Resumen de Existential Verse-Capping between a Female Troll and the Poet Bragi
Two formally similar stanzas of verbal contention between a troll woman and the poet Bragi Boddason display auto-definitions, one of a paranormal being antagonistic toward, and destructive of, human life, another of a creator of order and its pre-eminent expression, skaldic verse. In the irony so often deployed in Old Norse-Icelandic literature, the troll, the initiator of the contest, uses what is, for her, the antithetical medium of verbal art to proclaim her attack on it. Bragi replies in more straightforward manner and seems to be the immediate winner of the contest, since he is allowed the last word. In this, the poet’s craft may forestall Ragnark, the epitome of the troll’s objectives of chaos. The contest has affinities with the senna, flyting, and less formal exchanges of defamatory verse. It could have originated in an aristocratic patron’s challenge to a court poet or poets to devise such a pair of stanzas, his challenge then evoking the greater existential challenge of these representatives of differing orders of being. The stanzas, in multiple and varied ways, celebrate the social value of the poet, the art of skaldic verse, and its capacity to preserve cultural history against oblivion.
