Angol
Icelandic sagas are replete with episodes of adventure, romance, treachery, politics, paranormal visitations, and -- poetry. Poetry? Among Vikings?
Most certainly. Poetry. During (and long before) Viking times, Norse Skalds entertained their patrons with accounts ranging from legends to the news of the day, all delivered from memory in highly stylized verse formats. Many of these verses found their way into the written prose accounts we call sagas, (which is just an Icelandic word for Tellings.)
Most readers skip over saga verses when they are encountered; they seldom make much sense. Editors often write: "Skaldic verse is so dense with underlying meaning that no translation can do it justice." This might be true, but in consequence early translators often published what they thought skalds were intending to convey, rather than what they actually said. Sometimes their published (English) verses simply reiterate the prose text within which a verse is embedded. The purpose of this book is to correct that situation. The results will be enlightening in some cases and confusing in others, but at least readers will know what the skalds actually said.
One hundred seventy verses from eight different sagas are presented in this book, each on a separate page that summarizes the context in which the verse was delivered, defines metaphors and kennings in the verse, displays a word-for-word transliteration, and suggests two (or three, or four) prose English translations. A fifteen-page discussion provides an introduction to saga literature, the rules of skaldic verse, and Icelandic pronunciation.
Saga verse is an acquired taste, but the maître d' says: "Try it; you'll like it."
