Gripla - 01.01.1979, Page 196

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GRIPLA
this way, praise poetry could also have the implicit result of
exerting control on a ruler as well as the obvious one of upholding
his position.
The function of the court poems comprised at least the four features
(a)-(d). The scalds and their poems were a social institution, and this
institution remained intact as long as the society remained unchanged.10
The main function of the court poets was thus political. This is the
primary function of the court poetry.
3.0 When the court poems were written down, mainly in the 13th
century, some of them were said to be the work of poets who served
chiefs or kings who lived in the 9th century. According to this they
had been handed down for four centuries, or about twelve generations,
before being committed to parchment. The question of their transmis-
sion will be dealt with in what follows.
3.1 Poems handed down orally usually show this in one way or
another. The following features of scaldic tradition and scaldic poetry
indicate oral tradition:
(a) Tradition knows no instance of a scald writing down a poem
for the benefit of a chief. The scalds declaim or recite (kveða, flytja)
their poems and the listeners learn (nema) the poems.
(b) Some scalds are said to have recited the poems of other scalds
along with their own.11 Thus it appears that the repertory of a scald
was not limited to his own poems. In fact, the training of a scald must
have included the memorizing of a considerable corpus of poems, no
doubt with accompanying tales and appropriate explanations. It is
therefore likely that the transmission of scaldic poetry was largely in
the hands of the scalds themselves. It is noteworthy that there are
examples of poetic families (cf. Finnur Jónsson 1920:332-333), a
phenomenon also known elsewhere (cf. Finnegan 1976:88).
The sources say little about how young scalds learned their trade.
10 When the Scandinavian states and their rulers achieved a greater stabiliza-
tion, comparable to the rest of Western Europe, the poets and the poems lost their
function. Courtly romances from Central Europe brought with them a human
ideal, different from and more complicated than the ideal held up by the scalds.
At the same time romances and jongleurs substituted the court poems as a pastime.
11 Examples of this have been collected by Finnur Jónsson 1920:341-342.