Handbook of Pre-Modern Nordic Memory Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches 3110440202, 9783110440201

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Foreword
Preface and Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Abbreviations
Pre-Modern Nordic Memory Studies: An Introduction
Part I: Disciplines, Traditions and Perspectives
Culture and Communication
I: 1 Rhetoric
I: 2 Philosophy and Theology
I: 3 History of Religion
I: 4 Mythology
I: 5 Folklore Studies
I: 6 Performance Studies
I: 7 Orality and Oral Theory
Material Culture
I: 8 Archaeology
I: 9 Late Iron Age Architecture
I: 10 Medieval Architecture
I: 11 Museology
Philology
I: 12 Law
I: 13 Linguistics and Philology
I: 14 Material Philology
I: 15 Runology
Aesthetics and Communication
I: 16 Literary Studies
I: 17 Trauma Studies
I: 18 Media Studies
I: 19 Spatial Studies
I: 20 Translation Studies
I: 21 Visual Culture
Constructing the Past
I: 22 History
I: 23 Medieval Latin
I: 24 Environmental Humanities
Neighbouring Disciplines
I: 25 Anglo-Saxon Studies
I: 26 Celtic Studies
I: 27 Sámi Studies
In-Dialogue
I: 28 Reception Studies
I: 29 Popular Culture
I: 30 Contemporary Popular Culture
Part II: Case Studies
Media: Mediality
II: 1 Orality
II: 2 Writing and the Book
II: 3 Manuscripts
II: 4 Skin
II: 5 Textual Performativity
II: 6 Text Editing
II: 7 Miracles
II: 8 Hagiography
Media: Visual modes
II: 9 Images
II: 10 Óðinn’s Ravens
II: 11 Ornamentation
II: 12 Animation
II: 13 Marian Representations
Media: Narrating the past
II: 14 Dialogues with the Past
II: 15 Trauma
II: 16 Icelanders Abroad
II: 17 Folk Belief
II: 18 Emotions
II: 19 Remembering Gendered Vengeance
II: 20 Remembering the Future
Space: Nature
II: 21 Nature and Mythology
II: 22 Climate and Weather
II: 23 Skyscape
Space: Landscape
II: 24 Onomastics
II: 25 Cartography
II: 26 Diaspora
II: 27 Pilgrimage
II: 28 Pilgrimage – Gotland
II: 29 Landscape and Mounds
II: 30 Saga Burial Mounds
II: 31 Sites
II: 32 Memorial Landscapes
Action: Using specialist knowledge
II: 33 Skalds
II: 34 Kennings
II: 35 Charm Workers
II: 36 Mental Maps
II: 37 Mnemonic Methods
Action: Performing commemoration
II: 38 Ritual
II: 39 Ritual Lament
II: 40 Memorial Toasts
II: 41 Women and Remembrance Practices
II: 42 Donation Culture
II: 43 Chain Dancing
II: 44 Neo-Paganism
Power: Designing beginnnings
II: 45 Origins
II: 46 Genealogies
II: 47 Religion and Gender
II: 48 Strategies of Remembering
II: 49 Remembering Origins
Power: National memories
II: 50 Danish Perspectives
II: 51 Danish Perspectives – N.F.S. Grundtvig
II: 52 Faroese Perspectives
II: 53 Greenlandic Perspectives
II: 54 Icelandic Perspectives
II: 55 Norwegian Perspectives
II: 56 Norwegian Perspectives – Heimskringla
II: 57 Swedish Perspectives
II: 58 Swedish Perspectives
II: 59 Balto-Finnic Perspectives
Power: Envisioning the northern past
II: 60 Canadian Perspectives
II: 61 U.S. Perspectives
II: 62 North American Perspectives – Suggested Runic Monuments
II: 63 Irish Perspectives
II: 64 British Perspectives
II: 65 The Northern Isles
II: 66 French Perspectives
II: 67 German Perspectives
II: 68 Polish Perspectives
II: 69 Russian Perspectives
II: 70 Russian Perspectives – Viking
Part III: Texts and Images
Einleitung
Remembering the Past and Foreseeing the Future: Mnemonic genres and classical Old Norse memory texts
Media of Memory and Forgetting: Oral and written transmission of memories in prologues and colophones
Media of Memory and Forgetting: Figures of remembering and forgetting
Memory in Action: Memory strategies and memory scenes in sagas, poetry, laws, and theological and historical texts
Runic Inscriptions
Colour Plates
Select Bibliography of Pre-Modern Nordic Memory Studies
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

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: CPI books GmbH, Leck 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 Rhetoric: Jürg Glauser — 37 I: 2 Philosophy and Theology: Anders Piltz — 52 I: 3 History of Religion: Simon Nygaard and Jens Peter Schjødt — 70 I: 4 Mythology: Pernille Hermann — 79 I: 5 Folklore Studies: Stephen A. Mitchell — 93 I: 6 Performance Studies: Terry Gunnell — 107 I: 7 Orality and Oral Theory: Stephen A. Mitchell — 120

Material Culture 

I: 8 Archaeology: Anders Andrén — 135 I: 9 Late Iron Age Architecture: Lydia Carstens — 151 I: 10 Medieval Architecture: Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen and Henning Laugerud — 159 I: 11 Museology: Silje Opdahl Mathisen — 168

Philology

I: 12 Law: Stefan Brink — 185 I: 13 Linguistics and Philology: Michael Schulte — 198 I: 14 Material Philology: Lena Rohrbach — 210 I: 15 Runology: Mats Malm — 217

Aesthetics and Communication

I: 16 Literary Studies: Jürg Glauser — 231 I: 17 Trauma Studies: Torfi H. Tulinius — 250 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-002

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 Table of Contents

I: 18 Media Studies: Kate Heslop — 256 I: 19 Spatial Studies: Lukas Rösli — 274 I: 20 Translation Studies: Massimiliano Bampi — 284 I: 21 Visual Culture: Henning Laugerud — 290

Constructing the Past

I: 22 History: Bjørn Bandlien — 303 I: 23 Medieval Latin: Aidan Conti — 318 I: 24 Environmental Humanities: Reinhard Hennig — 327

Neighbouring Disciplines

I: 25 Anglo-Saxon Studies: Antonina Harbus — 335 I: 26 Celtic Studies: Sarah Künzler — 341 I: 27 Sámi Studies: Thomas A. DuBois — 348

In-Dialogue

I: 28 Reception Studies: Margaret Clunies Ross — 361 I: 29 Popular Culture: Jón Karl Helgason — 370 I: 30 Contemporary Popular Culture: Laurent Di Filippo — 380

Part II: Case Studies Media: Mediality

II: 1 Orality: Gísli Sigurðsson — 391 II: 2 Writing and the Book: Lena Rohrbach — 399 II: 3 Manuscripts: Lukas Rösli — 406 II: 4 Skin: Sarah Künzler — 414 II: 5 Textual Performativity: Sandra Schneeberger — 421 II: 6 Text Editing: Karl G. Johansson  — 427 II: 7 Miracles: Svanhildur Óskarsdóttir — 433 II: 8 Hagiography: Ásdís Egilsdóttir — 439

Media: Visual modes

II: 9 Images: Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen — 447 II: 10 Óðinn’s Ravens: Stephen A. Mitchell — 454 II: 11 Ornamentation: Anne-Sofie Gräslund — 463 II: 12 Animation: Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen — 471 II: 13 Marian Representations: Karoline Kjesrud — 477

Media: Narrating the past

II: 14 Dialogues with the Past: Vésteinn Ólason — 489 II: 15 Trauma: Torfi H. Tulinius — 495



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 VII

II: 16 Icelanders Abroad: Yoav Tirosh — 502 II: 17 Folk Belief: John Lindow — 508 II: 18 Emotions: Carolyne Larrington — 514 II: 19 Remembering Gendered Vengeance: Bjørn Bandlien — 519 II: 20 Remembering the Future: Slavica Ranković — 526

Space: Nature

II: 21 Nature and Mythology: Mathias Nordvig — 539 II: 22 Climate and Weather: Bernadine McCreesh — 549 II: 23 Skyscape: Gísli Sigurðsson — 555

Space: Landscape

II: 24 Onomastics: Stefan Brink — 565 II: 25 Cartography: Rudolf Simek — 575 II: 26 Diaspora: Judith Jesch — 583 II: 27 Pilgrimage: Christian Krötzl — 594 II: 28 Pilgrimage – Gotland: Tracey Sands — 601 II: 29 Landscape and Mounds: Ann-Mari Hållans Stenholm — 607 II: 30 Saga Burial Mounds: Lisa Bennett — 613 II: 31 Sites: Torun Zachrisson — 620 II: 32 Memorial Landscapes: Pernille Hermann — 627

Action: Using specialist knowledge

II: 33 Skalds: Russell Poole — 641 II: 34 Kennings: Bergsveinn Birgisson — 646 II: 35 Charm Workers: Stephen A. Mitchell — 655 II: 36 Mental Maps: Gísli Sigurðsson — 660 II: 37 Mnemonic Methods: Pernille Hermann — 666

Action: Performing commemoration

II: 38 Ritual: Terry Gunnell — 677 II: 39 Ritual Lament: Joseph Harris — 687 II: 40 Memorial Toasts: Lars Lönnroth — 695 II: 41 Women and Remembrance Practices: Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir — 699 II: 42 Donation Culture: Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir — 709 II: 43 Chain Dancing: Tóta Árnadóttir — 716 II: 44 Neo-Paganism: Mathias Nordvig — 727

Power: Designing beginnnings

II: 45 Origins: Else Mundal — 737 II: 46 Genealogies: Úlfar Bragason — 744 II: 47 Religion and Gender: Sofie Vanherpen — 750

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 Table of Contents

II: 48 Strategies of Remembering: Laura Sonja Wamhoff — 756 II: 49 Remembering Origins: Verena Höfig — 762

Power: National memories

II: 50 Danish Perspectives: Pernille Hermann — 771 II: 51 Danish Perspectives – N.F.S. Grundtvig: Sophie Bønding — 782 II: 52 Faroese Perspectives: Malan Marnersdóttir — 788 II: 53 Greenlandic Perspectives: Kirsten Thisted — 798 II: 54 Icelandic Perspectives: Simon Halink — 805 II: 55 Norwegian Perspectives: Terje Gansum — 811 II: 56 Norwegian Perspectives – Heimskringla: Jon Gunnar Jørgensen — 818 II: 57 Swedish Perspectives: Stephen A. Mitchell — 824 II: 58 Swedish Perspectives – Rudbeck: Anna Wallette — 834 II: 59 Balto-Finnic Perspectives: Thomas A. DuBois — 841

Power: Envisioning the northern past

II: 60 Canadian Perspectives: Birgitta Wallace — 855 II: 61 U.S. Perspectives: Stephen A. Mitchell — 866 II: 62 North American Perspectives – Suggested Runic Monuments: Henrik Williams — 876 II: 63 Irish Perspectives: Joseph Falaky Nagy — 885 II: 64 British Perspectives: Richard Cole — 891 II: 65 The Northern Isles: Stephen A. Mitchell — 899 II: 66 French Perspectives: Pierre-Brice Stahl — 908 II: 67 German Perspectives: Roland Scheel — 913 II: 68 Polish Perspectives: Jakub Morawiec — 921 II: 69 Russian Perspectives: Ulrich Schmid — 927 II: 70 Russian Perspectives – Viking: Barbora Davidková — 933



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 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 The Seeress’s Prophecy – an iconic Old Norse-Icelandic memory poem — 947 III: 2 Memory and poetry in Egil’s Saga — 951 III: 3 Dómaldi’s death – a memorable sacrifice in The Saga of the Ynglings — 960 III: 4 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 Personal memories and founding myths in The Book of the Icelanders — 967 III: 6 Writing as a means against oblivion in Hunger-stirrer — 970 III: 7 Male and female voices in oral transmission and memory in The Saga of Óláf Tryggvason — 974 III: 8 Medieval mnemonic theory and national history in Saxo Grammaticus’s preface to The History of the Danes — 975 III: 9 Commemorating the achievements of the ancient kings in Sven Aggesen’s A Short History of the Kings of Denmark — 979 III: 10 Remembering and transmitting for future generations in the prologue to A History of Norway — 981 III: 11 Theodoricus Monachus filling up memory gaps in An Account of the Ancient History of the Norwegian Kings — 983 III: 12 Writing and memory in The King’s Mirror — 986 III: 13 The prologue to Heimskringla: Snorri Sturluson comments on his sources — 988 III: 14 Stories fixed in memory in The Saga of King Sverrir — 992 III: 15 The prologue to The Saga of the Sturlungs and the transmission of contemporary sagawriting — 994 III: 16 Remembering old tales from foreign countries in Strengleikar — 996 III: 17 Memorising between storytelling and writing in the prologue to T he Saga of Thidrek of Bern — 1002 III: 18 Remembering and the creation of The Saga of Yngvar the Far-traveler — 1004

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 Table of Contents

Media of Memory and Forgetting: Figures of remembering and forgetting

III: 19 Eddic mythological poetry: Birds of memory and birds of oblivion — 1009 III: 20 Desire, love, and forgetting in eddic heroic poetry — 1011 III: 21 Memory’s bodily location in The Prose Edda — 1017 III: 22 Embodied and disembodied memory in The Saga of Saint Jón — 1018 III: 23 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 Memorial toasts in The Saga of Hákon the Good — 1023 III: 25 Old poems and memorial stones in The Separate Saga of Óláfr the Saint — 1025 III: 26 The remembered glory of Lejre in A Short History of the Kings of Denmark — 1027 III: 27 Remembering and rhetoric in the Saga of Saint Óláfr — 1028 III: 28 Poets as eye witnesses and memory bearers in The Saga of Saint Óláfr — 1034 III: 29 Reciting and remembering disastrous poetry: Gísli Súrsson’s fatal stanza — 1035 III: 30 Archaeology and oral tradition: The hero’s skull and bones in Egil’s Saga — 1037 III: 31 Memory, death and spatial anchoring in Njal’s Saga  — 1039 III: 32 Scenes of competitive memory in Morkinskinna — 1042 III: 33 The curse of forgetting in Gautrek’s Saga  — 1047 III: 34 How to remember the outcome of a law-suit in The Saga of the Confederates  — 1049 III: 35 Men with good memory in the Laws of Hälsingland — 1051 III: 36 Re-membering a lost deed in the Stockholm Land Registry — 1052 III: 37 Establishing the remembrance of a king across the sea in The Greatest Saga of Óláfr Tryggvason — 1053 III: 38 Remembering and venerating – the death and funeral of Saint Þorlákr as staged memory scenes — 1055 III: 39 Memorialising a king in The Saga of Hákon Hákonarson — 1059 III: 40 The knight and the lily-petal in An Old Swedish Legendary — 1060 III: 41 The soul and memory in The Cloister of the Soul — 1061 III: 42 Memory and revenge in The Chronicle of Duke Erik — 1062



Table of Contents 

Runic Inscriptions

 XI

III: 43 Commemorating the reign of King Haraldr on the Jelling stone — 1067 III: 44 Memory’s role in the Rök stone — 1069 III: 45 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

Guðrún Nordal

Foreword

Memory is to most people an intensively private concept. We recognise the selec­ tiveness of our own memory processes, when, for example, some stories from our past remain vivid in our minds, while others are easily forgotten. What are the cognitive processes which determine how we reconstruct our own rememb­ered lives? Snapshots and home videos assist in the reconstruction of past events, even though details and names may be forgotten. Diaries are passed down in families, letters from the past come into the hands of descendants who know little of the initial context – yet the written text lives on and takes on a new meaning in a different setting. Memory studies remind us that this constant reconstruction of the past is strongly affected by the collective memory of societies and groups. Our memory is conditioned by audiences and social settings, and by the technology of writing, and even by memory aids, factors that similarly condition our conti­ nuous reconstruction of the early history of the north through the centuries. Memory studies is a relatively new field within medieval studies, and cer­ tainly within Old and Medieval Scandinavian Studies. Scholars examine the social, cultural, cognitive, political and technological shifts which affect how, what and why individuals, groups and societies remember, and forget. It is the study of the process of remembering over time, rather than what is remembered. Social, political and technological constraints affect the remembered. The study of the past is inherently preoccupied with memory, the way in which events, ideas and people are remembered, what is suppressed and then ultimately omitted from our records. Our idea of the past is always a representation of past events at any given time; however, cultural memory is not limited to language and written texts, preserved through the medium of manuscripts, runic inscriptions or wax tablets, but is also communicated through monuments, archaeological remains, artefacts, forms in the landscape and even the stars in the sky. This new field eases into a scholarly space already occupied by other dis­ ciplines, but lends it a new and stimulating perspective. Memory studies have obvious and inextricable ties with folklore, oral, literary and historical studies, as we are reminded of in this handsome volume, and it is of interest and importance to highlight and explore the borderlines between the different disciplines ori­ ented to the past. The study of folklore and orality takes into account the cultural context of the artistic performance, but memory studies are concerned with how the past is created individually and collectively and how it is used in the present. The study of history deals, however, with the past as something final.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-003

XIV 

 Foreword

Icelandic medieval literature is rich in size and content, but also of interest is how notably poor it is in theoretical works on rhetoric and memory, and there­ fore it is implicit and scattered references to rhetoric and memory in a variety of literary, learned and historical texts that must be studied carefully. Memoria artificialis, the theoretical-aesthetic of memory, and the practical-technical aspects of remembering are absent, but that does not mean that there are not ample sources for the student of memory. Neither category is represented in a systematic form in Old Norse texts, yet we have a number of remarkable texts which discuss theories of languages and literary representations, such as Snorra Edda, the prologues and the grammatical treatises, even though the emphasis is rather on poetic expressions, style and diction, than rhetoric. Any writing system draws on memory, and stores information; so too does language and its semantic fields, rooted in a different social context but uttered afresh in new settings. Close readings of early texts challenge the literary scholar to draw up a semantic map of language over time. A skaldic stanza composed in the ninth century by a pagan poet and transmitted orally for four centuries, is given a fresh meaning when anchored in a prose text in the thirteenth century. The poetic utterance and the metaphoric language is then placed in a new and challenging setting in different manuscripts written from the medieval period well into the nineteenth century. This book draws together a wealth of surveys and case studies by leading scholars in the field of Old and Medieval Scandinavian Studies. The writers in this book remind us time and again that memory is the vehicle for remembering, not what is remembered. It is a process from the individual to the collectively shared forms, to the carriers of memory as media: language, orality, writing, image, symbols, monuments and so on. The role of the non-textual is crucial in the con­ struction of memories, even though it is more difficult to contain and evaluate. Some even contrast the media of the imaginary memory and that of the lifeworld. The study of manuscripts is a case in point. A text is written down in a given context, and then its meaning changes with new audiences over time. The initial context is lost, though it may be implicit in a poetic expression and the way the words are transcribed on the leaf. The manuscript is furthermore an artefact in itself, an expression of economic wealth and political and social objectives, and the choice of text and how it is laid on the page gives us clues to the cultural context. The size of the manuscript, its binding, script, colouring and illumina­ tions, all become part of the archive of the past. The manuscript exists over time and falls into hands of multiple generation of readers. We are always studying the past in the past, how humans in the past regarded their own past. The breadth of this book is inspiring. The geography covers the area from Greenland east to the Baltics and to Russia, and south to Shetland, the Orkneys,

Foreword 

 XV

the Hebrides, and Ireland, and the timeframe spans from the Viking period to the present day. The disciplines range from the study of early languages to the reception of medieval texts in modern film. I congratulate the editors, Jürg Glauser, Pernille Hermann and Stephen Mitchell, for their visionary undertak­ ing. It is immensely helpful to put together such a wide-ranging handbook at this juncture, at a time when so much is still left to be done. The most compelling part of the handbook is its emphasis on new perspectives, questions, and problems which will inspire scholars and students to further this exciting field of study.

Preface and Acknowledgements It is the aim of this volume – as the title Handbook of Pre-Modern Nordic Memory Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches suggests – to scrutinise the ways in which memory, remembrance, commemoration, and other forms of anamnesis (at individual, collective, and cultural levels) mattered to pre-modern Nordic cul­ tures and to examine how and in what forms these concepts of memory took shape. The articles in this volume reveal and confirm that this concern with memory, so dominant in the Viking and Middle Ages, has had implications that go far beyond the temporal and spatial frames of the pre-modern Scandinavian worlds, implications that extend deep into subsequent centuries, all the way to our own times. Occasionally, the shaping of memory in the pre-modern Nordic world was expressed in ways that are not immediately intelligible, discernible even, to us today, predating as they do modern classification systems. This volume thus begins a systematisation of these diverse materials that brings us one step closer to a description and explanation of the memory studies of the past, a concept which, although itself not attested in the medieval period in that form, we believe precipitates out of the texts. Still, the term ‘memory studies’, prominent in the title, alludes not only to the concepts of memory and remembering as they devel­ oped in pre-modern Scandinavia, but also to recent theoretical developments, which we believe offer particularly fruitful tools for understanding how the past is conceptualised and used in these bygone eras. We trust that this volume, containing exactly one hundred entries by nearly eighty authors representing, as the sub-title suggests, a variety of scholarly fields, will not be interpreted as some sort of collective culminating proclamation on memory studies of pre-modern Scandinavia, but rather as an invitation into the possibilities of what memory studies perspectives can offer to those working on the pre-modern Nordic materials. These materials constitute historical terrain sufficiently important, and sufficiently interesting, to warrant being examined afresh in every generation. Toward that end, scholarship inevitably benefits from new theoretical ingresses to understanding these materials, and it is precisely opportunities of this sort we believe readers will find in these entries. It is thus our hope that the handbook will in the first instance meet the needs of colleagues and university students working directly in the various disciplines preoccupied with the Viking Age and Old Norse culture and literature; moreover, although the handbook looks to provide fresh insights even to specialists in these fields, we have the further ambitious hope that it will also reach audiences in adjacent, or even far distant, disciplines, everything from other medieval traditions and memory studies itself to contemporary cultural and literary studies. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-004

XVIII 

 Preface and Acknowledgements

The seemingly obsessive attention to people and events remembered and memorialised in various ways by later generations in pre-modern Scandinavia has formed an important framework for modern scholarship’s reception and understanding of this world. But as profound as this early attention to memory has been, the focus of Nordicists on issues of memory has intensified greatly over the past decade or so, especially given the explosion internationally in memory studies, with major theoretical statements in the form of monographs, reference works, and journals appearing on a regular basis and swelling the rich theoreti­ cal dimensions of memory study research. Engagement with these issues within the Nordic orbit owes much to the many individual colleagues whose articles, books, dissertations and conference presentations have drawn more and more pre-modern Nordic topics into dialogue with these theories. Among these many contributions, a bright line of recent, generally annual workshops and meetings associated with the authors and editors of this handbook can be traced, and its activities are offered here as something of a prolegomenon to a history of premodern Nordic memory studies. In 2012, a so-called ‘exploratory seminar’ was gathered in Cambridge, Massa­ chusetts. Sponsored by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard Uni­ versity, “The Ambiguities of Memory Construction in Medieval Texts: The Nordic Case” included cross-disciplinary discussions about the implications and possi­ bilities of memory studies for our understanding of medieval Scandinavia among a small group of scholars representing diverse disciplines. It was from the fruitful conversations at this meeting among historians, archaeologists, folklorists, phi­ lologists, and literary scholars that the articles in Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North (Hermann and Mitchell 2013; for this and other titles in the preface, see the Select Bibliography) came about the following year. Building on the success of this initial gathering, a series of similar meet­ ings, sponsored by a variety of universities and learned societies, took place, as follows: in 2013, a workshop on “Memory Studies and Pre-modern Scandinavian Culture” met at Landgut Castelen, Basel, Switzerland; in 2014, “Cultural Memory in Medieval Scandinavia” was held at Midgårdsenteret in Borre and Slottsfjellet in Tønsberg, Norway; in 2015, “The Trouble With Memory II: The Middle Ages, Landscape, Heritage, Crisis, War, Travel” took place at the University of Iceland; in 2015, a round table discussion on “Memory Studies, Old Norse, and the Disci­ plines” was organised as part of the Sixteenth International Saga Conference in Zurich and Basel, Switzerland; also in 2015, “Pre-Modern Nordic Memory Studies. An International Seminar” was held at the University of Zurich; in 2016, “Memory in the Pre-Modern North: An Interdisciplinary Workshop” took place at Aarhus University; in 2017, “Nature, Landscape, and Place: Memory Studies in the Nordic Middle Ages”, met through, and in the facilities of, Kungl. Gustav Adolfs Akade­

Preface and Acknowledgements  

 XIX

mien, Uppsala; in 2018, sessions about Old Norse Studies and Collective Memory were held at the Leeds International Medieval Congress; and a seminar session “Memory Studies and the Íslendingasögur” took place at the Seventeenth Inter­ national Saga Conference in Reykjavík. Tangible results of these meetings have been many, including anthologies on memory studies and pre-modern Scandi­ navia (i.e. Hermann and Mitchell 2013; Hermann, Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórs­ dóttir 2014) and the founding in 2014 of the research network, “Memory & the Pre-Modern North. An international Memory Studies network focusing on Viking Age and Medieval Scandinavia”. These activities formed the intellectual predicate for the present volume, the preparation of which, given its scope and ambition, could not have been suc­ cessfully completed without a great deal of assistance. Our gratitude to all the contributors is, we trust, obvious; during our numerous meetings, electronically and at various locations in Europe and the US, reading essays, and our dialogues and communications with their authors, have been among the most rewarding aspects of our work. We are grateful that so many colleagues accepted our invita­ tions and dared to join us on this adventurous journey, and it goes without saying that without their keen interest in, and willingness to scrutinise, the theme of memory, this project would not have been possible. Numerous individuals and institutions have supported the various stages of this project’s development, from the point when it was initially conceptualised and outlined in 2015 through to the final stages of its editing during the summer of 2018. Among those organisations and colleagues the editors would like to acknowledge are, first of all, our home institutions, the Universities of Zurich and Basel, Aarhus University, and Harvard University. In fact, a range of insti­ tutions have shown their support by hosting editorial meetings and workshops, and we would in particular like to thank the following: the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University; the Anne and Jim Rothenberg Fund for Humanities Research, Harvard University; Swiss National Science Foundation; swissuniversities; and Kungl. Gustav Adolfs Akademien, Uppsala. We thank the various publishers, including The Viking Society for Northern Research, Bókaút­ gáfan Leifur Eiríksson and Íslenzk fornrit, for permission to reproduce original texts and translations in Part III. We are indebted to the staff at De Gruyter for sharing their expertise and experience. Since our first meeting during the Sixteenth International Saga Con­ ference at the University of Zurich in August 2015, our editor, Maria Zucker, has been a supportive advisor, always positive to the relevance and importance of the project. Thanks are due as well to Daria Aeberhard, Ailie Kerr, and Yoav Tirosh, our engaged and industrious student assistants, for their significant help on the project. Finally, we are grateful to our families, friends, and colleagues who

XX 

 Preface and Acknowledgements

have throughout patiently endured listening to details about the handbook and its technical and academic implications. We have learned much while working on this project; we hope readers will find themselves facing the same joyful and exhilarating experience it has been for us. August 2018

Jürg Glauser, Zurich and Basel, Switzerland Pernille Hermann, Aarhus, Denmark Stephen A. Mitchell, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

List of Illustrations Part I Article 1. Fig. 1. Manuscript UUB C 599, 143r. © Uppsala Universitetetsbibliotek Article 1. Fig. 2. Manuscript UUB C 601, 2vb. © Uppsala Universitetsbibliotek Article 8. Fig. 1. Romanesque cathedral, Old Uppsala. Photo by Anders Andrén Article 8. Fig. 2. Plan of graves. After Ann-Mari Hållans Stenholm, “Fornminnen. Det förflutnas roll i det förkristna och kristna Mälardalen.ˮ Vägar till Midgård, 15. Lund. 2012, fig. 90. Article 8. Fig. 3. Memorial cross Gotland. Photo by Anders Andrén Article 10. Fig. 1. Ribe Cathedral. Photo by Torben E. Meyer. 2012. © The City of Esbjerg Archives. Q11039-041 Article 11. Fig. 1. The Oseberg ship. Photo by Stephen A. Mitchell Article 21. Fig. 1. Stone cross, Rogaland. Photo from Wikimedia Commons / Accessed 13 September 2018 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stone_cross,_Leiasundet,_Kvits%C3%B8y_ Rogaland.jpg Article 27. Fig. 1. Sieidi stone above Deatnu (Tana) River, Norway. Photo by Thomas DuBois Article 27. Fig. 2. View of mountains and landscape around Lake Duortnos (Torneträsk), Sweden. Photo by Thomas DuBois Article 29. Fig. 1. Screenshot from the film Erik the Viking (1989) directed by Terry Jones

Part II Article 3. Fig. 1. Return of manuscripts to Reykjavík in 1971. Photo by Guðjón Einarsson. © The Árni Magnússon Institute, Iceland Article 3. Fig. 2. Return of Flateyjarbók and eddic poems to Reykjavik in 1971. Photo by Gunnar V. Andrésson. © The Árni Magnússon Institute, Iceland Article 10. Fig. 1. Vendel period helmet plate. Photo from Oscar Montelius, Om lifvet i Sverige under hednatiden / Wikimedia Commons / Accessed 13 September 2018 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huginn_and_Muninn#/media/File:Del_av_hj%C3%A4lm_ vendel_vendeltid_m%C3%B6jligen_oden.jpg Article 10. Fig. 2. “Odin from Lejre”, exhibited at Lejre Museum, Denmark. Photo by Ole Malling. © Museum Organization ROMU Article 11. Fig. 1. Rune stone (U489). Photo by Anne-Sofie Gräslund Article 13. Fig. 1. Mary, Hedalen church (C 11264). Photo by Eirik Irgens Johnsen. © Kulturhistorisk museum, Universitetet i Oslo Article 13. Fig. 2. Anne, from Skjervøy church (C 2998). © Kulturhistorisk museum, Universitetet i Oslo Article 24. Fig. 1. Map of Vadsbo. Illustration by Stefan Brink Article 29. Fig. 1. Burial-grounds in Ärvinge. Illustration by Ann-Mari Hållans Stenholm Article 29. Table 1. The number of mounds in Ärvinge. Illustration by Ann-Mari Hållans Stenholm Article 29. Table 2. Foundation, use and ending of the burial-grounds in Ärvinge. Illustration by Ann-Mari Hållans Stenholm https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-005

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Article 31. Fig. 1. Old Uppsala, late eight century. Map from John Ljungkvist and Per Frölund, “Gamla Uppsala – the emergence of a centre and a magnate complex.” Journal of Archaeology and Ancient History 16 (2015), 13 Article 32. Fig. 1. The Glavendrup stone. Photo by Pernille Hermann Article 32. Fig. 2. The Glavendrup monument, Magnus Petersen (1875). Image from Illustreret Tidende Article 32. Fig. 3. The Glavendrup memorial park. Photo by Pernille Hermann Article 34. Fig. 1. The fire-wolf. Illustration by Bergsveinn Birgisson Article 34. Fig. 2. House-thief in fire stockings. Illustration by Bergsveinn Birgisson Article 49. Fig. 1. Einar Jónsson’s Ingólfr statue 1924. © Christian Bickel Article 50. Fig. 1. The Jelling stone, Ole Worm Monumenta Danica, 1643. Photo by the National Museum Copenhagen / Wikimedia Commons / Accessed 13 September 2018 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Harald_Bl%C3%A5tands_runesten_af_Ole_ Worm,_1643_(5781678832)_(2).jpg Article 50. Fig. 2. The Jelling monuments, Ole Worm Monumenta Danica, 1643. Photo by the National Museum Copenhagen / Wikimedia Commons / Accessed 13 September 2018 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ole_Worms_oversigt_over_jelling_ monumenterne,_fra_1643_(5781678648)_(2).jpg Article 50. Fig. 3. “Thor” by Nicolai Abildgaard (1770s). © ARoS Aarhus Art Museum Article 52. Fig. 1. Jógvan Waagstein, “Sigmundur announces Christianity”, 1922. © Fotostudio við Per á Hædd og Finnur Justinussen Article 52. Fig. 2. Hans Pauli Olsen, “Sigmundur Bretison”, Vesturkirkjan, Tórshavn. Photo by Malan Marnersdóttir Article 52. Fig. 3. Hans Pauli Olsen, “Tróndur í Gøtu”, Gøta. Photo by Malan Marnersdóttir Article 55. Fig. 1. 1934-map of the Oseberg Mound. © Topografisk Arkiv, Vestfold fylkeskommune Article 55. Fig. 2. Norwegian currency, 100 crown note, version VIII, front page, published summer 2017. © Norges Bank Article 57. Fig. 1 The Härlingstorp rune stone (Vg 61). Photo from Wikimedia Commons / Accessed 13 September 2018 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Vg_61,_H%C3%A4rlingstorp.JPG Article 57. Fig. 2. Björner’s Nordiska kämpa dater, 1737. © Bayerische StaatsBibliothek digital Article 57. Fig. 3. Tegnér’s Frithiofs saga, 1876. Photo from Wikimedia Commons / Accessed 13 September 2018 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fritiofs_saga_(1876),_titelillustration.png Article 61. Fig. 1. The Dighton Rock. © Getty Museum Article 61. Fig. 2. Statue of Leif Erikson, Boston, Massachusetts, 1887. Photo by Pernille Hermann Article 61. Fig. 3. The Museum of America and the Sea, in Mystic, Connecticut, 2018. Photo by Stephen A. Mitchell Article 62. Fig. 1. The Kensington stone. Photo from Wikimedia Commons / Accessed 13 September 2018 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kensington_Runestone#/media/File:Kensingtonrunestone_flom-1910.jpg Article 62. Fig. 2. The San Antonio stone. Photo by Henrik Williams Article 62. Fig. 3. The Shawnee stone. Photo by Henrik Williams Article 64. Fig. 1. BL Harley MS 2278, fol. 61 (England, 1430s). © British Library, London

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Article 65. Fig. 1. “Up helly aa celebration” in 2016, the waterfront in Lerwick. © John Coutts Article 70. Fig. 1. The entrance of the Viking Park in Crimea. Source: https://www.facebook. com/viking.crimea/photos/a.1305522952794905.1073741827.1305521449461722/219018 1520995706/?type=3&theater

Part III Article 1. Fig. 1. GkS 2365 4to (Codex Regius of the Elder Edda). © Árni Magnússon Institute, Reykjavík Article 19. Fig. 1. Picture stone (G181). Photo from Wiki Media Commons / Accessed 13 September 2018 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Detail_from_G_181.jpg Article 23. Fig. 1. The Hopperstad Stave Church. Photo by Stephen A. Mitchell Article 32. Fig. 1. The Nidaros Cathedral, west front. © Henning Grøtt, NDR Article 43. Fig. 1. The Jelling stone. Photo by Stephen A. Mitchell Article 44. Fig. 1. The runic phrase sagum mogminni. Photo by Stephen A. Mitchell Article 45. Fig. 1. The Karlevi runestone (Öl 1). Photo by Stephen A. Mitchell

Colour plates Colour plate 1. Old Uppsala. Photo by Stephen A. Mitchell Colour plate 2. Þingvellir. Photo by Stephen A. Mitchell Colour plate 3. The Gokstad Viking Ship, Viking Ship Museum in Bygdøy, Oslo. Photo by Stephen A. Mitchell Colour plate 4. Urnes Church relief. Photo by Marco Bianchi Colour plate 5. Drinking horn, National Museum Copenhagen. Photo from Wikimedia Commons / Accessed 13 September 2018 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aslak_Bolt%27s_drinking_horn,_National_ Museum_Copenhagen.jpg Colour plate 6. Rök stone, east side (Ög 136). Photo by Bengt Olof Åradsson / Wikimedia Commons / Accessed 13 September 2018 https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%B6kstenen#/media/File:R%C3%B6kstenen_2.jpg Colour plate 7. Rök stone, west side (Ög 136). Photo by Bengt Olof Åradsson / Wikimedia Commons / Accessed 13 September 2018 https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%B6kstenen#/media/File:R%C3%B6kstenen_1.JPG Colour plate 8. Ramsund rock engraving (Sö 101), Mälar Valley, Södermanland, Sweden. 11th cent., 4.7 x 1.8 m. Image courtesy of the Swedish National Heritage Board; photographer: Bengt A. Lundberg / Accessed 13 September 2018 http://www.medievalists.net/2015/09/whats-new-in-scandinavian-runestones/?utm_content=buffer0c48e&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter. com&utm_campaign=buffer Colour plate 9. Rune stone (U 978). Photo by Anne-Sofie Gräslund Colour plate 10. The Jelling stone. © Kongernes Jelling

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Colour plate 11. The Glavendrup stone. © Northern Funen Viking Moot Colour plate 12. Manuscript GkS 1812, 11r. Photo by Jóhanna Ólafsdóttir. © The Árni Magnússon Institute, Reykjavík Colour plate 13. Manuscript UUB DG 11 4to. © Uppsala universitetsbibliotek Colour plate 14. Manuscript Skálholtsbók yngri, AM 354 fol. 20r. Photo by Jóhanna Ólafsdóttir. © The Árni Magnússon Institute, Reykjavík Colour plate 15. Manuscript SÁM (Stofnun Árna Magnússonar á Íslandi) 66. © Institute for Icelandic Studies Colour plate 16. St Olofsholm. Photo by Stephen A. Mitchell Colour plate 17. Altar-frontal, Kinsarvik. Photo by Svein Skare. © University Museum Bergen Colour plate 18. Mural painting (www.kalkmalerier.dk, no. 233). Photo printed with permission from www.kalkmalerier.dk Colour plate 19. Man of sorrows, Mariager. Photo by Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen Colour plate 20. Mary, Urnes church (MA_46). Photo by Svein Skare. © Universitetsmuseet i Bergen Colour plate 21. Alabaster altarpiece, Skarð church. © The National Museum Iceland Colour plate 22. Carl Larsson’s Midvinter blot. Photo from Wikimedia Commons / Accessed 13 September 2018 https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midvinterblot_(m%C3%A5lning)#/media/File:Carl_ Larsson_-_Midwinter%27s_Sacrifice_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg Colour plate 23. Hákon Hákonarson, Lerwick Town Hall. Photo by Stephen A. Mitchell Colour plate 24. Le Dieu Thor, la plus barbare d’entre les barbares divinités de la vieille Germanie 1915. Image printed with permission from Musée de l’Image, Ville d’Épinal / cliché E. Erfani Colour plate 25. From the Russian film Viking, The Pagan crowd. Photo from http://viking-crimea.com/kinolenta/ Colour plate 26. From the Russian film Viking, The baptism of Kiev. Photo from http://vikingfilm.ru/viking.html#gallery The editors, authors and publishers are grateful to all the institutions and persons listed for permission to reproduce their material. An effort has been made to trace and contact the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any unintended omission.

Abbreviations ANF Arkiv för nordisk filologi CSI The Complete Sagas of Icelanders FFC Folklore Fellows Communications ÍF Íslenzk fornrit KLNM Kulturhistorisk leksikon for nordisk middelalder fra vikingetid til reformasjonstid Stofnun Árna Magnússonar í íslenskum fræðum SÁM SÁM Rit Stofnun Árna Magnússonar Rit SFSS Svenska Fornskrift-Sällskapets Samlingar (also: Samlingar utgivna av Svenska fornskriftsällskapet) SUGNL Samfund til Udgivelse af gammel nordisk Litteratur

Jürg Glauser, Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell

Pre-Modern Nordic Memory Studies: An Introduction 1 Minni – memory and remembering in the pre-modern Nordic world In the Old Norse tradition, the most common way of referring to memory and acts of remembering is minni, a term that has survived well into modern Scandina­ vian. Minni is used in diverse contexts, occurs across genres and in various texts, and can denote a range of mnemonic activities. For example, it is used repeatedly in the thirteenth-century Prose Edda, a work written in Icelandic that successfully merges pagan mythology, Viking Age and medieval poetry, rhetoric, grammatical theory and various other subject matters. A passage in Skáldskaparmál [the lan­ guage of poetry] – part of the Prose Edda – which lists ways of paraphrasing parts of the human body, states that: Brjóst skal svá kenna at kalla hús eða garð eða skip hjarta, anda eða lifrar, eljunar land, hugar ok minnis. [...] Vit heitir speki, ráð, skilning, minni, ætlun, hyggjandi, tǫlvísi, langsæi, bragvísi, orðspeki, skǫrungskapr (Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Skáldskaparmál, 1, 108–109) [The breast shall be referred to by calling it house or enclosure or ship of heart, spirit or liver, land of energy, thought and memory. [...] Wisdom is called sagacity, counsel, under­ standing, memory, deliberation, numeracy, far-sightedness, subtlety, eloquence, genius. (Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Trans. Faulkes, 154–155)].

It is significant for the present context that in this passage, remembering (minni) is assigned a specific location in the human body and thus becomes localised in a corporeal, i.e. material, way. Furthermore, minni is twice associated in this short passage with hugr, a term with a semantic range encompassing thought, reason, understanding, and eloquence. The prominent connection between remember­ ing and corporeality, as well as their implicit associations with cognitive abilities, are key to characterising the meaning of minni in the Prose Edda. Other references to minni throughout the Prose Edda complete our under­ standing of how this central work engages with memory and remembering. For example, the prologue narrates how in the deep past, humans forgot the name of God and as a consequence, the concept of (a) god was also lost. Yet humans kept believing in a higher power that guided life on earth. As the Prose Edda tells us, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-006

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 Pre-Modern Nordic Memory Studies: An Introduction

En til þess at heldr mætti frá segja eða í minni festa þá gáfu þeir nafn með sjálfum sér ǫllum hlutum ok hefir þessi átrúnaðr á marga lund breyzk svá sem þjóðirnar skiptusk ok tungur­ nar greindusk. (Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Prologue and Gylfaginning, 4) [But so as to be better able to give an account of this and fix it in memory, they then gave a name among themselves to everything, and this religion has changed in many ways as nations became distinct and languages branched. (Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Trans. Faulkes, 2)]

The text thus implies that the act of naming (frá segja, ‘to give an account’) creates reality and constructs memory. Minni, it suggests, is the result of collective experi­ ence, a verbal and culturally-defining activity. A further small example allows us to formulate another central observation. If used in the dative plural and in conjunction with the verb hafa at, minni can mean ‘to keep in memory, as something to remember’ (Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Prologue and Gylfaginning, 125). When the Æsir are enumerated, Hǫðr, one of their gods, is introduced as follows: Hǫðr heitir einn Ássinn. Hann er blindr. Œrit er hann styrkr. En vilja mundu goðin at þenna Ás þyrfti eigi at nefna, þvíat hans handaverk munu lengi vera hǫfð at minnum með goðum ok mǫnnum. (Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Prologue and Gylfaginning, 26) [Hod is the name of one As. He is blind. Only too strong is he. And the gods would prefer that this As did not need to be named, for the work of his hands will long be kept in mind among gods and men. (Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Trans. Faulkes, 26)]

Loss of memory – a central aspect of remembering – is also alluded to in various and varying contexts in the Prose Edda. An important and frequently quoted passage from Skáldskaparmál outlines how one of the central functions of this mythographical and poetological work is to prevent the old traditions (forn minni) from slipping into oblivion (gleyma): En þetta er nú at segja ungum skáldum þeim er girnask at nema má skáldskapar ok heyja sér orðfjǫlda með fornum heitum eða girnask þeir at kunna skilja þat er hulit er kveðit: þá skili hann þessa bók til fróðleiks ok skemtunar. En ekki er at gleyma eða ósanna svá þessar sǫgur at taka ór skáldskapinum fornar kenningar þær er hǫfuðskáld hafa sér líka látit. (Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Skáldskaparmál, 1, 5) [But these things have now to be told to young poets who desire to learn the language of poetry and to furnish themselves with a wide vocabulary using traditional terms; or else they desire to be able to understand what is expressed obscurely. Then let such a one take this book as scholarly inquiry and entertainment. But these stories are not to be consigned to oblivion or demonstrated to be false, so as to deprive poetry of ancient kennings which major poets have been happy to use. (Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Trans. Faulkes, 65)]



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The text exhibits a high (self-)awareness of the importance of literary transmis­ sion. “Ortak ǫld at minnum þá er alframast vissak of siklinga snialla með sex tøgum hátta […]” (Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Háttatal, 10) [I have composed as a memorial for men about the valiant princes whom I knew to be quite the most outstanding with sixty verse-forms […] (Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Trans. Faulkes, 205)]. This is expressed by the idiom forn minni, for instance when the verse metre hjástælt [abutted] is defined as “skal orðtak vera forn minni” (Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Háttatal, 10) [“the expression has to be proverbial statements” (Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Trans. Faulkes, 5)]. Minni is also used as a terminus technicus for a very particular metre (possibly borrowed from Latin), the greppaminni [poets’ reminder]. Greppaminni is characterised by a range of questions in the first half of the stanza, which are then answered in the second half, often by drawing on the common mnemonic aid of enumeration (Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Háttatal, 20). The Prose Edda is thus a highly complex text, which sketches a whole spec­ trum of constructs of memory and remembering on different levels of the narra­ tion. It exemplifies how acts of remembering are tied to specific activities, how memory may be used for poetic diction and which material and technical aspects are connected to acts of remembering. Even the very limited examples just cited allow us to outline an explicitly and implicitly constructed memory theory, one that in turn reflects contemporary learned memory tradition from the continent; yet at the same time, the Prose Edda also asserts a Nordic independence by out­ lining its own theory and drawing on traditional Nordic concept(ion)s of remem­ bering and forgetting. For this reason, the Prose Edda may be repeatedly drawn on to illustrate pre-modern Nordic memory culture in an exemplary fashion.

2 What is memory? The memory cultures of the pre-modern Nordic world are expressed in a rich variety of sources. As the introductory examples above show, its textual culture – comprised of writings in the runic alphabet, in the vernacular Norse languages, and in Latin – contains numerous reflections on memory. The texts give insight into theories of memory, both when authors deal explicitly with ideas about memory and remembering, and when – at other times – these themes are dealt with implicitly and expressed in symbolic or metaphoric form. Obviously, other kinds of evidence than the textual sources also provide access to the conceptual and theoretical dimensions of memory, and to the memory practices, of northern Europe; visual and material cultures are equally important, and such culturally symbolic expressions as images, iconography, and sculptures are intriguing gate­

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 Pre-Modern Nordic Memory Studies: An Introduction

ways to examinations of memory, as are also archaeological, man-made construc­ tions, ranging from engraved stones over burial sites to house constructions. The exactly 100 entries in this volume examine these various sources and by doing so, they enter into different corners of memory cultures with roots in the Nordic world. The articles deal not only with memory as a biological or neural phe­ nomenon, but additionally recognise that the term is also, even more often so, understood metaphorically as a socio-cultural phenomenon. In this latter sense, memory is considered to be a phenomenon that “grows into us from the outside” (Assmann 2006, 1), that is, as something that is formed socially and is constantly negotiated by groups of people and mediated in cultural forms and objects. The multi-faceted contributions in the volume provide detailed knowledge – useful for comparative memory studies – about the media, theories, and the workings of individual and collective memory, and give insights into how local, regional, national, transnational, and diasporic memory-cultures developed in, and from, the Norse world. Ever since nineteenth-century scholarship on the Nordic materials, there has been an awareness that memory represents a crucial pillar of, and, in many ways, was fundamental to, pre-modern Nordic culture. The Norse regions were among the last areas in Europe to convert to Christianity, implying that the Latin alpha­ bet was introduced relatively late, in the decades around the year AD 1000. This comparatively late adaptation of ideological and pragmatic uses of literacy – and with it, the late establishment of written, that is, disembodied, archives – has led scholars to believe in the existence of an oral culture with a high aware­ ness of memory and intricate memory techniques, a culture that was accessible to the medieval authors who transferred elements of it into our extant written texts. The longevity of orality might very well have facilitated the development of complex memory strategies of relevance for the preservation of historical, legal, and religious knowledge, strategies that would simultaneously have evoked verbal, visual and material memory aids. Yet, at the same time, when looking at medieval culture, and investigating the bishoprics, cloisters, and churches in the North, it becomes clear that memory was not only affiliated with preliterate or oral-dominant cultures, but continued to be an important resource in contexts where alphabetical literacy was reguarly used. People from mainland Scandina­ via and Iceland were in close contact with European intellectual environments and networks, and – to judge from the textual culture – after the introduction of Christianity, book-learning and ideas circulating in medieval Europe became an important source of inspiration for how to approach and understand the past, the present, and the future. The conditions that shaped the memory cultures exam­ ined in this volume are most of all a result of a merging of cultures, one locally based in northern Europe and mainly using elements from oral, visual, and mate­



Jürg Glauser, Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell 

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rial environments, and the other, a trans-regional culture gathering around the Christian church, which added literacy, writing and the book to these other strat­ egies of remembrance. Although the interest in memory within the different disciplines working with the pre-modern Nordic world has been long-lasting, and to a varied degree has left its traces within these different traditions, recent developments in the wider scholarly world, the so-called “memory boom” (Tamm 2013, 458), has led to a renewed interest in memory among scholars working with Norse materials. Obviously, it is nothing new to study memory: already Greek philosophers had an interest in this fascinating faculty, and in some disciplines the faculty of memory has been studied for more than a century (see Roediger and Wertsch 2008). The development of what in broad terms can be called international and interdiscipli­ nary memory studies is of a more recent date, covering studies that have emerged and grown, particularly since the 1980s, when scholars from a broad spectrum of fields, ranging from sociology, art history, history, cultural studies, and literary studies to psychology and to the neurosciences became interested in describing different types of memory (Gudehus and Welzer 2010; Radstone et al. 2010). In the context of this volume, the disciplinary focus has been narrowed to repre­ sent primarily the humanities and the interpretative social sciences. Although a few entries (e.g. ‘Remembering the Future’, ‘Trauma Studies’, ‘Emotions’) touch on scientific approaches, the authors are mainly concerned with memory as a resource and a technique possessed by individual experts and craftsmen, or mostly, with memory and remembering as a socio-cultural phenomena. This con­ striction in the range of disciplines should not, however, prevent future collabo­ rations and more all-inclusive interdisciplinary work, as collaboration with, say, psychology and neuroscience, or other similar fields, would be a much welcome development in the future. This so-called memory turn has presented conceptual frameworks and a vocabulary that make it possible to investigate the memory-based cultures of the North in new, and more meticulous and systematic, ways than was the case earlier. At times, ideas about memory have otherwise been implicitly presuppo­ sed in discussions, or have tended to merge with related themes such as, say, orality, tradition, narrative, myth, history, and fiction. But by borrowing from, and at times further developing, theories and concepts of, as well as the voca­ bularies for, memory as evolved elsewhere – and which are still developing with ramified meanings depending on cases and contexts – it has become possible to penetrate more deeply into the forms, functions, and implications of memory in the pre-modern Nordic world. Or in other words, to investigate its broader philo­ sophical implications.

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 Pre-Modern Nordic Memory Studies: An Introduction

International and interdisciplinary memory studies Memory studies covers a wealth of concepts, methodologies, and theoretical inter­ ests. In the first volume of the journal Memory Studies (2008), Henry L. Roediger and James V. Wertsch note that “Memory studies currently represents a huge tent in which scholars from many perspectives and fields can find a home, using their quite disparate methods and means of inquiry” (Roediger and Wertsch 2008, 12). Within the multi-faceted and multi-disciplinary field of contemporary memory studies, rapidly evolving as it is, many understandings of memory occur. It is not our aim in this introduction, or in the volume as such, to give thorough defini­ tions of the many terms and concepts, neither to present an overview nor to give an evaluation of the current state of research within memory studies per se; for that purpose we refer to studies that are dedicated to such discussions (see e.g., Olick and Robbins 1998; Erll and Nünning 2008; Wagoner 2018). What we wish to achieve in this volume is to provide a fine-grained image of those particular areas of the pre-modern Norse world that have affinities with, depend on, or are influenced by memory, and to support the arguments with references to relevant concepts that have been developed within memory studies. The studies that have informed the growing interest in memory in the premodern Nordic world relate mostly (but not only) to two different, yet interre­ lated branches of international and interdisciplinary memory studies. The first one consists of studies in the arts of memory (ars memoria) and the crafting of memory. Particularly important studies are the works of such scholars as Frances Yates (1974) and Mary Carruthers (e.g. 1990, 1998, 2010), which focus on the means by which individuals trained their memories, how in monastic environ­ ments memory was an integral part of authorship and composition, and how metaphorical expressions and imagery reveal exactly how widespread and resourceful memory was in classical and medieval contexts (see Draaisma 2000). In treating this engagement with memory and remembrance by medieval writers, Mary Carruthers and Jan Ziolkowski note: In one common meaning of the word, “memory” specifically connotes “storage”, a treasure house both of experiences and facts […] This is a curious intellectual model, for it suggests that our memories are essentially passive impressions of experiences we have had that can be taken out whole and unchanged whenever we need them. The notion that in re-collec­ ting we actually make (and remake) our memories is regarded as somewhat shameful, an admission that memory, like art and poetry, can “tell lies” […] Ancient and medieval writers on memory recognized, as we do now, the dual aspects of storage and recollection are invol­ ved in remembering. (Carruthers and Ziolkowski 2002, 1)



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Examinations and clarifications of the character of memory, whether in classi­ cal, medieval or renaissance environments, have direct application to pre-mod­ ern Nordic culture, where communication and authorship depended greatly on embodied knowledge, and at different stages and with shifting impact on the interaction between memory and runic, Latin, and vernacular writings. In a culture where both storage and re-collection relied on embodied knowledge, memory was a highly valued skill, requiring mnemo-technical expertise and the training of people’s minds, as well as competence in using mental techniques in combination with external memory aids from the material world. Such technical and rhetorical uses of memory are dealt with in several of the volume’s entries. The second branch of international and interdisciplinary memory studies that has influenced research in the pre-modern Nordic world looks very similar to what has been called “New cultural memory studies” (Erll 2011 [2005], 13). It covers studies that explain the social and cultural frameworks of memory. The major representatives of this branch include such scholars as Pierre Nora, Jan Assmann and Aleida Assmann, and – in an earlier generation – Maurice Halb­ wachs and Aby Warburg. The authors of this volume are inspired by the work of these scholars, as well as by, for instance, the writings of Paul Connerton, Jacques Le Goff, Peter Burke, and Elisabeth van Houts, who have also contributed to our awareness of how memories are formed socially, culturally, and medially. The view that memory is indebted to social frameworks was set forth by Maurice Hal­ bwachs, who rejected the idea that memory was only to be connected with the individual psyche: Most of the time, when I remember, it is others who spur me on; their memory comes to the aid of mine and mine relies on theirs. There is nothing mysterious about recall in these cases at least. There is no point in seeking where they are preserved in my brain or in some nook of my mind to which I alone have access: for they are recalled to me externally, and the groups of which I am part at any time give me the means to reconstruct them; upon condition, to be sure, that I turn toward them and adopt, at least for the moment, their way of thinking. (Halbwachs 1992, 38)

Following up on the idea that memory is formed socially, Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann introduced the influential concept ‘cultural memory’, a term that nuances Halbwachs’ idea of collective memory. Jan Assmann distinguishes between ‘communicative memory’ and ‘cultural memory’; whereas the former type is indebted to informal, non-hierarchical communication in everyday con­ texts, the latter is a formalised memory that is carried by specialists and indebted to ceremonial contexts. In contrast to ‘communicative memory’, which is a living memory, ‘cultural memory’ is a mediated memory, which opens to a diachronic perspective and makes it possible to concentrate on events and situations in a

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 Pre-Modern Nordic Memory Studies: An Introduction

distant past. Aleida Assmann writes that “Living memory thus gives way to a cultural memory that is underpinned by media – by material carriers such as memorials, monuments, museums, and archives” (Aleida Assmann 2011 [1999], 6). Such carriers, including texts, rituals and performances, are cultural objectivations that mediate the past, and around which people can rally when defining belonging and identity (Jan Assmann 2008, 117). Both Halbwachs, Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann emphasise that memory and remembrance are not about fixed preservation, but reconstruction: Cultural memory works by reconstructing, that is, it always relates its knowledge to an actual and contemporary situation. True, it is fixed in immovable figures of memory and stores of knowledge, but every contemporary context relates to it differently, sometimes by appropriation, sometimes by criticism, sometimes by preservation or by transformation. (Jan Assmann 1988, 130)

Memory is a “contemporized past” (Jan Assmann 1988, 129), which implies that focus is neither on the past itself, nor on the social or historical reality of the past, but exactly on the memory of the past, on how people remember, and why. This further implies that cultural memory is upheld by the selections and choices that are made by groups of people; there is no ‘self-regulation’ of this type of memory, which makes it relevant to focus on the complicated and multiple forces and powers that stand behind it: The transposition of individual living to artificial cultural memory and thus from short-term to long-term memory is a highly complex process fraught with problems: it brings together temporal extension with the threat of distortion, reduction, and manipulation that can only be averted through continuous public criticism, reflection and discussion. (Aleida Assmann 2011 [1999], 6)

Another important perspective – confirming what generations of anthropologists and folklorists, e.g. Victor Turner and Richard Bauman, have found and dealt with – turns our attention to the performative dimension of collective memory and on how bodily practices carry, shape, and maintain the shared memories of groups of people, or, in the words of Paul Connerton, If there is such a thing as social memory, I shall argue, we are likely to find it in commemo­ rative ceremonies; but commemorative ceremonies prove to be commemorative only in so far as they are performative; performativity cannot be thought without a concept of habit; and habit cannot be thought without a notion of bodily automatisms. (Connerton 1989, 5)

In emphasising such bodily behavior as “incorporating practice” (e.g. cultural specific postural performances) and “inscribing practice” (e.g. actions which



Jürg Glauser, Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell 

 9

imply storage) (Connerton 1989, 72) as crucial catalysts for collective memory, attention is turning to the co-existence of non-tangible and inscribed media. The ideas and concepts briefly sketched here offer compelling approaches to studying the many different sources deriving from Norse culture, covering materially-, visually- and textually-mediated objects, as well as performativity. Of course, to speak about a group’s or a culture’s memory is to speak in metaphori­ cal language, a fact that has often been emphasised and commented on (e.g. Erll 2008, 5; Jan Assmann 2008, 111); still, with this approach, it becomes possible to investigate how groups of people of the past have coalesced around cultural symbols and shared media, and how important human interaction with cultural symbols have been for group formation, belonging, and notions of distinctive­ ness. “New cultural memory studies” (cf. Erll 2011 [2005]; Erll and Nünning 2008) has mutated and proved to be useful in areas and fields far removed from the original cases and situations from which it first developed, of which the entries in this volume are themselves an indication. Cultural memory is often used in a broad sense, where it is understood as a particular mode of the past, which differs from history and thus is considered as “an ongoing process of remembrance and forgetting in which individuals and groups continue to refigure their relation­ ship to the past […] It is as much a matter of acting out a relationship to the past from a particular point in the present as it is a matter of preserving and retriev­ ing earlier stories” (Erll and Rigney 2009, 2). One of the key-terms that has been especially influential since it was first described is Pierre Nora’s concept of les lieux de mémoire [sites of memory], a term that stresses the close connection that exists between memory and space, and thus reintroduces a theme with a deep history reaching back to the rhetoric of the Classical world. Nora’s studies of the connection between place and memory have developed within a framework of modern dissolutions of national memory and have dealt with the reconstruction of symbolically invested and ideologically informed pasts (cf. Nora 1996–1998 [1984–1992]). It is sometimes assumed that pre-modern eras, say, epochs previous to the industrial revolution, “still lived in the warmth of tradition, in the silence of custom” (Nora 1989, 7). Whereas it is true that the implications of modernity, and even more of globalisation with mass media and digital media, accelerate the rate of change, facilitate new group formations, and provoke a need to engage with the past in new ways, this does not at the same time suggest – as the entries in this volume will demonstrate – that the concern with identity, the formation of collective memories, and ideological and symbolic engagements with the past are not relevant in pre-modern times. Conflicts and crises, experiences of trauma, and the need to reinvent the past are experiences of the Middle Ages too, just as

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 Pre-Modern Nordic Memory Studies: An Introduction

much as is the handling of social and religious changes through negotiating the relationship between the present and the past. Much power is to be found in the past, both when it comes to clarifying the situation of the present and when sug­ gesting future actions. The entries in the volume demonstrate the truism within international memory studies that remembrance is not merely about the recov­ ery of a fixed past, but an activity that concerns the interplay between the past, the present, and the future. As will be evident from many entries in this volume, what is especially intriguing about the memories of the pre-modern Nordic world is how they, as transnational phenomena, have been negotiated over long time spans, how they have been selected as relevant, and how they possess an extremely powerful formative capacity under certain conditions, such as, for example, nation-building in such different geographical and cultural areas as, say, North America and the Crimea.

Authors’ models and uses of memory Memory studies continues to be a vast field with much conceptual and methodo­ logical variation, and the frequent tendency to use concepts across disciplines may, despite often being extremely fruitful, at times blur or confuse the meanings of terms and concepts (Viejo-Rose 2015); it has not been our intension in this handbook to argue for a particular methodology or theoretical position. In reality, the authors of the entries in the handbook, all experts in and fascinated by their particular topics, have not been asked to adopt or adhere to a unified theoretical corpus, and the chapters represent different attitudes toward, and approaches to, memory, just as they may reveal disagreements about a specific situation. On the whole, the volume presents a diversity of thought with regard to models employed to understand the memory cultures being scrutinised, just as it presents different views about the nature of memory within the different disciplines represented. Whereas some entries directly evoke newly developed theoretical concepts and frameworks (in particular those mentioned above), others use related ideas from, for instance, social history, history of mentalities, or reception theory, while yet again, other contributions are largely empirically orientated, and thus offer data presented as aspects of memory cultures with the potential for further theoretical scrutiny. Whereas the dominant opinion among the authors is to consider indi­ vidual and collective memory as construction and re-collection, and to emphasise how memories are continuously communicated, negotiated, and exploited, the view of memory as storage occasionally appears as well, a model that has more affinity with exact recall and the possibility for individuals or collective groups to archive fixed data (technological, geographical, legal, ritualistic, mythologi­



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 11

cal, and so on) across longer time spans. This broad spectrum approach provides a platform within which pre-modern Nordic memory cultures are defined with reference to a multitude of memory-types, such as would have co-existed and simultaneously facilitated cultural maintenance – or oblivion. This allowance for a diversity of thought and our avoidance of a commitment to normative methodological and overly systematic terminological approaches is a conscious choice on the part of the editors in order to facilitate an open, unre­ stricted dialogue about the field of pre-modern Nordic memory studies, with as many potential readings and attitudes as possible. Furthermore, this openness to different approaches we consider the most rewarding, because the volume as a whole, rather than looking back at paradigms that have evolved over many years, tests the potential of new points of views. In this regard, it is important to empha­ sise that the volume seeks to define the current state of research in the study of the pre-modern Nordic world and point to and encourage future studies. The most frequently used concepts in the volume derive from the sorts of memory studies which have been described above; among them are the concept of ‘collective memory’, which implies the conviction that memory is a social phenomenon, and that memory and its uses are decided in, from and by the individual’s social existence (Halbwachs 1992; see e.g. Jan Assmann 2011 [1992]), and ‘communicative memory’, which belongs to “the intermediary realm between individuals; [and] grows out of intercourse between people” (Jan Assmann 2006, 3, 2008). Perhaps the most frequently used concept in the volume is ‘cultural memory’, which is a type of memory that suggests that the shared memory of people will take root in external cultural symbols, and thus will exist beyond the living memory of individuals (Jan Assmann 2008; Aleida Assmann 2008). In realising the importance of media for collective memory, many chap­ ters adopt the concept lieux de mémoire which emphasises how the memory of (national) groups concentrate and crystallise in monuments, landscapes, texts, museums, and so on (Nora 1989, 1996–1998). But many other concepts are dealt with here, and throughout the handbook, the term memory, indeed complicated and still not fully explained, is expanded, challenged, and examined, and fre­ quently employed in collocations with any one of a number of modifiers, such as semantic memory, episodic memory, social memory, connective memory, auto­ biographical memory, environmental memory, popular cultural memory, politi­ cal memory, all terms that are explained from or in their immediate contexts in the volume. The ideas drawn from international and interdisciplinary memory studies may not fully address the different techniques, types, manifestations, and exter­ nalisations of memory that derive from the pre-modern Norse world. Nonetheless when they, themselves indebted to and developing from other theories, are com­

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 Pre-Modern Nordic Memory Studies: An Introduction

bined with older and current discussions on the pre-modern Nordic world, pro­ mising new pathways for how to study this past culture are proposed. It should be underscored that it has not first and foremost been our goal in this project to produce new theories, but rather to apply and find inspiration from international and interdisciplinary memory studies, inspiration to enable further scrutiny of the foundations of Nordic memory cultures. When terms and concepts from memory studies are used, they function mostly as a tool kit to understand better and to pin down more precisely than before points of intersection between memory, in the different forms it takes, and cultural forms occurring in pre-modern Nordic culture; however, to the extent that new conceptualisations might be generated, such a turn of events would be a welcome development.

3 The idea of the pre-modern North in memory studies This handbook purposefully avoids setting out with a narrow definition of the period with which it is concerned, and neither does it divide the contributions according to commonly used temporal frame-works such as the late Iron Age, the Viking Age, or the Middle Ages. Instead, it operates with, and through, the umbrella term ‘pre-modern’. And there are valid reasons for this approach, as throughout the pre-modern era, diverse memory phenomena are observable in Nordic culture. There is no universally accepted way of separating the Middle Ages from the preceding period and the Nordic Middle Ages (c. 1000 to c. 1550) cannot be easily divided from the late Iron Age (an archaeological term denoting the period from c. 550 to c. 1050), including the Viking Age (a period canonically defined by historic events and lasting from 793 to 1066). At the other end of the temporal continuum, it is important to note that many central characteristics of medieval Nordic culture survived well into the early modern period, a time that is characterised by the major innovations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This notable permeability of the temporal boundaries which commonly define the medieval period in the Nordic countries has repeatedly been pointed out and is addressed in many of the contributions to this handbook. Limiting the focus of the handbook to the Viking Age or the medieval period, however, would not only be insufficient as a chronological outlook, but would also and more importantly compromise our understanding of Nordic memory culture, a phenomenon which by its very nature transcends epochs and needs to be analysed by considering broader social, cultural and historical perspectives.



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One of the most consistent and noticeable topoi we encounter when study­ ing the ideas, forms, genres, modes of narration, not to mention the medialities of textual, visual and material culture(s) throughout the Nordic Middle Ages, is the negotiation between old and new, between past and present, and the ways in which the past was examined through the present and, in turn, the present was in dialogue with the past. For example, such a cultural engagement with the inherited tradition, transmission, and ideas about the past is observable in a wide variety of sources, spanning narrative, pictorial, architectural and other media. We find various strategies for legitimising power and social hierarchy – con­ structed genealogies, creative derivations from invented origins, and other forms of authentication – and these serve to legitimise, explain and authorise the ever changing and sometimes fixed imaginations of the present status quo. In doing so, they consistently refer to older forms, styles and functions. Yet the history of the pre-modern North must not be understood as a simple, linear linking together of the periods we refer to as Viking Age, the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, without any apparent inconsistencies, dissonances or interferences. Such observable fluctuations are a key reason why it is impossible to frame a handbook such as the present case within ‘the’ Middle Ages or, in fact, to work with any rigidly defined, teleological dimension of time. The thematic focus of this handbook reflects this lack of linear development and instead embraces the back-and-forth movements which the sources outline. It acknowledges that the Nordic Middle Ages are distinguished from the preced­ ing period through cultural and social developments, yet they clearly engage with the foregoing era and thus, in effect, become a continuation of it. For example, visual media, such as Nordic representations in animal style, picture stones, or runic inscriptions which were productive during the Middle Ages, evidently draw on forms that emerged during the Viking Age. The same may be said about applying pre-medieval techniques of working with different materials, objects, or visual imagery. Linguistic media such as the Eddas, skaldic poetry or the sagas, in fact, appear to echo pre-literate, oral and vocal phenomena long after the script­ ing of the societies which produced them. This suggests that during the medieval period, the conceptions, pictures, impressions and even the desires people had concerning the proceeding period – which, after all, were part of dynamic pro­ cesses of cultural appropriation – did not statically and unreflectively preserve and transmit older models. Instead, we observe creative negotations with older forms, which in turn engendered new forms and could become memories of times past, important cornerstones of the present, because they ostensibly established, legitimised and stabilised the status quo, but also because they provided alterna­ tive (or counter-) narratives to how this status quo developed.

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 Pre-Modern Nordic Memory Studies: An Introduction

Similar developments indicate an active engagement with past phenomena, and subsequent, deliberate creations of new memories are observable also at the ‘other end’ of the Middle Ages, a fact which further necessitates a flexible, openended and dynamic definition of our era. The term pre-modern aptly captures this temporally, culturally and socially pluralistic period. In addition, it promotes a way of engaging with the sources which is not rigidly defined in chronological terms but instead typologically describes the acts of remembering illustrated in the sources, including the use of different media and their forms of transmission. The editors are convinced that through this, its deliberately interdisciplinary outlook, the handbook becomes most useful to the readers. While some of the disciplines represented here, such as archaeology, medieval theology and philo­ sophy, rhetoric, mythology and linguistics are concerned partially with the period preceding the Viking Age and the medieval period, other disciplines, on the other hand, often select their objects and concepts from a later period. These include history, folklore, reception studies or popular culture studies. Many of the case studies, for example, engage with the role of memories of the Viking Age and the medieval period in Nordic (and other) regions during the time of emerging natio­ nalist movements in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, proving the longevity of these powerful images, which depict a past constructed through a retrospective engagement with previous eras. Limiting the picture to traditional medieval topics prevalent in the Viking Age and medieval period would greatly compromise our understanding of how memory was (and is) generated, transmit­ ted, and utilised. Despite this broad outlook, many entries focus on the Viking Age and the medieval period, not least because the sources are most plentiful during these centuries. We may therefore think of these periods as key phases in which the creation, transmission and use of memory become exemplified, and this thresh­ old constellation makes a scholarly engagement with the cultures and societies of northern Europe in the centuries before and after the year 1000 so productive. During these centuries, a wealth of examples with, at times, very nuanced illus­ trations allow us to observe how past and present relate(d) to each other, how the old shaped the new, and how the later mediated the earlier, perhaps more so than is possible in other cultures. In this context, it is paramount to introduce ‘new cultural memory studies’, an outlook which engages with the diverse manifesta­ tions of memory not simply out of an interest in preservation and transmission of past events, but rather by stressing the importance of memory for interactions and with an interest in the performative aspects of memory, which themselves are subject to constant flux and re-construction(s) and need to be continuously re-defined.



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A brief look at an analogous example will shed further light on such proces­ ses. Around the turn of the twentieth century, German-speaking scholars within Nordic studies such as Andreas Heusler (1865–1940) strove to coin a commonly acceptable (and accepted) definition of ‘Altgermanisch’. Amongst other things, this led to the first edition of the well-known Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde (I–IV, 1910–1919), a thesaurus of Germanic pre-historic culture edited by the English studies scholar Johannes Hoops; however, Heusler did not think of ‘Altgermanisch’ as a chronological term. Rather, he argued that it was definable by a bundle of characteristics including literary style, forms of expression, and subject matter(s). These characteristics, Heusler argued, pre-dated the Middle Ages and were thus not ‘contaminated’ by medieval written Latin culture but in fact exhibited signs of orality, pagan ethics, and popular tradition. The Altgermanisten of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries could not avoid enga­ ging with the written sources of the high and late Middle Ages, sources which also allege to mediate an apparently untouched Old Germanic culture – and, in fact, often present the only access we have to this culture, a telling example of how, much like the sources themselves, modern scholarship continuously generated (and generates) memories.

4 The idea of memory in pre-modern Nordic studies Etymological observations and terminology in practice As outlined above, Old Norse texts exhibit a distinct awareness of the importance of ‘remembering’, understood as a broad, multifaceted concept and – to a lesser degree – ‘forgetting’. This observation may be supported by a brief discussion of some etymologies and the terminology used to refer to these concepts. The lexeme minni (a neuter noun, used both in the singular and the plural) is the most common way of referring to ‘memory’ and ‘memories’ in the Old Nordic languages. Just like the weak verb minna, ‘to remind somebody, to remember’ (also used reflexively minnask) and the preterite-present verb muna ‘to remem­ ber something, to commemorate’), minni is derived from the common Germanic root *ga-menþja. Minni is also frequently related to the Latin term mens ‘thought, meaning’. Muna corresponds to Greek μεμονα ‘to think, to intend’ and Latin memini ‘to remember something’ (de Vries 1962; Ásgeir Blöndal Magnússon 1989, s.v. minjar, minna, minni 1, muna 1, mynd).

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 Pre-Modern Nordic Memory Studies: An Introduction

The semantic proximity of ‘to think’ and ‘to remember’ – which was further outlined in the introductory discussion of the passages from the Prose Edda – is thus echoed on an etymological level. The likely-to-be-related lexeme mynd ‘image’ would then be assigned an original meaning of ‘mental image, symbol, imagination’, which lends support to the hypothesis that the mental activities involved in acts of remembering and imagining were understood as being closely connected in the Nordic languages. Besides being attested in Old Norwegian and Old Icelandic, the lexeme minni is also found in Old and Middle Danish, Old Swedish, and in Old Gutnish. There are, however, variations in spelling; besides the standard form minni we find minne, minde, mynde, mynne and so on. In the most comprehensive Nordic glossary dating to the medieval period, the “Latinskt-Svenskt glossarium” (Ms C20, UUB, University Library of Uppsala, second half of the fifteenth century), a number of entries of Latin lexemes con­ taining mem- (memini, Memon, memor, memoria, memoriosus) are paired with their Swedish equivalents: “jac mynnis och myntis” [I remember something and I remembered something], “mynnogher oc thz som mynnis” [endowed with a good memory and what one remembers], “mynne […] wäl mynnoger […] aamynnilse” [memory, endowed with a good memory, remembrance] (Neuman 1938–1942, 131 [authors’ translation]; see also Söderwall 1925–1973, s.v. minne). As is the case with most lexemes in Old Norse, the semantic range of minni and its derivations is exceptionally broad. We find minjar denoting ‘an object of memory, memorial etc.’, and minning ‘memory (both as a self-reflective action and as an action instigated by outside forces)’. Not directly related to this are, however, additional meanings of minni, such as ‘a toast’, ‘goodwill, consent/ agreement’. Minni and minning are also extraordinarily productive in com­ pounds, both with nouns, adjectives and adverbs, e.g. minningarbœn [memorial service/prayer], minningarmaðr [a person who remembers well], minngarverðr [worthy of remembrance], minnissjóðr [pouch containing something which ought not to be forgotten], and many more (see Fritzner 1891, 705 and various attesta­ tions in Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog and Lexicon poeticum). Numerous verbal compounds such as festa í minni [to commit something to memory] or hafa at minnum [to keep something in memory] are further testimony to the lexeme’s productivity. The construction vera uppi or hafa uppi, both meaning ‘to live on in memory, to be remembered’, e.g. in “hans nafn mun lengi uppi vera (haft)” [he/his name will long be remembered] is also common; see for example Vǫluspá [The Seeress’s Prophecy], St. 16: “Þat mun uppi, / meðan ǫld lifir, / langniðja tal / Lofars hafat.” “they’ll be remembered while mankind endures […]”. At the other end of the spectrum, óminni (containing the negative prefix ó-) denotes the opposite of minni and means ‘forgetting’. It is only used as a noun. In contrast to the common usage of terms denoting acts of remembering, the ter­



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minology for acts of forgetting is less diverse. The most commonly used root in Old Norse is that of the weak verb gleyma [to forget] and the derived feminine noun gleymska [oblivion]. Óminni und gleymska may be used as synonyms, as is evident in the Old Norse translation of the Bible, Stjórn: “i uminnis ok gleym­ sku fliodi“ [in the stream of oblivion (authors’ translation)] (Stjórn, 1862, 25; for óminni, see also Schulte 2007, 68). Composites of óminni are formed in ways anal­ ogous to those of minni. The mention of a “minnisveig” [curative drink of memory (authors’ translation)] in Göngu-Hrólfs saga (Fornaldar Sögur Nordrlanda, 1830, 309), for example, corresponds to the “drink of forgetfulness”, the “óminnisveig” in Dráp Niflunga (Eddukvæði, 2014, II, 352) [The Death of the Niflungs, 2014, 195]. Of special interest is the Danish and Norwegian idiom skrive i glemmebog/k (and similar expressions) with a meaning of ‘to relegate (something) to oblivion, to ignore, to quietly forget, to be forgotten’. A literal translation, however, would read ‘to write something into the book of forgetting’, which appears to propose a deliberate act, i.e. writing something down. In the sixteenth century, we find “de ere icke screffne i glembog hoss herren” [they (the deeds) are not written into the Lord’s book of forgetfulness = are not forgotten] (Anders Sørensen Vedel, It hundrede vduualde Danske Viser, Ribe 1591, prologue a8v). A form such as Danish “j glømmelsæ oc forsømmelse” [in oblivion and neglect] by Hans Tausen (1494– 1591) suggests that forgetting could also be perceived as arising from negligence and may therefore be evaluated negatively (see Kalkar 1976 [1886–1892], V, 369). Older sources also demonstrate that remembering and forgetting may be tied to objects, as, for instance, in Stjórn, which says, “gaf hann [Moses] gleymskugullit hustru sinni […] enn sealfr hann bar minnisgullit” (Stjórn, 1862, 254) [Moses gave the ring of forgetting to his wife, but he himself kept the ring of memory (authors’ translation)]. In this example, two rings are moulded, one incorpo­ rating qualities which make the (female) wearer become forgetful, the other to remind the male bearer of his wife. That minni does not exclusively contain retrospective memories of times past shows another derivation of minni, the term minning or áminning. This has an equivalent in Latin præmonitio [premonition, warning], which implies that some future event is alluded to (see Fritzner 1891, 705). The exceptionally broad and well-defined vocabulary of remembering and forgetting just discussed is testimony to a conscious, and often reflective, engage­ ment with central questions of tradition, memory, and imagined pasts in the Nordic cultures, an engagement which goes back at least to the Viking Age and the Middle Ages. Of special interest both for its cultural value and for current memory studies is the fact that even early sources show a remarkable awareness of the multifaceted nature of remembering and forgetting. This pluralistic nature

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 Pre-Modern Nordic Memory Studies: An Introduction

was subjected to remarkable attempts at grasping its essence, and to express this basic quality in verbal, visual or performative ways.

Pre-modern Nordic memory studies Even well before the emergence of memory studies proper – introduced as ‘new cultural memory studies’ above – Nordic studies had been interested in discuss­ ing medieval and early modern conceptions of the past. In fact, such topics were addressed (albeit implicitly and without any direct reference to memory) since the emergence of the discipline in the mid-nineteenth century. Studies of Icelan­ dic saga literature in particular generated a pronounced interest in such matters, an interest which, incidentally, considered numerous problems now under debate and which continued to shape the study of saga literature until the recent period. These questions address the very nature of memory culture(s) from the Nordic Viking Age and the Middle Ages and well into the post-medieval period (in a broad sense). Central to early saga scholarship – represented primarily (but not exclusively) by Finnur Jónsson (1858–1934) – were questions about the historic­ ity and authenticity of the sagas, and thus also about the very status of medieval Icelandic literature. Between the events which the sagas narrate (set between the colonisation of Iceland in the ninth century and the time of Christianisation around the year 1000) and the writing down of the sagas in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, there existed several hundred years and they presented a major problem for such approaches, as this gap needed explaining. During the early years of saga scholarship, the majority of philologists insisted that despite this noticeable interlude in documentation (texts dated to the first half of the thirteenth century or later detailing events of the landnám-period), the sagas presented an accurate picture of the historical, social and cultural environment of the time(s) of which they narrate. Therefore, they thought the sagas reliable sources for reconstructing early Icelandic history. The scholarly belief in the historicity of the events, the characters and the subject matters depicted in these texts led to an understanding of the Icelandic past which was generated almost exclusively on the basis of literary sources. As a consequence of this situation, scholars such as Heusler, Knut Liestøl (1881–1952) and others formulated the socalled freeprose theory, a paradigm which was influenced i.a. by contemporary folklore scholarship. This dominated a large part of saga scholarship in the first half of the twentieth century. In their desire to overcome the gap in transmis­ sion and to prove the historicity of the sagas, their followers referred to other oral cultures that transmitted narratives orally over a long period of time, ostensibly



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with minimal shifts and without significant modifications. The freeprose theory is an interesting example through which to examine how at the end of the nine­ teenth century, scholarship engaged with the literary mediation of the past and discussed possible definitions of historicity. Much later, this perspective would become a key theme of modern memory studies. It is no coincidence that at the same time, calls for a political independence of Iceland from Denmark became more pronounced, and this encouraged a cultural reversion to the literature and language of the thirteenth century, which had long been perceived as rep­ resenting classical standards. In fact, these political calls for national autonomy, shaped by the scholarly engagement with perceptions of the past, drew heavily on particular readings of these sagas as texts evoking an independent and spe­ cific Icelandic history (see Andersson 1964). It may be pointed out that the first mention of a term common to all Nordic languages which comes conspicuously close to what is now termed memory studies goes back to the Icelandic philologist Bjarni Jónsson frá Vogi (1863–1926), who in 1915 first used “menningarminning” [culture-memory] (Bjarni Jónsson 1915, 95). Bjarni used this term to refer to the ancient status of the Icelandic lan­ guage and employed a concept akin to modern memory studies, albeit, of course, avant-la-lettre. He achieved this by elevating the Icelandic language to a status of quasi-ritual veneration and embellished it with a strong nationalistic and unify­ ing aura. The language and its use thus conveyed acts of creation and ritualisa­ tion, which even included the stabilisation of cultural memory. From the middle of the twentieth century onwards, however, the agenda of freeprose theory was increasingly challenged by counter-movements such as bookprose theory. The followers of this theory were interested less in the (poten­ tial or even hypothetical) oral pre-cursor narratives of the sagas, but instead focused predominantly on the literary composition of the texts and, in a broad sense, on their intertextuality. The sagas were studied to discover their origin in medieval scribal practices and their representations of the past were seen as backprojections of issues and events of the thirteenth century, cast into the pagan past much like historical novels of the nineteenth century did. When discussing the emergence of memory studies in the pre-modern Nordic regions, it is important to note that in the late twentieth century, it became customary to foreground ques­ tions about the relationship between narration, society and history – one of the most central concerns of contemporary memory studies. This relationship in fact dominated scholarship, not least because freeprose theory and bookprose theory slowly began to converge. On this ground, notable scholars of the 1980s and 1990s – Preben Meulen­ gracht Sørensen, Margaret Clunies Ross, Carol Clover, Gerd Wolfgang Weber, Lars Lönnroth, Kirsten Hastrup and many more – began to work with methods and

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 Pre-Modern Nordic Memory Studies: An Introduction

concepts of historical anthropology in order to outline paradigms for the inter­ pretation of ‘texts and society’. Their studies frequently anticipate the topics and methodology of later memory studies. There is, for example, a short reference to the “collective memory about the landnám and the time before it” in a posthu­ mous work by Meulengracht Sørensen (2006, 146–147: “den kollektive erindring om landnamet og tiden før det”). It is, however, worth noting that in the last decades of the twentieth century, saga scholarship conspicuously did not engage with the works of Jan Assmann, despite the obvious overlap between saga schol­ arship and Assmann’s concept of cultural memory. It was probably the German Nordicist Thomas Fechner-Smarsly who first referred to Jan Assmann’s concept in his dissertation on saga literature as a lit­ erature of crisis (defended at the university of Bonn in 1994). Fechner-Smarsly’s study suggests that Jan Assmann’s cultural memory provides fertile ground for critically approaching Old Norse literature (Fechner-Smarsly 1996). What may have favoured the subsequent reception in Nordic studies of a paradigm from international memory studies was an emerging discussion about broadening the scholarly concept of medieval texts, which gained momentum around this time. Discussed primarily through the paradigms of New Philology, this view proved influential in Nordic studies predominantly in the less theoretically oriented arena of Material Philology. Such a re-orientation of the way we approach manu­ scripts  – which has proved productive mainly in the last 15–20 years – clearly contributed to the successful establishment of modern memory studies in the discipline. That this development took place depended mostly on the fact that it allowed scholars to focus on the long-running transmission of narratives in the late medieval and post-medieval era, and led to a broadening of scholarly perspectives, which now included questions about the creative engagement with ancient narratives over several centuries and entailed investigating reception his­ tories, changes in media (a shift from textual to pictorial media, or from one genre to another, for example) or noting consistencies and variances in performative acts – all factors which lie at the heart of modern memory studies. New cultural memory studies thus looks back on nearly 20 years of reception and a diverse history of scholarship in Nordic medieval studies, but many of its subject areas are by no means new. In this relatively short period of time, new memory studies has emerged as an exceptionally dynamic focus within pre-mod­ ern Nordic studies. As is evident throughout this handbook, this goes far beyond an engagement with canonical texts from thirteenth-century Iceland. The study of memory, memories and remembrance in all their manifestations is a central idea in many disciplines which engage in the study of the Nordic cultures of the Viking Age, the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period.



