I: 7 Orality and Oral Theory

Jürg Glauser, Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell (Eds.) HANDBOOK OF PRE-MODERN NORDIC MEMORY STUDIES !!INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACHES VOLUME 1 f f f Handbook of Pre-Modern Nordic Memory Studies Interdisciplinary Approaches Edited by Jürg Glauser, Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell Volume 1 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-001 ISBN 978-3-11-044020-1 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-043136-0 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-043148-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018957732 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de © 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: The Hills of Old Uppsala in Sweden, Erik Dahlberg, Suecia Antiqua et Hodierna Reproduction: National Library of Sweden Typesetting: Satzstudio Borngräber, Dessau-Roßlau Printing and Binding: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com Table of Contents Volume 1 Guðrún Nordal Foreword — XIII Preface and Acknowledgements — XVII List of Illustrations — XXI Abbreviations — XXV Jürg Glauser, Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell Pre-Modern Nordic Memory Studies: An Introduction — 1 Part I: Disciplines, Traditions and Perspectives Culture and Communication I: 1 I: 2 I: 3 I: 4 I: 5 I: 6 I: 7 Rhetoric: Jürg Glauser — 37 Philosophy and Theology: Anders Piltz — 52 History of Religion: Simon Nygaard and Jens Peter Schjødt — 70 Mythology: Pernille Hermann — 79 Folklore Studies: Stephen A. Mitchell — 93 Performance Studies: Terry Gunnell — 107 Orality and Oral Theory: Stephen A. Mitchell — 120 Material Culture I: 8 I: 9 I: 10 I: 11 Archaeology: Anders Andrén — 135 Late Iron Age Architecture: Lydia Carstens — 151 Medieval Architecture: Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen and Henning Laugerud — 159 Museology: Silje Opdahl Mathisen — 168 Philology I: 12 I: 13 I: 14 I: 15 Law: Stefan Brink — 185 Linguistics and Philology: Michael Schulte — 198 Material Philology: Lena Rohrbach — 210 Runology: Mats Malm — 217 Aesthetics and Communication I: 16 I: 17 Literary Studies: Jürg Glauser — 231 Trauma Studies: Torfi H. Tulinius — 250 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-002 VI Table of Contents I: 18 I: 19 I: 20 I: 21 Media Studies: Kate Heslop — 256 Spatial Studies: Lukas Rösli — 274 Translation Studies: Massimiliano Bampi — 284 Visual Culture: Henning Laugerud — 290 Constructing the Past I: 22 I: 23 I: 24 History: Bjørn Bandlien — 303 Medieval Latin: Aidan Conti — 318 Environmental Humanities: Reinhard Hennig — 327 Neighbouring Disciplines I: 25 I: 26 I: 27 Anglo-Saxon Studies: Antonina Harbus — 335 Celtic Studies: Sarah Künzler — 341 Sámi Studies: Thomas A. DuBois — 348 In-Dialogue I: 28 I: 29 I: 30 Reception Studies: Margaret Clunies Ross — 361 Popular Culture: Jón Karl Helgason — 370 Contemporary Popular Culture: Laurent Di Filippo — 380 Part II: Case Studies Media: Mediality II: 1 II: 2 II: 3 II: 4 II: 5 II: 6 II: 7 II: 8 Orality: Gísli Sigurðsson — 391 Writing and the Book: Lena Rohrbach — 399 Manuscripts: Lukas Rösli — 406 Skin: Sarah Künzler — 414 Textual Performativity: Sandra Schneeberger — 421 Text Editing: Karl G. Johansson — 427 Miracles: Svanhildur Óskarsdóttir — 433 Hagiography: Ásdís Egilsdóttir — 439 Media: Visual modes II: 9 II: 10 II: 11 II: 12 II: 13 Images: Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen — 447 Óðinn’s Ravens: Stephen A. Mitchell — 454 Ornamentation: Anne-Sofie Gräslund — 463 Animation: Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen — 471 Marian Representations: Karoline Kjesrud — 477 Media: Narrating the past II: 14 II: 15 Dialogues with the Past: Vésteinn Ólason — 489 Trauma: Torfi H. Tulinius — 495 Table of Contents II: 16 II: 17 II: 18 II: 19 II: 20 Icelanders Abroad: Yoav Tirosh — 502 Folk Belief: John Lindow — 508 Emotions: Carolyne Larrington — 514 Remembering Gendered Vengeance: Bjørn Bandlien — 519 Remembering the Future: Slavica Ranković — 526 Space: Nature II: 21 II: 22 II: 23 Nature and Mythology: Mathias Nordvig — 539 Climate and Weather: Bernadine McCreesh — 549 Skyscape: Gísli Sigurðsson — 555 Space: Landscape II: 24 II: 25 II: 26 II: 27 II: 28 II: 29 II: 30 II: 31 II: 32 Onomastics: Stefan Brink — 565 Cartography: Rudolf Simek — 575 Diaspora: Judith Jesch — 583 Pilgrimage: Christian Krötzl — 594 Pilgrimage – Gotland: Tracey Sands — 601 Landscape and Mounds: Ann-Mari Hållans Stenholm — 607 Saga Burial Mounds: Lisa Bennett — 613 Sites: Torun Zachrisson — 620 Memorial Landscapes: Pernille Hermann — 627 Action: Using specialist knowledge II: 33 II: 34 II: 35 II: 36 II: 37 Skalds: Russell Poole — 641 Kennings: Bergsveinn Birgisson — 646 Charm Workers: Stephen A. Mitchell — 655 Mental Maps: Gísli Sigurðsson — 660 Mnemonic Methods: Pernille Hermann — 666 Action: Performing commemoration II: 38 II: 39 II: 40 II: 41 II: 42 II: 43 II: 44 Ritual: Terry