May 2026: Musa scaldica: translating Icelandic poetry into Latin in the Early Modern

Let’s assume you have come across a collection of Indonesian poems and decided to read it. Except: you don’t know a single word of Indonesian. As a reader in 2026, you would probably look for a translation of the book, either in your language or in English.

When reading the poems in translation, however, something feels off. The poems ‘sound’ strangely familiar, but not only because of the language. They have the same metre of the verses that, for instance, you had to learn by heart for Christmas at primary school, and use the same kind of rhetorical imagery you are used to and read since you were a child.

As a modern reader, this would be surprising and, perhaps, even disappointing: you were expecting the poems to carry with them at least sometrace of foreignness, even if they are in your language. You don’t expect a translation to heavily modify the stylistic features of the original.

Early modern readers did not necessarily think the same way.

Modern scholars traditionally divide the poetic corpus of the Scandinavian Middle Ages into the macro-genres of eddic and skaldic poetry, intending by the latter a metrically complex poetry often linked to the social context of the court. Most commonly, these verses are embedded in prose, thus skaldic strophes are preserved in sagas of different types.

Because of their difficult metre and rhetorical imagery, skaldic poems became progressively difficult to understand after the Middle Ages, even for Icelanders. This is particularly evident when looking at some early modern manuscripts, which sometimes even add numbers above the words in a strophe in order to rearrange its syntax into prose order. [1] This practice, also found in some editions of the time [2], is comparable to the method that the edition project Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages still employs nowadays. [3]

With the rise of antiquarian interests in 17th century Scandinavia and the consequent renewal of interest in Old Norse manuscript sources, the first publications and translations of sagas appeared, and, with them, skaldic verses were first given to print too. However, authors and editors at the time were concerned with how these strophes would have been received by their readership.

On the one hand, this was a question of language. Since skaldic strophes were considered obscure, some saga translations decided not to translate them at all, as seen for instance by Torfæus’ Danish translation (1661) of the medieval manuscript Flateyjarbók. In the prologue to the translation, Torfæus acknowledges that the presence of the strophes proved the authenticity of the text [4], but he also admits that he did not understand them well enough to translate them, and that therefore he had inserted them untranslated. This insertion in a foreign language of some untranslated passage enhances the effect of ‘exoticism’, but does not offer any real possibility of comprehension.

On the other hand, the difficulty posed by skaldic strophes was also a matter of style. This becomes clear in publications from the end of the 17thcentury: those that do include translations of skaldic strophes sometimes also provide a stylistic justification for the translation, especially if they attempt to retain the formal features of the Old Norse original. This is seen for instance in Thomas Bartholin’s Antiquitatum Danicarum (1689), which includes Árni Magnússon’s translations of skaldic verses. Here, the translations deliberately retain stylistic features of the original, but the preface of the work presents an apology, warning readers that the poetry might appear less sophisticated than one would expect from Latin and Greek verses.

However, not all translators adopted this strategy. For instance, in Torfæus’ Historia Hrolfi Krakii (1705), the translator of the skaldic strophes, Þorleifur Halldórsson, adapts the verses, translated in Latin, to the expectations of a European learned readership.

A brief comparison can illustrate this process. The opening lines of a lausavísa from Hrólfs saga kraka as edited in 2017 by the Skaldic Project read as follow:

Öll er orðin          ætt Skjöldunga
lofðungs lundar           at limum einum.

(“All the family of the Skjǫldungar, the princely trees <men>, have become branches only”) [5].

In his Latin translation, Þorleifur also modifies the stylistic aspects of these verses, which become:

En Skioldi soboles, florida quæ prius,

Ceu Sylvæ viridis filia nobilis,

Læta & frondiferis luxurians comis

Alto contigerat sydera vertice:

Jam vexata malis, immemor & sui,

In ramos steriles arida desiit […]

(“The offspring of Skjǫldr, once flourishing, like the noble green daughter of the forest, joyful and luxuriant with a rich canopy of leaves that reached up above; now, beset by misfortune, forgetful of itself, has withered away in barren branches”)

Rather than only translating, Þorleifur modifies here the poem, expanding the strophe and introducing elements that might be familiar to a European, Latin-learned audience, from a recognizable metrical pattern to several expressions drawn from the classical poet Horace (sylvae filia nobilis, sidera vertice). This way, skaldic strophes lose their ‘exotic’ character, but their (even stylistic) adaptation for the orbis eruditus testifies to their reception also beyond Scandinavia in the 17th century.

[1] This is for instance the case with the (antiquarian) skaldic commendatory poem by Árni Magnússon in praise of Thomas Bartholin’s Antiquitatum Danicarum (https://sprogsamlinger.ku.dk/q.php?p=ds/hjem/billed/37706, last accessed 24.04.2026). see also Már Jónsson, ‘Skýringar Árna Magnússonar Við Eigið Dróttkvæði Frá 1689’, Lesið í Hljóði Fyrir Kristján Árnason Sextugan 26. Desember 2006 (Reykjavík), 2006.

[2] See for instance Verelius’ notes to Hervarar saga(Hervarar Saga på Gammal Götska med Olai Verelii Vttolkning och Notis, Uppsala 1671: 4)

[3] https://skaldic.org/m.php?p=doc&i=707last accessed 24.04.2026

[4] This is likely meant in the sense of ‘they are so difficult that they cannot be falsified’: a similar argument is present also in Bartholin’s preface to his work.

[5] Desmond Slay (ed.) 2017, ‘Hrólfs saga kraka 1 (Signý Hálfdanardóttir, Lausavísa 1)’ in Margaret Clunies Ross (ed.), Poetry in fornaldarsögur. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 8. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 541. https://skaldic.org/m.php?p=verse&i=5121(last accessed 27.04.2026)