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The development of international memory studies and especially its theoreti­ cal approaches voiced in the last few years had a similarly defining influence on this, as did the above-mentioned scholarly traditions and the willingness of many scholars of the Nordic material to be inspired by international developments. At first, it was predominantly the works of Jan Assmann which generated such an engagement, as saga scholarship could successfully relate to his typological con­ cepts of cultural memory. While Assmann’s approach provided an exceptionally fruitful model for constructivist analysis of the sagas of the Icelanders and other narratives texts from the Icelandic Middle Ages and, in fact, emerged as a fre­ quently mentioned generator of ideas (see Fechner-Smarsly 1996; Glauser 2000; Hermann 2010), in recent years, the attention of scholars examining memory in Nordic sources has focused increasingly on the relationship between memory theories of medieval Latin learned culture and possible parallels in the Nordic countries, as well as on the innovation of memory studies research as practiced largely by younger scholars from the German-speaking countries, such as Ansgar Nünning, Astrid Erll, Birgit Neumann and others. These scholars are interested primarily in discussing modern forms of art – (post-)modern literature, twenti­ eth-century and contemporary art, and other new visual media, in particular, film – but their approaches can be adapted to the study of earlier cultures and generate a substantial re-thinking of the sources. Such a critical transference and adaption(s) of methodology and approaches has become central to Nordic memory studies. Traditional disciplines, such as literary studies, folklore, runol­ ogy, and so on, were soon joined by other disciplines, e.g. history, gender studies, art history, and archaeology, which led to an enhanced spectrum of pre-modern Norse memory studies and included new, important areas and methods. In recent years a variety of generic overviews and introductory volumes detailing the state of research have been published (e.g. Hermann and Mitchell 2013; Glauser 2014; Hermann, Mitchell, and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir 2014; Hermann 2014). Other works addressed specific disciplines such as law (e.g. Brink 2014; Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir 2014), religion and mythology (e.g. Ásdís Egilsdóttir 2006; Lindow 2014; Clunies Ross 2014; Hermann, forthcoming), literary studies (e.g. Bennett 2007), archaeology (e.g. Andrén 2013), ethnography (e.g. DuBois 2013), history (e.g. Byock 2004; Bandlien 2013), and gender studies (e.g. Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir 2013), or they engaged with interdisciplinary theoretical concepts such as memory theories (e.g. Hermann 2009, 2013; Ranković 2010), rhetoric (e.g. Heslop 2014; Malm 2016), source criticism (e.g. Gísli Sigurðsson 2013), medi­ ality (e.g. Grage 2001; Schnall 2004; Glauser 2007; Bergsveinn Birgisson 2010; Mitchell 2013; Hermann 2017; Heslop and Glauser 2018), diaspora or identity research (e.g. Jesch 2008; Vohra 2008; Zilmer 2008; Mundal 2010), or studies examining a particular Nordic region (e.g. Mitchell 2014). Needless to say, this

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 Pre-Modern Nordic Memory Studies: An Introduction

list does not do justice to all contributions to the field of memory studies in the Old Norse-Icelandic world and that a number of recent publications could be added. ‘New cultural memory studies’ were granted an important initial impetus by the “Memory & the Pre-Modern North. An international Memory Studies network focusing on Viking Age and Medieval Scandinavia” (MPMN). Members have met regularly for workshops since 2012 and these workshops have generated a number of collaborative publications (e.g. Hermann and Mitchell 2013; Hermann, Mitchell, and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir 2014). Furthermore, the Fifteenth Interna­ tional Saga Conference, held at Aarhus University in 2012, had as its topic “Sagas and the Use of the Past”, while the Sixteenth International Saga Conference, held at the Universities of Zurich and Basel in 2015, addressed “Sagas and Space”. On the basis of this intense and multifaceted scholarly engagement with memory, scholars of the Scandinavian Middle Ages have more and more come to realise that memory is not a static or fixed concept and that memory studies does not look to uncover simple, unmediated, historically true memories. Rather, memories are dependent on fluctuating yet specific situations, they are re-created, actively and flexibly constructed. This Handbook of Pre-Modern Nordic Memory Studies represents the first attempt to address the explicit and direct engagement with issues of memory, remembering, and forgetting through pre-modern Nordic sources, as well as the more implicit, symbolic conceptions about the impact of memory. It does so on the basis of individual, representative contributions which allow us to sketch these areas from broad, interdisciplinary perspectives. The contributions assess questions of contact with, acquisitions of, and influences by learned, continental, Latin memory theories (e.g. in the Grammatical Treatises) but they also seek to outline the specifically Norse and Nordic element in medieval and early modern conceptualisations of memory. Many contributions also address practices of remembering on the basis of terminological questions, poetic dictions, attested and (re-)constructed ritual, religious, cultural, rhetoric, literary and social sources. These works clearly approach their sources by study­ ing their inherent symbolic, and thus more abstract(ed), forms of memory cul­ tures. As a guiding principle, we refer to one of the leading questions of contem­ porary memory studies, which is not ‘what is memory? (or forgetting?)’, but ‘what can function as memory (or forgetting) to whom, under which circumstances and under which specific conditions?’



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5 How to use this book General overview As emerges from the reflections above, the current volume explores multiple themes and enters many gateways, and some thought has gone into how to sys­ tematise and organise the multiple readings and approaches. The volume has been divided in three parts: I. Disciplines, traditions and perspectives; II. Case studies; and III. Texts and images. The entries in Part I, Disciplines, traditions and perspectives, provide the reader with an overview of scholarship in pre-modern Nordic memory studies within particular fields, such as Rhetoric, Archaeology, Literary studies, History, Law, Media studies, Folklore, and History of religion; each entry examines germane cases that illustrate the relevance of memory studies for the area under discussion, and it gives a brief forward-looking evaluation of promis­ ing future perspectives. By far most of the entries give surveys of pre-modern Nordic memory cultures, including the impact of these cultures in modern times, however, one section contextualises the Norse case and provides treatments of memory studies in neighboring disciplines (Anglo-Saxon studies, Celtic studies, and Sámi studies). It should be noted, that the individual entries in Part I are not meant to give complete descriptions of the particular discipline or tradition under examination; the treatments home in on crucial points of intersection between the discipline investigated and memory studies. As such, this volume does not compete with general treatments or handbooks about, say, Old Norse literature, Old Norse mythology, Viking Age or Medieval archaeology, volumes where more comprehensive treatments of the disciplines in question are the goal; moreover, the aim has not been to write empirically complete encyclopedic entries, but rather essays prioritising evaluations and perspectives. Part II, Case studies, contains a variety of individual examinations, all being examples intended to illuminate, supplement and expand the discussions in the disciplinarily-organised entries in Part I. Each case study discusses a particular phenomenon or research question, and they all consist of an analysis of a partic­ ular theme and deal with memory-related texts, images, objects, practices, sites or other aspects of Viking and Medieval traditions. The altogether seventy case studies are organised thematically under four broad categories: Media, Space, Action, and Power. The entries in the Media-section center on mediality, on visual and artificial representation of memory in diverse art-forms, as well as on narra­ tive representations of memory; the entries in the Space-section center on nature, landscape and geographies of memory; while the third section, Action, moves the focus to the crafting of memory, to performance and ritualised behavior. Finally,

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 Pre-Modern Nordic Memory Studies: An Introduction

the last section, Power, deals with the foundational capability of memory for defining origins and beginnings, and – in showing how much the past matters for people – on the ability of memories to define imagined communities and socie­ ties. Part II offers multi-faceted cases, and we are aware that overlaps between the organising categories exist – however, the division of the many entries into these four broad categories acknowledges the seminal importance of the dimensions of memory; namely its dependence on media, on spatial anchoring, on ritualised action and behavior, and its capability to enforce and create shared, and power­ ful, versions of the past. The last section, Part III, Texts and images, differs from the previous two parts in as much as it does not contain discursive arguments. It moves the reader of the volume closer to the materials themselves in presenting a selection of texts and images that make it possible to encounter the material directly. Obviously, the section is restricted to only a very few examples, but when considered as an addition to the quotations and images found in the discursive treatments in the entries in the first two parts, it should allow a reader not previously informed about the materials to become aware of the key characteristics of some of the core texts and images.

Coverage and organisation One of the paradigmatic assumptions of international and interdisciplinary memory studies reminds us that a total recall of all details is neither possible nor desirable (Rigney 2005), and a similar truth is relevant for this volume, which does not include all illuminating materials nor give a comprehensive treatment of the pre-modern Nordic memory cultures. Having learned from Jorge Luis Borges’ short story about Funes the Memorious (1942), that without abstraction, a recall of every single detail is not productive, we have made an attempt to generalise from what is, after all, a relatively wide selection of representative details and examples. When conceptualising this book, and when deciding its content, we have aimed to cover key materials, central disciplines, and seminal themes. Still, as some users may notice, not all important examples, media, and traditions have been dealt with in-depth or to the extent that we had hoped for when laying out the plan for this volume. That this is so depends on a variety of reasons, practical and academic, and it may as well in some cases be due to our limited knowledge of the broad fields and areas covered. We are aware that, for instance, specific entries for such important disciplines as musicology, anthropology, and gender studies are absent from Part I. Still, even if such areas are not treated from the disciplinary perspective, these and other crucial areas are nevertheless dealt



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with in separate case studies. For instance, gendered memories are treated in, among others, the articles titled ‘Remembering Gendered Vengeance,’ ‘Dona­ tion Culture’, ‘Women and Remembrance Practices’, and ‘Religion and Gender’. Despite the relatively high number of individual case studies in Part II, this section is not fully comprehensive either, and many more separate case studies could have been added and obvious topics are missing, for instance political uses and misuses of the Nordic past (e.g. how the national socialists of 1930s-Germany constructed a memory of a pan-Germanic past); the transnational perspective could have been presented even more broadly than is now the case (e.g. an area such as The Isle of Man would have deserved more interest). But again, in many cases what has not been singled out for particular treatment in an individual case study, will often be touched on or included in other entries. Even if the term ‘Nordic’ signals a broad geographical coverage of, say, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and the North Atlantic islands, including Iceland, readers will notice that the areal focus is somewhat uneven. Relatively much attention is paid to Icelandic culture and society, and to the textual corpus coming out of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Iceland. As mentioned above, particular social and historical conditions apply to Iceland, and so does a par­ ticular cultural situation, in which Icelanders were immensely preoccupied with story-telling and composition of poetry, both at home and when travelling. In the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, history writers from Norway and Denmark credited their North Atlantic neighbors for their treasures, that is, their historical records, and their ability to preserve the history of all the Nordic countries, which they themselves would make use of when writing their historical works. From the retrospective gaze of academia, the textual culture then developing in Iceland, and the manuscripts containing texts in Old Icelandic and Latin, are immensely important entrances, unique and rich in details, to the Nordic cultures, societies, religions and so on, and for that reason stress has been laid on these materials. Throughout the volume, we have preferred a disciplinary or thematic to an empirical organisation, which also means that the entry-titles in the list of contents in general give guidance to themes, fields and subjects, rather than to generic categories of the material itself. We have, for instance, avoided establish­ ing a genre-based structure; since memory is a concern of all genres – prose and poetry; history, fiction, myth, law; and at an even more narrow scope, of all the sub-genres of the Medieval Icelandic saga – a genre-division would not be a pro­ ductive entrance. There are multiple pathways to follow and explore in the work at hand, and we realise that some effort will go into the question of how to navigate the volume. No matter what type of organisation is chosen, details and particular parts of the pre-modern Nordic memory cultures would be difficult to locate from the list of contents; and, as this is not a book that is likely to be read chronologi­

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 Pre-Modern Nordic Memory Studies: An Introduction

cally from beginning to end, readers particularly interested in a specific genre, object-category or example, are encouraged to consult the index for guidance on how, according to their own priorities, to find their way through the book and how to combine the individual chapters. The extensive index is intended to func­ tion as a cross-referencing system, and consulting the index will also reveal what may not be evident from the list of contents, namely, that clusters of articles con­ centrating on similar themes have been generated below the level of deliberate organisation. Such thematic clusters are formed between, for instance, the articles ‘Museology’, ‘Norwegian Perspectives’, and ‘Norwegian Perspectives – Heimskringla’, which together demonstrate the relevance of the Viking and medieval culture in Norwegian (national) memory; between the articles about ‘Folklore Studies’, ‘History of Religion’, ‘Performance Studies’, and ‘Ritual’, which share focus on ritualistic performance; and between the articles about ‘Philosophy and Theology’, ‘Medieval Architecture,’ and ‘Mnemonic Methods’, which deal with the method of loci and architectural memory; and so on. To make the book as unified, and as pleasant to read, as possible, we have encouraged the authors to follow similar structures when presenting their ideas about the materials on which they are all true experts. Whereas, on the one hand, we have insisted on a unified format, and broadly similar lengths of entries and bibliographies, on the other hand, we have allowed for some flexibility, realising that some topics require more space than others. That is, we trust, a flexibility that will be to the benefit of the reader, who may find relevant examples or refer­ ences not otherwise easily accessible to them.

Works cited Primary sources The Death of the Niflungs. In The Poetic Edda. Trans. Carolyne Larrington. Rev. ed., Oxford, 2014. 195. Dráp Niflunga. In Eddukvæði. II. Hetjukvæði. Ed. Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason. ÍF. Reykjavík, 2014. 352. Fornaldar Sögur Nordrlanda eptir gömlum handritum. III. Ed. C. C. Rafn. Copenhagen, 1830. Latinskt-svenskt glossarium efter Cod. Ups. C. 20. Ed. Erik Neuman. SFSS, 45. Uppsala, 1938–1973. The Seeress’s Prophecy. In The Poetic Edda. Trans. Carolyne Larrington. Rev. ed., Oxford, 2014. 3–13. Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Trans. Anthony Faulkes. London 1995. Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Háttatal. Ed. Anthony Faulkes. 2nd ed. London, 2007. Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Prologue and Gylfaginning. Ed. Anthony Faulkes. 2nd ed. London 2005. Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Skáldskaparmál. 1. Ed. Anthony Faulkes. London, 2007.



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Stjórn. Gammelnorsk Bibelhistorie fra Verdens Skabelse til det Babyloniske Fangenskab. Ed. C. R. Unger. Christiania, 1862. Vedel, Anders Sørensen. It hundrede vduualde Danske Viser. Ribe, 1591. Vǫluspá. In Eddukvæði. I. Goðakvæði. Ed. Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason. ÍF. Reykjavík, 2014. 291–321.

Secondary sources Agnes Arnórsdóttir. 2013.“Cultural Memory and Gender in Iceland from Medieval to Early Modern Times.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 378–399. Agnes Arnórsdóttir. 2014.“Legal Cuture and Historical Memory in Medieval and Early Modern Iceland.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 211–230. Andersson, Theodore M. 1964. The Problem of Icelandic Saga Origins. A Historical Survey. New Haven, CT. Andrén, Anders. 2013. “Places, Monuments, and Objects: The Past in Ancient Scandinavia.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 267–281. Ásdís Egilsdóttir. 2006. “From Orality to Literacy: Remembering the Past and the Present in Jóns saga helga.” In Reykholt som makt-og lærdomssenter i den islandske og nordiske kontekst. Ed. Else Mundal. Reykholt, 215–228. Assmann, Aleida. 2008. “Canon and Archive.ˮ In Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Media and Cultural Memory, 8. Berlin and New York. 97–107. Assmann, Aleida. 2011 [1999]. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization. Arts of Memory. Cambridge. Assmann, Jan. 1988. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.ˮ New German Critique 65: 125–133. Assmann, Jan. 2006 [2000]. Religion and Cultural Memory. Ten Studies. Stanford. Assmann, Jan. 2008. “Communicative and cultural memory.ˮ In Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Media and Cultural Memory, 8. Berlin and New York. 109–118. Assmann, Jan. 2011 [1992]. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization. Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. Cambridge. Ásgeir Blöndal Magnússon. 1989. Íslensk orðsifjabók. Reykjavík. Bandlien, Bjørn. 2013. “Hegemonic Memory, Counter-Memory, and Struggles for Royal Power: The Rhetoric of the Past in the Age of King Sverrir Sigurðsson of Norway.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 355–377. Bennett, Lisa. 2007. “‘The Most Important of Events’: The ‘Burning-In’ Motif as a Site of Vultural Memory in Icelandic Sagas.” Journal of Australian Early Medieval Association 3: 69–86.

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Bergsveinn Birgisson. 2010. “The Old Norse Kenning as a Mnemonic Figure.” In The Making of Memory in the Middle Ages. Ed. Lucie Doležalová. Later Medieval Europe, 4. Leiden and Boston, MA. 199–214. Bjarni Jónsson frá Vogi. 1915. “Mál og menning.” Skírnir 89: 78–96. Brink, Stefan. 2014. “Minnunga mæn: The Usage of Old Knowledgeable Men in Legal Cases.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 211–230. Byock, Jesse. 2004. “Social Memory and the Sagas. The Case of Egils saga.” Scandinavian Studies 76: 299–316. Carruthers, Mary. 1990. The Book of Memory. A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge. Carruthers, Mary. 1998. The Craft of Thought. Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200. Cambridge. Carruthers, Mary. 2010. “How to Make a Composition. Memory-Craft in Antiquity and in the Middle Ages.” Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates. Ed. Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz. New York. Carruthers Mary and Jan Ziolkowski, eds. 2002. The Medieval Craft of Memory. An Anthology of Texts and Pictures. Pennsylvania, PA. 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. 59–74. Connerton, Paul. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge. Draaisma, Douwe. 2000 [1995]. Metaphors of Memory. A History of Ideas about the Mind. Cambridge. DuBois, Thomas A. 2013. “Ethnomemory: Ethnographies 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. Erll, Astrid and Ann Rigney. 2009. “Introduction: Cultural memory and its Dynamics.” In Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory. Berlin and New York. 1–11. Erll, Astrid. 2008. “Cultural Memory Studies: An Introduction.” In Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Media and Cultural Memory, 8. Berlin and New York. 1–15. Erll, Astrid. 2011 [2005]. Memory in Culture. New York. Erll, Astrid and Ansgar Nünning, eds. 2008. Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Media and Cultural Memory, 8. Berlin and New York. Fechner-Smarsly, Thomas. 1996. Krisenliteratur. Zur Rhetorizität und Ambivalenz in der isländischen Sagaliteratur. Frankfurt am Main, etc. Finnur Jónsson. 1966 [1931]. Lexicon poeticum antiquæ linguæ septentrionalis. Ordbog over det norsk-islandske skjaldesprog. Orig. author, Sveinbjörn Egilsson. 2nd ed. Copenhagen. Fritzner, Johan. 1891. Ordbog over Det gamle norske Sprog. II. 2nd ed. Kristiania. Gísli Sigurðsson. 2013. “Past Awareness in Christian Environments: Source-Critical Ideas about Memories of the Pagan Past.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 400–410.



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Glauser, Jürg. 2000. “Sagas of Icelanders (Íslendinga sögur) and þættir as the literary representation of a new social space.” In Old Icelandic Literature and Society. Ed. Margaret Clunies Ross. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 42. Cambridge. 203–220. Glauser, Jürg. 2007 “The Speaking Bodies of Saga Texts.” In Learning and Understanding in the Old Norse World. Essays in Honour of Margaret Clunies Ross. Ed. Judy Quinn, Kate Heslop and Tarrin Wills. Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe, 18. Turnhout. 13–26. Glauser, Jürg. 2014. “Foreword.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. vii–x. Grage, Joachim. 2001. “Der Vergessenheitstrank. Zur Funktion der magischen Amnesie in der Nibelungenüberlieferung.” In Arbeiten zur Skandinavistik. 14. Arbeitstagung der deutschsprachigen Skandinavistik, 1.–5.9.1999 in München. Ed. Annegret Heitmann. Frankfurt am Main. 499–508. Gudehus C., A. Eichenberg and H. Welzer. 2010. Gedächtnis und Erinnerung: Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Stuttgart and Weimar. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1992. On Collective Memory. Trans., and with an introduction by Lewis A. Coser. Chicago, IL. Hermann, Pernille. 2009. “Concepts of Memory. Approaches to the Past in Medieval Icelandic Literature.” Scandinavian Studies 81: 287–308. Hermann, Pernille. 2010. “Founding Narratives and the Representation of Memory in Saga Literature.” Arv 66: 69–87. Hermann, Pernille. 2014. “Key Aspects of Memory and Remembering in Old Norse-Icelandic Literature.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout.13–39. Hermann, Pernille. 2013. “Saga Literature, Cultural Memory, and Storage.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 332–354. Hermann, Pernille. 2017. “The Mind’s Eye: The Triad of Memory, Space and the Senses in Old Norse Literature.” European Journal of Scandinavian Studies 47: 203–217. Hermann, Pernille. Forthcoming. “Memory, Oral Tradition, and Sources.” In Pre-Christian Religions of the North. Histories and Structures. Ed. Anders Andrén, John Lindow and Jens Peter Schjødt. Turnhout. Hermann, Pernille and Stephen Mitchell. 2013. “Constructing the Past: Introductory Remarks.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 261–266. Hermann, Pernille, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. 2014. “Introduction: Minni and Muninn – Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 1–10. Hermann, Pernille, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir, eds. 2014. Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Herrman, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. Heslop, Kate and Jürg Glauser. 2018. “Introduction: Medial perspectives on textual culture in the Icelandic Middle Ages.” In RE:writing. Medial perspectives on textual culture in the Icelandic Middle Ages. Ed. Kate Heslop and Jürg Glauser. Zurich. 9–56.

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 Pre-Modern Nordic Memory Studies: An Introduction

Heslop, Kate. 2014. “Minni and the Rhetoric of Memory in Eddic, Skaldic, and Runic Texts.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 75–107. Jesch, Judith. 2008. “Introduction: Myth and Cultural Memory in the Viking Diaspora.” Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 4: 221–226. Kalkar, Otto. 1976 [1886–1892]. Ordbog til det ældre danske Sprog (1300–1700). I–VI. Copenhagen; see also GDO online: gammeldanskordbog.dk Lindow, John. 2014. “Memory and Old Norse Mythology.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 41–57. Malm, Mats. 2016. “Two Cultures of Visual(ized) Cognition.” In Intellectual Culture in Medieval Scandinavia, c. 1100–1350. Ed. Stefka Georgieva Eriksen. Disputation, 28. Turnhout. 309–330. Meulengracht Sørensen, Preben. 2006. Kapitler af Nordens litteratur i oldtid og middelalder. Ed. Judith Jesch and Jørgen Højgaard Jørgensen. Aarhus. Mitchell, Stephen A. 2014. “The Mythological Past: Memory in Medieval and Earky Modern Gotland.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 155–174. Mitchell, Stephen. 2013. “Memory, Mediality, and the ‘Performative Turn’: Recontextualizing Remembering in Medieval Scandinavia.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 282–305. Mundal, Else. 2010. “Memory of the Past and Old Norse Identity.” In The Making of Memory in the Middle Ages. Ed. Lucie Doležalová. Later Medieval Europe, 4. Leiden. 463–472. Nora, Pierre, ed. 1996–1998 [1984–1992]. Realms of Memory. New York. Nora, Pierre. 1989. “Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations 26: 7–24. Olick, Jeffrey K, and Joyce Robbins. 1998.“Social Memory Studies: From ‘Collective Memory’ to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices.” Annual Review of Sociology 24: 105–140. Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog; See: onp.ku.dk Rigney, Ann. 2005. “Plenitude, Scarcity and the Circulation of Cultural Memory.” Journal of European Studies 35.1: 11–28. Radstone, Susannah, Sally Alexander, Howard Caygill, Stephan Feuchtwang, Kate Hodgkin, Jo Labanyi et al. 2010. Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates. New York. Ranković, Slavica. 2010. “Communal Memory of the Distributed Author: Applicability of the Constructionist Model of Memory to the Study of Traditional Narratives.” In The Making of Memory in the Middle Ages. Ed. Lucie Doležalová. Later Medieval Europe, 4. Leiden. 9–26. Roediger, H. and J. V. Wertsch. 2008. “Creating a New Discipline of Memory.” Memory Studies 1: 9–22. Schnall, Jens Eike. 2004. “Nahrung, Erinnerung, Dichtung oder Vom Zu-sich-Nehmen, Bei-sich-Behalten und Von-sich-Geben. Zum Raub des Skaldenmets und mittelalterlicher Körpermetaphorik.” In Poetik und Gedächtnis. Festschrift für Heiko Uecker zum 65. Geburtstag. Ed. Karin Hoff, Susanne Kramarz-Bein, Astrid van Nahl and Thomas FechnerSmarsly. Beiträge zur Skandinavistik, 17. Frankfurt am Main, etc. 249–277. Schulte, Michael. 2007. “Memory Culture in the Viking Age. The runice evidence of formulaic patterns.” Scripta Islandica 57: 57–73. Söderwall, K.F. 1925–1973. Ordbok över det svenska medeltidsspråket. Supplement A–Ö, Lund; see also: Fornsvensk lexikalisk databas: spraakbanken.gu.se/fsvldb/



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Tamm, Marek. 2013. “Beyond History and Memory: New Perspectives in Memory Studies.” History Compass: 458–473. Viejo-Rose, Dacia. 2015. “Cultural Heritage and Memory: Untangling the Ties that Bind.” Culture and History. Digital Journal 4.2. Vohra, Pragya. 2008. “The Eiríkssynir in Vínland: Family Exploration or Family Myth.” Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 4: 249–267. de Vries, Jan. 1962. Altnordisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. 2nd ed. Leiden. Wagoner, Brady, ed. 2018. Handbook of Culture and Memory. Oxford. Yates, Frances. 1974. The Art of Memory. Chicago, IL. Zilmer, Kristel. 2008. “Scenes of Island Encounters in Icelandic Sagas: Reflections of Cultural Memory.” Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 4: 227–248.

Part I: Disciplines, Traditions and Perspectives

Culture and Communication

Jürg Glauser

I: 1 Rhetoric 1 Definition The most helpful way to express the complex relationship between rhetoric and memory is perhaps by means of a chiastic figure of thought: on the one hand, such a figure means examining the relationships between internal and external aspects of memory that draw on concepts of rhetoric; on the other hand, it relates to observations about the relationships between various representations of rheto­ ric which become apparent in conceptions of memory. At the point when rhetoric becomes established in classical, that is, ancient Greece, it is already apparent that the idea of oratory ‘as an art’ is intimately related to two conceptualisations of memory: memory as an aesthetic theory, and memory as a technical skill which may be acquired. A conclusion would be that rhetoric could not exist without concepts of memory. Only in the early modern period did memoria become disassociated from rhetoric and instead was con­ sidered to be a part of logic and ethics. Up to this point, memoria played a key role in the preparation of speeches and it is therefore not surprising that it was granted a pre-eminent position in theories of rhetoric. Memoria is the last phase of preparing a speech, in which the speaker – after having found, collected and ordered the material in the two initial phases of inventio (invention) and dispositio (arrangement) and then transformed the ideas and structures developed in these two phases into verbal form in the elocutio (style) – memorises the speech with the help of existing techniques and learnable memory aids, before practicing the oral presentation. As the fourth of five so-called canons of rhetoric, memoria (memory) is situated between elocutio and actio (delivery), and thus occupies an important place between the planning and preparation of a speech and its delivery as an actual presentation. In a metaphorical sense, memoria therefore mediates between what the speaker cultivated ‘internally’ and developed in his or her thoughts and that which the speaker aims to share with the outside world as a specific act of communication; within the canons of rhetoric, memoria thus renders the public effect of a speech possible (comparable to the writing down of a text in literary communication). The dynamic and extraordinarily performative function of memoria in clas­ sical rhetoric is apparent even in its position within the five canons of rhetoric. Within this system, memoria occupies a central role in accomplishing the main aim of a speech – and hence of rhetoric – which arguably lies in influencing the listeners so that they may adopt a specific point of view or execute certain actions. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-007

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But on the other hand – reinforcing the reciprocal dependence between rhetoric and memory – it must not be overlooked that when narrated, memory employs all of language’s abundant facets. This entails that thinking about and discussing memory is always in a fundamental way dependent on rhetoric, that discourses about reasoning and communication can only be grasped through the vocabulary of rhetoric. Such a broad understanding of rhetoric is, therefore, not limited to the single goal of instigating the audience to perform a specific, often immediate action by means of an eloquent oration. In such a broader definition, the concept of rhetoric is understood as one, if not the, most central and encom­ passing idea behind theories of language, aesthetics and literature, which defines all linguistic utterances (as well as language-based pictoral representations) from both a historical-diachronic and a typological-methodological perspective, and which may be analysed through such theoretical frame-works. The close relationship between memory and rhetoric is observable in very different areas throughout the process of analysing historical, linguistic sources. Within the present emphasis on the memory culture of the pre-modern North, this point – the analysis of the linguistic composition of narrative texts (especially within a rhetorical text-analysis which is aimed at discovering diverse phenom­ ena within memory theory) – is especially relevant for the field of historical nar­ ratology. Furthermore, it also adds an important dimension to our understand­ ing of how the learned written culture of the Latin Middle Ages was transferred into the Latin and vernacular literature of the Nordic countries (e.g. in provid­ ing an analytical focus on cultural history and the sociology of literature, which delineates the role of remembering within the larger frame-work of medieval scholarly pursuits; see, for example, Lausberg 1960, especially II, cf. memoria, μνεμε, mémoire; Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik 1–7, 1992–2005, s.v. Antike, Barock, Humanismus, memoria, Mittelalter, Reformation, Renaissance; Pethes and Ruchatz 2001, s.v. Mnemotechnik, Rhetorik; Oexle 2002; Ottmers 2007).

2 State of research Drawing on a division which reaches back to Aristotle, the medieval understan­ ding of memory applies a distinct, two-fold division of the concept. On the one hand, memory is perceived as an innate competence and thus common to all humankind (memoria naturalis). On the other hand, this inherent ability may be significantly supported and advanced by the use of mnemonic technics and ins­ truments (memoria artificialis) (see e.g. Hajdu 1936; Yates 1966; Carruthers 1990, 1998; Berns and Neuber 1993; Heimann-Seelbach 2000; Meierhofer 2010). It is



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evident that medieval theories of memory are concerned with both areas, much as classical teaching was as well, and much like modern philological and literary medieval studies are interested in the theoretical-aesthetic and the practical-tech­ nical aspects of remembering (see Carruthers 1990, 1998 and others); however, neither category of memory is represented in coherent, systematic or theoretical form in Old Norse texts, and thus may not readily be compared with influential and comprehensive classical or medieval Latin theories and handbooks which makes it necessary to examine and refer to individual case studies and implic­it forms of expression as a means of trying to establish how Old Norse memory culture imagined rhetorical compositions of memory, and which role it assig­ ned memory in the rhetorical process. Yet even modern scholarship only started to discuss this complex relationship between memory and rhetoric in recent years. There exist, however, a small number of very instructive and notable studies which engage with the influence of classical rhetoric on Old Norse literature and discuss corresponding ‘native’ examples in Old Norse texts. In general, however, it may be observed that if rhetoric was discussed as an independent subject in Old Norse texts at all, it was considered largely for its contribution to stylistic aspects of narrative texts. Thus, earlier studies generally focus on the rhetorical effect of differing styles of narration within the sagas (see Halvorsen 1982; Þor­ leifur Hauksson and Þórir Óskarsson 1994, 13–36). In a similar vein, Lie (1937) and Knirk (1981; the latter referring primarily to Lausberg 1960) primarily analysed dialogues and speeches in the sagas of kings, while Lönnroth (1976, 2011) exam­ ined the rhetoric style of narration in classical sagas of the Icelanders. Another area in which rhetoric appears as a central focus, and which has received detailed scholarly attention, are the grammatical treatises and Old Norse theories of language more broadly (see Dahlerup and Finnur Jónsson 1884–1886; Bjørn Magnússon Ólsen 1884–1886; Holtsmark 1981; Raschellà 1982; Beuerle 2010). Especially the so-called Third Grammatical Treatise, attributed to the Ice­ landic author Óláfr Þórðarson hvítaskáld (c. 1210–1259) deserves attention as a key tract in the history of rhteoric in Iceland. The work is dated to c. 1250 and features a section called “Málskrúðsfræði” [rhetoric], which presents an intense engagement with, and appropriation of, Latin models of rhetoric. Rhetoric is seen primarily as a means of creating aesthetically appealing and stylistically adequate poetry (cf. the edition by Krömmelbein 1998 and more recent studies by Clunies Ross 2018 and Wellendorf 2018). Margaret Clunies Ross was the first to present a broad analysis of the rootedness of Skáldskaparmál [The Language of Poetry] of the Prose Edda in language theory and poetics within the learned con­ tinental literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and to further discuss the relevant aspects of rhetoric (Clunies Ross 1987); however, these analyses lack

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systematic references to memory as a distinct focus, and for large parts, no refer­ ences to memory are made at all. Even to a casual observer it quickly becomes apparent that all studies which specifically and jointly address rhetoric and memory of Old Norse narrative sources are of a more recent date. Such recent studies may be concerned with aspects of mediality, a fundamental category for theories both of rhetoric and memory (Glauser 2007; Heslop 2014, 2018), or with diverse rhetorical methodolo­ gies which both classical and Old Norse mythological poetry employ to gener­ ate memory and enable remembering, such as, for example, rhetorical aspects of space, the senses, or memory (Hermann 2014, 2017b). Others analyse the impres­ sive and thus mnemotechnically especially suitable imagery of skaldic kennings (Bergsveinn Birgisson 2010; Malm 2016) or (even more recently) the permuta­ tion of linguistic theories, relations of texts and imagery, performativity and the resulting creation of memory in the Second Grammatical Treatise (Schneeberger forthcoming). It must be stressed that these studies demonstrate how besides delineating the hugely influential contribution of the classical rhetorical tradi­ tion (mediated through continental Latin learned culture), it is also possible to discover aspects which draw on the Nordic tradition itself when outlining the relationship between rhetoric and memory. This becomes especially evident if one looks beyond the Middle Ages and, for example, turns to Icelandic Baroque literature of the seventeenth century, in which a very telling amalgamation of traditional classical rhetoric and Old Norse poetological tradition becomes apparent. Especially the very well represented memorial poetry from this era, with its focus on remembering the dead, can include highly complex figures of commemorative poetry (e.g. funeral poems, funeral elegies, consolation poems) and rhetoric (see Margrét Eggertsdóttir 2014; Þórunn Sigurðardóttir 2015; review in Glauser 2016). Yet even in light of these recent studies, the topic has not yet been systema­ tically and coherently addressed. Attempts to formulate a theory of the rhetoric of native forms are still at the very early stages, and in the few studies which do address rhetoric, memory theories or mnemonic techniques are represented only marginally. Moreover, none of the large and influential surveys dealing with memory, rhetoric and grammar in medieval Latin culture (Yates 1966; Carruthers 1990, 1998; Copeland and Sluiter 2009) makes any references to the traditions of Scandinavian countries, suggesting that Nordic studies as of yet lack a compre­ hensive and theory-based interpretation of the relationship between rhetoric and memory, and that the present short contribution may only sketch some prelimi­ nary observations.



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3 Pre-modern Nordic material As has been mentioned several times, with few but important exceptions, the extant Nordic material is not theoretically explicit but rather narratively implicit in its treatment of rhetoric and memory and, as a part of this relationship, also in its treatment of media and mediality. This fact entails that these sources must be examined on the basis of individual (often only implicitly developed) pas­ sages and that frequently, only a goal-oriented analysis will help elucidate such matters. Yet closer looks reveal that this corpus is indeed diverse, extensive, of high value for scholarship and, at times, unique. A short discussion of selected examples helps outline this point. The Scandinavian tradition of the Middle Ages contains numerous sources which may be classified as belonging to the area of mnemotechnics (cf. Carruthers 1990, 1998; Pethes and Ruchatz 2001, 380–383; Hermann 2017b). In these cases, as in many others, the classical theories of places (loci / topoi) and of topology are a frequently used means of supporting memory. Much as in other traditions, such places may be natural (e.g. landscape, nature, the human body) or cultural and hence part of civilisation (buildings, architecture, but also the human body and so on). An often-quoted example from Norse tradition is the so-called “Stave Church Sermon” (Norwegian “Stavkirkepreiken”) from the Gammelnorsk homiliebok (Old Norwegian Book of Homilies, a collection of sermons in the vernacular, dated to the twelfth century). In developing its rhetoric, the “Stave Church Sermon” employs the architectonic structure of a medieval wooden church as a mnemonic aid and interprets the individual parts of the building in accordance with the fourfold scriptural sense. The sermon has even been called a ‘mnemonic theatre play’ (“mnemonisk teater”, Stylegar 2004; see also Laugerud 2010), because besides the common church inventory, it also draws on the text, on rituals and on the church space as a thesaurus (see below). While the sermon in itself can be viewed as an encompassing act of mnemonic practices, the preacher heightens and intensifies its memory-generating effect in that he deliberately draws the audi­ ence’s attention to architectural elements visible to all. Through this, the church’s architectonic arrangement becomes a mnemonic aid and an initiator of memory through the textual source of the sermon. Other mnemonic devices are mentioned explicitly in prologues to sagas, which sometimes contain telling thoughts on rhetoric and memory. For example, the longish and incredibly complex prologues to Þiðreks saga (an extensive col­ lection of North-Germanic heroic sagas in Old Norwegian translation) and Streng­ leikar (a contemporary Old Norwegian translation of Marie de France’s lais), dated to the thirteenth century, discuss the advantages of writing down narra­ tives in order to save them from being forgotten.

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Several mnemonically interesting passages form part of the narratives and are narrated so precisely that it is possible to deduce from them an implicit rheto­ ric of memory. Ynglinga saga, extant in the Heimskringla by Snorri Sturluson, is an excellent example of this almost classical eloquence of narrative figures in Old Icelandic narrative texts. Óðinn (Odin) is here described as follows: “Ǫnnur [íþrótt] var sú, at hann talaði svá snjallt ok slétt, at ǫllum, er á heyrðu, þótti þat eina satt. Mælti hann allt hendigum, svá sem nú er þat kveðit, er skáldskapr heitir.” (Heimskringla 1941, Ch. 6) [“Another [‘faculty’] was that he spoke so eloquently and smoothly that everyone who heard thought that only what he said was true. Everything he said was in rhyme, like the way what is now called poetry is composed.” (Heimskringla 2011, Ch. 6)] The quality of Odin’s speech, its ornatus, enables him to convince his audience of the truth-value of his utter­ ances – a passage which echoes an exemplary description of an orator success­ fully influencing the audience in his favour. Odin is, of course, also the god of poetry (as is narrated at length in the myth of the origin of the mead of poetry in Skáldskaparmál) and the god of memory (with his two ravens Huginn and Muninn, the latter of which may be seen as representing memory, see Mitchell 2018) and of oratory. In the so-called Rhetorica ad Herennium, memoria is described with an impressive and memorable double expression as the place in which all memory is stored and simultaneously as the place from which memory may be recollected through re-membering (αναμνησις, reminiscentia): “Nunc ad thesaurum invento­ rum atque at omnium partium rhetoricae custodem, memoriam, transeamus.” [“Now let me turn to the treasure-house of the ideas supplied by Invention, to the guardian of all parts of rhetoric, the Memory.” (Ad C. Herennium, 3.16)] (see Neuber 2001, 1038) The same idea – albeit formulated less theoretically than in its Latin counterpart and extant in much more comprised form – is found in the prologue to Snorri’s Heimskringla. In this well-known prologue to the history of Norwegian kings, the skaldic poems (kvæði) take on the function of a thesaurus inventorum (treasure-house of ideas) but also of custos rhetoricae (guardian of rhetoric), when – discussing the historicity of his sources at the end of the prologue – Snorri writes: “En kvæðin þykkja mér sízt ór stað fœrð, ef þau eru rétt kveðin ok skynsamlegt upp tekin.” (Heimskringla 1941, Prologus) [“As to the poems, I consider them to be least corrupted if they are correctly composed and meaningfully interpreted.” (Heimskringla 2001, Prologue)] Like the Latin text by the anonymous author of Rhetorica ad Herennium, Snorri’s expression in this thirteenth-century Icelandic example emphasises the double relationship between memoria and rhetorica. The skaldic kenningar are a special field of interest for those discussing the topic of rhetoric and memory in Old Norse literature. In fact, the scholarship on



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these sources had observed and identified relatively early on parallels between, on the one hand, the imagery of the kenning-art – and, in somewhat less detail, the specific syntax of the dróttkvætt-stanza – and, on the other hand, the largely contemporary Viking Age animal style. In this vein, correspondences with rhe­ torical devices were repeatedly pointed out (see, for example, Vogt 1930–1931; Lie 1982a [1952], 1982b [1957]; Krömmelbein 1981; Engster 1983; Marold 1983; Heslop 2014). The strong visual and onomatopoetic images evoked and the complexity of the skaldic syntax as a whole – and the kenningar in particular – are instru­ mental in arousing the imagination of the audience. This works on the basis that a strong visual and auditory excitement appeals to the senses of the listeners, and, incidentally, is also how a skilled orator operates and instigates performa­ tive processes of remembering, a parallel which demonstrates that even in the case of the kenning, memory cannot be separated from rhetoric. By appealing to seeing and hearing, the two senses on the top of the hierarchy of senses and most trusted in the medieval period are involved. The mentally stimulating and memory-inducing kenningar demonstrate that, much as was the case in classi­ cal rhetoric, Viking Age and medieval theories of memory are closely connected to orality and vocality. Here is for once a point which sharply separates them from the theories of memory which emerged from the written culture of the Latin Middle Ages, which had a strong focus on writing (see e.g. Carruthers 1990, 1998; see Buchholz 1980 for an early discussion of oral performances in Old Norse liter­ ature). In more recent years, such observations have also been discussed in rela­ tion to the importance of unconventional, explicitly ‘rhetoricised’ verbal imagery for memory (Bergsveinn Birgisson 2010; Malm 2016; Hermann 2009, 2014, 2015, 2017b; Heslop 2014; Schneeberger forthcoming). Aby Warburg formulated a cor­ responding concept for art history in his ‘pathos formulae’ (see below), but the concept itself has not yet been explored sufficiently in skaldic studies. While Old Norse tradition therefore presents us with a range of examples which indirectly outline a rhetoric of memory and memory construction, we do not have knowledge of an explicitly formulated and extensive memory-myth which may correspond in its entirety and importance to the Greek myths of Mne­ mosyne, “the mother of all the Muses” (Carruthers 1998, 7). According to classical mythology (Hesiod), the muses are the children of Zeus and Mnemosyne and it is their duty not only to bring memory to humankind but to let humankind forget its suffering as well. Mnemosyne is called upon as a figure of memory and seen as an idea of dynamic memory based on personal experience in many different periods of European cultural history, and as such she even appears as a counterfigure to mnemo-technics. In the twentieth century, Aby Warburg (1866–1929) provided key impulses for cultural studies with his so-called “Mnemosyne-Atlas” and the pathos formulae which it contained (see Matussek 2001). Such an influ­

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ential myth is not found in the Old Norse tradition. Yet a closer look at individual myths figuring Óðinn reveals that parts which may be seen as traces of a myth of remembering have been retained, and these narratives certainly come closest to the Greek myth of the culturally defining importance of memory. The most exten­ sive and relatively clear indicators for a Nordic memory myth are contained in the multidimensional story of the mead of poetry, the central Norse myth con­ cerned with knowledge, poetic composition, rhetoric, memory, and forgetting, but which has not yet been analysed as a whole from a memory studies perspec­ tive (Hermann 2017a). As has been mentioned repeatedly, we possess no handbook from the Nordic Middle Ages which explicitly addresses the art of memory and which is self-ref­ erential in this task. The few notable exceptions which contain an explicit and comprehensive, ‘theoretical’ engagement with memory and rhetoric are the Prose Edda (and within it, especially the theory of language in Skáldskaparmál) and the Grammatical Treatises of the Prose Edda (which in some manuscripts are transmitted together), as well as post-medieval poetic texts, the majority of which are based on the Prose Edda. That certain parts of the Prose Edda, such as Skáldskaparmál, are to be understood as a contribution to Old Norse theories of language and rhetoric has already been shown convincingly in studies by Clunies Ross (1987, 2018). In its claim to explain the old, that is, the pagan poetry reach­ ing back to orally transmitted phases of the tradition and to adapt this to new religious, mental and medial circumstances and therefore to guarantee its future transmission, the Prose Edda may be viewed as a specifically Icelandic treatise on the medieval memory theories in the vernacular, both as a whole and in its specific sections on language and poetic theory. The grand, over-arching project that is the Prose Edda, at least in some areas, consists of preserving and creatively shaping what is thematically, formally and medially ‘old’ within what is themati­ cally, formally and medially ‘new’. This project ensures that its material remained usable, and in use. It is evident in terms of content (in the reception of pre-Chris­ tian myths), of form (in the development of an actual theory of the kenningar) and of media (in the introduction of performative speeches in written narrative con­ texts). The explicit observable parallels between the Prose Edda as a whole and a general process of constructing a (cultural) memory are evident in that both are dependent on a continuous repetition to prove their legitimacy, which ensures their survival over the centuries. The long-standing reception of parts of the Prose Edda until the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is testimony to this extraordinary transmission, and in this respect, the Prose Edda completes a movement which can be seen as prototypical for constructions of memory. If one is interested in analysing the relationship between rhetoric and memory in the medieval Nordic texts, one of the most central questions to address



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Fig. 1: Manuscript UUB, C 599, 143r

is whether the Nordic tradition provides enough material to sketch a specifically Nordic understanding of memory and rhetoric. That such a Nordic theory may not be thought of as in complete opposition to the learned Latin tradition is selfevident. More than any other area of medieval learned culture, questions about tradition, memory, rhetoric and grammar in Nordic sources are always charac­ terised by a dual perspective, incorporating extant Nordic as well as the Latin culture. A simple and short example allows us to illustrate this observation. Rela­ tively early in the Middle Ages, visual conceptions of the human brain emerged, and these are extant from countless diagrams which illustrate the ventricles of the brain. Some of these refer to Albertus Magnus’ text De bono and show the place of remembering as the outermost part of the brain, located at the very back. At least two documents testify to the fact that the doctrine of these ventricles was known in Sweden towards the end of the Middle Ages. The first are lecture notes taken by a student at the university of Uppsala, Olov Torstensson (Olaus Thorstani), dated to the 1480s which contain an illu­ minating drawing of a philosophical debate between Aristotle and Albertus Magnus (manuscript C 599, 143r; see fig. 1). For the present purpose, the drawing is particularly interesting because in analogy to their brains, the caps of both

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Fig. 2: Manuscript UUB, C 601, 2vb

figures also feature an area with the caption memoratiua, i.e. a visual representa­ tion of the position of the ventricles (see Piltz 1975–1976, 1977: i.a. 90, 128). A similar drawing is to be found in lecture notes taken by another Uppsala student, Olov Johansson (Olaus Johannis Gutho) (manuscript C 601vb; see fig. 2). It shows “det thomistiska schemat utvisande relationerna mellan yttre och inre sinnen: de fem sinnenas vittnesbörd samordnas av sensus communis och går vidare till […] för att sedan lagras i […] potentia memorativa […]” (Piltz 1975–1976, 277–278) [the Thomisian scheme indicating the relations between external and internal senses; the evidence of five senses is coordinated by sensus communis and proceeds to […] and is later stored in […] potentia memorativa […] (author’s translation)]. Furthermore, the Swedish King’s Mirror (Konunga styrelse) contains a short passage, which enumerates the abilities and qualities of a good monarch, and it says:



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Wise mästara thz lika ok almanna samhälde widh manz likama/ Ty at suåsom likamen hauer hierta thz sum styre allom likamens limom ok åthäuom/ Ok han hauer huwdh ok främbr alt hans styrilse: I höfdom är hiärne ther hauer try styrilse. Then första lutren af hiärnanom väkkr up hugh ok åthäue likamens. Then anra wäghr medh sik sieluom ok dömer huat är görande ella latande sum huxat är. Then tridhi är äptarste luteren/ han minniz thet huxat är/ ok medh skälom gripit ok wäghit: // Så skal godhr kunungr huxa huat almoghans tarf ellr skadhi må wara/ Han skal ok thz wägha medh fullum skiälum/ huru görande är ella låtande. Han skal ok minnaz thz almoghans gaghn ella skadhi hauer warit ella warda må. I höfdino äru ok öghon […] I höfdeno äru ok öron […] I höfdeno är ok mundr ok tunga […]. (En nyttigh Bok om Konnunga Styrilse och Höfdinga 1964, 31–32) [Wise masters liken society with the human body. For much like the body has a heart which directs all members and gestures of the body, so it has a head which drives its movement: within the head, there is the brain, which has three areas. The first part of the brain awakens the senses and the gestures of the body. The second debates with itself and decides which of its thoughts shall be done or not. The third is the last part, it remembers that which was thought and which had been gripped and weighed with reasons: Thus shall a good king consider what the need of, and damage to, his people may be. He shall also weigh up with full reasoning, how something shall be done or not done. He shall also remember the gain or loss of his people, or what that may be in future. The head also has eyes […] The head also has ears […] The head also has a mouth and a tongue […]. (author’s translation)]

Both sources locate memory in the outermost part of the human brain, situating it after the reception of impressions from the outside world by the sense of the eyes, ears, tongue and after their successive processing through the ventricles. They are clearly influenced by contemporary learned medico-historical literature and its diagrams. This tradition is opposed to another one which locates memory in the breast of human beings, as Snorri Sturluson lists in Skáldskaparmál among the ways of paraphrasing parts of the human body: “Brjóst skal svá kenna at kalla hús eða garð eða skip hjarta […], eljunar land, hugar ok minnis.” (Edda, Skáldskaparmál 1998, 108) [“The breast shall be referred to by calling it house or enclosure or ship of heart […] land of energy, thought and memory.” (Edda 1995, 154)] The Prose Edda clearly presents an alternative understanding of the location of memory in the human body. It is unclear, however, if this may be seen as an idea which refers back to skaldic material and therefore in essence could be pre-Christian/preLatin, and hence testimony to an independent, genuinely Nordic understanding which pre-dates other influences of the Middle Ages. Without any further scope for examination such observations are simultaneously intriguing and stimulating but by their very nature must be seen as patchwork that ought to be situated in a larger context.

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4 Perspectives for future research The topics of memory and rhetoric / rhetoric and memory in the pre-modern Nordic tradition may only be discussed successfully as part of a more compre­ hensive engagement with medieval scientific literature, so-called artes-literature. The artes liberales are the binding frame-work in which memoria is to be viewed as part of medieval grammatical and rhetorical thinking. Any studies examining the relationship between rhetoric and memory, even when concerned specifically with Nordic sources, must therefore engage with such ordering of knowledge (see Stolz 2004; Copeland and Sluiter 2009). This may lead to the discovery of inter­ esting, yet hitherto overlooked typological parallels between Nordic and Latin theories of poetry, and of memory. As a general rule it would be beneficial to include the Middle-Latin tradition of the North more fully, not least because (as was briefly sketched above), Norse contributions to Latin and vernacular learn­ ing have not been sufficiently addressed in the extant overviews. A further central area in the theoretical and methodological approaches to rhetorical memory studies may be opened by a new focus on the performative character of the texts and of memory constructions in a general sense. This could include aspects of the senses, emotions and so on, and equally contribute to novel textual analyses. By examining the concrete linguistic, medial, visual etc. composition of the tradition, such studies could help to locate possible influences from learned Latin literature on Nordic memory theories, and hence shed light on accompanying processes of cultural transfers. Perhaps more importantly, it could also help recognising and delineating culturally specific categories within Old Norse rhetoric and memory theory which become apparent in the texts. The aim of such perspectives for future memory research would then be the demarca­ tion of a genuine Norse memory theory, one which combines classical Latin and Viking Age and medieval Nordic aspects in its analysis.

Works cited Primary sources Ad C. Herennium. De ratione dicende (Rhetorica ad Herennium). Ed. and trans. Harry Caplan. The Loeb Classical Library, 403. London, 1954. Bjørn Magnússon Ólsen, ed. Den tredje og fjærde grammatiske afhandling i Snorres Edda tilligemed de grammatiske afhandlingers prolog og to andre tillæg. Islands grammatiske litteratur i middelalderen II. Copenhagen, 1884–1886. Copeland, Rita and Ineke Sluiter, eds. 2009. Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric. Language Arts and Literary Theory, AD 300–1475. Oxford.



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Dahlerup, Verner and Finnur Jónsson, eds. Den første og anden grammatiske afhandling i Snorres Edda. Islands grammatiske litteratur i middelalderen, I. Copenhagen, 1884–1886. En nyttigh Bok om Konnunga Styrilse och Höfdinga. Johannes Bureus utgåva 1634. Ed. Lennart Moberg, SFSS, 235. Uppsala, 1964. Krömmelbein, Thomas, ed. Óláfr Þórðarson Hvítaskáld, Dritte Grammatische Abhandlung. Studia Nordica, 3. Oslo, 1998. Snorri Sturluson. Heimskringla. Ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson. ÍF, 26. Reykjavík, 1941. Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Skáldskaparmál. 1. Introduction, Text and Notes. Ed. Anthony Faulkes. London, 1998. Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Trans. Anthony Faulkes. London, 1995. Snorri Sturluson. Heimskringla, I. Trans. Alison Finlay and Anthony Faulkes. London, 2011.

Secondary sources Berns, Jörg Jochen and Wolfgang Neuber, eds. 1993. Ars memorativa. Zur kulturgeschichtlichen Bedeutung der Gedächtniskunst 1400–1750. Frühe Neuzeit, 15. Tübingen. Bergsveinn Birgisson. 2010. “The Old Norse Kenning as a Mnemonic Figure.” In The Making of Memory in the Middle Ages. Ed. Lucie Doležalová. Later Medieval Europe, 4. Leiden and Boston. 199–213. Beuerle, Angela. 2010. Sprachdenken im Mittelalter. Ein Vergleich mit der Moderne. Studia Linguistica Germanica, 99. Berlin and New York. Buchholz, Peter. 1980. Vorzeitkunde. Mündliches Erzählen und Überliefern im mittelalterlichen Skandinavien nach dem Zeugnis von Fornaldarsaga und eddischer Dichtung. Skandinavistische Studien, 13. Neumünster. Carruthers, Mary J. 1990. The Book of Memory. A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 10. Cambridge. Carruthers, Mary. 1998. The Craft of Thought. Meditation, Rhetoric and the Making of Images, 400–1200. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 34. Cambridge. Clunies Ross, Margaret. 1987. Skáldskaparmál. Snorri Sturluson’s ars poetica and medieval theories of language. The Viking Collection. Studies in Northern Civilization, 4. Odense. Clunies Ross, Margaret. 2018. “The Fourth Grammatical Treatise as medial poetics.” In RE:writing. Medial perspectives on textual culture in the Icelandic Middle Ages. Ed. Kate Heslop and Jürg Glauser. Medienwandel – Medienwechsel – Medienwissen, 29. Zürich. 227–242. Engster, Hermann. 1983. Poesie einer Achsenzeit. Der Ursprung der Skaldik im gesellschaftlichen Systemwandel der Wikingerzeit. Europäische Hochschulschriften. Reihe I. Deutsche Sprache und Literatur, 667. Frankfurt am Main, Bern and New York. Glauser, Jürg. 2007. “The Speaking Bodies of Saga Texts.” In Learning and Understanding in the Old Norse World. Essays in honour of Margaret Clunies Ross. Ed. Judy Quinn, Kate Heslop and Tarrin Wills. Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe, 18. Turnhout. Pp. 13–26. Glauser, Jürg. 2016 “Ritdómur. Þórunn Sigurðardóttir. 2015.” Saga: 184–188. Hajdu, Helga. 1936. Das mnemotechnische Schrifttum des Mittelalters. Vienna and Budapest. Halvorsen, E. F. 1982 [1956–1978]. “Retorikk.” In KLNM XIV: Cols. 89–95.

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Heimann-Seelbach, Sabine. 2000. Ars und scientia. Genese, Überlieferung und Funktion der mnemotechnischen Traktatliteratur im 15. Jahrhundert. Frühe Neuzeit, 58. Tübingen. Hermann, Pernille. 2009. “Concepts of Memory and Approaches to the Past in Medieval Icelandic Literature.” Scandinavian Studies 81.3: 287–308. Hermann, Pernille. 2014. “Key-Aspects of Memory and Remembering in Old Norse-Icelandic Literature.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 13–40. Hermann, Pernille. 2015. “Memory, Imagery, and Visuality in Old Norse Literature.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 114.3: 317–340. Hermann, Pernille. 2017a. “Cultural Memory and Old Norse Mythology in the High Middle Ages.” In Theorizing Old Norse Myths. Ed. Stefan Brink and Lisa Collinson. Acta Scandinavica, 7. Turnhout. 151–173. Hermann, Pernille. 2017b. “The Mind’s Eye. The Triad of Memory, Space, and the Senses in Old Norse Literature.” European Journal of Scandinavian Studies: 203–217. Heslop, Kate. 2014. “Minni and the Rhetoric of Memory in Eddic, Skaldic and Runic Texts.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 75–197. Heslop, Kate. 2018. “Talking heads: the mediality of Mímir.” In RE:writing. Medial perspectives on textual culture in the Icelandic Middle Ages. Ed. Kate Heslop and Jürg Glauser. Medienwandel – Medienwechsel – Medienwissen, 29. Zürich. 63–84. Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, 1–7. 1992–2005. Ed. Gert Ueding. Tübingen. Holtsmark, Anne. 1981. “Grammatisk litteratur.” In KLNM V: Cols. 414–419. Knirk, James E. 1981. Oratory in the Kings’ Sagas. Oslo, Bergen and Tromsø. Krömmelbein, Thomas. 1981. Skaldische Metaphorik. Studien zur Funktion der Kenningsprache in skaldischen Dichtungen des 9. und 10. Jahrhunderts. Hochschul-Produktionen. Germanistik, Linguistik, Literaturwissenschaft, 7. Freiburg im Breisgau. Laugerud, Henning. 2010. “To See with the Eyes of the Soul: Memory and Visual Culture in Medieval Europe.” ARV. Nordic Yearbook of Folklore Studies 66: 43–68. Lausberg, Heinrich. 1960. Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik. Eine Grundlegung der Literaturwissenschaft. 1–2. Munich. Lie, Hallvard. 1937. Studier i Heimskringlas stil. Dialogene og talene. Skrifter utgitt av Det Norske Videnskaps-Akademi i Oslo. II. Hist.-Filos. Klasse. 1936. No. 5. Oslo. Lie, Hallvard. 1982a [1952]. “Skaldestil-studier.” In Om sagakunst og skaldskap. Øvre Ervik. 109–200. Lie, Hallvard. 1982b [1957]. “‘Natur’ og ‘unatur’ i skaldekunsten.” In Om sagakunst og skaldskap. Øvre Ervik. 201–315. Lönnroth, Lars. 1976. Njáls saga. A Critical Introduction, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London. Lönnroth, Lars. 2011. “Rhetorical Persuasion in the Sagas (1969)”. In The Academy of Odin. Selected Papers on Old Norse literature. The Viking Collection. Studies in Northern Civilization, 19. Odense. 77–109. Malm, Mats. 2016. “Two Cultures of Visual(ized) Cognition.” In Intellectual Culture in Medieval Scandinavia, c. 1100–1350. Ed. Stefka Georgieva Eriksen. Disputatio, 28. Turnhout. 309–334. Margrét Eggertsdóttir. 2014. Icelandic Baroque. Poetic art and erudition in the works of Hallgrímur Pétursson. Trans. Andrew Wawn. Islandica, 56. Ithaca, NY.



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Marold, Edith. 1983. Kenningkunst. Ein Beitrag zu einer Poetik der Skaldendichtung. Quellen und Forschungen zur Sprach- und Kulturgeschichte der germanischen Völker. Neue Folge, 80 (204). Berlin and New York. Matussek, Peter. 2001. “Mnemosyne”. In Pethes and Ruchatz, eds., Gedächtnis und Erinnerung. 378–379. Meierhofer, Christian. 2010. Alles neu unter der Sonne. Das Sammelschrifttum der Frühen Neuzeit und die Entstehung der Nachricht. Würzburg. Mitchell, Stephen A. 2018. “Óðinn’s Twin Ravens, Huginn and Muninn.” In Gemini and the Sacred: Twins and Twinship in Religion and Myth. Ed. Kimberley C. Patton. London. Neuber, W. 2001. “Memoria.” In Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, 5. Cols. 1037–1078. Oexle, O.G. “Memoria, Memorialüberlieferung” In Lexikon des Mittelalters, 6. Munich 2002. Cols. 510–513. Ottmers, Clemens. 2007. Rhetorik. 2nd ed. Sammlung Metzler, 283. Stuttgart and Weimar. Pethes, Nicolas and Jens Ruchatz, eds. 2001. Gedächtnis und Erinnerung. Ein interdisziplinäres Lexikon. Reinbek bei Hamburg. Piltz, Anders. 1975–1976. “Den äldsta Uppsalapsykologien. Kring några anteckningar från 1480-talet.” Lychnos. Lärdomshistoriska samfundets årsbok. 274–278. Piltz, Anders, ed. 1977. Studium Uppsalense. Specimens of the oldest lecture notes taken in the mediaeval University of Uppsala. Skrifter utgivna till Uppsala Universitets 500-årsjubileum, I.2. Uppsala. Raschellà, Fabrizio. 1982. The So-Called Second Grammatical Treatise. Filologia germanica. Tesi e studi, 2. Florence. Schneeberger, Sandra. Forthcoming. Handeln mit Dichtung. Literarische Performativität in der altisländischen Prosa-Edda. Beiträge zur Nordischen Philologie. Tübingen. Stolz, Michael. 2004. Artes-liberales-Zyklen. Formationen des Wissens im Mittelalter. Bibliotheca Germanica, 47. Tübingen. Stylegar, Frans-Arne H. 2004. “Stavkirken som mnemonisk teater. Ting, tekst og kristen fornyelse i en muntlig kultur.” http://arkeologi.blogspot.ch/2004/08/stavkirken-sommnemonisk-teater-ting.html. (retrieved 20 February 2018) Þorleifur Hauksson and Þórir Óskarsson, ed. 1994. Íslensk stílfræði. Reykjavík. Þórir Óskarsson. 2005. “Rhetoric and Style”. In A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture. Ed. Rory McTurk. Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture, 31. Oxford. 354–358. Þórunn Sigurðardóttir. 2015. Heiður og huggun. Erfiljóð, harmljóð og huggunarkvæði á 17. öld. Reykjavík. Vogt, Walther Heinrich. 1930–1931. “Bragis Schild. Maler und Skalde.” Acta Philologia Scandinavica 5: 1–28. Wellendorf, Jonas. 2018. “Virtues and vices: The Fourth Grammatical Treatise”. In RE:writing. Medial perspectives on textual culture in the Icelandic Middle Ages. Ed. Kate Heslop and Jürg Glauser. Medienwandel – Medienwechsel – Medienwissen, 29. Zürich. 243–263. Yates, Frances A. 1966. The Art of Memory. London.

Anders Piltz

I: 2 Philosophy and Theology 1 Definition Writing in his Metaphysics (I, 4), Aristotle noted, “From memory we acquire expe­ rience. The numerous memories of the same thing eventually produce one single experience.” An effective method to evaluate the mentality of a society would surely be to record the sayings frequently repeated there. Proverbs in fashion in a community reveal its spirit: pithy statements expressing some commonly accepted truth in a striking and memorable way. A wealth of set locutions, prov­ erbs and memorial verses from the Middle Ages are preserved in the Nordic coun­ tries, and in some cases still in circulation (Kjær 1967; Holtsmark 1967). Medieval education could be defined as the conscientious impressing of innumerable propositions and texts on pupils and students. Philosophy and the­ ology in pre-modern Scandinavia were disciplines coextensive with the mission, establishment, and development of the Catholic Church, as well as its educational system, with its focus on the Latin language. The Nordic countries were thus part of the Latin Christendom of Western Europe. Education aimed at training young men for service in the church and was a matter of tradition, handing down to new generations the cultural heritage of the past: the Latin language, nobody’s ver­ nacular but the lingua franca of the intellectuals; a core of ancient, mostly Greek, philosophy; biblical scriptures as interpreted by the Church Fathers; the decrees of councils and popes, and by later theologians, and the liturgy. Teaching, preaching, and praying within a community are key factors in the preservation and practice of a memory culture of believers and worshippers. A  memory community shares a common understanding of its origins, history, values, obligations, options and future prospects.

2 State of research Little is known about Scandinavian intellectuals at large and their achievements, with a few brilliant exceptions (Eriksen 2016). The sources left by persons and institutions within the scholastic communities have been edited and examined thoroughly over the last several decades by scholars. Saxo, called Grammaticus (c. 1150–c. 1220), authored a Danish national history in sixteen books, including the story of prince Amlet. Andreas Sunesen (d. 1228), archbishop of Lund, com­ https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-008



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posed Hexaemeron, a treatise in hexameters on theology, anthropology, natural philosophy and metaphysics. Boethius de Dacia, master of philosophy in Paris c. 1270, a radical Aristotelian, earned a condemnation for heterodoxy by maintain­ ing that natural philosophers ought to deny revealed Christian truths on rational grounds (Ebbesen 2002). Saint Birgitta’s first confessor and mentor during her stay in Sweden, Master Mathias of Linköping (d. 1350), was the leading theolo­ gian in Scandinavia, also interested in literary theory, and influenced Bernardino of Siena and Nicolaus Cusanus (Piltz 1986; Malm 2016). The Swede Bero Magni of Lödöse (d. 1465) spent his whole professional life at the University of Vienna (Kihlman 2011). Universities were established in Uppsala (1477) and Copenhagen (1479), where a mild philosophical realism ruled (Ebbesen 2002). Seven volumes of notes taken in the newly established University of Uppsala (Piltz 1977) yield precious information of the level and content of instruction there during the first years of its activities (1477–1486).

3 Pre-modern Nordic material: Memory communities Medieval Catholicism as a memory community Roman Catholicism in Western Europe, after the Carolingian Reform, was highly organised, sensual and visual in its outward manifestations. It was easy to learn, self-assertive, creative and expansive, exploring its potentialities in choral music, painting, sculpture, and architecture. The individual believer was inserted through baptism into the so-called communion of saints, in the three storeys, heaven, earth, and under-earth: the Church triumphant, militant and penitent, forming one spiritual body, animated and held together by the Holy Spirit. This mental universe was engraved in the minds of the clerics systematically, in ritual repetition of the uniform prayers and songs of the Roman liturgy, adopted by Charlemagne, and it filled each hour with a given content, throughout the day, the week and the year (Brown 1996). Those aspiring to and exercising ministries in the Church learned great por­ tions of the Bible and the liturgy by heart, due to constant repetition and chanting of the same words, to an extent unknown today. The second canon of the Second Ecumenical Council of Nicaea in 787, accepted as a binding regulation in the East and West alike, stated:

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Quoniam psallentes repromittimus Deo: “In iustificationibus tuis meditabor, non obliviscar sermones tuos”, omnes quidem christianos hoc servare saluberrimum est, sed præcipue hos, qui hierarchiam consecuti fuerint dignitatem. Unde definimus omnem qui ad episcopa­ tus provehendus est gradum, modis omnibus psalterium nosse; ut ex hoc etiam omnis cle­ ricus, qui sub eo fuerit, ita moneatur et imbuatur. (Conciliorum œcumenicorum decreta, 139) [Chanting the Psalter, we promise God: “I will meditate in thy precepts, I will not forget thy words” [Psalm 118 [119], 15–16], it is most salutary that all Christians keep this prescript, but especially those who reach a rank in the hierarchy. We therefore rule that everyone who is to be promoted to the dignity of bishop by all means must know the Psalter [by heart], and even every cleric under his command shall be admonished and instructed to do the same. (author’s translation)]

The overall worldview within the clerical paradigm The cathedral schools, where future priests received their training, did not teach philosophy and theology in any real sense. During the thirteenth century, the opportunities to pursue higher learning opened through membership in one of the mendicant orders, i.e. of the Dominicans or Franciscans, and outside of these orders, those students who were destined to make an ecclesiastical career were sent to universities abroad. Paris was the preferred place of study until c. 1350. Swedish historiography began with one of the first professors in Uppsala, Ericus Olai (d. 1486). In his Chronica regni Gothorum, he describes Uppsala as the third most dignified metropolis in Christendom after Jerusalem and Rome. Ericus was an exponent of Gothicism, the persuasion that the island Scandza was the womb of all European peoples, and thus the Swedes represented a more vital culture than their southern neighbors, an ideology to become the national myth boosting future Swedish military expansion around the Baltic (Chronica regni Gothorum). Ericus begins his book by stating the overall ideology of his times, namely, the responsibility of Catholicism to convert the world to Christ. This is probably as close to a declaration of an officially accepted Weltanschauung as we can reach on the eve of the Humanism, the Renaissance, and the Reformation: Corpus Cristi misticum, quod est ecclesia, cuius ipse caput est principale, papa vero politi­ cum et ciuile, duo latera continet, dextrum videlicet et sinistrum, hoc est duplicem populum, clericalem scilicet et laicalem. Ideoque in ecclesiastica ierarchia duplicem instituit princi­ patum, qui hominem ex anima creauit et corpore, ponens in ecclesie firmamento duo lumi­ naria magna, vtrumque magnum sed alterum maius, que sunt pontificalis auctoritas et regalis potestas: nam ea que preest diei, id est spiritualibus, mayor est, que vero carnalibus minor, vt quanta est inter solem et lunam, tanta inter pontifices et reges differencia cog­ noscatur. […] Cum enim XII apostoli imbuendum Cristi euangelio mundum distributis sibi terrarum partibus suscepissent, beatissimus Petrus, princeps apostolici ordinis, ad arcem



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Romani destinatur imperii, vt cunctis simul nationibus, que Romano regebantur imperio, lucem veritatis inferret et in ea vrbe anchoram tocius firmitatis fidei figeret, que sub omnium cultura deorum fedissime laborabat. Hic enim conculcande philosophie opiniones, hic dis­ soluende erant terrene sapencie vanitates, hic confutandi demonum cultus, hic omnium sacrificiorum impietas destruenda, vbi diligentissime habebatur supersticione collectum, quidquid vsquam fuerat vanis erroribus institutum. (Chronica regni Gothorum, 1–12) [The mystical body of Christ, the Church, whose principal head He is Himself, but whose political and civil head is the pope, has two sides, the right and the left, that is the twofold people, the clerics and the laity. Therefore He, who created man of soul and body, ordai­ ned a double leadership in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. In the firmament of the Church He placed two great lights, both great but one greater: the authority of popes and the power of kings. The one light ruling the day, the spiritual, is the greater, whereas the carnal one is the lesser. The difference between the sun and the moon is as great as between the popes and the kings […] When the twelve apostles had received the mission to instil the Gospel into the world, and when their respective territories had been distributed among them, Saint Peter, the prince of the apostolic college, was sent to the stronghold of the Roman Empire to bring the light of truth to all nations under Roman rule and cast the anchor of the whole unwavering truth in that city, afflicted most horribly by the cult of all gods. Here all the philosophical tenets should be trampled upon, here the vanity of earthly wisdom should be annulled, here the worship of the many demons should be destroyed, here the impious sacrifices should be abolished – here, where all idle errors and superstitions ever invented had been amassed with such utmost exactitude. (author’s translation)]

A shared mental and temporal space The biblical narrative, i.e. the Creation, Fall, Incarnation, Redemption, and Judge­ ment, was the overall frame of reference. The collective memory, officially welldefined, provided words to speak, images to watch and imagine, relics to vener­ ate, gestures to perform, and sacraments to receive, at regular intervals. Churches and cathedrals with their images and sculptures formed a Zeitenraum, a “tem­ poral space” (Ohly 1977) visualising the decisive moments in salvation history (Oexle 1999b). The liturgical year reminded of these basic events in biblical history and of the model lives and deaths of the Saints. The whole universe was symbolic: the visible world signified the invisible. Through its liturgy, preaching, sacraments and blessings, the Church permeated and ritualised every moment in the life even of lay persons. The Church offered formulas, images painted or graven, gestures, crosses, medals, holy water, candles, ashes, palm leaves and other material reminders and rites de passage for every occasion in an individual lifespan. Everyone was expected to attend Mass on Sundays and holy days of obli­ gation, to memorise the Creed and the essential prayers – Our Father and Hail Mary – and, after the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, to make complete confes­

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sion to the local priest at least once a year of all sins recalled after a thorough examination of conscience (Angenendt 2009). From all sides the individual was threatened by uncertainties, by unre­ deemed, demoniac forces. Human existence was experienced as highly dra­ matic and eristic: every moment, charged with risks and possibilities, asked for a personal decision between good and evil, God and the devil, heaven and hell, indescribable bliss or eternal terror (Piltz 1995). The departed were prayed for, to shorten their cleansing sojourn in Purgatory. The means to help one’s rela­ tives and friends in the hereafter were strictly regulated: prayer, penance, fasting, alms, indulgences, and, above all, the sacrifice of the Mass. The saints, the cham­ pions of faith, now members of the heavenly court, were adopted as patrons and advocates in the struggle to reach the ultimate meaning of life, the beatific vision of God, but it was vital to mobilise even the intercession of one’s earthly friends. No borders existed between the living and the dead; hence the urgency to keep the departed in living memory (Molland 1976). The juridical importance of collective memory must not be underestimated in medieval Scandinavian culture. Whereas written documents were normally used in legal cultures to prove a marriage and the dowry and dower rights, in Sweden, the oral legal culture rested heavily on witnesses. The written form was not obli­ gatory for the validity of a legal act. The lawful performance of the betrothal or trothplight – rather than its written manifestation – was considered decisive (Kor­ piola 2009, 68).

Memory as bearing in mind The Judaeo-Christian tradition is, to a great extent, a matter of memory. Commem­ oration (Hebrew zikkaron, Gr. anamnesis, Lat. memoria), the cultic remembrance and re-telling of an archetypical situation in the past, is an essential element of the Old Testament. In the law concerning the altar (Exodus 20:24), the primor­ dial event, the covenant between God and Israel, undertaken on Mount Sinai, is recalled “in every place where I cause my name to be remembered”. The same happens when the covenant is renewed (Deuteronomy 5:3): “Not with our ances­ tors did the Lord make this covenant, but with us, who are all of us here alive today.” Material monuments marked important events in the past: Jacob’s pillar (Genesis 35:14), Samuel’s stone (1 Samuel 7:12), the stones of remembrance on Aron’s ephod (Exodus 39:7). Trumpets reminded God of his promises (Numbers 19:10), and ‘remind’ is a common verb in scriptural prayers: “You who remind the Lord, take no rest, and give him no rest until he establishes Jerusalem” (Isaiah 62:6–7). Personal piety consists in remembering what God has done and ordered.



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The rainbow is a reminder of the primordial covenant between God and every living creature (Genesis 9:13) and Psalm 105:5 reads: “Remember the wonderful works he has done, his miracles, and the judgement he uttered.” Above all else, the commandments must never be forgotten: “You shall put these words of mine in your heart and soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and fix them as an emblem on your forehead” (Deuteronomy 11:18). This text, written and kept in small black leather boxes (phylacteries or tefillin), are worn by observant Jews even today. On the other hand, the wicked will be cursed by oblivion (damnatio memoriæ): “The memory of the righteous is a blessing, but the name of the wicked will rot” (Proverbs 10:7), a punishment which threatened even the prophet Jeremiah: “Let us cut him off from the land of the living, so that his name will no longer be remembered” (Jeremiah 11:19). These aspects of memory and oblivion are present also in the New Testament: “[God] has remembered his holy covenant” (Luke 1:72) and “Your prayers and your alms have ascended as a memorial before God” (Acts 10:4). Jesus commends the woman who anointed his body in advance, some days before his burial: “Where­ ver the Gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her” (Mark 14:10). The mutual intercession among Christians is expressed by the formula mneian poiein [make remembrance] (e.g. Romans 1:9) or mneian echein [have remembrance] (e.g. 2 Timothy 1:3). ‘Praying for’ is the same as ‘bearing in mind’ (Neumann 2009). The essential cultic act in Christianity, the Eucharist, was ordained by Jesus with the command: “Do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19). The whole eucharistic rite re-presents the sacrifice of Christ, offered once and for all on the Cross, and makes it present and operative by its effects on the communicants in all subsequent centuries (Dix 1945). The Four Gospels were written down and canonised in order to rescue all that Jesus had said and done from oblivion (John 20:30–31). The narratives are constantly repeated, in services and privately, and thus kept in memory by the Christian congregations as the most substantial part of its collective memory. The Gospels were even called “the memoirs (apomnemoneumata) of the apostles” (Justinus, Apologia I, 66; about AD 155). The whole of Christian practice aims at keeping up the memory of sacred history, recorded in the Bible and re-presented and performed in the cult. The celebration of the liturgy during the year re-actualises the founding events of bib­ lical history (Piltz 1991). These concepts, ideas and practices of memory, remembrance, and comme­ moration were perpetuated in the successive Christian centuries. The anamnesis, the recalling of Christ’s life, death and resurrection, seemed to be a mandatory ingredient after the Words of Institution in all early Christian eucharistic rites

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(Hänggi and Pahl 1968, passim; Martimort 1983, 43), including the Canon prayer of the Roman Rite, used everywhere in medieval Scandinavia.

Memory as commemorating the dead In the Hellenistic culture, anamnesis, a ritual remembrance ceremony, played a considerable role in societal life: the commemoration of a deceased person and/ or an event in the past was celebrated in sponsored festivals, although without meals. Not so in Rome: there a funeral was accompanied by a refrigerium, a meal nearby the grave, to keep alive the memory of the deceased. Such meals suc­ cessively lost their religious significance and became more folklore (Mohrmann 1953). To counteract oblivion, which could endanger the destiny of souls in the afterlife, memory and commemoration must be institutionalised by individuals, families and communities. The concern for the welfare of souls would constantly increase and culminated in the late Middle Ages, when the northern regions had been firmly integrated in the Catholic Church. Pious foundations for the repose of souls were the core of the ecclesiastical economy in the high Middle Ages (Angenendt 2009, 496–499). Hence the entreaty on many runestones to pray for somebody’s soul (Beskow 1994). The eleventh century was the era of building churches, lodgings and bridges and the laying out of roads. There are a considerable number of runestones, over one hundred, in Sweden concerning bridges or embankments over marches, and the construction of such facilities were considered acts of piety if undertaken for the benefit of souls. An inscription from Näs, Uppland (U 347) reads, lefstein lit kera siR til sialu botar ok sini kunu… [Lífsteinn had the bridges made for himself for the salvation of his soul and that of his wife (til sialu botar)]. Two sisters in Kar­ berga in the same province raised a stone auk kera aur uta i sunti iftiR þuri faþur sin þur-- ...t kira siluaus iftR ink-þuru kunu sina… [U 996; …and [had] the ford made out in the sound in memory of Þórir, their father. Þórir(?) had the hospice made in memory of Ingiþóra, his wife…] (SRD)

The Mass for the repose of souls The last recorded words of Monica, the mother of Saint Augustine, were: “ponite, inquit, hoc corpus ubicumque, nihil vos eius cura conturbet. Tantum vos rogo ut ad Domini altare memineritis mei ubiubi fueritis” (Augustine, Confessiones, IX, 11, 27) [Put this body anywhere, don’t bother about that, but remember me at the altar of the Lord wherever you are (author’s translation)].



