Igor Tretyakov. Forward to the cyberskald

Nowadays, you can only experience surprise from good and pleasant things (bad things no longer surprise). You experience this rare feeling when holding in your hands a beautifully published volume of “The Poetry of the Skalds.” Today in Russia to publish a seven-hundred-page book dedicated to poetry, and even such an exotic variety as skaldic art... Hats off! But with all my admiration for the fact itself, I cannot help but doubt. Who is the book actually intended for? The answer to this question is not so simple. On the one hand, in terms of content, this is a purely scientific monograph, in its first chapters generally little accessible to the understanding of non-specialists; on the other hand, the design style, the entire design of the publication seems to signal the authors’ calculation for a wider range of recipients. What is this - a mistake, a deliberate misrepresentation for marketing purposes? Or is the contradiction between form and content only apparent? That is, in other words, is the book of interest only to specialists in medieval Icelandic poetry, or could it also be of interest to a wider range of humanities-oriented readers?

It seems to me that only those scientific publications can be of interest to a non-specialist in which the range of problems addressed is somehow correlated with his own thoughts, as a non-specialist reader. In this case, it does not matter at all whether the authors of the study set such a task. I would like to make a reservation right away that we are not talking here about the so-called general public and about books “that are of interest to everyone.” There is probably no need to prove that these concepts are extremely mythological and the phenomena they designate do not exist in nature. We are talking, as has already been said, about the possible interest in this monograph of a humanitarian-oriented intellectual. A creature, like any collective image, quite ephemeral, but still possessing at least some heuristic value.

In addition to purely archaeological interest in such an entertaining and unique artifact as the poetry of the Icelandic skalds, an amateur can be captivated by at least one cross-cutting theme that can be traced in the work of respected authors - the theme of the relationship and coexistence of tradition and innovation in artistic creativity. It seemed that with the advent of postmodernism this antithesis lost its relevance. But, alas, it only seemed so. Never say never.

Revealing the mechanism of interaction between the innovation of the skalds and the original Icelandic poetic tradition is the key plot of the monograph by Gurevich and Matyushina. In their opinion, this mechanism is unique and has no analogues in European culture. Skalds were not innovators or traditionalists, although they were both; they were, so to speak, the conservative revolutionaries of medieval Icelandic literature. “If the skalds were destined to make a revolution in poetry, then it was carried out not from the outside and hardly out of a desire to decisively break with the “routine” of the epic system, which had not yet managed to “dead” by the time the first skaldic poems appeared, but in the depths of the traditional style itself.” . It would probably be useful to reflect on why such an interesting and successful experiment turned out to be unclaimed, and someone will probably do it. However, the realization that a fruitful synthesis of tradition and innovation in art is possible is valuable in itself.

The Russian reader is also interested in the fact that the history of skald poetry at times comes into close contact with Russian history. Many skalds worked on the territory of our country, turning their lines of praise and love to the rulers of our ancestors. It is curious whether skaldic art had any influence on Russian pre-Christian literature, if, of course, such existed at all? If it did, then the similarity in the perception of the poet and poetry that can be traced between medieval Icelanders and us is understandable. Skald, Gurevich and Matyushina claim, in the opinion of Icelandic medieval society, is a person not of this world, who has not learned poetic skills from people, but who received it as a gift from higher powers, a person with a quarrelsome and difficult character, standing apart and above the crowd, acutely feeling his special purpose and thanks to him having the opportunity to address the rulers on equal terms. Well, it’s just that “a poet in Russia is more than a poet.” The only thing that distinguishes the image of a skald from the typical image of a Russian poet is brutality. Both in appearance - the skald is almost always ugly and unusually physically strong - and in the type of side activities: he is always a warrior, one of the king’s warriors. Here we are more likely to approach pan-European models. What else makes our idea of ​​poetry similar to the medieval Icelandic one is the belief in the special effectiveness and efficiency of the poetic word. But it seems that the skalds had more reasons for this belief.

Analyzing two myths about the poet that existed in Icelandic society at that time - the myth about the “honey of poetry”, which interprets the poet as Odin’s chosen one, and the myth about the “unprofessionalism” of the skald, that, on occasion, anyone could compose a visu or two, - the authors of the monograph they wonder how such contradictory versions could coexist within one culture. They see the answer in the dual nature of skaldic art, on the one hand, individually innovative, on the other, purely traditionalist. Without disputing the opinions of respected authors, I still dare to express a different version, which, in my opinion, follows from the text of the book. The myth about the “honey of poetry” says that Odin gives magical honey to those people who already know how to write poetry. And as a result of this operation they become skalds. From here, most likely, it follows that a skald is still something more than just a poet. Taking into account the numerous references in the book to the widespread belief in the special effective power of skaldic verses, be it a song of praise that brings good luck to the addressee, or a blasphemous one that simply destroyed the opponent, or a love song, which, in fact, was a variant of a love spell, as well as the brilliant absence any information about the training of skaldic art, it can be assumed that the “gift of Odin” imparted to its recipient the ability to fill the poetic lines he spoke (which, we recall, he already knew how to compose before) with specific magical power. Possession of this power made the poet a skald. Otherwise, it is difficult to explain why sometimes the skald was rewarded for pronouncing other people’s poems in the same way as for composing his own. Probably, it was important that these lines were spoken appropriately and that they were recited by the skald.

In this regard, the absence of any information about the training of skaldic art does not seem surprising. All written sources date back to the era of the spread of Christianity in Iceland; It is unlikely that learned monks would give descriptions of esoteric pagan rituals and practices. Although the monograph does contain one quotation that can be considered as such evidence. Orkney Bishop Bjarni Kolbeinsson writes that his poetic gift comes from Christ and that in order to receive it, he “did not sit under the hanged” and “never cast a spell . ”

Of course, the above does not claim the honorary title of a scientific hypothesis, but is only a free improvisation of an amateur on the topic of the text he read. As for the scientific integrity of the book itself, it, like Caesar’s wife, is beyond suspicion. An excellent reference apparatus, an abundance of poetic quotations, a dictionary of terms, a convincing system of evidence, a fundamental and - in the good sense of the word - academic approach to the topic, combined with the competent Russian language in which the monograph is written, makes it almost as unique a phenomenon as the poetry of the skalds, which she is dedicated.

Finally, a short comment from the apartment. When I read the examples of skaldic poetry given in the book by Gurevich and Matyushina and tried to at least understand the rules of their composition - all these polynomial kennings, interlocking sentences, drottkvettas, etc. - I could not leave the feeling of something vaguely familiar. Finally, I realized what this reminded me of: computer algorithms, learned with difficulty in computer science classes at school. Of course, to a person intimately familiar with computers, such an association should seem far-fetched and random. Let be. But this passing resemblance gave me an idea for an interesting intellectual speculation. Why not use the form of skaldic verses, now ownerless, to create original virtual poetry? After all, there is virtual sex, virtual religions on the Internet, and God knows what else exists there. Why shouldn’t there be special, virtual poetry? And the skaldic form is the best suited for this: a strict, mathematically constructed structure of the verse, deliberately obscured content, incomprehensible to the uninitiated, while appealing to the purely rational in the listeners - all this, coupled with the tradition of perceiving skaldic verses, as they say, in real time and the modern fashion for neo-paganism gives the idea of ​​a cyberskald a good chance of success. After all, you will agree that it is much more pleasant to be called a “skillful mouse master” than a banal “advanced user”.