“From the Hiding Places of the Soul: The Ins and Outs of Skaldic Poetry”
Martin Chase

Skaldic poetry is intensely self-conscious, and it is common for the poems to contain reflections on their own making. Skalds of the later, post-conversion period, humbly granting that poetry does not come of itself, were careful to begin their poems with invocations and requests for divine inspiration. But in early, pre-Christian skaldic poetry we find a different topos. As the early skalds understood it, poetry is not "breathed in" from an external spiritual source. Rather, it emerges from deep within the poet. The terms the skalds use to refer to their creativity are visceral, turbulent, and emetic (the famous regurgitated mead) and reflect what analytical psychology calls the unconscious. This paper will examine skaldic kennings for poetic composition as well as the Nordic myths of the origin of poetry in the light of archetypal theory to show how the skalds viewed their poetry-making as a transformative process engaging both consciousness and the unconscious.