In the introduction to his translation of the Völsunga Saga (1870), the Victorian polymath William Morris (1834–96) proposed that the “Great Story of the North” should be to England what the story of Troy was to ancient Greece and Rome. Clearly, his dream was never realized, and Old English and Old Norse literature remain niche areas of study, unapproached and misunderstood by many. In The Etiquette of Early Northern Verse, Roberta Frank aims to resurrect Old English and Old Norse poetry and, by examining their structures and complexity, reveal the value of these two corpora.
Frank, the Marie Boroff Professor Emeritus of English at Yale University, explores the minute details of Old Norse “skaldic” verse or dróttkvætt (court meter) and Old English alliterative poetry from the long Viking Age, a period well known for the dynamic historical and political shifts that shaped the nations of Northern Europe and beyond and was remarkable for its literary treasures. Frank’s goal is to examine the connections between the two poetic traditions by analyzing their histories and by reconstructing the interplay between the two languages. In a concise and helpful introduction, Frank imparts that the biggest challenge to her study was that only a small portion of Old Norse and Old English poetry survives.
The first chapter of Early Northern Verse looks at structure and aesthetics in the subjects and themes that interested Norse and Anglo-Saxon listeners. These are stories about change and loss, detailed and expressed in their broken structures and enjambed sentences. The central chapter explores the architecture behind this kind of verse. The blueprints Frank lays out reveal layers of complexity and ornamentation that are easily lost on the casual reader. She examines both the linguistic and poetic tools used by these writers and the sounds they produced. The last chapter deals with the unspoken rules of decorum and politesse.
Frank starts by discussing the relationship between Old Norse and Old English poetry. Old English, Old Norse, Old Saxon, and Old High German alliterative poetry share a common ancestor in early Germanic oral poetry. As a result, they retain a communal basic structure: each line consists of two parts, or half lines, linked together by alliteration. Though the link between the two traditions is strongly demonstrated, the lack of evidence in time and authorship means that exact proof of how they influenced each other is impossible. Frank breaks these verse structures down in more detail, dispelling the misconception that these early forms of poetry are crude or simple. In reference to the form of dróttkvætt stanza, she says:
All forms of linguistic expression involve constraints, but few meters are more like a strait jacket than dróttkvætt is. Of the forty-eight syllables in a stanza, normally twenty-four were metrically long and stressed, twelve bore alliteration, eight had to form half-rhyme, and eight, full rhyme.
The skald, who served a function similar to bards in the Celtic tradition, had to be perfectly precise in the words he chose and how they were placed to tell his story effectively.
Keats once described a rhyme as a kiss, and rhyme and meter are undoubtedly the backbone of modern English poetry. In the Viking Age, Frank writes that alliteration was the most important mechanism for skalds and Old English poets. These poets still used rhyme to distinguish themselves, but the complex assortment of half- and internal rhymes sounds strange to a modern English speaker. Frank offers numerous examples in both languages of alliteration and rhyme, while providing her own translations beneath, drawing myriad extracts from Beowulf to Bede.
The final chapter examines what was being said and not said—the etiquette of early Northern poets. Here Frank looks more at what the words actually meant than how they were structured, and she uncovers a complex layer of understanding that existed between the Viking-Age poet and his audience. “Poet after poet in the Viking-Age North practiced ostentatious verbal restraint, counting on listeners to fill in the gaps according to taste and knowledge,” explains Frank. “There is an aching incompleteness and indeterminacy to such verse, a sense of something not quite said.” Her vast knowledge of these languages, their respective literatures, and their shared codes of poetic etiquette allows Frank to reveal to the reader the subtle meaning behind skaldic reticence. Frank, in her words, helps her audience “read between half-lines, to hear what was not said.”
Frank quips that “students of Old English verse forever find themselves on the wrong side of the Norman Conquest.” The Etiquette of Early Northern Verse may not bring Northern literature to the primacy Morris hoped it might one day enjoy, but within its pages, Frank provides a blueprint for understanding and resurrecting two important literary traditions.