First full analysis of the skaldic verse appearing in the family sagas
of Icelanders, considering why and how it is deployed.
Sagas of Icelanders, also called family sagas, are the best known of the
many literary genres that flourished in medieval Iceland, most of them
achieving written form during the thirteenth and early fourteenth
centuries. Modern readers and critics often praise their apparently
realistic descriptions of the lives, loves and feuds of settler families
of the first century and a half of Iceland's commonwealth period (c. AD
970-1030), but this ascription of realism fails to account for one of
the most important components of these sagas, the abundance of skaldic
poetry, mostly in dróttkvætt "court metre", which comes to saga heroes'
lips at moments of crisis.
These presumed voices from the past and their integration into the
narrative present of the written sagas are the subject of this book. It
investigates what motivated Icelandic writers to develop this particular
mode, and what particular literary effects they achieved by it. It also
looks at the various paths saga writers took within the evolving
prosimetrum (a mixed verse and prose form), and explores their likely
reasons for using poetry in diverse ways. Consideration is also given to
the evolution of the genre in the context of the growing popularity in
Iceland of romantic and legendary sagas. A final chapter is devoted to
understanding why a minority of sagas of Icelanders do not use poetry at
all in their narratives.
