Rimur

Rimur are a genre of Icelandic epic poetry in which a single rima is composed in one of roughly ten families of rimur meters, most commonly ferskeytt, each stanza rhymed, alliterated and made up of two to four lines; a long work is typically divided into several sections, each also called a rima and often set in a different meter. The verse inherited ornamental devices from earlier Icelandic poetic tradition, including kennings and heiti drawn from skaldic verse, along with the rhetorical flourishes of late medieval diction. After its earliest examples, composers adopted the convention of opening each rima with a mansongr, a lyric address, customarily to a woman, describing unrequited love. Most rimur adapt existing prose sagas, sometimes preserving narratives that would otherwise be lost, with subjects ranging from historical figures such as Olafr Haraldsson to legendary or mythological figures such as Numa Pompilius.