attacks on the pagan gods. Finally, the chapter discusses how poets in eleventh-century Norway were able to adapt their verse to reorient it away from its associations with paganism, allowing them to praise the Christian king Óláfr Haraldsson while preserving the cultural value their art form had traditionally possessed.

This chapter discusses a group of texts which can be categorized as ‘diaspora sagas’: sagas which take place largely in Greenland, Vínland, the Faroe Islands and Orkney, regions settled as a result of migration westward from Norway in the Viking Age. This group comprises four sagas, Orkneyinga saga, Færeyinga saga, Grœnlendinga saga and Eiríks saga rauða, and two þættir, Helga þáttr ok Úlfs and Grœnlendinga þáttr. The chapter discusses the rationale for considering these texts as a group, arguing that they are distinctive for their close focus on the diasporic experience and identifying the most prominent shared themes in these sagas, including settlement and voyaging, the political evolution of the diasporic communities and their relationship with the Norwegian kings, and the process of conversion to Christianity. It suggests that these sagas share an interest in the complex identities of their characters, which are explored in relation to Scandinavia, other regions of Europe and indigenous inhabitants encountered in the Vínland sagas. Finally, the chapter discusses the narrative mode of the diaspora sagas and outlines what is known of their origins, authorship and preservation.

This chapter focuses on Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, providing a thorough introduction to this important text. It argues that few books have been as foundational to several fields of study as Snorri’s treatise has been for the investigation and appreciation of Norse myth, poetry and religion. The opening section of the chapter discusses the work’s title, structure and authorship, and describes the most significant manuscripts and modern translations of the text. It emphasizes the heterogenous character of the Edda, suggesting that the work’s variegated and intertextual nature has given rise to sharply divergent critical impressions of the text and competing theories about its origins and function. The most notable of these different perspectives are summarized, with a comparison of contrasting views on how the Edda came together and what its purpose may have been. Each section of the text is then considered in turn, discussing in detail its content, sources, form and purpose, and the relationship of each section to the compilation as a whole.

The Biskupa sögur (sagas of bishops) deal with the lives of six medieval Icelandic bishops, covering the history of Iceland’s two bishoprics, Skálholt and Hólar, from the mid eleventh century to the fourteenth century. They are important sources for Icelandic church history and the lives of individual bishops, three of whom were venerated as saints. This chapter provides a history of the genre, surveying texts about the saints Þorlákr Þórhallsson, Jón Ögmundsson and Guðmundr Arason, the chronicle Hungrvaka, which records the lives of the five bishops who preceded St Þorlákr, the sagas of three other bishops, Páls saga, Árna saga Þorlákssonar and Lárentíus saga Kálfssonar, and two þættir, Ísleifs þáttr and Jóns þáttr Halldórssonar. This genre has received less scholarly attention than some other genres of Icelandic literature, but this chapter argues that the sagas have much to offer historians and literary scholars. It examines the role of miracle-stories within the sagas and considers what these texts can tell us about such questions as the relationship between memory and literacy in medieval Iceland, the expression of emotion, masculinity, sexuality and celibacy.

This chapter describes the prevalence of prosimetrum – the alternation of narrative prose and skaldic verse – in the Íslendingasögur, with a brief consideration of prosimetrum in konungasögur and samtíðarsögur. A distinction is introduced between verses which are quoted as the dialogue of characters and those which appear to corroborate the narrative prose; it is explained that this distinction is established through the way the verses are incorporated in the prose, and is not inherent in the stanzas themselves. The aesthetic effects of verses representing dialogue in saga prose – additional content, the direct perspective and apparent voice of a character, control of narrative pace and ornamentation – are set out. The plausibility or otherwise of the impromptu recitation of skaldic verse is discussed, and a contrast drawn between the elaborate artificiality of skaldic verse and the ostensible simplicity of saga prose. The distinction between the two kinds of verse use is then problematized. A discussion of how and why the prose and verse first came together comes next, with speculation about how authors constructed their prosimetrical sagas and the literary effects achieved.

By the time Christianity reached Iceland, saints’ lives were already a vast and enormously popular genre of literature well-established across the medieval Christian world. This chapter discusses how Icelandic writers engaged with this genre, concentrating especially on translated saints’ lives in Old Norse. While rooted in and responding to the particular conditions of Icelandic society, these vernacular adaptations and engagements with Latin Christian culture also transported the readers and writers of Old Norse-Icelandic literature far beyond their immediate environs. Beginning with the earliest examples of saints’ lives from the twelfth century, this chapter outlines how the genre developed over time from relative simplicity to a more complex and rhetorically accomplished approach. It describes how saints’ lives intersected with other forms of literature being written in medieval Iceland, including romance and the family sagas, and addresses categories of saint’s life which have received less critical attention: the Marian corpus, the lives of virgin martyrs and Low German translations into Old Norse-Icelandic.