Whenever I say “rímur” and “kvæði” are poetry I feel like I’m lying. So many things about this tradition are so easily lost in translation and, as I have gradually found out, are often quite misunderstood by the average Icelandic person today.
When I say the word “poetry” in English, people probably think of something romantic, artsy, highbrow, etc., whereas this tradition that we are talking about included EVERYTHING. Rímur and various related traditions with overlapping stylistic elements would include any topic covered on Netflix and also ones that would not be allowed even on Netflix. It was the Icelandic people’s primary form of entertainment and art for at least 700 years – if not longer. Gossip, praise, women, tobacco, alcohol, coffee. Verses to remember one’s way between farms, pornographic jokes, ways to entertain oneself when on a boat, on a horse, during roundup, while drinking with friends. Most famously, long epic poetry: stories that were more than an evening’s length of half-sung, half-spoken material. The word “söngur” or song/singing was all but reserved for what one did in church. The “rímur”/“kveða”/“kvæði” type of “song” and its many variations and cousins were the dominant art forms. Needless to say, when people had so few distractions in their lives other than poetry, poetry developed into a language of its own, and its embellishments became so elaborate that to this day it is almost impossible to translate most of it into any other language. Ironically, the most elaborate effort to do so has been with some of the poetry of Jónas Hallgrímsson, who is Iceland’s most beloved romantic poet and who is also often portrayed as the archenemy of the traditional rímur style. Let’s look at an example from this website, translated by the late Dick Ringler:
| Út um móinn enn er hér engin gróin hola, fífiltóin fölnuð er; farðu’ í sjóinn, gola! |
| Heath and howe are bare and bleak, here no flowers revel; daisies cower, wan and weak — wind! you sour devil! |
This is a ferskeytla or quatrain, which is also hringhend (I’ll get to that later). This is the most common of the traditional meters from the 14th century onwards. What exactly makes it a quatrain/ferskeytla? Well, first off, there is the infamous 7/6/7/6 syllable count for the lines (see the musical examples in my last post with the ⅞ ¾ ⅞ ¾ rhythm). For some languages this would be enough to make it metered poetry, but not here. It also needs to rhyme. For a ferskeytla, every other line rhymes with every other line. Also (and this is arguably an ancient and somewhat unique feature of germanic poetry), you have to include alliteration: two words in the first line of a couplet and the word at the beginning of the second need to start with the same consonant, unless you want to go the easier route and fall back on vowels. Any vowel can alliterate with any vowel. This pattern is repeated in the second couplet or second half of the stanza. Some meters are also very specific on which beats these alliterating words are to be placed, musically speaking – typically the first and third syllable of first line and the very first of the next, although there are some exceptions. This was not thought of as enormously complex but rather standard. For a nineteenth-century audience, this would simply be the most basic criteria for something to be even considered a poem or “bound speech” (Icelandic bundið mál). This particular example is a hringhend quatrain, which means that the third syllable in each line also rhymes with all of the others.
By the time I was 24, I had developed quite an interest in this subject and had been searching for nonconventional means of conceiving of and notating rhythm. After having been introduced by Charles Ross to the music of Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, which was a revelation, my curiosity towards the music of an island I was more familiar with was re-kindled. When I heard that an old teacher of mine had received a grant for folk music research, I contacted him and asked if he needed minions for this project. He accepted me into this project, and that summer I learnt a great deal about this subject and started reading whatever there was to read about this subject, scanning old manuscripts and listening to many hours of these performances for data entry.
Later, I was offered to transcribe folk songs for the Iðunn society. I ultimately transcribed 160 folk songs for what was to become volume II of their collection, The Magnetic Tape Collection.Eventually, I discovered the research of Svend Nielsen and then the book Kvæðaskapur by Hreinn Steingrímsson, two radically different studies that both seem to contradict the ideas most people have about traditional Icelandic folk songs. Others have argued that the style most suitable for performing longer pieces of epic poetry involves a lot of not only improvisation but built-in variations within the song. On top of that, Hreinn argues that the pitch relationships of a song could also expand and contract – both in a single performance and between performers performing the same song. According to Hreinn, what defined the song was primarily its contour rather than a melody of specific pitches. These ideas and the recordings I listened to at the time were to prove very influential on me.
Listening to these taped performances opened further up gateways for me in terms of rhythm. Ideas of pitch and harmony or the looseness and relativity of it have been an endless source of inspiration for me, but one feature that didn’t immediately find its way into my music is the hypnotizing effect of the meter. After having listened to countless hours of this music, it finally occurred to me that, even though we talk about meter as a poetic, prosodic, structural, stylistic element, it is in my opinion first and foremost musical (in the modern sense of the term), meaning it has to do with sound patterns. Repeated over and over in a long string of stanzas, these patterns become very hypnotizing and somehow stimulating at the same time, like a good cup of tea.