The canons of ancient Germanic poetic art are considered in this book as a tool for the formation of a poetic language and as a source of new cultural information. The starting point for the analysis is the laudatory poetry of skalds with its strictly regulated metric rules and lexical models. The skald metric is considered in the book as the result of a systemic transformation of the Eddic metric and a kind of linguistic experiment that absolutizes the principle of conventions of the language sign. The "loss of sons" by Egil Skallagrimsson (X century) and the "List of Inglings" by Tjodolv Khvinsky (IX century) appear in this perspective as multidirectional genre branches from the main trunk of skaldic poetry, which are of interest for understanding the possibilities inherent in it and require new techniques of textual analysis.