The Mythological Landscape of Sonatorrek: An Experiment in Contextualising Poetic Experience
The Mythological Landscape of Sonatorrek: An Experiment in Contextualising Poetic Experience

Summary/Abstract: Egill Skallagrimsson’s poem Sonatorrek, traditionally held to have been composed ca. 960 AD and thus perhaps one of the very few genuinely pre-Christian skaldic poems that have been preserved, treats the grief of a father who has lost his son to the sea and his reckoning with the divine powers who have allowed this to happen. The poetic presentation of this emotional struggle repeatedly draws on a stylised and fundamentally mythologising imagery of the coastal landscape in which the central tragedy – the drowning of the poet􏰎s son – has occurred. The paper will analyse the poem’s use of this landscape imagery, compare it with attitudes to the landscape that can be grasped through the everyday medium of place-names as well as through Icelandic place-storytelling, and contrast the implications of this comparison with the cosmic character of much of the mythological imagery employed in the poem. This will serve to contextualise the poetic technique of Sonatorrek and show how it harnesses the tension between the cosmic and the everyday as a means of poetic expression.

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