Everyman a Poet

According to the sagas of Icelanders Everyman (and rather less often Everywoman) was a poet – or potentially so. The art of poetry, expressed mostly in skaldic lausavísur and recorded in writing by anonymous saga authors, is implicitly represented there as a skill available to all to varying degrees and mastered by a good many men and some women living in the Icelandic countryside during the Settlement Age and the following century. Even draugar [revenants], characters appearing in dreams and apparently inanimate objects, like prescient stones and cloaks hanging on walls, are credited with the power of poetic speech in sagas of Icelanders. Although it is acknowledged in the texts of many sagas that some men had a reputation for their poetic skills and were the composers of named and well-known poems, poetry in the form of lausavísur is attributed to many of the characters in sagas of Icelanders, including some individuals who do not play a prominent part in the narrative. In effect, the family saga presents the art of poetry as having been democratised in Iceland, in contrast to the elitist culture of the Norwegian and other Scandinavian courts, at which select skalds, mainly from Iceland and Norway, practised their skills in a highly competitive environment and were handsomely rewarded for them.

On the whole scholars and critics have tacitly or openly regarded the presumption that every Icelander of the Settlement Age was potentially a poet as a likely literary fiction but have rarely questioned why saga writers implicitly endorsed it. Perhaps it seems like a naive question, but it is one nevertheless with some important implications, as we shall see. Those scholars who have edited the texts of sagas of Icelanders, together with editors of the poetry published separately from the prose texts, like Finnur Jónsson and E. A. Kock, have tried to address the issue by dividing the poetry in these sagas into what they consider genuine and what they estimate to be spurious, either as the invention of the saga author or of someone composing poetry in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries and passing it off as the authentic composition of a poet from the tenth or early eleventh centuries.