Papers by Jonathan Grove
Norse Greenland: Selected Papers of the Hvalsey Conference 2008 (Journal of the North Atlantic, Special Volume 2), pp. 30–51, 2009
This paper explores the accounts of Norse Greenland in the medieval Icelandic sagas, looking past... more This paper explores the accounts of Norse Greenland in the medieval Icelandic sagas, looking past the Vínland sagas to examine ways in which Greenlandic settings are employed in the 'post-classical' saga-tradition and other texts. The style and content of these tales varied over time, but the recurrence of certain conventional patterns indicates that stories set in Greenland retained important thematic continuities for Icelandic saga audiences. From as early as the 12th century, Icelandic writers identified Greenland as a peripheral space in the Norse world, connected with Iceland, but markedly distinct and remote. This marginalization is evident in the Vínland sagas and developed further in the post-classical tradition, which made Greenland a place of exile in which Icelandic heroes were tested by extreme adversity in the settlements and wilderness. Embodying the preoccupations of Icelandic writers and audiences, these writings tell us little about historical realities in Norse Greenland; but they do show how details of geographical and historical lore were subsumed and transformed in the Icelandic narrative tradition.
Á austrvega. Saga and East Scandinavia. Preprint Papers of the 14th International Saga Conference Uppsala, 9th–15th August 2009, I–II, ed. Agneta Ney, Henrik Williams and Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist, Papers from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences 14, vol. II, pp. 327–335 , 2009
As a source of public recognition and enrichment, as a means of making and breaking the reputatio... more As a source of public recognition and enrichment, as a means of making and breaking the reputations of others, and as a showy but highly conventional form produced and transmitted by poets whose names were perpetuated in tradition, Old Norse court poetry seems to have provided an important conduit for the performance of status rivalry and the matching of skill among its practitioners. The poetic tradition emerged from the progressive appropriation and reinvention of earlier work, as individual skalds struggled to maintain the conventions of a highly circumscribed oral form, while at the same time passing down to posterity material that might differentiate them from their predecessors, contemporaries and successors.
Here I examine how the competitive aspect of skaldic verse-making is expressed in poems attributed to two of the best known court poets of the earlier eleventh century, at the court of Óláfr Haraldsson of Norway, focussing on the indebtedness of Óttarr svarti in his Höfuðlausn to the Víkingarvísar of his kinsman Sigvatr Þórðarson. Patterns of echoes and parallel usages between the works of these court colleagues indicate that the hirðskáld actively engaged with the compositions of their contemporaries, advertising their ability to match or surpass them by referencing their work and developing new formulations from old.
Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 4, 85-131 , 2008
This article examines an exchange of skaldic verses between a number of Icelandic chieftains, lan... more This article examines an exchange of skaldic verses between a number of Icelandic chieftains, landholders and semi-professional poets, reported to have taken place in a period of political crisis in western Iceland in 1229. The surviving sequence, preserved in Sturla Þórðarson’s Íslendinga saga, constitutes an unparalleled example of extended verse-capping in medieval Icelandic narrative writing. The historical context of these verses and their narrative treatment in Íslendinga saga are considered in detail, and some new readings of the verse material and the political relationships they disclose are proposed. The verses are shown to illuminate the continuing value of skaldic performance as an instrument of social and political leverage in thirteenth-century Iceland, and the stimulatory function of competitive posturing in skaldic discourse. The analysis presented here suggests the need to revise some recent propositions concerning the supposed clerical and scholastic co-option of skaldic poetics in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Further stanzas composed in the period 1229–32 perpetuate the agonistic pattern developed in the initial sequence, and the narrative framing of these later compositions is shown to embody conspicuous ambivalence to the adversarial ethics underlying the continuing exchange.