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The early Christian regular agape-meals for the members of a congregation disappeared when the Church became a compulsory fellowship, but the need for closer social gatherings remained. The Christian tradition amalgamated similar pre-Christian institutions, especially the Mithras cult and other forms of social meals, as well as the Germanic guilds. Originally, a guild (gilda) among the Germans was a brotherhood of young warriors around the cult of a hero; members took a pledge to assist one another in need. Christian saints replaced the cult heroes, and the intercession and the toast, (the Minne drinking, for deceased members remained an essential part of such regular gatherings [Black 1983, 3–14]). In every Mass, names were recited, if only silently, for certain persons who had contributed to the service and for the deceased on whose behalf the Mass was offered (the Memento for living and dead). Originally in the form of tablets (diptychs) on the altar, these lists were later organised in memorial books (libri memoriales), understood as the earthly equivalents of the “Book of Life” in the Revelation of John (3:5). Commemorating the anniversary of someone’s death became an important moral obligation of monasteries and cathedrals.

Case study: Scandinavian fraternities and guilds All these generally accepted practises in the medieval church can be amply attested in Scandinavia. That the eucharist should be offered on certain days for the deceased was part of Christian spirituality from the beginning in the Nordic regions. Examples, among innumerable other possibilities, include: the cathe­ dral chapter of Lund in 1136 established brotherly communion of mutual inter­ cession for the departed (Gebetsbrüderschaft) with the Benedictine monks in the town, and with the Augustine chapter of Dalby, and the Premonstratensian canons of Lund, later in Öved, and Tommarp (Nyberg 2015). The Necrologium Lundense, considered to be the oldest manuscript written in Scandinavia, may be dated to 1123 and contains the memoriale fratrum, short notices on deceased clerics and benefactors on the anniversary of their death, as a reminder to pray for them (Ekström 1985). Another ancient manuscript from Lund, the Liber daticus vetustior, was originally a martyrology, a calendar with short biographies of the saints, written in France c. 1135. It was brought to Lund and successively supple­ mented during the period from 1140 to 1410 with marginal notes about deceased locals, something that makes it a precious source for medieval Danish history, personal names and placenames. It comprises also a note on bishop Egino of Lund (d. 1072) as well as a biography of Saint Canute, martyred in 1086 in Odense (Nilsson Nylander 2015). The statutes of the chapter of canons in Lund, written

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in 1223, rule that matins and vespers should be said for a departed member daily for a week, and a mass for thirty days, and that alms should be distributed to the poor corresponding to the consumption of one person. Every priest should offer three masses, and other members of the chapter should recite one Psalter. Similar provisions are made for canons and monks of other communities (Consuetudines Lundenses, 173–178). All the Swedish provincial laws have provisions for requiem masses on the third, seventh, thirtieth day after, and the anniversary of, a person’s death (Piltz 1994).

Fraternities and guilds for intercession for the dead In the numerous guilds, i.e. associations of craftsmen, merchants, clerics or lay people of both sexes, in the late Middle Ages, the commemoration of departed members had a prominent place. A guild (Lat. convivium, sodalitas) was constitu­ ted by the oath, a legal obligation of solidarity with each and every member of the confraternity, and meals on regular occasions, which renewed this obligation and included a mass, spending of alms and ritual commemoration of the dead, not only of formally immatriculated members but also of their families (Oexle 1999a; Wallin 1975; Piltz 2012; Fallberg Sundmark 2016). Some 180 guilds are recorded in Sweden, of which 120 – probably only a small part of the total number – are known by name. In comparison, fifteenth-century England is estimated to have had some 30,000 guilds (Fallberg Sundmark 2016, 112).

Saint Birgitta on making amends for deceased sinners The certainty of belonging to a much greater community than the visible society meant that death did not constitute an absolute border but rather called for even greater solidarity in the one and same body, the church of living and dead, in a community of commemoration and reparation for the sins of the past (Piltz 1994). How tangibly this mandate to remember the dead was understood is dem­ onstrated by Saint Birgitta (d. 1373). In one of her Revelations, the Virgin Mary recommends intense prayers for a Swedish aristocrat, now in Purgatory, who had sinned in every conceivable way. The living may still make amends on his behalf with specific works of charity: Quia in gula tripliciter peccauit, primo laute et vltra mensuram comedendo et bibendo, secundo propter superbiam et ostentacionem plura fercula preparando, tercio nimis diu in



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mensa sedendo et opus Dei pretermittendo, et ideo, qui voluerit, colligat in honore Dei, qui est trinus et vnus, propter hanc triplicem gulam tres pauperes per vnum annum integrum, et ministret eis talia fercula et eque bona, qualia ipse personaliter comedit, qui colligit eos […] Insuper ministret illis tribus vestes sufficienter et lectisternia […] pro superbia, quam habuit multipliciter, debet, qui voluerit, colligere septem pauperes in qualibet septimana per vnum annum, quali die voluerit, et lauet pedes ipsorum […] Lotis autem pauperibus refi­ ciat eos, vt melius poterit et expedire eis viderit, et roget eos humiliter, vt orent pro anima illius […] quia peccauit in inani gloria et leticia, colligat, qui voluerit, omnes pauperes, qui sunt in curia eius vel vicinio eius, in quolibet mense semel per vnum annum […] Dicta autem missa reficiantur omnes pauperes taliter, quod recedant de convivio leti, vt defunc­ tus letetur precibus eorum et pauperes letentur de refeccione. (Sancta Birgitta. Revelationes. Book VI, 10 6–20) [Because he sinned in three ways through gluttony, namely, by eating and drinking sump­ tuously and beyond measure, then by preparing meals of many courses due to pride and ostentation, and, finally, by sitting too long at table and missing divine services, someone should therefore, in reparation for his threefold gluttony and also in honour of the triune God, voluntarily support three paupers for an entire year. He should serve them food of the same kind and quality as he himself eats. […] Moreover, he should provide suffici­ ent clothing and beds for them […] in reparation for the pride that he had in abundance, someone should voluntarily bring together seven paupers on a day of his choosing once a week for an entire year. He should humbly wash their feet […] Once they have been washed, he should feed them as best he can and as he sees fit. He should then ask them humbly to pray for that man’s soul […] because he sinned through vanity and pleasure, someone should voluntarily gather all the poor people under his care or in his neighbourhood once a month for a full year […] Once the mass has been said, refreshment should be served to all the poor so that they may leave the gathering in a pleasant spirit. Thus the departed soul will have the pleasure of their prayers and the poor will have the pleasure of the refresh­ ments. (Searby 2012, 6–10)]

Memory as mental faculty and access to God Augustine (d. 430), the incomparably most influential of the Latin Fathers, inquires into the hidden depths of the memory faculty, “abstrusior profunditas nostræ memoriæ” (De Trinitate, XV, 21, 40; Karnes 2011, 72). He imagines memory spatially: Venio in campos et lata praetoria memoriae, ubi sunt thesauri innumerabilium imaginum de cuiuscemodi rebus sensis invectarum […] vel augendo vel minuendo vel utcumque variando ea quae sensus attigerit […] quod nondum absorbuit et sepelivit oblivio […] Item continet memoria numerorum dimensionumque rationes et leges innumerabiles, quarum nullam corporis sensus inpressit […] et meminisse me memini, sicut postea quod haec remi­ nisci nunc potui. (Confessiones, X, 8, 12–13)

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[I come into these fields and spacious palaces of my memory, where the treasures of innu­ merable forms, brought into it from these things that have been perceived by the senses, are hoarded up […] by way of enlarging and diminishing […] which forgetfulness has not swal­ lowed up and buried; […] for there I have heaven and earth, the sea and whatever I could per­ ceive in them […] The memory contains also the reasons and innumerable laws of numbers and dimensions, none of which have been imprinted in it by any sense of the body […] And I remember myself to have remembered, as I shall hereafter call to remembrance that I have been able to remember those things now. (Watts 1919 [1912], slightly modernised)]

These concepts and abstractions have no sensual quality, and yet they are stored in the memory, and we have invented words to signify them: Neque ullo sensu corporis attigi neque uspiam vidi praeter animum meum […] et in memoria recondidi non imagines earum, sed ipsas: quae unde ad me intraverint, dicant, si possunt. (Confessiones, X, 8, 10) [As for the things themselves which are signified by those sounds, I never so much as reach them otherwise than by my very mind […] yet I have laid up not their images only, but their very selves. How they got into me, let them tell if they can. (Watts 1919 [1912], slightly mod­ ernised)]

The happy life which every human being aspires to in this miserable existence would not be longed for if it did not already exist in the memory of everyone, as a distant but real and collective idea of the lost beatitude of Paradise before the Fall: “beati fuimus aliquando, […] in illo homine qui primus peccavit” (Confessiones, X. 20, 29) [as in that man (Adam) who first sinned]. Yet it cannot be some­ thing ever perceived by the corporeal senses: Ubi ergo et quando expertus sum vitam meam beatam, ut recorder eam et amem et desi­ derem? Nec ego tantum aut cum paucis, sed beati prorsus omnes esse volumus. Quod nisi certa notitia nossemus, non tam certa voluntate vellemus. (Confessiones, X, 21, 31) [Where, therefore, and when did I have any feeling of a happy life that I should remember and love and long for? Nor is it my desire alone, or of some few besides, but everybody would indeed be happy. Unless we had notice of it by some certain knowledge, we should not with so certain a will desire it. (Watts 1919 [1912], slightly modernised)]

This is an instance of Augustine’s Platonic persuasion that learning something is tantamount to recalling (anamnesis, proeidénai) what was already present in the mind: “Memoria is the whole potential knowledge of an individual mind at any one time” (Markus 1970, 371; Karnes 2011, 72; Oeing-Hanhoff 1971). Rational knowledge, therefore, enters the mind not from outside but is present to it from within. Its ultimate foundation is God’s intimate presence in the human mind, since man was created in the likeness of God. Memory is the access



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to God. In turning towards him, the mind makes itself deliberately present to him, and this is called by Augustine “remembering God”: Tanta vis est memoriae, tanta vitae vis est in homine vivente mortaliter! […] Transibo et hanc vim meam quae memoria vocatur […] volens te attingere, unde attingi potes, et inhae­ rere tibi, unde inhaereri tibi potest. […] Transibo et memoriam, ut ubi te inveniam, vere bone et secura suavitas, ut ubi te inveniam? Si praeter memoriam meam te invenio, immemor tui sum. Et quomodo iam inveniam te, si memor non sum tui? (Confessiones, X, 17, 26) [So great is the force of memory, so great is the force of life, even in man living as mortal […] I will pass beyond this faculty of mine which is called memory, desirous to touch you, whence you may be touched, and to cleave fast to you, whence one may cleave to you. […] I will soar beyond my memory, that I may find you, where, o You truly Good, and You secure Sweetness? Where shall I be able to find you? If I now find you not by my memory, then I am unmindful of you. And how shall I find you, if I do not remember you? (Watts 1919 [1912], slightly modernised)]

Meditation and affective memory The ancient techniques of memorising (ars memoriæ, ars memorativa) were practised through the Middle Ages (Yates 2016 [1966]; Carruthers 2008). Various medieval authors display the basic principle of classical mnemonics, often with the help of images. As Hugh of St Victor (about 1130) puts it, “the whole useful­ ness of education consists only in the memory of it” (Carruthers 2008, 101). The extensive text corpuses of the Scholastics (Decretum Gratiani, Glossa ordinaria, Libri sententiarum of Lombardus, Auctoritates Aristotelis, the encyclopedias and the Summæ) can be considered as aids, devised and compiled to help students memorise the essential teachings, tenets and rulings of the great philosophers and ecclesiastical authorities (Oexle 1999a). Meditation was an important part of a monk’s calling. It comprised lectio divina, the close reading of a chosen passage of the Scriptures, followed by prayerful reflecting on it and memorising it in constant repetition (ruminatio) of the same words, performed in order to increase love of God. Reading aloud was considered a form of corporal exercise and the most effective aid to internalise the sacred words with the help of the corporeal (muscular) memory (Leclercq 1978, 90). Around 1100 a new epoch began in the development of western spiritual­ ity: a deliberate effort to imagine intensely the earthly life of Jesus and all the circumstances of the biblical scenery, the events, the actions, the lines uttered in the Gospel narratives, and to fill in, with personal involvement, what is not said in the text. Such an approach was inspired by the sermons of Bernard of

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Clairvaux (d. 1153), and it grew later into a literary genre of its own (Dinzelbacher 1999; Angenendt 2009, 537–541). The seminal texts were the Lignum vitae of Saint Bonaventure (1217–1274), and the Meditationes vitae Christi, formerly attributed to Bonaventure, now thought to be written by the fourteenth-century Franciscan friar John de Caulibus. John invites, in a vivid, visual, sensuous style, his female reader, a Poor Clare, to imagine the Gospel scenes as if the events described were actually tangible. From Ch. 75 on, the meditation follows Christ’s passion, death and entombment hour by hour, in line with the canonical hours of the divine office during a day: hora matutinali (Gethsemane), ad primam (trial, scourging), ad terciam (carrying the cross), in sexta et hora nona (crucifixion, death), in vesperis (deposition), and hora completorii (burial). The core of this method is the advice to be attentive to every detail: Attende igitur ad singula ac si presens esses; si […] uis intelligenciam et consolacionem habere […] recordare de his que supra sepius dixi, ut scilicet in omnibus locis et factis ita sis animo ac si presens esses et corpore […] Eligens ergo in his meditandis aliquam horam quietam, postea intra diem poteris discere moralitates et auctoritates et eas studiose memorie commendare. (Meditationes vitae Christi, 256, 5; 307, 10–13; 350, 14–17) [Observe every detail as if you were personally present […] If you want to understand and be comforted […] remember what I have often said above: in all places and events you should have the same sentiments as if you were corporally present […] Chose some quiet hour during the day to commit eagerly these moral lessons and assertions to memory. (author’s translation)]

The author then suggests his reader to adopt a strict program: to start on Mondays meditating on Christ’s infancy, to continue on Tuesdays with his youth and first public appearance, on Wednesdays consider his public ministry, on Thursdays his passion, on Fridays and Saturdays each single stage of his sufferings, his death and resurrection, and on Sundays his appearances, his ascension into heaven and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. The exercises should be repea­ ted systematically in imitation of Saint Cecilia (Meditationes vitae Christi, 350, 20–31). A chant in the office on Saint Cecilia’s day has it: “semper evangelium Christi gerebat in pectore suo, non diebus neque noctibus a colloquiis divinis et oratione cessabat” (Corpus antiphonalium officii, n. 7902) [She always carried the Gospel in her heart, day and night incessantly praying and conversing with God. (author’s translation)] Such was the method handed down to later generations in numerous “lives of Christ”. The most influential of later followers is the Vita Jesu Christi by the Car­ thusian Ludolph of Saxony, who lived c. 1295–1378 (Baier 1999). The same current in later medieval spirituality, the keen interest taken in the humanity of Christ and in the Holy Family, especially the compassion of Mary at the Cross, also led



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to the introduction of the Christmas crèche, by Saint Francis himself, the Calvary, the Stations of the Cross, and other material aids to facilitate pious imagination (in Sweden: Härdelin 2003). The same kind of immersing and projecting oneself into a biblical scene was practised also by the Devotio moderna community, and it later influenced Ignatius of Loyola and his Spiritual Exercises (Kieckhefer 1988). Such practical spirituality was popularised even among the laity, by means of so-called Books of Hours (livres d’heures), simplified breviaries, normally begin­ ning with the Marian short office, officium parvum Beatae Mariae Virginis (Clayton 1990, 63–89), but often also containing the short office Hours of the Cross, begin­ ning with the stanza Patris sapientia, veritas divina (Analecta hymnica, 30, 13). This hymn is found 19 times in the extant manuscripts from Vadstena monastery, now kept in Uppsala (Mittelalterliche Handschriften, 7, 328; König and Bartz 1998). As a rule, this hymn was followed by a verse and a prayer, and the single hours were attached to the events of Christ’s passion, in the same vein as in Meditationes vitae Christi. In the first printed prayerbook in Sweden, the Hours of Our Lady (Horae de Domina, Vadstena 1495), the little office De sancta Cruce is not missing; in the spiritual life of ordinary people in the late fifteenth-century Sweden, it was obviously one of the staple commodities in great demand. On the eve of the Reformation, there were probably over 50,000 Books of Hours or Primers in circulation among the English laity (Duffy 2005, 7; Angenendt 2009, 486). The many English private prayerbooks still extant in libraries and archives are valuable even as sources of mentality history and sociology (Duffy 2006). Even in Scandinavia, a comparatively great number of prayerbooks are preserved, almost without exception manufactured in the female monastery of Vadstena (Svenska böner 1907–1909; Hedström 2016). These Books of Hours were especially important for women, and the Blessed Virgin Mary was often portrayed in them as a young woman contemplating in her closed chamber with a prie-dieu, reading a small prayer-book (Hedström 2016). This image represented the ideal of imitatio Mariae, in keeping alive the constant remembrance of the single most decisive moment in history, when the destiny of humankind, Adam’s miserable children, depended on the readiness, consent and cooperation of a teenage girl, according to a famous sermon by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (Homiliæ, 4).

4 Perspectives for future research The examples used attest that philosophy and theology in the Middle Ages, and long after that, were pursued in Latin. Research in these fields must be under­

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taken in close connexion with Latinists and depend on trustworthy editions of texts. There are still many unexplored texts. The most impressive collection of manuscripts in Scandinavia are the remains of the monastic library of Vadstena, the C collection, now in Uppsala University Library. The Brigittine monastery traces its origin back to 1346 and its formal consecration took place in 1384. The monastery itself survived the Protestant Reformation until 1595, a remarkable record. Most of the manuscripts in Latin, nearly 400 volumes, are catalogued in a detailed way, but not exploited so far by scholars (Mittelalterliche Handschriften 1988–1995). The collection contains numerous texts on natural science and math­ ematics. One of the brothers, Petrus Astronomus, manufactured the great clock in the cathedral of Uppsala (1513, later ruined by fire), something which presup­ poses advanced calculations. Aristotle, including his books on natural philoso­ phy, was amply represented in the University of Uppsala, as could be expected, but there are also texts by John of Sacrobosco, Occam, Buridan, Nicolas Oresme and Raimundus Lullus (Härdelin and Hedlund, 1990). Vadstena is of special interest due to its intense public activity in late medieval Sweden. Much remains to explore in this centre of spiritual radiance. (An example of various aspects on the C collection are the thirteen studies published in Risberg 2006.) The card index of the cataloguers contains more than 10,000 sermons, alt­ hough it is not evident how many of these were actually composed and held by Vadstena brothers. It has been estimated that 120 sermons were given ad populum at the abbey every year. If multiplied with the 135 years the monastery existed that makes 16,200 sermons in all, and about 5000 of them are still extant. Vadstena attracted ten thousands of pilgrims each year, even from Germany, Holland and Scotland (Borgehammar 1995), and exercised an incomparable influence.

Works cited Primary sources Analecta hymnica medii ævi. I–LV. Ed. Guido M. Dreves, Clemens Blume and Henry M. Bannister. Leipzig, 1866–1922. Aurelius Augustinus. Confessiones. I–XXII. Ed. Pius Knöll. Vindobonæ, 1898. Aurelius Augustinus. De Trinitate. Corpus Christianorum, series Latina, 50; 50A. Ed. W.J. Mountain, Turnholti, 1968. Bernardus Clarevallensis (Bernard of Clairvaux). Opera omnia. Editio Cisterciensis. 4. Romæ. 1966. Conciliorum œcumenicorum decreta. Editio tertia. Curantibus J. Alberigo, Perikle-P. Joannou, Claudio Leonardi, Paulo Prodi and consultante Huberto Jedin. Bologna, 1973.



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Consuetudines Lundenses. Statutter for kannikesamfundet i Lund c. 1123. Ed. Erik Buus. Copenhagen, 1978. Corpus antiphonalium officii. Rerum ecclesiasticarum documenta. Series maior. Fontes 9–10. Ed. René-Jean Hesbert. Romæ, 1968–1970. Ericus Olai. Chronica regni Gothorum. Ed. Ella Heuman and Jan Öberg. Acta universitatis Stockholmiensis. Studia Latina Stockholmiensia, 35. Stockholm, 1993. Horae de Domina. Vår Frus Tider. Studier, transkription, översättning och faksimil av inkunabeln från Vadstena klostertryckeri 1495. Ed. Johnny Hagberg. Skara stiftshistoriska sällskap skriftserie, 36. Skara, 2008. 160–164. Justinus, Apologia I, 66. Migne, Patrologia græca, 6. 428. Ludolphus de Saxonia [Ludolph of Saxony]. Vita Jesu Christi e quattuor evangeliis et scriptoribus orthodoxis concinnata. Ed. A. C. Bolard, L. M. Rigollot and J. Carnandet. Analecta Cartusiana, 241. Salzburg, 2006–2007 [1865]. Meditationes vitae Christi. Ed. Mary Stallings-Taney. Corpus Christianorum. Continuatio mediaeualis, CLIII. Turnholti, 1997. Mittelalterliche Handschriften der Universitätsbibliothek. Katalog über die C-Sammlung. Ed. Margarete Andersson-Schmitt, Håkan Hallberg and Monica Hedlund. 1–8. Uppsala, 1988–1995. Prex eucharistica. Textus e variis liturgiis antiquioribus selecti. Editio secunda. Ed. Anton Hänggi and, Irmgard Pahl, Johannes Wagner, Albert Gerhards and Paul de Clerck. Fribourg, 1968. The Revelations of St. Birgitta of Sweden. Vol. 3. Trans. Denis Searby. Introductions and notes by Bridget Morris. Oxford, 2012. Sancta Birgitta. Revelationes. Book VI. Ed. Birger Bergh. SFSS. Ser. 2. Latinska skrifter, VII:6. Stockholm, 1991. St. Augustine’s Confessions II. Trans. William Watts. London and New York, 1919 [1912]. SRD = Samnordisk runtextdatabas. http://www.nordiska.uu.se/forskn/samnord.htm. (14 February 2018). Svenska böner från medeltiden. Ed. Robert Geete. SFSS, 38. Stockholm, 1907–1909.

Secondary sources Angenendt, Arnold. 2009. Geschichte der Religiosität im Mittelalter. 4th ed. Darmstadt. Baier, Walter. 1999. “Meditationes vitae Christi.” In Lexikon des Mittelalters. VI. Darmstadt. 452. Beskow, Per. 1994. “Runor och liturgi.” In Nordens kristnande i europeiskt perspektiv. Ed. Per Beskow and Reinhart Staats. Occasional Papers on Medieval Topics, 8. Skara. 16–36. Black, Antony. 1983. Guilds and Civil Society in European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present. London. Borgehammar, Stephan. 1995. “Preaching to Pilgrims: Ad vincula Sermons at Vadstena Abbey.” In A Catalogue and Its Users. A Symposium on the Uppsala C Collection of Medieval Manuscipts. Ed. Monica Hedlund. Uppsala. Brown, Peter. 1996. The Rise of Western Christendom. Triumph and Diversity AD 200-1000. Oxford. 276–298. Carruthers, Mary. 2008. The Book of Memory. A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge.

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Clayton, Mary. 1990. The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Anglo-Saxon England. Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England, 2. Cambridge. Dinzelbacher, Peter. 1999. “Meditation.” In Lexikon des Mittelalters. VI. 450–452. Dix, Gregory. 1945. The Shape of the Liturgy. Glasgow. Duffy, Eamon. 2005. The Stripping of the Altars. Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580. New Haven and London. Duffy, Eamon. 2006. Marking the Hours. English People and their Prayers 1240–1570. New Haven and London. Ebbesen, Sten. 2002. Dansk middelaldersfilosofi ca 1170–1536. Copenhagen. Ekström, Per. 1985. Libri antiquiores Ecclesiæ et Capituli Lundensis. Lunds domkyrkas äldsta liturgiska böcker. Lund. Eriksen, Stefka G., ed. 2016. Intellectual Culture in Medieval Scandinavia, c. 1100–1350. Turnhout. Fallberg Sundmark, Stina. 2016. “Gillen i svensk medeltid. Organiserad gemenskap för levande och döda”. In Doften av rykande vekar. Reformationen ur folkets perspektiv. Ed. Fredrik Heiding and Magnus Nyman. Skellefteå. 111–136. Härdelin, Alf. 2003. I Kristi och hans moders spår. Om stationsandakter i Vadstena. Textutgåvor och analyser. Sällaskapet Runica et Mediævalia. Stockholm. Härdelin, Alf and Monica Hedlund, eds. 1990. Vadstena klosters bibliotek: ny katalog och nya forskningsmöjligheter = The monastic library of medieval Vadstena: a new catalogue and new potentials for research. Stockholm. Hedström, Ingela. 2016. “Tradition, variation, kontemplation. Bönböcker från svensk medeltid.” In Doften av rykande vekar. Reformationen ur folkets perspektiv. Ed. Fredrik Heiding and Magnus Nyman. Skellefteå. 137–167. Holtsmark, Anne. 1967. ”Memorialdiktning”. In KLNM XI: Cols. 524–526. Karnes, Michelle. 2011. Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages. Chicago and London. Kieckhefer, Richard. 1988. “Major Currents in Late Medieval Devotion.” In Christian Spirituality. High Middle Ages and Reformation. Ed. Jill Raitt. New York. 75–108. Kjær, Iver, et al. 1967. “Ordspråk”. In KLNM XII: Cols. 672–684. Kihlman, Erika. 2011. “Bero de Ludosia, Student and Teacher.” In Swedish Students at the University of Vienna in the Middle Ages. Ed. Olle Ferm and Erika Kihlman. Runica et mediaevalia, Scripta minora, 20. Stockholm. 88–133. König, E. and Bartz. G. 1998. Das Stundenbuch. Perlen der Buchkunst. Die Gattung in Handschriften der Vaticana. Darmstadt. 108–112. Korpiola, Mia. 2009. Between Betrothal and Bedding. Marriage Formation in Sweden 1200–1600. Leiden and Boston. Leclercq, Jean. 1978. The Love of Letters and the Desire for God. London. 89–95. Malm, Mats. 2016. “Two Cultures of Visual(ized) Cognition.” In Intellectual Culture in Medieval Scandinavia, c. 1100–1350. Ed. Stefka G. Eriksen.Turnhout. 309–334. Markus, R. A. 1970. “Augustine. Reason and Illumination.” In The Cambridge History of later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy. Ed. Arthur Hilary Armstrong. Cambridge. 362–373. Martimort, Aimé Georges. 1983. L’Église en prière. Introduction à la liturgie. II. L’Eucharistie. Paris. Mohrmann, Christine. 1953. “Locus refrigerii.” In L’ordinaire de la messe. Ed. Bernard Botte and Christine Mohrmann. Paris-Louvain. 123–132.



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Molland, Einar. 1976. “Årtidhold.” In KLNM XX: Cols. 453–457. Neumann, Klaus. 2009. “Gedächtnis/Erinnerung.” In Handbuch theologischer Grundbegriffe zum Alten und Neuen Testament. Ed. Angelika Berlejung and Christian Frevel. 2nd ed. Darmstadt. 202–203. Nilsson Nylander, Eva, ed. 2015. Mellan evighet och vardag. Lunds domkyrkas martyrologium Liber daticus vetustior (den äldre gåvoboken). Studier och faksimilupplaga, 10. Lund. Nyberg, Tore. 2015. “Broderlig bönegemenskap i 1100- och 1200-talens Lund.” In Nylander, ed., Mellan evighet och vardag. 179–190. Oeing-Hanhoff, Ludger. 1971. “Anamnesis.” In Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. 1. Basel. 263–266. Oexle, Otto Gerhard. 1999a. “Gilde.” In Lexikon des Mittelalters, IV. Stuttgart and Weimar. 1452–1453. Oexle, Otto Gerhard. 1999b. “Memoria, Memorialüberlieferung.” In Lexikon des Mittelalters. VI. Stuttgart and Weimar. 510–513. Ohly, Ernst Friedrich. 1977. “Die Kathedrale als Zeitenraum. Zum Dom von Siena.” In Schriften zur mittelalterlichen Bedeutungsforschung. Ed. Ernst Friedrich Ohly. Darmstadt. 171–273. Piltz, Anders. 1977. Studium Upsalense. Specimens of the Oldest Lecture Notes Taken in the Mediaeval University of Uppsala. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Skrifter rörande Uppsala universitet. C. Organisation och historia, 36. Uppsala. Piltz, Anders. 1986. “Magister Mathias of Sweden in his Theological Context: A Preliminary Survey.” In The Editing of Theological and Philosophical Texts from the Middle Ages. Acts of the Conference arranged by the Department of Classical Languages, University of Stockholm, 29–31 August 1984. Ed. Monika Asztalos. Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis. Studia Latina Stockholmiensia, 30. Stockholm. 137–160. Piltz, Anders. 1991. “Än som i gången tid. Mysterieteologi från fornkyrka till nutid.” In Florilegium patristicum. En festskrift till Per Beskow. Ed. Gösta Hallonsten, Sten Hidal and Samuel Rubenson. Delsbo. 146–167. Piltz, Anders. 1994. “Communicantes. Aspekter på kyrkan som solidarisk gemenskap i svensk högmedeltid.” In Svensk spiritualitet. Tio studier om förhållandet tro-kyrka-praxis. Ed. Oloph Bexell et al. Uppsala. 15–55. Piltz, Anders. 1995. “I begynnelsen var idén.” In Signums svenska konsthistoria. Den romanska konsten. 3. Ed. Lennart Karlsson, Mereth Lindgren, Margreta Nockert et al. Lund. 7–25. Piltz, Anders. 2012. Det gråtande djuret. Människans mångtydighet i europeisk tradition. Skellefteå. 147–189. Risberg, Sara, ed. 2006. Dicit Scriptura. Studier i C-samlingen tillägnade Monica Hedlund. Sällskapet Runica et Mediævalia. Stockholm. Wallin, Curt. 1975. Knutsgillena i det medeltida Sverige. Stockholm. Yates, Frances. 2016 [1966]. The Art of Memory. London.

Simon Nygaard and Jens Peter Schjødt

I: 3 History of Religion 1 Definition

Religion may generally be viewed as an adaptive symbolic meaning system or world view (Rappaport 1999, 409–410; Geertz 1973, 90). It draws its meaning from feelings of community and the idea that the beings that inhabit the Other World – which according to this world view exists in addition to the world inhab­ ited by humans – can influence the human world. Additionally, communication between these worlds must take place – often through rituals – in order for the humans to make the influence beneficial to them. Pre-Christian Nordic religion may then be viewed as the world view and rituals of, broadly speaking, the North Germanic-speaking cultural area in the Roman and Germanic Iron Ages, and the Viking Age, where Christianity gradually gained ground and became the prevail­ ing religion. When working with pre-Christian Nordic religion, various forms of diversity in religion should be expected (e.g. social, temporal, geographic and cognitive diversity; Schjødt 2009). This makes matters of group identity – like religion – hard to tackle, but a complete arbitrariness and total discontinuity within this diversity does not apply either. Instead, discursive spaces or spaces of possible expression within pre-Christian Nordic religion (Schjødt 2012) can be utilised to argue for both continuity over time and a common tradition within the diversity. Here the concept of cultural memory is very relevant (Nygaard forth­ coming). While the Old Norse written sources for pre-Christian Nordic religion all stem from the Middle Ages (mainly thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Iceland and Norway) and thus from a Christian context, it is also generally accepted that many of them stem from an oral tradition reaching back to pre-Christian, oral societies (Gunnell 2016; Meulengracht Sørensen 1991).

2 State of research Seemingly, no systematic interest in memory studies has been taken within the dis­ cipline of history of religion. On the one hand, this situation is exemplified well by one of the latest general anthologies on memory studies (Erll and Nünning 2010), where parts are dedicated to various disciplines such as history and media, but nowhere do we encounter religion treated separately. On the other hand, in recent handbooks on the study of religion (e.g. Braun and McCutcheon 2000; Stausberg https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-009



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2009) theories on memory are not treated to any extent (there are exceptions to this, for instance in the French tradition, e.g. Borgeaud and Basset 1988). This is also the case in the field of pre-Christian Nordic religion, since using memory studies within pre-modern Nordic studies is a relatively new phenomenon (see Hermann et al. 2014; Hermann and Mitchell 2013). In the sociology of religion (e.g. Hervieu-Léger 2006) and the cognitive science of religion (e.g. Schjoedt et al. 2013; Xygalatas et al. 2013), however, memory studies have found a firmer foothold. Throughout the history of the discipline history of religion it has been stated numerous times that rituals, for instance, are essentially about remembering events that took place in the past. From Émile Durkheim, Mircea Eliade and other founding fathers of the discipline, this has been regarded as an implicit fact (Durk­heim 1995 [1912], 331–337; Eliade 1957, 45). But remembering and memory have not been dwelt on as explicit traits by scholars of religion. Thus, the memory studies approach is new, but some of the realisations that come with it have been around for a long time in some form or the other: Religion and especially myths and rituals are generally about the past, be it the near past of an old man, who remembers which crisis rituals were performed last time the village experienced famine or draught, or a cosmogonic myth set in illo tempore. This entry explores this situation by looking at the relationship between memory, ritual and religion. While seemingly no systematic interest has been taken, some scholars have explicitly dealt with memory studies and religion. The German Egyptologist Jan Assmann (e.g. 2006 [2000]) is the main religion and memory-scholar, since his work on Egyptian religion (e.g. 1984) has been instrumental in the conceptuali­ sation of cultural memory. Assmann’s approach functions as a theoretical start­ ing point for this entry (see below). British anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse (2000) has worked with religion and memory from a cognitive psychological angle. Employing the psychological terms episodic and semantic memory, he links these terms to his two proposed modes of religiosity, the imagistic (multivo­ cal, sporadic, and episodic) and the doctrinal (codified, routinised, and ‘general’) (Whitehouse 2000, 1), often at play within the same religious tradition. As such, these modes of religiosity employ both episodic and semantic memory, as they are ubiquitous cognitive processes, but the doctrinal mode employs seman­ tic memory to a greater degree, while the imagistic mode makes greater use of episodic memory. The routine use of repeated dogma, liturgies and other rituals in the doctrinal modes embeds the religious experiences in semantic memory, while the rather sporadic use of, for example, initiation rituals in the imagistic mode employs traumatic experiences which create long-lasting episodic memo­ ries (Whitehouse 2000, 9–11). Much work in the history of religion begins with collective phenomena, a tradition that can be traced back to Émile Durkheim. This is criticised by French anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Pascal

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Boyer from a cognitive perspective, where he advocates beginning at the level of communication between individuals. To avoid what he calls “extreme cultural entropy” (Boyer 2009, 291), findings from experimental psychology should be utilised. Here, the concept of cognitive predispositions that are specific to various human domains secure that the cultural transmission between individuals is not arbitrary – our brain knows what to expect and in which direction to lead the information it receives. Danish scholar of religion Hans J. Lundager Jensen (2008) has stressed the relevance of memory studies in the study of religion by stating, “For hvis kultur er hukommelse […] og hvis (som jeg her tager for givet) religion er kultur (i betydnin­ gen afgrænselige symbolske systemer), så er religion naturligvis hukommelse.” (Lundager Jensen 2008, 7) [Because if culture is memory […] and if (as I here take for granted) religion is culture (understood as delimited systems of symbols), then, naturally, religion is memory. (authors’ translation)] This observation builds on an understanding of religion, leading back to Durkheim, that views it as an adaptive symbolic system, as mentioned above. Thus, there is a close relationship between religion and memory and this is why it also seems relevant to pursue the use of memory studies in history of religions.

3 Pre-Modern Nordic material: Memory, ritual and religion Since Old Norse society was an oral society, memory studies can provide a theo­ retical framework for understanding how religion may have functioned and been transmitted in such a society. Following Assmann, as well as Lundager Jensen, religion can be seen as a primary constituent of cultural memory, especially in oral societies, and crucial to the forming of group identity and tradition in such societies. Pre-Christian Nordic religion fits firmly in the category that Assmann (inspired by Sundermeier 1987) calls “primary religions”, and thus we expect certain things about pre-Christian Nordic religion to fit with this category when we look at the sources. At the same time, we have an idea of what not to expect – mainly traits from the radically different category, secondary religion (Assmann 2006 [2000], 123). Essential to primary religions is that they are firmly grounded in cult and that they are primarily orally transmitted, and keeping the oral prov­ enance of pre-Christian Nordic religion in mind, it is thus relevant to examine the relationship between memory, ritual and religion. Following Assmann, memory in oral societies can be classified in the fol­ lowing way: 1. Individual memory, or an embodied storehouse (Hermann forth­



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coming), i.e. memory kept in the minds of specialists trained to remember large amounts of information (myths, rituals and so on). 2. Collective memory, which is social and shared. Assmann (2010) speaks of both communicative and cultural memory, but it is cultural memory which is most relevant when working with preChristian Nordic religion. The cultural memory of a group is mediated by ritual and memory specialists through ritual reconstruction and without writing, ritual becomes the chief means of preserving tradition, memory or religion in any oral society (Assmann 2006 [2000], 39–40; Hermann forthcoming). When, however, such rituals are not performed anymore – when a gradual change in religion takes place, for example – the tradition is broken. Still, medie­ val textual versions of myths can contain motifs and crystallised images of, for instance, pre-Christian rituals. Taking into account Whitehouse’s use of the terms episodic and semantic memory, one might argue that some of these ritual descriptions are part of our sources because they created an episodic memory. An example could be Hákonar saga góða [The Saga of Hákon the Good], Ch. 17 where King Hákon creates an episodic memory in the minds of the participants in the ritual at Hlaðir by refusing to toast to the gods and take part in the ritual meal of horse meat. Something out of the ordinary happened during this particular ritual performance, while the ritual description in Ch. 14 of the same saga seems to have been part of a semantic memory as it is a general description (the ritual descrip­ tions in Hákonar saga góða have been critically assessed by Düwel 1985, who in turn has been criticised by e.g. Hultgård 1993; Sundqvist 2016, 316–359). Such ritual descriptions are, however, very scarce in the Old Norse textual corpus, and none of the preserved instances explicitly describe remembering the past in a religious, ritual manner. So how do we argue that rituals in the preChristian North had the function ascribed to them by Assmann? One perspective on this matter is Terry Gunnell’s ‘performance archaeology’ approach to eddic and skaldic poetry (e.g. Gunnell 2016, forthcoming). Gunnell reassesses a tradi­ tion stemming from scholars like Dame Bertha Phillpotts (1920) and John Stanley Martin (1972), putting an emphasis on Old Norse poetry as originally intended for oral performance, in some cases as rituals. The details of such an approach can, of course, be criticised, but in general it seems convincing and in line with oral traditions around the world (Foley 2002). Moreover, paired with Assmann’s thoughts on cultural memory in oral societies, this view seems particularly fruit­ ful. Cultural memory in oral societies consists of everything the individual needs to know about the group’s traditions, culture and religion in order to function in the group (Assmann 2006 [2000], 24). The term tradition seems particularly apt in this context, as it by definition refers to the past. As indicated above, cultural memory is transmitted through rituals, and in the concrete logic of primary reli­

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gions, the world will collapse if the rituals are not performed properly, making the ritual paramount to the transmission and preservation of cultural memory (i.e. religion or tradition). According to Assmann (2006 [2000], 39), three func­ tions need to be fulfilled in order for this to take place in oral societies: 1) Preservation. In oral societies, cultural memory is often preserved in a poetic form, which makes it easier to remember over time, but it is uncertain how unchanged with respect to form such poems can be (Gunnell 2016). By viewing ritual as a structured medium capable of preserving and transmit­ ting information possibly (but not necessarily) almost verbatim from genera­ tion to generation continuity can be argued for (Assmann 2010). 2) Retrieval. This happens in the oral, performative act of the ritual (Rappa­ port 1999, 114–119), where the cultural memory is reconstructed in the inter­ action between a performer and the audience and it is context dependant. This context, or ritual framework, gives the poems reality along with the use of sound as a way to underpin the poems’ narrative content (Gunnell 2016, 94–96). The performer brings the past to the audience’s present, either as an intermediary between past and present (primarily in poems in the fornyrðislag metre), or making past and present appear at the same time (primarily in poems in the ljóðaháttr metre) (Gunnell 2016, 96–101). 3) Communication. By participating in the ritual performance of cultural memory, the group’s coherence, cultural identity and religious world view are created and maintained, and in this way, cultural memory is reconstructed in the minds of the pre-Christian northerners. Accepting such theories enables us to find instances of rituals of remembering embedded in for instance Old Norse poems in their proposed ritualised perfor­ mance. These poems can then work as sources for examining cultural memory, showing future perspectives in using memory studies in the study of pre-Chris­ tian Nordic religion. The eddic poem Grímnismál [Grímnir’s Sayings] as a representation of a performative piece of oral-connected cultural memory offers a useful example, keeping in mind Assmann’s definition of cultural memory as “mythical history, events in absolute past” that reaches back in the “mythical primordial time”, and is “mediated in texts, icons, dances, rituals, and performances of various kinds” by “specialized carriers of memory” using “formalized language(s)” (Assmann 2010,  117). Grímnismál is one of the ljóðaháttr poems that plausibly were per­ formed by a ritual specialist – possibly taking on the identity of the god Óðinn (Odin) – to an audience in a ritualised hall setting (Gunnell 2016, 101–102; Nygaard forthcoming). In this context, the content of the poem is interesting. In Sts. 4–44, Grímnismál relates what might be viewed as pre-Christian esoteric knowledge



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of primarily cosmological but also cosmogonic and eschatological information, about the abodes of the gods (Sts. 5–17), the creation of the world (Sts. 40–41), the threats to the world tree (St. 35), the names of the valkyries (St. 36) and many other things. In short, pre-Christian Nordic cultural memory in poetic, formal­ ised form passed on as such quite certainly via writing on vellum by a medieval scribe – and plausibly also orally by a ritual specialist in the Viking Age. The last half of the poem, where Grímnir reveals his identity as Óðinn could be a further indication of the ritualised, oral performance background of the poem. The shift from the use of past tense in the list of names (Sts. 46–50) “Hétumk Grímr, hétumk Gangleri” (Grímnismál, St. 46) [I was called Grímr, I was called Gangleri (authors’ translation)] to the use of the present tense of “nú knáttu Óðin sjá […] Óðinn ek nú heiti” (Grímnismál, Sts. 53–54) [now you can see Óðinn […] Óðinn I am called now (authors’ translation)] is interesting and possibly revealing in this respect. These stanzas may have functioned as what ritual studies scholar Roy A. Rappaport terms ‘performatives’ (Rappaport 1999, 114–119) that make what is said truly real to the participants in the proposed ritual. Such action may have turned the performer or pre-Christian ritual specialist into Óðinn in the ritual moment, making it the god who relates the cultural memory to the envisioned group of preChristian Northerners, who may have been elite warriors (Nygaard forthcoming) and in this respect the cultural memory of an oral version of Grímnismál may have been reserved for such a group. That is, we may actually be dealing with what Assmann terms secret knowl­ edge (Assmann 2006 [2000], 125). For Assmann, this kind of knowledge is typical for primary religions (Assmann 2006 [2000], 122), whereas secondary religions are dominated by revelation and proclamation. One can question, however, how decisive this distinction is as an opposition between orally and canonically based religions. Whereas the transmission of memory in certain types of ritual, such as the spectacular cyclical rituals known from all religions, is truly cultural in the sense that it is shared (in principle, at least) by all members of society, there is another kind of memory which is limited to certain members of society, and most often transmitted in initiation rituals, thus reserved for the initiates. Grímnismál may be an instance of such memory and another good example of that within preChristian Nordic religion is the kind of knowledge which is related in Hyndluljóð [Hyndla’s Chant]. Here we learn that Óttarr needs to remember specific knowl­ edge, which is transmitted to him from an underworld being, Hyndla. It is most often assumed that Óttarr needs this knowledge for a competition with his oppo­ nent Angantýr for the kingship (St. 45; Fleck 1970; Schjødt 2016). The knowledge is about royal genealogy, as well as mythological lore. So, what seems to be at stake here is that the king-to-be must possess some numinous knowledge as a prerequisite for acquiring the position of king – and must be able to remember

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it. Therefore, he receives some minnisǫl (memory beer) (Hyndluljóð, St. 45). This sort of memory is certainly not ‘cultural’ in the same way as is the memory shared by all members of society, but just as important. The maintenance of that sort of memory is thus most likely due to a transmission within a small exclusive group within society. Therefore, it is not just a matter of primary and secondary religions, but also a question of what degree of secrecy is involved in the rituals. Neverthe­ less, it is true, as Assmann argues (2006 [2000], 125), that whereas secondary reli­ gions are in principle open to everybody who reads the canon, primary religions tend to be constituted by much more secret lore, acquired through various kinds of initiation rituals. But large parts of the primary religions are of course open for everybody. On the spectrum of ‘individual – collective memory’, various degrees of collectivity are at play, and thus also various forms of cultural memory.

4 Perspectives for future research As this brief section suggests, the main avenue for future research on memory studies and pre-Christian Nordic religion seems to be the study of ritual. The overlap between memory studies and the performance-led approach to Old Norse poetry is steadily gaining ground in scholarship and would seem to point to a par­ ticularly fruitful future perspective. The fact that rituals play an extremely impor­ tant role in the transmission of knowledge and, thus, of memory in a lived, oral religion, indicates that the theoretical frameworks provided by memory studies and performance-oriented approaches are critically important when examining pre-Christian Nordic religion.

Works cited Primary sources Eddukvæði. Ed. Jonas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason. ÍF, 36–37. Reykjavík, 2014. Grímnismál. In Eddukvæði. ÍF. I: 367–379. Hákonar saga góða. In Heimskringla. 1. Ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson. ÍF, 26. Reykjavík, 1941. 150–197. Hyndluljóð. In Eddukvæði. ÍF. I: 460–469.



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Secondary sources Assmann, Jan. 1984. Ägypten. Stuttgart, Berlin and Cologne. Assmann, Jan. 2006. Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Stanford. [German orig. 2000] Assmann, Jan. 2010. “Communicative and Cultural Memory.” In A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin and New York. 109–118. Borgeaud, Philippe and Jean-Claude Basset, eds. 1988. La Mémoire des religions. Geneva. Boyer, Pascal. 2009. “Cognitive Predispositions and Cultural Transmission.” In Memory in Mind and Culture. Ed. Pascal Boyer and James V. Wertsch. Cambridge. 288–319. Braun, Willi and Russell T. McCutcheon, eds. 2000. A Guide to the Study of Religion. London and New York. Durkheim, Émile. 1995. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Trans. Karen Fields. New York. [French orig. 1912] Düwel, Klaus. 1985. Das Opferfest von Lade: Quellenkritische Untersuchungen zur germanischen Religionsgeschichte. Vienna. Eliade, Mircea. 1957. Das Heilige und das Profane: Vom Wesen des Religiösen. Hamburg. Erll, Astrid and Ansgar Nünning, eds. 2010. A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies. Berlin and New York. Fleck, Jere. 1970. “Konr-Óttar-Geirroðr: A Knowledge Criterion for the Succession to the Germanic Sacred Kingship.” Scandinavian Studies 42.1: 39–49. Foley, John Miles. 2002. How to Read an Oral Poem. Chicago, Il, and Urbana, Il. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. Selected Essays. New York. Gunnell, Terry. 2016. “Eddic Performances and Eddic Audiences.” In A Handbook to Eddic Poetry. Ed. Carolyne Larrington, Judy Quinn and Brittany Schorn. Cambridge. 92–113. Gunnell, Terry. Forthcoming. “Performance Archaeology, Eiríksmál, Hákonarmál and the Study of Old Nordic Religions.” Hermann, Pernille and Stephen A. Mitchell, eds. 2013. “Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 261–410. Hermann, Pernille, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir, eds. 2014. Minni and Muninn: Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. Hermann, Pernille. Forthcoming. “Memory, Oral Tradition, and Sources.” In Pre-Christian Religion of the North: History and Structures. Ed. Anders Andrén, John Lindow and Jens Peter Schjødt. Turnhout. Hervieu-Léger, Danièle. 2006. Religion as a Chain of Memory. Trans. Simon Lee. Malden, MA. Hultgård, Anders. 1993. “Altskandinavische Opferrituale und das Problem der Quellen.” In The Problem of Ritual. Ed. Tore Ahlbäck. Åbo and Stockholm. 221–259. Lundager Jensen, Hans J. 2008. “Religion, hukommelse og viden – Jan Assmann, med udblik til Durkheim, Rappaport og Augustin.” Religionsvidenskabeligt Tidsskrift 52: 3–17. Martin, John Stanley. 1972. Ragnarǫk: An Investigation into Old Norse Concepts of the Fate of the Gods. Assen. Meulengracht Sørensen, Preben. 1991. “Om eddadigtenes alder.” In Nordisk hedendom: Et symposium. Ed. Gro Steinsland, Ulf Drobin, Juha Petikäinen and Preben Meulengracht Sørensen. Odense. 217–228.

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Nygaard, Simon. Forthcoming. “Being Óðinn Bursson: The Creation of Social and Moral Obligation in Viking Age Warrior Bands through the Ritualised Performance of Poetry: The Case of Grímnismál.” In Proceedings from the First Jómsborg Conference, Wolin, 20th–22nd April, 2017. Ed. Jakub Morawiec, Aleksandra Jochymek and Grzegorz Bartusik. Beyond Medieval Europe. Kalamazoo. Phillpotts, Bertha. 1920. The Elder Edda and Ancient Scandinavian Drama. Cambridge. Rappaport, Roy A. 1999. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge. Schjoedt, Uffe, Jesper Sørensen, Kristoffer Laigaard Nielbo, Dimitris Xygalatas, Panagiotis Mitkidis and Joseph Bulbulia. 2013. “Cognitive Resource Depletion in Religious Interactions.” Religion, Brain & Behaviour 3.1: 36–55. Schjødt, Jens Peter. 2009. “Diversity and Its Consequences for the Study of Old Norse Religion.” In Between Paganism and Christianity in the North. Ed. Leszek P. Słupecki and Jakub Morawiec. Rzeszow. 9–22. Schjødt, Jens Peter. 2012. “Reflections on Aims and Methods in the Study of Old Norse Religion.” In More than Mythology. Ed. Catharina Raudvere and Jens Peter Schjødt. Lund. 263–287. Schjødt, Jens Peter. 2016. “Eddic Poetry and the Religion of Pre-Christian Scandinavia.” In A Handbook to Eddic Poetry. Ed. Carolyne Larrington, Judy Quinn and Brittany Schorn. Cambridge. 132–146. Stausberg, Michael, ed. 2009. Contemporary Theories in the Study of Religion: A Critical Companion. London and New York. Sundermeier, Theo. 1987. “Religion, Religionen.” In Lexikon missionstheologischer Grundbegriffe. Ed. Karl Müller and Theo Sundermeier. Berlin. 411–423. Sundqvist, Olof. 2016. An Arena for Higher Powers. Leiden and Boston, MA. Whitehouse, Harvey. 2000. Arguments and Icons. Oxford. Xygalatas, Dimitris, Uffe Schjoedt, Joseph Bulbulia, Ivana Konvalinka, Else-Marie Jegindø, Paul Reddish et al. 2013. “Autobiographical Memory in a Fire-Walking Ritual.” Journal of Cognition and Culture 13: 1–16.

Pernille Hermann

I: 4 Mythology 1 Definition Old Norse mythology is known primarily from narratives and poetry in the ver­ nacular Norse language written mainly in the thirteenth century. In early scholar­ ship in the nineteenth century, the study of Northern and Germanic mythologies was anchored in etymological and comparative inquiries into the medieval texts, but it has expanded considerably and is now an interdisciplinary field. While the source material – which apart from verbal products includes pictorial and mate­ rial sources – calls for involvement of multiple perspectives, conceptual develop­ ments have implied an understanding of mythology that is not tightly intertwined with narratives about gods acting in imagined, supernatural worlds, but with mythologising processes, i.e. ideological and ethical forms of communication, too. The field is concerned not only with the religious functions and worldviews of the orally-preserved mythology during and from pre-Christian times, but also engages the mythology’s social and cultural functions, including the founda­ tional power that Old Norse myths have had for groups of people.

2 State of research In comparison to, e.g., Greek mythology where memory has a superior role – and to the Greek world where memory was a central tenet of debate in philosophy and culture – the faculty of memory is less in the foreground in Norse mythologi­ cal materials. But, in fact, memory and Old Norse mythology meet in numerous ways: Memory exists as a thematic concern in the mythology, just as mythology exists in memory, and – looking at the broader implications – over time and in multiple contexts Old Norse mythology has participated in the formation of col­ lective identities and cultural memories. Concerning the Greek case, and in real­ ising the many functions and the key impact memory had among the Greeks, Jean-Pierre Vernant emphasises that, “Memory is a very complicated function related to important psychological categories, such as time and identity. It brings into play a whole collection of complex mental operations that can be mastered only with effort, training and exercise.” (Vernant 2006 [1965], 116) The quotation emphasises that memory is associated with mental operations; however, a mem­ ory-orientated investigation of Old Norse mythology reveals that memory takes https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-010

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many forms and concerns not only the individual, but also social and cultural levels.

Memory in the mythology Concepts and ideas from memory studies have begun to be introduced into the field of Old Norse mythology. In a recent publication, John Lindow writes that the application of “analytic tenets” of memory studies “can help lead to a more nuanced view of a number of familiar matters having to do with the actors in the mythology and the broad plot that it enacts” (2014, 42). Lindow employs Jan Assmann’s ideas of communicative and cultural memory to describe the exist­ ence of different types of memory in the mythological world and has drawn our attention to carriers, i.e., experts, of mythological memory (Lindow 2014). Like­ wise, Margaret Clunies Ross points to different types of memory that exist in the universe inhabited by the Norse gods. With reference to the divine being Mímir, meaning “the one who remembers” (Simek 1993; however, see Heslop 2018), spe­ cifically Mímisbrunnr [Mímir’s well] and Míms hǫfuð [Mím’s head], Clunies Ross suggests that Jack Goody’s idea of oral memory in the form of generative recall is relevant. Presupposing the coexistence of memoria verborum (i.e. rote memory) and memoria rerum (i.e. creative recall), Clunies Ross argues that “The general point that emerges here in the context of the various representations of the power of memory in Norse myth and its personification in Mímir is that this kind of memory is much more creative, much more deeply concerned with cognitive pro­ cesses, than rote memory is” (1994, 214). International memory studies have revisited ancient and medieval mne­ monic cultures (see e.g. Yates 1974; Carruthers 1990; A. Assmann 2011 [1999]; Erll 2005). Similarly, recent investigations have brought the classical art of memory and ideas deriving from medieval mnemonic culture in contact with Old Norse myths. Jens Eike Schnall has argued that the myth of the poetic mead in Skáldskaparmál [The Language of Poetry] is a reflection of the metaphor of ‘memory as stomach’, going back to the classical world (Schnall 2004), and it has been argued that the god Óðinn (Odin) has an extraordinarily good memory, similar to the artificial memory described in classical rhetoric (Hermann 2014, 2015). One memory-related mythological being has continuously attracted the attention of scholars, namely the raven Muninn, who has been considered a personification of Óðinn’s memory (Mogk 1906; de Vries 1961; Ström 1961; Tur­ ville-Petre 1964, 60, 142). Whereas nineteenth-century scholars, in line with the scholarly discourse of the day, based this argument on philological grounds and



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understood the name Muninn to derive from the verb muna “to remember” (e.g. Grimm 1966 [1882], 147), more recently the meaning of Muninn as an embodi­ ment of memory has been argued also with reference to narrative semantics (Clunies Ross 1994; Lindow 2014; Mitchell 2018). The raven Muninn (memory) is one of a pair and occurs only in combination with the raven-partner Huginn (a word deriving from hugr and hugi “thought/mind”). This indicates that the two mythological ravens would personify mutually dependent capacities of the mind, thought and memory. It has been suggested that this binary configuration of the mind is a medieval Norse, reduced, variant of a Christian tripartite division of the mind in memoria (memory), intelligentia (understanding), and voluntas (will) (Meyer 1891, 232). Also, the point has been made that – when the raven-birds are mentioned together in the medieval texts – there is a tendency to emphasise the importance of memory above thought. In the eddic poem Grímnismál [Grimnir’s Sayings], it appears that Óðinn is more dependent on Muninn (memory) than on Huginn (thought). In stanza 20, the ravens are presented as follows: Huginn ok Muninn fljúga hverjan dag jǫrmungrund yfir; óumk ek of Hugin at hann aptr né komit, þó sjámk meirr um Munin. (Grímnismál, St. 20) [Hugin and Munin fly every day / over the vast-stretching world / I fear for Hugin that he will not come back / yet I tremble more for Munin. (Grimnir’s Sayings, St. 20)]

Óðinn, the “I” in the poem, fears that when Muninn flies out it will not come back. Obviously, the god of wisdom depends on his mind-capacity, that is, the faculties of thought and memory to be able to maintain, control and keep order in the mythological world. Likewise, in the myth about the making of peace between the Æsir and the Vanir, the two god-groups of the mythology, memory is com­ bined with the intellectual resource of thought: When the Vanir and the Æsir exchange hostages to confirm the peace made between them, the divine being Mímir (memory) is paired with Kvasir, who is the wisest of beings, in a way that suggests that Mímir holds the prominent position: Kvasir (representing wisdom) does not know what to do without having Mímir (representing memory) by his side (Turville-Petre 1964, 142).

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Mythology in embodied and disembodied memory Scholars have been concerned with the existence of Old Norse myths in embodied, i.e. internal, human memory and – metaphorically speaking – in the various dis­ embodied forms of memory, i.e., external cultural symbols (such as images, rituals, and writing) that have preserved and transmitted the mythology (cf.  Assmann 1995). In a study of Indo-European mythological structures, Emily Lyle deals with ‘internal-external memory’, that is, a type of memory-management that requires “a symbiotic relationship between internal memory and external representations” (Lyle 1993, 2012, 10), thus bringing our attention to the intimate connection that exists in oral cultures between inner mnemonic devices (such as spatial and visual imagery) and external memory devices (such as graphic structures and images). Much remains to be said about the character of this so-called internal memory and the methods that myth-carriers used to train the faculty of memory. Most thoroughly investigated is verbally based ‘mnemonic anchoring’, that is, “the fixing of words and phrases through metre, rhyme, assonance, and allit­ eration” (DuBois 2016, 214). Such verbal mnemonic devices were crucial for e.g. skaldic poetry, one of the oral genres that was responsible for maintaining mythic materials in both communicative and cultural memory (Heslop 2014). It has been suggested too that skaldic kennings, often alluding to myths, depended on visually striking cognitive figures (Bergsveinn Birgisson 2010, 201). Ritualised performance and bodily behaviour were without doubt an integral part of the mnemonic culture as well. With regard to medieval textual culture, which provide the primary sources to Norse mythology, attention has focussed on writing in alphabetical literacy as an external memory storage and on the function of the book as an aid to memory. Scholars have pointed to an awareness by authors of the risk of forgetting and to the attempts of medieval mythographers of transferring their knowledge about myths and legend from memory to writing, from one storeroom to another, with the stated purpose of avoiding the problem of forgetting (Glauser 2007; Hermann 2009). Already before writing in alphabetic literacy was introduced, Old Norse mythology existed in a multi-media environment, for example of skaldic ekph­ rasis describing mythological images on wall-panels and shields evoked exter­ nal, visual, memory aids that assisted the oral-verbal transmission of the myths; however, with writing and the rise of a book-culture yet another overlay of medial intricacy was added to the transmission of the mythology (Glauser 2013). Embod­ ied human memory and external storage capacities co-existed; and discussions of internal/external memory point to the relevance of the (changing and varied) media frameworks that are decisive for myth-communication and to the close connection, perhaps identification, between memory and its media.



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The function and meaning of Old Norse mythology in the High Middle Ages Several studies focus on the relevance of Old Norse mythology for medieval soci­ eties’ construction of the past. Despite occasionally using another vocabulary, such studies, mostly having to do with the Icelandic case, have dealt with issues that are central in cultural memory-studies, such as foundational narratives, that is, narratives that have normative and formative power, and with the identitycreating functions of mythology (Assmann 2011, e.g. 37–38). In other words, this research supports the view that myths are cultural forms that, like history, reli­ gion, literature, and art “contribute to the production of cultural memory” (Tamm 2013, 463). Old Norse mythology offers numerous foundational narratives that explain how phenomena and institutions came into being, and it provides deep and significant meaning to important social establishments and practices, such as social hierarchies, natural occurrences, human competences (for instance, poetic skills), and so on. In the pre-Christian Nordic world, these institutions were considered to be divinely sanctioned, and  – even if the introduction of Christianity in the decades around the year 1000 led to a gradual de-sacralisation of the mythology and the worldviews it implied – it seems as if the mythology continued to have a foundational quality for some time (Lindow 1994). Still in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the mythic heritage offered “a conven­ tional means of expression” for a variety of societal concepts, and – it has been argued – mythological details and structures functioned as cognitive models that had the power to organise and “make sense of human experience” (Clunies Ross 1998, 22 and 26). Exactly how much the myths were indebted to continuity and change respectively is a vexed question, but to judge from the medieval texts, the myths were flexible narrative units that were adapted to new contexts. Christian ideology in particular meant that mythological beings, plots and concepts were historicised, euhemerised and etymologised according to learned methods and strategies existing at the time when the mythology was recorded in writing, or we could say, at the time of the remembering activities. This openness to change in context and meaning facilitated the mythic heritage becoming a central asset of medieval cultural memory (Hermann 2009, 2018). As was the case with the mythic texts, medieval works of history and fiction (such as Íslendingabók [Book of Settlement] and saga-narratives) could func­ tion as foundational narratives that explained why the world looked as it did and offered orientation for groups of people (see e.g. Glauser 2000). Similarities across genres (between myth, saga, and history) in terms of function are under­ scored by the fact that historical texts sometimes actually share “concerns with the mythology” and include in their narrative organisation such mythologicalcosmic motifs and themes as, for example, origin, time, space and law (Lindow

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1997, 455). Family history was often expressed through genealogies and pedigrees (e.g. ættvísi, mannfræði, langfeðgatal), tools that created diachronic links and pervading connections with the mythic past; and the preoccupation with linking families or individuals not only with biblical, but also mythic and legendary persons reveals how important these different pasts were for defining status and position in the present. Gerd Wolfgang Weber anticipated discussions of remembered pasts as cul­ tural memory when asserting that the engagement with the past in Iceland in the High Middle Ages was best described as “geschichtsmythische” [historicalmythical] (1981, 497). In ignoring the widespread idea that the term myth con­ notes fiction (cf., e.g. the Greek understanding of mythos and Barthesian con­ ceptualisation of the term), this so-called historical-mythical approach was first of all qualified by its claim of truth. The ideas presented by Weber combine well with Jan Assmann’s formulation of ‘foundational history’ and ‘remembered pasts’ and with the recognition that cultural memory may very well be created on a basis of myth: “The forms of the remembered past entail myth and history without any distinction between them. The past that is fixed and internalized as foundational history is myth, regardless of whether it is fact or fiction” (Assmann 2011, 59). Yet other studies have shown how mythological communication affects different cultures’ representations of the past, and how groups of people con­ struct imaginative and ideologically invested visions of the past. For instance, Stephen Mitchell deals with the Baltic island of Gotland showing that this insular community’s past and identity are socially constructed and imbued with cultural memory (Mitchell 2014).

3 Pre-modern Nordic material Óðinn and mythological memory In the mythology as construed by the thirteenth-century texts, memory is closely connected to the god Óðinn, and the myths, names, attributes and functions of this god are among the most immediate entrances to investigations of memory in the mythological world. When Óðinn, the god of wisdom, constantly seeks knowledge, he fights oblivion and becomes a bearer of the memory that under­ pins the (mythological) world. The quest for knowledge is the theme of multiple encounters between Óðinn and other beings, and – as already mentioned above – the contact between this god and Mímir is significant. Oðinn, also called Míms



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vinr [Mímir’s friend], must leave his eye in Mímisbrunnr [Mímir’s well] in return for a drink from the well: […] þar er Mímis brunnr, er spekð ok mannvit er í fólgit, ok heitir sá Mímir er á brunninn. Hann er fullr af vísindum fyrir því at hann drekkr ór brunninum af horninu Gjallarhorni. Þar kom Alfǫðr ok beiddisk eins drykkjar af brunninum, en hann fekk eigi fyrr en hann lagði auga sitt at veði. (Gylfaginning, Ch. 15) [“There is where Mimir’s well is, which has wisdom and intelligence contained in it, and the master of the well is called Mimir. He is full of learning because he drinks of the well from the horn Giallarhorn. All-father went there and asked for a single drink from the well, but he did not get one until he placed his eye as a pledge.” (Edda. Snorri Sturluson, Ch. 15)]

The incident tells of the crucial moment when Óðinn becomes the one-eyed god. The whole idea of disembodiment indicates that knowledge is gained by sacri­ fice and will (which is also the case for Óðinn in, for instance, the eddic poem Hávamál [The Sayings of the High One]), showing that the mental operations of memory are gained only when an effort is made. The focus on the disembodiment of the eye indicates that the process of acquiring knowledge through Mímir, that is, through memory, depends on the senses. Obviously, the sacrifice of the eye does not disable Óðinn, who is also called Blindi [Blind]. In contrast, it under­ scores that his vision is of a spectacular quality. This quality is also demonstrated in, for instance, Grímnismál, where Óðinn’s seeing (inner vision) and his recol­ lecting activities are tightly interwoven; the poem testifies to the view that to see with the inner eye is actually to remember (Hermann 2017). The myths about Óðinn indicate that the faculty of memory is a portal to privileged knowledge belonging to all times, or to knowledge that derives from the beyond – it is not in the first place merely concerned with attempts to recall things from the past. Míms hǫfuð is yet another source of memory-based know­ ledge. This speaking head, i.e., oracle, is carefully kept and treated by Óðinn and in return, it reveals to him occult and hidden knowledge that derives from a realm beyond the observable world (Ynglinga saga, Ch. 4) (Lindow 2014). Another source that transmits memory-dependent knowledge to Óðinn is the vǫlva in Vǫluspá [The Seeress’s Prophecy]. The way the vǫlva resorts to memory shows that recollection is simultaneously to access knowledge of the past, the present and the future; not only does the vǫlva remember the ancient past, she also sees the future (Vǫluspá, e.g. Sts. 37–38). A similar conceptualisation of time as a tem­ poral continuum of past/present/future is indicated through the norns, Urðr, Ver­ ðandi, and Skuld, whose names seem to cover the meanings of past, present and future (Grimm 1966 [1882], I 405; Lindow 2002 [1985], 245). Whereas the vǫlva at one and the same time remembers and sees the all-encompassing cosmic situa­

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tion, the tripartite norn-group, however, is concerned with the fate and destiny of individual beings. When answering Óðinn’s questions, it becomes evident that for the vǫlva – as for Óðinn – recollection is a sensory activity dependent on vision (Quinn 2002), which again indicates that a close relationship exists between memory and sense experience. If such a thing as extraordinary sensory ability attaches itself to memory, it becomes relevant to consider the god Heimdallr as another bearer of mythological memory. Heimdallr has an exceptionally good hearing ability, and like Óðinn he is affiliated with Mímir and Mímisbrunnr. As we saw in the quotation above, Mímir used Gjallarhorn [Screaming Horn] to drink from the well, a horn which is otherwise associated with Heimdallr (Gylfaginning, Ch. 15). Also, Vǫluspá indicates that Heimdallr left his hearing (that is, his ear) in a well beneath the cosmic ash tree Yggdrasill (St. 27). The structural resemblances between Heimdallr and Óðinn may indicate that not only the mind’s eye, but also the mind’s ear is relevant for acquisition of knowledge through memory, under­ scoring Heimdallr’s possible function as an agent of cosmological memory. Others of Óðinn’s functions are consistent with memory as well, among those his role as the god of poetry. The myth of the poetic mead relates that Óðinn acquired the precious drink – a mix of honey and the blood from Kvasir (the wisest of beings) – from the giants, transformed himself into an eagle, and – after having ingested the mead – distributed it to humans i.e., to poets, by spewing it out and excreting it (Skaldskaparmál, 5) (cf. Orton 2007). The ability to compose poetry depended on intake of this special Odinic drink, which had undergone multiple transformations during its production. In light of the considerations above, the mead provided poets with access to special knowledge, or memory, deriving from the world beyond and relating to past, present and future situa­ tions, indicating the poet’s subtle, even sacred and transcendent function in Old Norse culture. Clearly, poetic competence reached beyond technical craftsman­ ship – that is, the handling of verbal composition and mnemonic techniques – in enabling access to omniscient knowledge. More concretely, as the god of poetry Óðinn secured one of the main (verbal) instruments of commemoration of indi­ viduals and events, which once again situates this god centrally as a figure serving memory and working against forgetting. This function relates well to his position as Valfǫðr [Val-father] and to the power to assign fallen warriors a place in Valhǫll [Hall of the slain] (Gylfaginning, Ch. 20). In securing the afterlife of warriors, he is exercising control over death, for to reside in Valhǫll is to be remembered as a warrior, a son of Óðinn, it is a sign of honour and key to remembrance of the dead in the Old Norse world.



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Prose Edda The Prose Edda, the earliest version of which was written ca. 1220, is a pertinent text-example that can be accessed from multiple memory-perspectives. Its elabo­ rate story-worlds are major sources to investigations of mythological memory, but it also informs about the mythology’s own memory, namely, its intertextuality, and the storage cues, i.e., the technical dimensions of memory that have guaranteed the existence of the myths. That the Prose Edda is supremely preoccupied with memory at various levels is supported by a meta-comment in the text about the relationship between memory and forgetting which indicates that the book was written to prevent the mythic narratives from being forgotten (Skáldskaparmál, 5). The text quotes, and is engaged in a dialogue with, numerous other texts, such as eddic poetry, skaldic poetry and learned texts, which it reuses, that is, remembers, in a new textual context. Following the ideas of Renate Lachmann, according to whom the memory of a text is its intertextuality, we can infer that the Prose Edda “traverses memory spaces and settles into them” and thus creates a “transformed mnemonic space, a textual depository” (2008, 303). Looked upon in this way, Old Norse mythology is understood as a multi-layered text-space, where individual texts gain meaning from their relationships to other texts (either by similarity or contrast), the Prose Edda being a part of a comprehensive mythic intertext. Along these lines, with a focus on “the way texts speak with other texts”, Jürg Glauser has defined skaldic kennings “as one large memory machine, recalling earlier events and narratives in the forms of concentrated mini-myths” (Glauser 2014, x). The Prose Edda is a highly informative source of recollection methods and mnemonic techniques; among other methods, it reveals that spatially-based memory was an integral part of the crafting of written compositions in the thir­ teenth century (cf. Carruthers 1993). The work, which is essentially about poetry, is framed by a creative representation of the resource from where the mythologi­ cal narratives basically stem, namely memory. Within this framework the mytho­ logical content is presented in a dialogue between three Æsir, who are disguised as Hár [High], Jafnhár [Just-as-High], and Þriði [Third] and the Swedish king Gylfi (disguised as the wanderer Gangleri). Gylfi enters the city of the Æsir, where he gazes at a huge hall: “En er hann kom inn í borgina þá sá hann þar háva hǫll, svá at varla mátti hann sjá yfir hana. Þak hennar var lagt gyltum skjǫldum svá sem spánþak” (Gylfaginning, Ch. 2) [“When he got into the city he saw there a high hall, so that he could scarcely see over it. Its roof was covered with gilded shields like tiles” (Edda. Snorri Sturluson, Ch. 2)]. Once inside the city, and afterwards inside the hall, Gylfi sees many rooms populated with people actively playing games, drinking and fighting. To enter the hall, Gylfi crosses a doorway, where he

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encounters a man juggling with knives, seven in the air at the time; he is allowed to enter the hall and the door closes behind him. The juggler is placed in a tran­ sitional spot, the doorway, which marks the entrance to the multi-layered and spacious, yet delineated, space where knowledge of the mythology is kept. In this spectacular location, the wise Æsir reveal their knowledge of the mythological world to Gylfi. This architectonic space, which frames the mythological details, resemblances mnemonic places (loci), locations that are created in the mind and used for recollection (Rhetorica ad Herennium, 206–207). The framework is not only concerned with spatial organisation, it also hints towards striking images (imagines), which classical rhetoricians described as part and parcel of artificial memory – and which transforms memory locations into dynamic and vivid scen­ eries. The hall Gylfi enters, here understood to represent a mnemonic space, is not static and without movement: Gylfi sees people actively moving in all the rooms that are within his sight. Moreover, it is emphasised that Gylfi’s senses are alert and that he is affected by what he sees. A fictionalised passage gives access to the thoughts of Gylfi who “looked around and thought many of the things he saw were incredible” (Gylfaginning, Ch. 2) [“Þá litaðisk hann umb ok þótti margir hlutir ótrúligir þeir er hann sá” (Edda. Snorri Sturluson, Ch.2)]. Gylfi is stunned by the immense spaciousness of the apartments, which is to say that to enter the hall of memory is an emotive experience. Different cultures share mnemonic techniques and methods of mental recoll­ ection, however, may express them differently. The stunned reaction of Gylfi when recognizing the capacity of memory calls to mind Augustine’s utterances about this resource. Augustine too discusses memory in spatial terms, as when he refers to the fields, caves and hollows of his memory (Confessions, 113). Also for Augustine the indefinite force of memory is emotive, but we note that in Confessions, memory is understood in the context of the search for God, whereas in Gylfaginning, the hall of memory is set forth in the context of magic and illusion (see Gylfaginning, Ch. 53) (Glauser 2009). The relevance of architectonic spatial memory is demonstrated also outside of this framework, for instance, in the Prose Edda’s cosmogony myth. The sky, otherwise expressed with the ancient kenning Ymirs haus [Ymir’s skull], is descri­ bed with “fjórum skautum” [four corners] carried by four pillars [lit. dvergar] (Gylfaginning, Ch. 8), which indicates that the sky – in the form of a roof covering a square – had a form resembling the design of Romanesque churches (see espe­ cially Holtsmark 1964, 33–34). In that case, the perception of the sky might have been coloured by architectonic constructions from the time of the remembe­ ring activity; constructions that were themselves used for mnemonic purposes (cf.  Laugerud 2010). Or put differently, the examples reveal how during trans­ mission, myths might have been inspired by, and may sometimes quite literally



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represent, memory constructions, its changing spaces and images. Obviously, other types of mnemonic templates than architectural space are relevant in the Prose Edda. The body of the primordial being Ymir and the world tree Yggdrasill, perhaps identical to the tree called Mímameiðr [Mími’s tree], are some examples of useful background structures upon which images of mythological knowledge could be attached and orderly organised – and from where this knowledge could be recollected at a later point. Further studies will perhaps show in more detail the extent to which the imagined supernatural world was influenced by a variety of mnemonic constructions, and how the mythological world most likely was built from a variety of spatial locations and mnemonic templates.

4 Perspectives for future research Old Norse mythology existed orally previously to, roughly, the thirteenth century, a fact which supports the assumption that memory would have been an indis­ pensable element in the culture of which it was a part. Memory is crucial for cul­ tural endurance, and it is to be expected that this resource would be embedded in mythologies, deified and associated with divine powers. With an increased aware­ ness of the many forms and functions that memory can take, more investigation might reveal that this resource is actually a much more overarching and pervasive component of Old Norse mythology than has been suggested earlier. Studies like those referred to in this chapter have taken the initial steps in showing the rele­ vance and fruitfulness of thinking about Old Norse mythology through the lenses of memory studies. The increasing awareness of the role of memory in the context of Old Norse mythology is demonstrated in the handbook-project Pre-Christian Religions in the North, which in contrast to earlier general treatments of Old Norse mythology and religion, singles out the theme of memory and deals with it in a separate chapter (Andrén, Lindow and Schjødt forthcoming). Focus on such diverse and wide-ranging topics as supernatural actors, space, imagery, senses, intertextuality, transmission, and identity offer some of the relevant entrance points. The fact that Old Norse mythology has lived on for centuries, and has been mediated in new contexts, in ways meaningful to its contemporary situa­ tions, only supports that the myths it contains have the capacity to found cultural memory. The founding and identity-creating functions of Old Norse mythology expands its uses in the medieval world (as dealt with above). The myths have been imbedded in e.g. nation-building and romantic movements across Europe and in the wider world; they have been used – and misused – religiously and ideologically; and they continue to be a much referred to component in popular

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culture, cultural heritage and historical tourism. Negotiations of this sort with Northern mythology, negotiations that in a variety of ways remember and repro­ duce its worldviews and narrative details in ever shifting contexts, offer captivat­ ing topics for future investigations.

Works cited Primary sources Augustine. Confessions. Vol. II. Ed. and trans. Jeffrey Henderson. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA, and London, 2016. Cicero. Rhetorica ad Herennium. Ed. and trans. Harry Caplan. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA, and London, 1954. Edda. Snorri Sturluson. Trans. Anthony Faulkes. London and Ruthland, VT, 1995. Grimnir’s Sayings. Trans. Carolyne Larrington. In The Poetic Edda. Rev. ed. Oxford, 2014. 50–60. Grímnismál. In Eddukvæði. Ed. Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason. ÍF. Reykjavík, 2014. I: 367–379. Gylfaginning. In Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Prologue and Gylfaginning. Ed. Anthony Faulkes. London, 2005. Skáldskaparmál. In Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Skáldskaparmál 1–2. Ed. Anthony Faulkes. London, 1998. The Seeress’s Prophecy. Trans. Carolyne Larrington. In The Poetic Edda. Rev. ed. Oxford, 2014. 3–13. Vǫluspá. In Eddukvæði. Ed. Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason. ÍF. Reykjavík, 2014. I: 291–307. Ynglinga saga. Trans. Lee M. Hollander. In Heimskringla. History of Norway. Austin, TX, 1964.

Secondary sources Andrén, Anders, John Lindow and Jens Peter Schjødt, eds. Forthcoming. Pre-Christian Religion of the North: History and Structures. Turnhout. Assmann, Aleida. 2011 [1999]. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization. Arts of Memory. Cambridge. Assmann, Jan. 1995. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” New German Critique 65: 125–133. Assmann, Jan. 2011. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. Cambridge. [German orig. 1992] Bergsveinn Birgisson. 2010. “The Old Norse Kenning as a Mnemonic Figure.” In The Making of Memory in the Middle Ages. Ed. Lucie Doležalová. Later Medieval Europe, 4. Leiden and Boston. 199–213.



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Carruthers, Mary J. 1990. The Book of Memory. A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 10. Cambridge. Carruthers, Mary J. 1993. “The Poet as Masterbuilder: Composition and Locational Memory in the Middle Ages.” New Literary History 24.4: 881–904. Clunies Ross, Margaret. 1994. Prolonged Echoes. Old Norse Myths in Medieval Northern Society. Vol. I: The Myths. The Viking Collection, 7. Odense. Clunies Ross, Margaret. 1998. Prolonged Echoes. Old Norse Myths in Medieval Northern Society. Vol. II: The Reception of Norse Myths in Medieval Iceland. The Viking Collection, 10. Odense. DuBois, Thomas A. 2016. “Oral Poetics: The Linguistics and Stylistics of Orality.” In Medieval Oral Literature. Ed. Karl Reichl. Berlin. 201–224. Erll, Astrid, 2005. Kollektives Gedächtnis und Erinnerungskulturen. Eine Einführung. Stuttgart. Glauser, Jürg. 2000. “Sagas of the Icelanders and þættir.” In Old Icelandic Literature and Society. Ed. Margaret Clunies Ross. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 42. Cambridge. 203–220. Glauser, Jürg. 2007. “The Speaking Bodies of Saga Texts.” In Learning and Understanding in the Old Norse World. Essays in honour of Margaret Clunies Ross. Ed. Judy Quinn, Kate Heslop and Tarrin Wills. Turnhout. Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe, 18. 13–26. Glauser, Jürg. 2009. “Sinnestäuschungen. Medialitätskonzepte in der Prosa-Edda.” In Greppaminni. Ed. Margrét Eggertsdóttir, Árni Sigurjónsson, Guðrún Ása Grímsdóttir, Guðrún Nordal and Guðvarður Már Gunnlaugsson. Reykjavík. 165–174. Glauser, Jürg. 2013. “Unheilige Bücher. Zur Implosion mythischen Erzählens in der Prosa-Edda.” Das Mittelalter. Perspektiven mediävistischer Forschung. Zeitschrift des Mediävistenverbandes 18: 106–121. Glauser, Jürg. 2014. “Foreword.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. vii–x. Grimm, Jacob. 1966 [1882]. Teutonic Mythology. Vols. I–IV. Translated from the Fourth Edition with Notes and Appendix by James Steven Stallybrass. New York. Hermann, Pernille. 2009. “Concepts of Memory and Approaches to the Past in Medieval Icelandic Literature.” Scandinavian Studies 81.3: 287–308. Hermann, Pernille. 2014. “Key-Aspects of Memory and Remembering in Old Norse-Icelandic Literature.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 13–39. Hermann, Pernille. 2015. “Memory, Imagery, and Visuality in Old Norse Literature.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 114.3: 317–340. Hermann, Pernille. 2017. “The Mind’s Eye: The Triad of Memory, Space and the Senses in Old Norse Literature.” European Journal of Scandinavian Studies 47.1: 203–217. Hermann, Pernille. 2018. “Cultural Memory and Old Norse Mythology in the High Middle Ages”. In Theorizing Old Norse Myth. Ed. Stefan Brink and Lisa Collinson. Acta Scandinavica, 7. Turnhout. 115–131. Heslop, Kate. 2014. “Minni and the Rhetoric of Memory in Eddic, Skaldic and Runic Texts.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 75–107. Heslop, Kate. 2018. “Talking heads: the mediality of Mímir.” In RE:writing. Medial perspectives on textual culture in the Icelandic Middle Ages. Ed. Kate Heslop and Jürg Glauser. Medienwandel – Medienwechsel – Medienwissen, 29. Zürich. 63–84.

