Hi Haukur,

Till now I've been imagining fornyrðislag, etc., chanted in the
style of Captain Beefheart! Not the chaotic jazzy songs, but the
unaccompanied intoned verses on his record Trout Mask
Replica: "Well" and "Orange Claw Hammer" -- which even have crackle
and hiss as if to evoke old folk music recordings, but I was
thinking more of the force of them. Perhaps these were inspired by
old American recordings.

There's actually quite a bit of variety in the Ísmus recordings
identified with the verb kveður. Some, such as the Gísli Ólafsson
ones, are more spoken, but Hjálmar Lárusson comes closer to what we
would call singing. So even if we there was a continuous tradition,
that still leaves quite a bit of room for interpretation.

From what you say, it seems that Icelandic poetry is a more
continuous tradition than English. Not that alliteration doesn't
keep cropping up in English, but there was a definite break with
formal alliteration. I was using "alliterative" vaguely just to
mean the old Eddic metres, where this was the main formal device,
and the Skaldic ones like dróttkvætt where the rhymes usually
connect syllables within one line, rather than linking different
lines -- although there are Skaldic metres that connect different
lines using rhyme, aren't there?

Anyway, this has got me wondering how best to translate kveða where
it occurs in sagas in the context of people intoning verse. Till
now I've tended to use "said", "spoke", "declared", but maybe it
should sometimes be "chanted", "intoned", even "sang". Except that
this could get quite distracting for modern readers, for instance
where verses alternate in a dialogue. There's a danger of it
sounding like a musical. Then again, strange isn't always bad.

Still, I'm tempted to stick with "said" and "spoke" in a lot of
instances, and just add the occasional "chanted". Pálsson & Edwards
seem to go with "said", "spoke" (in 7 Viking Romances), as does
Jesse Byock in The Saga of the Volsungs, and The Saga of King Hrolf
Kraki (varð henni þá ljóð á munni "this chant emerged from her
mouth", but ensuing verses are "spoken" and "said"). However Gwyn
Jones (Eirik the Red & Other Icelandic Sagas) almost always
has "chanted", although in the title story, Þá kvað einn maðr
kviðling þenna = "one of them sang this ditty". But then this last
book is mainly of sagas set in Iceland, whereas the others I
mentioned, being Fornaldarsögur, tend to have have larger proportion
of verse (with the exception of Hrolf).

As ever, there's arguments both ways. What do folks think?

Lama Nom





--- In norse_course@yahoogroups.com, "Haukur Thorgeirsson"
<haukurth@...> wrote:

> > There´s a variety of styles, some quite hymnlike, and even
> > one to the tune of "Oh My Darling Clementine" (374)! But also

many

> > where it actually says "X kveður..." (so-and-so chants,

intones...)

> > 508-515 have multiple performers. I wonder if alliterative verse
> > was ever done in this way?
>
> Some things to keep in mind:
>
> 1. All Icelandic poetry (or almost all) is alliterative;
> even when there is end-rhyme the alliteration is still present.
>
> 2. Much Old Norse poetry has some form of rhyme in addition
> to the alliteration.
>
> 3. The old alliterative meters (fornyrðislag) continued to be
> used in Iceland through the ages.
>
> So I don't think there's anything problematic with chanting
> fornyrðislag strophes. I don't know if you can find examples
> on Ísmús but I think you can somewhere obtain recordings of
> Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson, the late high priest, chanting parts
> of the Sæmundar-Edda.
>
> I can't, however, vouch for a living tradition of chanting
> fornyrðislag throughout the second millennium.
>
> Kveðja,
> Haukur