Reanimating Extinct Oral Poems: Seventeenth-Century Scribal Performances of Medieval Scandinavian Eddic Poetry (original) (raw)
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The vigorous pursuit of writing and copying manuscripts in 17th-century Iceland involved all the most important genres of Icelandic literature and extended over the whole country. Humanism brought with it a new interest in Icelandic saga literature, as confirmed by the increasing number of manuscript copies that contained saga texts. It was at the instigation of the two bishops, Brynjólfur Sveinsson at Skálholt and Þorlákur Skúlason at Hólar, that many priests and literate members of the laity copied and sometimes also provided explanatory commentaries for medieval works. In my paper I will mainly focus on two prolific scribes, Ketill Jörundsson (1603–1670) and Jón Erlendsson (d. 1672), who were both in the service of the church and copied a large number of/many vellum manuscripts, in some cases thereby saving important medieval works from oblivion. Contemporary poetry, both secular and religious, was also transmitted in manuscripts – a fact often overlooked by modern literary critics and historians. In my paper I will mention a few examples of poetry that can shed interesting light on Icelandic culture and society in the so-called Age of Learning.
Scripta Islandica, 2023
The idea that Old Norse poetry derives from an oral tradition is commonly accepted in contemporary research. However, more detailed considerations of the consequences of this notion for our understanding of specific poems and their context are seldomly given. In this article, three Old Norse poems that challenge the genre categories of eddic and skaldic (i.e. Hákonarmál Eiríksmál, and Hrafnsmál) are analysed using performance and ritual studies in order to consider the poems possible function as orally performed poems in a presumed Viking Age context. It is argued that the performance is these poems constituted more or less religious rituals with the potential to transform both the performer(s) and the physical settings of the poems. Furthermore, is it argued that the analysed presented in the article have consequences for the understanding of the role of the poet in the Viking world; they were also individuals who potentially had religious, ritual knowledge and authority and thus an important role to play in pre-Christian Nordic religion.
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The written residue of oral tradition from the medieval Nordic world encompasses a wide variety of pan-national genres, including charms, legends, and genealogical lore, but modern scholarly attention has generally focused on two areas: (1) the prose (and often prosimetrical) Icelandic sagas and (2) traditional poetry in its two dominant forms, eddic and scaldic.
Runes and Verse: The Medialities of Early Scandinavian Poetry
European Journal of Scandinavian Studies
The paper discusses a number of versified runic inscriptions, mainly from Scandinavia, and from ca. 400 to 1400 AD, to explore what they reveal about the forms and functions of early Scandinavian poetry outside the manuscript tradition. With a particular focus on ‘authors’ and ‘audiences’, as defined by Bredehoft in his work on Anglo-Saxon inscriptions, the paper elucidates the potential oral contexts of Scandinavian runic verse and concludes that, although runic writing is a form of literacy, the examples show that for most of its history it is associated with various kinds of oral context. Runic verse shows that inscriptions provide one of the best ways into understanding the Scandinavian oral tradition, not only before the arrival of manuscript literacy, but also during its infancy.
Skaldic Verse-Making In Thirteenth-Century Iceland: The Case of the Sauðafellsferðarvísur
Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 4, 85-131 , 2008
This article examines an exchange of skaldic verses between a number of Icelandic chieftains, landholders and semi-professional poets, reported to have taken place in a period of political crisis in western Iceland in 1229. The surviving sequence, preserved in Sturla Þórðarson’s Íslendinga saga, constitutes an unparalleled example of extended verse-capping in medieval Icelandic narrative writing. The historical context of these verses and their narrative treatment in Íslendinga saga are considered in detail, and some new readings of the verse material and the political relationships they disclose are proposed. The verses are shown to illuminate the continuing value of skaldic performance as an instrument of social and political leverage in thirteenth-century Iceland, and the stimulatory function of competitive posturing in skaldic discourse. The analysis presented here suggests the need to revise some recent propositions concerning the supposed clerical and scholastic co-option of skaldic poetics in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Further stanzas composed in the period 1229–32 perpetuate the agonistic pattern developed in the initial sequence, and the narrative framing of these later compositions is shown to embody conspicuous ambivalence to the adversarial ethics underlying the continuing exchange.
