Poet's Mead is Culture

There are countless issues and examples that Lawrence Lessig raises (see "Capturing Content", below) that deserve broad and open public discussion. I’ll probably hit a few of these in future posts. But for the moment, consider the Norse concept of “content” as articulated in myths about the wisdom of Kvasir and the mead of poetry (described in previous posts).

Like digital content, the mead of poetry is defined as much by what is changed as what is preserved. Scandinavian poets knew that they were clothed in borrowed robes; of course, they were operating in a feudal culture, but even so, the kings and lords who might lay claim to the person of a poet could never claim ownership of a poem. Poems were often dedicated to royalty and chieftains (they still are); but the purpose of such dedications was never to say “this poem belongs to King Harald” but “this poem was devised to honor King Harald,” presumably by ensuring that his memory would be preserved in the transformative matrix of culture that is sometimes called “posterity.”

More to the point, even the gods themselves were said to have stolen poetry (the poet’s mead) and the wisdom it enables (Kvasir’s wisdom, accessed through poetry). Rather than evading the reality that art and culture are always crafted out of what precedes them, and claiming sole ownership of a cultural work, the myth of Kvasir and the metaphor of the poet’s mead declares up front that what the artist creates is borrowed, if not stolen. In fact, by uttering the words of poetry – which, I must point out, was primarily a performed rather than a published medium in the 12th century – the poet was literally spilling his mead out into the listening audience, where they might taste of it themselves … in fact, literally drink it with the poet by internalizing the words, and (like the poet) speaking them aloud as their own.

For a contemporary example, consider your favorite song. Perhaps the lyrics are dear to you, because the song marks a critical time in your life. If you wish to sing the words, are you stealing from the artist? After all, the singer could never have anticipated what those words might mean to you, could she?

And the skaldic poet – who announced that his poetry was itself stolen or borrowed from the gods – literally gave shared ownership of his work to his community, quite literally praying that the audience would take that work and make it their own – that they might all drink deeply of Kvasir’s wisdom together.