Gunnell — 677 Ritual Lament: Joseph Harris — 687 Memorial Toasts: Lars Lönnroth — 695 Women and Remembrance Practices: Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir — 699 Donation Culture: Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir — 709 Chain Dancing: Tóta Árnadóttir — 716 Neo-Paganism: Mathias Nordvig — 727 Power: Designing beginnnings II: 45 II: 46 II: 47 Origins: Else Mundal — 737 Genealogies: Úlfar Bragason — 744 Religion and Gender: Sofie Vanherpen — 750 VII VIII II: 48 II: 49 Table of Contents Strategies of Remembering: Laura Sonja Wamhoff — 756 Remembering Origins: Verena Höfig — 762 Power: National memories II: 50 II: 51 II: 52 II: 53 II: 54 II: 55 II: 56 II: 57 II: 58 II: 59 Danish Perspectives: Pernille Hermann — 771 Danish Perspectives – N.F.S. Grundtvig: Sophie Bønding — 782 Faroese Perspectives: Malan Marnersdóttir — 788 Greenlandic Perspectives: Kirsten Thisted — 798 Icelandic Perspectives: Simon Halink — 805 Norwegian Perspectives: Terje Gansum — 811 Norwegian Perspectives – Heimskringla: Jon Gunnar Jørgensen — 818 Swedish Perspectives: Stephen A. Mitchell — 824 Swedish Perspectives – Rudbeck: Anna Wallette — 834 Balto-Finnic Perspectives: Thomas A. DuBois — 841 Power: Envisioning the northern past II: 60 II: 61 II: 62 II: 63 II: 64 II: 65 II: 66 II: 67 II: 68 II: 69 II: 70 Canadian Perspectives: Birgitta Wallace — 855 U.S. Perspectives: Stephen A. Mitchell — 866 North American Perspectives – Suggested Runic Monuments: Henrik Williams — 876 Irish Perspectives: Joseph Falaky Nagy — 885 British Perspectives: Richard Cole — 891 The Northern Isles: Stephen A. Mitchell — 899 French Perspectives: Pierre-Brice Stahl — 908 German Perspectives: Roland Scheel — 913 Polish Perspectives: Jakub Morawiec — 921 Russian Perspectives: Ulrich Schmid — 927 Russian Perspectives – Viking: Barbora Davidková — 933 Table of Contents IX Volume 2 Part III: Texts and Images Remembering the Past and Foreseeing the Future: Mnemonic genres and classical Old Norse memory texts III: 1 III: 2 III: 3 III: 4 The Seeress’s Prophecy – an iconic Old Norse-Icelandic memory poem — 947 Memory and poetry in Egil’s Saga — 951 Dómaldi’s death – a memorable sacrifice in The Saga of the Ynglings — 960 Ekphrasis and pictorial memory in the House-poem — 962 Media of Memory and Forgetting: Oral and written transmission of memories in prologues and colophones III: 5 III: 6 III: 7 III: 8 III: 9 III: 10 III: 11 III: 12 III: 13 III: 14 III: 15 III: 16 III: 17 III: 18 Personal memories and founding myths in The Book of the Icelanders — 967 Writing as a means against oblivion in Hunger-stirrer — 970 Male and female voices in oral transmission and memory in The Saga of Óláf Tryggvason — 974 Medieval mnemonic theory and national history in Saxo Grammaticus’s preface to The History of the Danes — 975 Commemorating the achievements of the ancient kings in Sven Aggesen’s A Short History of the Kings of Denmark — 979 Remembering and transmitting for future generations in the prologue to A History of Norway — 981 Theodoricus Monachus filling up memory gaps in An Account of the Ancient History of the Norwegian Kings — 983 Writing and memory in The King’s Mirror — 986 The prologue to Heimskringla: Snorri Sturluson comments on his sources — 988 Stories fixed in memory in The Saga of King Sverrir — 992 The prologue to The Saga of the Sturlungs and the transmission of contemporary sagawriting — 994 Remembering old tales from foreign countries in Strengleikar — 996 Memorising between storytelling and writing in the prologue to The Saga of Thidrek of Bern — 1002 Remembering and the creation of The Saga of Yngvar the Far-traveler — 1004 X Table of Contents Media of Memory and Forgetting: Figures of remembering and forgetting III: 19 III: 20 III: 21 III: 22 III: 23 Eddic mythological poetry: Birds of memory and birds of oblivion — 1009 Desire, love, and forgetting in eddic heroic poetry — 1011 Memory’s bodily location in The Prose Edda — 1017 Embodied and disembodied memory in The Saga of Saint Jón — 1018 The mind’s eye in The Old Norwegian Book of Homilies — 1019 Memory in Action: Memory strategies and memory scenes in sagas, poetry, laws, and theological and historical texts III: 24 III: 25 III: 26 III: 27 III: 28 III: 29 III: 30 III: 31 III: 32 III: 33 III: 34 III: 35 III: 36 III: 37 III: 38 III: 39 III: 40 III: 41 III: 42 Memorial toasts in The Saga of Hákon the Good — 1023 Old poems and memorial stones in The Separate Saga of Óláfr the Saint — 1025 The remembered glory of Lejre in A Short History of the Kings of Denmark — 1027 Remembering and rhetoric in the Saga of Saint Óláfr — 1028 Poets as eye witnesses and memory bearers in The Saga of Saint Óláfr — 1034 Reciting and remembering disastrous poetry: Gísli Súrsson’s fatal stanza — 1035 Archaeology and oral tradition: The hero’s skull and bones in Egil’s Saga — 1037 Memory, death and spatial anchoring in Njal’s Saga — 1039 Scenes of competitive memory in Morkinskinna — 1042 The curse