Scop

A scop (Pronunciation: IPA: /ʃɒp/ or /skɒp/) was an Old English poet, the Anglo-Saxon counterpart of the Old Norse skald.

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 metre, and the ballad-like forms that form most of the corpus of the Poetic Edda. Both, of course, wrote within the Germanic tradition of alliterative verse.