Forn kveðskapur norrænn og bragarhættir
— Old Norse Poetry and Metrics
Málþing á vegum Miðaldastofu Háskóla Íslands — A University of Iceland Centre for Medieval Studies Symposium
Föstudaginn 5. júní 2026 kl. 14.00–17.00 — Friday, June 5, 2026, at 14.00–17.00
Fyrirlestrasal Eddu (E103) — Edda auditorium (E103)
Dagskrá — Programme:
14.00–14.30 Bianca Patria, University of Florence: The Karlevi poet and extemporary composition in dróttkvætt
14.30–15.00 Petter Jensen, University of Oslo: Haustlǫng 1–13: a culinary conundrum or a sabotaged sacrifice?
15.00–15.30 Klaus Johan Myrvoll, University of Copenhagen: Lítt sá hǫlðr inn hvíti — the intricate journey of a dróttkvætt verse
15.30–16.00 Kaffihlé — Coffee Break
16.00–16.30 Mikael Males, University of Oslo: Sigmundr the Dragon-Slayer
16.30–17.00 Haukur Þorgeirsson, Stofnun Árna Magnússonar í íslenskum fræðum: The Eddic fairy-tales
Málþingið fer fram á ensku og er öllum opið. — The symposium will be conducted in English. All are welcome to attend.
Miðaldastofa Háskóla Íslands — The University of Iceland Centre for Medieval Studies
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Bianca Patria
The Karlevi poet and extemporary composition in dróttkvætt
In sagas, many lausavísur are portrayed as the product of improvisation, with saga characters pronouncing verses in the most unlikely circumstances: while facing mortal duels, colossal drunkenness, when first falling in love or, typically, with their very last breath. Most scholars today are skeptical about the improvised nature of such verses, which probably required something more than a few minutes to be composed. But what would an (almost) improvised stanza in dróttkvætt look like? The Karlevi stone was erected sometime in the late tenth century on the island of Öland by the retainers of a certain Sibbi; a runic inscription containing dróttkvætt lines celebrates the fallen warrior. This paper will argue that this stanza can tell us something about skaldic composition on short-notice, while the poetic echoes it contains might shed light on the artistic network of its anonymous author.
Bianca Patria is a tenure-track researcher in Germanic Philology at the University of Florence. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow in Old Norse philology at the University of Oslo, where she obtained her Ph.D. in 2021. Her research focuses on intertextual phenomena in Old Norse poetry, skaldic diction and Germanic metrics.
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Petter Jensen
Haustlǫng 1-13: a culinary conundrum or a sabotaged sacrifice?
The skaldic poem Haustlǫng by Þjóðolfr ór Hvini was composed during the latter half of the 9th century and is preserved in manuscripts of Snorri’s Edda, written during the first half of the 13th century. The poem is one of the oldest extant pieces of Old Norse literature and is filled with kennings which can only be understood with knowledge of Old Norse myth, poetics and an understanding of the context of the poem. In order to explore the last point, we need to address the question: what exactly is the narrative context of Haustlǫng? The talk will investigate this topic through stylistic analysis and linguistic evidence not previously discussed in the context of Haustlǫng.
The question of context is especially pertinent for the poems first half, 1–13 of a total of 21 stanzas, or the Þjazi-episode as it is also known. This episode depicts the conflict arising from the giant Þjazi disturbing Óðinn, Hœnir and Loki as they are attempting to cook an ox which they serve from a heilagr skutill ‘holy trencher’, which eventually leads to the kidnapping and rescue of the goddess Iðunn. The presence of a ‘holy’ trencher during the god’s meal was taken as evidence by Anne Holtsmark’s (1949) that the Þjazi-episode described a sacrificial ritual being performed by the gods. The sacrifice theory contradicts the explanation provided us by Snorri in Skaldskaparmál, who writes that the episode was the result of a misadventure by the gods where lack of food forced them to steal an ox and attempt to cook it. The most recent edition of the poem in Skaldic Poetry of the Middle Ages (SkP) rejects Holtsmark’s sacrifice theory and reads the poem on the basis of the context provided by Snorri’s prose. This conservative approach is fairly typical of SkP and is understandable in a standard edition. In the analysis of pagan poetry, however, it seems reasonable to assume that Snorri’s interpretations may have been adapted to render the poems acceptable for transmission within a Christian context, whether by Snorri himself or during the preceding two Christian centuries. If indications to this effect can be detected, we gain new evidence both for pagan perceptions and Christian reception. This is the aim of the present talk, which evaluates the probability of the cultic hypothesis versus Snorri’s prose description.
