Wisdom in Old Norse denotes two things. On the one hand, wisdom describes maxims, proverbs, riddles and the like: abstracted pronouncements about humanity and the world it inhabits that might occur in a range of texts. On the other, wisdom describes a genre of texts that are concerned in whole or large part with the conveyance and context of such wisdom material. The two need to be understood together, like words and the typeface in which they are written, and as a pair the two sides of wisdom encapsulate a particular cultural urge to relate generalised knowledge to particular or collective experience. Wisdom literature in one sense derives from wisdom content, since the former perforce contained reams of the latter, but the relationship between the two was symbiotic. Wisdom as a genre stemmed from what was considered to be valued knowledge – and in turn helped valorise that knowledge, and situate its acquisition, exchange and deployment within a relatable framework. By this means knowledge was arranged and categorised, as well as contextualised with voice and setting.

The way in which wisdom texts encoded information inevitably depended on specific cultural, historical and literary circumstances. Both wisdom and the literature that conveyed it tended to be highly diverse, reflecting shifting tastes in what knowledge mattered and why. These variations can be perceived in a great many medieval and world cultures. In part that is because wisdom – and the desire to record it – is a response to universal social situations, and the inherent human desire to provide a structure for defining reality, knowledge and truth, in a sense doing what the concept of genre does in relation to literary compositions. Another reason for the heterogeneity of wisdom and literature is that it is an analytic category, not an ethnic one, which is to say that it is based on analogy with the textual product of a particular culture and then exported into others. In this instance the base category is ultimately the Biblical books of wisdom. If one takes Biblical wisdom as the prototype from which all others diverge, the expression of wisdom in other cultures will inevitably seem highly diverse.

Part of the attraction of eddic poetry for modern readers lies in its particularly compelling blend of the familiar and the remote. It presents a strange world, distanced physically and chronologically from that of its audience; a world populated by larger-than-life characters drawn from myth and legend who experience a correspondingly heightened form of reality. The anxieties of the real-world societies of medieval Scandinavia are played out in the grandest possible terms on the eddic stage. There is much in this poetry that appeals to universal human experience, but it is inextricably framed within its own particular cultural setting. The interpretation of eddic poetry begins with investigation of this context. Approaching genre in Old Norse poetry is deeply problematic – as it is in any literary tradition – and made more so by the nature of the preservation of eddic poetry across a variety of manuscripts and by its relationship to associated prose texts (see Clunies Ross on preservation, Chapter 1 in this Handbook). Some of these difficulties are ultimately insurmountable if the aim is to construct a rigid and universal taxonomy. Rather than shoe-horn eddic verse into such a mould, we should therefore seek to construct a refined and nuanced – even if sometimes apparently contradictory – series of overlapping generic criteria, best conceived of as literary modes, and a similarly flexible perspective on these modes’ relationship to Old Norse poetics and literature more broadly.

Genre is itself a highly malleable literary tool; one which aids composers or performers as well as audiences. It provides the former, in the terminology of Hans Robert Jauss (1982), with a ‘mode of writing’ (or ‘mode of composing’, as we might extrapolate back to the oral period) to shape new works within comprehensible frames of reference, and the latter with a ‘horizon of expectations’ according to which they can judge and interpret new material. Thus, genre can be interpreted loosely as any set of conventions used to contextualise a composition: it is a useful device for describing mediation between composer and audience, and can be based on a near infinite array of features finding expression in form, style, and content.

The style of eddic poetry is as distinct as its subject matter, with characteristics that go hand in hand with its unique form. This Scandinavian reflex of traditional Germanic alliterative verse was highly innovative and productive for half a millennium, spanning and responding to profound cultural change whilst maintaining the essence of the ancient character that constituted a large part of its allure for medieval redactors. The voices of ancient heroes and supernatural beings had a particular style that lent them authenticity and commanded the rapt attention that the seeress calls for at the opening of Vǫluspá (1/1–3), which begins the Codex Regius eddic collection. The ways in which eddic poets exercised their skill and originality in this tradition distanced them from courtly skaldic compositions (see Schorn on genre, Chapter 12 in this Handbook). Masters of traditional aspects of form, structure, diction, and rhetoric, individual eddic poets manipulated the poetic idioms in which they worked with varied and sophisticated effect and were thus able to draw out ever new meaning from ancient lore. The tools they used to do so are the primary focus of this chapter: diction, verse-form, and, above all, dramatic dialogues used mimetically to recreate crucial moments and encounters, allowing the characters themselves to debate their choices and motivations, their wisdom and world-views, and to argue for the meaning of their lives and legacies.

Diction

Eddic style shows the development of tendencies already present in Old English, Old Saxon, and Old High German poetry, such as the extensive use of dialogue and an aesthetic that favours allusion and economy of phrase. Old Norse likewise possesses an expansive poetic lexicon, employing a range of vocabulary that is rarely or never attested in prose, and which is in some cases likely quite archaic. Using a variety of terminology with subtle variations in meaning to reference the same object – sometimes in quick succession – allowed poets to explore aspects of its identity or role in context. Thus, the mysterious and contradictory nature of Vǫlundr's elusive wife in Vǫlundarkviða emerges as she is named mær (‘girl’), alvitr (‘strange creature’), drós (‘woman’), ljóss (‘shining [one]’), and brúðr (‘bride’) (Vkv 1, 2 3, 5, and 19).