amory_1990_second thoughts on skaldskaparmal

SECOND THOUGHTS ON SKLDSKAPARMLSkldskaparml: Snorri Sturluson's ars poetica and medieval theories of language. VikingCollection 4 by Margaret Clunies Ross; P. Meulengracht-Srensen; G. W. WeberReview by: Frederic AmoryScandinavian Studies, Vol. 62, No. 3 (SUMMER 1990), pp. 331-339Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of the Society for the Advancement ofScandinavian StudyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40919159 .Accessed: 16/03/2014 04:50

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SECOND THOUGHTS ON SKLDSKAPARML

Frederic Amory University of San Francisco

Margaret Clunies Ross. Skldskaparml: Snorri Sturlusoris ars poetica and medieval theories of language. Viking Collection 4. Ed. P. Meulengracht-S0rensen and G. W. Weber. Odense University Press. Odense, 1987. Pp. 210.

I have sometimes thought that in the preindustrial, traditional societies of Europe the appearance of an ars poetica of either medieval Latin or vernacular literature is one sure sign that not only the literature it codifies has "arrived" but also that the culture to which the literature and the ars belong has achieved some special historical importance. To "arrive," let me add, can only mean in the cultural context of Europe to gain equal critical status with the classical literature of Rome, or even independence from the same. This thought of mine may at least serve as a reminder that such artes as the Poetria nova (ca. 1210) of Geoffrey of Vinsauf, the Snorra Edda (1220-25), or The Third Grammatical Treatise (1245-52) of lfr Prarson, and the De Vulgari Eloquentia (1304-06) of Dante offer much more in the way of cultural self-assessment than the collections of literary touchstones and tropes and the technicalia of versification with which they are replete.

It is one of the intellectual virtues of Margaret Clunies Ross's study of Snorri' s Skldskaparml - together with the Httatal, the most technical part of his Edda - that she never loses sight of what is discerned as his hidden cultural agenda for Old Norse poetry in her discussions of the technical details of his poetics or skaldic verse. She has striven throughout to integrate the Skldskaparml with the other main parts of his Edda, especially with the Prologue to the whole (Heusler's "gelehrte Urgeschichte"), in which Snorri' s cultural agenda is veiled in a Biblical myth of the origins of the Scandinavians, their gods, and their language (cf. Skm . 8, with the Prol.). This striving of hers after the underlying unity of the whole is admirable, even though Gylfaginning is somewhat slighted thereby and Httatal scarcely discussed. Where we should have any serious reservations about her aims, however, is primarily in her reconstructions of the European backgrounds of Snorri' s learning, above all, of his linguistic precocity. Nevertheless, Clunies Ross's little book, with its novel insights into Snorri's materials, its dedication to the unity of his work, and its driving argumentation, is bound to stimulate and direct future research on Snorra Edda and therefore deserves our closest attention now.

There are perhaps three or four main topic areas that the book covers at length: 1) the thematic connection of the Prologue with the Skldskaparml, 2) Snorri's grammar of poetic diction and his seeming antipathy to metaphor, and 3) the latinate philosophical and linguistic background of his mythopoetics. I shall condense into shorter synopses the coverage of each of these areas in the book and insert rectifications and addenda where appropriate.

(1) The Prologue has been isolated by Heusler and his pupils from Snorra Edda as a learned interpolation,1 but more reasonably it is usually read as the introduction to the further adventures with the Aesir of the Swedish king, Gylfi, whom Odin came into contact with on his migration north, at the end of the Prologue. Clunies Ross, however, on the

Scandinavian Studies 62 (1990): 331-39


332 Scandinavian Studies

basis of one cross-reference in Skldskaparml (eh. 8, quoted p. 16), has refocused the Prologue on the poetic-diction section, so that the latter will reflect linguistically Snorri's benign religious attitudes to Scandinavian paganism as outlined in his prefatory Biblical myth of the pre-Christian Scandinavians, who had a glimmering of the true God from their "earthly understanding" of His creation (p. 28).

