The Etiquette of Early Northern Verse

by Roberta Frank

Overview

In The Etiquette of Early Northern Verse, Roberta Frank peers into the northern poet’s workshop, eavesdropping as Old English and Old Norse verse reveal their craft secrets.

This book places two vernacular poetries of the long Viking Age into conversation, revealing their membership in a single community of taste, a traditional stylistic ecology that did serious political and historical work. Each chapter seeks the codes of a now-extinct verse technique. The first explores the underlying architecture of the two poetries, their irregularities of pace, startling formal conventions, and tight verbal detail work. The passage of time has worn away most of the circumstantial details that literary scholars in later periods take for granted, but the public relations savvy and aural and syntactic signals of early northern verse remain to some extent retrievable and relatable, an etiquette prized and presumably understood by its audiences. The second and longest chapter investigates the techniques used by early northern poets to retrieve and organize the symmetries of language. It illustrates how supererogatory alliteration and rhyme functioned as aural punctuation, marking off structural units and highlighting key moments in the texts. The third and final chapter describes the extent to which both corpora reveled in negations, litotes, indirection, and down-toners, modes that forced audiences to read between half-lines, to hear what was not said. By decluttering and stripping away excess, by drawing words through a tight mesh of meter, alliteration, and rhyme, the early northern poet filtered out dross and stitched together a poetics of stark contrasts and forebodings. Poets and lovers of poetry of all periods and places will find much to enjoy here. So will students in Old English and Old Norse courses.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780268202514
Publisher:	University of Notre Dame Press
Publication date:	05/01/2022
Series:	Conway Lectures in Medieval Studies
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	296
Sales rank:	1,054,054
File size:	674 KB

About the Author

Roberta Frank is the Marie Borroff Professor Emerita of English at Yale University. Over the past half century, she has published many essays on the style, form, and history of Old English and Old Norse poetry. Her first sole-authored book was Old Norse Court Poetry.

Read an Excerpt

Comparing poetries is a little like marriage: you begin by stressing mutual affinities and end up accentuating differences. As in lawful wedlock, the relationship between Old English and dróttkvætt verse encompasses stylistic mirroring and variation on multiple levels, a family resemblance reinforced by several periods of proximity and intercourse. The two vernacular poetries connected, even if it was an on-again off-again affair. Like many couples, they developed horizontal intimacies outside the immediate family. The Old English verse that has come down to us took shape within a culture of literacy; for some poems, a long-lasting attachment to Latin predecessors was an open secret. The post positioning of prepositions along with several other stylistic devices may have been reinforced by the practice of Latin poets. Nor was the earliest dróttkvætt verse immune to continental modes and the charms of Carolingian poetic ekphrasis. Both corpora weathered various forms of inequality; a range of economical, ideological, geographical, and cultural disparities all left a mark. Still, despite their distinct public personalities, the list of compatibilities confirming Old English verse and viking-age dróttkvætt as a viable pair is long.

Dróttkvætt verse presents itself as lean, tight, neat, and closemouthed, Old English, as run-on, messy, and expansive; the former is notably abstruse, devious, and unnatural, committed to maximizing gain at minimal cost and energy; the latter, warm, repetitive, and seemingly open. Handbooks teach that dróttkvætt verse is recondite, occasional, subjective, arrogant, formal, convoluted, esoteric, self-conscious, self-seeking, elitist, situation-bound, and datable, that Old English poetry is uncomplicated, narrative, objective, leisurely, expansive, and dignified, concerned with religious/heroic tradition and wisdom. One member of this couple underpays; the other over-tips. Nevertheless, they manage to get along and to demonstrate good manners in the other’s presence, a familial code of etiquette based on the tenet “if you can’t be kind, at least be vague.” Frankness, relevancy, logical fullness, staid clarity, a desire to be informative: the modern conversational principles set out by Grice are rarely in sight. Meaning in both poetries is cunningly camouflaged, half-hidden within a flow of compliments, negations, weasel words, and stray observations. In each, dignity, emotional minimalism, restraint, civility, even stealthy one-upmanship take precedence over the communication of facts. Urbane detachment and politeness rule.

