The Curving Branches of Skulls: Skaldic poetry. In the last lecture, we looked at an extremely deep tradition of literature, one that might only be preserved in 10th century poems, and only recorded in 13th century manuscripts, but goes all the way back to the time when the Huns were first invading Europe and fighting Germanic tribes; a time right after the fall of the Roman Empire, at the very beginning of the Viking period. This material might only be preserved in these later texts, but it has a deep, deep history. Now we're going to look at another kind of poetry. One which made the Icelanders famous in their own time, and made them successful and rich. But one that wasn't quite as old or as necessarily tied up in traditional rules, and one that's extremely difficult for us to understand in modern English. I'm making it sound really appealing, aren't I? It's not like the Eddaic poetry; it's the skaldic poetry, which is [i]not[/i] simple. But, the skaldic poetry is an immense poetic accomplishment within its own language and tradition, and more importantly, we'll really find out about drinking from skulls. I know I'm being a big tease about this; it's intentional. So this lecture we're gonna talk about skaldic poetry, and "skal" is really just the Old Norse word for "poet." Anyone with poetic skill cold be called a skald, but in the later Viking era, particularly during the reign of Harald Fair-Hair--remember him? He was the one who unified Norway and chased out the various chieftains. Skalds began to produce a particular kind of poetry. Complex, sophisticated and aimed at the king's court, rather than the traditional audience. And intended to be innovative, rather than to be traditional. See, court poetry is a different kind of poetry, and we see this in French in poetry, we see it in English poetry from the 17the century, or the renaissance period, and from later. Court poetry is aimed at a particular audience, and this is an audience that sophisticated, or even jaded. This is an audience that wants to see sort of verbal gymnastics, or cleverness, or wittiness, more than they care about the tradition. If I was a 19the century German scholar, I would say something like, "This was a tradition that was heading towards decadence." I don't think it's decadence, exactly, but it's not the kind of poetry that you would tell sitting around a campfire, or around the hearth of your house in Iceland with the regular group of friends and neighbors and the kids rolling around on the floor with the dogs or something like that. It's the kind of poetry that you said at the king's court. It's very very intellectual. It's full of jokes, references possible insults that you can't really be sure if they're insults. And it varies from the old traditions. Now the skalds, they were extremely brilliant. I sometimes wonder, though, how many people could actually understand them. I just don’t' know if everyone listening go the whole joke. I don't want to put down the abilities of people to understand oral traditions and poems that they're part of, but did they [i]really[/i] get all the loose ends, or did everybody or a lot of people in the audience just pretend they understood it, and laugh knowingly. Or maybe they just like the sound. Because the sound is wonderful. I can't do it justice, but I'll give it a shot. In fact there were even English kings who employed Icelandic poets, who almost certainly couldn't understand what the poets were saying. But they wanted the prestige of having an Icelandic skald in the court. Or more, they just liked the sound of the poet. And having a great poet on the payroll was a kind of form of conspicuous consumption. A way to show that you were pretty educated and pretty smart. And we'll return to this idea about not being able to understand what was being said, but first, I think it's useful for us to look at what the qualities of a skaldic poem were. The biggest thing to look at is it's the combination of a certain meter with a certain pattern of stanzas with some additional literary techniques thrown in. So it's this stew of stuff that's all tightly tied together. The metrical form is called the [i]drotvat[/i]. It's a complex pattern that's derived from that old [i]fornyrthislag[/i] meter. Now remember, [i]fornyrthislag[/i] was old story meter, it's the old traditional Germanic meter. When we get to [i]drotvat[/i] it becomes a little bit more elaborated, and little bit more fixed. The biggest thing to look at is some counting elements. Each stanza had eight lines, but you treated the odd lines and the even lines differently, and you also treated them as a pair. Remember that in this pattern over all, line one and line two are really part of a longer line because they alliterate