The emphasis of the [Snorrd' Edda lies much more on the relationship between religious thought and poetic expression in natural religions than on the universal applicability of late Roman grammatical theory [as with The Third Grammatical Treatise of lfr Prarson]. This statement of the connection between the Prologue and Skldskaparml is supported

with a string of correspondences between them. Since the pre-Christian Scandinavians had perceived after the Flood that the earth was an animate creature, whose very stones were like the teeth and bones of animals, and since their understanding of God through nature was still of the earth earthy, or sensory, the tolerant Snorri was disposed in his presentation of the poetic language of the pagan skalds to invest the term "kenning" with the meaning of sense perception (pp. 51 f.) and to adopt the "animistic principle" of kenning interpretation and a "nonfigurative approach" to their figures of speech (p. 175), which he took to be "literally true in terms of the mythological world-view" of the skalds and their forebears (p. 116; cf. pp. 142 and 149). Moreover, the power of naming things that Adam and his Scandinavian descendants exercised over creation set a precedent in Snorri's eyes for the onomastic kennings of the skalds (pp. 61 and 115). Indeed, the "Asian" language that the wandering Aesir of Troy imposed on the Scandinavians when they overran them may have comprised for him the poetic language of the pagan skalds, being at once "the classificatory and expressive tool of intelligent animists . . ." (p. 115).

All this, one might say, is squeezing a great deal out of one cross-reference at Skldskaparml 8, which harks back in the Prologue only to the lapses of faith of Adam's descendants before and after the flood and to the self-misrepresentations of the Trojan Aesir, who let themselves be exalted as gods over the Scandinavians. Snorri was no rigorist towards Scandinavian paganism, but would he have ever contemplated the pagan myths as de facto truths in and for skaldic poetry? The whole episode of "the deceiving of Gylfi," which Clunies Ross has slighted, testifies to the illusoriness of the mythologizing of the human Aesir, the ultimate authorities, by rights, on the mythical doings of their divine ancestors, but who "also deceive Gylfi and his people into thinking that they themselves are the gods about whom they have told the stories."2 The euhemerism of Snorri controverts the original myth-makers and their myths at every turn, until finally the myth-makers and their magical abode disappear into thin air, at the dnouement of Gylfaginning . A confirmation of the validity of their authority in mythology or poetic language is therefore not to be expected from him.

On the other hand, apart from the "gelehrte Urgeschichte" of Snorra Edda, there is a literary dimension to Old Norse mythology that Snorri must have been aware of and that he may have responded to in the manner of continental clerical readers of classical texts, who saw in the poetic mythology of the Roman gods a fictional integumentum enclosing some kernel of truth, as that Orpheus is the body, Eurydice the soul of man.3 Thomas Krmmelbein has spotted a passage in Skldskaparml 4, overlooked by Clunies Ross, in which this manner of reading texts seems to be illustrated.

The story is told here of a family of giants in which the three sons were left an inheritance by the father, to be measured out equally among them in mouthfuls of gold. Hence, Snorri's interlocutor, Bragi, explains, "the expression is current with us that gold is called the 'mouth-reckoning' [munntal] of these giants, and we conceal the matter in


Skldskaparml 333

conundrums [rnar] or in poetry in such guise that we call that [i.e., gold] the speech or the words or the talk of these giants." As Snorri puts it more compactly elsewhere (Skm . 88), to play with words in poetry is "to compose secretively" - "at yrkja flgit." In these passages the expression munntal or tal is more of a metonym than a metaphor like that of Orpheus for the human body, and the wordplay (ofljst) turns on mere equivocations with homonyms, but nonetheless metonomy and equivocation, as well as etymology, were recog- nized means in medieval hermeneutics of either embroidering integumenta on a text, or divesting it of them. If Snorri used all these means of interpretation - and he did - he probably also regarded the core "truths" of Old Norse mythology and skaldic poetry as more artificial than real, like most medieval interpreters of literature. As against the veracity of the Bible, it must be remembered, profane literature could achieve, if anything, only a precarious fictional status in the Middle Ages. On the whole, then, the integumentum concept of poetry and mythology seems to me perfectly designed for Snorri' s mixed attitudes towards the pagan myths of his countrymen and for his unannounced intention - the hidden agenda of Snorri - to reconcile the native poetry of Scandinavian paganism with the imported culture of Christianity. For already in the concept a similar provisional reconciliation of Roman poetry and myth with Christian beliefs is presupposed.