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Holtsmark, Anne. 1964. Studier i Snorres Mytologi. Oslo. Lachmann, Renate. 2008. “Mnemonic and Intertextual Aspects of Literature.” In Cultural memory Studies. An Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin and New York. 301–311. Laugerud, Henning. 2010. “To See With the Eyes of the Soul. Memory and Visual Culture in Medieval Europe.” ARV. Nordic Yearbook of Folklore 66: 43–68. Lindow, John. 1994. “Bloodfeud and Scandinavian Mythology.” Alvíssmál 4: 5–68. Lindow, John. 1997. “Íslendingabók and Myth.” Scandinavian Studies 69.4: 454–464. Lindow, John. 2002 [1985]. “Mythology and Mythography.” In Old Norse-Icelandic Literature. A Critical Guide. Ed. Carol J. Clover and John Lindow. Toronto, Buffalo, NY, and London. 21–67. Lindow, John. 2014. “Memory and Old Norse Mythology.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 41–57. Lyle, Emily. 1993. “Internal-External Memory.” Cosmos 9: 63–73. Lyle, Emily. 2012. Ten Gods. A New Approach to Defining the Mythological Structures of the Indo-Europeans. Cambridge. Meyer, Hugo E. 1891. Germanische Mythologie. Berlin. Mitchell, Stephen A. 2014. “The Mythologized Past: Memory in Medieval and Early Modern Gotland. In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 155–174. Mitchell, Stephen A. 2018. “Óðinn’s Twin Ravens, Huginn and Muninn.” In Gemini and the Sacred: Twins and Twinship in Religion and Myth. Ed. Kimberley Patton. London. Mogk, Eugen. 1906. Germanische Mythologie. Leipzig. Orton, Peter. 2007. “Spouting Poetry: Cognitive Metaphor and Conceptual Blending in the Old Norse Myth of the Poetic Mead.” In Constructing Nations, Reconstructing Myth: Essays in Honour of T.A. Shippey. Ed. Andrew Wawn. Making the Middle Ages, 9. Turnhout. 277–300. Quinn, Judy. 2002. “Dialogue with a vǫlva.” In The Poetic Edda. Essays on Old Norse Mythology. Ed. Paul Acker and Carolyne Larrington. New York and London. 245–274. Schnall, Jens Eike. 2004. “Nahrung, Erinnerung, Dichtung oder Vom Zu-sich-nehmen, Bei-sich-Behalten und Von-sich-Geben. Zum Raub des Skaldenmets und mittelalterlicher Körpermetaphorik.” In Poetik und Gedächtnis: Festschrift für Heiko Uecker zum 65. Geburtstag. Ed. Karin Hoff, Susanne Kramarz-Bein, Astrid van Nahl and Thomas Fechner-Smarsly. Frankfurt am Main. 249–277. Simek, Rudolf. 1993. Dictionary of Northern Mythology. Stuttgart. Ström, Folke. 1961. Nordisk hedendom. Tro och sed i förkristen tid. Gothenburg. Tamm, Marek. 2013. “Beyond History and Memory: New Perspectives in Memory Studies.” History Compass 11.6: 458–473. Turville-Petre, E.O.G. 1964. Myth and Religion of the North. The Religion of Ancient Scandinavia. London. Vernant, Jean-Pierre. 2006 [1965]. Myth and Thought among the Greeks. Trans. Janet Lloyd and Jeff Ford. Cambridge. de Vries, Jan. 1961. Altnordisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. Leiden. Weber, Gerd Wolfgang. 1981. “Irreligiosität und Heldenzeitalter. Zum Mythencharakter der altisländischen Literatur.” In Speculum Norroenum. Norse Studies in Memory of Gabriel Turville-Petre. Odense. 474–505. Yates, Frances. 1974. The Art of Memory. Chicago.

Stephen A. Mitchell

I: 5 Folklore Studies 1 Definition The study of Old Norse folklore focuses on the expressive and customary prac­ tices of the speakers of the North Germanic dialects, communities of the premodern era (mainly the Viking and Middle Ages) living not only in the modern Nordic countries but also, for example, in various outposts and settlements along the Baltic perimeter (e.g. Estonia) and in the North Atlantic (e.g. Greenland, Shetland, Orkney, the Isle of Man, the Hebrides). These widely dispersed settle­ ment areas consisted of significantly diverse sub-cultures, especially given their often extensive contacts with neighbouring social groups, yet the Nordic peoples of these regions generally recognised that a broad linguistic continuity existed between and among the groups, and that they shared numerous cultural traits and traditions; moreover, they were frequently aware of and honoured their his­ torical and genealogical affinities. The intersection between ‘folkloristics’ and memory studies is inherently profound, as discussed below. In addition to legends, tales, ballads, proverbs and other narrative or text-centred genres, expressive manifestations of Old Norse culture included a wide range of customary practices and behaviours, such as calendric rituals (e.g. jól), building and craft traditions (e.g. ship-building), superstitions and beliefs, artistic and musical conventions, and other forms of traditional knowledge and expressions of value and heritage. The source materi­ als for such all-encompassing studies are necessarily equally diverse. Although modern folklorists exclude no data source from their inquiries, Old Norse folklore research tends overwhelmingly to centre on information gleaned from the Ice­ landic sagas; Latin and vernacular chronicles and other historical writings, such as Saxo’s Gesta Danorum; religious and heroic works (e.g. the Prose and Poetic Eddas); as well as runic inscriptions and monuments.

2 State of research The role of Scandinavian folklore scholarship has been so influential in the crea­ tion of modern international folklore studies scholarship that disambiguating the specific study of Nordic folklore, including its roots in Old Norse philology, from the evolution of the field as a whole is largely impossible (von Sydow 1922, 1944; https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-011

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Boberg 1953; Strömbäck 1979; Mitchell 2000). Moreover, the scientific study of folklore – a field historically concerned with the reception, perception, use, and reconfiguration of cultural forms inherited from the past (or believed to have been inherited from the past) – means that folklore scholarship often anticipated by decades many of the concerns and approaches we today associate with modern international memory studies. As Henning Laugerud notes, “Folklore studies have in one sense always been concerned with memory as a cultural phenom­ enon. The term folklore describes a certain kind of transmitted and collectively shared memory” (Laugerud 2010, 19). Famously proposed by the English anti­ quarian William Thoms in 1846, folklore, or ‘Folk-Lore’ as it was originally styled, is a calque on German Volkskunde. Now widely used in international scholarship, this term can occasionally mask telling native phrases. Indicative of how the field has been popularly conceived in the North, one especially common term, known since the 1830s, specifically builds on the compound ‘folk memory’ in the various Nordic languages (i.e. folkminnesforskning, folkeminnesforskning, folkeminde­ forskning, þjóðminjafræði). Already in the early seventeenth century, Ole Worm in Denmark, Johannes Bureus in Sweden, and Jón Guðmundsson lærði in Iceland, for example, had interested themselves in, and were independently collecting, specimens of local folklife and folklore. These efforts were made official state priorities when royal decrees – in 1622 for Denmark and Norway, in 1630 for Sweden – called for, in the words of the Danish proclamation, bishops to collect information on ‘antiqui­ ties’ of all sorts in their bishoprics (Boberg 1953, 144, 220, 304). Thus, as part of the struggle between the two kingdoms for political and cultural hegemony in the northern world, clergymen throughout Scandinavia ransacked their parishes for legends, memorials, runic monuments, and so on in order to add weight to the arguments of the competing polities. Given the resulting and continuing deep roots of Nordic folklore scholarship over the following centuries in nationalist, colonialist/post-colonial, and nation-building discourses, questions of memory, remembering, forgetting, oblivion, and other topics of particular relevance to modern memory studies have played a considerable role in the cultural, political and intellectual debates that have for centuries figured into – often dominantly so – the study of Old Norse traditions (e.g. freeprose and bookprose; the historical trustworthiness of the sagas; orality, oral performance, and oral composition; the disposition of the Icelandic manuscripts in the era of Icelandic independence). Given folklore’s field of enquiry and its eclectic intellectual foundations, the field often traces some of its key insights back to many of the same sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, philologists and historians associated with the early phases of memory studies (e.g. Émile Durkheim, W.H.R. Rivers; F.C. Bart­ lett). Folklore’s concern with such key issues for the understanding of memory



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as continuity, heritage, remembering, tradition, memorialisation and invention led to, and are largely revealed in, such ambitious theoretical stances as, e.g., the concepts of the ‘superorganic’ (Kroeber 1917) and the ‘mentifact’ (Bidney 1947, 384; cf. Mitchell 2014, 47–48). The Finnish Historical-Geographical School (Krohn 1971 [1926]) was a methodology of particular prominence and longevity, whose methods long dominated thinking in Western traditions about the nature of, and proper approach to, folklore. These approaches were all concerned more-or-less exclusively with the verbal production of folklore; in recent decades, folklore studies has experienced a strong movement away from this earlier tendency to focus on such text-centric concepts as motifs, genres, and taxonomy, and re-focused its energies toward consideration of folklore’s social and performance contexts, that is, away from the privileged position which the ‘cultural documents’ themselves once held as the key, even exclusive, area of concern, and toward the social processes by which these items are constructed and through which they acquire much of their meaning. This broader understanding of where meaning resides also meant recognizing and appreciating with renewed vigour the concept and role of ‘folk groups’, the sub-national groups that create and use such materials, that is, “a reorientation from a traditionalist view of folklore as reified, persistent cultural items – texts, artefacts, mentifacts – to a conception of folklore as a mode of com­ municative action” (Bauman and Briggs 1990, 79). These changes of perspective parallel – and even are, broadly speaking, the results of – the approaches asso­ ciated with and inspired by the study of mentalities (cf. Hutton 1981; Knuuttila 1993, 1995), the development of ethnohistory and ethnopoetics as scholarly fields (Dorson 1961; DuBois 2013), and, especially, the related concept of performance and the ‘ethnography of communication’, or as originally styled, the ‘ethnogra­ phy of speaking’ (cf. Hymes 1962; Bauman 1975; Bauman and Briggs 1990). To the extent then that folklorists are interested in the nature and uses of ‘tradition’, from Latin trāditiō, with a sense of ‘handing over, delivery, transmis­ sion of knowledge, teaching’ (cf. Ben-Amos 1984; Noyes 2009), the pivotal roles of memory and transmission for the work of folklorists has been at the forefront of the field’s thinking since its earliest days. From the ambitious volumes of Deutsche Sagen (1816–1818) by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm – characterised by one scholar as testimony to the notion that the legend represents a particular kind of narrative, namely, “Erinnerung in poetischer Einkleidung” [memory in poetic garb] (Fried 2012, 64) – to such seminal theoretical statements as Axel Olrik’s 1992 [1921] con­ sideration of folklore’s ‘rules’, including the effects of faulty memory or lapses, in Nogle grundsætninger for sagnforskning [Principles for Oral Narrative Research], to David Rubin’s 1995 examination of recall and performance in Memory in Oral Traditions: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-Out Rhymes,

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considerations of memory and its impact on recollection, reception and perfor­ mance stud the history of the field. Exploring the technical dimensions of this relationship, several recent studies have focussed on the role of memory –often in the form of such phenomena as the sort of neuroimaging envisioned in, for example, the work of Harold Scheub (1998) – for tradition participants in their production of narratives (e.g. Rubin and Greenberg 2003; Tangherlini 2008; Rubin 2009). These memory-oriented traditions of scholarship within folklore studies are not always obvious, however. Differences in terminology and emphasis can sometimes mask the substantial similarities between the nascent field of memory studies and folklore studies. Thus, shortly after the key notion of ‘collective memory’ was proposed by Maurice Halbwachs in 1925 (1992), the distinction between, and significance of, what we would today refer to as ‘communicative memory’ and ‘cultural memory’, i.e. what Jan Assmann refers to as kommunikatives und kulturelles Gedächtnis (2011 [1992]), was already anticipated in the lively discussion initiated in the 1930s among Nordic folklorists (e.g. von Sydow 1934; Granberg 1935) about the processes by which an encounter with the supernatural is initially related by the individual as a first-person experience (or P.E.N., per­ sonal experience narrative), and subsequently undergoes narrativisation within the tradition, increasingly conforming to and thereby becoming part of that tradi­ tion, what folklorists today, using von Sydow’s terminology, describe as a memorate which over time becomes a fabulate (cf. Bødker 1982, 660–661). To the extent von Sydow’s ideas parallel in important ways our contemporary ‘communicative memory’ and ‘cultural memory’ paradigm, it is notable that he too was building on ideas that were prevalent already generations earlier. For example, the idea that ‘communicative memory’ necessarily has a short shelf-life was already commonly bruited about a century ago (e.g. Heusler 1914, 52, “Ander­ wärts hat man beobachtet, daß schriftlose Volkserinnerung höchstens 100 Jahre, drei Menschenalter, einigermaßen glaubhaft umspannt”). But as Heusler himself carefully goes on to note, when crucial events are taken up in the tradition, they may endure for much longer periods. Modern research reveals that this durability may, in fact, last over many centuries, even millennia, as in such famous nonNordic cases as the Amerindian narratives about Crater Lake, the myths of the Māori of New Zealand about Mount Taranaki, or Hawaiian traditions of volcanic activity (Swanson 2008; cf. the essays in Cashman and Giordano 2008). The path that led to modern memory studies naturally has its history as well, as different fields emphasised areas of particular interest, such as memory’s role in ‘learning’ (cf. the review in Neisser 1982), yet these thoughtful and penetrating discussions often seem to sit isolated within their respective disciplinary silos. Indeed, one can occasionally be nonplussed by the apparent innocence of autho­



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ritative writers on memory of the existence of earlier or complementary, even competing, theorising in other disciplines. Such would seem to be the treatment of the works of the sociologist Edward Shils (1971, 1981) on the role of institutions in maintaining and curating traditions, works which are only rarely noted or dis­ cussed by memory studies scholars. Uniquely among the disciplines, research by anthropologists on memory (e.g. Bloch 1998) enjoys wide-spread use by scholars in other fields, especially some of its better-known findings on memory’s function in specific cultural set­ tings (e.g. Bateson 1936; D’Azevedo 1962). Thus, in a refreshing display of crossdisciplinarity, in 1977 the historian Jacques Le Goff (1992 [1977], 55) took stock of the results of anthropological research on the role of memory in pre-literate societies by, among others, Jack Goody, and suggests, adopting the terminology of André Leroi-Gourhan (1974), the phrase ‘ethnic memory’ to refer to “the collec­ tive memory of people without writing,” although it should be noted that LeroiGourhan does not make this distinction and regards this kind of memory as the property of all human societies (cf. Connerton 1989). As one quickly infers from these examples, memory in a modern sense – social, shared, collective, ethnic (cf. Jerman and Hautaniemi 2006) – has been of importance to a variety of fields for many decades and is, or ought to be, the ultimate interdisciplinary research area, especially for humanists.

3 Pre-modern Nordic material Exactly when concern for memory as such is first articulated in Old Norse folk­ lore studies is difficult to determine – as noted, one might reasonably argue that memory in a broad, generic sense has always been an important issue in the field. Certainly, the relationship is one much commented on by early scholarship: in the first volume of his Sagabibliothek (1817), for example, Peter Erasmus Müller notes that the ancients’ tales of ghouls (Giengangere) could, in the imagination of the poorly educated, fool the senses, “hvis Erindring blander sig med hvad, virkeligen er bleven erfaret” (Müller 1817, 31) [whose memory would blend with that which has actually been experienced (author’s translation)]. A similar strain of thinking can be seen in analyses of contemporary culture with perceived roots in the medieval world, such as Sweden’s first scientific ethnology, Wärend och Wirdarne. Ett försök i Svensk Ethnologi (Hyltén-Cavallius 1863–1868). Its author, a trained and published philologist, Gunnar Olof Hyltén-Cavallius, implicitly pro­ jects a perspective we would today recognise as embracing the notion of cultural memory when, some years before Edward Tylor’s seminal work on ‘survivals’

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(1871), he views local traditions in southern Småland as atavistic reflections of earlier pagan traditions, writing, for example, that in the trolls of contemporary local folklore of the area one sees “den ursprungliga bilden af en fornnordisk Oden någon gång framskymta” (Hyltén-Cavallius 1863–1868, 224) [the original image of an ancient Nordic Odin occasionally burns through (author’s transla­ tion)]. In an important review of the Nordic materials, the Norwegian folklorist, Brynjulf Alver (1962), demonstrated on more empirical grounds how folklore collected in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries sometimes reveals uncanny ‘knowledge’ of, or echoes about, events and materials connected to the Viking and medieval periods, even the pre-Roman Iron Age. In fact, the history of Old Norse scholarship sports more than a few attempts, often grounded in an underarticulated notion of ‘folk memories’, to argue for connections between recently observed folklore and medieval Nordic antecedents (e.g. Olrik 1901; Westman 1943). On the other hand, recent research investigating related folklore matters (e.g. Gunnell 2001; Jesch 2008; Mitchell 2007, 2009), although often approaching the evidence with a similar interest in continuities within folk traditions, have at the same time incorporated into their frameworks subtler approaches to the func­ tion of memory and memory studies. The role of memory – understood in its least elaborated form, i.e. as recall capable of reflecting empirical reality and thus, by extension, tied to the idea of saga reliability – emerges as a critical component of Sigurður Nordal’s famous 1940 study of Hrafnkels saga, in which, among other kinds of evidence, Sigurður employs the factually inaccurate historical information to be found in the saga as proof of the tale having been composed by an individual author rather than being the result of the events having had an historically accurate oral existence handed down within the tradition. Various scholars, including those coming from a folk­lore perspective, have over the decades built on, and in some cases pushed back against, this key study. Both Óskar Halldórsson (1976) and Jón Hnefill Aðal­ steinsson (2000), for example, present arguments that rely on ethnic or cultural memory and folklore as critical elements in continuing to make the case for an older oral Hrafnkels saga, or at least for elements of the one known to us in the extant written saga. This matter of the trustworthiness and historical accuracy of the Icelan­ dic sagas, an issue with obvious ties to the twinned questions of tradition and memory, has been at the heart of the so-called freeprose-bookprose debate (on which see, Andersson 1964, 65–81; cp. Mitchell 1991, 1–6; Gísli Sigurðsson 2004 [2002]; Mitchell 2003) ever since the term Freiprosa was first introduced by Heusler (1914, 54). The possibility of a special role for individuals with unusual abilities of recall, what Snorri seems to mean by gamlir frœðimenn ‘old wise men’ in his prologue to Heimskringla, and the implications of such people, the ‘men of



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memory’, in their East Scandinavian legal context has been explored in depth by Stefan Brink (2014). Gísli Sigurðsson (2004 [2002], 53–92) similarly investigates the significance of the changing media environment for the Icelandic institution of the so-called ‘lawspeaker’, an officially recognised ‘man of memory’. At the same time, Gunnell (2001) is able to show how modern folkloric material appear­ ing to bear on medieval Black Death epidemics is, in fact, more likely to reflect eighteenth-century Icelandic conditions, demonstrating that the relationship between historical fact and tale-telling can, paradoxically, be more-or-less true, even if it is not exactly a mirror-like reflection of reality. A perspective on memory as both a socially-constructed and sociallyemployed phenomenon, one whose use in the Old Norse field could have deep meaning for its medieval ‘present’, is represented in what might be called, as the theme was entitled at the 15th International Saga Conference held at Århus University in 2012, The Sagas and the Use of the Past. This idea came to be used extensively as one way of understanding the Old Norse world in its folkloric and memorialisation dimensions in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (e.g. Hastrup 1987; Byock 1992; Jesch 2005; Hermann 2009; Harris 2010; Kaplan 2011; Mitchell 2012; cf. Eriksen 1999, 2010). In fact, a perspective on memory as implying uses of the past has percolated widely throughout different areas of Old Norse folklore scholarship, including its relation to such fields as material culture and the inherited, built landscape (e.g. Hållans Stenholm 2012; Andrén 2013; Gunnell 2014; Lund and Arwill-Nordbladh 2016). Employing an ethnosymbolic approach to cultural memory, one book-length study of the heavily folkloric legendary sagas, or fornaldarsögur, for example, builds on the view that these texts were understood, or agreed upon to be under­ stood, by their audiences to be ‘traditional’– storied tales based on orally-trans­ mitted memories, or purported memories, from the past (Mitchell 1991; cp. Mitch­ ell 2014). Focusing on their folkloric content and building on the value these works would have had in the late medieval period as “cultural forms inherited from the past (or believed to have been inherited from the past),” the study underscores the roles played by revitalisation, folklorism, and “the attitudes of the Iceland­ ers toward their past” (Mitchell 1991, 133–35, 180). Taking a different approach in his important examination of the relationship between oral sources and Old Icelandic literary texts, especially with respect to the so-called Vínland saga, Gísli Sigurðsson (2004 [2002], 253–263) employs the phrase “floating memories” as a way of capturing the process that yields many of our extant texts as the results of multigenerational tale-telling, “in exactly the way we might expect of stories and information preserved by memory and passed on by word of mouth” (Gísli Sigurðsson 2004 [2002], 301). Returning to the question of the use of the past in the Old Icelandic materials, Merrill Kaplan’s study of four tales in Flateyjar-

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bók (2011; cf. Kaplan 2000, 2004) carefully examines episodes in the manuscript where figures from the pre-Christian past makes appearances, in some cases fol­ lowing the familiar outlines of the Meleager story and its life-ending candle (AT 1187), episodes which in her estimation constitute “a guide for thinking about the narrative goods of the pagan past, and for reusing them” (Kaplan 2011, 194). The central concept Kaplan develops, is the idea of these references to the pagan past as irruptions, “not the rupture or symptomatic textual discontinuity of decon­ structionist criticism,” but rather “the thing out of place, the event like the incur­ sion of a supernatural being in legend without which the legend would not exist” (Kaplan 2011, 16). Thus, engaged in their own internal discussions of memory’s role in, and connection to, Old Norse representations of tradition, scholars of Old Norse folk­ lore might be understood to have turned rather slowly towards modern interna­ tional memory studies. Yet especially with the appearance of several of the essays in Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North (Hermann and Mitchell 2013a; see Hermann and Mitchell 2013b) – a special issue of the journal Scandinavian Studies that resulted from a so-called exploratory seminar at Harvard University on memory studies and Old Norse the previous year – it becomes apparent that the complementary interests of the two groups were being carefully joined. In “Ethnomemory: Ethnographic and Culture-Centered Approaches to the Study of Memory” DuBois (2013) turns the lessons to be had from decades of memory studies and ethnopoetic research on the Nordic materi­ als, both Old Norse and Saami. In that same volume, Mitchell (2013) examines commemoration, memory, mediality, performance, and the turn toward the ‘eth­ nography of communication’ in international folkloristics. Similarly, a number of the articles in Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture (Hermann, Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir 2014a; see also the comments in 2014b) are likewise highly relevant to the intersection of Old Norse folklore materials and memory studies in such areas as mythology and narrativizations of the past according to local traditions. Although generally less oriented toward modern memory studies as such, the activities in recent years of the so-called Retrospec­ tive Methods Network (on which, see Heide’s 2009 call-to-arms) have in several anthologies (e.g. Heide and Bek-Pedersen 2014; Sävborg and Bek-Pedersen 2014) offered critiques that nonetheless bear on our understanding of memory and the Old Norse folklore materials, often explicitly so (e.g. Gunnell 2014; Mitchell 2014).



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4 Perspectives for future research Folklore and ‘memory’ (in all its different varieties) are largely inseparable, even, one might say, conceptual helpmates. On the other hand, the fundamental cat­ egory of ‘memory’ is not the same thing as ‘memory studies’, although the two are clearly related. The degree to which the more narrowly defined approach asso­ ciated with modern international memory studies can be of value to the study of Old Norse folklore is a highly promising experiment, yet one still only in its infancy. Moving conceptually from the idea of ‘memory’ as a matter of recording, keeping, owning, and utilising the past, to a more subtly textured understand­ ing of memory’s character and value in line with modern international memory studies, and how these approaches enhance folklore’s long-standing engage­ ment with memory, will be critically important going forward. The results thus far are encouraging, and bolster the view that a sustained engagement of memory studies scholars with the rich folklore materials of the Nordic world (e.g. Íslenzkar þjóðsögur og ævintýri) would be highly productive. One easily missed aspect of this partnership is the opportunity it presents to re-examine, armed now with new perspectives, earlier empirical studies that have been framed in different discourses. The study, for example, of how a famous early modern homicide comes to be memorialised within local folk traditions (Runn­ quist 1983) is predicated on interest in Oral Theory, yet this case study also pro­ vides an opportunity to understand better within a memory studies perspective the point made by Preben Meulengracht Sørensen when he writes of an analogous situation in the sagas where historical knowledge is presented in narrative form, that is, “the knowledge that the bearers of tradition, the wise men and women, thought it important to pass on unchanged to their inheritors” (1993 [1977], 108). The same basic historical matter, he sensibly reasons, was then manifested in different ways over the centuries, at first in oral forms, and later in written saga forms. In a similar way, looking now outside the Nordic world, there exist already exemplary studies of temporal and cultural comparanda (e.g. Nagy 1990; Beiner 2007) which scholars of Old Norse folklore should not hesitate to use as models. As folkloristics continues to embraces its disciplinary tradition of coopera­ tion with other fields, and especially as scholars explore relationships beyond the traditional text-based genres, one would expect to see further advances in areas where memory plays a central role, as has already been the case in the use archaeologists, for example, have made of folklore materials (e.g. Zachrisson 2003). Noting folklore’s inherently transdisciplinary character, Richard Bauman observed some years ago that “the philological synthesis” of the past may provide a possible charter for folklore’s future (Bauman 1996, 17). That same guiding prin­ ciple could, and should, be extended to include memory studies.

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Works cited Primary sources Fornaldar Sögur Nordrlanda, eptir gömlum handritum. Ed. C. C. Rafn. 3 Vols. Copenhagen, 1829–1830. Hrafnkels saga. In Austfirðinga sǫgur. Ed. Jón Jóhannesson. ÍF, 11. Reykjavík, 1950. 95–133. Íslenzkar þjóðsögur og ævintýri. Ed. Jón Árnason. 2nd rev. ed. Reykjavík, 1954–1961. Snorra Edda = Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Prologue and Gylfaginning. Ed. Anthony Faulkes. 2nd ed. London, 2005. Poetic Edda = Eddukvæði. Ed. Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason. ÍF. Reykjavík, 2014. Saxo Grammaticus. Gesta Danorum. The History of the Danes. Ed. Karsten Friis-Jensen. Trans. Peter Fisher. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford, 2015. Snorri Sturluson. Heimskringla. I. Ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson. ÍF, 26. Reykjavík, 1962 [1941].

Secondary sources Alver, Brynjulf. 1962. “Historiske segner og historisk sanning.” Norveg 9: 89–116. Andersson, Theodore M. 1964. The Problem of Icelandic Saga Origins: A Historical Survey. Yale Germanic Studies, 1. New Haven, CT. Andrén, Anders. 2013. “Places, Monuments, and Objects: The Past in Ancient Scandinavia.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 267–281. Assmann, Jan. 2011. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. New York. [German orig. 1992] Bateson, Gregory. 1936. Naven. A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of View. Cambridge. Bauman, Richard. 1975. “Verbal Art as Performance.” American Anthropologist 77: 290–311. Bauman, Richard. 1996. “Folklore as a Transdisciplinary Dialogue.” Journal of Folklore Research 33: 15–20. Bauman, Richard and Charles L. Briggs. 1990. “Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life.” Annual Review of Anthropology 19: 59–88. Beiner, Guy. 2007. Remembering the Year of the French: Irish Folk History and Social Memory. Madison, Wisconsin. Ben-Amos, Dan. 1984. “The Seven Strands of Tradition: Varieties in Its Meaning in American Folklore Studies.” Journal of Folklore Research 21.2–3: 97–131. Bidney, David. 1947. “Human Nature and the Cultural Process.” American Anthropologist 49.3: 375–399. Bloch, Maurice. 1998. How We Think They Think: Anthropological Approaches to Cognition, Memory, and Literacy. Boulder, Colorado. Boberg, Inger M. 1953. Folkemindeforskningens historie i Mellem- og Nordeuropa. Danmarks Folkeminder, 60. Copenhagen. Bødker, Laurits. 1982 [1956–1978]. “Sagn.” KLNM XIV: Cols. 658–662.



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Brink, Stefan. 2014. “Minnunga mæn: The Usage of Old Knowledgeable Men in Legal Cases.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 197–210. Byock, Jesse L. 1992. “History and the Sagas: The Effect of Nationalism.” In From Sagas to Society: Comparative Approaches to Early Iceland. Ed. Gísli Pálsson. Enfield Lock. 43–59. Cashman, K.V. and G. Giordano, eds. 2008. “Volcanoes and Human History (Special issue).” Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research 176.3: 325–438. Connerton, Paul. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge and New York. D’Azevedo, Warren L. 1962. “Uses of the Past in Gola Discourse.” Journal of African History 3: 11–34. Dorson, Richard M. 1961. “Ethnohistory and Ethnic Folklore.” Ethnohistory 8.1: 12–30. 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. Eriksen, Anne. 1999. Historie, minne og myte. Oslo. Eriksen, Anne. 2010. “Memorial, Sentiment and Exemplarity.” ARV. Nordic Yearbook of Folklore 66: 351–370. Fried, Johannes. 2012. Der Schleier der Erinnerung: Grundzüge einer historischen Memorik. Munich. Gísli Sigurðsson. 2003. “Medieval Icelandic Studies.” Oral Tradition 18.2: 207–209. Gísli Sigurðsson. 2004. The Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition: A Discourse on Method. Transl. Nicholas Jones. Publications of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature, 2. Cambridge, MA. [Icelandic orig. 2002] Granberg, Gunnar. 1935. “Memorat und Sage. Einige methodische Gesichtspunkte.” Saga och Sed: 120–127. Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. 1816–18. Deutsche Sagen. 2 vols. Berlin. Gunnell, Terry. 2001. “Mists, Magicians and Murderous Children: International Migratory Legends Concerning the ‘Black Death’ in Iceland.” In Northern Lights: Following Folklore in North Western Europe: Essays in Honour of Bo Almqvist. Ed. Séamas Ó Catháin. Dublin. 47–59. Gunnell, Terry. 2014. “Nordic folk legends, folk traditions and grave mounds.” In New Focus on Retrospective Methods: Resuming Methodological Discussions: Case Studies from Northern Europe. Ed. Eldar Heide and Karen Bek-Pedersen. FFC, 307. Helsinki. 17–41. Hållans Stenholm, Ann-Mari. 2012. Fornminnen: Det förflutnas roll i det förkristna och kristna Mälardalen. Vägar till Midgård, 15. Lund. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1992. On Collective Memory. Trans. Lewis A. Coser. Chicago. [French orig. 1925] Harris, Joseph. 2010. “Old Norse Memorial Discourse between Orality and Literacy.” In Along the Oral-Written Continuum: Types of Texts, Relations, and Their Implications. Ed. Slavica Ranković, Leidulf Melve and Else Mundal. Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, 20. Turnhout. 120–133. Hastrup, Kirsten. 1987. “Presenting the Past: Reflections on Myth and History.” Folk 29: 257–269. Heide, Eldar. 2009. “More inroads to pre-Christian notions, after all? The potential of late evidence.” In Á austrvega. Saga and East Scandinavia. Ed. Agneta Ney, Henrik Williams and Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist. Papers from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, 14. Gävle. I: 361–368.

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Heide, Eldar and Karen Bek-Pedersen, eds. 2014. New Focus on Retrospective Methods: Resuming Methodological Discussions: Case Studies from Northern Europe. FFC, 307. Helsinki. Hermann, Pernille. 2009. “Concepts of Memory and Approaches to the Past in Medieval Icelandic Literature.” Scandinavian Studies 81.3: 287–308. Hermann, Pernille and Stephen A. Mitchell, eds. 2013a. Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85:3. Hermann, Pernille and Stephen A. Mitchell. 2013b. “Constructing the Past: Introductory Remarks.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 261–266. Hermann, Pernille, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir, eds. 2014a. Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. Hermann, Pernille, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. 2014b. “Introduction: Minni and Muninn – Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 1–10. Heusler, Andreas. 1914. Die Anfänge der isländischen Saga. Aus den Abhandlungen der Königlich preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Jahrg. 1913. Phil-hist. Classe. Nr. 9. Berlin. Hutton, Patrick. 1981. “The History of Mentalities: The New Map of Cultural History.” History and Theory 20: 237–259. Hyltén-Cavallius, Gunnar Olof. 1863–1868. Wärend och Wirdarne. Ett försök i Svensk Ethnologi. Stockholm. Hymes, Dell H. 1962. “The Ethnography of Speaking.” In Anthropology and Human Behavior. Washington, D.C. 13–53. Jerman, Helena and Petri Hautaniemi, eds. 2006. Anthropological Perspectives on Social Memory. Anthropological Yearbook of European Cultures, 15. Berlin. Jesch, Judith. 2005. “Memorials in Speech and Writing.” In Runesten, magt og mindesmærker: Tværfagligt symposium på Askov Højskole 3.–5. oktober 2002. Ed. Gunhild Øeby Nielsen. Højbjerg. 95–104. Jesch, Judith. 2008. “Myth and Cultural Memory in the Viking Diaspora.” Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 4: 221–226. Jón Hnefill Aðalsteinsson. 2000. Þá hneggjaði Freyfaxi. Reykjavík. Kaplan, Merrill. 2000. “Prefiguration and the Writing of History in Þáttr Þiðranda ok Þórhalls.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 99.3: 379–394. Kaplan, Merrill. 2004. “The Past as Guest: Mortal Men, King’s Men, and Four gestir in Flateyjarbók.” Gripla 15: 91–120. Kaplan, Merrill. 2011. Thou Fearful Guest: Addressing the Past in Four Tales in Flateyjarbók. FFC, 301. Helsinki. Kroeber, A. L. 1917. “The Superorganic.” American Anthropologist 19.2: 163–213. Krohn, Kaarle. 1971. Folklore Methodology. Trans. Roger L. Welsh. Publications of the American Folklore Society. Bibliographical and special series, 21. Austin, Texas. [German orig. 1926] Knuuttila, Seppo. 1993. “Some Questions Concerning Mentalities, Ethnomethodology and Rhetorics in the Folkloristic Study of Community.” In Nordic Frontiers: Recent Issues in the Study of Modern Traditional Culture in the Nordic Countries. Ed. Pertti J. Anttonen and Reimund Kvideland. NIF Publications, 27. Turku. 121–130.



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Knuuttila, Seppo. 1995. “Mentalities and Modalities.” Suomen Antropologi 20.1: 18–25. Laugerud, Henning. 2010. “Memory Stored and Reactivated – Some Introductory Reflections.” Arv. Nordic Yearbook of Folklore 66: 7–20. Le Goff, Jacques. 1992. History and Memory. Trans. S. Rendall and E. Claman New York. [Italian orig. 1977] Leroi-Gourhan, André. 1974. “Les vois de l’histoire avant l’ecriture.” In Faire de l’histoire. Ed. Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora. Paris. I: 93–105. Lund, Julie and Elisabeth Arwill-Nordbladh. 2016. “Divergent Ways of Relating to the Past in the Viking Age.” European Journal of Archaeology 19.3: 415–438. Meulengracht Sørensen, Preben. 1993. Saga and Society: An Introduction to Old Norse Literature. Studia Borealia, 1. Odense. [Danish orig. 1977] Mitchell, Stephen A. 1991. Heroic Sagas and Ballads. Ithaca, New York. Mitchell, Stephen A. 2000. “Folklore and Philology Revisited: Medieval Scandinavian Folklore?” In Norden og Europa. Fagtradisjner i nordisk etnologi og folkloristikk. Ed. Bjarne Rogge and Bente Gullveig Alver. Oslo. 286–294. Mitchell, Stephen A. 2003. “Reconstructing Old Norse Oral Tradition.” Oral Tradition 18.2: 203–206. Mitchell, Stephen A. 2007. “DgF 526 ‘Lokket med runer’, Memory, and Magic.” In Emily Lyle: The Persistent Scholar. Ed. Francis J. Fischer and Sigrid Rieuwerts. Ballads and Songs International Studies, 5. Trier. 206–211. Mitchell, Stephen A. 2009. “Odin, Magic and a Swedish Trial from 1484.” Scandinavian Studies 81.3: 263–286. Mitchell, Stephen A. 2012. “Transvektion und die verleumdete Frau in der skandinavischen Tradition (TSB D367): Ein neuerliches Überdenken des Super-Organischen in der Folkloristik.” In Text, Reihe, Transmisson: Unfestigkeit als Phänomen skandinavischer Erzählprosa 1500–1800. Ed. Jürg Glauser and Anna Katharina Dömling. Beiträge zur Nordischen Phlologie 42. Tübingen and Basel. 183–204. Mitchell, Stephen A. 2013. “Memory, Mediality, and the ‘Performative Turn’: Recontextualizing Remembering in Medieval Scandinavia.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 282–305. Mitchell, Stephen A. 2014. “Continuity: Folklore’s Problem Child?” In Folklore in Old Norse – Old Norse in Folklore. Ed. Daniel Sävborg and Karen Bek-Pedersen. Nordistica Tartuensis, 20. Tartu. 34–51. Müller, Peter Erasmus. 1817. Sagabibliothek med Anmærkninger og indledende Afhandlinger. I. Sagaer, der angaae Islands egne Begivenheder. Copenhagen. Nagy, Gregory. 1990. Pindar’s Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past. Baltimore. Neisser, Ulric. 1982. “Memory: What are the Important Questions?” In Memory Observed: Remembering in Natural Contexts. Ed. Ulric Neisser. San Francisco. 3–19. Noyes, Dorothy. 2009. “Three Traditions.” Journal of Folklore Research 46.3: 233–268. Olrik, Axel. 1901. “Odinsjægeren i Jylland.” Dania 8: 139–173. Olrik, Axel. 1992. Principles for Oral Narrative Research. Bloomington, Indiana. [Danish orig. 1921] Óskar Halldórsson. 1976. Uppruni og þema Hrafnkels sögu. Reykjavík. Rubin, David C. 1995. Memory in Oral Traditions: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-Out Rhymes. New York and Oxford.

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Rubin, David C. 2009. “Oral Traditions as Collective Memories: Implications for a General Theory of Individual and Collective Memory.” In Memory in Mind and Culture. Ed. Pascal Boyer and James V. Wertsch. Cambridge. 273–287. Rubin, David C. and D.L. Greenberg. 2003. “The Role of Narrative in Recollection: A View from Cognitive and Neuropsychology.” In Narrative and Consciousness: Literature, Psychology, and the Brain. Ed. G. Fireman, T. McVay and O. Flanagan. Oxford. 53–85. Runnquist, Ingrid. 1983. “Mordet i Sandby. En jämförelse mellan muntlig tradition och historisk verklighet.” Rig 66: 97–116. Sävborg, Daniel and Karen Bek-Pedersen, eds. 2014. Folklore in Old Norse – Old Norse in Folklore. Nordistica Tartuensia, 20. Tartu. Scheub, Harold. 1998. Story. Madison, Wisconsin. Shils, Edward A. 1971. “Tradition.” Comparative Studies in Sociology and History 13: 122–159. Shils, Edward A. 1981. Tradition. Chicago. Sigurður Nordal. 1940. Hrafnkatla. Íslenzk fræði, 7. Reykjavík. Strömbäck, Dag. 1979. “Folklore and Philology: Some Recollections.” Arv 35: 13–23. Swanson, Donald A. 2008. “Hawaiian Oral Tradition Describes 400 Years of Volcanic Activity at Kīlauea.” Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research 176.3: 427–431. Sydow, Carl von. 1922. “Folkminnesforskning och filologi.” Folkminnen och folktankar 8: 75–123. Sydow, Carl von. 1934. “Kategorien der Prosa-Volksdichtung.” In Volkskundliche Gaben. John Meier zum siebzigsten Geburtstage dargebracht. Ed. Harry Schewe and Erich Seemann. Berlin and Leipzig. 253–268. Sydow, Carl von. 1944. “Folkminnesforskningens uppkomst och utveckling.” Folkkultur 4: 5–35. Tangherlini, Timothy R. 2008. “‘Where was I?’: Personal Experience Narrative, Crystallization and Some Thoughts on Tradition Memory.” Cultural Analysis 7: 41–65. Tylor, Edward B. 1871. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom. London. Westman, K.G. 1943. “Bidrag till problemet om Nerthus-Frökulten i Sverige.” Saga och Sed: 199–204. Zachrisson, Torun. 2003. “The Queen of Mist and the Lord of the Mountain. Oral Traditions of the Landscape and Monuments in the Omberg area of western Östergötland.” Current Swedish Archaeology 11: 119–138.

Terry Gunnell

I: 6 Performance Studies 1 Definition Performance studies is a field of research that focuses on the nature of experi­ ence, and how experiences are created and sometimes manipulated by the powers that be. As a research field, performance studies deals with all aspects of human performance, examining the various complex ways in which any live per­ formance works on those present (thereby attempting to reach beyond the level of the spoken or written text that might lie behind the performance in question). It thus focuses on the multiple aspects of the moment, analysing communication, interaction and the way in which any experience plays on the whole range of human senses (as well as various types of memory). It can effectively be applied not only to those activities that a society usually considers to be deliberate performances but also most aspects of human be­haviour, all of which involve different kinds of learning. It is especially useful as a means of analysing festival, ritual and drama, which are closely interrelated in various ways, and not least in terms of performance and the ways in which they are built around cultural tradition, itself an expressive form of cultural memory. Indeed, as with all types of performance, each of these activities involves some aspect of staging, since by nature they all involve performers, observers, and something that is performed, and will always automatically create its own per­ formance space (see further e.g. Schechner 2013, 28–51; Gunnell and Ronström 2013). As something out of the ordinary, each of these activities involves events which are more likely than not to burn themselves into people’s memories in one way or another. Indeed, in the case of both festival and ritual, it could be argued that this is one of the main purposes of the activity.

2 State of research In modern English, the word festival has roots in the word feast. While the word fest is also known in the Nordic countries, there is good reason to draw atten­ tion to the Old Norse word for festival: hátíð (high time). While this word has a Christian background in the idea of higher and lower festivals in the Christian calendar, it has particular validity here because of its widespread and long-term Nordic use; its stress on the element of time; and the difference it implies between https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-012

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festive time and other times in the year, and not least their sense of height. Thus, hátíð underlines that festivals are culturally marked-off periods during which we behave differently and in which the things that we do tend to have more sig­ nificance within the cultural societies that we inhabit. In the past in particular, these were times at which the borders between the natural and supernatural worlds opened up allowing passage and transaction in both directions. It was this feature, more than anything else, that bestowed on the festival its element of height, its performative power (in the sense suggested in Austin 1962), and not least its element of what Eliade calls “sacred time” (Eliade 1958, 388–408), in which the mythical past and present momentarily became one. (On the concept of the festival, see further e.g. Falassi 1987; Santino 1994; Dorson 1972, 159–172; and the examples in Hutton 1996.) Festivals by nature commonly involve a great deal of play, but have ritual of various kinds at their heart. Unlike play, which may involve learned rules but tends to allow both freedom and creativity (see further Huizinga 1949; Bateson 1978; Schechner 2013, 89–122), ritual is about repetition, “invariance” and often “unison” (Rappaport 1979, 208 and 213; Bell 1997, 150–153). While it can be found in secular, day-to-day activities, it is commonly analysed in terms of the reli­ gious and the sacred, and involves embodied tradition (Assmann 2006, 8; Bell 1997, 145–150), focusing on learnt and remembered action, often accompanied by words. They are the feature that introduces the element of “sacred time” to festivals, involving “the interplay of the symbolic with the corporeal” (Assmann 2006, 10), and often gaining added power by reference to the ancient past and the numinous (Rappaport 1979, 177 and 213). Ritual naturally sometimes involves elements of spectacle and not least drama as a means of sharpening experience and actively introducing a sense of liminality to the proceedings. Indeed, as the present author has earlier under­ lined, liminality is a central feature of all forms of drama which can be seen, in essence, as: “the momentary living creation of an alternative world (or a section of it) within this one,” which brings about an “‘illu­sion’ of double real­ity” that naturally “involves the addition of a system of semiotics extending beyond the arguably limi­ted dimensions of the merely spoken or written word” (Gunnell 1995, 12). As suggested above, drama will always involve elements of ritual for both the performer and those experiencing it. All the same, like festival and ritual, it can never be wholly repeated (if only because the context will always be different: see Schechner 2013, 34–36). As Schechner has underlined, drama, like ritual, necessarily involves various types of prior learning and preparation (not only in terms of words and actions but also skills), and to be understood and to function effectively, it draws on shared cultural memories and not least various forms of shared cultural language



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(Schechner 2013, 225–250). Furthermore, like all other performative experiences, drama is transient. Once it has taken place, the dramatic moment vanishes. As with the festive and the ritual, its memory is also scenic and episodic: while it may leave behind a few material remains (sometimes taking the form of dramatic manuscripts), for the main part all that remains of the emotive experience are various forms of memory, initially communicative but eventually only cultural, and this is the form in which they will have to be examined in the future. In spite of this, as noted above, there are various ways of getting beyond this, not least by drawing on the nature of our own experiences of performative moments in the present. Previous discussions of memory in Old Norse culture have logically tended to concentrate on the tangible, focusing on the memories represented by extant texts or archaeological remains (see e.g. Hermann and Mitchell 2013; Hermann, Mitchell and Agnes Arnórsdóttir 2014; Hållans Stenholm 2006; Laugerud 2010; for an exception, see Mitchell 2013). The intangible in the shape of various kinds of ritual performance, practices which Connerton refers to as “incorporating practices” (as opposed to “inscribed practices: see Connerton 2010, 72–73), in other words practices which “do not exist ‘objectively’, independently of their being performed” (Connerton 2010, 102), have tended to be granted less status. This is because they are “largely traceless” and in many cases are “incapable of providing a means by which any evidence of a will to be remembered can be ‘left behind’,” meaning that they are “are not easily susceptible to critical scrutiny and evaluation” (Connerton 2010, 102). In spite of the fact that in tangible terms, such practices are here one minute and ‘gone’ the next, there is little question they are not only grounded in memory of various kinds (both communicative and cultural: see Assmann 2006), but also designed to foster and burn new memory in the minds and bodies of those present (memory naturally not only being something that lives in the mind but also the muscles). Of course, any analysis of Old Norse performances will have to draw on extant textual sources for its evi­ dence (sources which have already been selected and edited for preservation by the culture in question). However, it will not focus on the means by which this material has come to be remembered, but rather attempt to engage in a process that the present author has come to call “performance archaeology” (Gunnell 2013, 189). Building on the belief that the records in question have a back­ ground in oral memories of actual events, this process will naturally draw on our personal experiences of how various kinds of performances work in order to attempt to read between the lines and analyse what might have been actually going on in those living performances of the past preserved in these accounts.

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3 Pre-modern Nordic material There is little question that religious belief and religious practice in the form of various kinds of ritual formed part of daily life in the pre-Christian Old Norse world. Indeed, the understanding of the world as a whole appears to have been very different to the way in which we view it today, and the same must have applied to the ways in which people dealt with it. As Brink notes, During pre-Christian times, all nature and landscape were metaphysically ‘charged’ in different ways, with different degrees of energy, as regarded holiness or sacrality; the landscape was metaphysically impregnated as a totality, and people lived in a numinous environment. Everything “out there” was, as Mircea Eliade would have called it, a huge hierophany. (Brink 2001, 81–82)

Within this world, it seems evident that organised communal festivals (as opposed to celebrations, commemorations or other smaller ritualistic activities) were essentially associated with turning points in a year that was divided into two seasons: winter (which in temporal terms, like night, was seen as coming first) and then summer (see further Gunnell 2005), the main festivals taking place at the start of winter (hence the start of the year) in late October (at the so-called vetrnætr); at the winter solstice; at the start of summer in late March; and then at time of the summer solstice (although the existence of this latter festival has been questioned: see Billington 2007). Snorri Sturluson’s euhemeristic account in Ynglinga saga [The saga of the Ynglings] (Ch. 8) tells how Óðinn (Odin) insti­ tuted three of these festivals in Sweden, each of which had different associations: “Þá skyldi blóta í móti vetri til árs, en at miðjum vetri blóta til gróðrar, it þriðja at sumri, þat var sigrblót” [People should sacrifice at the start of winter for a good year, and in the middle of the winter sacrifice for the growth of the soil, and the third was at the start of the summer for victory]. The vetrnætr (also referred to as the dísablót [sacrifice to the dísir, who were protective female spirits]), seems to have been the most important of these festivals (at least in Norway and Iceland: see Gunnell 2005). Meanwhile, the large national festival that was apparently celebrated at Old Uppsala by the Swedes every nine years appears to have taken place in late March (presumably in connection with the start of the summer: see further Adam of Bremen 1917, 259–260 (Book IV, Ch. 27); Adam of Bremen 1959, 208; and Nord­ berg 2006; and Gunnell 2017. Elsewhere, in Snorri’s Ólafs saga Helga [The saga of St  Olaf], Ch. 41, reference is given to an autumnal álfablót (sacrifice to the álfar, which appear to have had a relationship to protective ancestors and/or nature spirits: see Gunnell 2007) which also seems to have taken place at some time in the late autumn. Another household sacrifice involving a preserved horse



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phallus is described in Vǫlsaþáttr [The story of Volsi] in Ólafs saga hins helga, Chs. 265–266. Most (if not all) of these festivals seem to have included some kind of socalled blót [lit. ‘blood sacrifice’], a shared communal meal, and the commu­ nal consumption of alcohol. Among other things these would have effectively impressed on the minds of those present not only the format and meaning of the repeated ritual (which itself may have been meant to refer to a mythical event, even if this is never refered to in the extant texts), but also awareness and memo­ ries of the passing seasons; and awareness of the human situation within time and worldview as a whole (see e.g. Rappaport 1979, 187). They would also have underlined social unity, social belonging; local hierachies; and human associ­ ation with the supernatural (which, as will be shown below, could have taken the form of ancestors, local nature spirits or the gods themselves, depending on the size and nature of the group). The blood sacrifice alone would have been enough to burn the memories of the blót into people’s minds (see further Lucas and McGovern 2007 on the remnant of such seasonal sacrifice found at the hall in Hófsstaðir in Iceland). Other Old Norse ritual activities, while also drawing on cultural knowledge and tradition for their form and meaning (and on their alleged age and possible mythical background for their power), were more occasional, and less often com­ munal. Some, such as those related to marriage, were essentially performative rites of passage (van Gennep 1960), bringing about changes in identity or owner­ ship and designed to be remembered and legally respected in the future by the local society, although funerals were naturally built around numerous types of memory relating to the past. While the physical remains of the fóstbrœðrathǫfn (the bridge of turf under which the participants blended blood) vanished back into nature, leaving nothing but memories supported by physical scars, the burial gravemound physically changed the surroundings as a permanent lieu de memoire (Nora 1989) and literal land-mark, simultaneously underlining bounda­ ries and bestowing the visible landscape with a new invisible dimension in the shape of the dead body and its accoutrements that people knew existed beneath the stones of the mound. Learned skills and visible change in the landscape were also a feature of Egill Skalla-Grímsson’s níðstǫng [insult pole] ritual, which apparently involved the setting up of a horse head on a pole; the chanting of poetry; and the carving of the same words in runes as a means of cursing a Norwegian king (see Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar [Egil’s saga], Ch. 57). This ritual was nonetheless focused on magically bringing about a permanent or temporary change in the status quo and order of things, like other occasional rituals involving the carving of runes (see e.g. Skírnismál [Skirnir’s journey], St. 36; Sigrdrífumál [The lay of Sigrdrifa],

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Sts. 6–19; and Hávamál [Sayings of the High One], Sts. 142–144). The same applies to other magical acts such as the Jarlsníð in Þorleifs þáttr jarlsskálds [The tale of Thorleif, the Earl’s Poet], Chs 4–5; the chanting of Darraðarljóð in Brennu-Njáls saga [Njal’s saga], Ch. 67; certain kinds of seiðr magic conducted by males (see e.g. Gísla saga Súrssonar [Gisli Sursson’s saga], Ch. 17; and Laxdæla saga [The saga of the people of Laxardal], Chs. 35 and 37); and those rituals the present author has referred to as “magical mooning and the goatskin twirl” (Gunnell 2014). Each of these magical rituals is carried out by individuals, sometimes out of sight of others and thus not as part of a public communal performance. Closely related to the above is the ritual art of útiseta (lit. sitting out [on graves]: see Þorleifs þáttr jarlsskálds, Ch. 8), which is closely related to the pro­ phetic seiðr ritual carried out by women (see Eiríks saga rauða [The saga of Eirik the Red], Ch. 14; and Ǫrvar-Odds saga [The saga of Orvar-Odd], Ch. 2); and that of lot-casting (referred to as hlutkesti or the throwing of blótspán [sacrificial twigs]: see Landnámabók [The book of settlements], Ch. S198; Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks [The saga of Hervor and Heidrik], Ch. 7; Vǫluspá [The seeress’s prophecy], St. 62; Fagrskinna – Noregs konunga tal, Ch. 17; and Gunnell, 2010, 108–109 for further examples in Latin works from other countries). Once again drawing on learned skills and traditional rituals which are here carried out in liminal spaces on the periphery (in the case of seiðr also at a temporal borderline: see below), these rituals are designed to gain knowledge that is not immediately accessible in human memory, but is nonetheless believed to exist in the assumed memory of the supernatural and/or the dead (which here seem to be closely interrelated) for whom knowledge (and thereby memory) is seen as also reaching into the future. Also designed as a means of gaining access to the supernatural in order to either win their support or express gratitude are those rituals relating to victory in combat (which can probably be seen as having parallels in the numerous archaeological deposition finds of arms found in Denmark and southern Sweden (see e.g. Illkjær 2002). In question here is the mention of the blótnaut [lit. ‘bull sacrifice’] in Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar, Ch. 65 and Kormáks saga [Kormak’s saga], Ch. 23 (where the bull is killed after the combat); and those other blood sac­ rifices relating to duels described in Kormáks saga, Chs. 10 and 22, which precede the event (and include the so-called tjǫsnublót [lit. ‘duelling-ring-peg sacrifice̕] in the former). In all of these cases, there seems to be an element of introducing some kind of sacred time in which the supernatural powers are invited to make a decision about who should win or lose, an idea that would seem to be reflected in the mythical conception of the god Óðinn deciding who should die in battle, either alone or with the assistance of the valkyrjur [Valkyries] (see e.g. Lokasenna [Loki’s quarrel], St. 22; and Hákonarmál [The lay of Hákon], Sts. 1–12).



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The role of dramatic activity within the rituals noted above is a more complex question. While there can be little question that various kinds of drama in the sense described above must have taken place in the Old Norse world, as it does in all human societies, the essential problem is finding firm evidence for it (since, like all performances, it is essentially intangible), not least because, as the sagas underline, the Old Norse world was one in which reality was essentially based on perception as opposed to objective fact. Here dreams and the supernatural are described as being as tangible as other events in daily life, and identity is based essentially on appearance. The difference between drama and reality would thus have been uncertain, as is the case in a number of societies even today. Two obvious examples of deliberate imitation are the háð [mockery] described in Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu [The saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-Tongue], Ch. 12; and the “dansa marga ok margs konar spott annat” and “dansagerðir” mentioned in Íslendinga saga, Ch. 39, and Þórðar saga kakala, Ch. 39, all of which both involve satirical activities, meant to have influence on the image of individuals in other people’s minds. All that exists of dramatic activity otherwise are archaeological remains in the form of iconography and masks, both of which suggest elements of role-play, and then the manuscripts of dialogic and monologic Eddic poems which, having an origin in the oral tradition (see below), imply the probability of some kind of dramatic performance in space having taken place (see espe­ cially Vǫluspá; parts of Hávamál; Vafþrúðnismál [Vafthrudnir’s sayings], Grímnismál [Grimnir’s sayings]; Skírnismál, Lokasenna; Hárbarðsljóð [Harbard’s song]; Fáfnismál [The lay of Fafnir]; Sigrdrífumál; and Helgakviða Hjǫrvarðssonar [The poem of Helgi Hiorvardsson]; see for example Gunnell 1995, 2005, 2011, 2013, and 2016). Such Eddic performances would probably have drawn on and invoked a complex range of memories for those involved, memories which would have extended beyond those involved in other forms of festival and/or ritual.

A dramatic performance of Skírnismál The potential dramatic presentation of various monologic Eddic poems (including Skírnismál) has been dealt with in some detail in a range of earlier articles. The focus here is placed not so much on the why and wherefore of such performances but rather the types of memory they would have involved and invoked. Skírnismál is a wholly dialogic work in ljóðaháttr [lit. ‘magical chant metre’], something that, as with most forms of magic like those noted above, implies a combination of action and words designed to have a temporary or long-term effect on the status quo. Preserved in two manuscripts from the later thirteenth/early fourteenth century (the Gl. kgl. sml. 2365 4to [the Codex Regius] and in part in the AM 748

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4to), both of which use marginal notation to indicate speakers (like other dramas from the time: see Gunnell 1995, 206–212; and 282–329), the work tells of how Skírnir, the boyhood friend of the god Freyr travels to Jǫtunheimar [the worlds of the jǫtnar] in order to convince the daughter of the jǫtunn Gymir to join the god in an amorous assignation (nothing is said about marriage here) in the grove of Barri. Everything points to the work having had an origin in pagan times (not least the physical carving of magical runes as part of the performance demands: see further Gunnell 1995, 247–255). The implication is thus that the work has been memorised in some form, and passed on between people in the oral tradition for nearly three hundred years. Whether this was because of its use for poets or because it was becoming some kind of folk drama related to midwinter (see St. 42 on the length of the night) is open to question. Quite possibly, as with the other Eddic poems, the reasons for preservation changed over time (see further Gunnell 2016, 96). Whatever the case, the key feature of Skírnismál in its extant form is that whoever created it seems to have intended the story to be performed in a dra­ matic fashion, in other words, for the supernatural not merely to be talked about, but for it to appear in person to those watching. The poem was then preserved in this dramatic form (which seems to be an implicit feature of the ljóðaháttr poems) in people’s memories for centuries (exactly where is open to question). While the description of a winter festival in a work like Þiðranda þáttr implies the presence of the mythic and the supernatural, and the account of Þorbjǫrg lítilvǫlva in Eiríks saga rauða implies the potential drawing of parallels to the mythic world, a performance of Skírnismál (or Vǫluspá, Grímnismál, Vafþrúðnismál, Hárbarðsljóð, Lokasenna or Eiríksmál), like any drama, would have invol­ ved the physical manifestation of the mythic world as part of that known and experienced by the spectators. Further than this, it can be seen as having had the potential to transform the surroundings and the participants in a permanent fashion, as living memories of the mythic performance moment burned themsel­ ves into people’s minds alongside living moments of the day to day. Hall perfor­ mances of Vǫluspá, Vafþrúðnismál, Grímnismál, Lokasenna and Eiríksmál would have physically ignited the potential cosmological dimensions of the hall that existed in people’s memories, turning the hall into a parallel mythical space, and placing the audience in the roles of figures in the mythological world (see, for example, Gunnell 2011, and 2016). Skírnísmál (which, like Fáfnismál/Sigrdrífumál appears to be designed for outdoor performance), on the other hand, involves a similar temporary transformation of the local landscape, placing it simulta­ neously in a new wider natural and temporal context. In performance, the preChristian audience (drawing on their own mythological knowledge, associations and cultural vocabulary) would witness and experience (in their own world) a performer in the role of Skírnir (himself taking on the guise of the sun god, equip­



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ped with his horse and sword) travelling from an inside hall setting (here seem­ ingly associated with male power) in the middle of a winter night (see sts 10 and 42) to an isolated outside space in the wild in which the jǫtunn daughter Gerðr (her name meaning field or fenced area) ruled, surrounded by a ring of flame and assisted by a female servant (no males appear here). In short, the audience would have witnessed and had impressed upon them clear spheres of power relating to the different genders, both physically connected and interrelated by the journey of Skírnir to and from Jǫtunheimar (stressed in the title of the work given in the Codex Regius: Fǫr Skírnis [Skírnir’s Journey]). Seen (in its earliest form) as a potentially magical ritual act of hieros gamos involving the joining of the sun and the earth as a means of bringing about a return of life to the earth, and involving powerful runic magic and an invoca­ tion of both gods and jǫtnar (St. 34), a midwinter performance of Skírnismál in the Nordic landscape for those who knew and believed would have thus been an effective blend of individual and cultural memory, individual in the sense that the experience would have both drawn on and renewed individual knowledge; and cultural in the sense that the event would have built on and reinforced ideas and customs created and shared by the local community who would have shared in the moment. Largely “episodic” in nature, rather than “semantic” (Assmann 2006, 2), it would have firmly underlined the connections between these beliefs and both the landscape and the moment. Once over, however, little would have remained but the participants, the landscape, and the memory of the perfor­ mance. The later extant manuscript, like the saga accounts that have been exami­ ned above, while not a memory of the overall multifarious performance in itself, can nonetheless serve as a key to opening a doorway allowing us to sense in some degree the ways in which ritual acts in the Old Norse world might have functioned as lieux de memoire for those involved, in many ways working at least as effec­ tively as memorials carved in stone. Here, however, they were essentially carved into human minds and bodies.

4 Perspectives for future research The performance studies approach can be effectively applied to detailed studies of all of the various festive, ritual and dramatic works and events noted above, essentially as a means of gaining a deeper understanding of not only the various roles played by memory in the ways in which these activities were intended and worked for those involved, but also how and why they were preserved in their own time, and then passed on down to us. In addition to containing learned traditional

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knowledge, and involving direct learning by the performer(s) who performed them and passed them down, it should never be forgotten that these works, like Skírnismál were designed to both educate and reinforce the knowledge of those who heard them (who may even have belonged to specific groups, the knowl­ edge involved also helping to create and underline group difference and identity). The same naturally applies to other mythological works presented in monologic form like Vǫluspá, Grímnismál and Sigrdrífumál (where once again, through the use of direct speech the supernatural manifests itself in the performance space, deepening and sharpening the experience). On another level, it is worth consid­ ering the way in which, like most humour, works designed to provoke laughter like Þrymskviða, Lokasenna and Hárbarðsljóð were naturally expected to play off earlier attained knowledge and expectations if they were to get the audience to react (Critchley 2002, 1–19; and Stott 2005, 131–137). The resulting laughter would nonetheless have added new fractures to previously accepted images. All in all, there is good reason for taking a similar performative approach to all materials that seem to have been passed down in the oral tradition, including the various heroic Eddic poems and most of the sagas and þættir, and the shorter family legends preserved in Landnámabók. All of these works (in one form or another) survived over a number of centuries in the form of oral narratives that were performed for others. If we wish to understand more fully how and why they survived, we need to consider the manifold dynamics involved in how they were transmitted to others over time in the shape of sound, movement and vision. With regard to the other festivals and rituals noted above, analysis of any of these from the viewpoint of how they might have “worked” in performance will commonly bring to light fresh, new understanding of the roles played by various types of memory in this performance, roles that are commonly not immediately self evident from merely reading an account of what happened. Indeed, the pre­ served, written account will naturally often ignore a number of important features that were taken for granted as part of the learned experience by those originally present, such as the effect of smoke, alcohol, and bad lighting at a communal gath­ering. As noted above, performance studies commonly deals with the int­ angible which fades into individual memory after the event, and then regularly disappears completely after the deaths of those involved (especially in an oral culture). However, in many cases, it was precisely the intangible (in the form of learned and accepted tradition and behaviour) that gave shape and meaning to the activities in question, and explained why, for example, archaeological remains took their present shape. For those present, each of these silent remains originally had some kind of story behind them that gave them meaning. As with the Eddic poems, if we really want to understand what was going on in a festival or ritual of any kind, it is natural that we consider the role that memory might



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played in its live performance. Although that moment of performance is lost, and although our considerations of memory and performance may be speculative, one might say that it is potentially misleading to ignore their original presence. One final aspect worth considering which the field of performance studies helps underline is that memory does not only take the shape of words (heard or seen). It also exists in the form of taste, smell, and touch (all of which which would have given colour, texture and emotive association to any worded perso­ nal memory). Furthermore, we should never forget that memory not only lives in the brain but also in the performing muscles, something that played a much greater role in the agricultural, seafaring, and military world of the Old Norse people than it does for most of us today. One merely needs to consider the skills of sailing, weaving, battle, horseriding, farming, boatbuilding and smithy work, and the role that this kind of active, daily reinforced memory played in daily life, as well as the ways in which these skills were learnt, passed on and effectively employ­ed. There is good reason for memory scholars to consider in greater detail than they have up until now the roles that all or any of these physical skills played in making the inhabitants of the Old Norse world as successful as they were in conquering, trading and merely surviving amidst the strictures of the harsh envi­ ronments that surrounded them.

Works cited Primary sources Ágrip af Nóregskonuna sǫgum. In Ágrip af Nóregskonuna sǫgum; Fagrskinna – Nóregs konunga tal. Ed Bjarni Einarsson. ÍF, 29. Reykjavík, 1984. 1–54. Hákonar saga góða. In Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla. 1. Ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson. 3 vols. ÍF, 26–28. Reykjavík, 1941–1951. 150–197. Íslendinga saga. In Sturlunga saga. Ed. Jón Jóhannesson, Magnús Finnbogason and Kristján Eldjárn. 2 vols. Reykjavík, 1946. I: 229–534. Skírnismál. In Edduvæði. Ed. Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason. Reykjavík, 2014. I: 380–388. Ynglinga saga. In Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla. Ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson. 3 vols. ÍF, 26–28. Reykjavík, 1941–1951. I: 11–83.

Secondary sources Assmann, Jan. 2006. “What is ‘Cultural Memory’?” In Jan Assman, Religion and Cultural Memory. Trans. Rodney Livingston. Stanford, CA. 1–30.

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Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA. Bateson, Gregory. 1978. “A Theory of Play and Fantasy.” In Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of the Mind. London. 150–166. Billington, Sandra. 2007. “Early Pagan Midsummer Traditions in North-western Europe: Fact or Fiction?” In The Ritual Year 2. Ed. Lina Midholm and Annika Nordström with Maria Teresa Agozzino. Gothenburg. 65–73. Bell, Catherine. 1997. Ritual: Perspectiives and Dimensions. Oxford. Brink, Stefan. 2001. “Mythologising Landscape: Place and Space of Cult and Myth.” In Kontinuitäten und Brüche in der Religionsgeschichte. Ed. M. Stausberg. Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde, 31. Berlin and New York. 76–112. Connerton, Paul. 2010. How Societies Remember. Cambridge. 72–104. Critchley, Simon. 2002. On Humour. London. Dorson, Richard. 1972. Folklore and Folklife: An Introduction. Chicago and London. Eliade, Mircea. 1958. Patterns in Comparative Religion. Trans. Ro­sem­ary Sheed. London. Falassi, Alessandro. 1987. “Festival: Definition and Morphology.” In Time Out of Time: Essays on the Festival. Ed. Alessandro Falassi. Albuquerque. 1–10. van Gennep, Arnold. 1960. Rites of Passage. Trans. Monika B. Vizedom. London. Gunnell, Terry. 1995. The Origins of Drama in Scandinavia. Cambridge. Gunnell, Terry. 2005. “The Season of the Dísir: The Winter Nights and the Dísarblót in Early Scandinavian Belief.” Cosmos 16 (2000): 117–149. Gunnell, Terry. 2007. “How Elvish Were the Álfar?” In Constructing Nations, Reconstructing Myth: Essays in Honour of T. A. Shippey. Ed. Andrew Wawn, Graham Johnson and John Walter. Turnhout. 111–130. Gunnell, Terry. 2010. “Ansgar’s Conversion of Iceland.” Scripta Islandica 60 (2009): 105–118. Gunnell, Terry. 2011. “The Drama of the Poetic Edda: Performance as a Means of Transformation.” In Progranicza teatralności: Poezja, poetyka, praktyka. Ed. Andrzeja Dąbrówki. Warsaw. 13–40. Gunnell, Terry. 2013. “Masks and Performance in the Early Nordic World.” In Masken der Vorseit in Europa (II): International Tagung vom 19. bis. 21. November in Halle (Saale). Ed. Harald Meller and Regine Maraszek. Halle (Saale). 184–196. Gunnell, Terry. 2014. “‘Magical Mooning’ and the ‘Goatskin Twirl’: ‘Other’ Kinds of Female Magical Practices in Early Iceland.” In Nordic Mythologies: Interpretations, Intersections, and Institutions. Ed. Timothy R. Tangherlini. The Wildcat Canyon Advanced Seminars: Mythology, 1. Berkeley and Los Angeles. 133–153. Gunnell, Terry. 2016. “Eddic Performance and Eddic Audiences.” In A Handbook to Eddic Poetry: Myths and Legends of Early Scandinavia. Ed. Carolyne Larrington, Judy Quinn and Britanny Schorn. Cambridge. 92–113. Gunnell, Terry. 2017. “Blótgyðjur, Goðar, Mimi, Incest and Wagons: Oral Memories of the Religion(s) of the Vanir.” In Old Norse Mythology: Comparative Perspectives. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell, and  Jens Peter Schjødt, with Amber J. Rose. Publications of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature, 3. Cambridge, MA. 114–137. Gunnell, Terry and Owe Ronström. 2013. “Folklore och Performance Studies: En introduktion.” In Folkloristikens akutella utmaningar: Vänbok till Ulf Palmenfelt. Ed. Owe Rönström, Georg Drakos and Jonas Engman. Visby. 21–55. Hållans Stenholm, Ann-Mari. 2006. “Past Memories. Spatial Returning as Ritualized Remembrance.” Old Norse Religion in Long-term Perspectives: Origins, Changes,



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Interactions. Ed. Anders Andrén, Kristina Jennbert and Catharina Raudvere. Vägar till Midgård, 8. Lund. 341–345. Hermann, Pernille and Stephen A. Mitchell, eds. 2013. Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85: 3. Hermann, Pernille, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir, eds. 2014. Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. Huizinga, Johan. 1949. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. London. Hutton, Ronald. 1996. Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain. Oxford. Illkjær, Jørgen. 2002. Illerup Ådal: Archaeology as a Magic Mirror. Højbjerg. Laugerud, Henning. 2010. “To See With the Eyes of the Soul: Memory and Visual Culture in Medieval Europe.” Arv 66: 146–159. Lucas, Gavin and Thomas McGovern. 2007. “Bloody Slaughter: Ritual Decapitation and Display at the VikingSettlement of Hofstaðir, Iceland.” European Journal of Archaeology 10.1: 7–30. Mitchell, Stephen A. 2013. “Memory, Mediality, and the ‘Performative Turn’: Recontextualizing Remembering in Medieval Scandinavia.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 282–305. Nora, Pierre. 1989. “Between Memory and History.” Representations 26: 7–24. Nordberg, Andreas. 2006. Jul, disting och förkyrklig tideräkning: Kalendrar och kalendariska riter i det förkristna Norden. Acta Academiae Regiae Gustavi Adolphi, 91. Uppsala. Rappaport, Roy A. 1979. “The Obvious Aspects of Ritual.” In Roy Rappaport, Ecology, Meaning and Religion. Berkeley. 173–221. Santino, Jack. 1994. “Introduction: Festivals of Death and Life.” In Halloween and Other Festivals: Death and Life. Ed. Jack Santino. Knoxville. I–xxviii. Schechner, Richard. 2013. Performance Studies: An Introduction. 3rd rev. ed. London. Stott, Andrew. 2005. Comedy. The New Critical Idiom. New York and Abingdon.

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 lan­ guage 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 Terdi­ https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-013



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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 con­ sistent 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 artis­ tic 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 func­ tional in terms that would have been readily appreciated by an experienced eth­ nographer 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 moder­ nity 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).

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Caution is naturally in order: memory studies has many branches, orienta­ tions and followers and no small sub-set of writers can be understood to encom­ pass its multifaceted interests. Moreover, one does not want to reduce the dif­ ferences 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 inher­ ently 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 inher­ ited 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 nati­ onalism 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



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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 politi­ cal 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 Iceland­ ers – 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 pro­ posed by Andreas Heusler (1914, 53–55). No modern scholar believes in an abso­ lute 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 genera­ tions of oral narration – writing made it possible to record them, but this new

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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 formula­ tion 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 Kings­ ley 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 under­ standing 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



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cannot consider such singers as oral poets,” he writes, “They are mere perform­ ers” (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 memo­ rized text, but as story-telling in which he uses the specialised tools of the tradi­ tion’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 struc­ tures, 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 com­ position 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.

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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 rami­ fications of the Parry-Lord project are to be seen in the fact that two prominent theoretical approaches to folklore and oral literature – ethnopoetics and perfor­ mance 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’. Con­ tinuing, 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 cer­ tainly the case that Parry and Lord’s observations on south Slavic song culture had profound impact throughout the humanities, and it is presumably no coin­ cidence 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, Sig­ urður 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 Nordi­ cist’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 sympa­ thetic advocacy (e.g. Ong 1982; Goody 1987; Foley 1988, 2002) – was to offer com­



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promises between the two century-old extremes in Old Norse scholarship, com­ promises 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 Scandina­ via, 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 obser­ ved 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 tradi­ tional 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

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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 interna­ tional memory studies within Old Norse studies has only recently been taken up in earnest (e.g. Mitchell 2013; Hermann 2017; Hermann forthcoming), but promi­ ses 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.



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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. Mitchell, Jens Peter Schjødt and Amber

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J. Rose. Publications of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature, 3. Cambridge, MA. 29–51. Hermann, Pernille. Forthcoming. “Old Norse Religion and Memory.” In Pre-Christian Religions of the North. Histories and Structures. Ed. Anders Andrén, John Lindow and Jens Peter Schjødt. Turnhout. Heusler, Andreas. 1914. Die Anfänge der isländischen Saga. Abhandlungen der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Philosophisch-historische Klasse, 9. Berlin. Le Goff, Jacques. 1986. Storia e memoria. Einaudi paperbacks, 171. Turin. Lönnroth, Lars. 1971. “Hjálmar’s Death-Song and the Delivery of Eddic Poetry.” Speculum 46: 1–20. Lönnroth, Lars. 1976. Njáls saga. Berkeley, CA, and Los Angeles, CA. Lord, Albert B. 1956. “Avdo Međedović, Guslar.” Journal of American Folklore 69.273: 320–330. Lord, Albert B. 1986. “The Merging of Two Worlds: Oral and Written Poetry as Carriers of Ancient Values.” In Oral Tradition in Literature: Interpretation in Context. Ed. John Miles Foley. Columbia, MO. 19–64. Lord, Albert B. 1991. ”Homer as Oral-Traditional Poet.” In Epic Singers and Oral Tradition. Ithaca. 72–103. Lord, Albert B. 2000 [1960]. The Singer of Tales. 2nd ed. Ed. Stephen Mitchell and Gregory Nagy. Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature, 24. Cambridge, MA. Mellor, Scott A. 2008. Analyzing Ten Poems from The Poetic Edda: Oral Formula and Mythic Patterns. Lewiston, NY. Mitchell, Stephen A. 1991. Heroic Sagas and Ballads. Ithaca, NY. Mitchell, Stephen A. 2002. “Performance and Norse Poetry: The Hydromel of Praise and the Effluvia of Scorn.” Oral Tradition 16.1: 168–202. Mitchell, Stephen A. 2003. “Reconstructing Old Norse Oral Tradition.” Oral Tradition 18.2: 203–206. Mitchell, Stephen A. 2013. “Memory, Mediality, and the ‘Performative Turn’: Recontextualizing Remembering in Medieval Scandinavia.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 282–305. Mitchell, Stephen A. and Gregory Nagy. 2000. “Introduction to the Second Edition.” In Stephen Mitchell and Gregory Nagy, Albert B. Lord. The Singer of Tales. 2nd ed. Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature, 24. Cambridge, MA. Mundt, Marina. 1997. “A Basic Scheme of Oral Poetry as Found in Ancient Scandinavia.” Tijdschrift voor Skandinavistiek 18.2: 29–38. Nagy, Gregory. 2011. “A Second Look at the Poetics of Re-enactment in Ode 13 of Bacchylides.” In Archaic and Classical Choral Song: Performance, Politics, and Dissemination. Ed. Lucia Athanassaki and Ewen Bowie. Berlin. 173–206. Ong, Walter J. 1982. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London. Quinn, Judy. 2016. “The Principles of Textual Criticism and the Interpretation of Old Norse Texts Derived from Oral Tradition.” In Studies in the Transmission and Reception of Old Norse Literature: The Hyperborean Muse. Ed. Judy Quinn and Adele Cipolla. Acta Scandinavica. Turnhout. 47–78. Ranković, Slavica, Leidulf Melve and Else Mundal, eds. 2010. Along the Oral-Written Continuum: Types of Texts, Relations, and Their Implications. Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, 20. Turnhout.



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Rigney, Ann. 2005. “Plenitude, Scarcity and the Circulation of Cultural Memory.” Journal of European Studies 35: 11–28. Schaefer, Ursula. 1992. Vokalität: altenglische Dichtung zwischen Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit. ScriptOralia, 39. Tübingen. Sigurður Nordal. 1958. Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða: A Study. Trans. R. George Thomas. Cardiff. [Icelandic orig. 1940] Terdiman, Richard. 1993. Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis. Ithaca, NY. Zumthor, Paul. 1990. Oral Poetry: An Introduction. Trans. Kathryn Murphy-Judy. Minneapolis. [French orig. 1983] Zumthor, Paul. 1992. Toward a Medieval Poetics. Trans. Philip Bennett. Minneapolis, MN. [French orig. 1972]

Material Culture 

Anders Andrén

I: 8 Archaeology 1 Definition Memory in archaeology is above all about cultural memory, or about how the past was constructed and apprehended in the past. This role of the past in the past has attracted a growing interest in archaeological research in recent decades. Memory studies can be found in archaeology in general, as well as in Scandina­ vian archaeology. Memory or the role of the past in the past, however, is not pos­ sible to understand without reference to time, which means that the construction of time in archaeology is crucial for any discussion of memory (cf. Andrén 2013a, 2015).

2 State of research Archaeological chronologies The breakthrough of archaeology as a modern field of research took place in the first half and the middle of the nineteenth century. This breakthrough had two revolutionising consequences. Plausible chronologies for ancient objects and monuments were constructed for the first time and these chronologies extended over a much longer time than human history had previously. The first archaeolo­ gists realised that humans had a prehistory which was much longer than could be gained from any texts, and, in consequence, that the historical past, covered by texts, was just a small fraction of a long human past (Trigger 2006, 121–138). Scandinavian antiquarians and archaeologists played a decisive role in the emergence of archaeology as a modern field of research. In Copenhagen, the director of the Royal collection of ancient objects, Christian Jürgensen Thomsen (1788–1865) started to re-organise the order of the artefacts in the museum in 1824–1825. Only in 1837, however, did Thomsen publish the methodological basis of the new museum display. He had divided the objects into three different periods: the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age (Jensen 1992, 63–108). The idea of three different historical periods based on stone, bronze and iron was old. Thomsen, however, was the first who made this division based on empirical observations instead of philosophical speculation and without using old texts. He showed that objects with sharp edges, such as weapons and tools, could be https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-014

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divided into three periods based on their similarities and their find contexts, such as graves (Jensen 1992, 136–142). The original three periods Thomsen developed were soon divided into many shorter units. In Scandinavia, these chronological studies were carried out in the middle and second part of the nineteenth century by Danish, Swedish and Norwegian archaeologists, such as Hans Hildebrand (1842–1913), Oscar Monte­ lius (1843–1921), Sophus Müller (1846–1934) and Ingvald Undset (1853–1893). In 1892, 55 years after Thomsen’s publication of the three-period system, Montelius proudly summarised his own and his colleagues’ studies in a detailed survey of the chronology of the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. This chronology is still employed in its main outlines (Baudou 2004, 158–204). While the basis of the chronologies for the Bronze Age and the Iron Age was solved in the 1890s, the Stone Age remained a challenge. By 1900, however, an absolute chronological frame of the first humans in Scandinavia was created by the Swedish geologist Gerard de Geer (1858–1943). He built up a chronology from the melting of the last inland ice to the present through studies of sedimentary clay. With the help of this method, de Geer could show that the inland ice started to melt about 14,000 years ago, thereby giving an absolute date for the oldest human habitation in Scandinavia (Baudou 2004, 209–219). In the middle of the twentieth century, new chronological methods were introduced from natural science. Carbon-14 dating was a method developed by the American chemist Willard F. Libby in the late 1940s. He was able to measure the quantity of Carbon-14 in organic material, and, because the half-time of the isotope Carbon 14 is known, he could establish absolute dates within certain timelimits (Baudou 2004, 283). Another chronological method that has gained increasing importance is den­ drochronology. It is based on measurements of the annual growth of tree rings in different tree species, such as oak and pine. Due to the climatic variations between different years, a unique curve of the thickness of tree rings can be estab­ lished. The method was developed by the American astronomer Andrew E. Dou­ glass in the first half of the twentieth century (Speer 2010), but in Scandinavia dendrochronology was only introduced in the 1970s. The method has above all been used in historical periods with preserved wood, such as medieval churches with preserved roof constructions (Madsen 2007). In recent years, archaeologists have also constructed a standard curve based on surviving trees in bogs, cover­ ing all periods from about 2300 BC in northern Europe and from circa 6050 BC in central Europe (Christensen 2007). In summary, the dating methods since the 1820s have become more diverse but also more refined. Excavations have been more focussed on closed strati­ graphical units, which has created more confined contexts for typological analy­



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sis. Carbon-14 has been refined by source critical studies of the archaeological samples as well as by calibrations of the results based on dendrochronology. Furthermore, typological results have been combined with dendrochronology as well as Carbon-14, creating a finer net of chronological points. Thus, the dating of the human past in Scandinavia is well equipped, although dating will always remain a basic problem in archaeology.