From a distance, the underlying architecture of the two bear a resemblance, the deep framework alluded to by the twelfth-century Chinese writer Chiang T’e-li, whose poem on how to do plum blossoms advised: “Painting plum blossom is like judging a horse. You go by bone structure, not by appearance.” In northern verse, these limbs are often artfully scattered. The disjointedness of the dróttkvætt stanza is notorious: within each quatrain, clauses are segmented and placed discontinuously, the sense dispersed over four lines. Old English half-lines do not undergo such drastic dismemberment, but they, too, are mobile; parenthetical clauses, syntactic retroversions, and other unnatural behavior abound. Fifty years ago, T. A. Shippey pointed out that, although subordinate clauses beginning with ‘when’, ‘since’, and ‘after’ are free to come before or after a main clause, in Beowulf such clauses almost invariably come second; the fact or emotion comes first, the explanation, cause, or time-indication trails behind. The surviving stanzas of the first extant Old Norse praise-poem in regular dróttkvætt, Þorbjǫrn hornklofi’s Glymdrápa ‘Resounding-drápa’ (c. 890), consistently and similarly subordinates the second half-stanza syntactically to the first, using conjunctions such as “before” or “when” (SkP 1.1: 73–91). The cumulative effect of this stylistic habit – “they rejoiced … until” – seems meaningful. Nothing in life is certain until the last word is in.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Conventions
Making an Entrance
1. Rules of the Game
2. Secrets of the Line
3. Accentuating the Negative
Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

Roberta Frank, one of the most skillful (and certainly the wittiest) of interpreters of early medieval poetry, demonstrates here that early English scops and Viking skalds manipulated their verse forms in remarkably similar ways and to remarkably similar effects.” —Christopher Abram, author of Evergreen Ash

“Roberta Frank’s scholarship is exemplary. She is the leading light in the field, and wherever she goes, others willingly follow, persuaded both by the force of her arguments and the weight of her evidence.” — Antonette diPaolo Healey, former editor of The Dictionary of Old English

"This fabulous book of ‘Northern’ poetics developed out of the Robert Conway Lectures in Medieval Studies . . . condenses the work of a lifetime. . . . Distant though it may be, Northern poetry is never read in isolation. Frank’s exuberance is, as always, catching—this is a book I want all my students to read." —The Review of English Studies

"The Etiquette of Early Northern Verse is a dazzling master class in early medieval alliterative style, identifying and showcasing artistic strategies shared by scop and skald. It collects half a century’s worth of insights into features that, though not formally required, were appreciated in both Old Norse dróttkvætt and Old English verse as expressions of poetic art, notably ornamental alliteration, half-rhyme, and paranomasia; understatement and litotes; and subtle ways of referencing individuals and narratives known to the audience." —Anglia

"Frank . . . 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. . . . [She] provides a blueprint for understanding and resurrecting two important literary traditions." —The New Criterion

"The Etiquette of Early Northern Verse is a wonderful book: erudite, witty, replete with allusions both learned and (occasionally) lewd. Frank treats, quite simply, style in Old English and Old Norse poetry, and the book is a master class in noticing and judging the sonic effects, understatements, and ironies that were the stock-in-trade of the early northern poets." —Choice

"The Etiquette of Early Northern Verse is the rare academic book whose style perfectly matches the excitement its subject raises for the author.... I would recommend it to anyone who wishes to go beyond a mechanical understanding of these complex and aloof poetries, for I think Frank succeeds in resurrecting these extinct strangers for us, bringing them a measure of the life and liveliness that they must have held for generations of Old English and Old Norse speakers. —The Medieval Review

"The Etiquette of Early Northern Verse is both a classic and a tour de force, with all the virtues of both; it is an important and thrilling read." —Heather O’Donoghue, University of Oxford

"This is a beautiful book, by a celebrated and sensitive reader of Old English and (especially) Old Norse, whose always elegant and witty prose has often been imitated by her many disciples, but never bettered. . . . The prose is always gorgeous, and the close reading equally thoughtful and thought-provoking. This is an electric book, that requires and repays rereading, and still leaves the hairs standing." —The Journal of English and Germanic Philology

"Frank presents the reader with an intellectual provocation of the best kind, and it is to be hoped that this may inspire further exploration of a highly interesting topic." –Speculum

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