(2) Clunies Ross's impression of Snorri as what Marianne Moore would call a "literalist of the imagination" is projected onto his grammar of poetic diction, with the result that little place for metaphor is allowed in it - a surprising result considering just how metaphorical the skaldic kennings are. But in her opinion it was Snorri' s nephew lfr Prarson who gave pride of place to metaphor in his trope-centered GrammaticalTreatise , whereas Snorri, under the triple sway of his own fantasy about the pre-Christian Scandinavians, the cosmology of the school of Chartres, and the logocentric speech-philosophy of the neo-Platonic William of Conches, Abelard, and the so-called "terminists" of the twelfth century, either accounted for skaldic metaphoring on unrhetorical, grammatical, mythological, and logical-philosophical grounds or else simply avoided it in favor of nonfigurative expressions, for example, metonyms (pp. 26, 30). This overburdened thesis is indubitably one of the most debatable novelties in Clunies Ross's book. Even though she concedes that Snorri could have had no direct acquaintance with the speech-philosophers of twelfth-century France, their linguistic concerns and his manifesting independently of each other "fundamental intellectual preoccupations of the age" (p. 33), yet she regularly ascribes to him the scholastic methods of Abelard and William of Conches without ever asking herself whether their modus operandi conforms to anything we might know about the mental habits of Snorri from his other writings {Heimskringla and Egils saga). Obviously, it does not. Scholasticism, generally speaking, was as foreign to medieval Iceland as feudalism. We shall descend to details on this topic below, under (3), but first I want to canvass some of Clunies Ross's remarks on Snorri' s paradoxically "nonfigurative approach" to poetic diction, in order to clarify this alleged avoidance of metaphor of his.

She claims (p. 31) that in the Skldskaparml there is no allusion to the translatio poetica of metaphor, "whether by means of Latinate technical terms or more informally." True, Snorri did not have a term for metaphorical transference like framfring , which his nephew lfr coined, but in his first working definition of kennings (Skm . 7) he speaks informally of a metaphorical transfer of names from the god Tyr to Odin, as in such kenning formations as hanga-Tyr, farma-Tyr, and the like. So, says Snorri, with each god to be named thus, "Jb tek ek med heiti af eign annars ssins ea get ek hans verka nkkura . . .," which we may English, "I then transfer [to him] with an appellative the property of another god or mention some of his deeds ..." The verb phrase taka af clearly renders the sense of translatio in this context. Clunies Ross, however, would object that the "Tyr"



member of the cited kennings was understood by skalds and their audiences more likely as a common noun for "god" than as the name of the fellow sovereign-god of Odin (pp. 99-102);5 these Odin kennings would then be reduced to nonmetaphorical periphrases - "the god of the hanged," "the god of cargoes," etc. But this was not the way Snorri understood these kennings, which he has analyzed as transfers of names and appurtenances from one god to another. In doing so, he has revived a faded onomastic metaphor, just as he revives an old mythological metaphor for men and women as trees by retelling, in Gylfaginning 6, the myth of the creation of the first man and woman from logs, and embellishing this metaphor in Skldskaparml 40 with fanciful associations between tree names and various homonyms for men and women (cf. Clunies Ross, pp. 108-10). These revivals do not suggest that Snorri was avoiding encounters with metaphor but rather the opposite. Clunies Ross appeals (p. 1 14) to Roberta Frank as witness, in her paper "Snorri and the Mead of Poetry," to a persistent avoidance of the metaphorical meanings of kennings for the poetic mead in Skldskaparml 10, but this skaldic expert does not point to such a "tendency" at all.6

Linguistically envisaged, the problem before Clunies Ross seems to be that she fails to find any consciousness of the semantic factor of similarity or analogy (no prime of LIKE) in Snorri' s mythopoetic interpretations of skaldic metaphor, and consequently she has mag- nified a tendency of his to "literalize" every metaphor he meets, usually with a "true story" of its mythological meaning but also with verbal quibbles about its latent figurative sense. It is not to be presumed, however, that Snorri was blind to the metaphorical character of the majority of the kennings. Even Clunies Ross has to admit that he made room somehow in his kenning system for metaphorically constructed gold kennings, god kennings (pp. 94 and 98), and sky kennings (p. 130), and she rightly notes "the extended metaphorical usage" (p. 132) in the nygervingar constructions that he recommends in Httatal 217. How, then, did the literal and the figurative go together in his kenning system, and what would it really imply to "literalize" the metaphorical kennings of the skalds? Let us perform a "thought- experiment" on this question by way of answering it.

