Skaldic Poetry as Christian Propaganda: Honouring Bishop Guðmundr Arason in Fourteenth-Century Iceland (Studies in Old Norse Literature)

A detailed literary study of fourteenth-century poetry composed in honour of a controversial thirteenth-century bishop. Vernacular poetry was a powerful influence in fourteenth-century Icelandic elite literary culture, even to the extent of providing the means of elevating a local bishop, Guðmundr Arason, to sainthood.Three Icelandic poets, Abbots Arngrímr Brandsson and Árni Jónsson, and Lawman Einarr Gilsson, composed impressive encomia of Guðmundr, with the intention of recording the holy bishop's sanctity in the language of contemporary religious devotion and to persuade Church authorities in both Scandinavia and the wider Christian world to canonize him.While the local campaign ultimately failed to sway the Catholic Church, it did succeed in producing a significant corpus of vernacular religious poetry, unmatched in combining the traditional diction and metres of Old Norse skaldic verse with the vernacular poetics of affective piety and Christian hermeneutics. This important group