together; there's that breath pause at the end of the line, and the two pieces alliterate. So you treat them differently in that you treat them as a pair, but you also have them linked across that line--and I'll explain that in a better way in a second. The lines are mostly six syllables long, and among those six syllables, there's three stressed, and two unstressed. But it's not a repeating meter, like in English. So in English when you pick a meter for your poem, essentially if it's a two beat meter, it's either iambic or trochaic. And what that means, it's either "da-DA, da-DA, da-DA," or "DA-da,-DA-da, DA-da." Those are the different kinds of iambs or trochees, whether it starts with a stressed or unstressed syllable. In that kind of meter, English meter, you have a mandatory pattern which goes on. In [i]drotvat[/i] you have a mandatory pattern in the last two syllables, which is STRESS-unstress. Or STRONG-weak. The preceding four syllables before that can be mixed up. But the simplest line would be, if we had it in English, would be called "trochaic trimester;" and that is a trochee is a strong followed by a weak, it's a two beat foot, and trimeter means there's three of them, and that gives you your six syllables. So the simplest [i]drotvat[/i] would be: STRONG-weak, STRONG-weak, STRONG-weak, but you could mix it up some more on those first two. They didn't [i]have[/i] to be STRONG-weak they could be weak-STRONG, or STRONG-STRONG, and then weak, and so forth. Like the [i]fornyrthislag[/i], and like Anglo-Saxon poetry, the lines that are linked together--one with two, three with four--are linked by alliteration. So you get those same stress sounds, so it's "tuh" and "tuh" or "duh" and "duh." Two of them go in the first line, the odd lines, and one of them in the second line. And that's corresponding to the ve(?)verse. Again, I'm tell you all this in the abstract, but in a moment I'm going to read one of these lines, and you'll hear how it works. The two alliterations in the first line are called "props." The Old Norse word is "stuthlar." And the single alliteration in the second line of each pair is called the "hofustafr" or the "head staff." That's the most important part in the line: the stressed alliterating syllable in the second line in each pair. That's where you have to make your key point all the time, if you're making a good [i]drotvat[/i] poem. But wait! There's more! [i]Drotvat[/i] lines also have to rhyme internally. So, in the first odd numbered line, where there's that double alliteration, you also have to have at least what we'd call a half rhyme. So not a complete rhyme, but so "-af" can rhyme with "-if" but it's at least gotta have a "-ff" sound at the end there. Those kind of rhymes; half rhymes or slant rhymes. In the even lines, though--yes, if you think this is complex and confusing--you're right! In the even lines, the rhyme had to be a true rhyme. So you couldn't rhyme "-af" with "-if", you need "-af" with"- af." Given all these metrical and rhyming constraints, it's not surprising that you're then allowed to do pretty much anything you wanted with the word order. Just following the rhyme and the meter scheme was hard enough. You could scramble all the words around, you could move clauses around, you could break up syntax and sense units, and it was the reader's problem to figure it out. If the reader couldn't figure it out--they're a dodo; not you the poet. And I think--and again, I read Skaldic poetry--I'm not sure I get it. I have to look at the translation sometimes and really think about it--there are people who can really read it--but I'm not one of them in the sense that I can sit down with a bunch of Skaldic poems and be sure I got the whole story out of them. But I think that the effect is something like this: as you hear the poem, you're holding a lot of different pieces of it in your head while you're listening to a stanza. So you've got different words here, and you know grammatically that they're connected, and you're hearing the rhyme, but you don't know what it all is. It's all up in the air, and then when you get to the last word of the stanza, it all snaps into place with this kind of mind-blowing moment of clarity. So, you're listening and there's this word here, and this word there, and there's something about a fish, and there's something about the sea--and oh there's a sword here and then--boom! Ohhhh! Now, that's happened to me like twice in all the many years I've been translating Old Norse, where it all clicked in at once, but it was a remarkable feeling. It's as if you have all these little bits of light and images, and then you turn your head and they coalesce into a bright, sharp picture. I think that that's what it was supposed to be for a