Normally, with metaphorical discourse of any kind, the reading or listening interpreter construes the flow of figurative expressions in it in the light of a plainer reality - some larger world outside, which the interpreter and the speaker or writer both mentally inhabit. A difficult text is thus fitted to a world context that helps to make sense of it. Exceptionally, however, this hermeneutic procedure can be reversed. In the words of the literary-text linguist, Samuel Levin, "Instead, that is, of construing the utterance so that it makes sense in the world, we construe the world so as to make sense of the utterance."7 Ordinarily, the figurative meaning of a metaphor will reside in the text, and its literal counterpart in an aspect of the world, but exceptionally the figurative and the literal may be transposed (by a consonai of the world), the text now being literalized as Clunies Ross wishes, and the world transfigured as a poetic creation, "a forest of symbols" in Baudelaire's phrase. In the exceptional case, Snorri and we should have to read skaldic poetry no longer as literature, but as truthful vision exalted by myth. But of course Snorri would have balked at such a reading for the reason that the symbolism of the Old Norse myths was tainted with the illusionism that deceived Gylfi and with the general falsity of the old pagan Scandinavian religion. Snorri' s critical position, accordingly, was nearer the norm than the exception: metaphorical kennings like dverga skip (Skm. 5 and 11, "dwarfs' ship"), for poetry, keep their figurative meaning in the skaldic texts, while their literal meaning emerges in myths of his retelling, for example, in the story of Suttungr's rescue of the dwarves from the tidal rock in return for the poetic mead from them - their "ship" to shore. The myths in their rapport with the texts function in his kenning system as so many substantive reference points for a bygone world of paganism, to which Snorri owed poetic allegiance,


Skldskaparml 335

but no religious faith. In Levin's linguistic parlance, Old Norse mythology would be the "encyclopedic knowledge" needed to decipher unfamiliar kennings.

(3) The chief inspiration for Clunies Ross's orientation of Snorri's source materials comes from a well-known article of the Dronkes, "The Prologue of the Prose Edda,"8 in which inter alia they assert that Snorri's love of wisdom, creationism, and religious tolerance in his Prologue have neo-Platonic overtones of the philosophical school of Chartres (section VI). Although in fact there is nothing particularly neo-Platonic about the down-to-earth Prologue, this lead started our author on her search for the grammatical and logical- philosophical sources of Snorra Edda in twelfth-century Europe (p. 20). I shall run over some items in Snorri's grammar of poetic diction and cosmology for which she proposes continental Latin antecedents. As we shall see, the Dronkes were not the safest of guides to his European sources.

These putative sources fall under two headings: the medieval neo-Platonism that culminates in the school of Chartres and the early scholasticism that is personified in Abelard and his dialectics. Bernard Silvestris, author of the creation poem Cosmographia, Thierry of Chartres, the philosophical expounder of the Hexameron, and the philosopher and gram- marian William of Conches were the group of French neo-Platonists who may have affected Snorri's cosmology, his mythography, and even his poetic grammar (pp. 48, 72-73, 104-05, 134, 154-55, 167); but this last was also subject to the logic of Abelard and his school (pp. 32, 73, 107). The "new" grammar and the "new" poetics of the twelfth to the thirteenth centuries were already exposed to terminist logic, and Snorra Edda and the Poetria nova of Geoffrey of Vinsauf will converge together in their philosophical perspective on metaphor as a text-integrated or "organic," but not a rhetorical, figure of speech (pp. 33-34, 175). So far Clunies Ross, after the Dronkes.

If one should wonder to oneself parenthetically how these diverse intellectual influences might have impinged on Snorri out in Iceland, we are to be advised that neo-Platonism and the new grammar could have been available to him orally or in the form of "anthologies [?] or lecture notes," which some of the traveled Oddaverjar may have brought home from the continent to Oddi, when Snorri was being educated there under the tutelage of Jn Loptsson (pp. 14, 28, 73, 157). The advanced grammars of Alexander of Villedieu and Eberhard of Bthune were echoed by Snorri's nephew in The Third Grammatical Treatise, but, according to Clunies Ross, the nephew would have had little to teach the uncle, since lfr was an old-fashioned rhetorician and Snorri an incipient speech-philosopher (cf. p. 26). That leaves the rest - almost everything - up to the mysterious offices of the Zeitgeist to spread around (cf. "the preoccupations of the age," p. 33).