Mirator 12: 1–29, 2011
This paper constructs an overview of Snorri Sturluson’s impact, through Edda, on the cultural activity of mythology in vernacular poetries and narration. General evidence of impacts on eddic and skaldic poetries (§1) provides a frame for a series of illustrative examples, beginning with the relatively unequivocal cases of the rímur Lokrur (§2) and the late stanzas added to the eddic poem Baldrs draumar (§3). The kenning ‘mud of the eagle’ is examined in skaldic verse as an indication of Snorri’s reception in a contemporary context (§4), opening a three-part survey of cumulative evidence of influence on the eddic poem Lokasenna (§5–7). The possibility of influence as a model for the eddic poem Þrymskviða’s composition is suggested (§8), which would have analogues in saga prose (§9). Although details may be equivocated, Edda nevertheless emerges as a (sometimes contested) voice of authority in medieval Icelandic mythological discourses.
EMBODYING THE PAST: Relics and Remains in Old Norse Literature
2019
This thesis explores the relationship between depictions of the dead and the representation of the past in Old Norse literature. The holy and the pre-Christian dead are read as representations of two different pasts: the collective Christian past of medieval Europe inherited by Scandinavia through conversion; and the indigenous, pagan past which informed many facets of medieval Scandinavian society. Depictions of the dead shed light on the negotiation of religious and cultural identity in medieval Norway and Iceland, as they provided one way for a medieval audience to encounter and confront aspects of these pasts. This thesis situates depictions of saints’ relics and other remains within a theoretical framework drawn from the discipline of museology. As museums represent the past through the interpretation of objects, they provide an interesting conceptual model through which to view the medieval Church and the relationship it facilitated between the living and the holy dead. The space of the church is understood through the application of structuralist and philosopher Michel Foucault’s work within the field of museum studies, and museum processes are used to further engage with the place of the dead within it. The medieval church is here interpreted as a heterotopia, which like a museum, can juxtapose temporally and geographically varied pasts within a single location, as well as uniting terrestrial and celestial places within Foucault’s conception of medieval space. Chapter 1 investigates textual accounts of the medieval church in Old Norse literature as a place to encounter the holy dead through the presence of holy relics. It addresses Norway’s participation in the Cult of the Saints through the discovery, translation and enshrinement of Saint Óláfr’s relics, and argues that depictions of these events permit Norway to partake in the collective inheritance of the Christian past through the creation of its first indigenous saint. Chapter 2 considers Iceland’s relationship to the past illustrated through encounters with the holy and the pre-Christian indigenous dead. Like Norway, Iceland enters the Christian past through the cult of its first indigenous saint, Saint Þorlákr, which necessitates negotiating the relationship to the relatively recent pre-Christian past. Depictions of “reverse-translations” in Laxdæla saga and Egils saga Skallagrímssonar are viewed as representations of attempts on Iceland’s part to reconcile its Christian present and its pagan past.
Ráð Rétt Rúnar: reading the runes in Old English and Old Norse poetry
University of Oxford, 2011
Reading the Runes in Old English and Old Norse Poetry By Thomas Birkett Reading the Runes in Old English and Old Norse Poetry is the first book-length study to compare responses to runic heritage in the literature of Anglo-Saxon England and medieval Iceland. The Anglo-Saxon runic script had already become the preserve of antiquarians at the time the majority of Old English poetry was written down, and the Icelanders recording the mythology associated with the script were at some remove from the centres of runic practice in medieval Scandinavia. Both literary cultures thus inherited knowledge of the runic system and the traditions associated with it, but viewed this literate past from the vantage point of a developed manuscript culture. There has, as yet, been no comprehensive study of poetic responses to this scriptural heritage, which include episodes in such canonical texts as Beowulf, the Old English riddles and the poems of the Poetic Edda. By analysing the inflection of the script through shared literary traditions, this study enhances our understanding of the burgeoning of literary self-awareness in early medieval vernacular poetry and the construction of cultural memory, and furthers our understanding of the relationship between Anglo-Saxon and Norse textual cultures. The introduction sets out in detail the rationale for examining runes in poetry as a literary motif and surveys the relevant critical debates. The body of the volume is comprised of five linked case studies of runes in poetry, viewing these representations through the paradigm of scriptural reconstruction and the validation of contemporary literary, historical and religious sensibilities. Download Reading the Runes in Old English and Old Norse Poe ...pdf Read Online Reading the Runes in Old English and Old Norse P ...pdf