of forgetting in Gautrek’s Saga — 1047 How to remember the outcome of a law-suit in The Saga of the Confederates — 1049 Men with good memory in the Laws of Hälsingland — 1051 Re-membering a lost deed in the Stockholm Land Registry — 1052 Establishing the remembrance of a king across the sea in The Greatest Saga of Óláfr Tryggvason — 1053 Remembering and venerating – the death and funeral of Saint Þorlákr as staged memory scenes — 1055 Memorialising a king in The Saga of Hákon Hákonarson — 1059 The knight and the lily-petal in An Old Swedish Legendary — 1060 The soul and memory in The Cloister of the Soul — 1061 Memory and revenge in The Chronicle of Duke Erik — 1062 Table of Contents XI Runic Inscriptions III: 43 III: 44 III: 45 Commemorating the reign of King Haraldr on the Jelling stone — 1067 Memory’s role in the Rök stone — 1069 A runic miscellany of memory, memorials and remembering — 1071 Colour Plates — 1079 Select Bibliography of Pre-Modern Nordic Memory Studies — 1103 Contributors — 1113 Index — 1117 Stephen A. Mitchell I: 7 Orality and Oral Theory 1 Definition In Old Norse scholarship, ‘orality’, ‘Oral Theory’, ‘oral text’ and similar terms commonly indicate two related but historically distinguishable approaches to the medieval materials. In one case, such locutions have been used very broadly to refer to a wide range of ideas discussed since at least the late eighteenth century relating to how historical, mythological and legendary materials, for example, were believed to have been narrativized and performed anterior to and/or outside of writing. In the Nordic context, this approach was both philosophical and deeply political. In the other instance, ‘Oral Theory’ and related terms (e.g. ‘oral tradition’) have, since the ground-breaking research on oral epic singing by Milman Parry and Albert Lord in the 1930s – expressed most famously in Lord 2000 [1960] and the substantial research it has inspired in a wide range of language traditions and periods – been used to take the lessons of that work, as well as other evolving oral-centred methodologies, and apply them to the Old Norse situation. These now largely merged lines of thinking share a number of concerns with memory studies, although the overlap is not absolute. 2 State of research Students of folklore and others with a stake in so-called oral literature might well be forgiven for asking whether or not memory studies does not simply represent a question of ‘new wine in old skins’: after all, some ‘discoveries’ made within memory studies do indeed appear to be simple re-packagings of ideas that are very old within folklore studies (e.g. ‘memory communities’ for ‘folk groups’). And importantly, folklore as a field has always had an eye on memory, whether the communicative memory of individuals or a folk group’s collective memory. Do memory studies in fact differ from studies of orality and performance practices, and can the two be disambiguated? It is apparent that the answers cannot be reduced to simple binaries, for the two fields share much but also differ in their orientations and the questions they seek to answer. Modern memory studies in all its diverse forms, as expressed in the works of i.a. Aleida Assmann, Jan Assmann, Paul Connerton, Astrid Erll, Andreas Huyssen, Jacques Le Goff, Pierre Nora, Ann Rigney, and Richard Terdihttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-013 I: 7 Orality and Oral Theory: Stephen A. Mitchell 121 man, is, after all, only a few decades old – the anthologies of e.g. A. Assmann, J. Assmann, and Hardmeier (1983) and Le Goff (1986) may be taken to represent convenient early milestones in these modern developments. Even the venerable initial considerations by Maurice Halbwachs about collective memory (1925, 1950) have not yet been around for as much as a century. By contrast, orality’s enagagement with memory – perhaps best visualised emically in the anthropomorphisation of ‘the tradition’ in the form of legendary performers e.g. Homer, Ossian, Ćor Huso, or, in the case of pre-modern Nordic oral poetry, Bragi (cf. Foley 1998) – represents a form of abstraction that dates back millennia. Moreover, it is telling that the compound ‘folk memory studies’ in the various Nordic languages (e.g. folkminnesforskning, þjóðminjafræði) has been used since at least the early nineteenth century as a primary means of expressing what in English was in that same period re-named Folk-Lore as a substitute for the earlier phrase, ‘popular antiquities’ – and in all of these cases there existed consistent and concomitant connections to orality, tradition and cultural memory. Perhaps a convenient if somewhat over-simplified means of disentangling the two approaches, especially for those interested in the pre-modern, would be to say that where students of orality, oral tradition, and so on look primarily to understand the means by which cultural monuments are produced in artistic performances or re-enactments (cf. Nagy 