But to begin with the suspicion of neo-Platonism that hangs over Snorri's Prologue, the earthliness of the wisdom of the pre-Christian Scandinavians ought to have indicated the conventionality of this wisdom, which may well be the gift of God as in Wisdom 7, 17 ff.,10 but could not remotely be a loan from Plato. As the neo-Platonist Adelard of Bath declared, "Unde nee ex sensibus scientia, sed opinio oriri valet."11 Sense perception in neo-Platonic epistemology was incapable of true knowledge or wisdom. Clunies Ross and Peter Dronke, however, seem to be agreed that Snorri himself had possibly "quite a keen understanding" (p. 134) of such metaphysical subtleties as the medieval neo-Platonic dis- tinction between the elements as unseen causes {elementa) and the elements as natural effects (elementata) . Snorri only had to allude to the "chief elements" (= four elements) in the Prologue to earn this mistaken compliment, which is otherwise not warranted anywhere by the tenor of Snorra Edda (pace P. Dronke as in n. 38 to p. 134).

Much more intriguing is Snorri's possible relationship to Geoffrey of Vinsauf and the Poetria nova, the representative Latin poetics of the early thirteenth century. Clunies Ross



has made out the two literary theoreticians to be exponents of a nonrhetorical "fully organic conception of metaphor" (p. 33). but in the passage she quotes in translation from the Poetria, 11.737-45 (p. 34), to exemplify the integrity of the figure, she does not observe that Geoffrey is defending metaphorical transsumptio against the logician Adam of Petit Pont' s imputations that it is a fallacy of speech. By Geoffrey's defense the integrity of metaphor becomes ethical, not "organic," as the lines on the "hypocrisy" of word-painting (11.742-45) intimate. Hence when Geoffrey prescribes for the discourse, "... se semper sermo coloret / Intus et exterius . . ./ Se nisi conformet color intimus exteriori, / Sordet ibi ratio . . ." (11.737-38, 741-42),

13 he is asking in the name of reason for no more and no less than an ethical conformity between the textual figure of speech and its image in the poet's mind - without that inner bond, "reason will be besmirched" by a vice of language, the "hypocrisy" of superficial word-painting.

Snorri does not share these ethical preoccupations, presumably because figurative language was not logically fallacious in his poetics, but are there, then, no "formal similarities between [his] Edda and the Poetria nova" as Clunies Ross somewhat arbitrarily concludes (p. 34)? This question is for others to answer. I would hazard the guess, however, that Snorri's ironic term for elaborate wordplay, ofljst ("too clear," "obvious"), was his wry reaction to those literary theoreticians like Geoffrey who not only equated the literal with lightness and light and the figurative with heaviness and obscurity but also attempted to harmonize these antithetical attributes in a chiaroscuro style of discourse (cf. with Skm . SS, Poetria, 11.832-43).

The grammatical terminology of Snorri in his poetics has been preliminarily sorted out by Clunies Ross, who assigns a number of his terms to Latin contexts or Latin roots. Thus "kenning," in the meanings of "doctrine" and "sense perception," was defined for him by the translator of the Old Norse Elucidarius (pp. 51 f.); kennt heiti approximates to Priscian's synonymum , under the gloss of William of Conches that synonyms denominate and signify the same thing (pp. 47 f.); sannkenning embraces the grammatical category of nominalized adjectives or paronyms (nomina adjectiva like "grammaticus"), which can denote both universal qualities and, secondarily, individual substances - cf. the "true sub- stance" of sannkenningar in Httatal 216 (pp. 71-75); and einkar nafn (= lfrProarson's

eiginligt nafn) translates nomen proprium, Priscian's proper noun that in the curious gloss of William of Conches "makes present itself alone" and thereby designates only the individual with a name, while the common noun (nomen appellativum = lfr's sameiginligt nafn) has universal scope of designation (p. 104).