native speaker. But again it's hard to tell, because Skaldic poetry is pretty hopeless to translate into modern English. There's almost no way you can do all the things that the Old Norse poet could do, because the language is different. In modern English we need these short little patter words, these "an," "if," "is," "with," "the," "but," for," and they didn't use them that much in Skaldic poetry. It's really, really, reallyreally hard to translate English into this verse form to compress it where every syllable has to count. There are some decent examples, but not many. I'll give you an example of a Skaldic stanza in Old Norse, and listen for the internal rhyme, the matching across the lines, the pattern of meter, the whole thing together. (Go here to listen: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/13250672/) Harmon Pulsa translates this as: "Time passes tediously, I tarry here alone an old senile elder, with no king to aid me. I walk on two widows, once true women, now frosted and feeble, needing the old flame." And that "I walk on two widows" means his cold feet, his numb feet. We'll meet this character later on; I'm gonna keep it a secret until then. But, Skaldic poetry wasn't just the verse form, or the alliteration, or the rhyming--because as if that wasn't enough--you have the patterns of the large scale stanzas themselves. The most important being what's called the [i]drapa[/i], which is a series of stanzas that also included a refrain or chorus called a [i]stef[/i] at various intervals. So, a [i]drapa[/i] was sometimes a [i]drapa[/i] of twenty stanzas or something like that. Or you could have a [i]flockr[/i] which is a shorter series of such stanza, without the refrain. And finally, you could have a [i]lausavisa[/i], and this is a single stanza that you're supposed to come up with spontaneously. Like, you're not supposed to have sat down and planned it out or whatever. A [i]lausavisa[/i] it's like, "I was thinking of something and bam! I came up with this great little poem." But wait! There's [i]still[/i] more! As well as fitting everything into all these kind of rules, you were supposed to use certain figures of speech. In particular, the kennings. And if you had a class on Beowulf when you were Junior High, the one thing they made you memorize and take on the exam for Beowulf, was that Beowulf used kennings. And then you promptly forgot that, or just wrote it down and didn't really know it because they're really aren't that many kennings--or maybe not any real kennings in Beowulf--but nevertheless, we're gonna force that on people. Well, I digress. A kenning is essentially a metaphor that is, at its most basic level, a two-part compound word that explains another thing. The Latin name for this figure of speech is "circum locution." "Going around, " and that actually kind of explains it a little bit better. So, I'll give you the simple ones in Anglo-Saxon that might not even [i]be[/i] real kennings, and then we develop it from there. If you studied Beowulf you heard of "the whale's road" or "the swan's road" and those are kennings for the ocean, right? They're little compound words--"whale road"-- and they mean something else--the ocean. The reason why this is not a kenning--maybe--is that you can obviously figure that out without any literary reference. It's just sort of a metaphor; it's where the whale swims or something. I don't think a real Skald would give that credit as a kenning. I mean it's technically still a kenning, but they wouldn't. . . they wouldn't be impressed at all. As Skaldic poetry evolves, the kennings get more and more and more complicated. They start to build on each other, and they get tied very tightly to a detailed knowledge of mythological stories. They're both conventional and they're subject to a great deal of individual invention. A Skald got to be a good poet when he or she--and I say she--there's a few female Skalds or female poets mentioned in the sagas--not that they went off and served kings, but that there were women who had a reputation for being able to make these poetic statements, and sometimes in nasty ways. But, you were considered good if you came up with clever kennings on you own. So, let me give you an example that's much better than "whale road" or "swan road." How about "the wound shovel" or the "wound hoe," and that's for a sword. "Sea steed" for a ship. Okay, that's still pretty basic, but then, you can make them a little more developed. Some of my favorites include the "wolf feeder," that's a sword because it kills people, and the then wolf feeds on their bodies--and this is where you start to see the kenning develop. It's not just one metaphor, or one step, it's multiple ones. "Wolf feeder" is not someone who's handing