Flattery and Rap Battles: Poetry in Norse Culture

Did you know that in medieval epics, warriors sometimes instigated duels by spinning poems?

In the Saga of Gunlaug Serpent-Tongue, Gunnlaug and a fellow Icelander have the medieval equivalent of a rap battle in the court King Olaf the Swede. Their conflict actually begins with a passive-aggressive disagreement about who should present a poem of flattery to the king first. They end up trading insults about each other’s’ poems, which escalates quickly and results in horrific consequences: Gunnlaug’s countryman returns to Iceland before Gunnlaug does and essentially steals Gunnlaug’s betrothed in revenge. Unsurprisingly, the two men eventually come to blows, and ultimately kill each other in a duel.

Because of their poems.

But there was more to poetry in the Norse tradition than throwing down verbal gauntlets.

When Gunnlaug first leaves his home in Iceland to travel the world, he presents himself at the court of King Ethelred in Britain, where he asks for permission to recite a poem he has composed on his journey specifically for the king. Although Gunnlaug does not seem to have needed the hearing to gain access to the court in general, his request suggests (and what follows demonstrates) that reciting original poetry for a ruler was at least not an uncommon phenomenon, and could be used to gain special access to the ruler in question.

Ethelred agrees to hear the poem, which he likes enough to reward Gunnlaug with “a cloak of scarlet lined with the finest furs and with an embroidered band stretching down to the hem.” And Ethelred is not the only ruler to hear Gunnlaug present a poem, and to reward him for it with fine clothes, jewelry, or equipment. Everywhere Gunnlaug travels, he presents himself to the local ruler and asks permission to recite a poem he has written just for them, resulting in gifts such as a “new suit of scarlet clothes, an embroidered tunic, a cloak lined with expensive furs and a gold bracelet which weighed a mark,” and a “broad axe, decorated all over with silver inlay.” Poetry, it seems, was a legitimate and, perhaps depending on the skill of the poet, reliable method of accumulating wealth. In fact, it is a common enough practice that when Gunnlaug has recited his poem for King Stigtrygg Silk-beard in Dublin, even though this particular king has never been entertained by a poet before and is not sure how to reward Gunnlaug, his treasurer knows exactly what the standard practice is. 

Poetry also functions in The Saga of Gunnlaug as a means of either avoiding (unlike the "rap battle" mentioned earlier), at court and in the wider world. During one of his visits with an Earl, two parties begin to argue about who is better, their host, Earl Sigurd, or the visiting Norwegians’ Earl Eirik. They ask Gunnlaug’s opinion as an impartial third party, and he settles the matter by reciting an apparently ad hoc poem that pleases both parties and thus ends the argument.

Finally, The Saga of Gunnlaug demonstrates that poetry could open a path into a lord’s retinue. When Gunnlaug recited his poem for King Ethelred, he did not just receive a cloak—the king made Gunnlaug one of his followers. Service in a lord’s retinue as a follower included functioning as a fighting man—when Grunnlaug asks Ethelred for permission to go home to Iceland at a time when war with the Danes was a looming possibility, Ethelred denies Gunnlaug the leave, saying “’Since you are my follower … it is not appropriate for you to leave when such a war threatens England.” While there are a number of reasons Ethelred may have been unwilling to let Gunnlaug leave while on the brink of war, the implication is that Gunnlaug was serving the king as a warrior—and his first step to getting this position was reciting that first poem.

This makes me want to undertake an analysis of the role of poetry in Tolkien's work—as far as I can recall, they primarily served to convey history and memorialize the dead.

Source: The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-Tongue, trans. Katrina C. Attwood (Milton Keynes: Penguin Books, 2015), from Sagas of Warrior-Poets (Penguin Classics, 2002).

Magic Rings

We all know about the One Ring and its attributes. Most notably, it made its wearer invisible. Genius idea! But even though I knew Tolkien drew from medieval literature and how fond its writers were of attributing special powers to objects like named weaponry, I was surprised to come across more than just those generic influences as I began to study medieval Germanic literature.

After taking a Middle High German class, I joined a reading group in which we read Iwein, an epic Aurthurian poem by Hartmann von Aue.

Fairly early on, the titular character Iwein runs into some trouble when he goes off in search of adventure ('aventiure? waz ist daz?'). In brief, he picks a fight and kills the lord of a castle. In the process, he has the misfortune to be caught inside the castle walls to face the ire of the lord's armed men. But there's a young woman there named Lûnete who decides to help him. She gives him a ring and tells him its special attribute: when he holds it in his hand, nobody can see or find him. The ring's power of bestowing invisibility upon its bearer as long as it is held in his hand bears true; though the men of the castle seek him diligently, they can't find him.

Peter J. Yost

This is a brief section of a long tale - a few hundred lines out of more than 8,000. But it jarred me when I first read the fateful words of Lûnete in lines 1202-1207:

her Iwein, nemet diz vingerlîn.

ez ist umben stein alsô gewant:

swer in hât in blôzer hant,

den mac niemen, als die vrist

unz her in blôzer hant ist,

gesehen noch gevinden.

Lord Iwein, take this ring.

