Scop

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For other uses see scop (disambiguation)

A scop (pronounced /ʃɒp/) was an Old English poet, the Anglo-Saxon counterpart of the Old Norse skald.

There were differences. As far as we can tell from what has been preserved, the art of the scop was directed mostly towards epic poetry; the surviving verse in Old English consists of the epic Beowulf, religious verse in epic formats such as the Dream of the Rood, heroic lays of battle, and stern meditations on mortality and the transience of earthly glory. By contrast, the verse preserved from the skalds consists mostly of poems in praise of kings and incidental verse preserved in the sagas, often done up in the elaborate dróttkvætt meter, and the ballad-like forms that form most of the corpus of the Poetic Edda. (See also: skaldic poetry) Both, of course, wrote within the Germanic tradition of alliterative verse. The scop was a performer as well as a poet; he recited or sang his verses, usually accompanying himself on a harp or a similar stringed instrument.

In the introduction to The Earliest English Poems, Michael Alexander claims that the word scop is related to modern English "shape". This assertion has been widely repeated, and if true would evoke the same notion of craftsmanship preserved in the metaphor of the Greek word poet itself. Unfortunately, there is no linguistic support for this derivation. The Oxford English Dictionary indicates that the word is cognate with Old High German scoph, scof, meaning poetry or jest, and Old Norse skop, meaning mocking or scolding. The word skald has also been preserved in modern English: it became "scold."