Editions of Skaldic Poetry by Jonathan Grove
Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages. Volume 5: Poetry in Sagas of Icelanders. Edited by Margaret Clunies Ross, Kari Ellen Gade, and Tarrin Wills. Turnhout: Brepols, 2022
A new edition of all 73 stanzas of poetry transmitted in Grettis saga, based primarily on the cop... more A new edition of all 73 stanzas of poetry transmitted in Grettis saga, based primarily on the copies of the saga in AM 551a 4to and the other principal early vellums (AM 556a 4to, AM 152 fol, DG10 and the short fragment AM 571 4to) together with Jón Eggertsson's C17th transcriptions of the verse material from a lost manuscript of the saga closely related to the text in 556a
Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages. Volume 3: Poetry from Treatises on Poetics. Edited by Kari Ellen Gade. Turnhout: Brepols, 2017
An edition of two Old Norse stanzas preserved in a C14th Icelandic learned miscellany (AM 732 b 4... more An edition of two Old Norse stanzas preserved in a C14th Icelandic learned miscellany (AM 732 b 4°): the first a scurrilous verse ridiculing the rejection of a failed suitor, written in a simple code; the second an ironic stanza apparently offering overblown praise to a leatherworker with a series of Latin honorific terms, some of which may have been culled from the Horatian Ode 'Iam satis terris nivis atque dirae'
Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages. Volume 7: Poetry on Christian Subjects. Edited by Margaret Clunies Ross. Turnhout: Brepols, 2007
Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages. Volume 7: Poetry on Christian Subjects. Edited by Margaret Clunies Ross,, 2007
Book Reviews by Jonathan Grove
Publication Date: 2015
Publication Name: English Historical Review 130
PhD Thesis (University of Toronto, 2007) by Jonathan Grove
This thesis examines the competitive function of Old Norse-Icelandic skaldic poetry of the late n... more This thesis examines the competitive function of Old Norse-Icelandic skaldic poetry of the late ninth to thirteenth centuries, arguing that verse-making was an instrument of social rivalry for its practitioners, who competed with one another to demonstrate their proficiency as verbal artists, and secure public status and lasting reputation. The agonistic quality of skaldic poetics is detectable throughout the verse corpus, and fundamental to the stereotyped representations of poets in saga narrative. Individual poets attempted not only to surpass their contemporaries, but also to outdo those preceding skalds whose work was transmitted to them in the memorial tradition. From the late twelfth century, when prose writers began to use skaldic poetry in the creation of their new textual communities, they memorialized this agonistic tradition as they translated it into the medium of writing, recreating the social and performative contests of the skalds in their narrative arrangements.
Chapter 1 sets out two case studies exemplifying the importance of competition between rival skalds in the sagas. Chapter 2 examines the conceptualization of skaldic verse-making in poetry and prose as a competitive performance skill, an #ré#t in which named poets strove to display their mastery of tradition in the pursuit of material and social advantage. Chapter 3 explores the creative tension between tradition and individual agency, showing how conventional mythologizing notions of poetry and poetic performance served the self-interest of skalds working in a highly conservative tradition. Chapters 4 and 5 offer a treatment of episodes in the Kings’ Sagas and Sagas of Icelanders that exemplify the consistent preoccupation with the dramatization of poetry as a form of agonistic display, representing the assimilation of skaldic performative conventions in literary narrative. Chapter 6 sets out some representative evidence for synchronic and diachronic poetic rivalry in the corpus of court poetry, focussing on representative examples from the hǫfuðskáld of the tenth to twelfth centuries. Finally, in Chapter 7, I discuss the expression of poetic competitiveness in the Contemporary Sagas, focussing on Íslendinga saga and an extended poetic exchange, involving Snorri Sturluson, that arose from the political rivalries that divided Iceland in the 1220s.
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Papers by Jonathan Grove
Here I examine how the competitive aspect of skaldic verse-making is expressed in poems attributed to two of the best known court poets of the earlier eleventh century, at the court of Óláfr Haraldsson of Norway, focussing on the indebtedness of Óttarr svarti in his Höfuðlausn to the Víkingarvísar of his kinsman Sigvatr Þórðarson. Patterns of echoes and parallel usages between the works of these court colleagues indicate that the hirðskáld actively engaged with the compositions of their contemporaries, advertising their ability to match or surpass them by referencing their work and developing new formulations from old.