Into these Latin/Old Norse pigeonholes Clunies Ross has slipped here and there scholastic ideas of grammar that would have been beyond Snorri's ken and that in any case create needless complications for his poetics. It is, for instance, quite predictable from her overestimation (and Peter Dronke's) of Snorri's taste for metaphysical subtleties that in her view he should "probably" have been aware of William of Conches' s gloss on the proper noun of Priscian, that "it makes present itself alone," and so realized beforehand the logical flaw in his first working definition of kennings (Skm. 7), namely, of exchanging the individual names of gods to form god kennings when these names were "universally" not transferable (pp. 105-06). To remove the flaw, he had recourse to a semantic notion of Abelard's that permitted transferred names in a trans latio poetica to take on a temporary secondary meaning according to context, as Tyr does in designating Odin metaphorically (p. 107).

14 Thus Snorri's exchange of names between Tyr and Odin would not entail another

naming, a fresh impositio of Tyr' s identity on Odin, and the flaw is eliminated by having Tyr "own" the name of Odin conditionally, in a given context.

Unfortunately, this scholastic reconstitution of the first working definition of kennings in Skldskaparml 7 may involve a misapprehension on Clunies Ross's part. She and


Skldskaparml 337

Anthony Faulkes have slanted their translations of the definition to the end that Tyr shall "own" Odin's name,15 but it is much more meaningful in this text for Odin to "own" Tyr's name.16 If so, instead of "Tyr" being a temporary name for Odin, Odin would be the constant referent of this appellative as of any of the other numerous pseudonyms in his possession. It depends on whether, in the sentence, "P eignast hann nafnit, en eigi hinn, er nefndr var [Skm. 7]" ("then he possesses the name and not the one who was named"), one correlates the first pronoun with Odin and the second with "some other god," that is, Tyr, or the other way round. The former alternative seems nearer Snorri's intentions (minus any scholastic complications).

I have reserved till the last a moot term of Snorri's - fornafn - whose Latin provenience has been disputed by Clunies Ross, who would derive the term from grammatical pronomen rather than rhetorical pronominatio (pp. 29, 42, 65-66, 77-78); but the derivation is somewhat irrelevant because it is plain from Snorri's definition of the term (Skm . 84) that he was ignorant of what a Latin pronoun was or did when he wrote of "/u heiti, er menn lata ganga fyrir nfn manna. Pat kllum vr vikenningar eoa sannkenningar eoa fornfn." In English: ". . . those locutions that people make precede men's names. We call them bynames or 'true' kennings or 'prenames.'" It is no use pretending that this unmeaning definition can be squared with the periphrastic and substitutive syntactic roles of the kennings17 - it cannot. Snorri did not know the Latin meaning of pronomen and has naively just spelled out the literal Icelandic meaning of fornafn (= "before the name") in his definition. If he had known the Latin term in the original, we should have heard of something from him more like his latinizing nephew's definition: "fornafn aer sett ista nafnsins"18 ("a pronoun is put in place of a proper noun").

Now, I submit that a man of letters who was honestly ignorant of the proper meaning and definition of a pronoun is hardly the one to busy his brains with scholastic grammar and neo-Platonic metaphysics, which were forever closed to him anyhow by their specialized vocabularies. The few latinate technical terms that infiltrated his cultural milieu - for example, hfudskepnur, einkar nafn, fornafn, edda (**edo!) - delimit sharply Snorri's knowledge of Latin, which was elementary and imperfect. Of the philosophical literature on the continent he would perhaps have been able to profit from some of the popularizing works of Honorius of Autun, whose Elucidariusl, 59, in Latin or Icelandic was the likeliest source of Snorri's microcosmic application of the four elements in the Prologue, and whose De Imagine Mundi was the closest encyclopedic model for the overall schema in Snorra Edda of the macrocosm (see Clunies Ross, pp. 158 ff.). Snorri, however, did not necessarily let the Icelandic Elucidarius-translator define the term "kenning" for him religious- ly or philosophically. Of the techniques of Latin text-exegesis or composition, etymology, homonymous wordplay, metonym and metaphor, and the integumentum concept were also all within his reach. But beyond these limits one can only guess whether he dubbed the wordplay "ofljst" in reaction to Geoffrey of Vinsauf's stylistic ideal of the clair-obscure as in Poetrianova, 11.832-^3.

