Ekphrasis and the Old Norse shield poem

This dissertation seeks to analyze and interpret the Old Norse shield poems as ekphrases and in light of their relationship to the drott, the aristocratic warrior band/court of Viking Age Norway. The approach is broadly interdisciplinary and two-pronged, consisting in (1) a close reading of the two relevant poems and (2) an interpretation of the ekphrastic performance as a socially and culturally meaningful event.;The first chapter reviews the extant poem fragments which might be considered ekphrases, along with previous scholarship on these poems as ekphrastic, and discusses the theoretical concerns of this study.;Chapters 2 and 3 give the texts of the shield poems Ragnarsdrapa and Haustlo¸ng, respectively, along with extensive commentary on the texts as ekphrases. The martial phenomenology of the shield is explored and the associations of the shield with physical/personal integrity and with the hostile, martial Other are taken as significant, if implicit, aspects of the text/performance. The potentially apotropaic function of Viking Age Art on the shield is mentioned and connected to this martial phenomenology. The usual oppositions of Old Norse mythology (gods versus giants, masculine versus feminine, culture versus nature, etc) are found to be active in these poems alongside oppositions such as see-er versus seen, voiced versus unvoiced, and subject versus object.;Chapter 4 summarizes the primary observations of chapters 2 and 3 and goes on to investigate other aspects of the larger context of the ekphrastic performance as a practice, first expanding the investigation to include the intermedial borrowings of skaldic terminology and then focusing on the details of the nature and context of the skaldic ekphrastic performance. In conclusion it is argued that the shield poem enacts a version of W.J.T. Mitchell's ekphrastic triangle, mediating the oppositions self versus Other and us versus them by projecting this conflict onto the encounter with the decorated shield. The "us" of this equation is the aristocratic, masculine drott, and the ekphrastic performance aggressively centers the perspective of the drott and asserts the subjectivity of its members at the expense of the socio-cultural Others.