2011) – and by extension to exploit re-contextualizations of performance practices as a means of analysing meaning within specific cultural contexts – the student of modern memory studies is primarily concerned with how the past is created collectively and, especially, with the purposes and values of how it is used in the present. Thus, one sees, for example, in Lord’s discussion of a young singer’s informal apprenticeship that there exists a reliance on memory in a sophisticated sense (2000 [1960], 36; see below) according to which memory in Lord’s thinking is viewed as an important generative technology, or art, writ large, useful and functional in terms that would have been readily appreciated by an experienced ethnographer like Bronislaw Malinowski. By contrast, memory studies tends to have other ambitions: to take a notable example, Terdiman writes of his major work on memory that it is a book “about how the past persists into the present,” arguing further that “there is another side to memory – memory as a problem, as a site and source of cultural disquiet” – his book’s goal is thus “to reconceive modernity in relation to the cultural disquiet I term the memory crisis” (Terdiman 1993, vii-viii). Emphasising a somewhat different research interest – “the link between collective memories and identity politics” – another leading memory studies scholar explores how “memories of a shared past are collectively constructed and reconstructed in the present rather than resurrected from the past” (Rigney 2005, 13–14). 122 Part I: Culture and Communication Caution is naturally in order: memory studies has many branches, orientations and followers and no small sub-set of writers can be understood to encompass its multifaceted interests. Moreover, one does not want to reduce the differences between studies of orality and memory studies to a mischaracterising binary in which one group focuses on questions of technique – memoria verborum (i.e. rote memory), memoria rerum (i.e. creative recall) and all that accompanies such debates – versus the supposed focus by the other group on contemporary society’s relation to the past in which memory is conceived as (mere) modality and mediating psychotechnology. Neither image would be accurate and inherently the perspectives of those interested in orality, oral literature, folkloristics and so on, and those engaged in memory studies share considerably overlapping sets of concerns. They have learned, and will continue to learn, much from each other; moreover, scholars need not belong to only one group (see e.g. the essays in Ben-Amos and Weissberg 1999). Orality Consideration of what constituted oral tradition in the hyperborean Middle Ages (and how to access it) is subject to many factors, i.a. how much of the medieval materials have survived; the use of analytic tools developed for non-Nordic texts, Homeric epics in particular; and the influence of early modern nation building in shaping how these texts have been experienced. Perspectives on such inherited cultural goods were in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries heavily influenced by the writings of Giambattista Vico, Friedrich August Wolf, Johann Gottfried Herder, Karl Lachmann and others, debates about so-called Naturpoesie (natural or ‘folk’ poetry, conceived in opposition to Kunstpoesie [art or elite poetry]), and epic construction through the so-called Liedertheorie [song theory] (see Andersson 1962; 1964, 1–21). Moreover, since the Union of Kalmar in the late fourteenth century, Norway and its overlordship of the Norse colonies in the North Atlantic had passed to Denmark. With the Napoleanic era, the map of Scandinavia was substantially rearranged, and an era of significant agitation for Norwegian and (to a lesser extent) Icelandic political independence ensued. In that world of Romantic nationalism and inter-Nordic colonialism, few cultural goods were as significant as the eddas and sagas, those unique literary windows on the medieval North. Who ‘owned’ them – that is, who created them, whose traditions they represent, whose unique literary achievement they were to be credited as being, and so on – played a meaningful role in justifying Norwegian claims to nationhood in the modern era. If early ideas of a fixed oral tradition were correct, nationalists could I: 7 Orality and Oral Theory: Stephen A. Mitchell 123 argue that the Icelandic literary enterprise of the thirteenth century was ‘really’ a displaced exercise in Norwegian creativity, and the greater the degree to which this oral tradition could be argued to be a practice harking back to the mother country, the greater the nationalist claim to these prized literary works – and the more legitimate the Norwegian demand for complete independence (Andersson 1964, 65–81; Mitchell 1991, 1–6). In this sense, discussions of orality were not only an academic debate, but rather a substantive argument deeply embedded in a serious political dilemma. And it