Icelandic Poetry Quotes

We thought it was drops of dew and kissed cold tears from the crossgrass.

It was where they kept their minds active by making up poetry on the spot, which they called að kveðast á - someone would make up the first line of a poem, someone else would make up the next line, and so on.

It is noteworthy that about the year 1200, the Nibelungenlied, with its poetic version of the Siegfried story, was written, probably in Austria. At approximately the same time or within seven decades, The Saga of the Volsungs was compiled in Iceland with far fewer chivalric elements than its German counterpart. Almost all the Old Norse narrative material that has survived—whether myth, legend, saga, history, or poetry—is found in Icelandic manuscripts, which form the largest existing vernacular literature of the medieval West. Among the wealth of written material is Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, a thirteenth century Icelandic treatise on the art of skaldic poetry and a handbook of mythological lore. The second section of Snorri’s three-part prose work contains a short and highly readable summary of the Sigurd cycle which, like the much longer prose rendering of the cycle in The Saga of the Volsungs, is based on traditional Eddic poems (Jesse Byock)

It is as natural to the Icelandic heart to turn to poetry in times of stress as for another to search his Bible.

It is certainly possible that knowledge of the myths survived the conversion to Christianity because of the value early Christian Iceland placed on the skaldic poems about kings and rulers. In other words, it is possible that the continued transmission of poetry about early kings and battles as historical sources required a continuing knowledge of heroic legend and of myth, not as the object of belief or as something associated with cult but simply as stories that people interested in the history of their own culture had to know.