Critique against linear time in archaeology While all the current chronological methods were established and refined, the first critique of chronological reasoning in archaeology started. Above all, the cri­ tique was directed towards the totally dominating linear chronology in archaeol­ ogy. This critique was based on the acknowledgment of the multitemporal char­ acter of human existence (Chippendale 1983; Shanks and Tilley 1987; Burström 1989). Remains from different periods coexist today and clearly coexisted in the past as well. For instance, megalithic tombs from the Neolithic still exist today, and therefore must have existed in the Bronze Age, the Iron Age and the Middle Ages as well. From this acknowledgment grew an interest in how humans in the past regarded their own past. Several archaeologists have been inspired by anthropological studies of non-modern ways of comprehending and reckoning time. Time in these contexts is not a neutral time outside human life, but rather time embedded in social life. Due to these studies, issues of the past in the past as well as of myth and cultural memory have been increasingly discussed in archae­ ology (Bradley 2002; Hållans Stenholm 2012). The critique of linear time also includes how archaeologists deal with time. According to the British archaeologist Gavin Lucas, linear time restricts archaeo­ logical reasoning to linear explanations. Instead, Lucas emphasises the durable character of material culture. Since objects from the past are preserved through time, different periods interact with each other, resembling echoes or folds in history. He also underlines that time can be viewed as accumulations of events rather than as a linear series of events (Lucas 2005, 32–60). Lucas criticises the common ways of writing history as well. Many archaeo­ logical and historical periods seem to be trapped in tripartite narratives, with a start, a middle and an end (Lucas 2005, 49–60). The Stone Age is divided into Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic, and the Neolithic in itself is divided between Early, Middle and Late Neolithic. The same triad can also be discerned in histori­ cal periods, such as the Early, High and Late Middle Ages. The question is if the past can be framed in other non-linear ways, with inspiration from literature or film. In these genres, non-linear narrative structures are common, such as flash­

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backs, extentions forward, parallel stories and starting points into the middle of things. Due to the persistance of material culture, the French archaeologist Laurent Olivier has even proposed that all archaeological narratives should take the multi­ temporal present as a starting point (Olivier 2011). So far, however, there have only been a few examples of presenting archaeology as hypertexts or as palimpsests. It seems that the traditional narrative structure is needed, although it could be modified with for instances flashbacks and extensions forward (Lucas 2005, 60). Although archaeologists such as Lucas and Olivier are highly critical towards linear chronologies in archaeology their attemptes to renew archaeological rea­ soning are paradoxically dependent on the same linear chronology. To study the past in the past, to investigate accumulation through time, or to write nonlinear narratives all require a linear chronology. Without this chronology, which has been refined since the 1820s, none of the non-linear alternatives are possible (cf. Andrén 2015).

Memory in archaeology Although chronology is still important in archaeology, the awareness of the multi-temporal past has clearly challenged the chronological mentality of the dis­ cipline. Since the 1980s, the general archaeological debate on the multi-temporal past has been broadened to include the many different ways that humans in the past related to their own past, partly with inspiration from scholars such as Henri Bergson, Paul Ricoeur, Pierre Nora, Jan Assmann, and Paul Connerton (Gosden 1994; Bradley 2002; Van Dyke and Alcock 2003; Williams 2006; Jones 2007). In this context, however, only a few aspects of this archaeological discussion can be highlighted. It is in general difficult to understand the intentions behind human actions in the past. Dealing with the past could have been a strategy for remembering, but also for reinventing or forgetting. Memory in early cultures is usually regarded as being based on oral culture, but archaeologists have recur­ rently emphasised the importance of material culture as a vehicle of memory. Oral culture was never only oral, since oral traditions were usually based on and interacting with the material world around humans, for instances, landscapes, monuments, settlements and objects. It is also important to emphasise that different forms of memory existed. Some memories related to the recent past, e.g. genealogical memories, others to the distant past, e.g. mythical memories. Besides, some memories can best be described as non-discursive practical memo­ ries. These included bodily memories, that is memories people usually internal­ ised as children, for instance, how a scythe was used in hay-making or how a pot was made from clay.



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This general debate in European archaeology is clearly reflected in studies on memory, or the past in the past, in ancient Scandinavia; however, these inves­ tigations also include other specific features and problems concerning northern Europe before and after the Christianisation (Andrén 2013a).

3 Pre-modern Nordic material The past as model People were not only surrounded by remains from the past, but in certain periods also used the past as models. The best-known examples come from what in Scandinavia is labeled as the Late Iron Age (c. 550–c. 1050), but from a Euro­ pean perspective usually is called the Early Middle Ages. During this period, different forms of graves, such as large mounds, cairns and ship-formed stonesettings, were constructed on the basis of much older models from the Bronze Age (c. 1700–c. 500 BC). In the Mälar valley, in central Sweden, about 270 large mounds, with a diam­ eter exceeding twenty meters, were built from the late sixth to the tenth century. The largest mounds were erected in an early phase, from the late sixth to the early eighth centuries. Excavations show that the dead in the large mounds were usually accompanied by objects and animals associated with an aristocratic life­ style, such as eating and drinking in large halls and hunting with birds of prey. Therefore, the large mounds clearly represented a local elite in this region (Bratt 2008). Some of the early mounds could have been modeled on mounds in north­ ern Sweden and Norway from the immediately preceding periods, but others were probably referring to much older models. The large so-called King Björn’s mound at Håga, situated only seven kilometers south of the royal mounds in Old Uppsala was excavated in 1902–1903, and turned out to have been constructed in about 1000 BC (Almgren 1905). Consequently, old mounds, such as King Björn’s mound, could have been used as a model 1500 years later, when the local elite began to erect large mounds. These new mounds based on old models can be interpreted as a way for the elite to make its position legitimate, by referring to a mythological past (see fig. 1). Large cairns are usually dated to the early Bronze Age (c. 1700–c. 1100 BC), but some have been dated to the Viking Age (c. 750–c. 1050), demonstrat­ ing how other old forms of graves were used as models about 1800–2700 years later (Artelius 2004). In similar ways, ship-formed stone-settings from the Late Iron Age (c. 550–c. 1050) were modeled on ship-formed stone-settings from the

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Fig. 1: The Romanesque cathedral at Old Uppsala from the twelfth century and the adjacent “royal mounds” from the late sixth and seventh centuries

Late Bronze Age (c. 1100–c. 500 BC), which were about 1000 to 2000 years older (Artelius 1996). An interesting aspect of the models used in the Late Iron Age (c. 550–c. 1050) is that no monuments older than the Bronze Age have been used as prototypes. For instance, no megaliths from the Neolithic have been used as models in later periods. It is disputed how this chronological distinction could be maintained so many centuries later. Some scholars regard the links between the Bronze Age and the Late Iron Age as expressions of direct ritual continuity (Widholm 2006), whereas others emphasise the use of historical models from a mythical past (Artelius 2004). The link between the past and certain forms of graves is quite clear in later sources, where larger as well as smaller mounds seem to have represented the odal rights, above all in central Sweden and in Norway. In these basically oral societies, the mounds came to be the tangible symbols of the property rights of families and households in adjacent settlements. In provincial codes from the twelfth, thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, the existence of mounds on the land of farms or villages could be used as proofs of land rights in legal disputes (Zachrisson 1994). Buildings could also be constructed according to older models. This relation to the past is most obvious in cases where important houses were rebuilt on the same spot. In the central place of Uppåkra in Skåne, a ritual building was built and rebuilt in the same way seven times from about 200 to about AD 950 (Larsson and Lenntorp 2004). The unchanged character of the ritual building clearly shows the retrospective character of Old Norse religion. Another example is a magnate farm at Sanda in Uppland, where the main hall was rebuilt on the same place and in the same fashion from the sixth century to the early twelfth century (Åqvist 1996). In the last phases, the form of the building was clearly outdated,



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but probably important since it referred to the past as a way of emphasising the significance of the place.

The past as place Other ways of relating to the past included locating new graves or houses by older remains, reusing older monuments, or remodeling them with new elements (Hållans Stenholm 2006; Pedersen 2006; Thäte 2007). It is well-known that graves from all periods of prehistory were reused in later periods. Neolithic monuments, such as megalithic tombs, were often reused as graves, in some cases as late as the Viking Age, more than 4000 years later (Strömberg 1968). In similar ways, many barrows from the Early Bronze Age (c. 1700–c. 1100 BC) in southern Scan­ dinavia contain cremation graves from the Late Bronze Age (c. 1100–c. 500 BC), as well as inhumations from the Roman Iron Age (c. 1–c. 400) and the Viking Age (c. 750–c. 1050) (Pedersen 2006; Thäte 2007). This reuse is also known during shorter intervals. The large mounds from the Late Iron Age (c. 550–c. 1050) were often built successively, due to recurring burials (Bratt 2008, 62–97). In other cases, the old mounds were not reused themselves but functioned as points of references for later graves. For instance, at Højrup and Højgaard in Jutland, inhu­ mation graves from the Viking Age have been placed around mounds from the Bronze Age (Pedersen 2006). The most extensive investigation of reuses and remodeling of monuments has been carried out by Ann-Mari Hållans Stenholm (2006, 2012). She has studied how graves were placed on older graves or houses, and how houses were placed on older houses and graves at 300 sites in the Mälar region in central Sweden during the Iron Age and early Middle Ages (c. 1–c. 1250). Above all, there are clear patterns between graves from different periods. Graves were mostly placed on older graves during the Migration Period (c. 400–c. 550) and the Viking Age (c. 750–c. 1050). These overlays occurred above all in burial grounds that were used for very long periods of time. The new graves mostly covered the oldest graves or the most unique graves, such as three-pointed stone-settings, in the burial grounds. Graves were also placed on the sites of abandoned houses. In some cases, the oldest grave was placed in the middle of the former house or on the site of the former fireplace, for instance at Äs in Västmanland and at Häs­ selby in Uppland (see fig. 2). The location of these graves indicated a direct link between the dead and the former dwellers of the house. These graves expressed a genealogical past, whereas graves from the Viking Age overlaying much older graves probably expressed a more mythological past (Hållans Stenholm 2006, 2012). There are less clear patterns regarding houses overlaying older remains,

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Fig. 2: Plan of graves overlaying an older house, at Hässelby in Uppland. The oldest grave (A31) is placed by the fireplace of the house.



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but one interesting aspect is that dwelling houses in ordinary settlements never overlaid older dwelling houses, unlike halls in central places. The spatial references to the past continued after the Christianisation of Scandinavia. In some cases, churches could be located on top of older grave mounds, for instance at Hørning in Jutland and at Forsby in Västergötland. In other cases, churches were placed immediately by the side of a large barrow, for instance at Jelling in Jutland and at Östra Vemmenhög in Skåne. Churches could also be located on older ritual sites, such as the church at Frösö in Jämt­ land, where the church was placed on the site of an older ritual tree surroun­ ded by deposits (Magnell and Iregren 2010). The most common relation to the past, however, was when churches and the churchyards were located by the side of older burial grounds, as a kind of extension of the burials (Andrén 2002, 2013b). Some good examples are Hjortsberga in Blekinge, Resmo on Öland, Dimbo in Västergötland and Stora Mellösa in Närke. A special case of relating to the past comes from the Gothic cathedral at Uppsala. Old runestones were used as fundaments for the pillars in the chancel of the new cathedral (Gustavson 1986). These different contexts can be explained by retrospective strategies in both Old Norse religion and in Christianity. From a Christian point of view, older graves were part of the Christian tradition. Christianity can be seen as a kind of grave cult, in view of the fundamental significance of the crucifixion, the martyrdom, and the cult of relics in Christian doctrine (Meckseper 1982, 200–210). Because Christianity has practised a unique combination of burial place and cult build­ ing since late antiquity (Dyggve 1952), it was natural to place churches beside older graves. This pattern is attested in the Rhineland, where early churches from the seventh and eighth centuries seem to have been built in or close by older pre-Christian Reihengräberfelder (Fehring 1991, 76). A similar strategy combining Christianity’s inherited tradition with local retrospective traditions and flexible attitudes towards the old customs can possibly explain why many of the churches are located near pagan burial grounds. A decision to place a church on or close by a pagan ritual site may also be explained by Christian appropriations of impor­ tant sites of the former religion. A good example is the Romanesque cathedral at Old Uppsala probably built on the site of a large hall from the Viking Age (Andrén 2002), and surrounded by terraces of older halls, as well as huge grave mounds and a possible thing mound (see fig. 1). Finally, the Christian associations with pagan ritual remains can be regarded as attempts to reconcile the two religious traditions, in ways similar to the writings of Snorri Sturluson and Saxo Grammati­ cus. In this perspective, the placing of a church and churchyard as an extension of a pagan cemetery can be explained as an incorporation of the ancestors and their cult into a Christian context.

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Later on, when churches were rebuilt, the past could also be preserved in the fabric of churches. On Gotland, several well-decorated Romanesque churches from the twelfth century were rebuilt as Gothic churches in the early fourteenth century. Instead of discarding the decorated stones with arches, crosses, animals, humans and different mythological figures, the stonemasons reused the stones in the new walls of the rebuilt churches. Thereby, they included the past in new churches at places such as Grötlingbo, Vänge, and Väte (Lagerlöf and Svahnström 1966, 139–141, 245–249, 255–257).

Gendered memories In an interesting article, Elisabeth Arwill-Nordbladh recently compared the famous runestone at Rök from about AD 800 with a well-known female grave found at Aska from about AD 950 (Arwill-Nordbladh 2008). The two sites are situ­ ated only a few kilometers away from each other, but their relations to the past were expressed in very different ways. At Rök, the long and partly obscured runic inscription expressed different male memories, covering nine ages, in honour of a dead young man. The inscription directly mentions that “Now I tell the mem­ ories completely” and that “We tell a folk-memory” (Lönnroth 1977). At Aska, the female memories were instead played out in different old objects and new objects based on old models. Several of the objects can be dated to the eighth and ninth centuries, and were consequently 100 to 200 years old when they were put in the grave. Some silver pendants from the ninth or tenth century, however, were made in the same form as gold pendants from the third or fourth century, thereby making references to a much more distant past about 600 to 700 years earlier. Arwill-Nordbladh has not generalised her comparison between Rök and Aska, but the difference between the two sites may have more general conse­ quences. In general, it is much easier to determine female graves than male grave from the Viking Age, with conventionally gendered objects (Bolin 2004). Perhaps this indicates that women were commemorated through objects to a much higher degree than men, and men were commemorated through oral praise and skaldic poetry. Such a gendered practice of memory could partly explain why most rune­ stones were erected by and for men (Sawyer 2000), since oral praise was transfor­ med into texts on the runestones. Men, however, could also be remembered through certain kinds of objects, above all exclusive weapons. These objects were often partly made of precious metals, and they were usually not placed in graves. Instead the exclusive weapons were deposited in special places, especially bogs, small lakes and rivers. These



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special places can be regarded as suitable for special objects, often with a long history and sometimes a foreign origin (Lund 2009).

Memorials of individuals and events Although prehistoric graves and burial grounds had clear memorial aspects, memory was more overtly expressed after Christianisation. This is clear in the approximately 2500 runestones that were raised in Scandinavia from the mid tenth century to the early twelfth century. All of these monuments were memori­ als for one or several dead people, often commemorating their deeds and causes of death. The sponsors of the monuments and their relations with the dead are always mentioned in the runic texts, and sometimes relations with other persons are mentioned as well. Through these texts, the runestones created a memorial web of thousands of people in the late Viking Age (Andrén 2000; Sawyer 2000). Early Christian grave monuments were a special form of runestones, which were built in the eleventh century in churchyards in some of the central Swedish provinces, especially in Östergötland. In a recent investigation, Cecilia Ljung has surveyed all the existing tombs from some 75 locations. The memorial tradition of these monuments is very similar to the ordinary runestones, although they seem to be more closely linked to elite families that later founded monasteries and local stone churches in the twelfth century (Ljung 2016). Ordinary Christian gravestones, placed in churches and monasteries from the twelfth century onwards, were more directly linked to the memory of one person, in contrast to runestones and early Christian grave monuments that also inclu­ ded the sponsors and family members. Usually, it is only the dead person that is mentioned in the inscriptions of the gravestones. The date of death is also often emphasised, particularly the day of death but occasionally also the year. In the Christian memorial tradition, the day of death was crucial, because of the annual requiems (Gardell 1945; Staecker 1999; Ström 2002). In memorial books kept by cathedrals and monasteries, donations to these institutions were recorded on the day of death of the donors, thereby linking donations to requiems, and, ulti­ mately, memory (Weibull 1923). In some regions during the Middle Ages, the two memorial traditions of rune­ stones and gravestones existed side by side. The contrast between the two tradi­ tions is clearest on Gotland where gravestones written in Latin were produced simultaneously with gravestones written in Gotlandic in runes. The Latin inscrip­ tions only mention the dead person and the date of death, whereas the Gotlan­ dic runic inscriptions mention the sponsors and family members, but seldom the date of death. In the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, Latin gravestones

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Fig. 3: Memorial cross by an old road at Laxarve in Boge on Gotland. The cross is raised over Halvi Västers, who died in 1404, probably at this place. The inscription requests the reader to pray for her soul.

were placed in churches in the city of Visby and its surroundings, whereas the runic gravestones were placed in churches further away from Visby, in the south and the east of Gotland (Andrén 1998). Memorials of certain events were also raised in the Middle Ages, especially on the islands of Öland and Gotland. Usually these memorials consist of huge stone crosses, often with accompanying inscriptions. They commemorate sudden and violent death, and many inscriptions request the reader to pray for the deceased (see fig. 3). The crosses were raised in memory of accidents, such as a priest falling from his horse, or crimes, such as a man killing another man with an axe (Schmeisser 1984). In a few cases, however, the crosses were erected as memorials of men being killed in battles. At Fjäle myr in central Gotland, a tall cross com­ memorates the huge battle between an invading Danish army and the local Got­ landers in July 1361. Another tall cross, erected just outside the city walls of Visby, commemorates a second large battle between the Danish army and the Gotlanders, on the twenty-seventh of July 1361. Around this cross, five mass graves have been



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located with remains of more than 1200 men killed at that battle (Thordeman 1944; Westholm 2007).

4 Perspectives for future research The past in the past has been much discussed and studied in Scandinavian pre­ history in recent decades. It is, however, much less clear how this discussion can relate to current studies of memory. The problem is that the intentions behind the different ways of dealing with the past are far from clear. For instance, placing a grave on top of an older grave could express some form of memory, but it could also be a more overt appropriation of the past or a deliberate way of forgetting or recreating the past. Consequently, from an archaeological point of view, issues of memory are difficult to handle regarding prehistory. The role of the past in a more general sense is much easier to study and discuss from material remains. As is clear from some of the studies referred to above, the use of the past varied through time. In periods of changes, such as the Viking Age, the past seems to have played a much larger role than at other periods. In the Viking Age, when the past was so important, memorial aspects of the past can be studied and discussed. For instance, in the case of graves being placed on the site of fireplaces in recently demolished houses, a direct genealogical memory is probably being expressed. The function of these graves closely resem­ bles the function of runestones. An interesting aspect of memorials in the Viking Age is the difference between the mostly male runestones and the many graves with female objects is that there may have been specific gendered ways of remem­ bering. In future research, this possibility of gendered memories has the poten­ tial to profoundly renew memory studies. Another so far unexplored perspective, which also could change memory research, is Jan Assmann’s suggestion that ritual was a means by which oral societies remembered (cf. Assmann 2006, 39–40). The Christianisation of Scandinavia was connected to a more widespread use of texts, especially runic inscriptions, Latin texts, and vernacular texts written with Latin letters. This more widespread use of texts was connected with more formalised memorial monuments, although the memorial traditions varied between different forms of monuments. Runestones, early Christian grave monu­ ments and medieval gravestones written in runes usually included the dead as well as their families, whereas gravestones written in Latin or vernacular written with Latin letters were focused on the deceased and the date of death, linking the monuments to annual requiems. Finally, the memorial crosses represent a specific form of memory connected to sudden and violent death, either of an indi­

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vidual or a huge collective. More systematic studies of the Middle Ages, however, is needed in order to understand the chronological changes as well as the local, regional and social variations of memorial practices. As this short overview shows, memory could be played out in many different ways in ancient and medieval Scandinavia. Formal memorial monuments with texts were part of the Christian tradition. In prehistory, however, material culture without texts was an important vehicle for remembering. Oral culture never existed on its own, but was embedded in references to objects, images, monu­ ments, places, and rituals.

Works cited Secondary sources Åqvist, Cecilia. 1996. “Hall och harg. Det rituella rummet.” In Religion från stenålder till medeltid. Ed. Kerstin Engdahl and Anders Kaliff. Stockholm. 105–120. Almgren, Oscar. 1905. Kung Björns hög och andra fornlämningar. Stockholm. Andrén, Anders. 1998. “Från antiken till antiken. Stadsvisioner i Skandinavien före 1700.” In Staden – himmel eller helvete. Tankar om människan i staden. Ed. Staffan Thorman and Majbritt Hagdahl. Stockholm. 142–184. Andrén, Anders. 2000. “Re-reading embodied texts. An interpretation of rune-stones.” Current Swedish Archaeology 8: 7–32. Andrén, Anders. 2002. “Platsernas betydelse. Norrön ritual och kultplatskontinuitet.” In Plats och praxis. Studier av nordisk förkristen ritual. Ed. Kristina Jennbert, Anders Andrén and Catharina Raudvere. Vägar till Midgård, 2. Lund. 299–342. Andrén, Anders. 2013a. “Places, Monuments, and Objects. The Past in Ancient Scandinavia.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 267–281. Andrén, Anders. 2013b. “Significance of places. The Christianization of Scandinavia from a spatial point of view.” World Archaeology 45.1: 27–45. Andrén, Anders. 2015. “En fråga om tid.” Kungliga Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademien, Årsbok 2015: 177–186. Andrén, Anders, Kristina Jennbert and Catharina Raudvere, eds. 2006. Old Norse Religion in Long-term Perspectives. Origins, Changes, Interactions. Vägar till Midgård, 8. Lund. Artelius, Tore. 1996. Långfärd och återkomst. Skeppet i bronsålderns gravar. Kungsbacka. Artelius, Tore. 2004. “Minnesmakarnas verkstad. Om vikingatida bruk av äldre gravar och begravningsplatser.” In Minne och myt. Konsten att skapa det förflutna. Ed. Åsa Berggren, Stefan Arvidsson and Ann-Mari Hållans. Vägar till Midgård, 5. Lund. 99–120. Arwill-Nordbladh, Elisabeth. 2008. “Aska och Rök – om minne och materiell kultur i nordisk vikingatid.” In Arkeologi och identitet. Ed. Bodil Petersson and Peter Skoglund. Acta Archaeologica Lundensia, Series altera in 8o, No. 53. Lund. 169–188.



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Assmann, Jan. 2006. Religion and Cultural Memory. Ten Studies. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Stanford, CA. Baudou, Evert. 2004. Den nordiska arkeologin – historia och tolkningar. Stockholm. Bolin, Hans. 2004. “The absence of gender. Iron Age burials in the Lake Mälaren area.” Current Swedish Archaeology 12: 169–185. Bradley, Richard. 2002. The Past in Prehistoric Societies. London. Bratt, Peter. 2008. Makt uttryckt i jord och sten. Stora högar och maktstrukturer i Mälardalen under järnåldern. Stockholm Studies in Archaeology, 46. Stockholm. Burström, Mats. 1989. “Kronologi och kontext. Om samtidighetens relevans för den arkeologiska tolkningen.” In Mänsklighet genom millennier. En vänbok till Åke Hyenstrand. Ed. Mats Burström et al. Stockholm. 37–41. Chippendale, Christopher. 1983. Stonehenge Complete. London. Christensen, Kjeld. 2007. “Forhistorisk dendrokronologi i Danmark.” Kuml 2007: 217–236. Dyggve, Einar. 1952. “The origin of the urban churchyard.” Classica et Mediaevalia 13: 147–158 Fehring, Günther P. 1991. The Archaeology of Medieval Germany. An Introduction. London. Gardell, Sölve. 1945. Gravmonument från Sveriges medeltid I-II. Stockholm. Gosden, Chris. 1994. Social Being and Time. Oxford. Gustavson, Helmer. 1986. “Runstenarnas Uppsala.” In Från Östra Aros till Uppsala. En samling uppsatser kring det medeltida Uppsala. Ed. Nanna Cnattingius and Torgny Nevéus. Uppsala Stads historia, 7. Uppsala and Stockholm. 10–41. Hållans Stenholm, Ann-Mari. 2006. “Past memories. Spatial returning as ritualized remembrance.” In Andrén, Jennbert and Raudvere, eds. Old Norse Religion in Long-term Perspectives. 341–345. Hållans Stenholm, Ann-Mari. 2012. Fornminnen. Det förflutnas roll i det förkristna och kristna Mälardalen. Vägar till Midgård, 15. Lund. Jensen, Jørgen. 1992. Thomsens Museum. Historien om Nationalmuseet. Copenhagen. Jones, Andrew. 2007. Memory and Material Culture. Cambridge. Lagerlöf, Erland and Gunnar Svahnström. 1966. Gotlands kyrkor. En vägledning. Stockholm. Larsson, Lars and Karl-Magnus Lenntorp. 2004. “The Enigmatic House”. In Continuity for Centuries. A Ceremonial Building and its Context at Uppåkra, Southern Sweden. Ed. Lars Larsson. Uppåkrastudier, 10. Acta Archaeologica Lundensia, Series in 8o, No 48. Stockholm. 3–48. Ljung, Cecilia. 2016. Under runristad häll. Tidigkristna gravmonument i 1000-talets Sverige I–II. Stockholm Studies in Archaeology, 67. Stockholm. Lönnroth, Lars. 1977. “The Riddles of the Rök Stone. A Structural Approach.” ANF 92: 1–57. Lucas, Gavin. 2005. The Archaeology of Time. London and New York. Lund, Julie. 2009. Åsted og vadested. Deponeringer, genstandsbiografier og rumlig strukturering som kilde til vikingetidens kognitive landskaber. Oslo. Madsen, Per Kristian. 2007. “Middelalderlige kirketagværker i Sydvest- og Sønderjylland – eksempler på alder og typer.” Aarbøger for Nordisk Oldkyndighed og Historie 2003: 7–172. Magnell, Ola and Elisabeth Iregren. 2010. “Veitstu hvé blóta skal? The Old Norse blót in the light of osteological remains from Frösö Church, Jämtland, Sweden.” Current Swedish Archaeology 18: 223–250. Meckseper, Cord. 1982. Kleine Kunstgeschichte der deutschen Stadt im Mittelalter. Darmstadt. Olivier, Laurent. 2011. The Dark Abyss of Time. Archaeology and Memory. Lanham, MD.

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Pedersen, Anne. 2006. “Ancient mounds for new graves. An aspect of Viking Age burial customs in sothern Scandinavia.” In Andrén, Jennbert and Raudvere, eds. Old Norse Religion in Long-term Perspectives. 346–353. Sawyer, Birgit. 2000. The Viking-Age Rune-stones: Custom and Commemoration in Early Medieval Scandinavia. Oxford. Schmeisser, Rainer H. 1984. Steinkreuze in Schweden. Ein Beitrag zur Denkmalsforschung in Schweden. Regensburg. Shanks, Michael and Christopher Tilley. 1987. Social Theory and Archaeology. Cambridge. Speer, James H. 2010. Fundamentals of Tree-ring Research. Tuscon, AZ. Staecker, Jörn. 1999. “Dialog mit dem Tod. Studien zu den mittelalterlichen Grabplatten Schwedens im Spiegel der Europäisierung. Die Epigrafik.” In Europeans or Not? Local level strategies on the Baltic rim 1100–1400 AD. Ed. Nils Blomkvist and Sven-Olof Lindquist. CCC papers, 1. Visby & Kalmar. 231–262. Ström, Annika. 2002. Monumental Messages. Latin Inscriptions on Tombstones and Church Bells in Medieval Sweden. Stockholm. Strömberg, Märta. 1968. Der Dolmen Trollasten in St. Köpinge, Schonen. Acta Archaeologica Lundensia, Series in 8o, No. 7. Lund. Thäte, Eva S. 2007. Monuments and Minds. Monument Re-use in Scandinavia in the Second Half of the first Millennium AD. Acta Archaeologica Lundensia, Series in 4o, No. 27. Lund. Thordeman, Bengt. 1944. Invasionen på Gotland 1361. Dikt och verklighet. Stockholm. Trigger, Bruce G. 2006. A History of Archaeological Thought. 2nd ed. Cambridge. Van Dyke, Ruth M. and Susan E. Alcock, eds. 2003. Archaeologies of Memory. Malden, MA. Weibull, Lauritz, ed. 1923. Necrologium Lundense. Lunds domkyrkas nekrologium. Monumenta Scaniae historica, 7. Lund. Westholm, Gun. 2007. Visby 1361. Invasionen. Stockholm. Widholm, Dag. 2006. Sacred sites. Burial Customs in South Scandinavian Bronze and Iron Age. Kalmar and Lund. Williams, Howard. 2006. Death and Memory in Early Medieval Britain. Cambridge. Zachrisson, Torun. 1994. “The Odal and its manifestation in the landscape.” Current Swedish Archaeology 2: 219–238.

Lydia Carstens

I: 9 Late Iron Age Architecture 1 Definition Architecture is never accidental, but rather a calculated effort that demands both resources and man-power. It is planned, constructed, and maintained for a special practical purpose: a house in which to live, a tomb in which to be buried, a sacral building in which to worship the gods. Different kinds of buildings can be distinguished according to their functions, but, at the same time, there is always room for individual traits reflecting the architect, the owner, or even society. Size, ornamentation, and placement are not only functional, but to a high degree also a social statement, reflecting hierarchy and social differentiation (Locock 1994, 1). Moreover, architecture has a connection to memory, which is most clearly visible in the memorial. But other architectural structures also involve memory to a certain degree. Architecture inevitably refers to past structures, as building techniques, decorations, and other traits are consciously adopted (or not) or con­ spicuously rejected. Future generations may even recall the builders and patrons of the structures, built, as they were, to last. Even if only ruins remain, they may attract curiosity about the meaning of the building, its people, or notable actions that took place in connection with the structure. Memory is employed to support and strengthen common identity, to link the present to a glorious past with pow­ erful ancestors, and to dissociate from others. Buildings of the social elite are in particular meant to carry a message and they often establish an identity with a larger group of people (Demandt 1982, 49). Specific architectural features form an important part of cultural memory; indeed, the close connection between archi­ tecture and memory is further exemplified by the ancient Greek mnemonic tech­ nique, where imagines agentes were placed in a tangible architectural space in order that they should be remembered (Tausch 2001, 52).

2 State of research The connection between architecture and memory has been emphasized fre­ quently and in many different contexts and disciplines (e.g. neurosciences, art history, history, and the social sciences). This entry concentrates on the memo­ rial aspect of architecture from the late Scandinavian Iron Age (i.e. from around https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-015

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AD 500 to the eleventh century) and the state of research within archaeology and adjacent subjects. Memory studies has become a significant field of research within archaeology since the 1990s. Developed following the post-processual approach (e.g. Hodder 1982; Shanks and Tilley 1987; Tilley 1994), memory studies urged archaeologists to humanise the past and to embrace subjectivity, as objective truth cannot be achieved within the field (Van Dyke 2011, 248). This gave rise to several studies about power, ideology, identity, and landscape and the focus shifted from the collective to the individual. Together with increased discussion of the role of materiality, the individual, and parts of the society, which have long been over­ looked (e.g. slaves), memory studies seem to be a natural topic for archaeological research today. This area of research was deeply influenced by the anthropologi­ cally-oriented works of, for example, Halbwachs (1980 [1950]), Connerton (1989), Nora (1990), Le Goff (1992) and Assmann (1995).

3 Pre-modern Nordic material Memory studies within archaeology have been represented in general studies about ‘the past in the past’ (e.g. Bradley 2002) and edited books with various case studies of different kinds of objects and find regions (e.g. Bradley and Williams 1998; Martini 2000; Van Dyke; Alcock 2003). Most of these studies, however, focus on examples from outside Europe or the Mediterranean, and Scandinavia is badly underrepresented. The memorial function of architecture is also discussed in archaeological landscape studies (Tilley 1994; Hirsch and O’Hanlon 1995; Bradley 2000; Ashmore and Knapp 1999; Crocker 2000; Brink 2001) and several case studies show that people used architecture to interact with the landscape and to link themselves to the past, either with the help of older monuments or through the re-building of structures with clear links towards the past. Another important link between memory studies and architecture can be found in burial practices and the rituals of death (Parker-Pearson 1999; Hallam and Hockey 2001; Williams 2003; Meier 2016). Several studies focus on Scandinavia (e.g. Randsborg 1999; Svanberg 2003; Gansum 2004; Price 2012), especially the re-use of Bronze Age mounds during the Viking Age (Jennbert 1993; Artelius 2004; Pedersen 2006; Tegnér 2008). This has been interpreted as an act of legitimising through memory (Andrén 2013, 270). Re-use is, of course, not limited to graves. It can also be studied in connection with settlements and other kind of monuments (Bradley 2002). The special con­ nection between architecture, memory, and the re-use of older structures has



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been studied extensively by Hållans Stenholm (2012), concentrating on Middle Sweden in the Iron Age. Studying memory in the context of mortuary practices and its performan­ ces is especially important, as it brings the architectural structure together with objects and places, as well as rituals and behaviour. The latter are particularly dif­ ficult to grasp in other contexts, but likely display important aspects of memory. More general studies about architecture and memory in the Scandinavian Iron Age are rare. Roesdahl (1989) put together several import architectural fea­ tures of the Viking Age in Denmark (e.g. the Trelleborg fortresses, the Jelling mounds, and the bridge in Ravninge) and interprets them as visual displays of power, but did not comment on a possible memorial function. Andrén (2013) gives some archaeological examples and asks about the role of memory in Iron Age Scandinavia in a short article, stating that memory was important, while the different issues of memory seem to be difficult to handle. Architectural features were also present on some pictorial works from the Late Iron Age, for example, on runestones, picture stones, tapestries, and coins. Thus far, the pictures have not been studied from a memorial perspective, but are mainly discussed as represen­ tations of tangible structures (e.g. houses as representations of Valhǫll). It has to be concluded that general studies about Scandinavian Iron Age architecture and memory are still missing, and buildings in particular have yet to be studied from this perspective. There are anthropological studies of houses and house symbolism (e.g. Samson 1990; Locock 1994; Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995), but they concern neither Scandinavia nor the Late Iron Age. In addition, several historical studies examine buildings of the social elite according to ques­ tions of memory, legitimation, and display, but they only focus on late medieval and early modern magnate buildings on the Continent (see e.g. Maran et al. 2006; Spieß 2008; Paravicini 2009). In a comparative analysis of magnate architec­ ture in Aachen, Magdeburg, and Jelling, Meier (2002) concludes, for example, that architecture is not only the setting of rulership and power, but possesses a strong metaphorical component as well, a component which is a priori cultu­ rally determined. The connection between architecture and the display of power is highlighted in several studies (e.g. Hansson 2006; Poulsen and Sindbæk 2011; Dengsø Jessen 2012), especially in the numerous contributions to the Scandina­ vian central place phenomenon (see Steuer 2007), but unfortunately, memory is not discussed in any detail.

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4 Perspectives for future research There are at least four different gainful approaches to the study of architecture and memory in the Scandinavian Iron Age, 1) through the study of grave construc­ tions and dealing with the deceased; 2) through the study of architectural fea­ tures in the landscape; 3) by interpreting different kind of actions, behaviour, and rituals which were connected to different architectural features; 4) and by study­ ing different kinds of dwellings from a memorial aspect (including depictions). All of these studies would benefit highly from an interdisciplinary approach and the consideration of different kinds of sources. Memory and mortuary practices have already been studied from different perspectives, and the same can also be said of memory and landscape. Never­ theless, several interesting aspects have yet to be considered. For example, as regards memory and landscape, several architectural features have not been taken into consideration so far, most of all, features of infrastructure. Rudebeck (2002) pointed out, that roads were an important part of memorial culture as well. It is thus conceivable, that the arrangement of roads did not only reflect practical reasons, but might also be a result of a carefully planned memorial landscape, where paths and roads not only lead from place to place and where sometimes the journey is its own reward. Bridges might cross the river at an important place of remembrance and not at the easiest crossing, while grand works of ancestors might have been extended but also demolished. The study of rituals and behaviour is very complicated and difficult, yet recent works on rituals and performance (Jezierski et al. 2015) could add new insights and ideas to the discussion. The past is not merely represented by artefacts and features, but also by performances, and it has been argued that ritual behavi­ our is an important way to learn about social memory practices in the past (Van Dyke 2011, 239). Performances connected to architectural features include, for example, religious and triumphal processions along the roads, the abandonment and/or destruction of buildings, votive depositions in buildings or grave const­ ructions, feasting and everyday life in the dwellings, and complicated rituals of politics and faith in connection to the settled areas. Studying memory in connection with buildings has partly been done through the analysis of the memorial landscape, where special spaces help to create special architecture, while at the same time, architecture also has an impact on the perception of space (Heinz 2006, 137). Buildings of the social elite were land­ marks of the aristocratic landscape (Hansson 2006) and architecture acted as a useful tool for a ruler. It has been shown that the ruler’s residence mirrors its owner, as well as all the important acts, which were conducted there (Carstens 2014).



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Thus, self-display is never only about oneself, but always about oneself in contrast to others (Paravicini 2009, 23). These ‘others’ might be superiors, equals, or subordinates; locals or foreigners, but they might also be ancestors or descendants. To reach them and to impress others, memory was employed. In a study of memory and buildings, three different arenas of memory can thus be distinguished: 1) memory in the outer appearance of the building; 2) memory and the interior; and 3) memory and actions. The first is made visible via buil­ ding tradition, the connection to older structures and the re-use or integration of older features, as well as visible allusions to buildings and other structures of the past in form and decoration. Second, memory has an impact on the inte­ rior in the choice of building technique and decoration, where allusions towards the past can be made with the help of pictorial works (e.g. tapestries) or the use of traditional tools and decoration (e.g. a special heirloom). Third, memory is evoked via actions, such as drinking ceremonies or votive distributions to honour dead ancestors and stories of the past that were told by poets and guests. Finally, it is the treatment of the building itself, which is important for a discussion of memory: The abandonment or destruction of the building to erase it from memory is as important as the notion, that abandoned halls were never re-used for other purposes (Hållans Stenholm 2012, 184). Even a ruin is never a neutral quarry, but full of memory and if there are only ruins left, specific associations were linked to the structures, which folklore could preserve for centuries. Aristocratic buildings were used by magnates to create a sense of identity, to build loyalty, to legitimate and to secure the claim to power and property (Cars­ tens 2014). This was often done with the help of memory. An important factor that promotes remembrance is the visibility of architectural structures. With their temporal and local durability, the buildings also became part of the memory of future generations, as they could be used to memorise such persons as the former resident, ideas, values, and special events. This might be one of the reasons, why many of the greatest architectural structures were raised in a time of crisis and before the collapse of a great dynasty (Demandt 1982, 50). It is a cross-cultural truism that rulers build great residences to make an impact (Meier 2002, 320). But how this impact is achieved has been studied as little as the general question of memory and architecture in the North. With the help of memory studies, archaeology can do more than state that the past had a past as well. The great value of memory studies within the field of archaeology is the possibility to gain new insights into thoughts, meanings, motivations, and ideas of people. Materiality is still in focus but the view goes further than that: “Memory studies humanize the past” (Van Dyke 2011, 240). They are not capable to tell objective historical information, but histories about the individual within the community.

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Works cited Secondary sources Andrén, Anders 2013. “Places, Monuments, and Objects. The Past in Ancient Scandinavia.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85: 267–281. Artelius, Tore. 2004. “Minnesmakarnas verkstad. Om vikingatida bruk av äldre graver och begravningsplatser.” In Minne och myt – konsten att skapa det förflutna. Ed. Åsa Berggren, Stefan Arvidsson and Ann-Mari Hållans. Vägar till Midgård, 5. Lund. 99–120. Ashmore, Wendy and Bernard A. Knapp, eds. 1999. Archaeologies of Landscape: Contemporary Perspectives. Cambridge. Assmann, Jan. 1995. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” New German Critique 65: 125–133. Bradley, Richard. 2000. An Archaeology of Natural Places. London and New York. Bradley, Richard. 2002. The Past in Prehistoric Societies. London and New York. Bradley, Richard and Howard Williams, eds. 1998. The Past in the Past: The re-use of ancient monuments. World Archaeology, 30. London. Brink, Stefan. 2001. “Mythologizing landscape: Place and space of cult and myth.” In Kontinuität und Brüche in der Religionsgeschichte. Ed. Michael Strausberg, Olof Sundqvist and Astrid van Nahl. Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde, 31. Berlin and New York. 76–112. Carsten, Janet and Stephen Hugh-Jones. 1995. About the house. Lévi-Strauss and beyond. Cambridge. Carstens, Lydia. 2014. “Lordship, Symbols and Memory: The great house at Runsa from a philological point of view.” In Runsa Borg. Representative life on a Migration period Hilltop Site – a Scandinavian Perspective. Ed. Michael Olausson. Papers from the Project Runsa Borg, 2. Stockholm. 145–166. Connerton, Paul. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge. Crocker, Kyle R. 2000. “Memory and the social landscape in eleventh-century Upplandic commemorative practice.” In Memory and the medieval tomb. Ed. Elizabeth Valdez del Alamo and Carol Stamatis Pendergast. Aldershot. 183–204. Dengsø Jessen, Mads. 2012. “The hall and the church during christianization – building ideologies and material concepts.” In Excavating the Mind: Cross-sections through Culture, Cognition and Materiality. Ed. Helle Juel Jensen, Mads Jessen and Niels Johannsen. Aarhus. 133–160. Demandt, Alexander. 1982. “Symbolfunktion antiker Baukunst.” In Palast und Hütte. Beiträge zum Bauen und Wohnen im Altertum von Archäologen, Vor- und Frühgeschichtlern. Tagungsbeiträge eines Symposiums der Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung Bonn-Bad Godesberg veranstaltet vom 25.–30. November 1979 in Berlin. Ed. Dietrich Papenfuss und Volker Michael Strocka. Mainz. 49–62. Gansum, Terje. 2004. Hauger som konstruksjoner: arkæologiske forventninger gjennom 200 år. Gothenburg Archaeological Theses, 33. Göteborg. Hållans Stenholm, Ann-Mari. 2012. Fornminnen. Det förflutnas roll I det förkristna och kristna Mälardalen. Vägar till Midgård, 15. Lund. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1980 [1950]. The Collective Memory. New York.



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Hallam, Elizabeth and Jenny Hockey. 2001. Death, Memory and Material Culture. Oxford and New York. Hansson, Martin. 2006. Aristocratic landscape. The spatial ideology of the medieval aristocracy. Lund Studies in Historical Archaeology, 2. Malmö. Heinz, Marlies. 2006. “Architektur und Raumordnung. Symbole der Macht, Zeichen der Mächtigen.” In Constructing power. Architecture, ideology and social practice. Ed. Joseph Maran, Carsten Juwig, Hermann Schwengel and Ulrich Thaler. Geschichte, Forschung und Wissenschaft, 19. Hamburg. 135–152. Hirsch, Eric and Michael O’Hanlon, eds. 1995. The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space. Oxford. Hodder, Ian. 1982. Symbols in action: ethnoarchaeological studies of material culture. Cambridge. Jennbert, Kristina. 1993. “Släkters hågkomst. Om bruket av bronsåldershögar.” In Bronsålderns gravhögar. Rapport från ett symposium I Lund 15.XI–16.XI 1991. Ed. Lars Larsson. Lund. 69–78. Jezierski, Wojtek, Lars Hermanson, Hans Jacob Orning and Thomas Småberg, eds. 2015. Rituals, performatives, and political order in Northern Europe, c. 650–1350. Turnhout. Le Goff, Jacques. 1992. Geschichte und Gedächtnis. Aus dem Französischen von Elisabeth Hartfelder. Frankfurt am Main. Maran, Joseph, Carsten Juwig, Hermann Schwengel and Ulrich Thaler, eds. 2006. Constructing power. Architecture, ideology and social practice. Geschichte Forschung und Wissenschaft Band, 19. Hamburg. Martini, Wolfram, ed. 2000. Architektur und Erinnerung. Formen der Erinnerung, 1. Göttingen. Meier, Thomas. 2002. “Magdeburg zwischen Aachen und Jelling: Repräsentationsarchitektur als semiotisches System.” In Europa im 10. Jahrhundert Archäologie einer Aufbruchszeit. Internationale Tagung in Vorbereitung der Ausstellung ‘Otto der Große, Magdeburg und Europa’. Ed. Joachim Henning. Mainz. 311–322. Meier, Thomas. 2016. “Tod und Gedenken in der Landschaft – Zur Einführung.” In Siedlungsforschung. Archäologie – Geschichte – Geographie 33: 9–93. Nora, Pierre. 1990. Zwischen Geschichte und Gedächtnis. Berlin. Locock, Martin. 1994. Meaningful architecture. Social interpretations of buildings. Avebury. Paravicini, Werner. 2009. “Die Gesellschaft, der Ort, die Zeichen. Aus der Arbeit der Residenzen-Kommission der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen.” In Spätmittelalterliche Residenzenbildung in geistlichen Territorien Mittel- und Nordostdeutschlands. Ed. Klaus Neitmann and Heinz Dieter Heimann. Studien zur brandenburgischen und vergleichenden Landesgeschichte, 2. Berlin. 15–31. Parker-Pearson, Mike. 1999. The Archaeology of Death and Burial. Gloucestershire. Pedersen, Anne. 2006. “Ancient mounds for new graves. An aspect of Viking burial customs in Southern Scandinavia.” In Old Norse religion in long term perspectives. Origins, changes and interactions. Ed. Anders Andrén, Kristina Jennbert and Catharina Raudvere. Vägar till Midgård, 8. Lund. 346–353. Poulsen, Bjørn and Søren Michael Sindbæk. 2011. Settlement and Lordship in Viking and Early Medieval Scandinavia. The Medieval Countryside, 9. Turnhout. Price, Neil S. 2012. “Mythic Acts: Material Narratives of the Dead in Viking Age Scandinavia” In More than Mythology: Narratives, Ritual Practices and Regional Distribution in Pre-Christian Scandinavian Religions. Ed. Catharina Raudvere and Jens Peter Schjødt. Lund. 13–46.

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Randsborg, Klavs. 1999. “Impressions of the past. Early material history in Scandinavia.” In Acta Archaeologica 70. 185–194. Roesdahl, Else. 1989. “Prestige, display and monuments.” In Les mondes Normands VIII–XII. Ed. Henri Galninié. Caen. 17–25. Rudebeck, Elisabeth. 2002. “Vägen som rituell arena.” In Plats och Praxis. Ed. Kristina Jennbert, Anders Andrén and Catharina Raudvere. Vägar till Midgård, 2. Lund. 167–200. Samson, Ross, ed. 1990. The social archaeology of houses. Edinburgh. Shanks, Michael and Christopher Tilley. 1987. Social Theory and Archaeology. Cambridge. Spieß, Karl-Heinz. 2008. Fürsten und Höfe im Mittelalter. Darmstadt. Steuer, Heiko. 2007. “Zentralorte.” In Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde 34. Ed. Heinrich Beck, Dieter Geuenich and Heiko Steuer. Berlin and New York. 878–914. Svanberg, Fredrik. 2003. Death rituals in South-East Scandinavia AD 800–1000. Decolonizing the Viking Age. Acta Archaeologica Lundensia Series in 4º, 24. Malmö. Tausch, Harald. 2001. “Architektur.” In Gedächtnis und Erinnerung. Ein interdisziplinäres Lexikon. Ed. Nicolas Pethes and Jens Ruchatz. Reinbek. 52–53. Tegnér, Mimmi. 2008. “Högar av minnen – förhållanden til det förflutna under järnåldern i Öresundsregionen.” In Arkeologi och Identitet. Ed. Bodil Petersson and Peter Skoglund. Lund. 243–270. Tilley, Christopher. 1994. A Phenomenology of Landscape. Places, Paths and Monuments. Oxford. Van Dyke, Ruth M. 2011. “Imagined Pasts Imagined” In Ideologies in Archaeology. Ed. Reinhard Bernbeck and Randall H. McGuire. Tucson, AZ. 233–253. Van Dyke, Ruth M. and Susan E. Alcock, eds. 2003. Archaeologies of Memory. Malden, Oxford, Melbourne and Berlin. Williams, Howard. 2003. Archaeologies of Remembrance: Death and Memory in Past Societies. New York.

Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen and Henning Laugerud

I: 10 Medieval Architecture 1 Definition

Architecture has been the ultimate memory topos, as well as the most common and basic structure of memory techniques from Antiquity to today – and the same holds true for the Middle Ages. In her now classic study of the art of memory, Frances Yates pointed out that classical mnemonic instructions are more remi­ niscent of “figures in some Gothic cathedral than of classical art proper”. In what she terms the “ages of Memory,” artificial memory was as important as natural memory, and “[s]o might the vast inner memory cathedrals of the Middle Ages have been built” (Yates 1994 [1966], 32, 95, 109). When studying medieval Nordic architecture from a mnemological perspec­ tive, several approaches may be taken, including architecture as both a mnemo­ technical device, as a container of specific memory, and as a memorial, signifi­ cant to collective memory and identity. These types of memory were interlaced and not distinct from each other. The inner memory architecture of an individual would have resonated with the built architecture of the community as an external locus of materialised memory. Thus, the well-rehearsed traditions of ars memoria [the art of memory] made use of loci [places] and imagines [images], as when Albertus Magnus (c. 1193–1280) advised the use of solemn, moving, and out­ standing memory places, memorised in real buildings (Carruthers 1996 [1990], 277–280). Such real and corporeal places, loci corporalia, were internalised from sense impressions and could be memorable either by nature, e.g. a field, or by artifice, e.g. a building, construction or edifice. The required capacity to move even lead Yates to “deduce that the best kind of building in which to form memory places would [perhaps] be a church”, quoting Albertus’ De bono (On the Good) (Yates 1994 [1966], 75). With its strikingly dramatic, beautiful or even irregular places, a church could acquire the designated memorability. But churches could be many different things and hence, in the following, basic categories and ope­ rations of architectonic memory are presented through a few, varying examples meant to represent the Scandinavian context.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-016

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2 State of research Only little has been done so far on Nordic architectural material specifically, or within a medieval Nordic historical context regarding the study of memory or mnemology. A study of the so-called Stavkirkeprekenen (Stave Church Homily) from the homiletic collection Gammelnorsk homiliebok (The Old Norwegian Book of Homilies) from the early thirteenth century, seen as an example of practical use of the church building as a kind of memory structure, is one of the very few known to the authors (Laugerud 2010). Birgitte Bøggild Johannsen, participant in the Medieval Memoria Onlineproject (MeMO) aimed at the memorial culture of the Middle Ages, has studied the visible and audible memory production at for instance Sorø Kloster on Zealand as a royal mausoleum and lieu de mémoire (Bøggild Johannsen 2011, 2012). Archaeological appropriations of older ritual sites, pagan buildings, burial places, grave monuments or past spatial models have been studied by Anders Andrén as witnesses of distinct kinds of memory reflecting the “retrospective strategies in Old Norse religion as well as in Christianity [...] apprehended as a kind of ‘grave cult’”. Basing his discussion of the “complex multi-temporal cha­ racter of the past” on the work of other archaeologists, he reaches the general conclusion that “different forms of memory existed. Some memories related to the recent past (e.g., genealogical memories), others to the distant past (e.g. mythical memories).” (Andrén 2013, 268–269, 275; further references by Meier 2016)

3 Pre-modern Nordic material Memoria could imply both internal and external memory production processed by memorials recording content to be recollected and enacting the processes of recollection. As a revered burial site or relic – i.e. a material memoria of a saintly or venerable person – a church, pilgrimage chapel or martyrium could invite the commemoration of a martyr, who had himself commemorated Christ through his bodily deeds and actions (Grabar 1972 [1946]). Such a manufactured memory structure offered itself to the community as an architectural instrument of recol­ lection and reminiscence – a material prosthesis acting almost as an externalised faculty of remembering in its own right. An example of this politically, ideologically, and religiously intentional engineering of collective memory might be the royal grave complex and conver­ sion monuments of Danish king Haraldr blátǫnn [Harald Bluetooth] at Jelling in Jutland, composed around the middle of the tenth century. The monuments

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were constructed in more than one stage and modified over time. They comprised both pagan and Christian burials, a grand stone setting, two impressive funerary or commemorative mounds, and a wooden hall or church with grave chamber, which was later replaced by a still extant Romanesque stone church between the high mounds (Roesdahl 1989, 2008; Holst et al. 2012). According to the memo­ rial inscriptions on the accompanying rune stones, the monuments were a selfconscious dynastic celebration of Haraldr’s father Gormr, King Gorm den Gamle [Gorm the Old], and his mother, Queen Thorvi [Thyra], and Haraldr’s claim to have converted the Danes. With recognisably pagan and Christian elements dis­ played conspicuously alongside each other, the ancestral past is deliberately recorded, recalled, and appropriated (even fabricated) in the splendid context of a new realm embodied by the Christ-like king, whose official remembrance of the Christianisation is collectively impressed on his subjects. The monument acts as a prosthetic recollection device – an instrumental generator of national identity and patrimony in retrospect – that made history by fabricating a glorious memory of it. A memory to be internalised by contemporary and future citizens of the supposedly converted kingdom. By building the past, the memoria-maker constructed the future. Referring to Jelling, Uppsala and Old Uppsala among others, Anders Andrén maintains that “spatial references to the past continued after the Christianisa­ tion of Scandinavia” and suggests that “Christian associations with pagan ritual remains can be regarded as attempts to reconcile the two religious traditions, in ways similar to the writings of Snorri Sturluson and Saxo Grammaticus. From this perspective, the placing of a church and churchyard as an extension of a pagan cemetery can be explained as an incorporation of the ancestors and their cult into a Christian context” (Andrén 2013, 274–277). When ancestral appropria­ tion is monumentalised in built form, it is a kind of proactive memory-building. It incorporates and mnemonically modifies the past to suit the purposes of the present. Architecture is thus often a container of historical memory. It recalls differ­ ent ideals and ideas from various periods as well as different styles and building elements, which gradually accrue through additions, rebuilding, alterations and so on. As such, an edifice is a visual representation of a time-span and docu­ ments the historical past through its built-in memory performance, which confers some sort of mnemonic agency upon the building itself. As a mnemonic agent or memory machine, the surviving building stores, records, and recalls the past. By becoming materialised in a lasting form, the past is made accessible to the present as a dynamic resource, actualised in its daily use and continued pres­ ence. Architecture is thus a privileged subject of memory, as well as an active generator of memory – or even a locus of the act of remembering.

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This function was made explicit when the act of memorisation was inscribed into/onto the architectural body itself in quite a literal sense through commemo­ rative and dedicatory inscriptions, donor portraits, statues and the like. Secular lords made a display of heraldic signs, coats of arms and power symbols on key stones, hangings, and textiles to make their stately dwellings reflect and call to mind their dynastic heritage. But generally, the sacrosanctity of religious build­ ings was liable to ensure a longer afterlife, and a more stable place in the col­ lective memory. The expressive forms, rich materials, majestic external volumes, and vibrant interior spaces of medieval church architecture certainly aimed at memorability and singularity among their physical surroundings in villages, landscapes, and cityscapes. The sight of daring and monumental visual forms, the sound of hymns and church bells, the smell of incense, oils and ritual fragrances in perfumed spaces would have impressed the hearts and minds of recipients. These sensory features stood out in the general environment and con­ tributed to the ceremonial anamnesis and cultic act of remembrance performed at shrines (e.g. Jessen and Sørensen 2015; Schleif 2010). As places of temporal duration and permanence, cult sites may have slowly changed over the centuries, but they nevertheless outlived the individual’s lifespan, accumulating time and history generation after generation. This relative permanence did not necessarily mean that sacred architec­ ture presented itself as smooth and homogenous unities, easy to take in and process. The heterogeneous appropriation and ongoing re-use of earlier build­ ing elements and parts accumulated over the centuries made both cathedrals and parish churches into complex and conglomerate structures. They explicitly reminded users of historical changes and vicissitudes – that is, of time going by, and, by implication, the individual’s embeddedness in a larger temporal context. An emblematic example of this processual memory-building is the cathedral of Ribe, the oldest town in Denmark and the location of one of the first missionary churches in the country, established by Ansgar (801–865) (see fig. 1). Probably placed nearby, the present Romanesque cathedral of the twelfth century also housed royal tombs and came to harbour about 50 altars in remembrance of the saints (Danmarks Kirker 1979, 85). Moreover, the hieratic shrine represented the local entry to CIVITAS HIERVSALEM (The City of Jerusalem) – as a portal inscrip­ tion reminds us, establishing the mnemonic connection between the heavenly city and its far-away representative on the shores of the Wadden Sea. From the outset, the composite sanctuary amalgamated many architectural and ornamental features, not least the richness of select building materials. This display of varied materials demonstrated the church’s international affiliations and may even have evoked the precious gem walls of Revelation’s Jerusalem: ashlar of dressed stone typical of Jutland’s granite churches; volcanic tufa

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Fig. 1: Aerial photography of Ribe Cathedral in the south-west of Jutland, Denmark, in 2012, showing the twelfth-century building with later additions and modifications

imported via the Rhine from the Eifel at Andernach and Laacher See; Weser sand­ stone from near Minden in various shades and colours; trachyte from Drachenfels near Bonn; chalk possibly from around Paris; samples of local bog iron, and so on (Danmarks Kirker 1979, 184–193). The aesthetic complexity was further enhanced by Gothic enlargements and auxiliary buildings in brick, such as the doubled aisles protruding from the nave on either side, clearly announcing their status as later additions to the aggregate. Showing its deep and varied history, the intricate compound exhibits a magnificent plethora of contrasting spatial volumes, archi­ tectural styles, artistic traditions and sensory materiality vibrant with traces of time. The church reminds viewers of periodic changes, which situates them in a (re-)collective continuity of space and time. Over time, this memorable building complex suffered fire, damage and unforgettable trauma, most dramatically on Christmas Day in 1283 just after morning Mass when the north tower collapsed into the church with the assem­ bled congregation and the surrounding streets, killing several townspeople (Danmarks Kirker 1979, 66, 83, 262, 274–275). In its place, the considerably larger and squatter Borgertårnet or Byens Tårn, i.e. the Commoner’s Tower, was erected to rise much higher than the former turret, resulting in a disturbing asymmetry that

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violates any notion of a harmoniously balanced two-tower facade. Even today when the new brick tower, completed towards 1333, has been somewhat reduced in appearance, it announces past events in its glaring contrast in height, size, shape, colour, and material to the earlier architectural body. The telling dispro­ portion produces an “irregular place” – as Yates says – that leaves the viewer with a curious impression, which is not easy to forget (Yates 1994 [1966], 32). Among other things, it might seem to be making a suggestive statement about preceding occurences, as if it were a monument to the loss and restoration of life in the city. Appropriately, the upper floors later found use as an archive and storage house of the city’s records, testifying to Borgertårnet’s assumed role as a marker of the city’s identity: an iconic emblem of the commoners’ Ribe, in its long and vexed history. Visible and audible from afar, even from the open sea, the evocative city tower with its mighty storm bell grew to become an integral element of the collec­ tive image of the place. It became a constitutive memory of old Ribe in more than one sense: as a seamark, landmark, and mental mark. Turning now to another medium for mnemonics, there are few direct refer­ ences to the art of memory in textual material that has survived from the Middle Ages in the Nordic countries. Yet the same understanding permeates most of them and can be found in liturgical texts, sermons and devotional literature. One rel­ evant text is the so-called Stavkirkeprekenen [Stave Church Homily], whose origi­ nal title or heading in the manuscript is: Jn dedicatione tempeli [!] sermo [Sermon for the dedication of churches]. It is the homily no. 20 found in the Gamal norsk homiliebok [Old Norwegian Book of Homilies] from the early thirteenth century (Haugen and Ommundsen 2010). The homily is a so-called sermon for the day. It was used on the annual cele­ bration held to commemorate the consecration day or dedicatio of that church. In this text, the priest speaks about the symbolic and allegorical meaning through which it was possible to understand the material building as a church, explaining how: “En með þvi at æino nafne callasc á bocum kirkian ok allir saman cristin lyðr.” (Gamal norsk homiliebok 96) [The church building and the Church of Chris­ tendom are known by one and the same word in the books]. This allegory func­ tions on two levels. Firstly, on a general level as a ‘church’: “Songhus merkir hælga menn á himni. er kirkian cristna menn á iorðu.” (Gamal norsk homiliebok  96) [The choir is an image of the blessed in heaven, while the nave represents Chris­ tians on earth]. And later on in the text: “Fiorer hornstafar kirkio merkia fiogur guðspioll. þvi at kenningar þæira ero enar stærgsto stoðir allrar cristni.” (Gamal norsk homiliebok 97) [The four corner posts of a church are the four gospels, as the wisdom they hold is the strongest support of the Christian faith.]. This alle­ gory can also be understood on a personal level: “En sva sem vér sægium kirkio merkia allan cristin lyð. sva man hon merkia sér hværn cristin mann. þann er

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sanlega geresc mystere hæilags anda í góðum siðum.” (Gamal norsk homiliebok, 97) [But in the same manner that we may speak of the church as an image of the whole of Christendom, we may also speak of it is an image of each and every Christian, who, by living in purity, becomes a temple for the Holy Spirit]. In this context, the corner posts are interpreted in a different manner: “Fiorer horn-sta­ far merkia fiora haufuð-costa þa er enar stærgsto stuðir ero annarra góðra verca. þat er vizka. ok ret-læte. styrcð. ok hofsemi.” (Gamal norsk homiliebok, 98) [The four corner posts are the four cardinal virtues, which are the strongest supports for all good deeds: they are prudence and justice, fortitude and temperance]. Not only are the structural parts of the building set into this mnemotechnical frame of reference dense with meaning, but so too is the interior. The altar symbolises Christ, the altar cloth is “Alteres clæðe ero hælgir menn þæir er scryða Crist í goðum vercum.” (Gamal norsk homiliebok, 96) [the holy men who adorn Christ with good deeds] and the crosses, crucifixes and church bells also have an alle­ gorical meaning beyond that of their immediate references. The purpose of this allegoric interpretation was to raise the individual believer to God and salvation: “En þat er vitanda at allt ma andlega merkiasc ok fyllasc í os þat er til kirkiu-bunings eða til þionasto þarf at hafa ef vér lifum sva ræinlega at vér sem verðir at kallasc guðs mysteri.” (Gamal norsk homiliebok, 99) [Then we shall know that everything which is needed to furnish the churches or the church services can be translated spiritually and fulfilled in us, if we live so blamelessly that we are worthy to be called temples of God (all translations by the author)]. The visible elements of the church building were supposed to awaken the spiritual feelings of the viewer and show the way to higher realities. In this manner the anagogic character of the architectural elements was emphasised. One should see with the eyes of the soul: “hugscotz augum” [the inner eye]. (Gammelnorsk homiliebok, 102; Gamal norsk homiliebok, 97). A central point of this sermon is underlined here: namely that the listener’s or beholder’s – the congre­ gation’s – memory should be activated. To see with the eyes of the soul means [to see] in, through or by memory. We can read this sermon as offering specific guide­ lines for, and a practical use of, the art of memory. The different corporeal and visible elements of the church building, such as the parts of the main body of the church, as the nave, choir or pillars, but also pictures and objects in the church, should become the places in which to store the most central truths and insights of faith (Laugerud 2010). Like a massive machine of memory, the corporeal structure was saturated with incorporeal meaning, which sustained the tenets of faith and made believers recall their divine origin. In this sermon for the day from around 1200, we have a demonstration of a practical application for the classical art of memory – ars memoria – in its medieval version: “Den står i en lang tradisjon bekover i historien, og er i tillegg

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et godt eksempel på hvordan bibelsk litteratur og klassisk litteraturteori eller retorikk på et tidlig stadium i tradisjonen inngikk i en intim forbindelse med hverandre.” (Schumacher 2006, 156) [It is part of a long tradition which stretches back into history, and is in addition a good example of how biblical literature and the classical theory of literature or rhetoric at an early stage in the tradition were intimately related to each other.”] Thus, architecture proves again to have been a crucial medium of memory, in Scandinavia as elsewhere. The art of memory was permeated with the art of building, and vice versa. To build was to memorise, and to memorise was to build (Carruthers 1993).

4 Perspectives for future research The mediality and materiality of medieval memory includes recollective opera­ tions performed by buildings or through the use of buildings, the location of mnemonic agency in constructions, the architectural instrumentalisation and materialisation of memory, and so on. In particular, the role of collective, cultural and communicative memory in the conversion process seems to be a promising prospect for the investigation of pagan and Christian architecture with memorial functions. Accordingly, the visual culture of memory involves art history, archae­ ology and other disciplines.

Works cited Primary sources Gamal norsk homiliebok. Cod. Am 619 4to. Ed. Gustav Indrebø. Oslo, 1966 [1931].

Secondary sources Andrén, Anders. 2013. “Places, Monuments, and Objects: The Past in Ancient Scandinavia.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 267–281. Bøggild Johannsen, Birgitte. 2011. “‘Cum tota posteritas digne ut meruit simul honorare nequeat.’ Staging the Queens Memoria in Early Fifteenth Century Denmark.” In Living Memoria: Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Memorial Culture in Honour of Truus van Bueren. Ed. Rolf de Weijert, Kim Ragetli, Arnoud-Jan Bijsterveld and Jeannette van Arenthals. Hilversum. 45–57.

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Bøggild Johannsen, Birgitte. 2012. “Fortidskult, status og identitet: Sorø Kloster som kollektivt erindringssted i senmiddelalderen og renæssancen.” Hikuin 39: 147–164, 182–183. Carruthers, Mary. 1993. “The Poet as Masterbuilder: Composition and Locational Memory in the Middle Ages.” New Literary History 24.4: 881–904. Carruthers, Mary. 1996 [1990]. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge. Danmarks Kirker: Ribe Amt. Vol. XVIII. Ribe Domkirke. Copenhagen, 1979. 61–680. Grabar, André. 1972 [1946]. Martyrium: Recherches sur le culte des reliques et l’art chrétien antique. 1–2. London. Haugen, Odd Einar and Åslaug Oddmundsen, eds. 2010. Vår eldste bok. Skrift, miljø og biletbruk i den norske homilieboka. Oslo. Holst, Mads Kähler, Mads Dengsø Jessen, Steen Wulff Andersen and Anne Pedersen. 2012. “The Late Viking-Age Royal Constructions at Jelling, central Jutland, Denmark: Recent investigations and a suggestion for an interpretative revision.” Praehistorische Zeitschrift 87.2: 474–504. Jessen, Mads Dengsø and Tim Flohr Sørensen. 2015. “Environment: Embodiment and Senses in Eleventh- to Thirteenth-Century Churches in Southern Scandinavia.” In The Saturated Sensorium: Principles of Perception and Mediation in the Middle Ages. Ed. Hans Henrik L. Jørgensen, Henning Laugerud and Laura K. Skinnebach. Aarhus. 206–225. Laugerud, Henning. 2010. “To See with the Eyes of the Soul: Memory and Visual Culture in Medieval Europe.” ARV. Nordic Yearbook of Folklore Studies 66: 43–68. Meier, Thomas. 2016. “Tod und Gedenken in der Landschaft – Zur Einführung.” Siedlungsforschung: Archäologie – Geschichte – Geographie 33: 9–93. Roesdahl, Else. 1989. “Prestige, Display and Monuments in Viking Age Scandinavia.” In Les mondes normands (VIIIe-XIIe s.): Actes du deuxième congrès international d’archéologie médiévale (Caen, 2–4 octobre 1987). Caen. 17–25. http://www.persee.fr/doc/ acsam_0000-0000_1989_act_2_1_1016 (18 November 2016) Roesdahl, Else. 2008. “The Emergence of Denmark and the Reign of Harald Bluetooth.” In The Viking World. Ed. Stefan Brink and Neil Price. New York. 652–664. Schleif, Corine. 2010. “Medieval Memorials: Sights and Sounds Embodied; Feelings, Fragrances and Flavors Re-membered.” Senses & Society 5.1: 73–92. Schumacher, Jan. 2006. “Den hellige ånds port. Til belysning av et særpreget motiv i Stavkirkeprekenen.” In Transformasjoner i vikingtid og tidlig middelalder. Ed. Gro Steinsland. Oslo. 153–168. Yates, Frances A. 1994 [1966]. The Art of Memory. London.

Silje Opdahl Mathisen

I: 11 Museology 1 Definition The field of Museology, or museum studies, considers the history and function of cultural institutions concerned with the preservation and curating of mate­ rial objects and their public roles in such areas as education. Museology is the term used in the Nordic countries and in Continental Europe, whereas the English-speaking world mainly uses the term museum studies (see Amundsen and Brenna 2010). Museology has been a growing field of research for the past three decades, an interest in museums as a phenomenon that reflects both the ever-expanding number of museums, as well as growing political demands on museums and increased political regulations of the museum sector by national governments and by trans-national institutions, such as the European Union’s cultural heritage policies and UNESCO. Museology emerged together with other interdisciplinary fields of research such as feminist and post-colonial studies, with which it shares such common traits as the belief that their fields of study do not fit conventional disciplines, and an interest in challenging established paradigms through critiques and analy­ ses of existing power structures (Amundsen and Brenna 2010, 10). The articles in The New Museology (Vergo 1989) became common reference tools for museo­ logical studies, posing critical questions about why museums are as they are, and looking to de-naturalise museum institutions (Amundsen and Brenna 2010, 11).

2 State of research In recent years, it seems that Vikings are everywhere, having thoroughly invaded popular culture, including television series, movies, literature and comic books, videogames and LARP (Live Action Role Play). Scientific research on the Viking Age is strong in such academic fields as Archaeology, History, and the History of Religion (Aannestad 2016), and Vikings are also present in Nordic museums: the museum exhibition VIKINGS, for example, has toured the world (Knight 2013). Among the most iconic legacies from the Viking Age are ships, such as those at the Viking Ships Museum in Roskilde (Vikingeskibsmuseet), Denmark; some of these vessels have survived almost intact, as can be seen at the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo (Vikingskipshuset), a part of the Museum of Cultural History (Kulhttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-017



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turhistorisk museum) at the University of Oslo. In 2016, the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo for the first time had more than 500,000 visitors in a year. It is useful to employ the Museum of Cultural History and its exhibitions of the Viking Age as empirical examples in discussing how Nordic Museology has tackled questions of memory, museums and the Viking Age. Museums today have an increased sensibility to, and awareness of, the fact that Norway is not a country with just one people. The north of Norway has always been multi-ethnic, with connections between Sámi and Norwegian documented in written sources that go as far back as the Viking Age, as documented by Ottar (or Othere), a Nor­ wegian chieftain who gave an account of his extensive travels to the North at the court of the Anglo-Saxon king, Alfred of Essex, around 890. In recent decades, Norway has become increasingly multi-ethnic. Much museological research has focused on inclusion: how can museums be made relevant and include the whole of society and not focus solely on a western, white, male perspective (see, e.g. Goodnow and Akman 2008; and Mathisen 2014). Historically, the Viking Age has played a pivotal role in the ideological and cultural formation of the Nordic nation states, but is it a challenge for Nordic museums to make the Viking Age relevant to contemporary society? If so, why – and how can this challenge be met? A look at Nordic museums and their representations of the Viking Age, with a perspective from Aleida Assmann (2008), who sees the museums as both canon and archive, provides a useful approach.

Museology, museums and the Viking Age Susan Crane captures the museologist’s conundrum thus: Any discussion of time and memory in a museum must acknowledge that no single account can ‘cover’ intensively or extensively the infinite variety of even apparently similar experi­ ences. What wealth of subjective impressions, past and present experiences formed through memories, does any individual bring to the organized efforts of scholars or curators who present an exhibition – at any point in time? How does the memory of previous museum experiences, and the knowledge of what the museum as institution represents, affect understandings of the museum and its purpose? And how, above all, is this infinite mass of impressions to be understood by those who care about the museum as an institution, and who will shape its status and future? (Crane 2013, 98–99)

Memory and History, Objects and Materiality, Places and Monuments, Inclusion and Exclusion – these are among the grand themes that museologists explore. Nordic Museology is known for an approach that combines overarching theoreti­ cal questions with thorough empirical research. Museology borrows from – and

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gives to – other fields of research where theory is developed through empiri­ cal studies. According to the Norwegian museologist Brita Brenna, museums represent places where it is particularly fruitful to explore theories from the humanities and social sciences about materiality, memory and inclusion (Brenna 2016, 1). As well as being seen as places and buildings, museums – and other cultural infrastructure – are linked more and more to civic identity and economic development, and thus have become objects in and of themselves, studied and used in a variety of ways that may or may not include the objects inside them (Conn 2010, 56). The number of museums is expanding rapidly, and today one can find a museum for practically everything. In Norway, there are currently more than 900 museums, ranging from large national institutions to small local museums (Eriksen 2009b, 11), museums for the arts, for science, for nature, and for cultural history, to name a few areas, all understood to be public institutions, open to the public and for the good of the public. According to the definition of the Internati­ onal Council of Museums (ICOM), a museum is “[…] a non-profit, permanent ins­ titution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and int­ angible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment” (see ICOM in the bibliography). The history of the museum as an institution is also a history of science: why do we collect, classify and exhibit objects in a certain manner? Museolo­ gists examine the so-called ‘cabinets of curiosities’ or Wunderkammer – the pre-modern collections of princes and learned scholars – exploring how these collections were organised according to a rationale that is different from how we think today, and how modern collections sprang out of a process of re-organising these Wunderkammer-collections (see, for example, Hooper-Greenhill 1992; Abt 2013 [2009]; Macdonald 2013 [2007]). The practice of maintaining ‘cabinets of curiosities’ evolved during the late Renaissance and Baroque periods and repre­ sents an early stage in the creation of the modern museum institution. These collections were private exhibition spaces, where precious artworks (artificialia), rare phenomena of nature (naturalia), scientific instruments (scientifica), objects from strange worlds (exotica), and inexplicable items (mirabilia) were preserved. In examining the Wunderkammer belonging to the king of Denmark, Danish ethnologist Cammila Mordhorst notes how this encyclopedic collection was re-organised at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In this process, the Nordic antiquities were separated from the more general “Antikvitetskammer” in 1811 (Mordhorst 2009, 69–70), and the Danish antiquarian, Christian Jürgen­ sen Thomsen (1788–1865), further re-arranged these objects into three periods based on their materials (the Stone Age, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age), and



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organised them as a chronological system (Jensen 1992), but the archaeological period ‘Viking Age’ was not separated from the rest of the Iron Age until the end of the nineteenth century, when Danish archaeologist J.J.A. Worsaae first used this name in his book Den Danske Kultur i Vikingetiden (1873), and it quickly caught on (Aannestad 2016, 69). It was thus not until the nineteenth century, with National Romanticism, that the concept of ‘Vikings’ really took hold, an ideal that became important in the search for both individual and national identity. In Norway, the ideal of the Viking Age was linked to the need to promote Norway as an independent nation state, separated from Danish and Swedish rule. At just that cultural moment, several large grave mounds containing Viking Age ship burials were discovered and excavated: Borre (1852), Tune (1867), Gokstad (1879) and, most famous of all and in the year before independence and the formal dissolution of the Union between Norway and Sweden, Oseberg (1904) (see Aannestad 2016, 68–69). From the Wunderkammer-tradition of the Renaissance, through the Enlightenment to the modern period, the museum institution as we know it today has changed greatly and come to be configured more or less in accordance with the ICOM’s definition (which has itself also changed over time). Museums represent mainly by making exhibitions. An important task for museology is to examine how museums choose to represent history and know­ ledge, and on what criteria they base their representations – that is, where the underlying ideas come from. Museology studies, among other things, how museums tell a story, which narrative(s) they use in their exhibitions, and which instruments and techniques they employ. The stories museums tell in their exhibi­ tions are, of course, not neutral, but are rather situated in ideologies, hierarchies, and political processes. Even so, these stories are often considered by the public to be ‘the Truth’ because museums tell their stories with authority, an authority which partly comes from the alleged authenticity of the objects – but it is also an authority that derives from the museum’s position from the Enlightenment on that as an institution, it should educate and inform the public (Amundsen and Brenna 2010, 20). Museological research has also been occupied with memory studies linked to the pre-modern world and, among other things, how remnants from what we today call the Viking Age were explained according to a pre-modern belief system, long before the concept Viking Age was created (see, for example, Brenna 2009; Eriksen 2009a, 2009b, 2014).

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3 Pre-modern Nordic material The Viking Age: A short period with a huge significance The Viking Age is relatively short, about 230 years (see Aannestad 2016, 65), but it has had a fundamental impact on how the Scandinavians see themselves and their history. How the Nordic countries and their museums relate to the Viking Age heritage constitutes a complex process of remembering and forgetting: remembering a glorious past for Norway, where the Norwegian state, although only for a short time, was a super-power in Europe, when laws were made, battles fought, and heroes praised in verse. From this period, art of great value has sur­ vived, as at the remarkable Oseberg and Gokstad ship burials. By the end of the fourteenth century, Norway fell into social and economic decline, largely due to the Black Death, and entered into the Kalmar Union, a personal union of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark under the rule of the Danish queen Margaret. Norway remained in this union until 1814, when Denmark was forced to give up Norway to Sweden by the Treaty of Kiel, a union dissolved in 1905. The great ship burial at Oseberg – discovered in 1903 and excavated in 1904 – was one of the richest graves ever from the Viking Age, and it could not have come at a better time: when Norway sought independence from Denmark, and later Sweden, romantic nation­ alism helped define and express a distinct national character. Nationalism was also an important component in the legitimacy of the museum as an institution in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many researchers of museum history have stressed the relationship between nation-building and the formation of the public museum (Hillström 2010, although Hillström is keen to nuance this view). The Oseberg ship burial was a discovery of national importance, and apart from the well-preserved ship, the grave contained the remains of two women, buried in a structure built inside the ship. The grave was plundered in antiquity, so no precious metals were found, but it contained rich finds made of wood, often elaborately decorated, such as a richly carved four-wheel wooden cart, as well as sledges, beds, various kitchen utensils and tools for textile manufacture, and the remains of horses, dogs, cows and an ox. The grave also contained the largest collection of textiles found in any grave in Norway. Among these were woolen garments, imported silks, and tapestries (Christensen et al. 1992). The excava­ tion itself only lasted 3 months, but it took more than 20 years to prepare and preserve the finds, which were exhibited in the newly built Historical Museum in the center of Oslo, where the ship was exhibited in a shed in a garden. In 1926, the Oseberg ship was moved to the purpose-built museum at Bygdøy, the Viking Ship Museum (see fig. 1).



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Fig. 1: Oseberg ship

And then came the Second World War and ruined everything: symbols from the Viking past were widely mis-used by the National Socialists, or Nazis, in the 1930s and during the war. The National Socialist movement in Norway drew actively on the Viking past, with youth meetings held at famous Viking Age archaeological sites such as Borre in Vestfold. This was the topic for an exhibition called Minus fem [minus five] at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo in 2014. The exhibition was part of a series of new exhibitions at the museum grouped under the common title Frihet [freedom], marking the 200-year centenary of the Norwegian constitution (1814). The exhibition, whose title – Minus fem – points to the five years Norway was occupied during World War II, showed how the Nazis made active use of a Viking past and Viking symbols in their propaganda. The exhibition highlighted how meanings attached by the Nazis to Viking Age symbols, such as the swastika, have continued, inevitably conjuring memories of Nazis, Hitler, and World War II. Stigmas of this sort suggest why museums, and Norwegian society and culture, needed to tread gently into the Viking Age in the years after the war: Nazi

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propaganda and its appropriation of Viking Age symbols were so successful that it was difficult to see the Viking Age without thinking about war and the occupa­ tion to a degree that made it almost embarrassing to study the Viking Age. Only in the 1960s and 1970s was it again legitimate to study the Viking Age, partly due to large excavations at places like York, Dublin, and Kaupang (Aannestad 2016, 71).

Museums, memory and the Viking Age Collective memory theory was first developed by Maurice Halbwachs in the early twentieth century and later expanded on considerably beginning in the 1970s (Crane 2013, 99). This theory offers insights into how individual experiences align along common experiences to create expressions of collective meaning. According to Susan A. Crane, an American scholar of modern European history, numerous examples of the application of collective memory theory to historical museum experience can be drawn from the 1990s, especially concerning exhibi­ tions about World War II and the Holocaust (Crane 2013, 99; see also Stordalen and Naguib 2015). Drawing on the work of Aleida Assmann on cultural memory and the rela­ tionship between the ‘canon’ and ‘archive’, it is enlightening to consider the Oseberg burial and how this site has been exhibited in order to discuss the role of cultural memory in museums – in both exhibitions and archives. She sees culture as the memory of a society, transmitted by external symbols like museums and monuments. Nation states produce narrative versions of their past, referred to as their collective autobiography (Assmann 2008, 100–101), a view often taught via history textbooks, monuments and museums. According to Assmann, there are similarities between individual memory and collective cultural memory. Both consist of a perpetual interaction between remembering and forgetting. Memory capacity is limited, and factors like focus and bias and psychological pressures may decide what is forgotten. Assmann makes a distinction between active and passive forgetting, and stresses that forgetting is the norm – while remembering is the exception. In the same way as forgetting, remembering also has an active and passive form. Museums can illustrate this point: exhibitions are a result of active processes like selection and re-contextualisation, where the past is connected to the present, while storage rooms and archives represents a passive memory, where the past acts as the past (Assmann 2008, 97–98). Cultural memory contains a number of cultural messa­ ges that are addressed to posterity and intended for continuous use and re-use (Assmann 2008, 99), some of which are stored in archives and storage rooms. Here they are disconnected from their earlier context, which also makes them



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open to new contexts and new interpretations. On the other hand, active cultural memory always has a notorious shortage of space. The process by which a cultu­ ral message can become part of a society’s active cultural memory is described by Assmann as canonisation. This requires selection, value, and duration. The object or message thus gets a kind of aura, a sacrosanct status, and is relatively independent of historical change (Assmann 2008, 100). Assmann thus maintains that cultural memory is based on two separate functions: presenting and storing. There is a tension between the emphatic appreciation of the presented, and the professional, specialised historical curi­ osity connected to the stored objects and messages. Between these two poles, the dynamics of cultural memory plays out (Assmann 2008, 101). The archive is a so-called ‘reference memory’ of a society. It provides something of a counterbalance and a possibility to correct the necessarily reductive and restrictive drive of working memory (Assmann 2008, 106).