Editions of Skaldic Poetry by Jonathan Grove
FOLLOW THE LINK to the relevant page at the Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages site.
https://www.abdn.ac.uk/skaldic/db.php?id=2969&if=default&table=text&val=&view=
FOLLOW THE LINK to the relevant page at the Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages site
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/skaldic/db.php?id=2923&if=default&table=text
Book Reviews by Jonathan Grove
PhD Thesis (University of Toronto, 2007) by Jonathan Grove
Chapter 1 sets out two case studies exemplifying the importance of competition between rival skalds in the sagas. Chapter 2 examines the conceptualization of skaldic verse-making in poetry and prose as a competitive performance skill, an #ré#t in which named poets strove to display their mastery of tradition in the pursuit of material and social advantage. Chapter 3 explores the creative tension between tradition and individual agency, showing how conventional mythologizing notions of poetry and poetic performance served the self-interest of skalds working in a highly conservative tradition. Chapters 4 and 5 offer a treatment of episodes in the Kings’ Sagas and Sagas of Icelanders that exemplify the consistent preoccupation with the dramatization of poetry as a form of agonistic display, representing the assimilation of skaldic performative conventions in literary narrative. Chapter 6 sets out some representative evidence for synchronic and diachronic poetic rivalry in the corpus of court poetry, focussing on representative examples from the hǫfuðskáld of the tenth to twelfth centuries. Finally, in Chapter 7, I discuss the expression of poetic competitiveness in the Contemporary Sagas, focussing on Íslendinga saga and an extended poetic exchange, involving Snorri Sturluson, that arose from the political rivalries that divided Iceland in the 1220s.
Here I examine how the competitive aspect of skaldic verse-making is expressed in poems attributed to two of the best known court poets of the earlier eleventh century, at the court of Óláfr Haraldsson of Norway, focussing on the indebtedness of Óttarr svarti in his Höfuðlausn to the Víkingarvísar of his kinsman Sigvatr Þórðarson. Patterns of echoes and parallel usages between the works of these court colleagues indicate that the hirðskáld actively engaged with the compositions of their contemporaries, advertising their ability to match or surpass them by referencing their work and developing new formulations from old.
FOLLOW THE LINK to the relevant page at the Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages site.
https://www.abdn.ac.uk/skaldic/db.php?id=2969&if=default&table=text&val=&view=
FOLLOW THE LINK to the relevant page at the Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages site
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/skaldic/db.php?id=2923&if=default&table=text
Chapter 1 sets out two case studies exemplifying the importance of competition between rival skalds in the sagas. Chapter 2 examines the conceptualization of skaldic verse-making in poetry and prose as a competitive performance skill, an #ré#t in which named poets strove to display their mastery of tradition in the pursuit of material and social advantage. Chapter 3 explores the creative tension between tradition and individual agency, showing how conventional mythologizing notions of poetry and poetic performance served the self-interest of skalds working in a highly conservative tradition. Chapters 4 and 5 offer a treatment of episodes in the Kings’ Sagas and Sagas of Icelanders that exemplify the consistent preoccupation with the dramatization of poetry as a form of agonistic display, representing the assimilation of skaldic performative conventions in literary narrative. Chapter 6 sets out some representative evidence for synchronic and diachronic poetic rivalry in the corpus of court poetry, focussing on representative examples from the hǫfuðskáld of the tenth to twelfth centuries. Finally, in Chapter 7, I discuss the expression of poetic competitiveness in the Contemporary Sagas, focussing on Íslendinga saga and an extended poetic exchange, involving Snorri Sturluson, that arose from the political rivalries that divided Iceland in the 1220s.