Clavis Metrica pt. 1 (of 4) – Out of Mere Curiosity
At one point in high school (or menntaskóli, the Icelandic equivalent), some friends convinced me to join a club that organized debates, mostly of a political nature, often consisting of long-winded rhetorical exchanges. At one point we, the organizers, decided to do something different, something out of the ordinary for us and this club. We decided to host what we called a “Hagyrðinga- og kvæðakvöld”. Whenever I try to translate these terms into English I feel like I’m lying from that point on, or at least oversimplifying, because it is really hard to put a finger on what it really means.
Now, it sounds like we knew what we were doing or what we were talking about, but at the tender age of 17 I hardly had a much clearer idea of what this meant than, say, your average English speaker. But roughly speaking, it means: “an evening of people making old-timey Icelandic poetry spontaneously (in a call-and-answer-rap-battle-like fashion) as well as a half-sung, half-spoken traditional performance of previously composed stanzas of such poetry”. What is interesting to note is at the time, I hardly knew how or if these two things (spontaneous poetry-making and the half-sung, half-spoken recital of such poetry) were related and was actually very worried whether the people we were going to invite to participate would be offended by having these things put together. I say this here because it is a testament to just how little I knew about these things at the time.
As someone born and raised in Reykjavík, I had heard about these things but not really seen or heard much about them in action. Not that I would have necessarily encountered them if I had grown up in a more rural area, but still, there wasn’t a lot of this in the suburbs at least. And it is hard to explain that we found this whole concept a little bit funny but also cool in a way, like … say … smoking a pipe or wearing a top hat or something like that. Interesting, funny, fascinating and a bit distant.
We would sing songs in school based on these traditions (usually sing-songy songs in ⅞ – 3/4 – ⅞ – 3/4 with a fermata on the last syllable). Kind of like this but not as good:
Voces thules
Or this:
Lónlíblúbojs
Well-known also through Jón Leifs’ “Icelandic Folk Dances”
Beint á Hani Krummi
And most famously (I can’t resist mentioning it), Henry Cowell based some fragments on this in his Iceland Symphony (roughly 30 years after Jón Leifs)
Beint á allegro Henry cowell’s
Jón Leifs and Henry Cowell were contemporaries, born two years apart. Jón Leifs, however, did live in and encounter the tradition he was basing these folk “arrangements” on, but more on that subject later.
Back to 1999 and Hamrahlíð High School in Reykjavík. We asked around for people who were good in spontaneous verse-ification and found some good suggestions, some of them well-known individuals who to our surprise agreed to participate despite no remuneration of any kind being offered. We didn’t quite understand the price of our youth and interest for all but vanishing traditions.
Then we contacted the Kvæðamannafélagið Iðunn, or just Iðunn for short. The goddess Iðunn is married to Bragi, the god of poetry in Old Norse mythology. The name Kvæðamannafélag is harder to translate, so I’ll come back to that later. Let’s say, for the sake of this narrative right now, that it means “old-timey Icelandic folk-song singing society” (which is a not too inaccurate description of what it is in practice, I was missing only one thing …). So, we called them and asked them to send some people to perform, which they also agreed to do (also not for remuneration). Then we asked them (and this is where I was worried about us revealing our ignorance, but my worries as you will see were the token of my ignorance) if they might know of any people, perhaps in their respectable society, who would be good at competing in spontaneous verse-ification (people known as hagyrðingar). They replied that they in fact did and they would send along two vocal performers and a spontaneous verse-ifyer (hagyrðingur) who might perform some stanzas as well.
Little did I know that most of what happens in the Iðunn meetings is spontaneous verse-ification as well as performances. A “kvæðamaður” is someone does both or either, with an emphasis on performance. The word kvæði may indeed refer to a traditional poem of this sort, regardless of whether it is sung, spoken or written. Not only that, but the closely related verb kveða can describe the making of such poetry, spontaneous or not, and also its performance. The word kveða can sound very ambiguous in modern Icelandic, but only because it is hard for modern people not to separate “song” and “poetry”. But in old-timey Iceland, song is poetry and poetry is song (except that it is not called song, but that’s a different story altogether).
The event came and the local celebrities lined up and the soon-to-be celebrity Steindór Andersen did a duo with Sigurður dýralæknir or Sigurður the veterinarian. Steindór Andersen, who unfortunately passed away earlier this year, blessed be his memory, was later to tour the world with Sigur rós and perform some of their arrangements of Icelandic folk songs, but at this moment in history he was in fact reluctant to perform into a microphone, which I found quite fascinating and a seal of his authenticity at the time (not knowing that he had sung in a band with my now-friend, composer Lárus Grímsson, in his youth). Their recital of Lækurinn (“The old creek”) and other such classics warmed our hearts, and I believe it was the first time I ever heard Steindór’s voice, or Sigurður’s for that matter. It was memorable and inspiring.
When it was time for the spontaneous verse-ification or rap-battle part, the then 90-year-old Andrés Valberg who came with the Iðunn people spontaneously versified everyone under the table with great ease. Everyone was flabbergasted, and the better-known individuals had their jaws drop over his ease and speed. He then recited a few stances in this traditional half-sung style like he owned the place and by the end of the evening he was the true winner in every sense.
This evening was one of great learning. It planted the seed for my curiosity for Icelandic folk music and started to make me understand the deep-seated connection between Icelandic folk “song” and its poetic meter.