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Klaus Johan Myrvoll
Lítt sá hǫlðr inn hvíti — the intricate journey of a dróttkvætt verse
In the skaldic record, there are some identical or almost identical verses across poems. Snorri Sturluson prescribes in his Edda that it is all right to reproduce a verse or less (“vísuorð eða skemra”); more than that, it is implied, is bad custom. In recent studies of Old Norse poetry, Bianca Patria has drawn the attention to such instances of intertextuality within the corpus. Some of these overlaps can be assigned to the wish or desire to make conscious allusions to earlier skalds and poems central to the canon. Others may just be attempts by late epigons to create something “genuine” or at least acceptable when faced with the difficulty of providing a certain amount of poetry in sagas of Icelanders. In these last-mentioned cases, one should probably recognize plain borrowings over literary allusions.
In some rare cases, we have three instances of more or less the same verse. One such case is lítt sá hǫlðr enn hvíti in a stanza by Gunnlaugr in Gunnlaugs saga (Gunnl 13/5), which is reminiscent of lítt mun halr enn hvíti in both a stanza by Hallfrøðr in Hallfreðar saga (Hallfr 20/1) and a stanza attributed to Óláfr Haraldsson inn helgi in the sagas about him (Ólhelg lv 7/1). Both Bjarne Fidjestøl (1982) and Russell Poole (in SkP I, 2010) refer to these verses as “formulaic”, a characteristic I think is misleading. In my opinion, one of the three stanzas is likely to be the original, and the others are, then, reworkings stemming from that original.
In this paper, I will follow the path this verse has taken and explain why this is the most likely explanation. The results will be, I think, highly unexpected and perhaps even disturbing to scholars holding too firm views on the order of things in Old Norse literature.
Klaus Johan Myrvoll is an associate professor of Old Norse philology at The Arnamagnæan Institute, University of Copenhagen. Previously, he was a professor of Nordic linguistics at the University of Stavanger. His research focuses on Old Norse poetry, literary history and manuscript transmission as well as the history of the Nordic languages.
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Mikael Males
Sigmundr the Dragon-Slayer
In Old Norse and German tradition, Sigurðr/Siegfried is the son of Sigmundr/Siegmund and slays a dragon. In Beowulf, by contrast, being by far the oldest source to the Vǫlsungar tradition, Sigemund is the one who slays a dragon. Anglophone scholars have long assumed that the version in Beowulf is more archaic, whereas most German and Scandinavian scholars have favoured the German-Norse attribution of the dragon-slaying to Sigurðr/Siegfried.
This talk argues that the Old Norse tradition offers more support for Beowulf’s version than scholars have realised. One problem has been a tendency to interpret early references through the lens of the late Vǫlsunga saga, being the most extensive source. In addition, the chronology of relevant poems needs to be revised. Most importantly, closer inspection reveals that there is considerable evidence that the richest poetic source, Fáfnismál, dates to the twelfth century. The evaluation involves a reassessment of the validity of one of the most important formal dating criteria (alliteration in vr-). Through this and other instances of refined dating methodology, as well as close reading of key tenth-century poetry, evidence emerges that Sigurðr was only attached to Sigmundr in that century, and that Sigurðr gradually eclipsed Sigmundr from the second half of the tenth century onwards. German evidence is consistent with these observations, although that topic can only be touched upon in the present talk.
Mikael Males is professor of Old Norse philology at the University of Oslo. He has published mainly on skaldic poetry and grammatical literature, but also on eddic poetry, saga literature and Irish-Norse influence.
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Haukur Þorgeirsson
The Eddic fairy-tales
The Eddic fairy-tales are a group of eight alliterative poems of medieval origin recorded from oral tradition in Iceland in the 17th century. The talk will give an overview of these poems and recent research on them. The points of discussion will include signs of medieval origin and formulaic composition, the variety of the oral tradition, the feminine perspectives of the poems, recent scholarly editions, and planned future work. The talk will take a look at the main similarities and differences between the Eddic fairy-tales and the Eddic poems collected in the 13th century and the reasons to think that they are authentically parts of the same tradition.
Haukur Þorgeirsson is research professor at the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic studies. His interests include Old Norse and later Icelandic poetry, historical linguistics, and metrics.
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Málþingið fer fram á ensku og er öllum opið.
The symposium will be conducted in English. All are welcome to attend.
Miðaldastofa Háskóla Íslands — The University of Iceland Centre for Medieval Studies