A genuinely unique European treasure, this volume bristles with the Viking verses of Rǫgnvaldr, Earl of Orkney, recorded in Orkneyinga Saga. Full of highly stylised, often grotesque images, Ian Crockatt's masterly translations convey the skill, vigour and daring of the original. Skaldic poetry is one of the most elaborate and original in European literature and this collection finally brings it to the deserved attention of the English-language reader. Rich narratives and old Norse mythology blend with familiar place-names and landscapes to create a peculiarly alluring, sometimes comic,...
A genuinely unique European treasure, this volume bristles with the Viking verses of Rǫgnvaldr, Earl of Orkney, recorded in Orkneyinga Saga. Full...
Egill Skallagrimsson was the most original, imaginative and technically brilliant of the Old Norse skalds, poets whose orally composed and performed verses were as much revered in ninth- to thirteenth-century Scandinavia as heroism in battle. Egill's saga details his life-story as well as those of his immediate predecessors, from whom he inherited his massive build, his early baldness (Skalla in his name means 'bald') and his exceptional ugliness. An arch enemy of Erikr Bloodax, he was a notoriously difficult man and, as many of the poems demonstrate, was lethal when crossed. But he also made...
Egill Skallagrimsson was the most original, imaginative and technically brilliant of the Old Norse skalds, poets whose orally composed and performed v...
The poet Ian Crockatt has published two superb translations of Viking poetry with Arc- Crimsoning the Eagle's Claw: the Viking Poems of Rognvaldr Kali Kolsson, Earl of Orkney and The Song Weigher: the Complete Poems of Egill Skallagrimsson, Tenth Century Viking & Skald - and in this chapbook he uses the same highly-wrought form developed by the Skalds (the professional poets employed by the kings and earls of the Viking courts of the 9th to 13th centuries) to tell a quasi-Viking tale set in the landscapes and seascapes once under Viking control - the West Coast of Scotland where he used to...
The poet Ian Crockatt has published two superb translations of Viking poetry with Arc- Crimsoning the Eagle's Claw: the Viking Poems of Rognvaldr Kali...