Canon: The Viking ships In Oslo, there are two possibilities for seeing archaeological museum exhibits on the Viking Age, both part of the University of Oslo’s Museum of Cultural History: the Viking Ship Museum at Bygdøy and the Historical Museum in the centre of Oslo. Conceptually, these museums embody Aleida Assmann’s ideas of the canon and the archive, and are the subjects of several recent museology studies examin­ ing the history of the Viking Ship Museum and the process of envisioning a new museum for the Viking Age (Beck 2014; Vedhus 2017). The Viking ship from the Oseberg ship burial is a prime example of a cano­ nised object. Even though Viking ships were actively used in Nazi propaganda, the Oseberg ship has maintained its unquestioned canonical status as a Norwe­ gian national symbol. As noted, an entire museum was constructed for this ship and other Viking Age ships, and adding to their status as canonical objects, the museum was designed by the foremost architect in Norway at the time, Arnstein Arneberg, and shaped like a Roman Catholic church (see colour plate 3). The current building housing the Viking Ship Museum is located next to the Norsk Folkemuseum [Norwegian Museum of Cultural History]. The original plan was to build a new museum for the whole of the archaeological collection belonging to the University of Oslo, and to connect it with the museum next door, the Norsk Folkemuseum, so that together, these museums would become a single national museum of cultural history. These plans were not realised in full, and the build­ ing as it stand today is only a small part of what had been planned. It opened in 1926, and was extended in 1932 and in the 1950s (Vedhus 2017, 22).

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Recent proposals for making a new museum for the Viking Age at Bygdøy assume an extension of the Viking Ship Museum, which has been described as a beautiful reliquary – by its form and architecture, this museum elevates and canonises the objects it contains (Vedhus 2017, 25). In the 1990s, there were plans to construct a new museum complex for the entire Museum of Cultural History in Bjørvika, in the eastern part of Oslo. This new museum building was meant to contain both the Viking ships and the collections and exhibitions from the Historical Museum. These plans stranded due in part to a controversy regarding whether or not the Viking ships and several of the objects from the Oseberg burial were too fragile to be moved (see Project Saving Oseberg in the bibliography). In the meantime, and also partly as a result of this controversy, the Viking Ship Museum itself was made a protected monument as part of the Bygdøy protected cultural environment, and deemed to be not just of national, but also of Nordic value (see Bygdoy in the bibliography) This protection did not, however, prohibit constructing extensions of existing museum buildings. In the end, the ships were deemed too fragile to be moved from their current Viking Ship Museum location. The solution was to build a new museum around the existing structure, and thus, in 2013, the Norwegian Govern­ ment decided that a new Viking Age museum should be built at Bygdøy, in contact with, and as an extension of, the existing Viking Ship Museum. The end result of the debate to date has been that the canonical Viking ships will be housed in a brand new museum at Bygdøy, while much of the collection will stay in the building from 1904 in the center of Oslo, and the Museum of Cultural History will move the bulk of its collections to new storage facilities on the outskirts of Oslo.

Viking Age exhibitions through time: Drawing on the archive How the Viking Age has been exhibited at the Historical Museum in the centre of Oslo can be seen as drawing on the archive to present a different version of ‘the Vikings’, and illustrates Assmann’s point that archives can be used to tell other stories and have a potential to be subversive. In 1904, new exhibitions opened in the brand new art nouveau-style Historical Museum building. The exhibitions were arranged according to chronological principles, with rooms for the Stone Age, the Iron Age and the Middle Ages. In addition, there was a separate space called The Viking Age Hall (Vikingetidssalen). These exhibitions showed archaeo­ logical objects in neatly ordered rows (Iveland and Simensen 2004), but as the collection grew, there was not enough room to show the whole collection in the exhibition. The new exhibitions of the 1930s and after World War II showed only 10% of what had been previously exhibited.



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There were almost no changes in the exhibitions for 50 years, until a new Viking Age exhibition opened in 1993 (Elliot 2016, 13–15). This new exhibition was controversial when it opened and has remained so ever since. It represented a radical break with earlier exhibition practice at the museum and has been criticised for not representing current research on the Viking Age at that time. Archaeologist Hanne Louise Aannestad describes the Viking exhibition from 1993 as being on the periphery of academic Viking Age discourse at the time, with its focus on contextualisation and daily life (Aannestad 2016, 65).

On the role of the archive in museum exhibitions At the Historical Museum, the Viking Age exhibition from 1993 is now being dis­ mantled after more than 30 years of service. Although controversial to the end, this exhibition has made a lasting impression on the many school children who have visited it during these years, helping form their views on the Viking Age. In accordance with broader exhibition trends, the Museum of Cultural History is replacing their old, chronological exhibitions with new, thematically-ordered exhibitions. But with one exception: even as the Museum of Cultural History is planning on how to fill the new Museum of the Viking Age at Bygdøy with exhibi­ tions, they are also planning to make a new Viking Age exhibition at the urban Historical Museum. The controversial 1993 exhibition contained more than 2000 objects from the Viking Age, and can be understood to illustrate Assmann’s point of how the archive, in this case archaeological objects which are disconnected from their earlier contexts, are open to new contexts and interpretations. As such, the archive is not just a passive ‘reference memory’ of a society, but also something that can be used actively to counter balance, for example, national narratives. Another example of this trend is Torunn Nilssen Beck’s Tre, tekstiler og skjeletter i Osbergfunnet [wood, textiles and skeletons in the Oseberg find]. Beck has looked at the Osberg burial and its research and exhibition history from a gender perspective and asks why the wooden objects have been given so much attention, both in research and in exhibitions, while the extremely rich textile finds from this burial have been largely neglected (Beck 2014). Even though archives have the potential to be a corrective, and to be subversive, Assmann reminds us that archives always belong to institutions of power, and archives are themselves also the result of selection processes (Assmann 2008, 102).

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4 Perspectives for future research The steadily increasing number of visitors at the Viking Ship Museum at Bygdøy in recent years is part of a larger Viking heritage tourism phenomenon that has emerged since the 1970s. Viking heritage tourism takes place not only in museums, but also in heritage centres, theme parks, village reconstructions and trading fairs. Chris Halewood and Kevin Hannam have pointed out how these different institutions and events represent varying degrees of ‘authenticity’, a concept which, like cultural heritage, has been widely discussed in recent years (see e.g. Bendix 1997 and Eriksen 1999. On the different forms of authenticity – material, prosessual and visual – see Rode 2003, as well as Eriksen 2014). Thus, there are museums like the Viking Ship Museum at Bygdøy at one end of the spectrum, where original archaeological material is presented as icons of pure ‘authenticity’ (although they are reconstructed so as to be presented ‘as they were’ – if the ships were to be presented as they were found, the appearance would be dramatically different); at the other end of the spectrum, Viking markets offer a greater scope for interpretation and negotiations of authenticity (Halewood and Hannam 2001). In a recent examination of the situation, Løkka (2017) finds two different types of information dissemination about the Viking Age in Norway: university museums (to which the Viking Ship Museum and the Historical Museum belong) and the emergence of a relatively new actor on the museum scene during the past 20 years, what Løkka calls regional Viking centres. Where the university museums still rely on relatively traditional displays of original objects in glass cases, the regional Viking centres – e.g. Lofotr Viking Museum, Midgard Histori­ cal Centre, and Nordvegen History Centre and Viking Settlement – are semi-com­ mercial institutions that rely primarily on reconstructions and activities, where the Viking Age is presented in reconstructed buildings, often based on previous excavations in the area. In these buildings, there are no designated routes to follow, and the audience is invited to take part and to experience history through a bodily and sensory experience. Unlike the university museums, these regional centres rely on close co-operation with volunteers. Løkka (2017, 127) observes that the two different ways of exhibiting and disseminating knowledge about the Viking Age – university museums and regional centres – can be likened to the distinction Hooper-Greenhill (1992) makes between modern museum institutions and so-called ‘post-museums’. Løkka compares this development with the complex political organization of the heritage field in Norway, where different museum structures are organized under different ministries, i.e. the university museums under the Ministry of Education and Research, but the majority of the museums under the Ministry of Culture. Further complicating matters, the regional centres are often closely



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connected to local archaeological monuments and sites, and these are managed by the Ministry of Climate and Environment. The white papers from the diffe­ rent ministries differ in how they value, for example, museum experience versus museum education and research, and to what degree they assess heritage as a revenue source (typically in the tourism sector), with corresponding consequen­ ces for how the Viking Age is used (Løkka 2017, 119–121). Løkka notes the positive in this situation, as it allows for experimenting with different angles and approa­ ches, for different actors to be heard, and for different understandings of the concept of ‘authenticity’. To fully understand these developments, the museums and their exhibi­ tions must be understood in light of events and institutions outside the museum. Presenting the Viking Age in the Nordic countries has changed considerably in the past 20 years, especially as new actors have arrived, such as the local Viking centres. The canonical objects, and thus the prime ‘authenticity’, still belong to the large museums, and they are still keepers of the archive, yet the regional Viking centres often borrow objects from the archives. The regional Viking centres focus on reconstruction and experience, and thus on a different and more proces­ sual sort of ‘authenticity’ (Løkka 2017). In light of these developments, one might well argue that the controversial Viking Age exhibition at the Museum of Cultural History from 1993 was perhaps simply ahead of its time.

Works cited Secondary sources Aannestad, Hanne Lovise. 2016. “Våre helter vikingene – et portrett av en historisk periode.” In Om vikinger og virkninger. Festskrift til Ellen Høigård Hofseths vikingtidsutstilling. Ed. Hege S. Gjerde and Gro B. Ween. Special issue of Primitive tider. 56–78. Abt, Jeffrey. 2013 [2009]. “The Origins of the Public Museum.” In A Companion to Museum Studies. Ed. Sharon Macdonald. Blackwell Companions in Cultural Studies, 12. Malden, MA. 115–134. Amundsen, Arne Bugge and Brita Brenna. 2010. “Museer, kritisk museologi og tverrfaglige museumsstudier.” In Samling og museum. Kapitler av museenes historie, praksis og ideologi. Ed. Bjarne Rogan and Arne Bugge Amundsen. Oslo. 9–23. Assmann, Aleida. 2008. “Canon and Archive.” In Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Media and Cultural Memory, 8. Berlin. 97–108. Beck Nilssen, Torunn. 2014. Tre, tekstiler og skjeletter i Osebergfunnet: En forvaltnings og formidlingshistorie. Masteroppgave i museologi og kulturarvstudier. Institutt for kulturstudier og orientalske språk, Universitetet i Oslo. Bendix, Regina. 1997. In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies. Madison, Wisc.

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Brenna, Brita. 2009. “Negotiating the History of the World.” In Negotiating Pasts in the Nordic Countries. Ed. Anne Eriksen and Jón Viðar Sigurðsson. Lund. 121–150. Brenna, Brita. 2016. “Forord.” Nordisk Museologi 1:1–2. Bygdoy.http://www.regjeringen.no/contentassets/d4f512f436f847058de0ab96bfe80c18/ kongelig_resol usjon_om_fredning_av_bygdoy_kulturmiljo_i_oslo_kommune_120217.pdf. Conn, Steven. 2010. Do museums still need objects? Philadelphia. Crane, Susan A. 2013. “The Conundrum of Ephemerality: Time, Memory and Museums.” In A Companion to Museum Studies. Ed. Sharon Macdonald. Blackwell Companions in Cultural Studies 12. Malden, MA. 98–110. Christensen, Arne Emil, Bjørn Myhre and Anne Stine Ingstad. 1992. Osebergdronningens grav: Vår arkeologiske nasjonalskatt i nytt lys. Oslo. Elliot, Katherine. 2016. “Sagaen om Vikingstidssalen: minner om en nybrottstid.” In Om vikinger og virkninger. Festskrift til Ellen Høigård Hofseths vikingtidsutstilling. Ed. Hege S. Gjerde and Gro B. Ween. Special issue of Primitive tider. 13–24. Eriksen, Anne. 1999. Historie, minne og myte. Oslo. Eriksen, Anne. 2009a. “On Whales, Potholes and Giants.” In Negotiating Pasts in the Nordic Countries. Ed. Anne Eriksen and Jón Viðar Sigurðsson. Lund. 151–174 Eriksen, Anne. 2009b. Museum: En kulturhistorie. Oslo. Eriksen, Anne. 2014. From Antiquities to Heritage: Transformations of Cultural Memory. New York. Goodnow, Katherine J. and Haci Akman. 2008. Scandinavian Museums and Cultural Diversity. New York. Halewood, Chris and Kevin Hannam. 2001. “Viking Age Heritage Tourism. Authenticity and Commodification.” Annals of Tourism Resarch 28.3: 565–580. Hillström, Magdalena. 2010. “Contested Boundaries.” Culture Unbound 2: 583–607. Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean. 1992. Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge. London. Iveland, Kristin and Tone Cecilie Simensen. 2004. “Utstillinger i 100 år.” In Kulturhistorier i sentrum: Historisk museum 100 år. Ed. Arne Aleksej Perminow, Ann Christine Eek and Jostein Bergstøl. Oslo. 116–35. ICOM. http://icom.museum/the-vision/museum-definition/ [last accessed 15th February 2018] Jensen, Jørgen. 1992. Thomsens Museum: Historien om Nationalmuseet. Copenhagen. Knight, Dorian. 2013. “Vikings: Life and Legend, British Museum.” Nordisk Museologi: 103–105. Løkka, Nanna. 2017. “Vikingtiden på museum og kulturarvspolitikken(e).” Nordisk kulturpolitisk tidsskrift 20: 109–131. Macdonald, Sharon. 2013 [2007]. “Collecting Practices.” In A Companion to Museum Studies. Ed. Sharon Macdonald. Blackwell Companions in Cultural Studies 12. Malden, MA. 81–97. Mathisen, Silje Opdahl. 2014. Etnisitetens estetikk: Visuelle fortellinger og forhandlinger i samiske museumsutstillinger. PhD-dissertation, Universitetet i Oslo, Det humanistiske fakultet. Mordhorst, Camilla. 2009. Genstandsfortællinger: Fra Museum Wormianum til de moderne museer. Copenhagen. Project saving Oseberg. (http://www.khm.uio.no/forskning/prosjekter/saving-oseberg/). (Last accessed 15th February 2018) Roede, Lars. 2003. “Kopi og original – flytting og autentisitet.” In Museer i fortid og nåtid: Essays i museumskunnskap. Ed. Arne Bugge Amundsen, Bjarne Rogan and Margrethe C. Stang. Oslo. 117–141.



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Stordalen, Terje and Saphinaz-Amal Naguib. 2015. The Formative Past and the Formation of the Future: Collective Remembering and Identity Formation. Instituttet for sammenlignende kulturforskning 153. Oslo. Vedhus, Vegard. 2017. Det nye Vikingtidsmuseet på Bygdøy: Museal arkitektur og romutførelse, og konstruksjon av kunnskap. Masteroppgave i museologi og kulturarvstudier. Institutt for kulturstudier og orientalske språk, Universitetet i Oslo. Vergo, Peter, ed. 1989. The New Museology. London.

Philology

Stefan Brink

I: 12 Law 1 Definition No consensus definition of legal memory or memory in law exists. In a sense, however, law equates to memory, or past events (Reiter 2010, 56), especially social or cultural memory, that is, recorded cases or stipulated rules used as codes or statutes, or customs, which have become part of (customary) law – although it should be noted that there is not always agreement between lawyers and anthro­ pologists on the relationship between custom and law (cf. the discussion between Bohannan 1967 [1965] and Diamond 1971). The discipline of cultural anthropol­ ogy, and its branches, legal anthropology and comparative law (e.g. Pospíšil 1971; Roberts 1979; Freeman and Napier 2009; Pirie 2013), has demonstrated the importance of cultural and social memory for law and a legal society. Within their field of research, anthropologists have tried to understand how law was made, remembered and then transferred between generations. Albeit no definition is presented, there are discussions of how law is created and of its function in oral or ‘primitive’ societies, in, for example, Hoebel (1954), Pospíšil (1971), Hamnett (1977), Roberts (1979), Wesel (1985, 2014), and Pirie (2013). The importance of memory and mnemonic technics – ars memoriae – for law and legal training were stressed and studied at law schools, starting in Italy in the twelfth century and then especially in the thirteenth and fourteenth centu­ ries (Carruthers 1990, 154–155). This importance of an ars memoriae is also – of course – quintessential for understanding the oral legal tradition in early Iceland (Quinn 2000, 31–34; Gísli Sigurðsson 2004 [2002], 65–81; Brink 2005, 79; Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir 2014).

2 State of research Normally, lawyers working on legal history analyse and discuss early laws in their written forms – Canon law, Roman law and Greek law. Thus the founders of legal history, such as Sir Henry Sumner Maine, as in his most influential book Ancient Law (1861, and in several later editions), typically begin with the Roman law of the Twelve Tables and Greek classical literature. The analysis of orally transmit­ ted law and the importance of remembrance has instead beeen of particular inter­ est to legal anthropologists. The most influential scholar in this field, Bronislaw https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-018

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Malinowski, led research in a new direction in his Crime and Custom in Savage Society (1926), in which he challenges the dominant position in earlier research. These scholars, often called ‘armchair theorists’, promulgated a formalistic and legalistic focus on rules. Malinowski challenged this focus and demanded that researchers go into the field (thus helping establishing the method of participant observation) where they should instead focus on norms, social control, and, especially, the role of reciprocity in social interaction in societies. In so-called ‘primitive’ societies, customs were important, and one could superficially claim that custom and memory functioned as law, and these customs were stored in the memory of knowledgeable individuals, as noticed by, for example, Jacques Le Goff (1992, 73–74): “The Middle Ages venerated old men above all because they were regarded as memory-men, prestigious and useful.” An example of the usage of these ‘knowledgeable men’ as witnesses in courts and legal disputes is highlighted below regarding the medieval border between Norway and Sweden, but we find the same ‘institutions’ in most early cultures. One good example is the background to Domesday Book (1086) in England, where “Sworn men […] sat at the heart of the Domesday inquest, and their words and their memories were the source of almost all the information in Domesday Book related to legal customs, legal activity, and disputes.” (Fleming 1998, 36) And as Fleming further notes: “The range of these men’s knowledge is astonish­ ing.” When settling a dispute or a legal case in an oral society, the method that sometimes ‘solves’ the case is the ability to “talk the language of the forefathers” (cf. Brink 2005, 65), a vital reference to ancient wisdom, to old custom, and to one’s ancestry. “Appeal to the ancestral past to justify the application of a rule or principle is often a feature of non-literate societies”, Fernanda Pirie notes (2013, 125), and Michael Clanchy (1970, 172, cf. 2013 [1979]) has further noticed that when one could claim a law to be ‘old’, that is a description of its high quality rather than a determination of its actual age. We meet this in many ‘primitive’ cultures, such as among the aborigines in Australia, among whom “References to the mythical past constitute the final word on any debated matter” (Loumala 1975, 93), and in traditional Samoan culture, when an archaic Samoan language is used on such occasions, a language nowadays only understood by some older people and hardly at all by younger Samoans (Amituana’I 1986, 37, 39). In this context, the French-British anthropologist Maurice Bloch’s (1975) work on Mada­ gascar is of major importance. Bloch (1975, 5–11) shows how a formulaic oratori­ cal language, and its intonation, rhythm and gestures, are important on these occasions, as is the use of archaic words and a ‘language of the forefathers’. A ‘law’ or the custom of the ancestors thus tends to be invoked according to the needs of the present.



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Two key findings thus emerge concerning the study of law: that old, knowl­ edgeable individuals are understood in the texts to be store-houses of knowledge, used in legal cases in order to settle disputes; moreover, the ability to refer to ancient lore, old customs, and ancestry, and the ability to use an archaic lan­ guage in a legal case, are important faculties in an oral culture. In Old Norse studies, research along these lines and approach to it have not been of much interest. Of course, the venerable, old scholars, such as Konrad von Maurer (e.g. 1907–1938 posthumous) and Karl von Amira (e.g. 1897), who in the nineteenth century were the first to describe and discuss the medieval legal tradition in Scandinavia (in a Germanic context, identifying – in their opinion – a common Urrecht for the Germanic-speaking people), understood that these laws had an older background than the written laws of the Late Middle Ages, and that this background was necessarily oral. The reassessment of this legacy, especially after the Second World War, changed focus in legal history towards identifying continental influence in the earliest Scandinavian laws, influence from Roman and Canon law, and firmly placing the Nordic laws in the context of European jurisprudence (see e.g. Gagnér 1960; Sandvik 1989; Tamm 2004; Andersen et al. 2011; for a rather extreme position, see Sjöholm 1988). Some scholars did, however, continue to analyse the laws by trying to find older layers or even discussing whether some parts of the laws should actually be seen in a specifically Nordic, and not a general European, context. These scholars where often philologists and historians. Such arguments included, for example, the fact that the language in the medieval laws was archaic, with mnemotechnic features such as alliterations and the use of proverbs, features considered typical for an oral culture (Ståhle 1965, 1976; cf. Brink 2005, 77–90; pace Utterström 1975, 1978; Sjöholm 1988 passim); that some of the þættir in the Icelandic law Grágás must have a pre-Christian origin, and must have been orally transmitted laws, legal customs and ‘sayings’, treasured and transferred by wise men knowledge­ able in legal matters (Foote 1977a, 1977b, 1987); that it was perhaps possible to trace an archaic procedural order, full of pre-Christian religious references, in a style resembling a formal agreement (trygdamål) in early Norwegian laws (Øyre­ hagen Sunde 2007); that this trygð, related to griþ/gruþ ‘peace, asylum’, seems to have been formulated in Norway at the latest in the beginning of the pre-his­ toric tenth century (Ruthström 2003, 150); or that an obvious ‘regionality’ is to be found in the medieval laws, so that the laws obviously reflect regional or even local preconditions, regarding, for example, the grazing of cattle and the culti­ vation of arable land which cannot be understood in a wider European context (Myrdal 2012). By analysing one of the Svea laws, the Hälsinge law, which is heavily depend­ ent on the Uppland law (from 1297), it is possible to see layers in that law, some of

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which have been taken directly from the Uppland law, while others look archaic and are unique among the medieval Swedish laws, and still others have an obvious affiliation to the early Norwegian legal language. This law provides a vivid example how a medieval provincial law could have been created by using learned law, Canon law, and newly (by king or church) imposed law, but also by reusing some older laws (Brink 2013, 2014a). The lawyer and legal historian Helle Vogt (2010, 61–63) has recently proposed that a balanced state should be consid­ ered with respect to old Scandinavian customary law or newly created law. In Old Norse studies focusing on Iceland, interest in memory and rememb­ rance has been on the research agenda for a long time for obvious reasons. Com­ monwealth Iceland was, as the legal historian William Ian Miller (1990, 223) has expressed it, a distinctively over-sanctioned society obsessed with law, a pheno­ menon noticeable in most of the Icelandic sagas, especially Njáls saga. Further­ more, Ari fróði’s Íslendingabók [Book of Icelanders] contains a famous descrip­ tion of how the first Icelandic law, the Grágás, was to be written down: Et fyrsta sumar, es Bergþórr sagði lǫg upp, vas nýmæli þat gǫrt, at lǫg ór skyldi skrifa á bók at Hafliða Mássonar of vetrinn eptir at sǫgu ok umbráði þeira Bergþórs ok annarra spakra manna, þeira es til þess váru teknir. Skyldu þeir gørva nýmæli þau ǫll í lǫgum, es þeim litisk þau betri en en fornu lǫg. (Íslendingabók, Ch. 10) [The first summer that Bergþórr spoke the law, a new pronouncement was made that our laws should be written down in a book at the home of Hafliði Másson the following winter, at the dictation and with the guidance of Hafliði and Bergþórr, as well as of other wise men appointed for this task. They were to make new provisions in the law in all cases where these seemed to them better than the old laws. [Bergþórr was lawspeaker 1117–1122.] (Íslendingabók, 12)]

Early laws and legal customs must therefore have existed in Iceland before the writing down of these laws (Agnes S. Arnórsdótter 2014, 214). Many Old Norse scholars have observed this fact and discussed these oral laws and the pre-liter­ acy legal society of Iceland, in recent times, for example, Gísli Sigurðsson (2004 [2002]), Sveinbjörn Rafnsson (2011), and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir (2014). Broaden­ ing the study of orally transmitted law and the importance of memory in law-giv­ ing for the whole of early Scandinavia, including eastern Scandinavia, has been attempted by Stefan Brink (2002, 2005, 2011, 2013).



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3 Pre-modern Nordic material Two illuminating cases, understood in an oral societal context, illustrate the special role and importance of memory in legal cases: 1) The first example concerns a legal dispute over land, and whether this land was in Norway or in Sweden. We know of this case by virtue of a letter which was later cited in another letter from 1315–1319 (AM 114a 4to), probably produ­ ced in the Norwegian royal chancellery, a compilation of many witness letters dealing with the boundary between Norway and Sweden (Brink 2014b). Here we learn that sometime between 1267 and 1282, a farmer, Loden from Ulvkälla in the province of Härjedalen, was brought to a thing assembly (alþing) in Sveg to act as a witness, where he orally enumerated forty-one boundary markers between Norway and Sweden: hafuer j Straumj or Straumi ok j rafnasill or rafnasill ok j raundar foss or fossenom ok j Morbek or Morbek ok a breko ok j Glaumshofda af hofdanom ok j haframinni or haframinni ok j Sottnorer or Sottnorum ok j rossang or rosange ok j runastein or steininum ok j hoadalenn or hoadale ok j Steinberget […]

Modern scholarship accepts that the astonishing body of knowledge Loden is able to remember and recite cannot have been unique during this period. Several of these medieval chants or lists, where the border between Norway and Sweden is defined, have been preserved. These texts consist of long lists of place names often beginning with or (from) ok j (and to), þedan i (then in) or swa i (and then in). This construction was obviously a mnemonic device. Olof Holm (2003) has compared these medieval lists with testimonies about the boundary from the eighteenth century, and has convincingly shown that the boundary markers must have been remembered in oral chants and lists for at least five hundred years. The conclusion must be that some men, probably old men, had taken or been given the task to learn and remember these long lists, which, of course, must have been of vital importance for local communities in order to be able to identify ownership and legal possession of land, meadows and forests.

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In the law for northern Sweden, the Hälsinge law, we are actually given a term for these men, namely minnunga mæn (men with [good] memory). For example in the church code (Kyrkiu balkær, 7), regulating tithe (tiund), we find: Koorn tiund ok all annor akur tiund göræs æ ir þy gamul siþwænnia hawr wærit ok skifptis sama lund. Delæ þe vm. þa witi þæt II minnungæ mæn a aþrum soknum ok II præstir huru þæt hawr wærit. [Corn tithe and all other arable tithe shall be paid according to the old custom and be dis­ tributed in the same way. If they quarrel about this, then two men with good memory [minnungæ mæn] from other parishes and two priests shall examine how it had been before. (author’s translation)]

The term minnunga mæn (or minninga mæn) contains the Old Swedish word minnung f. ‘memory; old possession of land; proof of old possession’; cf. Old Swedish minnunge n. ‘memory’ and Old Norse minning ‘memory’, derivations of the verb minna(s) ‘to remember’. Similar to the institution of minnunga mæn are the talumæn, also found in the same law, who had the same capacities of remembrance and the same duty in legal cases as the former. The first part of the compound talumæn seems to be related to the verb Old Swedish tælia ‘to count’ and Old Norse telja til ‘to count one’s origin or lineage from’, and probably is to be seen in context with Old Norse ættartal n., ættartala f. ‘genealogy, genealogical enumeration’. What we have here are examples of how – in an oral society – old, knowl­ edgeable men and women are used as ‘archives’ for a society. With no documents at hand, an oral society had to rely upon individuals who had a special gift and interest in preserving old customs and traditions. They represented the ‘well’ from which to draw knowledge when needed for legal, societal, or genealogical matters, walking reference libraries as Jan Vansina (1965, 37) has put it. In these kind of ‘primitive’, oral societies, they were individuals who were ‘memory spe­ cialists’, genealogists, guardians of the laws and of acceptable conduct for that society, according to tradition and custom. Normally these memory specialists were not custodians of an ‘objective’ history, but rather used their knowledge instrumentally. Jack Goody (1987, 174– 182) observes that the knowledge these individuals carried was not a word-forword memory, but instead worked toward a generative reconstruction of history, anything but a mechanical memorisation. Although broadly true, this obser­ vation needs to be tempered by such exceptions as the genre discussed above, namely witness chants or lists for boundaries. In these cases, one can, in fact, speak of word-for-word memorisation, where the stereotypical structure of the chants is used as an obvious mnemonic device.



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The conclusion to be drawn from this case is that there are, in an oral society, mnemonic devices in use that allow an individual to memorise large chunks of text word-for-word, hence a verbatim memorisation. The case from Härjedalen, with its stereotypically constructed lists of place names and boundary markers between Norway and Sweden, demonstrates that these lists have been memo­ rised and recited for hundreds of years. In such instances, there was no freedom for creative changes in the lists, as for a storyteller, who could embroider the story around a core of facts, resulting in several variants. In situations of this sort, there were knowledgeable men who had to be able to remember long lists, which were ultimately to be recited – under oath – at thing assemblies and there scrutinised and accepted as correct by other knowledgeable men. 2) In countries with a common law tradition, customary law has sometimes had a strong presence. What has been referred to as English common law has its roots in Anglo-Saxon royal laws, but took its shape from developments in the late twelfth century (Pirie 2013, 118). Such custom is what we find in, for example, English common law referring to ‘long use’ or as a customary right, objects or places practiced or used ‘since time immemorial’. We find this in many legal customs regarding ownership of land, farms, or even a kingship, that is, a requirement of being able to enumerate one’s ancestry and having owned the land or farm for a number of generations. A requirement in such cases was the ability to be able to state one’s ancestry, and to enumerate the former owners of the land or farm one claimed to possess (certainly in the presence of witnesses). These cases probably reflect in many societies an old custom, which has, at some point, been agreed upon and then reiterated as ‘our custom’, so often that after some time it has been considered a ‘customary law’. It is possible to show that something similar functioned in pre-historic, early Scandinavia. This is evident from inscriptions on two runestones in Sweden. One (Sm 71) standing in Norra Sandsjö in the province of Småland reads (SRD): Ærinvardhr let ræisa stæin thenna æftir Hægga, fadhur sinn, ok Hæru, fadhur hans, ok Karl, hans fadhur, [ok] Hæru, hans fadhur, ok Thiagn/Thegn, hans fadhur, ok æftir tha langfædhrga fæm.  [Erinvardhr had this stone raised in memory of Heggi, his father and Hæra, his (i.e. Heggi’s) father, and Karl, his (i.e. Hæra’s) father and Hæra, his father and Thegn, his father and in memory of these five forefathers.]

This runestone was probably carved in the first half of the eleventh century. The inscription enumerates six men, five of them the forefathers of this Erinvardhr. They were, as it is said, his (in Runic Swedish) langfæðrgar. This word, corre­ sponding to Old Norse langfæðgar, had the meaning ‘ancestors on the father’s

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side’ (Zoëga). What Erinvardhr is obviously stating in the inscription, proclaiming for everyone to know, is that by enumerating his forefathers, he is laying claim to the inheritance and is the legal owner of the farm. On another runestone (Hs 14) from northern Sweden, from Malsta in the prov­ ince of Hälsingland a similar inscription reads (SRD): A: Hrodhmundr rett[i] stæin/stæina thenna/thessa æftir He-Gylf[a] Bræsa/Brisa sun. En Bræsi/Brisi vas Lina(?) sunn. En Lini(?) vas Unar sunn. En Unn va[s O]fæigs sunn. En Ofæigr [vas] Thoris sunn. Groa vas modhir He-Gylf[a]. En tha . En tha Gudhrun. Hrodhmundr He-Gylfa sunn fadhi runar thessar. Vir sottum stæin thenna nordhr i Balas[tæ]in. B: Gylfir vardh um landi thessu, en tha nordhr i vega/ thrim byum, en tha Lønangri, en tha Fædhrasio.  [A: Hródhmundr erected this/these stone/s in memory of Hé-Gylfir, Bresi’s/Brísi’s son. And Bresi/Brísi was Lini’s (?) son. And Lini(?) was Unn’s son. And Unn was Ófeigr’s son. And Ófeigr was Thórir’s son. Gróa was Hé-Gylfir’s mother. And then . And then Gudhrún. Hródhmundr Hé-Gylfir’s son coloured these runes. We sought this stone in the north in Balasteinn. B: Gylfir acquired this land and then three estates in a northerly direc­ tion / in the north, and then Lønangr and then Fedhrasjór.]

This inscription probably dates to the middle of the eleventh century and is similar to the former one in enumerating ancestors. The central figure in the inscription is Hé-Gylfi (or Hæ-Gylfi), for whom Hródhmundr (his son) had erected the stone(s). Hé-Gylfi’s mother, Gróa, is mentioned, and also five of his male ancestors: Brisi, Lini, Unn, Ofæigr and Thori. What is written on the other side of the runestone is important for understanding what this inscription is about. Here we are told that Hé-Gylfi vardh um (inherited or acquired) this land – which must be the farm Malsta – and then also acquired (?) three farms or hamlets (byar) in the north, and then also the farms/hamlets Lönnånger and Färdsjö. Thus, what Hé-Gylfi pro­ claims on this runestone is his oðal, his farm and the land he is entitled to by ancestral right; moreover, he is also telling readers of the stone (bragging?) that he has expanded his estate with several other farms with land. He is thus legally claiming the inheritance and estate by enumerating five of the former owners in his ancestral line. The archaic Gulathing Law, valid for western Norway, stipulates (Ch. 266) that purchased land and property were not considered to be odal until it had remained in the family for five generations: “[the claimant] shall enumerate his ancestors, the five who have owned the land and the sixth who had it both in ownership and in odal” (Larson 1935, 171; Brink 2002, 105). In the poem Hyndl­ uljóð, where the goddess Freyja meets the völva Hyndla and they ride together to Valhalla, and Freyja’s mission is to find out the pedigree of her favourite, Óttarr, so that he can claim his inheritance (to the kingship):



I: 12 Law: Stefan Brink 

Þú ert, Óttarr! borinn Innsteini, en Innsteinn var Álfi inum gamla, Álfr var Úlfi, Úlfr Sæfara en Sæfari Svan inum rauða.

You, Ottar! Are of Innsteinn born, but Innsteinn was from Alv the old, Alv was from Ulv, Ulv from Seafari, but Seafari from Svan the red.

(Hyndluljóð, st. 12)

(author’s translation)

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Again, we can see that what Óttarr needed was to be able to enumerate five of his ancestors to be able to legally claim the inheritance. Thus, what we find in these two examples is a kind of a legal customary pre­ scription, namely, to be able to enumerate five of the langfeðgar, forefathers, male ancestors who had owned the farm, the land, the kingship, and so on before the claimant. This important five-generation rule also appears in several of the pro­ vincial laws, where ownership is regulated (Brink 2002, 103–105). Genealogical knowledge of one’s forefathers was so vital in early Scandinavian society that it came to constitute a literary genre of its own, variously called áttvísi, mannfræði or langfeðgatal.

4 Perspectives for future research Since memory and oral law are so tightly connected, the early laws of Scandina­ via become a vitally importance source for future ventures in Old Norse memory studies. As described above, in early scholarship on medieval Scandinavian juris­ prudence, scholars discussed and tried to find archaic traces and customs in the laws, and hence tried to see the provincial laws, in particular, in a diachronic perspective. As also noted above, research in Scandinavian legal history during the last 50 years or so has focussed on other – in principle only – synchronic aspects. This discourse has been more on political power-struggles and Conti­ nental influence than on tracing old customs and the importance of memory for legal matters. Today there are, however, several scholars who are again showing interest in the background and composition of the early laws: while they accept the importance of European learned jurisprudence and the influence of canon law, these scholars are trying once again see these laws in a diachronic light. The main interest in this endeavor emanates from Rechtsphilologie, hence mainly not from lawyers, but from philologists, historians and even archaeologists (Rechtsarchäologie, a field Karl von Amira initiated).

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A useful source and resource for this future research is the series Medieval Nordic Laws, in which the earliest Scandinavian laws have been or are being translated to English, with modern introductions and commentaries. These volumes are fully expected to ignite international interest in the Scandinavian laws, not least from a memory studies perspective.

Works cited Primary sources AM 114a 4to = Document in the Arnamagnean Manuscript Collection. Copenhagen. Grágás = Grágás: lagasafn íslenska þjóðveldisins. Ed. Gunnar Karlsson, Kristján Sveinsson and Mörður Árnason. Reykjavík, 1992. Hälsinge Law = Helsinge-lagen; Codicis iuris Smalandici pars de re ecclesiastica; Kristnubalken af Smålands-lagen; et, Juris urbici codex antiquior och, Bjärköa-rätten. Ed. C. J. Schlyter. Corpus iuris sueo-gotorum antiqui. Samling af Sweriges gamla lagar, 6. Lund, 1844. Hyndluljóð. In Eddukvæði. Ed. Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason. ÍF. Reykjavík, 2014. I: 460–469. Íslendingabók. Landnámabók. Ed. Jakob Benediktsson. ÍF, 1. Reykjavík, 1968. Íslendingabók = Íslendingabók. Kristni saga. The Book of the Icelanders. The Story of the Conversion. Ed. and trans. Siân Grønlie. Viking Society for Northern Research. Text Series, 18. London, 2006. Larson, Laurence M. The Earliest Norwegian Laws. Being the Gulathing Law and the Frostathing Law. New York, 1935. Laws of Early Iceland: The Codex Regius of Grágás, with material from other manuscripts. Ed. and trans. Peter Foote, Andrew Dennis and Richard M. Perkins. 2 vols. Winnipeg, 1980–2000. Medieval Nordic Laws. Series Ed. Stefan Brink. London and New York. https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Medieval-Translations/book-series/RMT. (14 February 2018). Njáls saga = Brennu-Njáls saga. Ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson. ÍF, 12. Reykjavík, 1954. Njal’s saga. Trans. Robert Cook. London, 2001. SRD = Samnordisk runtextdatabas. http://www.nordiska.uu.se/forskn/samnord.htm. (14 February 2018).

Secondary sources Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. 2014. “Legal Culture and Historical Memory in Medieval and Early Modern Iceland.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 211–230. von Amira, Karl. 1897. Grundriss des germanischen Recht. Grundriss der germanischen Philologie, 5. Strassburg.



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Amituana’i, Tevita. 1986. “Kava in Samoa.” In Pacific Rituals. Living or Dying. Ed. Gweneth and Bruce Deverell. [Suva]. 36–39. Andersen, Per, Ditlev Tamm and Helle Vogt, eds. 2011. How Nordic are the Nordic Laws? Proceedings from the First Carlsberg Conference on Medieval Legal Culture. 2nd ed. Copenhagen. Bloch, Maurice. 1975. “Introduction”. In Political Language and Oratory in Traditional Society. Ed. Maurice Bloch. London. 1–28. Bohannan, Paul. 1967. “The Differing Realms of the Law.” In Law and Warfare. Studies in the Anthropology of Warfare. Ed. Paul Bohannan. American museum sourcebooks in anthropology, Q1. New York. 43–50. [Reprint from: American Anthropologist 67 (1965), 33–42.] Brink, Stefan. 2002. “Law and legal customs in Viking Age Scandinavia.” In Scandinavians from the Vendel Period to the Tenth Century. An Ethnographic Perspective. Ed. Judith Jesch. Woodbridge. Brink, Stefan. 2005. “Verba Volant, Scripta Manent? Aspects of Early Scandinavian Oral Society” In Literacy in medieval and early modern Scandinavian culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann. The Viking Collection, 16. Odense. 59–117. Brink, Stefan. 2011. “Oral Fragments in The Earliest Old-Swedish Laws?.” In Medieval Legal Process: Physical, Spoken and Written Performance in the Middle Ages. Ed. Marco Mostert and P. S. Barnwell. Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, 22. Turnhout. 147–156. Brink, Stefan. 2013. “The creation of a Scandinavian provincial law: How was it done?” Historical Research 86: 432–442. Brink, Stefan. 2014a. “The Hälsinge Law between South and West, King and Church, and Local Customs.” In New Approaches to Early Law in Scandinavia. Ed. Stefan Brink and Lisa Collinson. Acta Scandinavica, 3. Turnhout. 37–56. Brink, Stefan. 2014b. “Minnunga mæn – The Usage of Old Knowledgeable Men in Legal Cases.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 197–210 Carruthers, Mary J. 1990. The Book of Memory. A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 10. Cambridge. Clanchy, Michael. 1970. “Remembering the Past and the Good Old Law.” History 55: 165–176. Clanchy, Michael. 2013 [1979]. From memory to written record. England, 1066–1307. 3rd ed. Chichester. Diamond, Stanley. 1971. “The Rule of Law versus the Order of Custom.” Social Research 42: 432472. Fleming, Robin. 1998. Domesday Book and the Law. Society and Legal Custom in Early Medieval England. Cambridge. Foote, Peter. 1977a. “Oral and literary tradition in early Scandinavian law. Aspects of a problem.” In Oral Tradition – Literary Tradition. Ed. Hans Bekker-Nielsen, Peter Foote, Andreas Haarder and Hans Frede Nielsen. Odense. 47–55. Foote, Peter. 1977b. “Some lines in Lögréttuþáttr. A comparison and some conclusions.” In Sjötíu ritgerðir helgaðar Jakobi Benediktssyni 20. júli 1977. Reykjavík. 1: 198–207. Foote, Peter. 1987. “Reflections on Landabrigðisþáttr and Rekaþáttr in Grágás.” In Tradition og historieskrivning. Kilderne til Nordens ældste historie. Ed. Kirsten Hastrup and Preben Meulengracht Sørensen. Acta Jutlandica, 63:2. Aarhus. 53–64. Freeman, Michael and Napier, David, eds. 2009. Law and Anthropology. Current Legal Issues, 12. Oxford.

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Gagnér, Sten. 1960. Studien zur Ideengeschichte der Gesetzgebung. Studia iuridica Upsaliensia, 1. Stockholm. 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, and London. [Icelandic orig. 2002] Goody, Jack. 1987. The Interface between the Written and the Oral. Cambridge. Hamnett, Ian, ed. 1977. Social Anthropology and Law. A.S.A. Monograph, 14. London, New York and San Francisco, CA. Hoebel, Edward Adamson. 1954. The Law of Primitive Man. A Study in Comparative Legal Dynamics. Cambridge. Holm, Olof. 2003. “Den norsk-svenska riksgränsens ålder och hävd. En studie av rikssamlingsprocesser och gränsbildning i mellersta Skandinavien.” Collegium Medievale. Interdisciplinary Journal of Medieval Research 16: 135–237. Le Goff, Jacques. 1992. History and Memory. Trans. Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman. New York. Loumala, Katharine. 1975. “Australian Aboriginal Mythology.” In Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend. Ed. Maria Leach. London. 92–94. Maine, Sir Henry Sumner. 1861. Ancient Law. Its Connection with the Early History of Society, and its Relation to Modern Ideas. Cambridge. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1926. Crime and Custom in Savage Society. London. von Maurer, Konrad. 1907–1938. Vorlesungen über altnordische Rechtsgeschichte. 6 vols. Leipzig. Miller, William Ian. 1990. Bloodtaking and Peacemaking. Feud, Law and Society in Saga Iceland. Chicago. Myrdal, Janken. 2012. Boskapsskötseln under medeltiden. Stockholm. Øyrehagen Sunde, Jørn. 2007. “‘De skal vera samde menn’. Ei vitenskapleg fundering og spekulasjon over den eldste norske processen.” De lege. Juridiska fakulteten i Uppsala årsbok: 305–322. Pirie, Fernanda. 2013. The Anthropology of Law. Oxford. Pospíšil, Leopold. 1971. The Anthropology of Laws: A Comparative Theory. New York. Quinn, Judy. 2000. “From Orality to Literacy in Medieval Iceland.” In Old Icelandic Literature and Society. Ed. Margaret Clunies Ross. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Culture, 42. Cambridge. 30–60. Reiter, Eric H. 2010. “Fact, Narrative, and the Judicial Uses of History: Delgamuukw and Beyond.” Indigenous Law Journal 8: 55–79. Roberts, Simon. 1979. Order and Dispute. An Introduction to Legal Anthropology. Oxford. Ruthström, Bo. 2003. Land och fæ. Strukturellt-rättsfilologiska studier i fornnordiskt lagspråk över beteckningar för egendom i allmänhet med underkategorier. Rättshistoriskt bibliotek, 61. Lund. Sandvik, Gudmund. 1989. “Norsk rettshistorie i mellomalderen”. Jussens Venner 6–7: 281–310. Sjöholm, Elsa. 1988. Sveriges medeltidslagar. Europeisk rättstradition i politisk omvandling. Lund. Ståhle, Carl-Ivar. 1965. “Lagspråk.” In KLNM X: Cols. 167–177. Ståhle, Carl-Ivar. 1976. “Om Dalalagens ålderdomlighet och ålder – och Kopparbergsprivilegiernas oförbätterliga ’sik biwiþär’.” In Nordiska studier i filologi och lingvistik. Festskrift tillägnad Gösta Holm på 60-årsdagen den 8 juli 1976. Ed. Lars Svensson. Lund. 392–402.



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Sveinbjörn Rafnsson. 2011. Af fornum lögum og sögum. Fjórar ritgerðir um forníslenska sögu. Ritsafn Sagnfræðistofnunar, 42. Reykjavík. Tamm, Ditlev. 2004. “How Nordic are the Nordic Laws?” Anuario de historia del derecho español 74: 9–22. Utterström, Gudrun. 1975. “Die mittelalterliche Rechtssprache Schwedens. Einige quellenkritische und sprachliche Beobachtung.” In The Nordic Languages and Modern Linguistics, 2. Proceedings of the Second International Conference of Nordic and General Linguistics: University of Umeå, June 14–19, 1973. Ed. Karl-Hampus Dahlstedt. Stockholm. 734–748. Utterström, Gudrun. 1978. ”Ålderdomlighet utan ålder? En replik om Dalalagen.” Arkiv för nordisk filologi 93: 199–204. Vansina, Jan. 1965. Oral Tradition. A Study in Historical Methodology. Trans. H. M. Wright. Chicago. Vogt, Helle. 2010. The Function of Kinship in Early Legislation. Leiden. Wesel, Uwe. 1985. Frühformen des Rechts in vorstaatlichen Gesellschaften: Umrisse einer Frühgeschichte des Rechts bei Sammlern und Jägern und akephalen Ackerbauern und Hirten. Frankfurt am Main. Wesel, Uwe. 2014. Geschichte des Rechts. Von den Früformen bis zur Gegenwart. 4th ed. Munich. Zoëga, Geir T., ed. 1910. A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic. Oxford.

Michael Schulte

I: 13 Linguistics and Philology 1 Definition Given the breadth of memory studies as an emerging field within linguistics and philology, it is rather difficult to give it a sharp and clear-cut definition; however, as broad as this field is, it is unified by a threefold interest in memoria as, at once, an object, a faculty, and the active process of summoning the now lost past back into consciousness. Memory, like language itself, is both individual and collective (cf. Oxford Latin Dictionary, 1096–1097, under memoria 1, 3, and 7). Old Norse minni reflects Germanic *ga-menþija- (cf. Gothic gaminþi), a neuter noun with the collective prefix ga- (‘together with’), which belongs to the same Indo-Euro­ pean root *men- (‘to think’) as the reduplicated Latin memoria ‘intense thought, memory’ (see Lehmann 1986, 260‒261). The noun minni shares the polysemy of the English and Latin cognates memory and memoria in contradistinction to German which keeps the faculty of memory (Gedächnis) and the process of recoll­ ection (Erinnerung) firmly separated. The Nordic cultures of the Viking Age and the Middle Ages were memorial cultures par excellence. Memory had a key part to play not only in the overall construction of their history, which means both the deep mythological past (forn minni) and the reported historical events in the sagas, but also in the constitution of their texts and their intertextuality (see Scheel 2014). The breadth of philologi­ cal and linguistic approaches to memory, alluded to above, is in part expressed through its marked pluralism of approach, which includes a variety of discipli­ nes, such as etymology, lexical field analysis, textual studies more broadly, media studies, performance studies, and cognitive linguistics. The sources on which the study of memory in medieval Nordic cultures is based are also diverse. The study of ars memorativa, as the site of classical mnemotechniques, has been an important path of inquiry as has the analysis of the multiple functions of memory in the Old Norse-Old Icelandic text genres, particularly eddas, sagas, skaldic poetry, and law texts. Runic inscriptions are another source for memory studies, one which has attracted increasing interest in recent research. This research area is, however, not limited to the study of even this widely varying array of textual evidence. For it includes not only the lexicogrammar of memory, reminding and forgetting, but also performative studies, studies on mediality and media change, each of which, in turn, involve their own distinct ways of approaching the relati­ onships between orality, literacy and visual images.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-019



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2 State of research Memory studies has become an increasingly important part of scholarship on the pre-modern North in recent decades, notably with the publication of Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture (Hermann et al. 2014; cf. also Goeres 2015). This is due to a growing awareness in academic discourse that memory is key to understanding Nordic society and culture as a whole. These studies elaborate on the contrasting concepts of memoria in different pre-modern text-types and media, in particular, the triad of eddic – skaldic – runic. Runic inscriptions were often designed as memory props, thus exhibiting interaction between orality and literacy. On the role of memory in Old English runic inscrip­ tions and medieval Scandinavian rune-sticks see Symons (2017). Harris (1996) affirms a continuum between eddic and skaldic where runic provides an over­ lapping category. Early law texts may be added to this triad as a fourth genre (see Schulte 2011). Runic inscriptions, eddic and skaldic poetry are all memorydependent, but each in their own way. Skaldic memory engages in the self-refer­ ential use of minni, typically in praise poetry, whereas rune-stones by their nature possess a static durability. Runic memory is reinforced by the formulaic character of memorial inscriptions: “X raised this stone in memory of Y, his/her relative” (cf. section 3). It would be worthwile to compare different memorial traditions in epigraphic culture in a more systematic way (on memorials and culture memory in Irish tradition, see e. g. Rekdal 2014). Heslop (2014), in a recent study, finds few direct references to the word minni in these stereotypical memorials, and she stresses the hybrid nature of runic memory culture. The interplay between active commemoration and the durability of the stone monuments is not only the guar­ antee of runic memory, but the medium through which it is able to come into being in the first place (cf. Jesch 2005). The Rök stone is the locus classicus for minni in runic studies and it most likely deploys this term in the sakum formula: sagum mogminni “I/we say the folk memory” (e.g. Mitchell 2013); however, a detailed discussion of its intricacies would take us too far here (Carstens 2017). As for skaldic poetry, the tight metrical pattern of dróttkvætt (court metre) supports memory and oral performance via the lexico-grammatical regularities as well as the aural cues of alliteration, rhythm and rhyme (cf. Schulte 2008). The noun minni itself lacks salience in the classical Old Norse kenning system which is based on condensed two-part metaphors (cf. Clunies Ross 2017). Only one post-classical kenning in the skaldic corpus uses abstract minni: minnis garðr (‘memory’s yard’) for mind and heart, in stanza 3 of Arngrímur Brands­ son’s fourteenth-century Guðmundardrápa (Skj BII, 372). By way of contrast, a frequent kenning type invokes the idea of imbibing knowledge. ‘Liquid knowl­ edge’ is largely used by early skalds who have as their basic conceit that verse is

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an intoxicating drink in tandem with the notion of divine wisdom. Quinn (2010, 186) found that “the common metaphor of knowledge being derived from a ‘fount’ demonstrates a ready structural analogy between ideas and liquid”. Orton (2007) identifies a universal cognitive concept that finds expression in Oðinn’s feat of obtaining the mead of poetry from the giant Suttungr and his daughter Gunnlǫð. This Norse myth forms the basis of many self-reflexive kennings for poets and poetry and stands as a test-case for further cognitive memory studies (cf. Clunies Ross 1989). As far as semantic field analysis is concerned, memory, understanding, mind, liquid, poetry, and knowledge are all intimately related. For instance, as Lindow (2014, 43) notes with reference to older lexical and etymological studies, Óðinn’s world-scouting ravens Huginn and Muninn embody mind and memory, and both hugr ‘mind’ and minni ‘memory’ occur in Skáldskaparmál as possible determinants in a list of kennings for the breast (cf. Meissner 1921, 136‒137). Furthermore, scholarship on cognitive universals in cross-cultural studies lends support to the transformative nature of liquid knowl­ edge; texts are recycled and re-shaped in the course of their transmission and even a monument is not a fixed entity in its original form for eternity; rather it is inces­ santly imbued with new meaning and new contextual knowledge depending on the observer and interpreter (cf. Bauer 2018, 115–117). On the metaphorical concept that ideas, words and informations are liquid, see Goatly (2011, 70): “Information becoming available is like the appearance of water: (news) filters through, seep/ leak out, pours (into an organization), percolate, permeate, osmosis”; cf. further transcultural metaphors such as ocean of knowledge or ocean of wisdom. The idea that poetry and memory are associated with liquids, intoxicants in particular, has transcultural significance; cf. the concept of Sanskrit madhu [mead] and amṛta [ambrosia]. Amṛta in the ancient Indian Rigveda is the nectar conferring wisdom and immortality, produced by the churning of the ocean. Recent research has drawn attention to contrastive notions of memory and memory techniques in the Poetic Edda (see Lindow 2014). A key feature is the opposition between active memorising and involuntary forgetting which is caused by external manipulation and deceit. In the prose passage of Dráp Nifl­ unga, the óminnisveig ‘potion of oblivion’ will make Guðrun forget all her grief and make her assent to a marriage with Atli. It has been noted that óminnis hegri (heron of oblivion), in Hávamál 13 is not, technically speaking, a true kenning (for detailed philological analysis see Johansson 1996, also Sayers 2015, with an Old Irish parallel). Heslop (2014, 83) cogently argues that óminnis hegri is an antiMuninn, or, to put it differently, the embodiment of oblivion: “a bird which per­ sonifies forgetting as the active obliteration of memory, hovering and snatching [stelr] memories like so many fish”. Likewise, Gotland’s minnugha mæn [men of memory], Mitchell (2014, 171) argues, selected their memory in a more or less



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conscious way. Hence oblivion, across all these examples, is consistently under­ stood as an active process meant to erase unpleasant, inconvenient memories. In which case, these textual studies demonstrate that the semantics of minni and its antonym óminni in the eddic lays is very far from the skaldic conception of memory. On the whole, the semantic network of minni and related verbs such as muna, minnaz signal the importance of cultural memory in the pre-modern North. This elaborated lexical field and the frequent occurrence of its field members indicates its status as a key concept in early Nordic society. The importance of memory in the North is no less evident in the context of Christian commemoration. The verb minnaz takes on the function of Christian commemoration, for instance, in the inscription from Tingvoll Church in Nordmøre (N 446): […] minnizk salo minnar i hælgum bønom […] […] minnizk sálu minnar í helgum bǿnum […] ‘[…] commemorate my soul in holy prayers’ […].

3 Pre-modern Nordic material Linguistic approaches to memory benefit from formulaic analyses of the textual corpora from the pre-Viking Age to the High Medieval period. An important dia­ gnostic feature, for our purposes, are the alliterative, often antithetical wordpairs or binomials which give the text a special aural quality, hence their fre­ quent deployment in Old Norse law texts, whether or not they are orally based (cf.  Schulte 2011). A case in point is the antithetic dyad iǫrð/upphiminn which occurs rather frequently in eddic lays, runic epigraphy and other Old Germa­ nic sources such as the Wessobrunner Prayer, Heliand and Old English verse (cf. Lönnroth 1981; Schulte 2007). The list below (1) is comprehensive: (1) The distribution of the iǫrð/upphiminn-formula (1)  eorðan ic bidde | and upheofon (OE charm) (2)  eorðan eallgrene | ond upheofon (Andreas v. 798) (3)  eorþan mid hire beorgum | ond upheofon torhtne mid his tunglum (Christ v. 967– 968) (4)  ero ni uuas | noh ufhimil (Wessobrunner Prayer) (5)  thit uueroldriki, ertha | endi upphimil (Heliand v. 2885–2886) (6)  jǫrð fannsk æva | né upphiminn (Vǫluspá 3:5–6) (7)  hvaðan jǫrð um kom | eða upphiminn | fyrst, inn fróði jǫtunn (Vafþrúðnismál 20:4–6) (8)  er eigi veit | jarðar hvergi | né upphimins: | áss er stolinn hamri (Þrymskviða 2:5–7)

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(9)  jǫrð dúsaði | ok upphiminn (Oddrúnargrátr 17:5–6) (10)  iǫrð bið ec varða | oc upphimin (Ribe rune-stick) (11)  iǫrð s[c]al rifna oc upphiminn (Skarpåker rune-stone)

As can be seen, the formula is versatile and accommodates itself to a number of different contexts and motives. Lönnroth (1981) argued that it invokes at least three themes or thought patterns, firstly the ‘Creation Myth’, secondly the inverse paradigm, viz. the ‘Destruction Myth’, or Ragnarǫk, and thirdly, a ‘Healing Charm’ against diseases and outer enemies. The formula itself is thus subordinate to a larger metaphysical theme of cosmic order versus chaos as depicted in the eddic poem Vǫluspá. This being the case, each use of the formula reactivates ‘cultural memory’ of the distant mythological past, viz. forn minni. As Hermann (2014, 31) cogently remarks, ‘Cultural memory’ metaphysically implies that culture has a memory of its own, i.e. that memory is not merely to be conceived of as a phenomenon that resides inside individuals, but as a collectively shared phenomenon, which takes external form, i.e. in poetry, narrati­ ves, rituals, or other representational forms.

Lindow (2014, 55), addressing cultural memory in Vǫluspá, identifies four memory techniques that reify the devastating consequences of Ragnarǫk. In view of this basic contrast between creation and destruction, the third function of a healing charm seems secondary, and its attestation on the Ribe stick is as late as AD 1300. In this case, the creation-versus-destruction-theme reinforces the power of the healing charm against malaria (see Moltke 1960, 122–125; 1985, 493–498; Schulte 2007, with references): (2) Ribe healing charm (North Jutland, late thirteenth century) [A] iorþ : biðak : uarþæ : sol : ok : santæ maria : þæt han : læ mik : ok lif : tuggæ : iǫrð bið ec varða sól oc Sancta Maríu at hann lé mér oc líf tungu

ok : upphimæn : ok : salfæn : gudrotæn : læknæs : hand : at liuæ | [B] uiuindnæ : oc upphimin oc siálfan Guð dróttin læcnis hǫnd at lyf // binda þar bóta þarf. (Moltke 1960)

[‘I bid the earth ensure, and the heaven above, sun and Saint Mary, and God the Lord himself, that he lend me a healer’s hand and a life-tongue to // bind a charm (cf. OE lib, Sigtuna lyfia) where cure is needed.’ (author’s translation)]



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The productivity of the iǫrð/upphiminn-formula in Nordic culture is signalled by its wide range of adaptations, a range which also extends to Christian con­ texts. This formula makes its appearance, for instance, on a Viking-age memo­ rial, viz. the Skarpåker stone (Sö 154) from the early eleventh century. The setting of this memorial is clearly Christian, and it represents a symbiosis of Christian and pagan features. Here the formula activates ancient pagan lore such as the father found fitting to commemorate his predeceased son. To quote the Skarpåker stone: (3) Skarpåker stone (Sö 154, early eleventh century) [I] kunar : raisþi : stain : þansi : at lyþbiurn : sun : sin : [II] iarþ s[k]al rifna uk ubhimin Gunnarr reisti stein þenna at Lýðbiǫrn, son sinn, iǫrð s[c]al rifna oc upphiminn. [‘Gunnar raised this stone in memory of his son, Lýðbiǫrn. Earth shall be riven and the over-heaven.’ (author’s translation)]

It is noteworthy that the thought pattern of this memorial ‒ like that of the Ribe healing stick ‒ is Christian rather than pagan. Lönnroth (1981, 321) identifies a topos of heroic praise: the father probably intended to honour his predeceased son by suggesting either “that Ragnarǫk would come before another man was born, or that heaven and earth would burst as the son’s soul travelled to the land of the dead”. In a straightforward reading, however, the blessing effect of the formula is due to its direct appeal to the ‘Creation/Destruction Myth’ (see Schulte 2007). The performative act of recollecting the distant past is thought to be intended to re-establish cosmic and social order. Compare the retrieval of the golden gaming pieces in Vǫluspá, Sts. 58–59, which enact the renewal of cultural memory (cf. Lindow 2014, 54–55). Finnask æsir á Iðavelli ok um Moldþinur máttkan dœma, ok minnask þar á megindóma ok á Fimbultýs fornar rúnar. Þar munu eptir undrsamligar gullnar tǫflur í grasi finnask,

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þærs í árdaga áttar hǫfðu. (Vǫluspá, Sts. 58–59) [The Æsir meet on Idavoll / and they converse about the mighty Earth-girdler, / and they remember there the great events / and the ancient runes of the Mighty One. There afterwards will be found in the grass / the wonderful golden chequers, / those which they possessed in the ancient times (The Poetic Edda, Sts. 60–61)]

To sum up, formulaic language draws on a pool of collective memory, or shared knowledge of the past, which resides in the social domain. Memory reflects the shared knowledge of what was conceived of as the ancient lore – it reflects a com­ munity’s social experience and knowledge which survives in its poetry, tales, myths, epics, proverbs, law texts, oaths, riddles, not least, in formulas. Being entrenched in history, language itself is collective memory (cf. Linke 2005). In a Saussurian sense, a language never exists even for a moment except as a ‘social fact’ in the passage of time (see De Saussure 2013 [1916], 90–91). Traditional dis­ ciplines such as comparative linguistics, historical phonology, etymology and word-history (including Wörter und Sachen) explore the historical basis of lan­ guage (on the memory function of writing and writing systems see Dürscheid 2016). Both oral and literate societies link past and present in different ways and espouse different notions of memory.

4 Perspectives for future research Modern memory research has turned away from oral-formulaic theory that encou­ raged earlier approaches to the ‘Great Divide’ between orality versus literacy (see e.g. Schulte 2008). In view of the breadth of this research area there is both a huge potential for nuanced, in-depth textual studies and the risk of broadening the memory research to the point of dilution (cf. Roediger and Wertsch 2008). Future research will probably refine the lexicogrammar of memory ‒ reminding ‒ for­ getting in different textual sources, and distinguish the diverse functions that are served by various types of memory. More specifically, the multiple distinctions between Assmann’s cultural memory, the collective memory in a Halbwachsian sense, communicative memory, and probably also autobiographical memory, need to be further explored in the textual material from the Viking Age through to the High Medieval period (cf. e.g. Clunies Ross 2014; Lindow 2014; Poole 2014). Tradition is by definition a dynamic process, as is memory. Cognitivism and psy­ cholinguistic research affirm that memory is meaning-making (e.g. Bluck et al. 2005). It is not an archive or storehouse inside the head, but rather a set of skills



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and capacities that are activated in specific contexts (on the cognitive psychology of poetry and narratives, see Rubin 1997). One of the primary manifestations of these skills and capacities is a selection process, which Bluck et al. (2005, 109) label the Directive function: “making sense of the past so as to have the best ‘old information’ available to us in directing one’s present and future”. On the active process of forgetting and erasing memory, cf. section 2. Advances in memory studies are triggered not least by cognitive approaches to lexicogrammar (cf. Drożdż 2016). Of particular import here is the contention, which is characteristic of the most recent scholarship, that the embodied mind is shaped by the experience of living in the human body and actively engaging in categorizing and structuring the world (cf. Locket 2016). Skaldic performance, for instance, involves living memory, as Heslop (2014) notes. The cognitive turn in skaldic studies was initiated several decades ago by Clunies Ross (1989), but further performance studies are needed to show how esoteric allusions to the Norse past could easily be understood in real-time performance. Further advan­ ces along the lines of Orton (2007) will probably draw on the notion of living memory. This is the idea that memory and commemoration are interactive skills rather than individual repositories of by-gone events. In light of this, memory is indeed ‘liquid knowledge’ in the sense that, as Quinn (2010) says: it is re-activa­ ted and renewed in each interaction, hence the importance of the audience (see Locket 2016). Collective memory is not a replication of past events, rather a steady process of re-contextualising the past. Insights into the past may also be gained by psycholinguistic studies of what Webster (2003) labels the reminiscence functions scale. This reflects a notable consensus between different disciplines: phi­ lological and linguistic memory studies as well as cognitive sciences and psycho­ linguistics. It emphasizes that memory, like cognition and language, depends on interactive processes since it is distributed in the social and cultural domain (see Clark 2008; Cowley 2011). To sum up, further advances in memory studies, on the basis of philology and linguistics, are possible in the following domains: 1. studies of formulas, formulaic language and verbatim recall (cf. section 3; also Wray 2009); 2. cultural-linguistic approaches to language in terms of memory, e.g. wordhistory and the broad research field of writing and writing systems (cf. Linke 2005; Dürscheid 2016); 3. comparative-philological studies of memory (cf. section 2 on ‘liquid know­ ledge’); 4. nuanced textual and intertextual inquiries into the lexicogrammar of memory, recollection and forgetting (cf. Hermann et al. 2014);

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5. performative studies and media studies, including mediality and media change, e.g. the shift from runic epigraphy to Roman manuscript literacy (cf. Mitchell 2013); 6. interdisciplinary studies engaging in biocognitivism, social cognition and cognitive psychology (cf. Sheldrake 2012 on memory and morphic resonance).

Works cited Primary sources N [plus number of inscription.] Norges Innskrifter med de yngre Runer. 6 vols. Ed. Magnus Olsen et al. Norges Indskrifter indtil Reformationen, 2. Oslo, 1941. Oddrúnargrátr. In Eddukvæði. Ed. Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason. ÍF. Reykjavík, 2014. II: 365–371. The Poetic Edda. Trans. Carolyne Larrington. Rev. ed. Oxford, 2014. Skj [plus vol. number.] Den norsk-islandske skjaldedigtning. Ed. Finnur Jónsson, AI–II (Tekst efter håndskrifterne), BI–II (Rettet tekst). 4 vols. Copenhagen, 1973 [1912–1915]. Sö [plus number of inscription.] Södermanlands runinskrifter. 2 vols. Ed. Erik Brate and Elias Wessén. Sveriges runinskrifter, 3. Stockholm, 1924–1936. Sturluson Snorri. Edda: Skáldskaparmál. 2 vols. Ed. Anthony Faulkes. London, 2008. Vafþrúðnismál. In Eddukvæði. Ed. Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason. ÍF. Reykjavík, 2014. I: 356–366. Vǫluspá. In Eddukvæði. Ed. Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason. ÍF. Reykjavík, 2014. I: 291–321. Þrymskviða. In Eddukvæði. Ed. Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason. ÍF. Reykjavík, 2014. I: 424–427.

Secondary sources Bauer, Alessia. 2018. “Runica manuscripta as an Example of Intermediality in Manuscripts.” In Epigraphics in an International Context. Ed. Alessia Bauer, Elise Kleivane and Terje Spurkland. Dublin. Bluck, Susan et al. 2005. “A Tale of Three Functions: The Self-Reported Uses of Autobiographical Memory.” Social Cognition 23.1: 91–117. Carstens, Lydia. 2017. “Die dreizehn Geschichten auf dem Runenstein von Rök.” In Die Faszination des Verborgenen und seine Entschlüsselung – Rāði sāʀ kunni. Beiträge zur Runologie, skandinavischen Mediävistik und germanischen Sprachwissenschaft. Ed. Jana Krüger et al. Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde, 101. Berlin and Boston, MA. 65–84. Clark, Andy. 2008. Supersizing the Mind. Embodyment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. New York.



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Symons, Victoria. 2017. “The Role of Memory in Old English Runic Inscriptions as a Model for Reading Selected Norwegian Rune-Sticks.” In Von den Hieroglyphen zur Internetsprache. From Hieroglyphs to Internet Language. Ed. Gaby Waxenberger, Hans Sauer and Kerstin Kazzazi. LautSchriftSprache, 2. Wiesbaden. 187–207. Webster, J. D. 2003. “The Reminiscence Circumplex and Autobiographical Memory Functions.” Memory 11: 203–216. Wray, Alison. 2009. “Identifying Formulaic Language. Persistent Challenges and New Opportunities.” In Formulaic Language, 1. Distribution and Historical Change. Ed. Roberta Corrigan, et al. Typological Studies in Language, 82. Amsterdam and Philadelphia. 27–51.

Lena Rohrbach

I: 14 Material Philology 1 Definition Material philology designates a branch in philological studies that focuses on the material characteristics of written artefacts, rather than studying them solely as carriers of linguistic texts. Instead of striving to reconstruct the original state of a text, material philology is interested in the transmission of texts in time depth and values them as material manifestations of changing cultural contexts. The term ‘New Philology’ was first introduced by Stephen Nichols in the widely influ­ ential, eponymous special issue of Speculum in 1990. Later on, Nichols himself suggested the alternative designation of ‘Material Philology’ (1997). In the context of Old Norse studies, material philology has gained ground over the past twenty years. In an attempt to further emphasise the focus on the manuscripts as material artefacts, Matthew Driscoll (2010) and Anne Mette Hansen (2012) suggested the alternative term of ‘Artefactual Philology’. The study of individual manuscripts that has always had a strong tradition within Old Norse studies gained further momentum with the introduction of Nichols’s ideas, as can be seen from numerous recent preoccupations with the compilation and codicological characteristics of individual manuscripts. Also influenced by the ideas of new and material philology, the post-medieval manuscript tradition has likewise received considerable attention over the past years.

2 State of research Over the past fifteen years, several studies of compilations have been – mostly implicitly – informed by notions of memory, most notably in the case of promi­ nent manuscripts such as Flateyjarbók (GKS 1005 fol.), Hauksbók (today archived in three volumes: AM 371 4to, AM 544 4to, AM 675 4to) and Möðruvallabók (AM 132 fol.). These compilations have been studied as manifestations of memo­ ries of different, more or less identifiable communities, with more or less identifi­ able purposes. Hauksbók has been characterised as private library (e.g. Gunnar Harðarson and Stefán Karlsson 1993; Hempel 2001), as encyclopaedia (e.g. Simek 1990, 377–383) and as “material testament of [Haukr’s] learning and knowledge” (Ashman Rowe 2008, 73; see also Sverrir Jakobsson 2007). Flateyjarbók has been approached as Gedenkbuch [memorial book] (Zernack 1999) and “gift with an https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-020



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implied purpose, that of encouraging the king to follow the example of his revered namesake” (Ashman Rowe 2005, 23). Explicitly linking to concepts of memory, Claudia Müller (2001, 225) interpreted the compilation of Möðruvallabók as a witness of individual and social memory. Most recently, Laura Sonja Wamhoff studied Icelandic compilations of the fourteenth century from a memory-theoret­ ical perspective as media for the construction of identity, differentiating between literature of identification (e.g. Möðruvallabók) and dissociation (e.g. Flateyjarbók) (Wamhoff 2016, 222). These studies are preoccupied with a synchronic perspective on the con­ struction of memory, taking the compilations as a snapshot at a specific point in time, in a specific, more or less identifiable context. But diachronic studies of the transmission of individual texts have also touched on issues of memory, in the discussion of the mouvance (for this concept, see Zumthor 1972, 84–96) of texts, and also in discussing in what manuscripts and in what period individual texts are transmitted. Elizabeth Ashman Rowe (2002) points out that the Icelandic annals exhibit a multilayered construction of memory, both from manuscript to manuscript – from annal to annal – and within the individual manuscripts, with additions in different hands throughout the complete timeframe of the annalistic work. Another prominent and widely discussed case that deals with questions related to the construction of memory is Patricia Boulhosa’s study of the trans­ mission of Gamli sáttmáli [Old Covenant], a text traditionally understood as a mutual agreement between the Norwegian king and the Icelanders in 1262/64. The transmission – which sets in at the end of the fifteenth century – combined with historical-critical readings of the text leads her to classify this core docu­ ment of Icelandic identity in its extant form as a fifteenth-century reconstruc­ tion, rather than as a witness from the time of the submission (Boulhosa 2005, 110–153). Recent research in other disciplines has directed attention to praxeological aspects, to the making, using and keeping of written artefacts. The field of prax­ eology is rather unexplored within Old Norse studies. As a first attempt, in an article on the copying of sagas in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir (2006) explored the keeping of manuscripts as memory-related activity: “Bevidst opbevaring af manuskripter vidner om en bestemt brug af for­ tiden som en fælles erindring, noget som kunne påvirke valget af, hvilke skrifter der blev bevaret, og hvilke ikke.” (Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir 2006, 292) [Conscious storage of manuscripts witnesses a certain use of the past as collective memory, something that could influence the decision of which texts were preserved and which were discarded. (author’s translation)]

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3 Pre-modern Nordic material It seems promising to further investigate the arrangement and keeping of texts as a materialisation of memory-related processes. Such a perspective embraces both the material arrangement of a text on a material carrier – a codex, a docu­ ment, a scroll – but also the arrangement of these carriers in space – in libraries and archives. A hitherto virtually unploughed field in the pre-modern Icelandic context is the making, collecting and keeping of administrative and legal docu­ ments. Most of the original Icelandic charters handed down to us were kept at the two episcopal archives of Hólar and Skálholt. Over the centuries, these doc­ uments were stored and organised according to changing practices that might provide insights into underlying memory concepts (see also Aleida Assmann 2011, 327–330). In particular, the making and arrangement of church invento­ ries (máldagabækur) and cartularies (bréfabækur) seem fruitful objects in that context. These books gather transcriptions of a large number of individual docu­ ments that in many cases are not extant in the original. The advent of these books in the Icelandic tradition in the fourteenth century coincides with a considerable increase of administrative literacy in the same period and mirrors new needs of storage and organisation arising from the ever-growing number of documents (see Rohrbach 2014, 256–257; Sigurdsson 2012). A particularly interesting case is an account book of Hólar (Þjóðskjalasafn Íslands, Bps B II 1). This book was begun early in the fourteenth century and features texts in several hands from different temporal layers between 1300 and 1450. The account book of Hólar con­ tains a variety of texts, in particular lists of property rights of the episcopal see, partially with notes on when and from whom these rights were aquired. Several of the scribal hands have been identified with officiales of the episcopal see, among them Jón Egilsson, the most prominent administrative scribe in late-medieval Iceland with pronounced archival endeavours (see Rohrbach 2014, 244; Stefán Karlsson 1963, xlv). Thus, the account book can be approached as a materialisa­ tion of the administrative memory of the episcopal see over several generations. Legal memory in the narrower sense was also kept and transmitted in codices. Some of these manuscripts exhibit continuous additions of new legal texts in hands from different times, but most of the codices are comprehensive compilations from the outset with only minor subsequent additions. Following the acceptance of Bishop Árni’s Church Law (Kristinréttr Árna biskups) in 1275 and the promulgation of the secular law code Jónsbók in 1281, these law texts were written down in many copies and compiled with a changing selection of shorter legal texts such as royal amendments, ecclesiastic statutes or decisions of the Althing. Some of the manuscripts exhibit extensive marginal notations that reveal intense studies of the texts, such as Skálholtsbók yngri (AM 354 fol.,



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c. 1400), amongst others again in the hand of Jón Egilsson (see colour plate 14). In particular, the writing down of legal key words and several series of different types of pointing fingers in a number of manuscripts can be read collectively as an “ocular gateway to memory and meditation” (Carruthers 2008, 314), as mate­ rial traces of memory practices. The Icelandic legal manuscripts also present a rare opportunity for studies of the transition between communicative and cultural memory in bygone times. In most cases, the additions consist of new amendments to the legal code or of recent local charters. These additions were literally inscribed into the legal corpus in a first manuscript. In the subsequent transmission, these additions were either taken up and handed down together with the rest of and as part of the legal corpus, or also they disappeared again, implying that – in that case – they did not transition into the cultural memory. These compilations, and in particular the recent elements in them, might thus be read as material traces, as gateway to the floating gap, to the span between communicative and cultural memory that in oral societies forms a proper unremembered timespan, which is shifting from generation to generation (Jan Assmann 2010, 112). Moreover, not all of the compiled texts had the status of applicable law when they were first included in the codices, but the subsequent copying of these texts, as well as late-medieval and early modern court protocols, testify that the inser­ tion of these texts had sustainable consequences for the constitution of the legal corpus (Rohrbach 2014, 249–250).

4 Perspectives for future research The legal compilations might thus be approached not only as transmission, but also as active formations of the legal memory of late medieval Iceland. The rewrit­ ings in the Icelandic legal manuscripts can be approached as negotiations of the legal canon that at the same time bear the inherent quality of an archive. The archive has been an influential concept both – but not only – in literacy and in memory studies over the past two decades. The current notions of archive hover between a material understanding of the archive as concrete, spatial storage and a Foucauldian understanding of the archive as the totality of discursive possibil­ ities at a given time (Foucault 1972, 128–131). Both Mary Franklin-Brown (2012) and Martin Irvine (1991) in their preoccupation with pre-modern textuality dis­ cussed the potentials of this double-layered quality of the notion of archive, and Franklin-Brown denoted the manuscript as a material archive that allows insights into the discursive archive (Franklin-Brown 2012, 30).

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This understanding of the manuscript as material crystallisation of the dis­ cursive archive of a given time allows for a link with the notion of archive in memory studies. In a series of articles, Aleida Assmann establishes the distinction between an actively circulated and a passively stored memory, between a cultural working memory and a cultural reference memory, and denoted these two types of memory as canon and archive, respectively (A. Assmann 2010, 98). Assmann stresses that the cultural memory of oral societies is restricted to the canon, to the working memory, while the archive, the reference memory, is dependent on the externalisation of knowledge as it was made possible with the introduc­ tion of literacy. The memory archive is a storage that prevents knowledge from oblivion while at the same time not participating in the active working memory (A. Assmann 2010, 102–104). Assmann’s memory archive thus draws both on the material notion of archive and on the Foucauldian discursive pool that one – the active canon – might refer to. Manuscript cultures and pre-modern textuality challenge Assmann’s dichotomic distinction between canon and archive. The making of every single manuscript implies a movement – a mouvance – between canon and archive in that texts are taken up and dismissed. Manuscripts allow for variant readings within the canon: they are polyphonic snapshots of a canon while at the same time turning into archives for future formations of the canon. They inscribe them­ selves into an intertextual web of references back and forth in time. Thus, the relationship between canon and archive is a fluent one, and every manuscript can be read, at the same time, as both materialisation of the canon and accumu­ lation of the archive. Legal manuscripts form a special case of these textual archives because of the normative status of effective law. In compiling and conflating the secular and ecclesiastical law in effect with texts of varying origin and legal status and pre­ senting them as a coherent material text, the manuscripts represent contestations of the current legal corpus and suggestions for reformulations of this canon. The individual challenges of the legal canon, the individual suggestions of what the law should look like, turned into textual archives that other scribes, influenced and steered by the materiality of the codices, in turn used in the production of their new manuscripts. Pre-modern Nordic manuscript transmission offers considerable material for future studies of this mouvance between canon and archive. One fruitful object of research might be to investigate the active and passive dismissal of memory from the archive. This could be achieved through studying palimpsests and maculation, that is, the active erasure and destruction of memory – or censorship – or by inves­ tigating discontinuities and disruptions in the transmission of individual texts over time, that is, the ‘passive’ omission of texts from new formations of the archive.



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Works cited Secondary sources Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. 2007. “Erindring i afskrift. Om den islandske oldtidsinteresse i 1500- og 1600-tallet.” In Renæssancens Verden. Tænkning, kulturliv, dagligliv og efterliv. Ed. Ole Høiris and Jens Vellev. Aarhus. 283–299. Ashman Rowe, Elizabeth. 2002. “The Flateyjarbók Annals as a Historical Source. A Response to Eldbjørg Haug.” Scandinavian Journal of History 27: 233–242. Ashman Rowe, Elizabeth. 2005. The Development of Flateyjarbók. Iceland and the Norwegian Dynastic Crisis of 1389. The Viking Collection, 15. Copenhagen. Ashman Rowe, Elizabeth. 2008. “Literary, Codicological, and Political Perspectives on Hauksbók.” Gripla 19: 51–76. Assmann, Aleida. 2010. “Canon and Archive.” In A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Media and Cultural Memory, 8. Berlin. 97–107. Assmann, Aleida. 2011. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization. Functions, Media, Archives. Cambridge. Assmann, Jan. 2010. “Communicative and Cultural Memory.” In A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Media and Cultural Memory, 8. Berlin. 109–118. Boulhosa, Patricia Pires. 2005. Icelanders and the Kings of Norway. Mediaeval Sagas and Legal Texts. The Northern World, 17. Leiden and Boston, MA. Carruthers, Mary. 2008. The Book of Memory. A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. 2nd rev. ed. Cambridge. Driscoll, Matthew James. 2010. “The Words on the Page. Thoughts on Philology, Old and New.” In Creating the Medieval Saga. Versions, Variability and Editorial Interpretations of Old Norse Saga Literature. Ed. Judy Quinn and Emily Lethbridge. Odense. 87–104. Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. New York. Franklin-Brown, Mary. 2012. Reading and Writing. Encyclopedic Writing in the Scholastic World. Chicago, Il, and London. Gunnar Harðarson and Stefán Karlsson. 1993. “Hauksbók.” In Medieval Scandinavia. An Encyclopedia. Ed. Philipp Pulsiano. New York. 271–272. Hansen, Anne Mette. 2012. “AM 421 12mo. An artefactual philological study.” Care and Conservation of Manuscripts 13: 1–16. Hempel, Annette. 2001. “Die Hauksbók – eine enzyklopädische Sammelhandschrift des 13./14. Jahrhunderts.” In Arbeiten zur Skandinavistik. Texte und Untersuchungen zur Germanistik und Skandinavistik, 48. Ed. Annegret Heitmann. Frankfurt am Main and New York. 401–409. Irvine, Martin. 1991. “Medieval Textuality and the Archeology of Textual Culture.” In Speaking Two Languages. Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies. Ed. Allen J. Frantzen. Albany, NY. 181–200. Müller, Claudia. 2001. Erzähltes Wissen. Die Isländersagas in der Möðruvallabók. Frankfurt am Main.

