Old Norse Women’s Poetry: The Voices of Female Skalds

The rich and compelling corpus of Old Norse poetry is one of the most important and influential areas of medieval European literature. What is less well known, however, is the quantity of the material which can be attributed to women skalds. This book, intended for a broad audience, presents a bilingual edition (Old Norse and English) of this material, from the ninth to the thirteenth century and beyond, with commentary and notes. The poems here reflect the dramatic and often violent nature of the sagas: their subject matter features Viking Age shipboard adventures and shipwrecks; prophecies; curses; declarations of love and of revenge; duels, feuds and battles; encounters with ghosts; marital and family discord; and religious insults, among many other topics. Their authors fall into four main categories: pre-Christian Norwegian and Icelandic skaldkonur of the Viking Age; Icelandic skaldkonur of the Sturlung Age (thirteenth century); additional early skaldkonur from the Islendingasoegur and related material, not as historically verifiable as the first group; and mythical figures cited as reciting verse in the legendary sagas (fornaldarsoegur).

Sandra Ballif Straubhaar is Senior Lecturer in Germanic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.