was a debate with a lengthy hangover: Harald Beyer’s Norsk Litteraturhistorie (A History of Norwegian Literature) was published in 1952, well after the political debates themselves had been resolved, yet even here the text emphasises that “the rise of the written saga must be seen against this background of learned antiquarianism in the pioneer society of Iceland,” and even refers to the Icelanders – by now, some 400 years after the beginning of the landnám – as “emigrated Norwegians in Iceland” (Beyer 1956, 44; emphases added). Oral sagas and eddic poetry were in this scheme seen as reified cultural memories. Over time, these positions developed into largely opposing schools of thought: on the one hand, those who emphasized the oral, performed roots of the extant written sagas, what has come to be called the ‘freeprose’ position, and, on the other, those who stress the sagas as the written products of individual authors influenced by Continental models, the so-called ‘bookprose’ position, terms proposed by Andreas Heusler (1914, 53–55). No modern scholar believes in an absolute dichotomy between these views, and the general question of how to account for this unique medieval genre has been posed as follows, “[…] is the background to the sagas’ art to be conceived of as native and essentially spoken (or verbal, or performed, or recited), or is the background based on foreign models in which the key aspects of composition have been shaped by literacy?” (Mitchell 1991, 1). Oral Theory The second approach, what is often called Oral Theory – nomenclature that often troubles adherents, as it tends to ignore the hard evidence of the original study – draws inspiration from many of the same early Homerists mentioned above. The Homeric problem Milman Parry sought to solve might reasonably be formulated as follows: how was it possible that the Iliad and Odyssey, two of the finest works of western literature, appear simultaneously at the very moment of writing’s inception in the west? The answer Parry proposed, of course, was that rather than being written creations, these epics were in fact the products of many generations of oral narration – writing made it possible to record them, but this new 124 Part I: Culture and Communication medium was not itself responsible for creating them. What distinguishes Parry from other Classicists who had posed the “Homeric Question” before him was not only his view that the Iliad and the Odyssey were originally the products of an oral tradition that was older than any written literature, but rather his formulation of a method for testing this hypothesis, a procedure which moved the debate from focusing solely on the content of orally produced songs to the actual process through which such songs are produced in performance, and an approach that asked the humanities to adhere to the scientific method (observation; hypothesis formulation; testing; validation, or modification, of the hypothesis). This goal Parry and Lord pursued vigorously by examining the living tradition of south Slavic oral poetry and learning how it functioned. In Parry’s own words, the problem and proposed solution is this: If we put lore against literature it follows that we should put oral poetry against written poetry, but the critics so far have rarely done this, chiefly because it happened that the same man rarely knew both kinds of poetry, and if he did he was rather looking for that in which they were alike. That is, the men who were likely to meet with the songs of an unlettered people were not ordinarily of the sort who could judge soundly how good or bad they were, while the men with a literary background who published oral poems wanted above all to show that they were good as literature. It was only the students of the ‘early’ poems who were brought in touch at the same time with both lore and literature. (Parry 1935, 3) Parry’s untimely death left to his assistant, Albert B. Lord, later the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Harvard University, the completion of this bold project. In Lord’s seminal analysis of their findings, The Singer of Tales (2000 [1960]), he demonstrates the process by which singers learn their craft and the methods they employ in singing epics of great length, several aspects of which are of particular relevance to memory studies. In the Yugoslavian case, those who aspire to become oral poets begin the process early, through informal training in adolescence, which Lord summarizes as “first, the period of listening and absorbing; then, the period of application; and finally, that of singing before a critical audience” (2000 [1960], 21). During this informal and lengthy period of ‘enskilment’ (cf. Gísli Pálsson 1994), singers “lay the foundation,” in Lord’s phrase, learning the stories, heroes, places, themes, rhythms, formulas, and the other tools they use in composing their own multiforms of these songs. It is not difficult to see in this process the broad