Regarding the stone, it is important:

Whoever has it in his bare hand,

him may no one, during that time

while it is in his bare hand,

see or find.

In other words, "Lord Iwen, take this ring. The stone is significant in that whoever holds it in his bare hand cannot be seen or found by anyone, as long as it is in his bare hand."

How cool is that?!

Now, this is not the only magic ring in medieval and ancient literature to grant its bearer invisibility. It's possible Tolkien was drawing from some other tale when he gave it to Bilbo as a means of escaping Gollum in The Hobbit, or that he was drawing from multiple stories. Either way, I loved stumbling upon the knowledge that Tolkien was referencing and building on other, older tales so specifically in his works.

It's kind of like finding treasure.

The Wanderer: Where is the Horse and the Rider?

I was an English major in college. As part of our program, we had to take a 3-term sequence of classes called Introduction to the English Major - basically a survey of the classical Western canon. Early on in that class we studied Old and Middle English literature in translation. I particularly recall reading The Dream of the Rood and The Wanderer, but that was in 2002; I had read The Lord of the Rings, but The Two Towers film wasn't out yet.

Long years have passed, and some things that should not have been forgotten were lost from my memory - like the content of The Wanderer. But today I pulled a book called The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation off my shelves and read The Wanderer, translated by Greg Delanty. In the middle of the poem is the following bit of verse:

Where is the horse gone? The young bucks? The kind king?

Where is the banquet assembly gone? The merrymaking?

O the glittering glass. O the uniformed man.

O the general's glory. How that time has passed.

Night shrouds all as if nothing ever was.

Anyone who's seen Peter Jackson's The Two Towers will recognize the similarity of this poem to King Theoden's words before the battle of Helm's Deep:

Where is the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?

They have passed like rain on the mountains, like wind in the meadow.

The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.

This film quote is in turn an abbreviation of a poem by Tolkien in the book (which is actually recited/translated by Aragorn, and not on the eve of battle):

Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?

Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?

Where is the hand on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing?

Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing?

They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow;

The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.

Who shall gather the smoke of the dead wood burning,

Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?

I love this. I imagine Tolkien reading The Wanderer and being struck by that portion of the poem, and choosing to create his own poem in its image. Then the movies came and the creators were struck by Tolkein's poem, and decided to include it, also with some changes, in their screenplay.

I have done similarly: I've written poems inspired by songs and hymns, and when I read The Song of Hildebrand in my Old High German class, I immediately had a similar impulse. (Being in the midst of term paper-writing, however, I had neither the time nor the brain cells to act on it. Must get back to that...).

If you love Tolkien, you really ought to check out some medieval literature. You'll be amazed how often you'll recognize its influence in his writings.

It's delightful. :)

Galadriel's RoP Swim: A Character Compression

Perhaps the key moment of "A Shadow of the Past," the first episode of The Rings of Power's first season one, happens at the end when Galadriel jumps from the ship to Valinor at the last moment and, after the light fully fades, begins swimming back to Middle Earth.

One of the important elements of this moment is that there is no guarantee that she'll make it. In episode two, in fact, she seeks refuge among shipwrecked humans; she's exhausted and dehydrated, with no land even in sight. If she hadn't ended up on the makeshift raft, she likely would have died on the Sundering Seas - she almost does, anyway.

So why did she even attempt it?

The Master Adapter: What People Don't Understand about Tolkien

Have you seen this meme? It floats across my social media periodically:

It's a fun meme, and there is truth behind it, but it's also rather misleading.

Contrary to popular belief, Tolkien did not create his story world out of thin air as the meme suggests. As many fans know, Tolkien was influenced by mythology and his Catholic faith. And it's clear that he relied on his professional knowledge of old languages and linguistics in creating the tongues of Middle Earth. But there's more:

The Elven Rings - A Site Introduction

Welcome to The Elven Rings! This site is about Tolkein's works and adaptations thereof, and the medieval literature and languages that inspired him. Here's why:

I was introduced to Tolkien via the movie posters for The Fellowship of the Ring in Germany, where I was living as an exchange student. I'd never read much fantasy before, but those posters were pretty cool looking, so I decided to see the film. But first, I wanted to read the book so I knew what was going on when I saw the movie (because I'd be seeing it in German). I found an English copy of The Lord of the Rings in one volume at a bookstore in the train station, and the rest is history.

Meanwhile, I majored in English literature in college and discovered a mild interest in medieval literature. Fast forward several years (and life adventures) later, and that interest is no longer mild; I'm almost done with a master's degree in Germanic Studies, in which I've focused on philology and linguistics. It's been pretty fun to read medieval knights' tales and the like in archaic forms of German and discover things therein like magic rings that make the wearer invisible, or to find the obvious inspiration for Rohan's poem (recited in part by King Theoden in The Two Towers film) in the middle of an Old English fragment.

There is, in my opinion, much joy to be found in such explorations and discoveries; in the contemplation of literary influences and the kinds of decisions that go into making translations, adaptations, and augmentations of source materials.

So pull up your cart, pass around some malt beer, and fulfill your oaths. You are most welcome here.