Icelandic hymnody

In Iceland there developed a rich literary heritage during the Middle Ages, the Sagas and the Eddas. Soon after the establishment of Christianity in 1000, Icelandic poets began also to write poetry on Biblical themes and on the Saints, in which they used the skaldic and eddic metres formerly used in the heroic and mythical poems. Of these the most famous are Geisli (‘The Beam’) on St Olav from the 12th Century, and Sólarljóð (‘The Sun Poem’) from the 13th Century composed in the Eddic metre ljóðaháttur, and Lilja from the 14th Century (which came to be called ‘the poem everybody wished he had composed’). In 1208 a renowned poet and chief named Kolbeinn Tumason, who had earlier written an...