understanding of memory, as a noted scholar in the field writes, “in the sense of an embodied storehouse,” “a craft and as a resource that can be trained to contain immense amounts of information” (Hermann forthcoming). An important distinction Lord draws is between traditional singers of this sort and those who sing but are using memorized (often published) texts – “we I: 7 Orality and Oral Theory: Stephen A. Mitchell 125 cannot consider such singers as oral poets,” he writes, “They are mere performers” (2000 [1960], 13). The traditional singer learns the craft at such a level, that over time he is able to compose, or recompose, the songs himself, not as memorized text, but as story-telling in which he uses the specialised tools of the tradition’s poetic language: When we speak a language, our native language, we do not repeat words and phrases that we have memorized consciously, but the words and sentences emerge from habitual usage. This is true of the singer of tales working in his specialized grammar. He does not ‘memorize’ formulas, any more than we as children ‘memorize’ language. He learns them by hearing them in other singers’ songs, and by habitual usage they become part of his singing as well. Memorization is a conscious act of making one’s own, and repeating, something that one regards as fixed and not one’s own. The learning of an oral poetic language follows the same principles as the learning of language itself, not by the conscious schematization of elementary grammars but by the natural oral method. (2000 [1960], 36) Lord’s generative model, implicitly anticipating important aspects of what later emerged as transformational grammar and discussions of deep and surface structures, is critical to so-called Oral Theory, insofar as it is the key finding behind the concept that traditional oral poets compose in performance, and are neither repeating memorised texts nor engaging in improvisation, extemporisation, or other autoschediastic utterances. “My own preferred term for that type of composition is ‘composition by formula and theme’. ‘Composition in performance’ or possibly ‘recomposition in performance’ are satisfactory terms as long as one does not equate them with improvisation […]” (Lord 1991, 76–77). Significantly for the issue of memory and memory studies, Lord also describes the phenomenon of ‘multiformity’ (99–102), essentially the same feature of oral poetry Zumthor (1992 [1972]) later popularises as mouvance (although their points of view differ somewhat). Lord’s formulation is especially apt, as he speaks not of the song but of songs; that is, to a singer and his audience, since the subject matter is ‘the same’, they will identify different performances as being of ‘the same song’, even though these performance-generated oral texts may differ markedly as regards length, focus, and other matters of treatment (something we must do as well in cataloguing texts). But, of course, they are not truly ‘the same’, since they are never fixed or memorised, and can vary greatly. Thus, in a famous example, Ženidba Smailagić Meha [The Wedding of Meho, Son of Smail] was recorded on two occasions, separated by some 15 years, from the most renowned of the singers in the Parry Collection, Avdo Međedović (Lord 1956). In July of 1935, Avdo’s performance ran to 12,323 lines; in May of 1950, he performed ‘the same song’ in 8,488 lines. They are both complete, full recountings of the story, but differ precisely in how Avdo treats the performances. 126 Part I: Culture and Communication In addition to these direct findings about south Slavic traditional oral poets, among the most important results of applying the Parry-Lord observations to other tradition areas, has been the reevaluation of just what we should hope to find – not merely duplications of Parry and Lord’s original methods for, e.g., testing the use of formulas or the mechanics of composition in performance, but also tools for such important perspectives as recontextualising performance practices (e.g. Nagy 2011; Mitchell 2013; cf. Harris and Reichl 2011). Further ramifications of the Parry-Lord project are to be seen in the fact that two prominent theoretical approaches to folklore and oral literature – ethnopoetics and performance studies, both of relevance to memory studies – were clearly anticipated in Lord’s writings (see, e.g. DuBois 2013 and Gunnell 2008). As Bauman notes in his highly influential Verbal Art as Performance (1977), The Singer of Tales is one of the first works to conceive of folklore texts in terms of ‘emergent structures’. Continuing, he writes, “one of Lord’s chief contributions is to demonstrate the unique and emergent quality of the oral text, composed in performance. His analysis of the dynamics of the epic tradition sets forth what amounts to a generative model of epic performance” (Bauman 1977, 38–39; cf. Mitchell and Nagy 2000). It is certainly the case that Parry and Lord’s observations on south Slavic song culture had profound impact throughout the humanities, and it is presumably no coincidence that just four years after The Singer of Tales first appeared, Andersson concludes his impressive history of the Nordic situation with the sentence, “The inspiration of the sagas is ultimately oral” (Andersson 1964, 119). 