Snorri Sturluson qua Fulcrum: Perspectives on the Cultural Activity of Myth, Mythological Poetry and Narrative in Medieval Iceland

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spillage as a (curious) description of ‘Óðinn’s piss’ as the frightened god 

fled. Roberta Frank proposes that this “is not even a kenning: because its 

base word leir (‘mud, filth’) refers literally to the concept designated by the 

whole (cf. Eng. crap).”

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  However,  leir describes solid waste rather than 

liquid, yet this opens a different set of issues observing that identification of 

this ‘mead’ as leir clearly marks it as (solid) excrement.  

 

A number of incongruities suggest that this was neither a 

conventional kenning nor a conventional conception. The use of leir presents 

a complete discontinuity with the central conceptual metaphor of poetry as 

liquid. Its interpretation as ‘piss’ would also be inconsistent with the model 

of oral production and ingestion. Inversions of the liquid metaphor are 

otherwise accomplished through ‘contamination’ by ‘mixing’ drink with 

other elements or substances.

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 Metaphors of ‘pissing poetry’ or drinking 

urine (or even mixing beer and urine) are absent from the Old Norse corpus. 

This reduces the likelihood that the motif of Óðinn pissing poetry was 

conventional. Explicit cowardice (let alone the humiliation of losing bladder 

control) is contradictory to Óðinn’s character or “semantic center”

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 as a 

mythic figure, nor is this cowardice mentioned in insult exchanges with 

other figures (cf. §8). Moreover, a humiliating portrayal of Óðinn in the 

origin of the mead of poetry is contextually inconsistent with Óðinn’s 

directly associated role as the cultural archetype and identity model for a 

poet. The connotation that poets were cowards (like Óðinn) would make it 

improbable that poets would maintain this element in a milieu where 

Óðinn’s role as an identity model was vital.  

Snorri’s interpretation of this motif is only supported by three skaldic 

examples of the ‘mud of the eagle’ kenning.

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 All three examples use the 

base-word  leir without exhibiting the verbal variation characteristic of 

traditional circumlocutions. One of these mocks Snorri personally in a 

                                                

37

 Frank 1981, 169. 

38

 Quinn 2010, 187–190; cf. the poet Egill Skállagrímsson forcibly vomiting the inappropriate drink 

which has been served in the face of his stingy host so that vomit goes into the other man’s eyes, nose and 

mouth, causing him to choke on it (Egils saga, ch. 73). This may also be a symbolic inversion, implicitly 

contrasting this oral effusion of foul fluid with Egill’s potential to produce praise poetry (cf. Richard 

North, Pagan Words and Christian Meanings, Editions Rodopi: Amsterdam 1991, at 58). 

39

 On the resistance of a figure’s semantic center to contradiction, see Jens Peter Schjødt, ‘Diversity and 

Its Consequences for the Study of Old Norse Religion: What Is It We Are Trying to Reconstruct?’, in L. 

P. S upecki & J. Morawiec (eds), Between Paganism, 9–22, at 17, 20. Óðinn may commit injustices and 

social improprieties, but even these actions occur in contexts expressing power, authority and also 

bravery. 

40

 Cf. Sveinbjörn Egilsson & Finnur Jónsson, Lexicon poeticum antiquæ linguæ septentrionalis: Ordbog 

over det norsk-islandske skjaldesprog (LP), 2

nd

 ed., København 1931, s.v. ‘leirr’. 

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parody  of  his  praise  poem  in  Edda.  A  second  does  so  accompanied  by  an  

explicit reference to Edda in a manner which “makes clear, poetics had come 

to be defined by [Snorri’s] book”.

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 In a corpus of well over five thousand 

stanzas of skaldic verse, the occurrence of two of these three examples in 

direct responses to Snorri or Edda is unlikely to be coincidental. This led 

Frank to propose that the third is also attributable to Snorri’s influence, 

although it is attributed to an earlier poet.

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 If authentic, the earlier kenning 

would nevertheless appear to be attributable to an inversion from ‘drink’ to 

‘waste’, engaging an unrelated metaphor of ‘throwing shit’ as a description 

of ‘bad poetry’, completely divorced from the conceptual metaphor (and 

myth) underlying the mead of poetry. It would thus not support Snorri’s 

account, although it could have inspired it. The inconsistencies of Snorri’s 

narrative with the conceptual metaphor of poetry as drink and with Óðinn 

as a god of poetry suggest a reinterpretation of motifs in a manner which 

compromises Óðinn’s power and authority (Óðinn comically wets himself) 

generating a new ætiology of ‘bad poetry’. However this is viewed, it 

remains apparent that this interpretation did not have a conventional place 

in the mythology, and it shows that Snorri’s presentation caught the 

attention of other poets: his account of this particular myth stimulated use of 

the kenning in a way particularly attached to Edda and Snorri himself. This 

example presents the possibility that Snorri’s narratives stimulated or 

provided the referent for other near-contemporary skaldic references, such 

as a parodic skaldic reference to the tragedy of Baldr’s death appearing 

within a few decades of Edda,

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 and it increases the probability that Snorri’s 

work had corresponding impacts on oral or written eddic poetry in this 

period, although eddic poems do not present the same possibilities for 

dating as skaldic verse. 

 

5. Edda and the So-Called ‘Prose Frame’ of Lokasenna 

 

Lokasenna  (‘Loki’s  Insult  Exchange’)  is  a  dialogic  eddic  poem  preserved  in  

the Codex Regius. The poetic text is comprised of bladed remarks which the 

troublesome figure Loki exchanges with all of the gods at the sea-god Ægir’s 

drinking party. In the Codex Regius, the poem is preceded by a prose text 

                                                

41

 Frank 1981, 168; Wanner 2008, 87–89; Quinn 1994 (quotation at 88). 

42

 Frank 1981, 168–170; see also Heimir Pálsson’s (2010) more thorough treatment, which leaves open 

the question of the earlier stanza’s authenticity.  

43

 Cf. Frog 2010, 46, 219.  

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