Court Poetry in the Viking Age: Performance and Reception
- Date: Tuesday 3 November 2026, 17:30 – 19:00
- Location: Parkinson SR (B.08)
- Cost: Free
Institute for Medieval Studies research seminar, with Professor Matthew Townend, Department of English and Related Literature, University of York.
This event is also running online. To register for a zoom link, please use this form: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/e/r4TnTTLLAU
Image caption: Borg, Iceland, home of the tenth-century poet Egill Skalla-Grimsson. Photo by Matthew Townend.
Professor Townend is a specialist in Old Norse language and literature, and in the history and culture of Viking Age England. He is interested in the history of the English language, and in the ways in which medieval language and culture were used in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His publications include Viking Age Yorkshire (2014), The Victorians and English Dialect (2024), and J.R.R. Tolkien: A Very Short Introduction (2024). He is currently writing a book about court poetry in the Viking Age. He has taught at the University of York since 1998.
For more information see https://www.york.ac.uk/english/people/matthew-townend/
Old Norse poetry survives in some abundance from the Viking Age, especially so-called ‘skaldic’ court poetry. This poetry is exceptionally valuable: it represents our best textual resource for being able to hear the Vikings in their own words; it is often able to be dated and localized, and attributed to named poets, opening up many possibilities for literary history; and it offers a fascinating corpus for exploring the interplay between communal tradition and individual poetic innovation.
In this paper I will examine Viking Age skaldic poetry in terms of the dynamics and rationale of its performance at court. How did Viking Age poets praise kings and other rulers? How did they conceptualize their own art-form and address their audiences? And what was the nature of the complex, reciprocal relationship between poets and patrons? The paper will be focused on tenth- and eleventh-century verse and it will assume no prior knowledge of this amazing body of poetry.
