Crimsoning the Eagle's Claw E-Book

Rognvaldr Kali Kolsson

• Herausgeber: Arc Publications
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: Arc Classics: New Translations of Great Poets of the Past
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 41

Beschreibung

A genuinely unique European treasure, this volume bristles with all 33 of Rognvaldr's verses from the Orkneyinga Saga. While full of highly stylised, often grotesque images, the poems convey the skill, vigour and daring of the original.Rich narratives and old Norse mythology blend with familiar place-names and landscapes to create a peculiarly alluring, sometime comic, world that never quite settles around the reader, as if time travel is possible from a favourite armchair.

Leseprobe

Crimsoning The Eagle’s Claw

Published by Arc Publications,

Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road

Todmorden OL14 6DA, UK

www.arcpublications.co.uk

Translation & Introduction copyright © Ian Crockatt, 2014

Preface copyright © Kevin Crossley-Holland, 2014

Design by Tony Ward & Ben Styles

978 1908376 60 2 (pbk)

978 1908376 62 6 (ebk)

978 1908376 61 9 (hbk)

Cover image and illustrations by Wenna Crockatt

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part of this book may take place without the written permission of Arc Publications.

Arc Classics:

New Translations of Great Poets of the Past

Series Editor: Jean Boase-Beier

Crimsoning

the Eagle’s Claw

THE VIKING POEMS OF

RǪGNVALDR KALI KOLSSON

EARL OF ORKNEY

Translated & introduced

by Ian Crockatt

with a preface by Kevin Crossley-Holland

2014

Contents

Preface by Kevin Crossley-Holland

Translator’s Introduction

Early Poems

Incidents in the Earl’s Daily Life

Shetland Shipwreck

The Lady Ermingerd

Seafaring and Piracy

Jerusalem

Sailing to Byzantium

Illness, Loss

In Praise of Rǫgnvaldr

Notes on the Translation

Biographical Notes

Translator’s Acknowledgements

Preface

Not a storm-surge, not yet, but the tide of scholarly and popular interest in Viking culture has never flowed more strongly. One has only to glance at a recent bibliography to see the welter of papers, histories, critical studies and translations to have appeared since the turn of the century, while the market-place has been flooded by adult, children’s and graphic novels, films, cartoons and computer games, and intellectual enquiry and general appeal have come together in the major exhibition, Vikings: life and legend, at the British Museum in early 2014.

But although more than five thousand skaldic poems composed between the ninth and thirteenth centuries survive, they have been sideswept not only because they are so very dense and allusive, and packed with kennings, but because translators have baulked at the poems’ extremely demanding verse form.

In his exemplary introduction, Ian Crockatt describes the classic skaldic stanza, the dróttkvætt, as exoskeletal, in which the form necessarily (if only scarcely) contains the contents, and makes his point with a memorable comparison – but I won’t steal his thunder! Crockatt then convincingly argues that a translation can only be successful if it ‘seeks equivalents for the original’s sound-patterns and imaginative reach as well as its narrative sense.’ William Morris was the last published translator to attempt this, one hundred and fifty years ago.

So it’s wonderful to report that the forty-one skaldic verses in Crimsoning the Eagle’s Claw, most of them preserved in Orkneyinga Saga, are really fine translations of fine poems. When I first read a few of them several years ago, I noted how passionate they were, how they had got under my skin, and were waking me up in the middle of the night. In this short preface, I would just add that the best of them are akin to fierce sparklers, momentarily lighting the dark; they’re like random jottings and observations; spirited, almost gamey, and marvellously skilful.

What I (and I certainly won’t be alone) find immensely exciting is that in these aristocratic, vivid, sensuous poems, I’m meeting a Viking face to face, and of course this gives the book both coherence and thrilling immediacy. Here’s the Norwegian who was an Earl of Orkney; the man who founded the beautiful pink cathedral in Kirkwall to house the remains of his martyred uncle, Magnus. Here’s a member of the Varangian Guard in Byzantium with stories of the old gods seething in his blood, who was canonised as a Christian saint. A sensitive extrovert… daring yet tender… a lover, a pilgrim, a warrior, a wit: Rǫgnvaldr was all these, and ‘bragging’ of his own skills, he concludes: ‘Best of all, I’ve mastered / harp-play and poetry .’

A number of Viking poets came from Norway to Orkney, among them Turf-Einar Rognvaldsson (‘I can promise you the greatest favour you could wish for’, he told his father, ‘and that’s never to see me again!’) and the anonymous skald who composed the Darraðarljoð, the spear-song sung by the Valkyries after the Battle of Clontarf in 1014, and the author of Orkneyinga Saga. And as one might expect, their work and Rǫgnvaldr’s poems bear the stamp of the Northern Isles (just look at Crockatt’s notes!) no less than fine but little known Orkney writers such as Samuel Laing and Robert Rendall, and the islands’ three important twentieth century writers, Edwin Muir, Eric Linklater and George Mackay Brown. Indeed, they’re all part of one thriving cultural story.

Rǫgnvaldr’s poems give us precious glimpses of a life lived to the full. They are spirited and generous. They’re celebrations. And they are manly.

In a charming dróttkvætt of his own by way of envoi, Ian Crockatt makes a promise to Rǫgnvaldr. His superb translations ensure that it is very likely to come true.

Kevin Crossley-Holland

Translator’s Introduction