The Structure of Old Norse Drottkvaett Poetry

Probably recited at court, the drottkvaett was a form of Old Norse skaldic poetry composed to glorify a chieftain's deeds or to lament his death. Kari Ellen Gade explores the structural peculiarities of ninth- and tenth-century drottkvaett poetry and offers new answers to fundamental questions about its word order, syntax, composition recitation, comprehension, and relationship to similar genres. At the same time, she suggests a solution to the mystery of the origins of the drottkvaett and its eventual demise in the fourteenth century.
Governed by a strict system of syllable counting and internal rhymes, drottkvaett meter was the most stylized and most highly regarded in skaldic poetry. Gade offers a systematic discussion of the metrical and syntactic structure of drottkvaett and shows how this poetry was composed according to traditional patterns of alliteration. The restrictions imposed by alliteration, she finds, were largely responsible for syntactic arrangements of various types and for differences between the syntactic fillers used in odd and even lines. Gade demonstrates as well that skaldic syntax was determined by fixed patterns of placement of subjects and verbs, and that sentence boundaries were marked by syllabi and metrical markers that must have made such syntactic breaks audible during recitation. The first scholar to examine the relations between the metrical structure and the phonetic realization of drottkvaett poetry, Gade shows that, contrary to recent speculation, it could not have been sung or chanted.

Kari Ellen Gade is Assistant Professor of Germanic Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.