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Nichols, Stephen G. 1990. “Introduction. Philology in a Manuscript Culture”. The New Philology. Special Issue of Speculum 1.65: 1–10. Nichols, Stephen G. 1997. “Why Material Philology? Some Thoughts.” In Philologie als Textwissenschaft: Alte und Neue Horizonte. Ed. Helmut Tervooren and Horst Wenzel, Zeitschrift für Deutsche Philologie 116: 10–30. Rohrbach, Lena. 2014. “Construction, Organisation, Stabilisation. Administrative Literacy in the Realm of Norway, the Case of Iceland.” In Rex insularum. The Realm of Norway and Its Dependencies. Ed. Steinar Imsen. Trondheim. 227–263. Sigurdsson, Erika. 2012. “Máldagabækur and Administrative Literacy in Fourteenth-Century Iceland.” Quaestio Insularis 13: 24–41. Simek, Rudolf. 1990. Altnordische Kosmographie. Studien und Quellen zu Weltbild und Weltbeschreibung in Norwegen und Island vom 12. bis zum 14. Jahrhundert. Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde, 4. Berlin and New York. Stefán Karlsson. 1963. “Indledning.” In Islandske originaldiplomer indtil 1450. 2 vols. Ed. Stefán Karlsson. Editiones Arnamagnæanæ A 7. Copenhagen. I:xiii–lxviii. Sverrir Jakobsson. 2007. “Hauksbók and the Construction of an Icelandic World View.” Saga-Book 31: 22–38. Wamhoff, Laura Sonja. 2016. Isländische Erinnerungskultur 1100–1300. Altnordische Historiographie und kulturelles Gedächtnis. Beiträge zur nordischen Philologie, 57. Tübingen. Zernack, Julia. 1999. “Hyndluljóð, Flateyjarbók und die Vorgeschichte der Kalmarer Union.” Skandinavistik 29: 89–114. Zumthor, Paul. 1972. Essai de poétique médiévale. Paris.

Mats Malm

I: 15 Runology 1 Definition While the subject of runology is runic script and runic texts, the interpreta­ tion of its material may include very wide contextualisation and exploration of adjacent fields. Runology is from the outset deeply engaged with memory: any writing system is a mode of storing knowledge and thus constitutes an extension of memory. Consequently, any writing system is also a powerful means of contrib­ uting to and/or modifying knowledge and the shared memory of a community. Runes will have been used for a number of every-day communicative purposes, but in such cases, the materials have usually been of a less persistent kind, and the main part will have been lost. Preserved runic inscriptions on objects such as combs, weapons and other items are often admonitions to memory of a very immediate kind: “nn made me”, “nn owns me” and so on. The names of the runes in themselves constitute a mnemonic aid which has lent itself to a number of functions and notions around mystery and magic. The aspect of memory appears stronger in the runic material than in other writing systems, as the large portion of what remains of runic inscriptions con­ sists in what is usually called ‘memorial stones’, ‘mindemærker’ and similar designations. The rune stones themselves only rarely include words for memory, but their being inscribed and raised “after” a person makes memory a centre of gravitation in runology.

2 State of research The name for rune has often been associated with ‘secret’, which may, in fact, be the correct etymology. If so, the name connects to ideas of the power of the writing system to contain, present and restrict information in a way parallel to individual memory. The associations with magic, such as character combinations and repetitions, on the one hand, enhance the restricting of access to information stored, and, on the other hand, substitute for oral incantations. Restricting infor­ mation is most apparent in the use of diverse forms of cipher. It is generally assumed that the runic alphabet in its first form was developed around the beginning of Christian chronology. The first known inscriptions date from around the second century AD. In Scandinavia, rune stones are known from https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-021

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the fourth century and onwards. Comparatively few rune stones date from before the middle of the tenth century, when it appears that a wave started with the Danish Jelling stones. The very great popularity of rune stones, however, is most apparent in Sweden’s eastern parts and peaked in the second half of the eleventh century. As the rune stones’ predominant functions pertain to memory and soci­ etal/religious identity, much research on the rune stones has concerned memory in different ways, although the perspective of actual memory studies has only recently begun to be applied. As Jan Assmann points out, everyday communicative memory is generally stable for at most 80–100 years, which warrants the need for a cultural memory which fixes the past in a stable, yet negotiable, way. The transfer of knowledge from communicative memory to cultural memory does not, however, coincide with the transfer from orality to writing (Assmann 1995, 127, 131). In the Scandina­ vian context, skaldic poetry has been shown to have documentary functions and the epitaph function of erfikvæði comes especially close to that of runic inscrip­ tions (Jesch 2005; Harris 2010). The rune stones are situated at a crossroads between various medial alternatives – vernacular orality, runes, Latin writing, poetry, image – and a number of stones demonstrate particular attention to the medial conditions for memory preservation and construction. This is especially true of the Rök stone, dating from about 800. Probably due to its early position as an alternative mode of handling memory in a predominantly oral society, it is not only occupied with what memory to transfer, but also with how this can be done: it thus offers a uniquely self-conscious negotiation of its function as a medium, a self-reflexivity (see below section 3). The rune stones of the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries are as a rule inscribed and erected “after” a person who is presented by name, often with information about mode of death, feats, social position, and so on. But the stones also function as a memory of the commissioner(s) who is (are) as a rule men­ tioned before the deceased, and then with a statement of relation to the deceased. They also constitute a memory of the carver, who is also often identified by name. Names and titles may specify the allegiances and networks of the persons men­ tioned, far beyond family into societal and political contexts. The significance of these aspects of memorial fixture has been treated in many studies. The rule of rune stones can be described as the attempt to transfer individual or communi­ cative memory to cultural memory, by connecting particulars to a larger shared memory through the objectivisation in text and monument (including images and ornament as well as stone). The great vogue of erecting rune stones in Eastern Sweden toward the latter part of the eleventh century was decidedly connected to political and religious change: the less social stability, the greater the need for stones to settle issues of



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political and religious belonging appears to have been. Christianity made old ways of memorial activities such as burial mounds and stone settings inadequate, and instead the rune stones would serve to commemorate not only the dead but also their families, their societal position and their contributions to the infrastructure that enabled further mission – bridges and roads, mostly. The frequently occur­ ring Christian crosses and prayer elements on the rune stones invoke a Christian shared consciousness, which connects to social and political alliances. As a con­ clusion of this, and although only few stones explicitly function as inheritance documents, the rune stones have been studied to trace systems of inheritance, settling family and network stability (Sawyer 2000). The Viking Age rune stones thus, on the one hand, draw on an established shared memory, and, on the other hand, are designed not only to connect to it but also to add to it, by inscribing persons, families and deeds. In doing so, they sometimes engage contrasting shared memories. So, for instance, the Ramsund carving not only proposes two competing representative systems: image and word, but also two competing, or rather complementing, conceptual systems: pre-Christian and Christian. Pre-Christian myth – the Sigurd story – entirely dominates through image while the inscription as such does not relate myth but instead inscribes the persons involved in the Christian community: siriþr : kiarþi : bur : þosi : muþiR : alriks : tutiR : urms : fur * salu : hulmkirs : faþur : sukruþar buata * sis (Sö 101; Sigríðr, Alríkr’s mother, Ormr’s daughter, made this bridge for the soul of Holmgeirr, father of Sigrøðr, her husbandman.) (SRD). As has been pointed out, the location and entire site makes the memorial complex “a perfor­ mance writ large” (Mitchell 2013) (see colour plate 8). Rune stones may thus embody several memory systems and several represen­ tational systems, and their contribution in these cases appears to be the actual establishing of the relation between the systems, meaning they not only relate to shared memory but are actually part of creating or establishing it. The combina­ tion of text and monumental materiality in the rune stones makes them a very particular example of what early memory theoretician Pierre Nora named ‘sites of memory’: locations which condense cultural memory and ‘become a self-perpet­ uating vortex of symbolic investment’ (Nora 1989, quotation by Rigney 2005, 18). The concept of ‘sites’, lieux, includes both actual sites and monuments as well as virtual sites such as texts, and the rune stones provide a unique combination of situated meaning. A vital distinction between tradition and cultural memory is that the latter embodies the notion of a constructive self-interpretation with the use of the past (see Heslop 2014, 90). Modern memory studies perspectives have recently been applied to the runic material by Mitchell (2013) and Heslop (2014), and corre­ sponding perspectives have been proposed by Zilmer (mainly) (2010) and Klos

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(2009), while a number of studies have approached rune stones from adjacent perspectives of mediality and performativity. In her study on the place and function of Swedish rune stones, Lydia Klos draws on Jan Assmann’s theory of cultural memory when tying together her con­ clusions. Starting with the notion that cultural memory serves as an improvised constancy for human continuance, she identifies his six traits: the concretion of identity; its capacity to reconstruct; formation (objectivation of meaning); organi­ zation and custody by specialists and institutions; obligation (communal valua­ tion); reflexivity (Assmann 1995). Remarking that death constitutes an inbetween space for communicative and cultural memory, Klos develops the perspective of the shift of faith as a shift in individual self-understanding. As the pre-Christian tradition of burial mounds and similar monuments was made impossible by Christian faith, instead rune stones appeared, often on grave fields. While preChristian ceremony had comprised gifts and other tokens, what now was left to the deceased was writing that perpetuated his (mostly) renown – and at the same time included the commissioner in this afterlife. Traditional elements of shared memory such as names, myths and notions of the landscape were thus comple­ mented with the monumental stones, which changed the actual landscape and constituted a physical document over the oral narrative. While pre-Christian monuments had been very much a collective effort, rune stones from the begin­ ning were, too, but Klos discerns a change from the communal to the family, and thence from the family to the individual. The Christian notion of the next life, and the individual’s responsibility for gathering good deeds in this life for the next, is mirrored in the more and more frequent placing of rune stones by, not least, bridges, and the mentioning of the construal of that bridge. This is connected to the growing focus on the one who had the stone erected, the focus of documenta­ tion now not so much communal memory as documentation of deeds for after­ life. The rune stones enable both old tradition and the new, as they incorporate crosses and prayers as well as deeds (Klos 2009, 322–339). While Klos valuably elaborates on the rune stones in regard of cultural memory, she leaves out the sixth of Assmann’s traits: reflexivity. While the first five to a great extent concern content of memory, reflexivity rather concerns the medial conditions and options. According to Assmann, cultural memory is refle­ xive in three ways: it is “practice-reflexive”, i.e. focussing on common practice through proverbs, rituals etc, it is “self-reflexive”, i.e. expands on itself, and it is “reflexive of its own image”, i.e. it reflects the group’s self-images and social systems (Assmann 1995, 132). Reflexivity is a pervasive trait in the rune stones (as discussed above; see also below). The pre-Christian practice of memorials certainly fits the definition of cul­ tural memory: the passing from oral, short-term communicative memory to cul­



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tural memory not necessarily carried by writing, but by symbolic monuments, created by a large community and surely accompanied by extensive rituals attended by many. The deceased will have been the object of unanimous remem­ brance. As practice shifted to rune stones, they will have been erected by smaller groups, with a closer connection to the deceased, as Klos shows. This means that unanimity about the deceased will have been smaller, and there will have been other families closer by, who may have been in a competitional relation to the deceased and the family of the deceased. At the next stage, focussing on the com­ missioner’s afterlife rather than the renown of a deceased, communal interest, participation and unanimity will have been even smaller. Simultaneously, the intended receiver will not to the same extent have been the community around but more and more the one who would in the end open the book of judgement. That is, monuments over the dead become less codifications of a wider cultural memory and increasingly become partial attempts at modifying cultural memory, without the broad sanction of earlier practices. Although the social dimension of Christian religiosity should not be underestimated, structurally, the focus on the individual’s Christian afterlife further reduces the aspect of cultural memory in the memorials. They certainly strive at establishing constancy and identity, but on different grounds and for different purposes.

3 Pre-modern Nordic material Klos’s application of memory studies fruitfully creates a general picture of the Viking Age rune stones in Sweden. When it comes to analysis of individual rune stones, memory issues are usually entangled in other perspectives. Judish Jesch was early to propose that the analysis of rune stones must include visual com­ position, material, placing in the landscape and the role of senders as well as receivers, and has developed the perspective since (Jesch 1998; cf. Andrén 2000). The perspective ties into much-discussed issues of orality, literacy and ‘runacy’, and has been developed into a description of the rune stones as a broad commu­ nicative system, where the rune stone combines an ‘oral monumentality’ with a ‘commemorative literacy’ (Zilmer 2010). As runic writing is connected to ornamentation as well as ritual practices, Marco Bianchi has proposed a multimodal understanding, based on social semi­ otics and combining the aspects of narration, the interpersonal and the textual with visual structuring and ornament. While the stones were efficient memorials also for those who could not read, both through monumental size and ornament/ symbols, they embody a number of discourses and communicative practices. On

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the one hand, the rune stones inscribed themselves in a community of commu­ nication, on the other hand, they could shift to different levels of exclusiveness by using cipher. The social elite could thus distinguish itself from the general discourse concerned with general memorial practice: in the Viking Age examples treated, formulaic information about the ‘memorial act’ – who carved, commis­ sioned, over whom, is in standard runes, while the rule when deviating script occurs is that it is used for markers of status and additional information about the deceased: regularly, these passages are to be found toward the end of the inscription (Bianchi 2010, e.g. 21–34, 156). The perspective efficiently maps out how the reader’s attention and relation to the message are directed, and thus how memory is established and negotiated. The rune stones regularly demonstrate an awareness of themselves as docu­ ments of memory through the explication of who carved, raised or commissioned the stone, but seldom point directly to memory. In sketching the perspective of memory studies, Heslop demonstrates how four rune stones from the tenth and eleventh centuries employ the word minni in different ways: used either in the singular or in the plural, the word designates the stone or possibly the site itself (DR 83, DR 94 and DR 110 – the possibility to understand minni as performance is very slight), or memory directed toward the future (U 114). In a predominantly oral society, the readers would have to supply the inscription with their own voice, thus making the monument “an event that can be experienced over and over again” (Zilmer 2010, 145). An essential question, however, is whose voice the reader actually sounds out. As a rule, the commissioner or carver will be understood as speaking of himself in the third person. But there are a number of smaller objects that speak of themselves: “nn made me”, “nn carved me” (see Malm 2008, 252–253). One rune stone speaks: “The stone proclaims that it will long stand here; it will name Valtóki’s cairn”, while in another, the rumour of the deceased is said to remain “while the stone and the rune-staves live” (DR 131 and SM 16; see Zilmer 2010, 158; 161–162). These notions of medial agency provide important clues to how medium and memory were understood and re-enacted. Medial self-reflexivity is particularly prominent in the Rök stone (Ög 136), representing an early stage where the medium was newer and in more need of pondering (see colour plates 6 and 7). With its more than 700 characters it is not only uniquely narrative, but also appears to be uniquely occupied with the power of the runes themselves. This is obvious already in the fact that it explores a number of different ciphers, from the old futhark (as an estranging alternative to the short-twig young futhark) to increasingly complicated actual ciphers. It is also – probably – obvious from the formula sakumukmini which constitutes a key to the different ciphers and can thus be considered the most vital part of the inscription. The formula has several complications and has been interpreted in



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a number of different ways: it may be read sagum ungmenni (I say to the young people; Gustavson 1991) or sagum yggmenni (we saw a horrible creature/man; Ralph 2007). It can also be read as memory combined with a word for young man or people: sagum mǫgminni (I tell the folk-memory; Widmark 1997), “Tell people that memory” (Lönnroth 1977), or “I pronounce this hint for the lad” (Harris 2009). If mini is read ‘minni’, memory is the kernel of the Rök stone not only because it is raised in memory of a dead son, but also because the suggestive and mystifying narratives are presented as memories or memorabilities. The word mǫgminni has been connected to the poetic genre greppaminni, which consists in questions and answers in a way that would account for the repeated questions and answers in the inscription (Lönnroth 1977). If mukmini is read ‘folk-memory’ or ‘memory for people’, the term in itself can be said to constitute the definition of cultural memory – or conversely, if Widmark (1997) was right in suggesting that greppaminni relates to the memory of a wider community and mǫgminni to that of a narrower family, that is, a less fixed long-term memory. The focus on literary genre has been further developed by Harris (2009), who convincingly shows the parallels to Egill Skallagrímsson’s elegy Sonatorrek and ties the inscription to a wider context of grief over a dead son, including the mythic complex – another highly significant memory resource – of the death of Baldr. There are reasons to believe that the preoccupation with memory does not stop there. The word ‘minni’ has also been interpreted as referring to the physi­ cal monument itself: the reading would then be sagu um mǫg minni (I tell over [the surface of] the memory/stone about the son; Marez 1997). One problem with translating sagum with ‘I say’ is that the verb is actually in the plural. The natural reading would thus be ‘we say the folk-memory’, which has been suggested to have been understood as a statement made by the runes themselves in a way parallel to objects carrying runic inscriptions and speaking of themselves. In this very early commitment of memory to a writing system, the focus would then be on the system itself: the runes embody and relate the stored memory (Malm 2008). A third medial approach to the Rök stone has been presented as social semiotic and relies on the multimodal aspects developed by Bianchi (2000), understanding even the questions and answers not as memories of or hints to mythic narratives, but as riddles the answers of which are the light which makes the runes legible, the carving of the runes, and the reading of them (Holmberg 2015). In the first two above interpretations, the issue of memory is treated on the Rök stone both in terms of what memory is to convey and the means for conveying memory. In the third interpretation, the whole text is about the means for conveying memory – which means that it contends with the much more consistent interpretation of the over-all structure proposed by Harris.

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On the whole, the Rök stone is much occupied with memory for the future, but the word minni in the inscription is directed toward the past. The interpreta­ tion of minni depends on the over-all interpretation and on how mǫg is under­ stood. In the structure with two questions which lead to an answer, it is the questions that are called mǫgminni. Thus, minni here is not the full memory or legend/content, but rather, with Harris, a hint. If minni is taken as the stone itself, this use does have parallels. In the social semiotic reading, there are no actual memories or legends: the word minni becomes equivalent with ‘speech act’ and cannot be understood other than as a kind of vague similitude. Mitchell (2014, 284) and Holmberg (2015) most strongly stress the connection between memory and performativity (cf. Arwill-Nordbladh 2007). It is clear that the Rök stone will never be conclusively interpreted, but it is also obvious that the interpretation of it will be strongly furthered as memory studies approaches develop in combination with approaches on the borders between orality and literacy, between different representational systems, and between the medium, message and receiver. This particular monument embodies a number of questions that are vital to the understanding of the large corpus of rune stones.

4 Perspectives for future research As the metaphor of cultural memory transfers focus from the individual inside to objectivised and collectively shared forms, the carriers of memory are media: language, orality, writing, image, symbol, monument, and so on. As these carri­ ers have been handled by institutions and guards, ceremony, ritual and practice have taken shifting roles. Actual practices will be difficult to reconstruct, but to the extent that medial, performative and ceremonial practices and impacts can be elicited from the documents preserved, this should be a viable way for deepened memory studies on the runic material. This approach also appears to be the most important way to forward runic studies, and these aspects have been poignantly formulated by Heslop (2014). A number of venues for future research stand out: Medial perspectives are inextricably connected with memory studies. The general development in this field has been most productive, and will in all like­ lihood provide important new understandings. This concerns not only actual materiality, but also and not least the combination of and relation between differ­ ent representational forms and modes. Self-reflexivity in monuments and inscriptions is a natural part of the preoc­ cupation with mediality, but also serves to clarify broader notions of script, lan­



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guage and runes. This should provide a way of developing the long established debate on orality, literacy and ‘runacy’, by adding memory perspectives and performative aspects. As John Lindow warns, referring to Margaret Clunies Ross, “memory in an oral society is not to be equated with memory in a writing society” (Lindow 2014, 45). As the Viking Age rune stones serve not only as containers of memory but also as contributions to developed shared memory and consciousness, there should be room for developing a concept such as Brian Stock’s ‘textual communities’ into ‘memorial communities’, since the shared consciousness was only to a small extent dependent on text, and the actual effect of rune stones impacted also on the illiterate. Simultaneously, some rune stones reveal a significant will to dem­ onstrate the power of commanding memory by restricting access to it by making reading more difficult. While allowing for other kinds of memorial understand­ ing than reading, this effects social differentiation (cf. Arwill-Nordbladh 2007). The tension between creating cultural memory and restricting parts of it, thus enhancing social differentiation, is an important part of the memorial aspect of rune stones. Social structures have always been part of runic studies, and the study of them has progressed greatly in recent years. Still, stressing the constructive efforts of cultural memory, rather than tradition as such, should open new ways. This concerns not least performative aspects, which have proven essential. On the one hand side, the stones in themselves create a space for re-enactment of informa­ tion, proposals and memories. How this is done and how the various parts of the stone interact in this, is a field for continued exploration. On the other hand, the rune stones are a key to reconstructing actual rituals and ceremonies. Some of these new approaches may come close to very old approaches: The new focus on performative and ceremonial aspects may in instances reawaken old scholarship’s interest in magic and ritual. The new focus on mediality includes perspectives on the runes themselves that may also come close to old scholar­ ship’s interest in number magic and curses, particularly on the Rök stone. While memory studies do and must include a number of perspectives and thus may refresh also more traditional knowledge on social and institutional contexts, the connection between culture and memory is not in itself new. Even focusing on memory, there is a risk of harking back into more static notions of tradition. In order to be functional, memory studies must maintain and develop the memory metaphor’s dynamic potential.

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Works cited Primary sources SRD = Samnordisk runtextdatabas. http://www.nordiska.uu.se/forskn/samnord.htm. (14 February 2018)

Secondary sources Andrén, Anders. 2000. “Re-reading Embodied Texts – an Interpretation of Rune-stones.”
 Current Swedish Archaeology 8: 7–32. Arwill-Nordbladh, Elisabeth. 2007. “Memory and Material Culture – the Rune-stone at Rök.” In Cultural Interaction Between East and West. Archaeology, Artefacts and Human Contacts in Northern Europe. Ed. Ulf Fransson, Sophie Bergerbrant, Fedir Androschchuk and Marie Svedin. Stockholm Studies in Archaeology, 44. Stockholm. 56–60. Assmann, Jan. 1995. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” New German Critique 65 (1988): 125–133. Bianchi, Marco. 2010. Runor som resurs. Vikingatida skriftkultur i Uppland och Södermanland. Uppsala. 2010. Gustavson, Helmer. 1991. Rökstenen. Svenska kulturminnen 23. Stockholm.  Harris, Joseph. 2009. “Philology, Elegy, and Cultural Change.” Gripla 20: 257–279. Harris, Joseph. 2010. “Old Norse Memorial Discourse between Orality and Literacy.” Along the Oral-Written Continuum. Types of Texts, Relations and their Implications. Ed. Slavica Ranković, Leidulv Melve and Else Mundal. Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, 20. Turnhout. 119–133. Heslop, Kate. 2014. “Minni and the Rhetoric of Memory in Eddic, Skaldic, and Runic Texts.” Minni and Muninn: Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 13–39. Holmberg, Per. 2015. “Svaren på Rökstenens gåtor: En socialsemiotisk analys av meningsskapande och rumslighet.” Futhark. International Journal of Runic Studies 6: 65–106. Jesch, Judith, 1998. “Still standing in Ågersta: Textuality and literacy in late Viking-Age rune stone inscriptions.” In Runeninschriften als Quellen interdisziplinärer Forschung Berlin. Ed. Klaus Düwel and Sean Nowak. Berlin. 462–475. Jesch, Judith. 2005. “Skaldic Verse, a Case of Literacy Avant la Lettre?” In Literacy in Medieval and Early Modern Scandinavian Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann. Odense. 187–210. 
 Klos, Lydia. 2009. Runensteine in Schweden. Studien zu Aufstellungsort und Funktion. Berlin and New York. Lindow, John. 2014. “Memory and Old Norse Mythology.” In Minni and Muninn: Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 41–57. Lönnroth, Lars. 1977. “The Riddles of the Rök-Stone: A Structural Approach.” Arkiv för nordisk filologi 92: 1–57.



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Malm, Mats. 2008. “Rökstenens tilltal.” In “Vi ska alla vara välkomna!” Nordiska studier tillägnade Kristinn Jóhannesson. Ed. Auður G. Magnúsdóttir, Henrik Janson, Karl G. Johansson, Mats Malm and Lena Rogström. Gothenburg. 243–257. Marez, Alain. 1997. “? – Une relecture de l’inscription de Rök.” Études germaniques 52: 543–557. 
 Mitchell, Stephen. 2013. “Memory, Mediality, and the ‘Performative Turn.’ Recontextualizing Remembering in Medieval Scandinavia.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 282–305. Nora, Pierre. 1989. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations 26. 7–24. Ralph, Bo. 2007. “Gåtan som lösning. Ett bidrag till förståelsen av Rökstenens runinskrift.” Maal og minne 2 (2007): 133–157. 
 Rigney, Anne. 2005. “Plenitude, scarcity and the circulation of cultural memory.” Journal of European Studies 35.1: 11–28. Sawyer, Birgit. 2000. The Viking-Age Rune-Stones. Custom and Commemoration in Early Medieval Scandinavia. Oxford. Widmark, Gun. 1997. “Tolkningen som social konstruktion. Rökstenens inskrift.” Runor och ABC. Elva föreläsningar från ett symposium i Stockholm våren 1995. Ed. Staffan Nyström. Sällskapet Runica et Mediævalia. Opuscula 4. Stockholm: 165–175. Zilmer, Kristel. 2010. “Viking Age Rune Stones in Scandinavia: The Interplay between Oral Monumentality and Commemorative Literacy.” In Along the Oral-Written Continuum. Types of Texts, Relations and their Implications. Ed. Slavica Rancović, Leidulf Melve and Else Mundal. Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, 20. Turnhout. 135–162.

Aesthetics and Communication

Jürg Glauser

I: 16 Literary Studies 1 Definition Analyses of examples which illustrate links between literature and memory must, quite naturally, form the basis for literary studies of memory, and, by extension, for investigations of literature from a mnemonic perspective. In the specific case of pre-modern Nordic textual culture, it is first and foremost the various forms of the Old Norse-Icelandic literary genres prevalent in the Viking Age and the Middle Ages – eddic and skaldic poetry, sagas, ballads, runic inscriptions, learned and scholarly writings and so on – which are of central importance. Such genres and texts reveal an extraordinarily extensive and varied spectrum of topics and prob­ lems, which recurrently engage with aspects of mnemonic culture through the medium of literature. In Old Norse-Icelandic literature, it is often difficult to dis­ tinguish literary texts from related genres and narrative modes, such as myth, folklore or historiography. This is i.a. due to the often complex transmission history of the texts and necessitates working with a broad definition of ‘litera­ ture’. In addition, the selected approaches from literary studies must always take into consideration the distinct rhetorical and medial characteristics inherent in literature. Traditionally, the field of ‘literature’ (as a deliberately ‘designed’ narrative, an aesthetic form of verbal expression) and ‘memory’ (as a culturally defining process) appear as naturally combined in scholarship, as was the case in Renate Lachmann’s seminal monograph, Memory and Literature (Lachmann 1997) / Gedächtnis und Literatur (Lachmann 1990). More recent studies have succeeded in delineating the various relationships between the two more clearly, so that indi­ vidual aspects may be differentiated. Discussions frequently focus on three catego­ ries of memory: “memory in literature” (that is, representations of acts of remem­ bering or memory as part of a narrative), “memory of literature” (best seen in cases of intertextuality) and “literature as a medium of memory” (see Erll 2011 [2005]). One of the central preoccupations of literary studies is the analysis of narra­ tives. Narratives – no matter in which literary or medial form they may be trans­ mitted – are undoubtedly at the heart of these analyses and hence central objects for analysis in literary studies. Narratives are equally important for memory studies, whether in relation to individual, private, or personal memory (i.e. the memory of individuals) or social, collective, cultural forms of collective memory. In as far as both are mediated through language, they are subjected to rules of narration. Literature and memory are, therefore, intimately related. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-022

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It may be added that a central part of this relationship between memory and literature is the idea of ‘a literary component’ within and of memory, that is, the fact that narratives – language-based, narrative utterances – always participate in memory, and that memory may only be expressed in narrative form. These relationships suggest that it can often be difficult to separate the two entities, literature and memory. The literature of a particular era – which may be under­ stood as denoting an individual text or a whole genre or form of expression – is frequently congruent with memory. Literature provides an ideal place in which memory is generated and discussed; literature is the medium, through which a certain culture (e.g. the Viking Age and the medieval and early modern Nordic culture) may best engage with the position, function, or the meaning of memory within this culture. In literature or, to be more precise, in individual forms of liter­ ary texts, such phenomena become more evident than in other media, and may thus be examined and interpreted more clearly. This also implies that memory in literature and memory of literature are always inherently literary and therefore an aesthetic phenomenon, and can only be understood as such; they are phe­ nomena which may not be directly and in their unmediated forms correlated with reality, however historically, socially, politically, and so on accurate the represen­ tation might be. Contrary to the majority of earlier attempts which sought to ‘reconstruct’ memory, a theory of memory that conforms to these observations of literary memory would, therefore, not presuppose an initial, authentic, and extra-textual event, which later becomes stored in oral or written media to, eventually, be medi­ ated as memory. Rather, such a constructive textual model would be based on the assumption that memory stands at the beginning, insofar as an act of remember­ ing is constructed through literature, which, shaped by media (in this case the oral or written literary narrative), is subsequently awarded the status of an event. This development would, in its central points, reflect Aristotle’s exposition of the movements and functions of individual human memories (Metaphysics, Book 1): sensations and impressions (φαντασία) form memories (μνήμη), which in turn become experience (εμπειρία), and finally knowledge (επιστήμή) and art (τέχνη): “γίγνεται δ᾽ ἐκ τῆς μνήμης ἐμπειρία τοῖς ἀνθρώποις: αἱ γὰρ πολλαὶ μνῆμαι τοῦ αὐτοῦ πράγματος μιᾶς ἐμπειρίας δύναμιν ἀποτελοῦσιν.” (Aristotle’s Metaphysics, 1993, 980β). [“It is from memory that men acquire experience, because the numerous memories of the same thing eventually produce the effect of a single experience.” (Aristotle 1993 [1989], 980b)] Also in Aristotle’s thinking, it is there­ fore memories from which everything originates and which finally enable the conception of art.



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2 State of research In the last 20 years, aspects of the relationship between literature and memory have been addressed primarily in contemporary literary studies and predomi­ nantly by German-speaking researchers in German studies, English studies, and Slavonic studies. Scholars such as Ansgar Nünning, Ann Rigney, Astrid Erll and many others have advanced Jan and Aleida Assmann’s work on cultural memory as a general cultural-historic concept, but have also engaged with Lachmann’s work on intertextuality, or, more precisely, examined the relationship between literature (understood in a more narrow sense) and memory. They consequently have often focused on the literary text as text (on literature and cultural memory in general, see Erll and Rigney 2006). The independently developing, general opening of literary studies towards cultural and media analysis has led to a realignment of the focus on various aspects of memory, which resulted in a broader, exceptionally dynamic and inherently interdisciplinary development of scholar­ ship in areas such as literature, film, art, media studies, history, and others. In addition to the numerous journals concerned with various aspects of ‘Memory’, there emerged book series such as Media and Cultural Memory (Erll and Nünning, since 2004) and Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies (Hoskins John Sutton, since 2010), handbooks such as Cultural Memory Studies. An Interdisciplinary Handbook (Erll and Nünning 2008), Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies (Tota and Hagen 2016), Handbook of Culture and Memory (Wagoner 2018) and such initiatives as “The Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform” (FMSP). All have become important for memory studies research in their own right. Surveying these developments, one senses that during the initial phase of memory studies, the main aim was to identify memory culture, which led to the realisation that memory is an exceptionally dynamic entity. In the second phase, the focus lay on describing memory in individual cultures, a strategy that fore­ grounded the culturally specific aspects of memory, aspects that were usually national(istic) and largely delineated as stable. In more recent years, it is first and foremost the transcultural aspects of memory which have defined and inspired scholarship and in certain ways, this shift of focus again marks a new phase in memory studies (for a valuable, if short, survey of the history of the field and the state of research see Erll 2011a; 2011 [2005], especially 48–51, 67–70; 2017; 2018). Literary memory and media studies are, in fact, now among the most dominant paradigms for studying new literatures. In contrast, the history of memory studies in medieval literature, and in medieval Scandinavian studies in particular, is comparatively young and far less differentiated. In medieval studies, it has predominantly been the various aspects of medieval memoria, and particularly mnemotechnics, which has been the focus

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of attention (see Hajdu 1936; Yates 1966; Carruthers 1990, 1998; and many others). Various studies outlined that in a medieval sense, memoria constituted a kind of cultural transfer and was closely related to mnemonic practices and writing strategies (see Cubitt 2000; Mierke 2008). With respect to the previously menti­ oned second phase of memory studies and its tendency to see memory as a nati­ onal or pre-national concept, there is a distinct tradition reaching back into the medieval period according to which tribal history (origo gentis, historia gentis), to which memoria gentis belongs, was often transmitted together with medieval tribal laws (leges gentis), so that the nation- and group-defining function of laws and historical texts was recognised early on. A notable example from the Nordic Middle Ages is Guta saga [Saga of the Gotlanders], the only extant copy of which in Old Gutnish is transmitted at the end of a manuscript of Guta lag [Law of the Gotlanders] (see Mitchell 2014). In this, and in countless other examples, we see how memory is shared by a social and cultural group, and is used to express the identity of this group. Memory therefore functions as a means of culturally distin­ guishing one group from another. In Old Norse-Icelandic studies and especially in saga scholarship there has been a long and far-ranging dispute about whether the sagas of the Icelanders should be classified as an oral or a written genre: the debates between the freeprose and the book-prose doctrines are well-known. This has often provided occa­ sions to discuss the concept(ion)s of history and memory within the sagas. Early examples of a memory theory avant la lettre in the pre-modern Nordic material are, for example, also the folkloristic analyses of traditon, made by Carl Wihelm von Sydow, who in 1934 introduced the concept of a ‘Memorat’ (memorate) into the study of oral tradition (von Sydow 1934; Dégh and Vázsonyi 1974; see also Bahna 2015). So although a certain amount of scholarship is interested in forms of memory and rememberance in Old Norse-Icelandic texts on a more general level, the concept of cultural memory, primarily outlined by Jan Assmann (Assmann 2011 [1984]), was first related to Old Norse-Icelandic studies in general terms in a monograph on the sagas of the Icelanders by Fechner-Smarsly (1996). There followed further analyses of sagas of the Icelanders which focussed more on liter­ ary elements of these narratives, but operated also through applications of Ass­ mann’s theories (Glauser 2000; Bennett 2007; Hermann 2009, 2010; Glauser 2011, 2016; Wamhoff 2016). Because it had proved useful for a general cultural and literary description of memory culture, especially of the Icelandic Middle Ages, these and other studies took the concept formulated by Assmann about ancient cultures and refined and tailored it to medieval Nordic contexts. However, Assmann’s model of cultural memory does have the disadvantage that the specifi­ cally literary nature of texts such as the sagas, Eddas and skaldic poetry cannot



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be focussed on sufficiently, because the concept in itself is primarily drawn along broad tendencies observable in early civilisations and their own, again cultur­ ally very specific, use of the past. Recent approaches in memory studies are, in discussing literary texts, keener to stress the more specifically literary and aes­ thetic phenomena in pre-modern texts. They understand a memory-focused anal­ ysis of literature primarily in relation to mediality, performativity and rhetoric (Glauser 2007; Hermann 2013; Mitchell 2013; Hermann 2014; Heslop 2014; Goeres 2015; Hermann 2015, 2017; Heslop and Glauser 2018; Schneeberger forthcoming). The branch of memory studies concerned with Old Norse-Icelandic sources has produced valuable contributions to what might be called the first and second phases of international memory studies. In contrast, the most recent focus of international memory studies, namely, the transcultural phenomena of memory, has only been marginally approached in the Nordic field to date (e.g. Jesch’s anal­ ysis of the Viking-Age diaspora, Jesch 2008, 2015). But it would indeed be possible for pre-modern Nordic memory studies to successfully draw on this ‘transcultural turn’ (see Bond and Rapson 2014), at least in certain areas. For it is this ‘transcul­ turality of memory’ (see Erll 2011a, 2011b, 2017, 2018), analysed intensely within recent memory studies, for which the Old Norse-Icelandic textual culture with its pronounced constellations of diaspora could provide interesting examples which could be studied for phenomena such as translations, re-writings, and re-media­ tions. These elements in fact define medieval Nordic literature to a large extent, and the literary tradition of the Nordic medieval period can present important contributions to the study of the “longue durée of cultural memory”, as well as to “the fundamental relationality of all cultural memory” (Erll 2017). If one cor­ relates the concept of the transculturality of memory with pre-modern Nordic textual culture, both aspects – transculturality, memory – are central, because Nordic literature is part of Nordic memory culture, which, in its general composi­ tion, incorporates transcultural phenomena. “The ‘transcultural’ is […] not only a category for studying memory in our current, global age, or an alternative to the two approaches delineated above, but a perspective on memory that can in prin­ ciple be chosen with respect to any historical period and with a view to both the synchronic circulation of representations (e.g. of ‘traumatic pasts’) as well as to the diachronic dimension of memory (‘afterlives’). Literary and media studies can contribute to an understanding of such ‘traveling memory’ […], mnemonic rituals […] or media-technologies and -formats […] in their local, translocal, and global dimensions.” (Erll 2011b, 4–5, see also Erll 2011a). Yet to date, pre-modern Nordic memory studies are far away from participating in this international, transcul­ tural, in many cases even global, turn. But it must be asked whether such a general opening of questions, themes, methods and objects does not carry a danger of losing the focus on more spe­

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cifically literary, explicitly medieval concerns. Do the answers from such open and general(ising) approaches inevitably become too broad, losing their validity? To avoid sweeping statements, the philological foundations of the studies which discuss the relationship(s) between literature and memory must always be care­ fully maintained.

3 Pre-modern Nordic material Observations like these clearly demonstrate that Old Norse literature is rich in mnemonic topoi, constellations and modes of thinking. Memory-related matter of this kind is extant in countless variations, such as narrated acts of remember­ ing within the narratives (memory in literature); on the level of metaphorically expressed, textual memory-figures (memory of literature); and, finally, in forms which shape the texts as media for memory (media of literary memoria).

Literary scenes of remembering A range of sagas, first and foremost the translated riddarasögur [chivalric sagas], but also many historiographic texts of the medieval Icelandic literary tradition, contain prologues of various lengths in which memory is explicitly considered. Usually such prologues are concerned primarily with questions of mediality and historicity, and hence with mnemotechnical aspects, as is evident in the short prologue to Hungrvaka [Hunger-Stirrer], a history of the first Icelandic bishops, in which we read: “Hefi ek af því þenna bœkling saman settan, at eigi falli mér með ǫllu ór minni þat er ek heyrða af þessu máli segja inn fróða mann Gizur Hallsson, ok enn nǫkkura menn aðra merkiliga hafa í frásǫgn fœrt.” (Hungrvaka, 2002, Ch. 1) [“Therefore I have set this little book together, so that it may not com­ pletely drop out of my memory; that which I heard the learned man Gizurr Halls­ son to say on this subject and which a number of other distinguished men besides have conveyed in narratives.” (Hungrvaka, 2013, Ch. 1)] Of central importance is the topos of escaping forgetting by employing effective methods and techniques which aid remembering: “En lioð þau er ec hævi hœyrt er gor voro i syðra bræt­ lande af þæim kynlegum atburðom er i þui lande gærðuz þa likaðe mer at snua ok oðrum segia þui at ec hafða mioc morg hœyrt þau er ec vil at visu fram telia. ok engom glœyma af. þui er ec ma minni minu a koma […].” (Strengleikar, 6/8) [“But the lais which I have heard, which were composed in Brittany about the strange adventures that took place in that land, I wanted to translate and tell to others,



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because I had heard very many things which I certainly want to tell. And I want to leave out nothing of what I can recall to my memory […]” (Strengleikar, 7/9)] It is mostly the competence of writing that is addressed. An important tes­ tament to this concern is found in the lengthy prologue to Þiðreks saga [Saga of Thidrek of Bern], in which the change from orality to literacy and hence the advantages of the various media of narration and memory are discussed. On the other hand, profound reflections on the conditions under which literary memory may exist are also present in the pre-modern Norse tradition, even if they are rather rare. The best-known examples are the prologues to Strengleikar, an Old Norwegian translation of Marie de France’s Lais (thirteenth century), which consist of a comprehensive frame-prologue, as well as of individual short pro­ logues to the embedded narratives, which discuss important questions relating to literary memory, such as interlinguistic translation. In this, the text presup­ poses that foreign models for narratives may be viewed as a distinct layer in the archaeology of literary memory – especially when a translation retains (‘stores’) elements of the narration which are no longer extant in the original. Exactly the same phenomenon – in which texts based on older strata of transmission and employing different media for transmission, and hence exhibiting a diachronic kind of intertextuality – is widely found in Old Norse-Icelandic poetry. The narrative episodes in which things are remembered (and these are numerous in the Nordic tradition) must be kept separate from discussions of medieval mnemotechnics, as they portray different forms of relating to memory and remembering. For example, Gísla saga Súrssonar [Gísli Súrsson’s Saga], nar­ rates how Þórdís memorises a complex stanza which her brother Gísli had pub­ licly recited, only to unriddle it on her way home: “Gísli kvað þá vísu, er æva skyldi: Teina sák í túni […]. Þórdís nam þegar vísuna, gengr heim ok hefir ráðit vísuna.” (Gísla saga Súrssonar, Ch. 18) [“Gísli then spoke a verse which should not have been spoken: I saw the shoots reach up […] Thordis remembered the verse [immediately], went home and [had] interpreted what it meant.” (Gísli Súrsson’s Saga, Ch. 18)] Other texts document the observation of memoria in a religious context. In Oddur Snorrason’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar, it is said that: Óláfr konungr var vinr mikill Englakonungs, ok hafði hann á honum mikla virðing. Ok þá er stýrði Norðmann ríki Haraldr Sigurðarson, þá var Játvarðr konungr í Englandi, er var ágætr konungr í mǫrgum hlutum. Hann minntisk á þann vinskap er Óláfr konungr Tryggvason hafði haft við fǫður hans, Aðalráð. Tók hann nú at vegsama Óláf konung Tryggvason, ok því var hann vanr á hverju ári at segja riddurum sínum frá Óláfi konungi á páskatíð, frá mǫrgum ágætligum verkum hans, er hann hafði unnit. (Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar eptir Odd munk Snorrason, Ch. 81)

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[King Olav was a great friend of king of England and he held him in great honour. And when Haraldr Sigurðarson ruled the kingdom of the Norsemen, Játvarðr [Edward] was king of England, and he was a good king in many respects. He remembered the close friendship which Olav Tryggvason had had with his father, Aðalráðr [Æthelred]. He began to praise King Olav Tryggvason and every year at Easter he told his knights about King Olav and about the great deeds which he did. (author’s translation)]

These comments also show how a ritualised continuation of the memory of an exceptional person (in this case the missionary king Óláfr Tryggvason) contri­ butes to his glorification and is adapted to the rhetorical structure of the text. Memoria, in this case, is a literary device. A corresponding example is found in the seemingly pagan milieu of the his­ toricising Svarfdœla saga [The Saga of the People of Svarfardardal]: The lethally wounded Þórólfr asks his brother Þorsteinn to name any future son he may have after him, as otherwise his name would slip into oblivion: “‘Mér þykkir nafn mitt eigi til lengi hafa uppi verit, ok mun þat falla niðr sem sina, ok mun mín at engu getit, þegar þú ert frá liðinn. […] Vilda ek, ef þér yrði sonar auðit, at þú létir Þórólf heita […], fyrir því at þá væntik, at nafn mitt muni uppi, meðan heimr er byggðr.’” (Svarfdœla saga, Ch. 5) [“I think that my name has not survived long enough and that it will disappear like withered grass and be forgotten, when you are gone. […] I would like you, if you have a son, to name him Thorolf, […] because then I can hope that my name will survive as long as the world is inhabited.” (The Saga of the People of Svarfardardal, Ch. 5)] After Þórólfr’s demise, a mound is erected for him and a funeral ceremony is held, as was usual at that time (Ch. 7). The dying Þórólfr thus instigates the common trope of naming a future descendant after him to ensure that his own name, and with it his memory, does not die with him. This request may betray a common human wish to live on after death – a fundamental force behind many cultures of remembering. In chapter 10 of the saga, a son is indeed born to Þorsteinn and is named Þórólfr. But remembering and memory may, on the level of narrative figures, also be activated by a minor textual element such as a single word. In Laxdœla saga [The Saga of the People of Laxardal], Guðrún incites her brothers and husband to finally rise and take revenge on Kjartan by uttering a famous hvǫt (encitement): “‘Gott skaplyndi hefði þér fengit, ef þér værið dœtr einhvers bónda ok láta hvárki at yðr verða gagn né mein; en slíka svívirðing ok skǫmm, sem Kjartan hefir yðr gǫrt, þá sofi þér eigi at minna, at hann riði hér hjá garði við annan mann, ok hafa slíkir menn mikit svínsminni’.” (Laxdœla saga, Ch. 48) [“With your tem­ perament, you’d have made some farmer a good group of daughters, fit to do no one any good or any harm. After all the abuse and shame Kjartan has heaped upon you, you don’t let it disturb your sleep while he goes riding by under your



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very noses, with only one other man to accompany him. Such men have no better memory than a pig.” (The Saga of the People of Laxardal, Ch. 48)] It is the word “svínsminni” (a hapax legomenon in Old Norse-Icelandic prose literature) – here combined with the stereotypical accusation of being effeminate – which triggers the subsequent action by becoming a medium for remembering past events. The powerful imagery arguably makes the remarkably lethargic men whom Guðrún addresses remember, and with these memories, emotions are aroused. And this is exactly what the female inciter Guðrún intends. This example in fact demon­ strates nicely how factual knowledge and literary memory may diverge. While we now know that pigs have an excellent memory and are highly capable of learning new things, in the literary sphere Guðrún likens the men’s lack of memory (or their lack of a will to remember) to the apparently equally faulty memory of pigs. Through this image, she also successfully conjures up a negative association with these animals, commonly seen as lowly and unclean creatures, and links these to her relatives’ lack of a feeling of honour. Literature thus employs its own, creative means and generates an imaginative expression of modes of remembering. These do not need to reflect reality, or may even contradict it outright. Repetition is a familiar strategy by which memory is created, and Icelandic texts make use of it in very different ways. For example, in its first part, Egils saga [Egil’s Saga] orchestrates a ‘gallery’ of its personages and the relevant narra­ tive strands through a noticeable repetition of the names of the main characters, Þórólfr Kveld-Úlfsson and Þórólfr Skalla-Grímsson, and the resulting recognition creates what we may call a text-internal memory. One of the most frequently discussed scenes in all of saga literature may be seen as an accumulation of explicitly formulated and implicitly recalled elements of remembering. In Njáls saga [Njal’s Saga], the outlaw Gunnarr is set upon by his enemies in his own house. He asks his wife Hallgerðr to give him a lock of her hair so she and his mother can make it into a string for his bow, thus enabling him to face his enemies. But Hallgerðr refuses his request by drawing on the following memory formula: “‘Þá skal ek nú,’ segir hon, ‘muna þér kinnhestinn, ok hirði ek aldri, hvárt þú verr þik lengr eða skemr.’” [“‘Then I’ll remind you,’ she said, ‘of the slap on my face, and I don’t care whether you hold out for a long or a short time.’”] Her mother-in-law Rannveig comments on Hallgerðr’s utterance with a reply that has equally become a proverb: “‘Illa ferr þér, ok mun þín skǫmm lengi uppi.’” (Brennu-Njáls saga, Ch. 77) [“‘You are evil, and your shame will live long.’” (Njal’s Saga, Ch. 77)] Hallgerðr makes explicit reference to an event which took place some time ago: “Gunarr reiddisk ok mælti: ‘Illa er þá, ef ek em þjófsnautr,’ – ok lýstr hana kinnhest. Hon kvazk þann hest muna skyldu ok launa, ef hon mætti.” (Brennu-Njáls saga, Ch. 48) [“‘It’s a bad thing if I’m partner to a thief’ – and he smacked her on the face. Hallgerd said she would remember this slap and pay it

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back if she could.” (Njal’s Saga, Ch. 48)] By explicitly using the lexeme muna (‘to remind someone of something’), Hallgerðr refers to the previous smack, a central Leitmotif of the saga. She not only makes reference to the physical assault by Gunnarr, but also to the fact that her two previous husbands Þorvaldr Ósvífursson and Glúmr Óleifsson had humiliated her in similar fashion and had subsequently met their deaths through her doing. The formulaic turn of actions ‘smack – death’ creates intra-textual memory, because both the characters and the audience cannot help but remember the blows of Hallgerðr’s previous husbands and their fatal consequences. Such manifold and diverse episodes and scenes of memory which deal with remembering are all connected, and they create a net(work) of memories and action. The internal logic of the narrative demands that the char­ acters – often to the astonishment of the audience – do not adapt their actions in accordance with their memory. This example also demonstrates how memory – at least in the fictional universe of the sagas – is often linked to physical violence, presupposes violence, and may lead to further violence. Similar or even identical observations can be made in relation to the poetic genres of Old Norse-Icelandic literature, the poetic Edda and skaldic poetry. Here too, the mnemonics and the memorial tradition of the mythological poems are staged on various levels, as is the case in Alvíssmál [All-Wise’s Sayings] (see Clunies Ross 2005, 102–103; for eddic memorial poems, cf. Schorn 2017, 164–167). Eddic poems too make reference to burial mounds: “sjaldan bautarstein­ar / standa brautu nær, / nema reisi niðr at niði” (Hávamál, St. 72) [”seldom do memorial stones stand by the wayside, / unless the kinsman raises them for another” (Sayings of the High One, St. 72)]. In the part of the Edda con­ cerned with heroic poems, the fatal entanglement between the three characters Brynhildr – Sigurðr – Guðrún (which eventually leads to the death of the first two and Guðrún’s tragedy – is only brought into motion when Sigurðr is given a potion of oblivion (óminnisveig), which obliviates any memory he has of his fiancée, Brynhildr, and in turn means that he thinks himself free to marry Guðrún. Espe­ cially the elegiac Guðrún-poems, but also Sigurðarkviða in skamma [Short Poem about Sigurd] are interwoven with gestures of mourning and commemoration, which frequently find expression in emotional terminology. The “daprar minjar” [sad memories], which Guðrún has in Sigurðarkviða in skamma, St. 54, “at dauðan ver” [of her dead husband] Sigurðr, shape the whole tone of the elegiac, retro­ spective poems. Combined with minni (memories), they are a constant expression of the deceit which they suffered: “Margs á ek minnask, / hvé við mik fóru, / þá er mik sára / svikna hǫfðuð; / vaðin at vilja / vark mepan ek lifðak.” (Sigurðarkviða in skamma, St. 57) [“Much I remember: how they [you] acted against me, / those who betrayed me, caused me pain; / deprived of joy was I while I lived.” (Short Poem about Sigurd, St. 57)] Just like forgetting, remembering can be the reason



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for sadness and sorrow. The whole second part of the songs in the eddic Codex Regius becomes an overarching illustration of the effect misguided forgetting may have, and this in turn causes traumatic memories which makes it possible to read the eddic heroic poems as a discourse on the disastrous interrelatedness between remembering and forgetting, presented in gripping, poetic form. In skaldic poetry, the presence of mnemonic thinking is exemplified by poems such as erfikvæði (funeral poem[s], in which both title and content make refer­ ence to remembering) and also by the well-known kenningar. A single example from Egill Skallagrímsson’s Arinbjarnarkviða [Poem in Arinbjorn’s Praise], St. 25, suffices to outline the possible ways in which skaldic poetry might engage with memory in literature: “hlóðk lofkǫst 
/ þann’s lengi stendr / 
óbrotgjarn / 
í bragar túni” (Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar, Ch. 78) [“I have piled a mound / of praise that long / will stand without crumbling / in poetry’s field” (Egils’s Saga, Ch. 80)]. As is the case in most skaldic poems, this stanza also does not make direct refer­ ence to the term minni, rather, the kennings paraphrase ‘memory’ at length and through various modes of reference, in this case as “lofkǫstr” (see Heslop 2014).

Metaphors of memory Very often, the literary transmission of texts during the Middle Ages takes the form of palimpsests. In terms of materiality, palimpsest means that a text may be over­ written and partially erased in a manuscript, so that it remains only indistinctly or partially visible on the parchment or paper. Yet the older text remains in some form, bearing testimony to a previous narrative, marking a temporal component to textual formation and also creating a metaphorical memory of the manuscript. A textual, literary parallel to the metaphor of the palimpsest is the idea that a text (in actual fact, any text) speaks through another text’s voice(s) and in doing so preserves the memory of the other text. The phenomenon – commonly referred to as intertextuality – has been studied most extensively by Mikhail Bakhtin and, subsequently, by Julia Kristeva and Renate Lachmann (see Lachmann 1997, 2004, 2008). The concept of intertextuality does not presuppose merely a direct (and directly motivated) relationship between two texts, but is a formative category of all literature, even in its medieval forms. Both ideas, that of the palimpsest and that of intertextuality, are relevant to our understanding of literature and memory, as the following examples from Old Norse-Icelandic literature illustrate. Of particular interest here are the skaldic kennings, as they are rich in, at times, rather extraordinary imagery (see Marold 1983, especially 65; Bergsveinn Birgisson 2010; Malm 2016). Drawing on poetic paraphrasing with metaphoric or metonymic function, a kenning successfully creates memory figures by fashion­

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ing spatially and mentally highly compressed, intertextual relationships. In fact, a kenning’s implicit and often encrypted techniques of literary allusion closely reflect central aspects of intertextuality. For one, a kenning may contain a multi­ plicity of voices. Furthermore, and even more importantly for memory studies, a kenning’s narrated time may include a variety of previous time layers through its references to mythological and heroic narratives, which are more fully presented in other narratives. A kenning thus carries a memory of events from olden times and keeps them alive. For example, the lausavísa [single stanza] 8 by Eyvindr skáldaspillir employs the simple, two-part gold-kenning “Fýrisvalla fræ” [seed of the Fyris field] to evoke the listeners’ memories of a certain episode in Danish heroic narratives, in which the Danish king Hrólfr kraki throws the gold which he had just robbed at the feet of his Swedish pursuer and therefore metaphorically sows it in the ground (see von See 1980, 36–38). It may therefore be argued that at its core, the skaldic kenning conceptualises models of memory en miniature. The kenning participates here in a movement which is applicable also to myths. Both kennings and myths are revealing in terms of their inherent memory. If one agrees with Hans Blumenberg and others that myths are only ever identifi­ able in their various states of reception and never in their original forms, every single narration of a myth may be understood as a construct of memory (see Blu­ menberg 1971, 1985). Myths would therefore always be attempts to describe mem­ ories of mythical narratives through the means of literature, but these mythical narratives in themselves are constructs of memory. Vǫluspá [Seeress’s Prophecy], a text which has not yet been mentioned in this essay, is the first poem in the main manuscript containing the eddic poems, and a powerful monument of memory culture in all its dimensions. Muna as the most common term for referring to ‘memory, remembering’ in Old Norse is also a central topos in this splendid visionary poem. In the first two stanzas, the seeress says of herself: “þau er fremst um man”, “Ek man […] / níu man ek heima […]” (Vǫluspá, Sts. 1–2) [“Those which I remember from the first, I remember […] / I remember nine worlds” (Seeress’s Prophecy, Sts. 1–2)]. In the following stanzas, other aspects of remembering become foregrounded, as when in stanza 19, the vǫlva (seeress) says: “Ask veit ek standa” [“I know that an ash-tree stands”], or in stanza 27: “sér hon” [“she sees”]. Knowledge (expressed by the verb vita ‘to know’) and seeing (expressed by the verb sjá ‘to see’) complete the panoply and, in conjunction with verbs in the future tense (munu, skulu in stanzas 59–60, 62–63) and verbs expressing acts of narrating (“fram telja” [“declare”], St. 1) sketch the mnemonic horizon of the poem. Remembering here includes both the senses and knowledge, and it is always a narrative, dialogic, performative, social, and hence a cultural act. What is further remarkable in Vǫluspá is how closely past and future appear to be connected, as the vǫlva not only reminds us of things



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past, but likewise refers to the future. Vǫluspá is thus a poem about remembering (narrative) and about what is to be remembered primordially (myths). Because of the prominent position of Vǫluspá in the manuscript, the Poetic Edda as a whole appears to be tremendously concerned with remembering. If, besides the giant­ ess Gunnlǫð (Gunnlod), there is another figure in Old Norse-Icelandic tradition which appears to remind us of the Greek goddess of memory, Mnemosyne, it is doubtless the seeress of Vǫluspá. Much as is the case in the classical myth of Mne­ mosyne, who procreates the muses with Zeus, the vǫlva’s relationship with the highest god, Óðinn (Odin), is worth remarking on. Óðinn is her partner in the dialogues of the poem and is the god of poetry and of wisdom. In the eddic poem Hávamál, which in the manuscript follows immediately after Vǫluspá, Óðinn remembers events which occurred in connection with the myths of the mead of poetry, and he does so in narrative mode. The power which Vǫluspá expresses in the figure of the seeress is remarkable, and makes her emerge as a literary pathos formula, as defined by Aby Warburg (for Mmenosyne and pathos formulae, see Matussek 2001; Erll 2018). The vǫlva as portrayed in Vǫluspá may therefore be seen as a kind of memory machine (for this term and idea, see Draaisma 1995a, 1995b) and, it follows, also as a metaphor of memory. She embodies memory to the extent that she may be described as an externalised memory – a concept of which Old Norse-Icelan­ dic literature has many examples. These include birds (ravens, heron), objects (rings), liquids such as (ó)minnisǫl (beer of remembering/oblivion) or (ó)minnisveig (potion of remembering/oblivion), all of which may become connected with memory (on Óðinn’s ravens, see Mitchell 2018). If Vǫluspá and perhaps to a certain extent the whole of the Poetic Edda present a kind of implicit memory theory, the Prose Edda may be described as a memory handbook in the Old Norse-Icelandic tradition. In multiple narratives and dis­ cursive examples, the Prose Edda demonstrates what remembering and memory represent in Old Norse texts, and how they may be expressed through language. In all four parts of the Prose Edda, forgetting and remembering are central con­ cerns. Even the prologue outlines how the memory of God is constantly threat­ ened and can only be guaranteed through communication. The second part of the Prose Edda, Gylfaginning [The Tricking of Gylfi], tells of the origin of remem­ bering and memory and how it is spread throughout the world. Within a fictional setting, a mnemonic theory is sketched out, a theory which is mainly based on acts of narrating and repetition. The third part of the Prose Edda, Skáldskaparmál [The Language of Poetry], continues the narrative and probes how this poetry may preserve knowledge about how older poetry functioned. Even the fourth and last part of the Prose Edda, Háttatal [List of Verse-Forms], a late, lengthy skaldic poem, seeks to enshrine the memory of the old poetic art. On all thematic/nar­

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rative levels of mythography, heroic epic, and historiography, as well as on the more clearly discursive levels of rhetoric, mediality, and linguistic theory, the Prose Edda outlines memory, remembrance, and oblivion as acts and processes with a founding character. Especially the narratives of the first three parts illus­ trate quite clearly that memory is an unstable, fragile and constantly threatened concept and thus was seen as in constant need of reproduction.

Literary media of memory Narrative media of memory in literature have been discussed from various per­ spectives in this analysis. To conclude, it suffices to stress a further remarkable aspect: the importance of the material transmission of Old Icelandic literature in medieval and early modern parchment and paper manuscripts. Its remarkably long transmission is a specific features of Icelandic literature originating in the Viking Age and medieval period, and this feature is especially important from the perspective of literary history. It means that narratives and modes of narra­ tion which were first written down in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries con­ tinued to be transmitted in a quasi-medieval form (reading aloud from handwrit­ ten copies of older texts) well into the modern period, in some cases even into the early twentieth century. These media of remembering thus existed alongside print culture. In many cases, Icelandic texts have a transmission history spanning several hundred years, which offers remarkable ground for exploring the (still unwritten) history of medieval and early modern literary media of remembering, as well as the corresponding cultures of memory (see Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdót­ tir 2014). The importance of these literature-based constructions of the past for Icelandic self-perception made it possible that – by drawing on the lavish spirit of national romanticism in the nineteenth century – the whole culture, and a ter­ ritory which only later developed into a nation, could be celebrated as a sacred place of memory, as is evident in the work of the Danish writer Adam Oehlen­ schläger, who, in one of his poems, refers to Iceland as a “Ihukommelses Tempel” [Temple of memory]. Many of the examples mentioned above draw attention to the central role of control and power, both on the level of the individual narratives and poems and in the broader context of the transmission of works and genres. The relationship between power, control of the archive and control of memory has long been the focus of history and discourse analysis (see Erll 2011 [2005], 51 with reference to Derrida; see also Geary 1994). That this complex relationship is a topic which relates to mnemonic aspects even outside the field of history and is equally rel­ evant for the connection between literature and memory, is perhaps most evident



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in the pre-modern Nordic sources in the case of the sagas of the Icelanders and the kings’ sagas. In these and other narratives such as the eddic poems or the Prose Edda, it is repeatedly shown that power is inseparably linked to memory. Whoever holds power has control over the literary canon, i.e. the archive, and therefore also over memory and the way it is practiced. Power creates memory, rules over memory, even consumes memory, power is, therefore, ‘mnemopha­ gous’ (see Vésteinn Ólason 1998; Glauser 2000, 2016 [2006]). This also entails, however, that memory is a legitimising guarantor for power.

4 Perspectives for future research Future studies on memory in Old Norse-Icelandic literature may fruitfully engage with the many forms and themes which have hitherto not been looked at from a memory studies perspective. Besides the skaldic poetry, this first and foremost includes the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda. The approach to pre-modern Nordic memory culture through literary studies should be open to current trends in (interdisciplinary) literary studies and memory studies and engage more closely with areas such as rhetoric, performativity, spatialisation, mediality, emotions and the senses. Not least, they should open themselves to concepts such as transculturality, employed primarily within transcultural memory studies. This field in particular could contribute many instructive insights to Old Norse culture. The post-medieval manuscript culture, too, could be successfully analysed in a much broader context if approached from memory studies and transcultural perspectives.

Works cited Primary sources Aristotle. Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Ed. W.D. Ross. 1924. Aristotle. Aristotle in 23 Volumes. Vol. 17. Trans. Hugh Tredennick. Cambridge, MA, and London, 1993 [1989]. Brennu-Njáls saga. Ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson. ÍF, 12. Reykjavík, 1954. Egil’s Saga. Trans. Bernard Scudder. In The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, including 49 tales. I. Ed. Viðar Hreinsson. Reykjavík, 1997. 33–177. Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar. Ed. Sigurður Nordal. ÍF, 2. Reykjavík, 1933. Gísla saga Súrssonar. In Vestfirðinga sǫgur. Ed. Björn K. Þórólfsson and Guðni Jónsson. Reykjavík. 1943.

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Gísli Súrsson’s Saga. Trans. Martin S. Regal. In The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, including 49 tales. II. Ed. Viðar Hreinsson. Reykjavík, 1997. 1–48. Hungrvaka. In Biskupa sögur. II. Ed. Ásdís Egilsdóttir. ÍF, 16. Reykjavík, 2002. 1–43. Hungrvaka. Trans. Camilla Basset. MA-thesis. Háskóli Íslands. Ort, 2013. https://skemman.is/ bitstream/1946/15914/1/CamillaCB_Hungrvaka_2013.pdf. (retrieved February 2018) Laxdœla saga. In Laxdœla saga […]. Ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson. ÍF, 5. Reykjavík, 1934. Njal’s Saga. Trans. Robert Cook. In The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, including 49 tales. III. Ed. Viðar Hreinsson. Reykjavík, 1997. 1–200. Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar eptir Odd munk Snorrason. In Færeyinga saga, Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar eptir Odd munk Snorrason. Ed. Ólafur Halldórsson. ÍF, 25. Reykjavík, 2006. 123–362. The Saga of the People of Laxardal. Trans. Keneva Kunz. In The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, including 49 tales. V. Ed. Viðar Hreinsson. Reykjavík, 1997. 1–120. The Saga of the People of Svarfadardal. Trans. Fredrik J. Heinemann. In The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, including 49 tales. IV. Ed. Viðar Hreinsson. Reykjavík, 1997. 149–192. Seeress’s Prophecy. In The Poetic Edda. Trans. Carolyne Larrington. Rev. ed. Oxford, 2014. 3–13. Strengleikar. An Old Norse Translation of Twenty-one Old French Lais. Ed. Robert Cook and Mattias Tveitane. Norsk Historisk Kjeldeskrift-institutt. Norrøne tekster, 5. Oslo, 1979. Svarfdœla saga. In Eyfirðinga sǫgur. Ed. Jónas Kristjánsson. ÍF, 9. Reykjavík, 1956. 127–211. Völuspá. In Eddukvæði. Ed. JÓnas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason. ÍF. Reykjavík, 2014. I: 291–321.

Secondary sources Assmann, Jan. 2011. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization. Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. Cambridge. [German orig. 1984] Bahna, Vladimír. 2015. “Memorate and memory. A re-evaluation of Lauri Honko’s theory.” Temenos 51: 7–23. Bennett, Lisa. 2007. “‘The Most Important of Events’: The ‘Burning-In’ Motif as a Site of Cultural Memory in Icelandic Sagas.” Journal of Australian Early Medieval Association 3: 69–86. Bergsveinn Birgisson. 2010. “The Old Norse Kenning as a Mnemonic Figure.” In The Making of Memory in the Middle Ages. Ed. Lucie Doležalová. Later Medieval Europe, 4. Leiden and Boston. 199–213. Blumenberg, Hans. 1971. “Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Wirkungspotential des Mythos.” In Terror und Spiel. Probleme der Mythenrezeption. Ed. Manfred Fuhrmann. Poetik und Hermeneutik, 4. Munich. 11–66. Blumenberg, Hans. 1985. Work on Myth. Trans. Robert M. Wallace. Cambridge, MA, and London. [German orig. 1979] Bond, Lucy and Jessica Rapson, eds. 2014. The Transcultural Turn. Interrogating Memory Between and Beyond Borders. Berlin and New York. Carruthers, Mary J. 1990. The Book of Memory. A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 10. Cambridge. Carruthers, Mary. 1998. The Craft of Thought. Meditation, Rhetoric and the Making of Images, 400–1200. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 34. Cambridge. Clunies Ross, Margaret. 2005. A History of Old Norse Poetry and Poetics. Cambridge.



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Cubitt, Catherine. 2000. “Memory and narrative in the cult of early Anglo-Saxon saints.” In The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages. Ed. Yitzhak Hen and Matthew Innes. Cambridge. 29–66. Dégh, Linda and Andrew Vázsonyi. 1974. “The Memorate and the Proto-Memorate.” The Journal of American Folklore 87: 225–239. Draaisma, Douwe. 1995a. De Metaforenmachine. Een geschiedenis van het geheugen. Groningen. Draaisma, Douwe. 1995b. Metaphors of Memory. Groningen. Erll, Astrid. 2011. Memory in Culture. Trans. Sara B. Young. Houndmills, Basingstoke and Hampshire. [German orig. 2005] Erll, Astrid. 2011a. “Travelling Memory.” Parallax 17.4: 4–18. Erll, Astrid. 2011b. “Traumatic pasts, literary afterlives, and transcultural memory: new directions of literary and media memory studies.” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 3:1 7186, DOI: 10.3402/jac.v3i0.7186. Erll, Astrid. 2017. “Odysseus Travels – A Literary History of Modern Memory.” Video. www.memorystudies–frankfurt.com/ Posted 27/11/2017. (retrieved February 2018) Erll, Astrid. 2018. “Media and the Dynamics of Memory: From Cultural Paradigms to Transcultural Premediation.” In Handbook of Culture and Memory. Ed. Brady Wagoner. Oxford. 305–324. Erll, Astrid and Ann Rigney. 2006. “Literature and the production of cultural memory. Introduction.” European Journal of English Studies 10: 111–115. Fechner-Smarsly, Thomas. 1996. Krisenliteratur. Zur Rhetorizität und Ambivalenz in der isländischen Sagaliteratur. Frankfurt am Main, Bern, etc. Geary, Patrick J. 1994. Phantoms of Remembrance. Memory and Oblivion at the Ende of the First Millenium. Princeton, NJ. Glauser, Jürg. 2000. “Sagas of Icelanders (Íslendinga sögur) and þættir as the literary representation of a new social space.” In Old Icelandic Literature and Society. Ed. Margaret Clunies Ross. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 42. Cambridge. 203–220. Glauser, Jürg. 2007. “The Speaking Bodies of Saga Texts.” In Learning and Understanding in the Old Norse World. Essays in honour of Margaret Clunies Ross. Ed. Judy Quinn, Kate Heslop and Tarrin Wills. Medieval Texts and Cultures ot Northern Europe, 8. Turnhout, 13–26. Glauser, Jürg. 2011. Island – eine Literaturgeschichte. Stuttgart. Glauser, Jürg. 2016 [2006]. “Mittelalter (800–1500).” In Skandinavische Literaturgeschichte. Ed. Jürg Glauser. 2nd ed. Stuttgart. 1–51. Goeres, Erin Michelle. 2015. The Poetics of Commemoration. Skaldic Verse and Social Memory, c. 890–1070. Oxford. Hajdu, Helga. 1936. Das mnemotechnische Schrifttum des Mittelalters. Vienna and Budapest. Hermann, Pernille. 2009. “Concepts of Memory and Approaches to the Past in Medieval Icelandic Literature.” Scandinavian Studies 81.3: 287–308. Hermann, Pernille. 2010. “Founding Narratives and the Representation of Memory in Saga Literature.” Arv 66: 69–87. Hermann, Pernille. 2013. “Saga Literature, Cultural Memory, and Storage.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 332–354. Hermann, Pernille. 2014. “Key-Aspects of Memory and Remembering in Old Norse-Icelandic Literature.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille

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Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 13–40. Hermann, Pernille. 2015. “Memory, Imagery, and Visuality in Old Norse Literature.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 114.3: 317–340. Hermann, Pernille. 2017. “The Mind’s Eye. The Triad of Memory, Space, and the Senses in Old Norse Literature.” European Journal of Scandinavian Studies: 203–217. Heslop, Kate. 2014. “Minni and the Rhetoric of Memory in Eddic, Skaldic, and Runic Texts.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval North Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 75–107. Heslop, Kate and Jürg Glauser. 2018. “Introduction: Medial perspectives on textual culture in the Icelandic Middle Ages.” In RE:writing. Medial perspectives on textual culture in the Icelandic Middle Ages. Ed. Kate Heslop and Jürg Glauser. Zürich. 9–56. Jesch, Judith. 2008. “Introduction: Myth and Cultural Memory in the Viking Diaspora.” Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 4: 221–226. Jesch, Judith. 2015. The Viking Diaspora. London. Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir, ed. 2014. Góssið hans Árna. Minningar heimsins í íslenskum handritum. Reykjavík. Lachmann, Renate. 1997. Memory and Literature: Intertextuality in Russian Modernism. Minneapolis, MN. [German orig. 1990] Lachmann, Renate. 2004. “Cultural memory and the role of literature.” European Review 12.2: 165–178. Lachmann, Renate. 2008. “Mnemonic and Intertextual Aspects of Literature.” In Cultural Memory Studies. An Interdisciplinary Handbook. Medien und kulturelle Erinnerung, 8 / Media and Cultural Memory, 8. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin. 301–311. Malm, Mats. 2016. “Two Cultures of Visual(ized) Cognition.” In Intellectual Culture in Medieval Scandinavia, c. 1100–1350. Ed. Stefka Georgieva Eriksen. Disputatio, 28. Turnhout. 309–334. Marold, Edith. 1983. Kenningkunst. Ein Beitrag zu einer Poetik der Skaldendichtung. Quellen und Forschungen zur Sprach- und Kulturgeschichte der germanischen Völker. Neue Folge, 80 (204). Berlin and New York. Matussek, Peter. 2001. “Mnemosyne.” In Gedächtnis und Erinnerung: Ein interdisziplinäres Lexikon. Ed. Nicolas Pethes and Jens Ruchatz. Rowohlts Enzyklopädie, 55636. Reinbek bei Hamburg. 378–379. Mierke, Gesine. 2008. Memoria als Kulturtransfer. Der altsächsische “Heliand” zwischen Spätantike und Frühmittelalter. Ordo, 11. Cologne. Mitchell, Stephen. 2013. “Memory, Mediality, and the ‘Performative Turn’: Recontextualizing Remembering in Medieval Scandinavia.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 282–305. Mitchell, Stephen A. 2014. “The Mythological Past: Memory in Medieval and Early Modern Gotland.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell, and Agnes Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 155–174. Mitchell, Stephen A. 2018. “Óðinn’s Twin Ravens, Huginn and Muninn.” In Gemini and the Sacred: Twins and Twinship in Religion and Myth. Ed. Kimberley C. Patton. London. Schneeberger, Sandra. Forthcoming. Handeln mit Dichtung. Literarische Performativität in der altisländischen Prosa-Edda. Beiträge zur Nordischen Philologie. Tübingen.



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Schorn, Brittany Erin. 2017. Speaker and Authority in Old Norse Wisdom Poetry. Trends in Medieval Philology, 34. Berlin. von See, Klaus. 1980. Skaldendichtung. Eine Einführung. Munich and Zürich. von Sydow, Carl Wilhelm. 1934. “Kategorien der Prosa-Volksdichtung.” In Volkskundliche Gaben, John Meier zum siebzigsten Geburtstage dargebracht. Ed. Harry Schewe. Berlin and Leipzig. 253–268. Vésteinn Ólason. 1998. Dialogues with the Viking age. Narration and Representation in the Sagas of the Icelanders. Trans. Andrew Wawn. Reykjavík. Warmhoff, Sonja Laura. 2016. Isländische Erinnerungskultur 1100–1300. Altnordische Historiographie und kulturelles Gedächtnis. Beiträge zur Nordischen Philologie, 57. Tübingen Yates, Frances A. 1966. The Art of Memory. London.

Torfi H. Tulinius

I: 17 Trauma Studies 1 Definition Trauma affects memory as terrifying or extremely disrupting events influence the way memories are formed and processed by individuals and groups. Trauma studies explore and explain these phenomena.

2 State of research Trauma studies have grown considerably over the last few decades (Alexander et  al. 2004, 1–10). Until recently, however, scholars in the field of pre-modern Nordic studies have shown little interest in them, despite the fact that many of the literary sources, be they poetry or prose, show a strong preoccupation with issues of violence, loss and memory, which are also at the heart of trauma studies. In this entry trauma studies will be briefly presented and, even more succinctly, the results of several recent attempts at bringing them to bear on medieval Icelandic sagas. Neuropsychology informs us that several parts of the brain collaborate in constructing memories (Baddeley et al. 2015, 159). Under great stress, however, the brain is disturbed in this activity. Parts of the central nervous system that are essential for memory formation are inundated with stress hormones making it very difficult for the brain to process an event and form normal memories (van der Kolk and Fisler 1995). Nevertheless, it continues to register what is happen­ ing, albeit in a different way. Immensely stressful experiences, such as being sub­ jected to extreme violence, rape, severe accidents, or even being a witness to such events, can result in a specific type of memory: so-called traumatic memory. In the words of one of the leading specialists on trauma, Bessel van der Kolk, “trau­ matic memories are fundamentally different from the stories we tell about the past. They are dissociated: The different sensations that entered the brain at the time of the trauma are not properly assembled into a story, a piece of autobiogra­ phy” (van der Kolk 2014, 196). Indeed, traumatic memories are patchy and con­ fused. They are also linked to unexplained emotions, smells, bodily sensations. In that sense, van der Kolk tells us that “all trauma is preverbal” (van der Kolk 2014, 43). This is because “the essence of trauma is that it is overwhelming, unbe­ lievable, and unbearable” (van der Kolk 2014, 197). The victim of trauma is often https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-023



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unable to process what has happened. Memories of the event are fragmentary and in some cases more or less entirely repressed. Nevertheless, they live on as a persistent traumatic memory which can invade the person’s present with feel­ ings, symptoms, even flashbacks, because side by side with “the reality of a rela­ tively secure and predictable present”, there lives “a ruinous, ever-present past” (van der Kolk 2014, 197). Dealing with trauma is, however, possible and many therapeutic approaches recommend helping the victim reconstruct the memory of the traumatic event as a step towards overcoming the symptoms of what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Re-telling the experience invests it with meaning and is a crucial step towards recovery (Herman 1992, 176–197; van der Hart et al. 1989). Artistic expression can be very useful in overcoming the symptoms trauma victims may suffer from, be it through narrative or other modes of expression, though little scientific research has been done to establish this more firmly (van der Kolk 2014, 234). The links between literature and trauma have been studied however (Caruth 1996) and since 2012 the Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies is devoted to clarifying this relationship. Literary works can represent traumatic events as well as the experience of being a trauma survivor. In some cases these works also signal the impossibility of this representation. At the same time they can find other ways to suggest both the event and the prolonged experience of it, often through a creative manipulation of the medium of expression itself, i.e. the poem or the story. In this case, the trauma is not remembered in the habitual sense of this word, since it is so overwhelming that the mind cannot process it. Neverthe­ less its impact will influence afterwards the way the mind constructs representa­ tions, among others of the past. It has been said that for the trauma to exist, it has to be expressed later (Caruth 1996, 17). In other words, the trauma itself may be repressed but shapes the way the mind remembers. Trauma’s relationship to time is therefore quite paradoxical as one can say that time disappears in trauma but also that the trauma persists through time, since in any attempt to construct a representation of time, the result of this structuring activity will be affected by the trauma.

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3 Pre-modern Nordic material: Trauma, memory, and the construction of the past in poetry and sagas The concept of traumatic memory is relevant for the study of pre-modern Nordic society as it was quite violent, not the least in Iceland during the period when the sagas were composed and most of the poetry we have preserved was written down. During what is often called the Age of the Sturlungs, or the period from 1220 to 1262, an exceptional number of battles were fought, with numerous casu­ alties. Farms were besieged and burned to the ground with their inhabitants, and individuals were hunted down for revenge (Einar Ól. Sveinsson 1953). The exer­ cise of violence must have been traumatising for many people and an experience of trauma and its effects must have accumulated within the culture. It is indeed difficult to find a more violent time in Icelandic history. The power structures that had developed in this stateless society relatively isolated from the rest of the world by were collapsing and being replaced by something differ­ ent. This was not a simple process but it must have been quite traumatic for the dominant segments of the Icelandic population at the time, not only because of the violence inflicted upon so many people: in battle, in attacks and the burning down of farms, as well as in individual vendettas (Fechner-Smarsly 1996, 19–28). There was also an ongoing identity crisis among elite Icelanders. It involved their relationship to the Church which was undergoing change in the great move­ ment of libertas ecclesiae (freedom of the Church from lay authority) that had been challenging power structures throughout Europe at the time, as well as with a Norwegian monarchy which was becoming stronger, more confident and claim­ ing authority over Iceland. The crisis was also in their relationship to each other. Indeed, the concentration of power in the hands of a few families with the estab­ lishment of territorial domains also lead to a change in the self-perception of this small group but not less in the attitude to society of those who previously had felt themselves to be on an equal footing with its members (Sverrir Jakobsson 2016). One could say that the society which generated these stories about its own origins has been subjected to a double trauma: that of extreme violence and – closely linked to this violence – a serious challenge to its identity. It is in this period that we witness the first flourishing of the literary genre which most thoroughly explores the identity of medieval Icelanders, i.e. the Íslendingasögur [Sagas of the Icelanders]. Descriptions of the debilitating effects of trauma on the individual are also known from this literature. An example of grief leading to an inability to speak fol­ lowed by death can be found in the contemporary saga Þórðar saga kakala [Saga



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of Thord kakali] where Kolbeinn kaldaljós, who cannot get over his son’s death, is unable to articulate his sorrow and soon dies (Sturlunga saga, Ch. 355). Another is the famous account of Egill, the warrior-poet, who locks himself in his bed and wants to die after the drowning of his beloved son, but is tricked into composing an elegy by his daughter who thereby saves his life (Egils saga, Ch. 80). If we move now from individual to collective or cultural trauma (Alexander et al. 2004), we see that the late thirteenth-century saga, Brennu-Njáls saga [Njal’s Saga], shows a strong awareness of what happens to a society that has been torn apart by violence. The received date of this saga’s composition is in the 1280’s, when one to two decades had elapsed since the most brutal fights took place in the country. As a representative of the genre of the sagas of the Icelanders, Brennu-Njáls saga portrays a past distant by almost three centuries from the time of writing. If it is based on some kind of memory, it is more of a cultural memory than that of events that actually took place. The narrative and the characters must therefore be shaped by whoever composed the saga and reflect her or his inter­ ests, values and preoccupations, and at the same time those of its intended audi­ ence and/or readers. It is therefore interesting to see that the saga shows a deep psychological understanding of the workings of the human psyche and of the unleashing of what Sigmund Freud named the death drives in situations where violence pre­ vails. Indeed, Freud’s theory of the death drive, with its relationship with vio­ lence, trauma and memory, can help us understand many features of this great work of art: the urge to repeat despite clear warnings of the terrible danger involved, the uncanny figures who exult in violence, the association of sexual passion with death, the inability of society to contain its destructive forces, not to mention the number of characters who go willingly to their death. All of this suggests that the image of the past given to us in the portrayal of Icelandic society during the years immediately preceding and following the Conversion of Iceland in the year AD 1000 was constructed by a person who had witnessed the unleash­ ing of the death drives in her or his close environment, i.e. Iceland in the latter half of the thirteenth century (Torfi H. Tulinius 2015). Recent work on Eyrbyggja saga also reveals a structuring principle under­ lying this seemingly haphazard assemblage of sundry events that took place in the vicinity of Helgafell during the first hundred years or so of Icelandic history. Here it is the pressure put on sons to take over and defend the social position their fathers had. This pressure is thematised by the number of dead fathers who appear in the saga. At the same time they must compete with other equally wellborn sons of dead fathers, some of whom are better warriors than themselves. The prime example of this is the rivalry between Arnkell goði and Snorri Þorgrímsson and their conflict for power in the area (Torfi H. Tulinius 2014).

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These examples of current studies suggest that in a traumatic time of collapse it seems very probable that the experience of crisis and violence – which was to a great extent impossible to conceptualise – shaped the way thirteenth-century Icelanders constructed stories about the time of the ancestors who founded the society in which they lived, a society which was falling apart.

4 Perspectives for future research Future research should concentrate on the way trauma studies can show how different types of trauma with differing degrees of intensity had an impact on the different literary genres of medieval Iceland. Thereby a new and possibly more detailed and elaborate explanation of the links between the turbulence of thirteenth-century Iceland and its exceptional literary output could be proposed.

