This episode is brought to you by The Daily Poem, a brief podcast which offers one essential poem each weekday.

From Shakespeare and John Dunn to Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, the Daily Poem curates a broad and generous audio anthology of the best poetry ever written.

Find it on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you dial up your favorite podcasts, and find out why listeners call it an oasis, thought-provoking, and a great daily excursion into beautiful language.

Music I'm I'm I'm I'm

I'm Hello and welcome to the history of Vikings.

Today we'll be discussing Old Norse death poetry.

That is the genre of Old Norse literature encompassing poems often written by men who were about to die.

Joining me to discuss this is Dr. Matthias Nordvik of the University of Colorado Boulder.

He teaches pre-Christian Nordic mythologies, Scandinavian folklore, North Atlantic and Greenlandic

literature, reception history of the Viking Age, and much more in the Nordic Studies program

there.

Dr. Nordvig, thank you so much for joining me today.

Hi, Noah. Thank you for inviting me. Once again, I'm always happy to be here.

Well, thank you. It's certainly my pleasure. Old Norse death poetry is a subject that I've

been wanting to delve into for quite some time, but first and foremost, how should we

understand the genre of death poetry within Old Norse literature?

And what is sort of the history of this type of poetry?

Well, so I would personally say that, in a sense, death is sort of the bedrock of this poetry

that the Vikings begin to create or formulate in the

Viking era because so much of Skaldic poetry but also what we call eddick poetry is actually

centered around the commemoration of the dead, especially heroes and kings.

But also, in that sense, as these poems are being created, we get glimpses of how they would have viewed the afterlife and how they saw this idea of death.

...