Having investigated the various strategies by which authors of sagas of Icelanders communicated with their audiences using the prosimetric form, the present chapter considers the subject matter of the poetry itself and the likely reasons why particular poetic subjects were chosen by saga authors for embedding in their prose texts. It has often been argued that the poetry in sagas of Icelanders allowed saga authors to address aspects of the emotional lives of their characters in a far more detailed and direct way than they felt able to do in the hard-boiled impersonal style of their narrative prose. Until now, however, there has been no comprehensive assessment of the actual subjects that the poetry cited in these sagas addresses, nor of the relative popularity of some topics over others, nor indeed of the frequent close connections between topics, nor of emphases or unexpected absences within the range of poetic topics compared with the broad coverage of subjects in the saga prose. This chapter initiates an investigation into the subjects of poetry in sagas of Icelanders, an investigation that has the capacity to go much more broadly and in greater depth into the mental world of these sagas than the compass of this book allows.

The latter part of the chapter comprises an Appendix, which presents a set of topics and lists (arranged by saga in alphabetical order) that gives as accurate a summary as possible of the subject matter of each stanza (or set of stanzas) found in the corpus of sagas of Icelanders containing poetry (see Chapter 1, Table 1 for a list of these). It is actually rather difficult to give an accurate summary of the contents of these stanzas, particularly those (a majority) in skaldic metres, and there are several reasons for this. It is frequently hard to identify the dominant theme or topic of each stanza or group of stanzas, because individual stanzas quite often address several topics and interweave them, typically making use of fragmented skaldic syntax and intercalary clauses. The choice of heading under which to classify each stanza thus involves an element of subjectivity in deciding the theme of greatest importance in the stanza in question.