The Song Weigher: Complete Poems of Egill Skallagrímsson, Tenth Century Viking and Skald, Translated and Introduced by Ian Crockatt, with a Preface by Roberta Frank. Todmorden: Arc Publications. 2017.
Brian McMahon reviews a new edition of poems by the famed Viking poet.
This slim volume presents the complete corpus of poems attributed to the Viking Age poet Egill Skallagrímsson by the anonymous author(s) of the medieval Icelandic saga which bears his name. Egill was, as Crockatt remarks in his introduction, “an impressively bold and cruel Viking” (p.12), known for composing vituperative verses with which to lampoon and lambaste his enemies; but his saga also captures a soulful figure capable of intense emotion, affection and loyalty. Here his poems are arranged according to the chronology of the saga, beginning with verses allegedly composed by Egill at the age of three and following the contours of his life through his courtship of the widow Ásgerðr, the heart-rending death of his son Böðvar (memorialised in his poem Sonatorrek), his deep friendship with the redoubtable Arinbjörn (valorised in the famous Arinbjarnarkviða), and finally his old age and frustration with the weaknesses he detects in the younger generation.
Egill emerges from the poems a complex figure, full of internal contradictions. In his translations, Crockatt captures as much his propensity to sullenness as his flights of fantastical wordplay. The English translations are spare, maintaining the integrity and structure of the original and preserving also the kennings, which are an essential feature of Old Norse skaldic poetry. A kenning, in Crockatt's words, “tie[s] two objects together in a way that gives a vivid filmic quality to a third, the object they replace” (p.133). Thus “sea-thralled stallion” for “ship” (p.62); “sheath's ice-rays” for “swords” (p.66); and “praise-cairn” for “poem” (p.116). Each of these renderings captures the sense of the original evocatively and hints at the semantic density of these typically compact poems.
Skalds were professional court poets in the Middle Ages, often Icelanders who had travelled to continental Europe for the purpose of serving some king or nobleman, and their skill was in composing fiendishly allusive and intricate verse to fit fixed alliterative patterns, often in a remarkably short space of time. One episode in Egils sagasees the protagonist locked in a cell overnight and tasked with composing a poem so stellar it will amuse the queen who has imprisoned him and buy him his freedom. The resulting text – Höfuðlausnor “Head Ransom” – is one of the finest in this collection, with an ingenious translation to match it. Because Old Norse is a heavily inflecting language, like Latin, word order is much less important in determining meaning than is the grammatical relationship of various words in a sentence. Thus the declension of nouns and conjugation of verbs means much more when interpreting a sentence than does the syntax per se. For this reason the language lends itself to alliterative structures, but skaldic verse, as Crockatt's appendix helpfully explains, also requires fidelity to fixed rules governing syllable-count per line (alternating between odd and even lines), stress patterning, half- and full-rhymes. In light of these complexities, the clarity of the translations, here rendered in verse despite the difficulties that presents, is hugely commendable.
The layout of this book is generally clear, although the decision to alternate between Old Norse and English verses sequentially (rather than by use of a facing page translation) produces occasionally odd spacing on the page (e.g. on p.25). Errors are few and do not generally impede clarity (e.g. the accidental addition of “‘s” in the middle of a verse line on p.59). The contextualising prose which precedes each poem is helpful for readers not familiar with the saga, as is the division of the book into sections which each deal broadly with a new chapter in Egill's life. Students of the sagas who are new to Old Norse texts often omit the skaldic verses upon first reading, since they are so intricate. Presenting Egill's life only through his verses is a welcome innovation and allows readers to identify him as a poet first, potentially offering new insights into his representation in the saga.
Crockatt's introduction errs on the side of brevity, but it does contain a helpful insight into his modus operandi as a translator: “I work as a translator and poet on the basis that the musical and imaginative qualities of poetry are where the poetry resides, and that skaldic poetry in particular is sold short by efforts to reduce every word and expression that seems obscure to literal sense at first reading” (p.20). This is a pragmatic approach, but it is also enormously helpful in setting this volume apart from textbook renderings of this poetry intended only for students of the language. Skaldic verse was meant to be unclear – to take some puzzling over. At one point in the saga, Egill stands accused of concealing the name of the woman he loves in some intricate poetry, and he response with a stanza no less convoluted – Crockatt's translation adds nothing to the allusive circumlocution of the original:
I'd seldom hide secrets
– stone-goddess's kin-names –
in the giants' intoxicant –
in poetry. It's finished –
the walled-town-of-wave-fire's
widow-grief – since this war-loud
verse-taster's tongue-finger
trawled the god's ale-cauldrons. (p.49)
The “walled-town-of-wave-fire” he is speaking of is his beloved, the widow Ásgerðr, whose grief at the loss of her husband he claims to have ameliorated. Egill is being deliberately coy here, and a translation less reflective of that would not serve so well. Crockatt is a deliberate and careful translator, and that is the great appeal of this collection.
In reading the introduction it is not necessarily clear for whom the book is intended. If for scholars or students of Old Norse it lacks much in the way of scholarly apparatus. The decision to gloss certain kennings in an appendix allows for a cleaner presentation of the verses, but at times the inclusion of footnotes might have been more reader-friendly. For the general reader one wonders whether a lengthier introduction to the character of Egill and the significance of each of the verses in his life might have been valuable. The introduction as it stands contains nuggets of interest for those coming to this poet for the first time, yet the verse is likely to be sufficiently alien to warrant a more detailed exegesis – or, at least, a bibliography.
These qualifications aside, however, the real appeal here is in the lyrical and evocative translations which Crockatt has coaxed from this diverse and riddlic body of work. A fitting testament to a great and enduring poet.
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