Skulvádi Úlfr: historical lacunae and poetic space

Year

1999

Degree Name

Doctor of Creative Arts

Department

University of Wollongong. Faculty of Creative Arts

Abstract

Skulvadi Ulfr is the first contemporary work in epic poetry of its scope to tackle the creative process in the mode of expression of skaldic poetry. The epic uses multi-layers of alliterative language and periphrases with illustrations 'evidencing' the language of soundimages on which the text is composed.

Skulvadi Ulfr is a language map that narrates the 'legend' of 'the real evidence' of my exploration of the terrain of the poetic imagination and the troublesome nature of rulership over that territory. To demonstrate the proximity/distance of the terrain as a touchstone for the exploration, it is significant for me that the worlds of the epic should occupy a or credible place. As such, we open the seven Books of Skulvadi Ulfr via the hand of a sixteenth-century translator and the history of Spanish and Viking expansion across the Atlantic; the epic's immediate landscapes occurring within the context of a fictional history placed between the mid-eleventh centuiy and the beginning of the sixteenth century.

The work addresses fundamental questions about the nature of reading by composerreader and observer-reader. To what extent can poetic intuitive experiences be examined? Can any examination be useful in making clear the articulation of the experiences of the poetic imagination? In reply, Skulvadi Ulfr offers a full-length Viking epic poem unfolding a grammar of secrets from a legend of the map of spaces of the intuitive terrain.

Historical lacunae provide spaces where unexpected realities are mapped to create their own authenticity, in much the same way that we validate those indeterminate spaces between ourselves and a work of art when we give value to our experience with the creative work in that relational space. In these spaces I chart the logic of casting each sound-image in a role, the ways each image looks back and ahead of its propositions as it reveals and creates itself. Ultimately, SkulvddiUlfr tries to answer a fundamental question raised by Roman Ingarden about the nature of "ideal" or "immutable objects" in a literary work, applied here to the composition of the world-as-a-poem: What is "the basis of their immutability?"

Comments

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Unless otherwise indicated, the views expressed in this thesis are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the University of Wollongong.