the wolf meat. It's a sword that's killing someone who then becomes meat for the wolf. Multiple steps. "Ender of the hunger of the ravens." Also a sword, because you kill someone and the ravens could eat their corpse. And you could stack them on top of each other. So, and example is "[i]branda elgr[/i]." [i]branda elgr[/i] is literally "the elk of beaks." And of course, you're all saying, "Oh! Drout! Don't even pretend that you can hide this from us! We know immediately 'elk of beaks' is." Well, if you do. . . I didn't. Turns out that "elk of beaks" means a ship, because the prow of the ship looks like a bird's beak, and the ship itself looks like an elk as it's bobbing around in the sea looks like how an elk walks around in the forest and its head bobs up and down. So the "elk of beaks" is a ship. And yes, I defy you to figure that out on your own, unless there's some other context. But, so far so good. Now, what you could do then, is start to pile more things on top. So you could say, "The ruler of the forest of the elk of beaks." . . . What is that? That's the ship's captain. See, the "ruler of the forest" is another name for like the wolf, or the powerful one, and if he's the ruler of the forest [i]of[/i] the elk of beaks, then it's the ruler or the leader of the ship, that's the captain. You could take it even further, which is "the protector of the ruler of the forest of the elk of beaks" and this would turn out to be armor, or a helmet or a sword. Now, some of these are just. . . impossible to figure out, and some of these aren't necessarily very good--though of course we wonder if our taste was the same--but this is what a good Skald would do: pile these metaphors, these kennings on top of each other and sort of go, "And, I dare you to figure out what I just said." And in fact, many people--I think--couldn't figure it out, but they weren't going to admit it. They were just like, "Ohhh. . . What a great poem! That's very veryyy. . . powerful!" You know, you nod like you understand it, and everyone does and the poet gets paid and everyone is happy. The other way you added to kennings, as we saw in our previous discussion, goes back to the mythological material that Snorri is compiling in [i]Skald Skapermal[/i]--and notice it's "Skald," right?--poetic diction that he's talking about. So some of these better kennings are "Sif's hair" for gold, because Sif had golden hair; "Freya's tears" because her tears were gold; "the otter's ransom"-- you know that story because I've told that already. And some of my favorite ones: "the wolf's joint" for the hand, because that's what Tyr got bitten off; a "blood worm" which is a sword; a "valley trout"--I love the valley trout. It sounds like it should be sick and wrong, but it's just a snake. "The bane of wood" which is fire; or "Kraki's seed." Now this is from a mythological and saga material. The great hero Rolf Kraki, one time when he is pursued by his enemies and has this bag of gold, and what he does is he reaches into the bag of gold and starts throwing gold coins behind him as he's riding on his horse, and his enemies stop to pick up the gold coins and he gets away. And it's like seed, because it's scattered like seeds. So, you can pile all these kennings together, and the Skaldic poem essentially becomes like a riddle. You're trying to figure out what is the poet really doing here, as you're holding all these other pieces in your mind. So it's really a brain challenger. Again, I'm not sure everyone really under stood it, but on the other hand. . . what else are they going to do in the king's hall when you have to entertain the king, and there's drinking going on, but you need something to do, so tell this poem, and use your brain to figure it out. And it's the use of kennings that gets us to the point where people think that the Vikings drank out of the skulls of their opponents--so yes, I've teased this for . . . [i]most[/i] of the course, and now I'm finally going to give it away. It's going to take some work on our part, though. There is a poem called "Krakumal," and that is the death song of Ragnar Lothbrok, and Ragnar Lothbrok means "Ragnar Hairy-pants." He's translated usually as "Ragnar Hairy-breeks." I don't know why; I guess because of the cognate of "brok" and "breeks." We don't use breeks, or britches very much anymore, and they were pants. They were hairy pants. It's "Ragnar Hairy-pants." He's called that, by the way, because his wife made him special trousers out of bear skins which she then soaked in pitch and rolled in sand so that they would become fireproof, and he could go fight a dragon. He's a legendary Viking, though there are some actual people who claimed to be his sons, and they are historical, so it's hard to tell. And