Several conclusions follow from this long review. For one thing, the main difference between Snorri and lfr Prarson, his nephew, is shown to be, not that the one is a speech-philosopher and the other a rhetorician, but rather that the uncle had small Latin and the nephew a great deal. The difference between them is in linguistic degree and not in intellectual kind, since they were both men of letters with an Icelandic passion for poetry. To the extent of their Latin, their cultural agendas diverged: lfr, with his panoply of latinate rhetorical figures, unfeignedly hoped to assimilate skaldic verse to the canons of ancient and medieval Latin literature; Snorri more deviously aimed, as I have said, to reconcile the native poetry of Scandinavian paganism with northern Christianity and its



imported culture, without either bowing the knee to Baal or condemning the old culture of medieval Scandinavia. In their agendas, lfr was a professed internationalist, Snorri an unassuming nativist. Clunies Ross has correctly conceived Snorri' s hidden agenda, but she goes a step too far in the right direction when she engages him in the mythopoetic cause not only of the pre-Christian Scandinavians but of their conquerors, the euhemerized Aesir, too. That indeed would be bowing the knee to Baal.

Another thing entirely is Snorri' s originality, especially in his grammar of poetic diction - an originality that, contradictorily, has spurred scholars like the Dronkes, Faulkes, and Clunies Ross to ever wider searches of patristic and medieval Latin literature for his sources, even though two of the foremost students of Snorra Edda, Frank20 and Clunies Ross herself (passim), have had to acknowledge how slight are the ties that bind him to the central European academic communities. What Snorri was ignorant of and what he independently accomplished with his poetics have both been buried under a steady ac- cumulation of Latin auctoritates, which have been heaped on his Edda by industrious, but unreflecting, scholarship since 1950, when the present lines of research were laid out by Walter Baetke in his "Die Gtterlehre der Snorra-Edda" (1950). Thus the precocity of Snorri' s insights into poetic language has been badly mistaken for a linguistic sophistication fully abreast of the latest European movements in philosophy and grammar. But back at the text of Skldskaparml 7, as translations of the passage will reveal, there is still no

scholarly consensus on the gist of his first working definition of kennings, which is the keystone of his implicit theory of names. Whether this theory was his or somebody else's in Europe evidently cannot be decided until this text and parallel passages elsewhere have been internally elucidated to everyone's satisfaction.

The daring and the deftness of the book under review should not go unpraised, however. It is, very honorably, the business of scholarship to tread the brink of sheer

improbability in sustaining a bold hypothesis, and though we stand away from such per- formances, they are for our benefit, if only because they demarcate the ne plus ultra on lines of research that we may have been fruitlessly pursuing. Clunies Ross's monograph is a landmark by which we can get our bearings again to return to Skldskaparml for a better appreciation of Snorri' s critical accomplishment.

1 Similarly, but still unpersuasively, Klaus von See in his new book, Mythos und Theologie im skandinavischen Hochmittelalter (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1988), pp. 28-29.

2 A. Faulkes, "Pagan Sympathy," in Edda, ed. R. J. Glendinning and Haraldur Bessason (Manitoba: University of Manitoba Press, 1983), p. 304.

3 On the integumentum concept, merely mentioned by Clunies Ross (p. 14), see H. Brinkmann, Mittelalterliche Hermeneutik (Tbingen: Max Niemeyer, 1980), pp. 169, 176, 180-84.

4 See his paper "Feia Skldskap," in Akten der fnften Arbeitstagung der Skan- dinavisten, ed. H. Uecker (St. Augustin: Dr. Bernd Kretschner, 1983), pp. 117-29.

5 There are several homonymie doublets of name and noun like Tyrltyr in the nomencla- tures of the Old Norse and Latvian pantheons; cf. W. Lauer, Der Name (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1989), p. 144.

6 Cf. Frank's paper in the Festschrift for Turville-Petre, Speculum Norroenum, ed. U. Dronke et al. (Odense: Odense University Press, 1981), pp. 155-70, esp. the words on

p. 159, ". . . Kvasis dreyri . . ., a metaphor for intoxicating drink ..."


Skldskaparml 339

7 As in the symposium on Metaphor and Thought, ed. A. Ortony (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 131.

8 In the Jakob Benediktsson Festschrift, Sjtiu ritgerdir, ed. Einar Ptursson and Jonas Kristjnsson (Reykjavik: Stofnun rna Magnssonar, 1977), I, 153-76.

