Composed between the mid-ninth and the end of the fourteenth centuries by 250 named poets, the impressive corpus of skaldic poetry consists of some 40,000 lines.He identifies a special genre of viking poetry dedicated to the description of war or - in a single case - the establishment of peace. The author treats seven such poems, six cast in the skaldic form of a flokkr, a simple sequence composed of five to thirteen stanzas without refrain (in contrast to the more ambitious drápa), and one in the more simple eddaic form of a ljóð (song).