Skaldic Poetry – A Case Study: The Poetry of Torf-Einarr Rǫgnvaldsson of Orkney

Summary

A variety of genres are expressed in the skaldic mode, including praisepoetry, love-poetry, hagiography, mockery and slander, travelogue, and political commentary. One of the most popular genres, however, is verse that describes armed conflict, which we might term ‘battle-poetry’. As Norman Ingham observes, genre reflects the interactions between literature and the society in which it is produced, and the sheer quantity of skaldic poetry about armed conflict must be due in large part to the courtly context in which so much of it originated: particularly during the early medieval period, skaldic verse was primarily composed by and for a warrior elite. Poetry about armed conflict offered a means through which to praise rulers, castigate enemies, and emphasise the shared values and experiences of the warrior community. Indeed, the very ubiquity of battle-stanzas in the skaldic corpus can make the genre seem somewhat amorphous. Descriptions of armed conflict appear in many of the generic contexts listed above: love-poetry, for example, may describe a warrior’s prowess as a means of impressing a woman; poetic slander may describe a man's defeat in battle or his failure to engage in conflict at all. Battlepoetry is particularly closely connected to praise-poetry, as many Viking- Age rulers are eulogised for their fighting abilities, and the line between these two genres is often blurred. This does not mean, however, that the concept of ‘battle-poetry’ as a genre should be discarded; it is, rather, an illustration of Kevin Whetter's argument that ‘what distinguishes a genre is not the presence of certain elements but the emphasis and significance given to each of them’. Battle-poetry is, in essence, poetry in which the description of armed conflict is of primary importance; battle-poetry in the skaldic mode also tends to incorporate a series of related features that further signal its generic identity. This chapter will discuss the genre of battle-poetry as manifested in five stanzas attributed to the early skaldic poet Torf-Einarr Rǫgnvaldsson, earl of Orkney. These stanzas are in many ways typical of the genre of skaldic battle-poetry, but they also exemplify the difficulties of delineating that genre, particularly when the stanzas are considered in the context of the later prose sagas in which they are now preserved.