Dróttkvætt
Quick answer: Dróttkvætt is the Old Norse court meter of the skalds: eight six-syllable lines woven with alliteration, internal rhyme and kennings. Learn how it works.
Dróttkvætt, 'court meter', was the verse form Viking-age poets used when the stakes were highest. From the ninth century onward, the skalds of Norway and Iceland composed in it to praise kings, mock enemies, mourn sons, and talk their way out of executions: the tenth-century Icelander Egill Skallagrímsson famously saved his own head at York by delivering a praise poem overnight. Skaldic stanzas survive embedded in the sagas and in histories like Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla, often as the oldest and most trusted layer of the text.
It is among the most tightly engineered meters ever devised. Eight short lines, each packed with alliteration, internal rhyme, fixed cadence, and a syllable count, plus a poetic dialect of riddling metaphors called kennings, in which the sea becomes the whale-road and a warrior a feeder of ravens. Old Norse scholarship regards the form's difficulty as the point: composing well in it proved a mind fast and disciplined enough to advise a king.
The stanza's machinery
A dróttkvætt stanza has eight lines, normally divided into two four-line half-stanzas (each a helmingr) that often complete separate sentences. Each line carries six syllables and three metrical stresses, and must end on a trochee: a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one. The lines work in pairs. In each odd line, two stressed syllables alliterate, and both must alliterate with the first stressed syllable of the following even line, the anchor called the head-stave.
Inside the lines runs a second system: hendingar, internal rhymes between two stressed syllables in the same line. Odd lines take skothending, half-rhyme in which the final consonants agree but the vowels differ, as in 'fast' and 'best'. Even lines take aðalhending, full rhyme of vowel and following consonants, as in 'hall' and 'fall'. Word order in skaldic verse could be radically scrambled, with two or three clauses interlaced, which the kennings and the meter helped listeners untangle.
Attempting dróttkvætt in English
English can approximate every element separately; the labour is running them together. Work in couplets. Draft an odd line of six syllables with two alliterating stresses and a consonant-echo pair inside it, then an even line opening on the same alliterating sound, with a full internal rhyme and a trochaic ending. Keep a kenning notebook: invent compressed metaphors for your poem's key nouns, phone as 'pocket oracle', motorway as 'tar-river', and spend them where plain words would sag. Expect a stanza to take an evening. The form rewards subjects with violence or grandeur in them, storms, sport, machinery, grief, and its clatter of stressed syllables argues for reading aloud at every stage.
Strengths, and the usual wreck
Dróttkvætt does ferocity and formality at once: praise that sounds like shields struck, elegy with iron in it. Modern poets raid it for texture even when they relax the rules, and translators of the sagas argue endlessly about how much of the machinery to keep. The usual wreck for newcomers is alliteration everywhere and structure nowhere, a line spattered with same-letter words but missing the paired-stave pattern and the internal rhymes that make the form cohere. Better to nail the architecture with modest vocabulary than to decorate chaos. Add kennings last, once the sound frame stands, or the stanza collapses into riddle soup.
What poets can take from this
- Compose in odd-even line pairs; the head-stave binds each pair.
- End every line on a stressed-unstressed word like 'hammer' or 'harbour'.
- Practise skothending by pairing words with shared final consonants but different vowels.
- Keep a running list of original kennings for your subject's main nouns.
- Read each pair aloud; three clear stresses per line is the pulse to protect.
- Let each four-line helmingr complete its own sentence.
Try it yourself
Write one eight-line dróttkvætt-style stanza praising or cursing a machine you depend on daily, using at least three original kennings for it, full internal rhyme in the even lines, and half-rhyme in the odd ones.
Questions
What is dróttkvætt?
Dróttkvætt, 'court meter', is the principal verse form of Old Norse skaldic poetry: an eight-line stanza of six-syllable, three-stress lines bound by patterned alliteration, internal half-rhyme and full rhyme, trochaic line endings, and kennings.
What is the difference between skothending and aðalhending?
Both are internal rhymes between stressed syllables within one line. Skothending, used in odd lines, matches final consonants but not vowels, like 'fast' and 'best'. Aðalhending, used in even lines, matches vowel and following consonants fully, like 'hall' and 'fall'.
What is a kenning?
A kenning is a compressed, often two-part metaphor standing in for an ordinary noun: 'whale-road' for the sea, 'sky-candle' for the sun. Skaldic poetry in dróttkvætt relies on kennings both for imagery and for meeting the meter's demands.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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