it's hard to tell if he really had hairy pants, and I think bear skin coated in pitch, even if it was rolled in sand, would actually catch on fire if you set it on fire, so, who knows? But, Ragnar Hairy-pants is captured by King Ala of North Umbria. The only really famous king of North Umbria. He shows up in Chaucer, he shows up in other places, Gregory the Great and others. He was a big deal, King of North Umbria, of north part of England in the very early part of the Viking Age. He captures Ragnar Hairy-pants and throws him into a snake pit. Okay, I don't think there were any snake pits in England; I don't think you could round up enough snakes--but, let's go with the story. He throws Ragnar into a snake pit, and Ragnar says, "Huh, how the piglets would grunt if they knew how the old boar suffered." So he's talking about how his sons would be upset if they knew how he was suffering. And his sons did indeed react. One of his sons, named Vitzark, was playing a board game, supposedly he squeezed the piece--we don't know if it's a chess piece or a checker piece or whatever--squeezed it so hard that his hand bled. His other son, Bjorn Ironside, squeezed his spear hard enough to leave an impression of his fingers in the wood shaft. And his other son, Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye, was trimming his nails and then slipped and cut right through to the bone, he was so upset. But they might have been upset, his other sons Ivar the Bonelss and Ube took direct action, and they led the great heathen army that conquered much of England in the middle of the 9th century, and probably also killed King Edmund. And then Ivar the Boneless "retires" to Dublin--I wonder what a Viking does when he retires? I think that's probably a metaphor for "died," but it's not clear. Retire to Dublin, die. Anyway, this is the poem that Ragnar Lothbrok, Ragnar Hairy-pants says in the snake pit: (Go here to listen: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/13250680/) And translated this says: "It gladdens me to know that Baldur's father"--that's Odin--"makes read the benches for a banquet. Soon, we shall be drinking ale from the curved horns. The champion who comes into Odin's dwelling does not lament his death. I shall not enter his hall with words of fear upon my lips." So he says he's dying a hero, and he's proud of it. But the key line from this is "[i]or bjugvithum hausa[/i]:" "from the curved branches of skulls." Now, this line was misunderstood by the awesomely named scholar Oli Worm, a Danish scholar, who didn't recognize the kenning, and therefore didn't understand that the "curved branches of skulls" is actually the horns of an animal--the branches that come off the skull--hence, a drinking horn. Instead, he thought it was drinking from skulls--and I wonder what you do when all the liquid pours out the eyes or out the bottom and so forth. But there were, I believe, Mayans or Incans who did drink out of special cups made form people's skulls--but [i]not[/i] Vikings! They were drinking out of drinking horns. And the word "skol" does not have anything to do with the word "skull;" the vowel would be wrong, anyway. Also, just to add a little tid-bit about Oli Worm, because though I made fun of his bad translation, he was one of the people who brought Viking culture to the knowledge of later Europe, and he was a great antiquarian. But also, somewhat crazy. He was the first person to figure out that the cups and other materials made of what was supposedly called unicorn horn in various king's treasuries, were actually made out of narwhal tusk. And then, he wondered that these things had a reputation for curing poison, so--and I'm not making this up--he poisoned some of his pets. And fed them ground up narwhal horn to see what would happen--and they got better. So either he didn't poison them very well, or he had some kind of narwhal horn that we don't have anymore. But, this is the kind of thing that antiquarians used to do, and it's--we owe them all this material. They saved it, and started us on the path of understanding it, so we should not make too much fun of drinking from the skulls. Except that when I was at the site of the Battle of Maldin recently, there was a man who walked up and says, "Well, you know why they cut off Baerknoth's head?" And I was curious, because the Vikings did cut off Baerknoth's head; this was a battle between the Vikings and the English at Maldin is an important a battle, and the leader Baerknoth was a tall, powerful but old man, and he lost and the Vikings cut off his head. His body was buried at the Cathedral of Eli, where they put a waxed head on, but supposedly without the head, he was over six feet tall, so he was a big guy. This man just comes up and