Reanimating Extinct Oral Poems: Seventeenth-Century Scribal Performances of Medieval Scandinavian Eddic Poetry (original) (raw)

This article introduces the scribal performance of Scandinavian eddic poetry on non-Christian mythological and heroic subjects, presenting perspectives from ongoing research. The poems were documented in Iceland centrally during the thirteenth century. They dropped out of oral use, but the written texts were discovered in the seventeenthcentury, leading to a remarkable boom in copying activity. Some copyists took active responsibility for the traditions that they were learning from the written texts. They varied the poems in diverse ways, including expansions, omissions, reorganizations, and even the production of new poems: they reanimated rather than reified the dead oral poems.