“Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Raven”
Roberta Frank

Thomas Love Peacock did not much like skaldic verse, describing it as “a rhapsody of rejoicing in carnage, a ringing of changes on the biting sword and the flowing of blood and the feast of the raven and the vulture.” He had a point. So much in the skaldic corpus depends on satisfying the desires of a carrion bird : prince after prince feeds it, pleases it, dulls its hunger, stops its fast, takes it to dinner, and lets it drink its fill, making the black bird red. Innumerable battle-references in viking-age court poetry are variations on this motif.  My short talk will attempt to construct a “grammar” for the use of this image-cluster in dateable skaldic verse. The goal is to see a bit more clearly how the poetry works.