says, "Well, they took the head because they boiled it!" I'm like, "Oh, really?" "Yes, they boiled it because then they drank a toast out of his skull, and that's why they say the word 'skol' when they have a toast." So, people actually believe this. Oli Worm--it's your fault! But it's not true. So going back to Skaldic poetry now, from skulls, it was extremely complicated, it was detailed, it required very hard listening--which people aren't very good at anymore, but they were in the Viking Age--and it led to the poetic reputation of the Icelanders, because they became the best Skalds. Even though they were just a bunch of farmers, even though "we ran away from King Harald ruining everything" is a bit mythological, there really was a very high proportion of aristocratic families living in Iceland. And this aristocratic families cultivated poetry. And they got a reputation, and then that reputation built on itself. Icelandic Skalds went on, served in the kings courts, and if y u were a good king, you want an Icelandic poet, because they're impressive. It's the same reputation that Irish singers, or Irish ballad makers and bards get later on. "These are the best, we want them--I don't care if I can understand what they say or not--I want the best for my court." And they even knew, by the way, that sometimes the king or the audience couldn't understand what they were saying. This leads to a great scene in Egilsaga which we're going to discuss in much more detail in lecture seven, but I have to set the scene here because it fits with skaldic poetry. Egil has done a lot of bad things to King Eric Blood-Axe, who is at this point exiled from Norway, but king of York. Eric Blood-Axe was one of the sons of Harald Fair-Hair. And Egil has killed one of his sons, insulted him and his wife multiple times, killed his retainers, and just been pretty bad to him. Egil gets shipwrecked near York, and gets brought to Eric. Eric's like, "Okay, let's have him killed." But Egil's friend--who is also Eric's retainer, Arinbjorn--says, "Oh you can't kill him during the night, that would be murder!" Which is, a custom. So, they lock him up, and Arinbjorn says, "Egil, what I think you should do is compose a twenty stanza [i]drapa[/i] praising Eric, and maybe then he'll spare your life." So then, Egil sits up in his room and he composes this [i]drapa[/i], because he's known as a good poet. And this is a few lines from this poem--just in English this time: "By sun and moon I journeyed west My seabourne tomb(?) from Odin's breast my songship packed with poet's art It's word-keel cracked the frozen heart. And now I feed with an English king so English to mead all word mean bring Your praise my task, my song your fame If you but ask I'll sound your name." [I wasn't sure if I heard the words right, so after much searching, I found this translation. It's a bit different, but likely more literally accurate. West over water I fared bearing poetry's waves to the shore of the war-god's heart; my course was set. I launched my oaken craft at the breaking of ice, loaded my cargo of praise aboard my longboat aft. The warrior welcomed me, to him my praise is due. I carry Odin's mead to England's meadows. The leader I laud, sing surely his praise; I ask to be heard, an ode I can devise. And yet another translation: Westward I sailed the wave, Within me Odin gave The sea of song I bear (So 'tis my wont to fare): I launched my floating oak When loosening ice-floes broke, My mind a galleon fraught With load of minstrel thought. A prince doth hold me guest, Praise be his due confess'd: Of Odin's mead let draught In England now be quaff'd. Laud bear I to the king, Loudly his honour sing; Silence I crave around, My song of praise is found. Anyway, back to the main text.] Arinbjorn says, "Oh, well now you have to let Egil go, because you'll be remembered forever for this great poem!" And at the end, the king says, "Okay, the poem was well delivered. I'll let you live." The interesting thing, is the poem--as we have it recorded in Egilsaga--is [i]not[/i] good. It's a bad poem. It's the Hallmark card of Old Norse. It's cheesy, it's repetitive, it's completely insincere, and it's not a good poem. But, Eric Blood-Axe can't tell the difference. That's at least how--remember this is all controlled by the person writing the saga, which is probably Snorri Sturlesson--and he wants to show these dim-witted Norwegian kings are no match for a crafty Icelander whose a great poet. But it also dramatizes the idea that the skaldic poetry is so complex and sophisticated, that if you really knew what you were doing, you could put one over on people because they would just pretend to understand it. But there are also types of skaldic poetry that are meant to be