9 See Bjrn M. lsen's preface to his edition of the work (Copenhagen: Fr. G. Knudtzon, 1884), pp. xxxviii-xxxix.

10 Faulkes, "Pagan Sympathy," p. 288. 11 De eodem et diverso, ed. H. Willner (Mnster: Die Aschendorffische Buchhandlung,

1903), p. 13. 12 Cf. his Fallacie 1 on "transsumptio termini" in L. M. De Rijk's Logica Modernorum

(Assen: Van Gorcum, 1962), I, 553. 13 As in E. Farai' s edition in Les arts potiques du XIIe et du XIIIe sicle (Paris:

Librairie Honor Champion, 1962), p. 220. 14 Cf. Abelard's Logica Ingredientibus , ed. B. Geyer (Mnster: Die Aschendoffische

Buchhandlung, 1921), p. 121. 15 Cf. with Clunies Ross's, p. 39, Faulkes's translation of Snorra Edda for Everyman

Library (London/New York, 1987), p. 64. 16 So A. G. Brodeur in his translation (New York: The American-Scandinavian Foun-

dation, 1916), p. 96, and R. Meissner in Die Kenningar der Skalden (Bonn/Leipzig: Kurt Schroeder, 1921), p. 2.

17 Cf. Faulkes's mistranslation in his version of Snorra Edda, p. 152. 18 Third Gram. Treatise, ed. B. M. Olsen, p. 57. 19 Cf. Y. Lefvre's edition (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1954), p. 371, and the note to pp.

115 f. 20 "Snorri and the Mead of Poetry," pp. 155 f., n. 3.


Article Contentsp. [331]p. 332p. 333p. 334p. 335p. 336p. 337p. 338p. 339

Issue Table of ContentsScandinavian Studies, Vol. 62, No. 3 (SUMMER 1990), pp. 265-399Front MatterIN MEMORIAM [pp. 265-265]JAMMERSMINDE REMEMBERED: A NEW LOOK AT THE STATUS OF HISTORY AND LITERATURE [pp. 266-279]BURN DOWN THE CASTLE! ANTIARCHITECTURAL STRATEGIES IN STRINDBERG'S ETT DRMSPEL [pp. 280-292]METAMORPHOSIS IN IBSEN'S LITTLE EYOLF [pp. 293-318]NOW AND ABSENCE IN THE EARLY EKELF [pp. 319-330]REVIEW ARTICLESECOND THOUGHTS ON SKLDSKAPARML [pp. 331-339]

REVIEWSReview: untitled [pp. 341-342]Review: untitled [pp. 342-344]Review: untitled [pp. 344-345]Review: untitled [pp. 346-347]Review: untitled [pp. 347-349]Review: untitled [pp. 349-351]Review: untitled [pp. 351-353]Review: untitled [pp. 353-355]Review: untitled [pp. 355-356]Review: untitled [pp. 356-358]Review: untitled [pp. 358-360]Review: untitled [pp. 360-362]Review: untitled [pp. 362-363]Review: untitled [pp. 363-364]Review: untitled [pp. 364-365]Review: untitled [pp. 366-367]Review: untitled [pp. 367-368]Review: untitled [pp. 369-370]Review: untitled [pp. 370-371]Review: untitled [pp. 371-373]Review: untitled [pp. 373-374]Review: untitled [pp. 374-376]Review: untitled [pp. 376-377]Review: untitled [pp. 378-379]Review: untitled [pp. 379-380]Review: untitled [pp. 380-382]Review: untitled [pp. 382-383]

BRIEF NOTICESReview: untitled [pp. 385-385]Review: untitled [pp. 385-385]Review: untitled [pp. 386-386]Review: untitled [pp. 386-387]Review: untitled [pp. 387-387]Review: untitled [pp. 388-388]Review: untitled [pp. 388-389]Review: untitled [pp. 389-389]Review: untitled [pp. 390-390]Review: untitled [pp. 390-391]Review: untitled [pp. 391-391]Review: untitled [pp. 392-392]

REPORTTHE CONSTITUTION OF THE SOCIETY FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCANDINAVIAN STUDY (Amended, as of April 29, 1988) [pp. 393-399]

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