3 Pre-modern Nordic material Capturing the essence of the Nordic localisation of the so-called Great Divide, Sigurður Nordal once described the bookprose-freeprose controversy as the Scylla and Charybdis between which saga scholarship has tended to sail (1958 [1940], 65) – should the medieval Icelandic texts be seen as products of a memorising oral culture or as a situation where “sagawriting existed in a social vacuum, that written sagas were influenced only by other written sagas,” as one scholar noted (Lönnroth 1976, 207)? Or, as a later writer less generously characterised the Nordicist’s dilemma, there was not much of a choice between “a desiccating formalism dedicated to a fixed text and an equally alkaline literary criticism that saw only words on a page” (Mitchell 2003, 204). The significance of Oral Theory’s contributions to the debate – fortified by complementary approaches (e.g. Zumthor 1990 [1983]; Schaefer 1992) and sympathetic advocacy (e.g. Ong 1982; Goody 1987; Foley 1988, 2002) – was to offer com- I: 7 Orality and Oral Theory: Stephen A. Mitchell 127 promises between the two century-old extremes in Old Norse scholarship, compromises that often resulted in new models and novel exploratory ingresses to the texts (e.g. Lönnroth 1976; Byock 1982; Harris 1983; Bandle 1988; Glauser 1996; Mundt 1997; Acker 1998; Gísli Sigurðsson 2004 [2002]; Mellor 2008; cf. Ranković, Leidulf and Mundal 2010), resulting in emerging symbioses (see, e.g. the reviews in Harris 2016 and Hermann 2017). Oral Theory, particularly in the context of the so-called ‘ethnography of communications’, has also led to much interest in the production of Norse oral compositions and their delivery in medieval Scandinavia, especially the frequently noted performance contexts of eddic and scaldic poetry (e.g. Lönnroth 1971; Bauman 1986; Acker 1998; Harris 2000; Mitchell 2002; Gunnell 2013; Clunies Ross 2014). That one can discuss a text from the Middle Ages as being oral naturally strikes many observers as paradoxical, since it cannot be literally true, and Lord himself acknowledges this point in what he refers to as “the merging of the world of orality with that of literacy” (1986, 19). Still, the power of orality, or of the idea of orality, as a key ingredient in the cultural kit seems to have been strong, and when mirrored in writing has been called “fictitionalized orality” (Fingierte Mündlichkeit; Goetsch 1985), a phenomenon also in evidence in the medieval North (cf. Andersson 1966). Recognition of both unconscious reflections of orality in the medieval texts, as well as of this more consciously applied oral style, was observed early on in scholarship, and the need for a descriptor for such materials was met by Foley, who coined the phrase “oral-derived text” to describe “manuscript or tablet works of finally uncertain provenance that nonetheless show oral traditional characteristics” (1990, 5; cf. Quinn 2016). The phrase is intended, as Foley states elsewhere (2011, 603), “As an alternative to the simplistic binary model of orality versus literacy, the concept of oral-derived texts suggests a broad range of diverse media interactions: from autographs through dictation to scribes and on to multiply-edited manuscripts and works written in an oral traditional style.” 4 Perspectives for future research Just as emerging perspectives like New Philology have re-energized manuscript studies, orality and Oral Theory have similarly re-vitalized the study of medieval literature and made available a variety of techniques to move serious scholarship beyond merely viewing the texts as ossified words on a manuscript page (cf. Gísli Sigurðsson 2008), leading to a healthy integration of oral-centered approaches with adjacent methodologies (e.g. ethnopoetics, ethnohistory, performance studies), symbioses that promise much (see DuBois 2013; Hermann 2017). Simi- 128 Part I: Culture and Communication larly, the specific intersection of orality and memory studies is significant, and one expects that so interdisciplinary and methodologically-agglutinating a field as folkloristics will enthusiastically embrace the lessons to be learned from memory studies. The interplay between Oral Theory/orality and modern international memory studies within Old Norse studies has only recently been taken up in earnest (e.g. Mitchell 2013; Hermann 2017; Hermann forthcoming), but promises bright prospects for future research. Works cited Primary sources Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature. Harvard University: Međedović, Avdo. Ženidba Smailagić Meha (The Wedding of Meho, Son of Smail). PN 6840, July 5–12, 1935; LN 35, May 23, 1950. Parry, Milman. 