A History of Old Norse Poetry and Poetics

Margaret Clunies Ross. A History of Old Norse Poetry and Poetics. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2005.

While the study of the poetry of any culture is an integral part of the familiarity with the literary tradition of that culture, the careful and systematic examination of the poetics that support and sustain that poetic tradition has typically commanded far less attention. Poetics may be understood as the foundational conceptions and systematic principles of a literary tradition that center on precepts related to the nature and fundamental characteristics of literature, their relationship to the resources of the languages that fall within their purview, and their social functions in the society in which they are embedded. In terms of the Western literary tradition at large, Aristotle's Poetics and their extension and elaboration in theorizing of Horace (Ars Poetica) are central. Similarly the precepts presented with great economy of means in the "Great Preface" to the Chinese Classic of Poetry (Shijing) or the two prefaces to Anthology of Ancient and Recent Japanese Poetry (Kokin Wakashu) offer readers decidedly different conceptions of poetry from those based on Aristotelean mimetic enactment and render the poems to which they refer accessible on more than a superficial level. Knowledge of the foundational assumptions of a discursive system-whether subliminal and at best very general or explicit and susceptible to clear articulation-is essential for heuristically productive contextualization of works emerging from within diverse literary contexts. In some highly developed and complex traditions, the sustaining system of poetics remains implicit in the works and has no systematic formulation. In the case of others, critics-typically with regard to a highly respected genre-have systematized norms, conventions, and practices as means of providing promising young writers with a point of reference for the development of their craft or explicitly for the sake of passing a waning tradition on to future generations. Old Norse, happily, belongs to that group of poetic traditions enjoying systematic formulation at the hand of able theorists.

Given this fact, A History of Old Norse Poetry and Poetics is a particularly significant accomplishment and a valuable addition to our understanding of Old Norse literature in that it undertakes the dual function of chronicling not only the development of a complex system of generic conventions and expectations, but...