understood, and these are those sort of one stanza forms, the [i]lausavisa[/i], and those are made--in the sagas at least, someone does something great and makes up on the spur of the moment, this one line stanza. Often these are insults, or a way to mock someone. So, in Egilsaga, he's having a fight with Leot, a cruel duel fighter, and Egil is bigger, and even more violent and more crazy than Leot. So, as they're fighting, Egil keeps insulting Leot in poetry. "I find this flashing swordsman falls back when I force him. He's afraid, this unfortunate overfed fighter, the bloodsucking battler backs away from my blows, and beats a retreat from this bald-headed bard." And then after he wins he says, "The foul wolf-feeder fell flat on the ground, the leg of Leot lanced off by the bard." (Meaning him.) "This poet gave Fridgeyr peace" (that was the person he was fighting on behalf of) "but seeks no payment. This play with the pale face was a pleasure to me." There's another famous insulting poet, also, [i]Gunlaugr Ormston[/i]. That's "Gunlaug Snake-tongue" and could be translated as "worm tongue" but it's really "snake tongue" in this case. And he insults people on poetry all the time, and gets away with it, because then he could make up great poetry for the king. So he won't really insult the king, he'll insult like the king's retainer but then make a great poem for the king. And he even says at one point--somebody has a poetry contest with him--and it was a pretty good poem but says, "King, you should ask him, why didn't he give you a whole [i]drapa[/i], like I did?" And this is totally skaldic, like "I could do the whole twenty stanza [i]drapa[/i] with a refrain, what was wrong with you?" So those kind of insults are often in the [i]lausavisa[/i] form but overall poetic and kind of one-liner insults are very important to Icelandic storytelling, and really appealing to listen to. And my favorite of these is the collection of insults called [i]Lokasenna[/i] and it's Loki the god has not been invited to a feast with the other gods. He forces his way in, and starts insulting everyone. And each god in turn tries to sort of calm him down and stop saying these things, and he turns on them one after the other. So, for example, Bragi says, "Listen, Loki if we were outside of this hall, I would chop your head off right now." And Loki says,"Oh you're brave in your seat, but you won't do as you say, Bragi the bench ornament. You run away if you see before you the angry man brave in spirit." And, as I said, the gods keep jumping in. So Idunn, a goddess, tries to smooth things over, and she's all like, "C'mon Loki, stop it." And he turns to her and says, "Be silent, Idunn! I declare that of all women, you are the biggest slut, since you put your arms around your brother's killer." She's highly offended so the next person says, "Loki, stop doing that." And he insults every goddess, and every god, saying that the gods are weak, and the goddess are sexually promiscuous. For example, Freya--now this is a big deal Freya is the powerful fertility goddess--and he turns to her and says, "Be silent Freya! You're a witch, full of malice. You were astride your own brother when the gods, all laughing, surprised the two of you. And then, Freya, you farted!" And it gets even grosser and ruder than that, but you'll have to read it for yourself. And then, by the way, Thor shows up carrying his hammer, and Loki keeps threatening and he ends up being punished in some ways. These insults, these one-liners are often sexualized, and you see that in the sagas where sometimes it gets out of hand and people get killed because of these insults. And they are an example of what we call "flighting;" a verbal contest. We don't always understand those exactly, but we'll them more as we move on. What those verbal battles, [i]do[/i] show, though, as does all this materials in skaldic poetry, is how highly valued the verbal arts were in Viking culture. So we can say "traders and raiders" and we can have all those dichotomies and everything, but what we should notice, is that the Vikings, the people of Scandinavia, and as they spread to many other places, highly valued everything from the excellently crafted one-liner, to the [i]lausavisa[/i] stanza, to a twenty stanza [i]drapa[/i] that was carefully crafted, to the preservation of the old traditional Eddaic material. But even more, it turns out, they valued the long prose tale. And in our final three lectures, we're going to look at those tales. The most widely respected and honored elements of Icelandic culture. The most famous piece of it: the sagas. Those long prose narratives, which are considered some of the great literary artifacts of not just medieval Europe, but all of European culture.