1935. “The Singer of Tales.” Typewritten ms. Secondary sources Acker, Paul. 1998. Revising Oral Theory: Formulaic Composition in Old English and Old Icelandic Verse. Garland Studies in Medieval Literature, 16. New York. Andersson, Theodore M. 1962. “The Doctrine of Oral Tradition in the Chanson de Geste and Saga.” Scandinavian Studies 34: 19–36. Andersson, Theodore M. 1964. The Problem of Icelandic Saga Origins: A Historical Survey. Yale Germanic Studies, 1. New Haven, CT. Andersson, Theodore M. 1966. “The Textual Evidence for an Oral Family Saga.” ANF 81: 1–23. Assmann, Aleida, Jan Assmann and Christof Hardmeier, eds. 1983. Schrift und Gedächtnis: Beiträge zur Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation. Munich. Bandle, Oskar. 1988. “Die Fornaldarsaga zwischen Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit: Zur Entstehung und Entwicklung der Örvar-Odds saga.” In Zwischen Festtag und Alltag. Zehn Beiträge zum Thema ‘Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit’. Ed. Wolfgan Raible. ScriptaOralia, 6. Tübingen. 199–213. Bauman, Richard. 1977. Verbal Art as Performance. Series in Sociolinguistics. Rowley, MA. Bauman, Richard. 1986. “Performance and Honor in 13th-Century Iceland.” Journal of American Folklore 99: 131–150. Ben-Amos, Dan and Liliane Weissberg, eds. 1999. Cultural Memory and the Construction of Identity. Detroit. Beyer, Harald. 1956. A History of Norwegian Literature. NY. [Norwegian original 1952] Byock, Jesse L. 1982. Feud in the Icelandic saga. Berkeley and Los Angeles. Clunies Ross, Margaret. 2014. “Authentication of Poetic Memory in Old Norse Skaldic Verse.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 74–90. I: 7 Orality and Oral Theory: Stephen A. Mitchell 129 DuBois, Thomas A. 2013. “Ethnomemory: Ethnographic and Culture-Centered Approaches to the Study of Memory.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 306–331. Foley, John Miles. 1988. The Theory of Oral Composition: History and Methodology. Bloomington. Foley, John Miles. 1990. Traditional Oral Epic: The Odyssey, Beowulf, and the Serbo-Croatian Return Song. Berkeley and Los Angeles. Foley, John Miles. 1998. “Individual Poet and Epic Tradition: Homer as Legendary Singer.” Arethusa 31: 149–178. Foley, John Miles. 2002. How to Read an Oral Poem. Urbana. Foley, John Miles. 2011. “Oral-Derived Text.” In The Homer Encyclopedia. Ed. Margalit Finkelberg. Chichester, West Sussex and Malden, MA. II: 603. Gísli Pálsson. 1994. “Enskilment at Sea.” Man n.s. 29.4: 901–927. Gísli Sigurðsson. 2004. The Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition: A Discourse on Method. Trans. Nicholas Jones. Publications of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature, 2. Cambridge, MA. [Icelandic orig. 2002] Gísli Sigurðsson. 2008. “Orality Harnessed: How to Read Written Sagas from an Oral Culture?” In Oral Art Forms and their Passage into Writing. Ed. Else Mundal and Jonas Wellendorf. Copenhagen. 19–28. Glauser, Jürg. 1996. “Tendenzen der Vermündlichung isländischer Sagastoffe.” In (Re)Oralisierung. Ed. Hildegard L. C. Tristram. ScriptOralia, 84. Tübingen. 111–125. Goetsch, Paul. 1985. “Fingierte Mündlichkeit in der Erzählkunst entwickelter Schriftkulturen.” Poetica 17: 202–218. Goody, Jack. 1987. The Interface between the Written and the Oral. Cambridge and New York. Gunnell, Terry. 2008. “The Performance of the Poetic Edda.” In The Viking World. Ed. Stefan Brink. in collaboration with Neil Price. London and New York. 199–203. Gunnell, Terry. 2013. “Vǫluspá in Performance.” In The Nordic Apocalypse: Approaches to Vǫluspá and Nordic Days of Judgement. Ed. Terry Gunnell and Annette Lassen. Turnhout. 63–77. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1925. Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Travaux de l’Année sociologique. Paris. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1950. La mémoire collective. Bibliothèque de sociologie contemporaine. Paris. Harris, Joseph. 1983. “Eddic Poetry as Oral Poetry: The Evidence of Parallel Passages in the Helgi Poems for Questions of Composition and Performance.” In Edda: A Collection of Essays. Ed. Robert J. Glendinning and Haraldur Bessason. Manitoba. 210–242. Harris, Joseph. 2000. “The Performance of Old Norse Eddic Poetry: A Retrospective.” In The Oral Epic: Performance and Music. Ed. Karl Reichl. Berlin. 225–232. Harris, Joseph. 2016. “Traditions of Eddic Scholarship.” In A Handbook to Eddic Poetry: Myths and Legends of Early Scandinavia Ed. Carolyne Larrington, Judy Quinn and Brittany Schorn. Cambridge. 33–57. Harris, Joseph and Karl Reichl. 2011. “Performance and Performers.” In Medieval Oral Literature. Ed. Karl Reichl. Berlin. 141–202 Hermann, Pernille. 2017. “Methodological Challenges to the Study of Old Norse Myths: The Orality and Literacy Debate Reframed.” In Old Norse Mythology – Comparative Perspectives. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. 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