God tur!

I have written, not a thesis for my project, but something almost as good: Sketches towards a thesis. Considering the jumbly, out-and-out spiderwebby state of my thoughts on Old Norse poetry lately, this is practically a miracle. I would never subject you to the whole thing, but here is an excerpt:

(I should mention that, in case you don't know, my project is on orality, visual metaphor, and cognition. Basically, I believe that, as oral poetics is fundamental to human language, cognitive poetics--i.e., metaphor-making--is fundamental to human thinking. And I'm going to exploit Old Norse verse to blatantly convey my personal biases!)

" ... In most of what I’ve read on oral poetry (and even much contemporary writing on written poetry), the focus seems to be on the sonic properties of poetry as mnemonic devices. Alliteration, patterns of stress, and other formal aural poetic devices aid in the memorization of a poem and allow poems to be handed down unchanged for generations. This, at least, is the theory.

However, in my personal experience as a reader of poetry, I can think of many instances in which I remembered not a single phrase from a poem I have read, and yet, I remember it as a poem that I liked because it contained a beautiful and memorable visual metaphor. For instance, without referring to my notes from the lecture, I don’t remember so much as the title of one of the poems we went over in our Old Norse class, but I remember the kenning “falcon’s altar” which refers to an arm, because I thought it was original (I hadn’t heard anything like it before), apt (it is a convincing use of poetic logic), and it makes reference to several things with which I am familiar (I know what a falcon looks like, I know what an altar looks like, I’m familiar with the concept of a hunter or bird-trainer keeping a falcon on his or her arm). I don’t remember the specific wording of the kenning, either in Old Norse or as translated in class, but I remember the image and can therefore reconstruct a similar metaphor in my own words … See where I’m going here?

If a revised look at the manuscripts we have and who it was who was writing them and for what purpose makes us skeptical of a continuous oral tradition of poetry in Old Norse, there seems nevertheless to be evidence in the poetry of a symbolic tradition, a tradition of imagistic metaphor, the meaning of which may change with time or context, but which nevertheless belong to a distinctive kind of poetics and a distinctive milieu of ideas, irrespective of whether or not they are identical in terms of specific wording or even word formulation. For those kennings which reference objects, animals, places, geographical formations, which would have been familiar over long periods of time, it is difficult to say when they began to have symbolic ties to the ideas, objects, gods, etc., for which they are metaphors, but certain of these objects (particularly geographic formations, e.g., anything referring to the sea, which has been an essential aspect of life in Scandinavia for millennia) could have very deep roots, enlightening for the study of culture in the area. However, this indicates nothing about the age of a particular representation of that metaphor in words. The metaphor may be old, the two or three word kenning may be the creative stroke of one poet at one particular moment. Moreover, when conceived as visual referential, these metaphors are fruitful for the scholar of Old Norse poetry, only inasmuch as they exist within a “symbolic field” which includes what we now view as “artifacts” (the kind of objects represented in the kennings including swords, drinking horns, technology, etc.), ecological features (animals, land formations, bodies of water, even weather), and other verbal arts (many of which have been lost). I think, then, one of the best things the scholar of Old Norse poetry can do is to approach the kenning in its convoluted form, initially resisting the urge to reduce it to its more graspable referent and to contemplate the visual image, imagining what sort of world is created by the co-existence of both these objects and the oftentimes heavy symbolic weight attributed to them."