Works cited Primary sources Brennu-Njáls saga. Ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson. ÍF, 12. Reykjavík, 1954. Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar. Ed. Sigurður Nordal. ÍF, 2. Reykjavík, 1933. Eyrbyggja saga. In Eyrbyggja saga. Brands þáttr ǫrva. Eiríks saga rauða. Grænlendinga saga. Grænlendinga þáttr. Ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson and Matthías Þórðarsson. ÍF, 4. Reykjavík, 1957 [1935]. 1–184. Sturlunga saga. I–II. Ed. Örnólfur Thorsson et al. Reykjavík, 1988.

Secondary sources Alexander, Jeffrey C., Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser and Piotr Sztompka. 2004. Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA, and London. Baddeley, Alan, Michael W. Eysenck and Michael C. Anderson. 2015. Memory. London. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience. Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, MD. Einar Ól. Sveinsson. 1953. The Age of the Sturlungs. Icelandic Civilization in the Thirteenth Century. Trans. Jóhann S. Hannesson. Islandica, 36. Ithaca, NY. Fechner-Smarsly, Thomas. 1996. Krisenliteratur. Zur Rhetorizität und Ambivalenz in der isländischen Sagaliteratur. Frankfurt am Main. van der Hart, Onno, Paul Brown and Bessel van der Kolk. 1989. “Pierre Janet’s Treatment of Post-traumatic Stress.” Journal of Traumatic Stress 2.4: 1–11. Herman, Judith L. 1992. Trauma and Recovery. The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York.



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Journal of Trauma and Literary Studies. 2012. Lincoln, NE. Sverrir Jakobsson. 2016. “From Charismatic Power to State Power: The Political History of Iceland 1096–1281.” Šredniowieczse Polskie i Powszechne 8.12: 47–74. van der Kolk, Bessel and Rita Fisler. 1995. “Dissociation and the Fragmentary Nature of Traumatic Memories: Overview and Exploratory Study.” Journal of Traumatic Stress 8.4: 505–525. van der Kolk, Bessel. 2014. The Body Keeps the Score: Mind, Brain and Body in the Transformation of Trauma. New York. Torfi H. Tulinius. 2014. “Deconstructing Snorri. Narrative Structure and Heroism in Eyrbyggja Saga.” In Narration and Hero. Recounting the Deeds of Heroes in Literature and Art in the Early Medieval Period. Ed. Victor Millet and Heike Sahm. Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde, 87. Berlin. 195–208. Torfi H. Tulinius. 2015. “Seeking Death in Njáls Saga.” In Essays on the Literature and Culture of Medieval Scandinavia. Ed. Jeffrey Turco. Islandica, 58. Ithaca, NY. 99–115.

Kate Heslop

I: 18 Media Studies 1 Definition Media studies is the study of the forms, content, history and effects of the modern ‘mass media’ – the press, radio, television, and so on (Downing et al. 2004). Here the paradigmatic instance of mediality is communication, and the medium an ideally neutral or ‘noiseless’ channel carrying a message between sender and receiver (Shannon and Weaver 1949). However, in the prehistory of the field, stretching back to antiquity, the medium is thought more abstractly as a ‘third term’ that intervenes, or mediates, between two extremes, and mediation is not limited to the domain of communication (Guillory 2010; Kiening 2010). These two streams meet in the work of pioneering theorists such as Marshall McLuhan (1964) and Friedrich Kittler (1985) who draw attention to the shaping force media technologies exert on culture in general. These insights have developed, especially in the German-speaking world, into highly ramified Medientheorien (Mersch 2006). By turning attention from semantics, the what of meaning, to how meaning is produced, transmitted and received, and how meaning is conditioned by “materialities of communication” (Gumbrecht, Pfeiffer, Elsner 1988), this medial perspective throws new light on premodern material (cf. Kiening 2008; Durham Peters 2016), and – perhaps more importantly – on the assumptions that are brought to its study. In medieval studies, questions of media were addressed in a series of mid-twentieth-century theorisations of oral and literate mentali­ ties (Havelock 1982; Ong 1967; Goody and Watt 1963; Clanchy 1979) and in the Oral Theory, focusing on the effects of oral culture on literary creativity (Parry 1971; Lord 1960; cf. Foley 1991); for a discussion of this material in the context of Old Norse studies, cf. Heslop and Glauser (2018, 24–33). This work postulates that literacy caused a number of cognitive changes, including changes in the status of individual memory; Havelock (1986, 114) writes of a new separation between knowledge and knower. Contemporary research in premodern medial­ ity has moved beyond contrastive accounts of orality and literacy to a broader spectrum of studies of “cultural techniques” (Siegert 2015), and an awareness of the constitutively mixed quality of media. Media studies approaches to memory in the premodern North de-emphasize the stable, static, and authorial in favour of dynamic, process-oriented, and collaborative understandings of remembering and memory making (Heslop and Glauser 2018).

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2 State of research Writing and the manuscript codex are the most frequently-mentioned media of memory in Old Norse scholarship, thanks to the watershed status accorded to the advent of literacy in media-historical and philosophical accounts of premod­ ern media; to the fact that texts, in the widest sense (cf. Kuchenbuch and Kleine 2006), offer our main way of accessing premodern Scandinavian culture; and, in recent scholarship, to the immense influence of the text-focused studies of Carru­ thers (1990, 2000) and Assmann (1992). Other media only sporadically enter the purview of Old Norse studies; chief among them is orality, viewed as the other of writing, with which it appears in a relationship of succession (as in the freeprose/ bookprose models), or more recently as one end of a “continuum” (Ranković et al. 2010). Recent research has also begun to consider architecture, landscape and monuments as memory media. Ranković (2007) offers a comparative reading of Norse texts and Serbo-Croa­ tian oral song, focusing on the role of performance context and external memory media in the dialogic and creative activity of remembering. Concrete performance contexts are explored in a number of studies focusing on aristocratic funerals and the poetic commemoration of the dead as a key site for the establishment of social memory (Wessén 1915: Ohlmarks 1944; Harris 1988; Price 2010; Goeres 2015). A large body of work investigates the nature of memorial transmission in orality, albeit usually without a memory studies framing; cf. however Tetrel (2012), who investigates the complex remediations of Strengleikar, at the core of which lie the Breton songs preserving “fragments of memorized adventures”, a model of oral transmission that seems to have fascinated the Norwegian translators (Tetrel 2012, 102; Heslop forthcoming). Runic inscriptions cross the oral/literate divide traditionally taken to be coterminous with the arrival of Christianity c. AD 1000. Schulte (2007) argues that memory culture as evidenced in poetry and runic inscriptions bridges oral and literate cultures in the premodern North, “conjoin[ing] the oral and the written” in its use of alliterative formulae, which he calls “fossilized oral language” (2007, 69, 58). Jesch (2005) takes an allied approach to skaldic verse, arguing that its linguistic fixity and pragmatics – among which preserving important events in memory is paramount – mean it is literate avant la lettre, while Roesdahl (2002) calls Harald bluetooth’s great stone at Jelling a “book in stone”, with respect to its visual organisation, the artistic influences on it, and its memorial function. Heslop (2014) offers a comparative study of eddic, skaldic and runic memory media, and argues that skaldic encomium is a medium of communicative rather than cultural memory.

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Runestones are constitutively intermedial commemorative monuments. Jesch (1998) and Zilmer (2009) point out the interplay of the monument, its loca­ tion in space, its inscription, and oral performance practice in the discourses of commemoration of Swedish Viking Age runic monuments. Harris (2006, 2009) makes analogous points about the early ninth-century Rök runestone (Ög 136), and draws attention to its inscription’s claim to cue orally preserved memories (the passage supposed to refer to these, sakumukmini, is, however, one of many notorious cruces presented by this long, visually and verbally riddling inscrip­ tion; for recent interventions in the vast literature proposing alternate interpreta­ tions, see Ralph 2007, Malm 2008, Holmberg 2015, Lönnroth 2017). Hållans Sten­ holm (2012), a study of the placement of grave and house sites in the Mälaren valley in Sweden in the late Iron Age and early Middle Ages in relation to earlier features, reveals a layered memorial landscape and the multi-temporal nature of the human lives lived in it; the Migration Period (c. AD 400–600) emerges in her study as a ‘golden age’ for Viking Age memory constructions. Saga studies dominate medially-inflected studies of memory in Old Norse. Perkins (1989) combs the sagas of Icelanders for “kernels” of oral prose tradi­ tions: memory media in the sagas. Writing before the memory wave broke over Old Norse studies, he takes tradition as his leading concept, and is accordingly uneasy about the lack of truth-value of many of the motifs he discusses. A path­ breaking study of memory before and outside the saga was presented by Clunies Ross (1993). She argued for the centrality of genealogical lists in the earliest Old Norse-Icelandic written and poetic traditions, and showed that genealogy also became a key structural principle of prose writing, for instance, linking multiple sagas together in an intertexual network of proprietary family memoria. Callow (2006) pursues this line of argument further, demonstrating how genealogy and topography work together as memory media in the sagas of Icelanders. Explicit memory studies theorisations first begin to appear in Old Norse-Ice­ landic in the 2000s. Glauser (2000) draws on Jan and Aleida Assmann’s work to suggest that after Iceland’s loss of independence in 1262–1264 the intertextual potentialities opened up by literate transmission allowed the sagas and þættir of Icelanders to become compact media of cultural memory. Processes of canon formation and codification in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries embedded this literature in the Icelandic consciousness as the answer to the question “who are we”? Byock (2004) uses Fentress and Wickham’s classic Social Memory (1992) to reveal memory’s creativity, its formative role and its importance for questions of identity in Egils saga. Assmann’s concept of ‘cultural memory’ has been popular in subsequent studies of the sagas of Icelanders. Hermann canvases sagas (2010) and images (2015) as media of cultural memory, and has taken important steps towards a



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metaphorology of Old Norse-Icelandic memory, exploring, for example, the metaphor of the storehouse (2009). Bennett’s work on the interplay of natural and cultural domains in the sites of memory constructed by the sagas of Iceland­ ers (2014) combines cultural memory theory with Pierre Nora’s notion of lieux de mémoire. Zilmer (2008) offers another approach to the mediation of cultural memory via landscape, focusing on the role of islands in saga narrative. Wamhoff (2016) contrasts Landnámabók [Book of settlements] with Íslendingabók [Book of Icelanders], seeing the former as coordinating personal memories into a col­ lective framework while the latter mines collective memory to construct a politi­ cally useful version of the past. Only the former strategy produced a ‘cultural text’ in Assmann’s sense (that is, one that remained productive for new connections and re-workings), hence their contrasting fates in the manuscript transmission. Kramarz-Bein’s study of Þiðreks saga (2012) employs Gérard Genette’s concept of the palimpsest to explain how perspectives proper to different time periods co-exist in the saga as a form of overwriting (an observation she also makes in an earlier analysis of Egils saga (Kramarz-Bein and Capelle 2001), but describes there in terms of Zeithorizonte). This notion of intertextuality as the memory of the text (cf. Lachmann 1990) is especially pertinent to premodern literature, with its profusion of variations and re-writings.

3 Pre-modern Nordic material ‘Media of memory’ in Old Norse textual culture can thus be considered from (at least) three standpoints: the imagined memory media of literature; the actually existing memory media of the lifeworld; and media as metaphors for memory (cf.  Draaisma 2000). Old Norse literary texts imagine memory in heightened, synaesthetic media metaphors. Óðinn (or Þórr, Hárbarðsljóð st. 19) hurls the eyes of the dead giant Þjazi into the heavens, where they become stars as a memo­ rial to him (Skáldskaparmál, Ch. 1). Drinks of memory (Hyndluljóð, St. 45) and forgetting (Guðrúnarkviða II, Sts. 21–24; Grage 2001) work from inside the body as part of a spectrum of “liquid knowledge” (Quinn 2010) that stretches from the love philtre of the Tristan legend to the ecstatic, agonising, memory-erasing, poetic-trance-inducing me(a)dium of poetry, wrested by Óðinn from the giants (cf. Hávamál, Sts. 13–14, 139–140, Sigrdrífumál, Sts. 14–19). According to Ynglinga saga (Chs. 4–7), Óðinn gains secret knowledge from the world of the dead from the severed head of Mímir, whose name thirteenth-century learned Icelanders associated with the Latin word for memory (cf. Heslop 2018). Óðinn says of his ravens Huginn [thought] and Muninn [memory]

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óumk ek of Hugin at hann aptr né komit, þó sjámk meirr um Munin. (Grímnismál, St. 20) [I fear for Hugin that he will not come back, / yet I tremble more for Munin. (Grimnir’s Sayings, St. 20)]

In Theaetetus 197c–199b, Socrates speaks of the aviary as a figure for memory, having abandoned his first metaphor, the impression in wax (191c–195b) due to its inability to explain how a person whose mental wax is “deep and abundant and smooth and properly kneaded” (194c) can nonetheless form false opinions. In contrast to the block of wax, the aviary figures memory as action, a merely potential re-activation, rife with the possibility of error (catching “a ringdove […] instead of a pigeon”, 199b) and forgetting. Like Socrates’ aviary, Muninn figures memory’s fleetingness and unreliability. The aspects of memory that these metaphors bring into focus – the materiality, solid or fragile, of its media, the memorial power of the performing body, and the complementary distribution of memory and forgetting – can all be observed in the memory media of the premod­ ern Scandinavian lifeworld. Old Norse textual culture in turn uses these media to think about how individuals and groups remember and forget.

Stone Ill-suited for building or carving, Icelandic basalts and rhyolites seem unpromis­ ing memory media, but turn out to work well when supplemented by narrative. Sagas report many rock formations named in memory of (often violent) events, such as Eyrbyggja saga’s Þrælaskriða, from which Þórarinn svarti’s þrælar [slaves] throw themselves, to their deaths “sem ván var, því at hǫfðinn er svá hár” [as was to be expected, because the headland is so high (author’s translation)] (Ch. 18). Many of these names are not ‘authentic’, in the sense that the aetiological narra­ tives are later inventions, but they bear undeniable witness to a desire to inscribe memory in the landscape. Stones bear still clearer traces of mobility and human making than do autoch­ thonous rocks. Egils saga recounts how Skalla-Grímr retrieves an anvil-stone from the waters of Breiðafjörður (Egils saga Ch. 30): “þat er brimsorfit grjót ok ekki því grjóti glíkt ǫðru er þar er ok munu nú ekki meira hefja fjórir menn” [that is a surfworn rock and not like the other rock that is there, and now four men cannot lift anything greater (author’s translation)]. Worked both by the sea and by SkallaGrímr’s hammering, the stone bears mute witness to the co-creation of memory places in a new land by human and non-human agents, to a “dynamic between



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re-activating the sedimented and the sedimentation of activity” (Klaver 2003, 157), and to the sagas’ characteristic negotiation of the past’s alterity, when a single, albeit not entirely human, man had the strength of four. The memorial resources of matter out of place are also visible in Eyrbyggja saga, as Þórólfr Mostrarskegg excavates soil from under the altar to Þórr in his temple in Norway and brings it to Iceland (Ch. 4). The floor of the Chapel of Sta. Croce in Gerusalemme in Rome con­ tains earth from Golgotha, brought back from Jerusalem along with other relics of the Crucifixion by St Helena. Eyrbyggja saga’s sacred earth both intertextu­ ally recalls the inventio crucis [discovery of the cross], casting Þórólfr as a pagan Helena, and is a “real conjuncture” (Nagel 2012, 100) in which a material trace triggers memories of the settlers’ homeland and its locally-anchored gods. The Swedish island of Gotland is a museum of medieval memory. Many of the island’s 92 or so surviving medieval churches have undergone multiple phases of rebuilding on the same site, typically involving the successive replacement of an early medieval wooden church with a Romanesque stone church in the thirteenth century, and then with a grander Gothic structure in the fourteenth. The stone church buildings were often constructed around the smaller stave churches, which remained in use until the new church was complete and the wooden church could be demolished (e.g. at Garde and Silte, cf. Sveriges kyrkor vi: 6 [1974], 465, 471). The Gothic churches usually retained the Romanesque nave and added or enlarged the tower and choir. The sacred space of the nave is thus one whose memories stretch back to the first church on the site and find concrete expression in the baptismal font. Many fonts are decorated with relief carvings depicting the childhood of Jesus, and a few covers survive, crowned with a model of a cen­ trally-planned church, evoking eastern basilicas such as the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and so the heavenly Jerusalem (Fåhraeus 1974, 130). Twelfth-century fonts are among few items of extant furnishing to survive from the Romanesque churches, and in some cases they may even have stood in the original wooden church (e.g. at Lau, cf. Sveriges kyrkor vi: 7 [1975], 597). In its stony anchoring of a space of sacred embodied performance, the font points up the multimedia nature of the church as memory theatre, where memory encapsulates the ritual (baptism as repeated rite), the historical (earlier churches on the same site), and the ‘timetraveling’ anamneses of sacred history that link Gotland to the Holy Land.

Body In the largely oral society of premodern Scandinavia the body was the guarantor of “ritual coherence” (Assmann 1992, 93), which maintains memory via repeated performance or enactment. Even after the advent of writing, when textual coher­

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ence became a possibility, bodies continued to lend authority, presence, and trustworthiness to textually mediated memories (Glauser 2007) and guaranteed not only the memorability, but also the efficacy of many kinds of knowledge. According to the sagas, specialist performers included the vǫlva (seeress), usually female and concerned with prophecy (Kress 1988; McKinnell 2003) and the þulr [sage], usually male and concerned with wisdom (Poole 2010; Tsitsiklis 2017). Special modes of vocal performance are attributed to vǫlur (involuntary vocaliza­ tion, cf. Quinn 1998) and þulir (mumbling, associated with the verb þylja); the word skáld [poet), by contrast, seems to have denoted a worker in both performa­ tive and inscriptional media (Jesch 2005; Malm 2010), and the sagas are fasci­ nated by the uncanny, disembodied voice of poetic tradition (Heslop 2008). The preservation of memory, via the highly patterned dróttkvætt stanza, was central to the skald’s art. An anonymous dróttkvætt half-stanza anthologised in Skáldskaparmál eulo­ gises poetry: Bæði ák til brúðar bergjarls ok skip dverga sollinn vind at senda seinfyrnd gǫtu eina. (Anon. [SnE], St. 1) [I have both, my swollen wind of the wife of the mountain-jarl [GIANT > GIANTESS > THOUGHT] and the never-forgotten ships of dwarfs [POEMS], to send in the same direction.]

Wittily counterpointing dwarves and giants, antagonists in the myth of the mead of poetry, these lines coordinate antithetical forces to celebrate the transform­ ative power of poetry, capable of rendering thought thinglike, able to be ‘had’ and ‘sent’. But the litotes of seinfyrnd [literally ‘hardly-decayed’] – from the verb fyrna(sk), derived from forn [old], usually used of the gradual decay of artefacts such as ships and churches – undercuts the claim that poetry is news that stays news. Like a wooden object left out in the weather, poetry will decay if it is not maintained in performance, the ur-scene of the mead myth (Orton 2007). This tension reflects dróttkvætt’s origins in the setting of ‘ritual coherence’: its com­ memorative power depends on the performing body. Judging by the surviving poetry, dróttkvætt was used to preserve events of the recent past as models of praise- and blameworthy action, rather than being concerned with cultural memory sensu strictu, although the so-called ‘skaldic ekphrasis poem’ (Clunies Ross 2006) and surviving fragments of pre-Christian religious poetry do encompass deep mytho-heroic time. Most poetry on mythic and heroic themes that survives is, however, not in dróttkvætt, but rather in one or other of the Old Norse variants of the common Germanic alliterative metre.



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Eddic poetry is often dialogical and seems to presuppose collective performance, perhaps with a strong dramatic element (Gunnell 1995). The rich manuscript evi­ dence of variation in poems such as Vǫluspá suggests that memorial transmission of fixed wording was never the norm for eddic poetry (Quinn 2001). Eddic poets, unlike skalds, told stories everyone knew – albeit with creative variations – and so their poetic medium guaranteed memory not by the eyewitness veracity of the poetic speaker, but by the wisdom of the crowd. It is a mark of skaldic poetry’s cultural capital (Wanner 2008) and inti­ mate relationship to political power that it survived the transition to textual coherence with the advent of writing, but its days as the key medium of royal memory and ‘höfische Erziehung’ [courtly education] (Wenzel 1991, 57) were numbered. The marriage in 1261 of the Norwegian king Magnús VI lagabœtir (r.  1263–1280) is the last royal event to be memorialised in skaldic poetry, in Sturla Þórðarson’s Drápa about Magnús lagabœtir. Magnús’ father Hákon instead championed Old Norwegian translations and imitations of the French chansons de geste. But skaldic poetry nonetheless continued to thrive in Iceland as a servant of the church, and remained an important medium of Christian devotion until the end of the Middle Ages and beyond (Wolf and van Deusen 2017). This poetry is steeped in the literate culture of medieval Christianity, and often echoes or imitates Holy Scripture, hymns, the liturgy and the church fathers, those authoritative texts that the monastic audiences of these poems were expected to know from memory útan bækr (“without books”, Pétrsdrápa, St. 20). Christian skaldic poetry celebrates remembering as an aspect of the spiritual technique of compunction, in which the believer’s heart is “pricked” (compungere) by the images of Christ’s suffering summoned up in the memory by the “heart’s eyes” (oculi cordis, in Old Norse hjarta sjónir; cf. Heslop 2009). In the late fourteenth-century Drápa af Máríugrát, the audience is enjoined to remem­ ber Christ’s Passion, the poet’s performance summoning up an embodied perfor­ mance of weeping in response: Prúðlig verk fyrir píslar marki pátris déí formið gráti; sonar guðs oft í saung og bænum sára minniz þjóð með tárum. (St. 40) [Perform glorious deeds with weeping before the sign of the Passion of God the father [CROSS]; may people often recall the wounds of the son of God [= Christ] with tears in song and prayers.]

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In its final stanza, the poem offers itself as a supplement to the Ave Maria. The vernacular text is intended to remind (minniz) its audience of the Latin liturgical poem: Allir bið eg menn, að minniz Máríu vess, og lesi með tárum, móður guðs, og dróttins dauða, dreyra þess, er Grátinn heyra. (St. 52) [I ask all men who hear the Lament, that they remember the verse of Mary and read it with tears, [that they remember] the mother of God and the death of the Lord, his blood.]

Wax Finds of tablets and styli in almost every part of Scandinavia from the eleventh century on indicate that the use of wax as a writing surface was widespread; both runic and Latin script occurs (Huitfeldt-Kaas 1886; Svärdström 1970; Þórður Tómasson 1982, 103–107; Margrét Hallgrímsdóttir 1990, 102). The ease with which the wax surface could be smoothed and used again was an advantage of such tablets, and some surviving examples are palimpsest (see the plates in Öberg 1975, 590–591). Erasability was also an attractive metaphor for the dynamics of memory and forgetting, as seen above (cf. also Stjórn III, Ch. 366). In contrast to runes, wax tablets are not part of the world of the sagas of Icelanders, but they are mentioned a few times in sagas set in the thirteenth century and later, such as Sturlunga saga. The best-known instance of a wax tablet in our sources is the account of the study habits of Lárentíus Kálfsson, fourteenth-century bishop of Hólar, in his saga: Eftir máltíðina dagliga reikaði hann; fyrst fór hann þá í sitt studium ok studeraði hann í bókum; skrifaði hann upp á vaxspjald, nóterandi þat sem hann vildi hafa sérliga ór bókum ok þar eftir skrifaði Einarr djákni upp í kvaterni eðr bók, svá at byskupinum var tiltæk nær hann vildi á líta eða þat frammi hafa. (Lárentíus saga biskups, Ch. 40) [Daily after meals he went for a walk; first after that he went into his study and studied in books; he wrote up on a wax tablet, noting precisely [sérliga], that which he wanted to have from the books, and Einarr the deacon copied it in a notebook or book, so that it was ready to hand for the bishop when he wanted to look at it or make use of it. (author’s translation)]

The concern for accuracy in copying is striking here (cf. sérliga, though it is also possible that this word merely means ‘especially’), as is the temporary nature



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of personal notes made on wax, part of a sophisticated literate environment involving a study, books, an amanuensis, and two, if not three (it is not clear how kvaterni and bók are differentiated) note-taking technologies. These notes both support Lárentíus’ memory of his books, and are used in his production of further writings. This is a clear instance of the separation between knower and knowl­ edge postulated by Havelock – in the mid-fourteenth century, some 250  years after the arrival of book culture in Iceland.

Codex The Norwegian king Sverrir (1177–1202) is famous for his dreams (cf. Lönnroth 2006). After his forces have suffered a heavy defeat at Ryginaberg, not far from present-day Oslo, Sverrir reports the following dream: Hér kom fram draumr minn, sá er mér birtisk í nótt, at ek átti mér bók ok var laus ǫll ok mikil, svá at hon tók mikit af landinu, ok var stolit ór einu kverinu. Þar hafa bœndr tekit menn mína. Hræðizk þér eigi her bœnda. Þeir fara því verri fǫr er þeir fara fleiri saman. (Sverris saga, Ch. 163) [“The dream is now fulfilled that came to me in the night. I dreamt that I owned a book, so large that it covered much of the land; but it was all loose, and one sheet was stolen out of it. That sheet is the men whom the yeomen have taken. But have no fear of their host; the more of them there are, the worse they will fare on their journey.” (The Saga of King Sverri, P. 209)]

Sverrir’s dreams are an important element of the saga’s central message of his pre-eminent suitability for the kingship of Norway (Bagge 1996; Þorleifur Hauks­ son 2012), and many of them have parallels in Christian literature (Bandlien 2013). The scale of the dream-book recalls the bird that Sverrir is transformed into in an earlier dream (Sverris saga, Ch. 2), and both suggest an intellectual element to Sverrir’s rise. In other ways, the two images are strongly contrastive. While the bird’s body figures power and wholeness, the salient feature of the dream-book is a lacuna. The book as metaphor, and before it the scroll and the tablet, has a long history (Curtius 1948, 302–321). At its most exalted, the codex in this tradition sig­ nifies the heavenly Book read by the angels and revealed to humans in the Bible and the book of nature (Gellrich 1985, 29). As such, the book is “a preeminent symbol of truth, order and totality” (Jager 2000, xvi) – a totality which is threat­ ened by the theft of a quire. The book Christians imagined with most fervour, however, was the liber vitae [book of life]. According to Augustine, this book sig­ nifies the power of God,

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[…] by which it will be made possible for every man to recall to memory all his own works, both good and evil, and for the mind to review them all with miraculos speed, so that each man’s knowledge will accuse or excuse his conscience […] we shall as it were read in it all that it causes us to remember. (Augustine, City of God, X: 14)

In scholastic thought, the liber vitae contained the “long story of our sins” (Ambrose, quoted in Jager 2000, 24), and was to be opened at Judgment Day. The materiality of the codex proved rich ground for extending the metaphor: sinners were reminded that their hearts were parchment, “stretched by regular abstinence [...] scraped by removing all carnality [...] formed into quires by unflagging consistency” (Richard of St Victor, quoted in Jager 2000, 50), and were enjoined to write only things worthy of remembrance on them. This inner codex, like its material counterparts, could be corrupted, chiefly by the devil, who might for instance erase the Ten Commandments “and write instead their opposites, that is, the deadly sins” (Peter Comestor, quoted in Jager 2000, 53). The bændr make still more radical alterations to Sverrir’s dream-book: by steal­ ing a quire, they aim to obliterate the Birchlegs from historical memory (cf. Ban­ dlien 2013). The book’s geometric equivalence to the territory of Norway indicates that it figures a local and contingent narrative – which is to say, it mirrors the saga of which it is a part – while the subterranean presence of the model liber vitae in Sverrir’s dream, as with other echoes of Christian learning in Sverris saga, lend the image a mnemonic heft and open up the grand vistas of salvific history. Although this brief survey cannot possibly do justice to the range of memory media in premodern Scandinavian textual cultures and life-worlds, it nonethe­ less demonstrates the value of a medial perspective on this material. It suggests new ways to think about premodern cultural techniques, beyond the dichotomy (or continuum) oral/literate, with its characteristic reduction of media to media of communication, and its bias towards textual mediation. Instead memory media encompass a world of things – stones, bodies, codices, runestaves, wax. Their materiality makes memory: matter out of place (such as Skalla-Grímr’s anvil, or Þórólfr’s sacred earth) can itself be a memory medium insofar as it allows for virtual travels in time and space. Matter also acts as an anchor for spaces of repeated, meaningful action, or ritual. Gotland’s baptismal fonts were explored above; an Icelandic instance would be the Lǫgberg [law rock], the axis of the memory-space of Þingvellir (see colour plate 2). As this instance demonstrates, textuality, or even human making, is by no means a necessary condition of mediality. Things can mediate between the human world and realms of nonhuman action, whether ecological, supernatural, or numinous.



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The specific aspects of memory revealed in these case studies include an awareness of the different scales at which memory operates, from the short-term, working memory represented by Lárentíus’ notes on his vaxspjald, to the aspira­ tions to permanence of a runestone “þæt skal at minnum manna, meðan menn lifa” [that will (stand) in memory of the men while people live] (U 114, Runby). The time-depth of what is remembered varies from the deep past of cultural memory to the memorializing of recent events – often violent ones, as memory and forget­ ting are profoundly associated with death. What is remembered can be a matter of individual recollection, where the presence of an author – a skald or runemas­ ter – is essential, or the mythic or legendary stuff of cultural memory, in which case the collective remembers, and any particular saga or eddic poem is anony­ mous. Lastly, there is an important, although often-neglected, ethical component to memory, whether of the exemplary Viking subjecthood that gives dróttkvætt its name, or of the compunction and memorial do ut des of Marian devotion.

4 Perspectives for future research A medial perspective on memory in the premodern North offers many openings for further work. One is the role of non-textual media in the construction of mem­ ories (e.g. images, architecture, landscape, sound, the senses), and the interplay of multiple media, and divergent memorial agendas, in “memoryscapes” (Gold­ hahn 2012, 242). These memoryscapes could be investigated both as textual rep­ resentations, and on the ground in archaeological traces of “the past in the past” (Bradley and Williams 1998). Another is the application of memory studies con­ cepts beyond the somewhat reductive dichotomy of cultural vs. communicative memory (for instance Jan and Aleida Assmann’s notions of canon, archive and cultural text, cf. the discussion of Wamhoff above) to the particular medial case of manuscript transmission, for instance investigating what is forgotten in the versions of the mythological and poetic canon constructed by the different manu­ scripts of the Prose Edda. Later medieval Scandinavian inflections of Christian teachings on memory, for instance in runic inscriptions and skaldic poetry, are a little-studied area where much remains to be discovered, for instance about how the nexus of body, emotion and memory was activated in Christian devotional and commemorative practices.

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Works cited Primary sources Anon. (SnE) 1. Ed. Kari Ellen Gade, Margaret Clunies Ross and Matthew Townend. “Anonymous Stanzas from Snorra Edda.” In Poetry from Treatises on Poetics. Ed. Kari Ellen Gade and Edith Marold. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages, 3: 2. Turnhout, 2017. 512–513. Augustine. The City of God against the Pagans. Ed. and trans. R. W. Dyson. Cambridge, 1988. Drápa af Máríugrát. Ed. Kari Ellen Gade. In Poetry on Christian Subjects. Ed. Margaret Clunies Ross. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages, 7.2 Turnhout, 2007. 758–795. Eddukvæði. Ed. Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason. I–II. ÍF. Reykjavík 2014. Egils saga. In Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar. Ed. Sigurður Nordal. ÍF, 2. Reykjavík, 1933. Eyrbyggja saga. In Eyrbyggia saga. Brands þáttr ǫrva. Eiríks saga rauða. Grœnlendinga saga. Grœnlendinga þáttr. Ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson and Matthías Þórðarson. ÍF, 4. Reykjavík, 1957 [1935]. 1–186. Grímnir’s Sayings. In The Poetic Edda. 2014. 50–60. Grímnismál. In Eddukvæði. I: 367–379. Guðrúnarkviða II. In Eddukvæði. II: 352–361. Hárbarðsljóð. In Eddukvæði. I: 389–398. Hávamál. In Eddukvæði. I: 321–355. Hyndluljóð. In Eddukvæði. I: 460–469. Lárentíus saga biskups. In Árna saga biskups; Lárentíus saga biskups; Söguþáttur Jóns Halldórssonar biskups; Biskupa ættir. Ed. Guðrún Ása Grímsdóttir. ÍF, 17. Reykjavík, 1998. Ög 136, Rök stone, Östergötland, Sweden. In Östergötlands runinskrifter = Sveriges runinskrifter, ii. Ed. Erik Brate. Stockholm, 1918. Pétrsdrápa. Ed. David McDougall. In Poetry on Christian Subjects. Ed. Margaret Clunies Ross. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages, 7: 2. Turnhout, 2007. 796–844. Plato. Theaetetus. In Plato in Twelve Volumes, xii. Trans. Harold N. Fowler. Cambridge, MA, 1921. The Poetic Edda. Transl. Carolyne Larrington. Rev. ed. Oxford, 2014. The Saga of King Sverri of Norway. Trans. J. Sephton. London, 1899. Sigrdrífumál. In Eddukvæði. II. 313–321. Skáldskaparmál. In Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Skáldskaparmál. I. Ed. Anthony Faulkes. London, 1998. Stjórn III. In Stjorn. Gammelnorsk Bibelhistorie fra Verdens Skabelse til det babyloniske Fangenskab. Ed. Carl Richard Unger. Christiana, 1862. Sveriges kyrkor: konsthistoriskt inventarium. Ed. Sigurd Curman, William Anderson and Lars-Göran Kindström. Stockholm, 1912–. Sverris saga. Ed. Þorleifur Hauksson. ÍF, 30. Reykjavík, 2007. U 114, Runby stone, Uppsala, Sweden. In Upplands runinskrifter = Sveriges runinskrifter, vi–ix. Ed. Elias Wessén, Sven Birger and Fredrik Jansson. Stockholm, 1940–1953. Ynglinga saga. In Heimskringla. Ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson. ÍF, 26. Reykjavík, 1941.



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McKinnell, John. 2003. “Encounters with Völur.” In Old Norse Myths, Literature and Society: Proceedings of the Eleventh International Saga Conference. Sydney. 110–131. McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, MA. Mersch, Dieter. 2006. Medientheorien zur Einführung. Hamburg. Nagel, Alexander. 2012. Medieval Modern: Art out of Time. London. Öberg, Jan. 1975. “Vaxtavlor.” In KLNM. xix: Cols. 590–591. Ohlmarks, Åke. 1944. “Till frågan om den fornnordiska skaldediktningens ursprung.” Arkiv för nordisk filologi 57: 178–207. Ong, Walter J. 1967. Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History. New Haven, CT. Orton, Peter. 2007. “Spouting Poetry: Cognitive Metaphor and Conceptual Blending in the Old Norse Myth of the Poetic Mead.” In Constructing Nations, Reconstructing Myth: Essays in Honour of T.A. Shippey. Ed. Andrew Wawn. Turnhout. 277–300. Parry, Milman. 1971. The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry. Ed. Adam Parry. Oxford. Perkins, Richard. 1989. “Objects and Oral Tradition in Medieval Iceland.” In Úr Dölum til Dala. Guðbrandur Vigfússon Centenary Essays. Ed. Rory McTurk and Andrew Wawn. Leeds. 239–266. Poole, Russell. 2010. “Þulir as Tradition-Bearers and Prototype Saga-Tellers: þat er opt gott, er gamlir kveða.” In Creating the Medieval Saga: Versions, Variability and Editorial Interpretations of Old Norse Saga Literature. Ed. Judy Quinn and Emily Lethbridge. Odense. 229–251. Price, Neil. 2010. “Passing into Poetry: Viking-Age Mortuary Drama and the Origins of Norse Mythology.” Medieval Archaeology 54.1: 123–156. Quinn, Judy. 1998. “Ok verðr henni ljóð á munni”– Eddic Prophecy in the fornaldarsögur.” Alvíssmál 8: 29–50. Quinn, Judy. 2001. “Editing the Edda: The Case of Vǫluspá.” Scripta Islandica 51: 69–92. Quinn, Judy. 2010. “Liquid Knowledge. Traditional Conceptualisations of Learning in Eddic Poetry.” In Along the Oral-Written Continuum: Types of Texts, Relations, and Their Implications. Ed. Slavica Ranković, Leidulf Melve and Else Mundal. Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, 20. 183–226. Ralph, Bo. 2007. “Gåtan som lösning. Ett bidrag till förståelsen av Rökstenens runinskrift.” Maal og Minne 99.2: 133–157. Ranković, Slavica. 2007. “Who Is Speaking in Traditional Texts? On the Distributed Author of the Sagas of Icelanders and Serbian Epic Poetry.” New Literary History 38.2: 293–307. Ranković, Slavica, Leidulf Melve and Else Mundal, eds. 2010. Along the Oral-Written Continuum: Types of Texts, Relations, and Their Implications. Turnhout. Roesdahl, Else. 2002. “Jellingstenen – en bog af sten.” In Menneskelivets mangfoldighed. Arkæologisk og antropologisk forskning på Moesgård. Ed. Ole Høiris. Højbjerg. 235–244. Schulte, Michael. 2007. “Memory Culture in the Viking Age.” Scripta Islandica 58: 57–73. Shannon, Claude E. and Warren Weaver. 1949. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana, IL. Siegert, Bernhard. 2015. Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real. New York, NY. Svärdström, Elisabeth. 1970. “Ett skrivdon med runinskrift från Lödöse.” Fornvännen 65: 81–89.



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Lukas Rösli

I: 19 Spatial Studies 1 Definition Spatial studies, being a part of the cultural turn, is an intellectual movement in the humanities and social sciences rather than an actual academic discipline, just as is the case with memory studies. This movement, which was initiated and developed during the so-called ‘spatial turn’, goes back to Edward W. Soja’s book Postmodern Geographies. The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (1989), where Soja introduced the term ‘spatial turn’ in a chapter subtitle “Uncovering Western Marxism’s Spatial Turn” (1989, 39). The new turn was not only named by Soja, he also set the general intellectual direction with his research, as it is concerned with the overall importance of how society creates space, and how space creates society. It was not, however, until the book Thirdspace (Soja 1996) that the spatial turn was accepted in its explicit paradigmatic significance in the humanities and social sciences, and was no longer considered as a negligible debate among post-Marxist theorists in human geographies: Contemporary critical studies have experienced a significant spatial turn. In what may be seen as one of the most important intellectual and political developments in the late twen­ tieth century, scholars have begun to interpret space and the spatiality of human life with the same critical insight and emphasis that has traditionally been given to time and history on the one hand, and to social relations and society on the other. (Soja 1996, blurb)

Before the spatial turn, the historical relationship and the connoted political discourses of fascism and Nazi ideology to space and habitat (e.g. Lebensraum) had created unease in academic discourse after the Second World War towards space as a cultural factor (Günzel 2007, 13–29; Gerok-Reiter and Hammer 2015, 481). The fact that there is still no general agreement to be found concerning the designation of the turn itself, which results in a complex three-way-split of the turn’s naming as spatial turn, topographical turn, or topological turn – and with rather blurred boundaries of their meaning and specialised direction according to the respective field or discipline to which they are applied (Döring and Thiel­ mann 2008, 7–45; Günzel 2008, 219–237) – might be an echo of this historical unease. Nevertheless, since the increasing differentiation of spatial studies, influenced by the spatial turn in the different fields and disciplines, occurred, it is no longer just society and space which are seen as being mutually depend­ ent, constantly changing, and adjusting to specific requirements. Thereby, the spatial turn has pointed to the fact that the same conditions concerning space https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-025



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and society also apply to space and culture or cultural phenomena in all their his­ torical depth. In other words, spatial studies builds on the fundamental premise that its main research subject – space – does not exist as a consistent factor or as an epistemological a priori, but rather has to be considered a construct, based on its intended use within the respective discourse on which it is built and to which it refers. It is this (social) constructivist epistemological approach shared by spatial studies and (cultural) memory studies, which makes fruitful interaction between these two intellectual and theoretical movements possible, useful, and essential.

2 State of research In his pioneering studies on collective memory, Maurice Halbwachs (1925, 1950) holds the view, that memory is defined through the present rather than through the past, which moves his theoretical approach into the proximity of recent neu­ ropsychological memory studies (Moller 2010, 86), and distinguishes Halbwachs from his contemporaries (e.g. Warburg, Freud). Furthermore, Halbwachs’ theo­ retical descriptions of memory functions are primarily based on spatial meta­ phors (Assmann 2011, 45), anticipating the idea of the constructedness of both memory and space. Assmann (2011, 44) also recognises Halbwachs’ theories on mnemotopes as the starting point of a critical analysis of topographical texts in combination with cultural memory. “This art [of memory] seeks to memorise through a technique of imprinting ‘places’ and ‘images’ on memory,” writes Frances A. Yates in her ground-breaking book The Art of Memory (1966, xi). This statement about the link between memory and space has become a commonplace in recent memory studies, at least when it comes to the topic of mnemotechnic from classical antiquity, which applies individual places and images to the memory of an individual person (Yates 1966, 63–64). With respect to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Yates locates places of memory as intellectual starting points, which are mentally (re-)visited to trace back the stories they once created, and whose narrations are revised, and whose meanings are transformed over time (Hutton 2016, 31). According to Hutton (2016, 31), it was Pierre Nora, who for the first time combined both Halbwachs’ theo­ ries on mnemotopes and collective memory and Yates’ statements on places of memory, when formulating his theories presented in Les Lieux de mémoire (Nora 1984–1992). For Nora, the term lieux (sites or places) is not restricted to actual memorial sites or monuments, but includes images, texts, performances, land­ scapes, symbols, and so on. In this light, “[…] the term ‘memory’ is not a metaphor

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but a metonym based on material contact between a remembering mind and a reminding object.” (Assmann 2008, 111) A similar assertion concerning space and society was made by Henri Lefeb­ vre: “The spatial practice of a society secrets that society’s space; it propounds and presupposes it, in a dialectic interaction; it produces it slowly and surely as it masters and appropriates it. From the analytic standpoint, the spatial practice of a society is revealed through the deciphering of its space.” (Lefebvre 1991, 38) According to Lefebvre, space is not a neutral setting in which historical events take place, but is rather constructed by social practices. Collective and cultural memory can be interpreted as a sort of social practice, which not only accumulate in different spaces and spatial or cultural phenomena, but also consolidate and reflect as social identity (Classen 2016, 547). As a consequence, memory, space, and society are interactive with each other and dependent on each other.

3 Pre-modern Nordic material According to Pernille Hermann “[t]here exist no learned treatises in the Old Norse literary corpus that explicitly deal with the ways in which Nordic writers per­ ceived memory […].” (Hermann 2015, 317). Nonetheless, “it is possible to observe in Old Norse-Icelandic culture itself – both the linguistic-written one and the nonverbal one (i.e. all aspects of material culture, landscape, and so on) – an intense and active examination of the numerous facets of memory.” (Glauser 2014, ix) As discussed below, there is an increasing acceptance of the idea that memory in and of Old Norse-Icelandic culture and society, as well as the self-perception of an Old Norse cultural identity (Wyatt 2004; Mundal 2010; Barraclough 2012), can be examined on the basis of spatial manifestations in landscapes, texts, and images (Brink and Price 2008). Space, and in certain respects memory too, has been the topic of many schol­ arly works in the field of Old Norse studies long before the cultural turns took place in humanities, though neither space (in a cultural sense) nor memory have been treated as constructed and dynamic factors of a cultural self-percep­ tion in academic studies before the cultural turns, but rather as anthropologi­ cal constant, reflecting a (historical) reality. Scholars from the first half of the twentieth century, like Grønbech (1909–1912), Schütte (1935–1936) and de Vries (1943), argued in favour of spatial concepts in the collective mind of a pre-modern (North-)Germanic society, mainly on the basis of Old Norse-Icelandic texts, treat­ ing these texts as unchanged manifestations of genuine memories or the concep­ tual world of a preliterate culture and society. Spatial concepts derived on the



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basis of literary texts, such as the Old Norse-Icelandic sagas or eddic texts, were also reflected in (structuralist) scholarly works from the second part of the twen­ tieth century on the so-called Weltmodel [world model] of medieval Scandinavian people, based upon the idea of a world view imagined as concentric circles where the medieval farmstead represented its centre. Such approaches – deducing a supposedly historical (often pre-Christian) spatial model from medieval literary texts – occurred, for example, in the fields of literary studies (Meletinskij 1973, 1974, 1977), medieval history (Gurevich 1969, 1985), anthropology (Hastrup 1990), history of religion (Schjødt 1990), archaeology (Hedeager 1997), and performance studies (Gunnell 2001). At the end of the twentieth century, a considerable change in the approach towards literary texts can be noticed, when narratives are no longer considered to be a reflection of the time and mentality of the people portrayed in their diegesis’, but rather as the processing of the past, a memory manifesting itself in, adapt­ ing to, and aligning itself with different discourses, depicted in fictitious narra­ tions, affecting the understanding of space in medieval texts, too. In his book on Altnordische Kosmographie, Simek (1990) highlighted the complex dependencies of Old Norse cosmographies on European Latin traditions, and Margaret Clunies Ross (1997, 1998) demonstrated how the medieval Icelandic perception of land­ scape, space, and social power is based on and reflected in constructed narratives known from Old Norse-Icelandic stories about the settlement. These scholarly works initiated a new approach towards spatial relations in Old Norse texts, by emphasising the facts that Old Norse cosmographical and spatial narratives, on the one hand, did not occur autonomously, but were dependent on contemporary scholarly discourses from Europe, and, on the other hand, that these texts shaped at least as much the cultural and collective understanding of space in medieval Iceland as they were in turn influenced by a conception of space. The starting point of pre-modern Nordic memory studies can be seen in an article by Jürg Glauser (2000) dealing with space as a social phenomenon in Old Norse literature, where memory – introducing Jan Assmann’s concept of cultural memory (Assmann 2011) to the field of Old Norse studies (Glauser 2000, 205, 210– 214) – was addressed for the first time. Glauser analysed Íslendinga sögur and þættir as literary representations of various social spaces, defining the central aspect of these texts as “coming to terms with the past, this construction, and therefore interpretation, of history and cultural memory” (Glauser 2000, 204). By linking the legend about the Greek rhetorician Simonides of Ceos, who is claimed to be the inventor of a system of mnemonics, to spatial modes of thoughts in Old Norse texts, Glauser also analysed “textual memory spaces” (2007, 20). Accord­ ing to Glauser, it is the landscape and the events situated in the topography of saga narratives “which play the decisive role as guarantors of memory” (Glauser

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2007, 20). It is the “semioticization of space” (Glauser 2007, 20) in the sagas, which inscribes an authoritative memory of a constructed past onto Icelandic topogra­ phy. One can see how inextricably linked the saga narratives are to the Icelandic landscape (and vice versa) in two rather concrete implementations of this theo­ retical approach by Emily Lethbridge (2010, 2016), when Lethbridge visited those places in Iceland that are described in the sagas, and pinpointed them on digital and interactive maps. The more theoretical and abstract concept of mental maps, originating from the fields of psychology and behavioural geography, was very fruitfully applied to Old Norse texts by Gísli Sigurðsson (2004, 251–301) investigating the extent to which written saga texts allow one to draw conclusion on mental maps in the col­ lective spatial memory of a preliterate society, and by Tatjana N. Jackson (2009), analysing the cardinal directions in the collective spatial memory of medieval Scandinavians. A different perspective within the research on memory and spatial thinking, including maps and images, was used by Clunies Ross (2011) to demonstrate the influence of images and schematically drawn maps of the Old Norse cosmos from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on the collective memory of modern research. In recent years, there has also been an increasing interest in the spatial repre­ sentation of memory with respect to Old Norse foundation narratives and cosmo­ logical creation myths. A text-immanent framework, combined with theoretical approaches influenced by the spatial turn, was used by Lukas Rösli (2013, 2015). With regard to creation myths as depicted in the Prose Edda and the Poetic Edda, Rösli (2015, 59–98) discusses memory spaces as the starting point for both the spatial creation in a narrative as well as the self-referential actualisation of nar­ rated topographical structures. Anders Andrén (2013, 2014) discusses Old Norse cosmology and memory of the past on the basis of archaeological findings accor­ ding to their spatial and mythological memory function from the Scandinavian Iron Age to the Middle Ages. Andrén draws attention to the fact that memory in an “[o]ral culture never existed on its own, but was embedded in references to objects, images, monuments, and places.” (Andrén 2013, 279) The interaction between landscape and its sacralisation through an accumulation of myths or the claiming of land is comprehensively discussed by Stefan Brink (2013), demonstrating the ability of landscapes to become charged with memory by repeated actualisations of narratives, rituals, or names at a specific place. A similar argumentation, based on the idea of pre-modern heterotopias, was brought forward by Sverrir Jakobs­ son with regard to “[…] how the hegemonic discourse of the church [in thirteenthcentury Iceland] influenced people’s view of the world, and its spatial and tem­ poral structure” (2010, 17), and, similarly, in a broader context in his article on space (Sverrir Jakobsson 2017). Pernille Hermann addresses the question of how



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founding narratives are structured by spatial memories on the basis of Íslend­ingabók in several articles (Hermann 2005, 2007, 2009, 2014). Her starting point is the assumption that “[i]n Íslendingabók a history is constructed, and this con­ struction is built upon a learned twelfth-century point of view and the existing notion of history” (Hermann 2005, 82). Hermann explicitly points to the fact that the way in which the memory of the landnám (the Icelandic settlement period) is portrayed in Íslendingabók is structured by literary demands (Hermann 2005, 82) and by topological structures (Hermann 2007, 26–29), thereby ordering memory in the literary text on the basis of spatial narratives. The connection between the foundation narrative in Íslendingabók and the eddic creation myths was already discussed by John Lindow (1997). Lindow drew attention to how the historically uncertain past of the Icelandic settlement period is narrated and memorised in a similar way as in Old Norse myths, concerning “[…] migration, law, and the orde­ ring and structure of the cosmos” (Lindow 1997, 456). By writing down a spatially structured narrative of a constructed past, Old Norse-Icelandic society develo­ ped both a starting point for and an artefact of their own cultural and collective memory.

4 Perspective of future research At the end of his article, Lindow raises a key issue: “[M]y larger question leads to a more commodious future scholarly path, along which we will seek new ways to ask how Icelanders made sense of themselves, of their identity and their society, within the wider geographic and historical world in which they lived.” (Lindow 1997, 463) Today, this question can be answered by referring to an interlacing of theories from spatial studies, influenced by the ‘spatial turn’, and from memory studies, which gives scholars the ability to access a growing understanding of how memory was structured, spatially represented and constructed in pre-mod­ ern Nordic culture, and on how the Nordic landscapes and topographies had a pervasive impact on the cultural output depicting and shaping pre-modern Nordic memory. With respect to future research, such a combination bears tre­ mendous potential – due to its epistemological value – for different disciplines dealing with pre-modern Nordic culture such as literary studies, archaeology, religious studies and theology, and cultural studies.

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Works cited Secondary sources Andrén, Anders. 2013. “Places, Monuments, and Objects: The Past in Ancient Scandinavia.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 267–281. Andrén, Anders. 2014. Tracing Old Norse Cosmology. The World Tree, Middle Earth, and the Sun from Archaeological Perspectives. Vägar Till Midgård, 16. Lund. Assmann, Jan. 2008. “Communicative and Cultural Memory.” In Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Astrid Erll, Ansgar Nünning. Berlin and New York. 109–118. Assmann, Jan. 2011. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization. Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. New York. [German original 1992] Barraclough, Eleanor R. 2012. “Land-Naming in the Migration Myth of Medieval Iceland: Constructing the Past in Present and the Present in the Past.” Saga-Book 36: 70–101. Brink, Stefan. 2013. “Myth and Ritual in Pre-Christian Scandinavian Landscape.” In Sacred Sites and Holy Places. Exploring the Sacralization of Landscape Through Time and Space. Ed. Stefan Brink and Sæbjørg Walaker Nordeide. Studies in the Early Middle Ages, 11. Turnhout. 33–51. Brink, Stefan and Neil Price, eds. 2008. The Viking World. London and New York. Carruthers, Mary. 1990. The Book of Memory. A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge. Classen, Albrecht. 2016. “The Innovative Perception of Space (Europe) in Late Medieval German Literature: The Spatial Turn in Light of Eleonore of Austria’s Pontus und Sidonia (ca. 1450–1460).” Neohelicon 43.2: 543–557. Clunies Ross, Margaret. 1997. “Textual Territory: The Regional and Genealogical Dynamic of Medieval Icelandic Literary Production.” New Medieval Literatures 1: 9–30. Clunies Ross, Margaret. 1998. “Land-Taking and Text-Making.” In Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages. Ed. Sylvia Tomasch and Scaly Gilles. Philadelphia, PA. 159–184. Clunies Ross, Margaret. 2011. “Images of Norse Cosmology.” In Myths, Legends, and Heroes. Essays on Old Norse and Old English Literature in Honour of John McKinnell. Ed. Daniel Anlezark. Toronto Old Norse-Icelandic Series, 5. Toronto. 53–73. Döring, Jörg and Tristan Thielmann. 2008. “Einleitung: Was lesen wir im Raume? Der Spatial Turn und das geheime Wissen der Geographen.” In Spatial Turn. Das Raumparadigma in den Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften. Ed. Jörg Döring and Tristan Thielmann. Bielefeld. 7–45. Gerok-Reiter, Annette, and Franziska Hammer. 2015. “Spatial Turn/Raumforschung.” In Literatur- und Kulturtheorien in der Germanistischen Mediävistik. Ein Handbuch. Ed. Christiane Ackermann and Michael Egerding. Berlin and Boston, MA. 481–516. Gísli Sigurðsson. Gísli Sigurðsson. 2004. The Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition. A Discourse on Method. Publications of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature, 2. Cambridge, MA, and London. [Icelandic orig. 2002] Glauser, Jürg. 2000. “Sagas of Icelanders (Íslendinga sögur) and þættir as the Literary Representation of a New Social Space.” In Old Icelandic Literature and Society. Ed.



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Margaret Clunies Ross. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 42. Cambridge. 203–220. Glauser, Jürg. 2007. “The Speaking Bodies of Saga Texts.” In Learning and Understanding in the Old Norse World. Essays in Honour of Margaret Clunies Ross. Ed. Judy Quinn, Kate Heslop and Tarrin Wills. Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe, 18. Turnhout. 13–26. Glauser, Jürg. 2014. “Foreword.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. vii–x. Grønbech, Vilhelm. 1909–1912. Vor folkeæt i oldtiden. 4 vols. Copenhagen. Gunnell, Terry. 2001. “Hof, Halls, Goðar and Dwarves: An Examination of the Ritual Space in the Pagan Icelandic Hall.” Cosmos – The Journal of the Traditional Cosmology Society 17.1: 3–36. Günzel, Stephan. 2007. “Raum – Topographie – Topologie.” Topologie. Zur Raumbeschreibung in den Kultur- und Medienwissenschaften. Ed. Stephan Günzel. Bielefeld. 13–29. Günzel, Stephan. 2008. “Spatial Turn – Topographical Turn – Topological Turn. Über die Unterschiede zwischen Raumparadigmen.” In Spatial Turn. Das Raumparadigma in den Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften. Ed. Jörg Döring and Tristan Thielmann. Bielefeld. 219–237. Gurevich, Aaron J. 1969. “Space and Time in the Weltmodell of the Old Scandinavian People.” Medieval Scandinavia 2: 42–53. Gurevich, Aaron J. 1985. Categories of Medieval Culture. Trans. G. L. Campbell. London and Boston, MA. Hallet, Wolfgang, and Birgit Neumann, eds. 2009. Raum und Bewegung in der Literatur. Die Literaturwissenschaften und der Spatial Turn. Bielefeld. Hastrup, Kirsten. 1990. Island of Anthropology. Studies in Past and Present Iceland. The Viking Collection, Studies in Northern Civilization, 5. Odense. Hedeager, Lotte. 1997. Skygger af en anden virkelighed: Oldnordisk myter. Copenhagen. Hermann, Pernille. 2005. “Spatial and Temporal Perspectives in Íslendingabók: Historiography and Social Structures.” Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 1: 73–89. Hermann, Pernille. 2007. “Íslendingabók and History.” In Reflections on Old Norse Myths. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Jens Peter Schjødt and Rasmus Tranum Kristensen. Studies in Viking and Medieval Scandinavia, 1. Turnhout. 17–30. Hermann, Pernille. 2009. “Concepts of Memory and Approaches to the Past in Medieval Icelandic Literature.” Scandinavian Studies 81.3: 287–308. Hermann, Pernille. 2013. “Saga Literature, Cultural Memory, and Storage.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 332–354. Hermann, Pernille. 2014. “Key Aspects of Memory and Remembering in Old Norse-Icelandic Literature.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 13–39. Hermann, Pernille. 2015. “Memory, Imagery, and Visuality in Old Norse Literature.” JEGP, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 114.3: 317–340. Hermann, Pernille, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. 2014. “Introduction: Minni and Muninn – Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 1–10.

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Hermann, Pernille and Stephen Mitchell. 2013. “Constructing the Past: Introductory Remarks.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 261–266. Hutton, Patrick H. 2016. “Pierre Nora’s Les Lieux de mémoire thirty years after.” In Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies. Ed. Anna Lisa Tota and Trever Hagen. London and New York. 28–40. Jackson, Tatjana N. 2009. “Ways on the ‘Mental Map’ of Medieval Scandinavians.” In Analecta Septentrionalia. Beiträge zur nordgermanischen Kultur- und Literaturgeschichte. Ed. Wilhelm Heizmann, Klaus Böldl and Heinrich Beck. Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde, 65. Berlin and New York. 211–220. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Cambridge, MA, and Oxford. [French orig. 1974] Lethbridge, Emily. 2010. The Saga-Steads of Iceland: A 21st-Century Pilgrimage. http:// sagasteads.blogspot.com. (10 October 2017) Lethbridge, Emily. 2016. Icelandic Saga Map. http://sagamap.hi.is. (10 October 2017). Lindow, John. 1997. “Íslendingabók and Myth.” Scandinavian Studies 69.4: 454–464. Meletinskij, Eleazar M. 1973. “Scandinavian Mythology as a System [Part 1].” Journal of Symbolic Anthropology 1: 43–57. Meletinskij, Eleazar M. 1974. “Scandinavian Mythology as a System [Part 2].” Journal of Symbolic Anthropology 2: 57–78. Meletinskij, Eleazar M. 1977. “Scandinavian Mythology as a System of Oppositions.” In Patterns in Oral Literature. Ed. Heda Jason and Dimitri Segal. Den Hague and Paris. 251–260. Moller, Sabine. 2010. „Das kollektive Gedächtnis.“ In Gedächtnis und Erinnerung. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Ed. Christian Gudehus, Ariane Eichenberg and Harald Welzer. Stuttgart and Weimar. 85–92. Mundal, Else. 2010. “Memory of the Past and Old Norse Identity.” In The Making of Memory in the Middle Ages. Ed. Lucie Doležalová. Late Medieval Europe, 4. Leiden and Boston, MA. 463–472. Nora, Pierre. 1984–1992. Les Lieux de mémoire. 3 vols. Paris. Rösli, Lukas. 2013. “Erschriebene und gespiegelte Welten im Prolog und der Gylfaginning der Prosa-Edda.” In Konstruktionsgeschichten. Narrationsbezogene Ansätze in der Religionsforschung. Ed. Gabriela Brahier and Dirk Johannsen. Diskurs Religion, 2. Würzburg. 281–293. Rösli, Lukas. 2015. Topographien der eddischen Mythen. Eine Untersuchung zu den Raumnarrativen und narrativen Räumen in der Lieder-Edda und der Prosa-Edda. Beiträge zur Nordischen Philologie, 55. Tübingen. Schütte, Gudmund. 1935–1936. Gotthiod und Utgard. Altgermanische Sagengeographie in neuer Auffassung. 2 vols. Copenhagen and Jena. Schjødt, Jens Peter. 1990. “Horizontale und vertikale Achsen in der vorchristlichen skandinavischen Kosmologie.” In Old Norse and Finnish Religions and Cultic Place-Names. Ed. Tore Ahlbäck. Åbo. 35–57. Simek, Rudolf. 1990. Altnordische Kosmographie. Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde, 4. Berlin and New York. Soja, Edward W. 1989. Postmodern Geographies. The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London and New York. Soja, Edward W. 1996. Thirdspace. Journeys to Los Angeles and other Real-and-Imagined Places. Cambridge, MA, and Oxford.



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Sverrir Jakobsson. 2010. “Heaven is a Place on Earth: Church and Sacred Space in 13th-Century Iceland.” Scandinavian Studies 82.1: 1–20. Sverrir Jakobsson. 2017. “Space.” In The Routledge Research Companion to the Medieval Icelandic Sagas. Ed. Ármann Jakobsson and Sverrir Jakobsson. Abingdon. 175–186. Vries, Jan de. 1943. Die geistige Welt der Germanen. Halle/Saale. Watt, Ian. 2004. “The Landscape of the Icelandic Saga: Text, Place and National Identity.” Landscape 5.1: 55–73. Yates, Frances A. 1966. The Art of Memory. London.

Massimiliano Bampi

I: 20 Translation Studies 1 Definition The field of translation studies is a wide-ranging, strongly interdisciplinary area of research concerned with investigating the process of translation and its final product. The rising interest in medieval translation over the last twenty-five years has been partly supported by the adoption of various theoretical frameworks, developed in neighbouring disciplines as a result of fruitful discussions on the nature of translation.

2 State of research In Old Norse scholarship, translated literature – viewed as an intrinsically less interesting form of textual production than original works (e.g. the ‘original’ sagas) – has resulted in translation being only sporadically represented as a research topic in international scholarship on the medieval Scandinavian world. Those few studies that were devoted to translated texts were for the most part based on a prescriptive approach, according to which the act of translation and its final result were assessed mostly in terms of how faithful the target text is to the source text (e.g. Aebischer 1956; Halvorsen 1959). Especially during the last ten years, however, translation in the medieval North has begun to attract more attention, and recent studies are based on a descriptive approach to translation, fostered primarily by the so-called ‘Descrip­ tive translation studies’ (Bassnett 1991; Toury 1995). During the course of the 1990s, Descriptive Translation Studies have indeed contributed to rethinking translation as a complex semiotic phenomenon. In this view, translation is a process that entails, to varying degrees, a rewriting of the source text, driven, in the first place, by the constraints of the target culture. In those studies that adopt this approach to investigating translated texts in the medieval North (e.g. Glauser 2005; Lodén 2012; Sif Ríkharðsdóttir 2012; Marti 2013; Bampi 2014), the focus is thus on how the translated text undergoes changes that are mostly meant to adapt it to a different reception context. Another relevant novelty in this field is the application of polysystem theory (Even-Zohar 1990) to the study of how translated texts interact with other works (both original and translated) within the literary system, both synchronically and https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-026



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diachronically. Although polysystem theory’s original formulation dates back to the early 1970s, its use in medieval studies is for the most part much more recent, and still scant (e.g. Bampi 2013; Pettersson 2014). Polysystem theory has mainly contributed towards drawing attention to the fact that translated litera­ ture actively takes part in the formation and subsequent development of a literary system (and, more generally, of the culture to which it belongs). Furthermore, translated texts may under certain circumstances even play an innovative role in the system, generating new original works (Even-Zohar 1990, 47). Whereas the memory-translation nexus has, in general, already attracted scholarly atten­ tion, especially with reference to modern literatures (D’Hulst and Milton 2000; Brodzki 2007; Brownlie 2016), the role of memory in translation studies on medi­ eval Scandinavia is by and large a hitherto unploughed research ground. Textual memory in translated texts, especially in the form of intertextual references, has occasionally been touched upon in earlier scholarship. Still, the potential of using memory – especially cultural memory – as an analytical tool in approach­ ing translational activities in the medieval North has gone mostly unnoticed in international scholarship on pre-modern Nordic material. A partial explanation to this is that both the establishment of translation studies as an interdisciplinary field and of memory studies are to some extent recent developments in Old Norse scholarship. If memory has been a relevant research topic in medieval studies for the last twenty-five years, the discussion of its role in the Nordic world in the Middle Ages has started in fairly recent times. Furthermore, it must be observed that memory in translation studies related to other disciplines in medieval studies (e.g. the Romance world) does not seem to have attracted any scholarly attention so far. It thus seems clear that a lack of research is not directly dependent on a specific field’s responsiveness to new theoretical suggestions.

3 Pre-modern Nordic material The literary repertoire that translation activities from across the whole North imported from various cultures is quite broad in scope, including as it does various textual types from both the religious and the secular spheres of Euro­ pean culture. Among Nordic translated texts, two major categories are particu­ larly interesting here because they are in various ways connected with cultural memory: 1) translations of historiographical works and of hagiographic literature of various origins; 2) intra-Nordic translations (i.e. translated texts based on a Nordic source).

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The first type of text is highly relevant in that it contributes to importing memories from a non-Nordic context as part of a process of identity construction in which Scandinavian history is incorporated into world history. Such works as Rómverja saga [The Saga of the Romans], Veraldar saga [The Saga of the World], Gyðinga saga [The Saga of the Jews], Trójumanna saga [Saga of the Trojans], and Breta sögur [The Sagas of the Britons] – also known as pseudo-histories – are thus extremely interesting in this respect. As Stefanie Würth points out (2005, 163–164), “[i]n relatively massive historiographical compendia, Icelandic redac­ tors and compilers combined material from antiquity and motifs from their own past. Thus did they manage to incorporate Iceland into world history. Icelandic chieftains claimed to be related to Norwegian kings who in turn were connected to the English crown and traced back their origins to Troy.” Thus, a memorial purpose – i.e. the creation of a shared cultural memory within the space of medi­ eval Europe – triggers the selection and manipulation of foreign sources by way of translation. Similarly, translated hagiographic literature made an important contribution towards incorporating Nordic history into the broader context of Christian history of salvation. Intra-Nordic translations offer a quite interesting palette of examples that help illustrate, among other things, how memory formed part of translation activ­ ities that served ideological purposes across linguistic borders. Some translations concern royal figures of the past, whose stories and adventures are recounted in Old Norwegian texts, while others deal directly with the Scandinavian past. To the first category belong, for example, two Old Swedish translations: Karl Magnus, an abridged version of Karlamagnús saga [Saga of Charlemagne, itself a translation of various chansons de geste] and Didrikskrönikan [The Chronicle of Didrik], based on Þiðreks saga af Bern [The Saga of Þiðrekr of Verona), which claims to be a translation from German sources. While both Karlamagnús saga and Þiðreks saga af Bern are large compilations of heroic deeds centred around the figures of the two kings, Þiðreks saga af Bern is particularly interesting in that it contains a memorial archive that is directly connected with medieval Scandi­ navia. Both works and their translations were intimately linked with royal ideol­ ogy, and thus contributed towards creating a shared cultural memory that could support an ideology of this sort (Kramarz-Bein 2002). An interesting example of the second category is the Old Swedish Historia Sancti Olai [The Story of St Olaus], a very condensed and selective version of the Old Icelandic Óláfs saga helga, which recounts the life of King Óláfr Haraldsson, the king-saint of Norway. The text was translated in all likelihood for propaganda purposes. As pointed out by Mitchell, the translator “has focused primarily on cobbling from his original the story of Swedo-Norwegian cooperation against the Danes” (Mitchell 1996, 47). Historia sancti Olai is thought to have been translated



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at the instigation of Karl Knutsson, when he was trying to maintain an alliance with the Norwegians against Christian I of Denmark (Mitchell 1996, 47). Historia Sancti Olai is thus a good example of memory being part of a broader manipula­ tive process (translation) by which memories of one’s own past are appropriated from sources written in other languages, and adjusted to new needs.

4 Perspectives for future research Future research in translation studies may benefit a great deal from including the notion of cultural memory as an analytical tool. Since cultural memory can be described as “as a type of memory that is collectively shared and connected to the formation of a group’s self-image and identity” (Hermann 2013, 333), its use in translation studies may help reveal relevant aspects of the translation process as a whole. In particular, two interrelated sets of questions may provide a starting point for future work, namely, in which ways do the mechanisms of cultural memory: a) contribute towards selecting the literary material to be translated; and b) influence how the text is translated? Another interesting topic that future studies may tackle concerns textual memory as intertextuality in a broader sense. Moving from the assumption that any kind of writing, including translation, “is both an act of memory and a new interpretation, by which every new text is etched into memory space” (Lachmann 2008, 301) and expanding on Hermann’s observation that “a text borrows and uses words and passages, themes and structures from other texts” (Hermann 2013, 335), it would be of great interest to study how translated texts interact with other forms of representation of the past (both synchronically and diachronically) to construct a shared cultu­ ral memory, both within the North and within the broader European perspective, resorting to a textual repertoire of memories and contributing to expanding it. Since polysystem theory has made clear that translation actively participates in the shaping of a literary system, the role of translated texts should thus be taken into proper consideration. The case of the Icelandic sagas is particularly interes­ ting in this respect. If we understand them as cultural memory (Hermann 2013, 334), including the contribution made by translation to constructing an image of the past and to building up a relationship with various segments of the historical continuum (both the Nordic one and the broader framework of world history) may blaze a trail towards a better understanding of the mechanisms of cultu­ ral memory. Since memory and translation are both manipulative processes that result in the rewriting of a previous object (e.g. the past, a text), examining them, across disciplinary borders, as interrelated aspects of representation through the

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medium of literature may lead to a cross-fertilisation of both fields of research, i.e. translation in memory studies and memory in translation studies.

Works cited Primary sources Historia sancti Olaj. In Svenska medeltids dikter och rim. Ed. Gustaf E. Klemming. SFSS. Stockholm, 1881–1882. 313–376. Karlamagnús saga og kappa hans. Ed. Carl Rikard Unger. Christiania, 1860. Sagan om Didrik af Bern: efter svenska handskrifter. Ed. Gunnar Olof Hyltén-Cavallius. SFSS. Stockholm, 1850–1854. Þiðriks saga af Bern. Ed. Henrik Bertelsen. Samfund til udgivelse af gammel nordisk litteratur 34. Copenhagen, 1905–1911.

Secondary sources Aebischer, Paul. 1956. Les versions norroises du ‘Voyage de Charlemagne en Orient’. Paris. Bampi, Massimiliano. 2013. “Literary Activity and Power Struggle: Some Observations on the Medieval Icelandic Polysystem after the Sturlungaöld.” In Textual Production and Status Contests in Rising and Unstable Societies. Ed. Massimiliano Bampi and Marina Buzzoni. Venice. 59–70. Bampi, Massimiliano. 2014. “Translating and Rewriting: The Septem Sapientes in Medieval Sweden.” In Ritterasagas: Übersetzung – Überlieferung – Transmission. Ed. Jürg Glauser and Susanne Kramarz-Bein. Beiträge zur Nordischen Philologie, 45. Tübingen. 229–252. Bassnett, Susan. 1991. Translation Studies. London. Brodzki, Bella. 2007. Can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory. Stanford. CA. Brownlie, Siobhan. 2016. Mapping Memory in Translation. New York. D’Hulst, Lieven and John Milton, eds. 2000. Reconstructing Cultural Memory: Translation, Scripts, Literacy. Amsterdam. Even-Zohar, Itamar. 1990. “Polysystem Studies.” Poetics Today 11.1: 1–251. Glauser, Jürg. 2005. “Romance (Translated riddarasögur).” In A Companion to Old NorseIcelandic Literature and Culture. Ed. Rory McTurk. Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture, 31. Oxford. 372–387. Halvorsen, Eyvind Fjeld. 1959. The Norse Version of The Chanson de Roland. Copenhagen. Hermann, Pernille. 2013. “Saga Literature, Cultural Memory, and Storage.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 333–354. Kramarz-Bein, Susanne. 2002. Die Þiðreks saga im Kontext der altnorwegischen Literatur. Beiträge zur Nordischen Philologie, 33. Tübingen. Lachmann, Renate. 2008. “Mnemonic and Intertextual Aspects of Literature.” In Cultural and Memory Studies. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin and New York. 301–310.



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Lodén, Sofia. 2012. Le chevalier courtoise à la rencontre de la Suède médiévale. Stockholm. Marti, Suzanne. 2013. “King Arthur’s Journey North: Translation in Medieval Norway.” Translation Studies 6.1: 19–32. Mitchell, Stephen A. 1996. “Literature in medieval Sweden.” In A History of Swedish Literature. Ed. Lars Warme. Lincoln, NE. 1–57. Pettersson, Jonatan. 2014. “Riddarasögur in the North-Atlantic Literary Polysystem of the Thirteenth Century: The Value of a Theory.” In Riddarasögur: The Translation of European Court Culture in Medieval Scandinavia. Ed. Karl G. Johansson and Else Mundal. Oslo. 107–127. Sif Ríkharðsdóttir. 2012. Medieval Translations and Cultural Discourse: The Movement of Texts in England, France and Scandinavia. Cambridge. Toury, Gideon. 1995. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam. Würth, Stefanie. 2005. “Historiography and Pseudo-History.” In A Companion to Old NorseIcelandic Literature and Culture. Ed. Rory McTurk. Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture, 31. Oxford. 155–172.

Henning Laugerud

I: 21 Visual Culture 1 Definition Memory was an inherent aspect of understanding images in the medieval period, and covered all kinds of visual media, including architecture. The study of memory in visual culture and art history includes the study of images and visual objects of all kinds as containers and mediators of dynamic meanings, specific memories, and/or as memorials, significant to collective memory and identity (Carruthers 1996 [1990], 1999 [1998]; Erll 2005; Erll and Nünning 2008). This per­ spective, sometimes referred to as mnemological, comprises the study of all forms of memory and mnemotechnique. Mnemotechniques are well-tested techniques, intellectual aides, and perspectives intended to develop and improve natural memory. The mnemological perspective also includes the study of how the dif­ ferent methods have been devised, understood, implemented and discussed as systems, often from a rhetorical perspective (Engel 2001/2002). This form of study allows a critical assessment of the implicit social, political, aesthetic, and scien­ tific frameworks that these mnemotechniques had in the medieval period. Memory studies has always had a strong affinity with the field of visual cul­ tural studies. Visual culture covers the field of study of all kinds of visual-mate­ rial artefacts such as paintings, sculpture, illuminations, as well as monuments, inscriptions, and the visual-material aspects of texts. It includes what is more conventionally labelled Art History, but is broader in scope and terms of perspectives, topics and materials, encompassing all kinds of imagery, like mental images, and the relation between visual, mental, verbal, textual imagery and their media (Mitchell 1987, 2002; Mirzoeff 2002). The medieval period is in this context under­ stood to cover the time from the end of the Viking Age (late tenth century) to the time of the Reformation (c. 1540) in the Nordic countries.

2 State of research Images, and the visual more generally, have always been central in the under­ standing of memory from antiquity through the middle ages to the early modern period. Aristotle referred to ars memoria (the art of memory) as seeing images through one’s inner eye, and connected this to thinking and understanding more generally when he stated that: “the soul never thinks without an image” (On the https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-027



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Soul, Bk. III, 3 and 7). Augustine made the same connections, grounding them in Scriptural tradition (Miles 1983). The classical Latin and medieval understanding of memoria covered several things: the intellectual faculty; all sorts of memory aides and techniques; knowledge to be passed on (tradition); and memorials (so-called memory containers). These types of memory and memory images are of course interlaced and not distinct from each other. This also relates to inner or mental images and the medieval understanding of the psychology of knowl­ edge, where memory was an important and integrated element. Mnemonics then are noticeable as something more than an instrumental technique, but rather a visual – and therefore sensual – basis for knowledge (Carruthers 1996 [1990], 1999 [1998]). Despite the fact that memory studies has been an important part of the study of all sides of European medieval culture for the last 20 years or so (Carruthers 1996 [1990], 1999 [1998]; Draaisma 2000; Bolzoni 2002) little work has so far been done on a Nordic material or historical context. Some aspects of memory in rela­ tion to how images communicate – that is, speak – with the viewer are touched upon in some studies of altarfrontals in Denmark and Norway (Danbolt 1988; Aavitsland 2008). Kirsten Berg (2010) discussed the mnemotechnical aspects of the visual design and textual organisation of the Old Norwegian Book of Homilies manuscript (AM 619 4to) from the early thirteenth century. Questions concern­ ing memory and the visual have also been treated in studies of Finnish donor portraits from the late Medieval and early Modern Period, where the focus has been on the pictures/paintings as memorials (Tuhkanen 2005). Aspects of the significance of memory in relation to devotional practices and devotion and the senses in Northern Europe, that also includes Danish material, have been studied by Laura Kathrine Skinnebach (2013).

3 Pre-modern Nordic material It is evident that memory can be analysed as a major aspect of medieval visual culture in the Nordic countries, just as in the rest of Europe. On the west coast of Norway, there stands a group of large monumental stone crosses, for the most part erected on visually significant places in the landscape, some with runic inscrip­ tions (see fig. 1). Most of them seem to belong to the early period of Christianisa­ tion from the late tenth to early eleventh century. The larger part of these monu­ mental crosses show a probable Anglo-Irish influence (Birkeli 1973; Gabrielsen 2007). These crosses engrave the Christian faith into the landscape, so to speak, creating a Christian topography. As such, they are also memorials, reminders of

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Fig. 1: Stone cross, late tenth century, from Leiasundet, Kvitsund, Rogaland in Norway

what has taken place and giving a new identity to the land and its people. Some of them are also memorials proper, like the one raised in memory of Erling Skjalgs­ son (d. 1027/1028), if the runic inscription is correctly understood (Birkeli 1973, 151–156). According to this inscription, it was raised by Erling’s priest Alfgeir, in memory of his lord. There is a large and diverse body of memorials of different kinds all over Scandinavia from the Viking Age and into the medieval times: burial monuments and commemorative bautas, both with and without runic inscriptions and figural carvings. Some, like the Jelling-stone, commemorate important events, like Christianisation, as well as individuals. The memory cross in honour of Erling Skjalgsson is not unique in this context. There are memorials of this kind from the eleventh and twelfth centuries with runic inscriptions and often with figu­ rative carvings to be found in most parts of Scandinavia (Mitchell 2013). These memorials play into an even more complex system, or systems, of memory. Here the memory culture of the Old Norse pre-Christian traditions blends with the new Christian culture, with its new concept of the afterlife where the memory of the dead was even more important because of its direct salvific importance for the individual. The dead had to be kept in mind because they needed the help of the



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living in their intermediate existence in purgatory. The Christian Church was a solidarity community of both the living and the dead. The living could intervene and shorten the sufferings of their loved ones through their own intercessory prayers and good deeds. As it says in a runestone from c. 1050 on Granavollen in Hedmark: “hialbi kuþ sol aufa” [May God help Aufi’s soul.] (Norges innskrifter, 177–182) The dead were not totally separated from the living and the living could influence the destiny of the dead. This makes memory even more crucial because it was also understood to concern the memory of God. Human memories were in this context understood as connected to the Divine; therefore, it was crucial to keep memory alive. (Oexle 2011 [1983]) This is yet another aspect of the impor­ tance of memory and the sophisticated understanding of memory in Old Norse culture, tapping into both the pre-Christian traditions and Christian – and Classi­ cal – learned traditions (Hermann 2014). A different kind of example of how memory could work is to be found in the wooden altar frontals from Norway (Hohler et al. 2004; Stang 2009) (see colour plate 17). These painted panels were placed in front of the altar. 31 such panels have survived from the Middle Ages, as well as two carved panels, all made between 1250 and 1350. The panels were most likely made in Norway, and most of the preserved ones were probably made in Bergen, where there was a painter’s guild according to Magnus Lagabøtes City Law from 1276 (Norges Gamle Love indtil 1387, 246; Magnus Lagabøters Bylov, 30). One such painting is the frontal from the church of Kinsarvik, Hardanger, probably made c. 1275, and most likely placed at the main altar in the church. The main motif on the panel is the crucifixion. In an octofoil in the centre of the painting, Christ is being nailed to the cross with St Mary and St John on each side. Longinus pierces His side with a lance and Stephaton hands Him the sponge with vinegar. Blood is flowing from the side wounds of His hands and feet. The scene is surrounded by four angels swinging censers, separated visually from the event by the borders of the octofoil. Two other motifs accompany the main scene in two half octofoils. On the right, we see St Peter and the allegorical Church por­ trayed as a crowned woman with a chalice and the victorious banner of the Cross. On the left side, we see the Apostle Paul with the allegorical Synagogue portrayed as a woman averting her face and with closed eyes, her chalice upturned and slipping out of her hands. The banner pole is broken and the crown is sliding down from her head. An interesting Christological commentary in Latin frames the entire panel. It states that this painting shows not only God or only man, but is an image of both God and man in one. Already here, at the identification of the iconographic motifs and figures, we are confronting the basics of mnemotechnics. These figures and symbols are all memory aides. Their meaning or content is not in the painting, but in the memory

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of the beholder, which is activated by the symbols. The deciphering of a symbol or a sign’s memory content is at the core of iconographical interpretation. The ico­ nological interpretation or perspective will always be a study of the interpretative framework of a historical culture and its tradition(s). The symbols are part of the overall cultural memory. Symbols and allegories, like the one we find in the altar frontal from Kinsarvik, can therefore be understood as part of a mnemotechnical system or aide, but are also expressions of the ways cultural memory could be transmitted. All kinds of memory aids in the classical and medieval traditions, the ars memoria, were based on images and visualisations. For instance, St Thomas Aquinas emphasised the importance of using images to aid the memory. When you wish to remember something, he said, you must take some suitable illustra­ tion of it. The reason for this is that simple and spiritual impressions easily slip from the mind, unless they are tied to corporeal images, because human knowl­ edge has a greater hold on perceivable objects. He also points out the need to arrange these images carefully in a systematic order, so that one easily can pass from one memory-object to another. (Summa Theologiae, II–II, Q. 49, Art. 1) Another significant aspect directly related to ars memoria is the symmetrical composition of the panel. This symmetry is first seen in the general structure of the framing of the main motifs with an octofoil in the centre and two halves on each side. The crucifixion scene is composed around the figure of Christ with two persons on each side, St Mary on the far right and St John on the far left. The two Roman soldiers are flanking Christ on each side. In addition, the three men crucifying Christ are placed in a triangle with one at each arm and the third at the foot of the Cross. The two ladders meeting at the same point accentuate this triangle. The placing of the four angels with the censers at the four corners of the Crucifixion scene creates a similar symmetry. The same goes for the two flanking motifs within each half octofoil, who are mirroring each other. All elements neatly composed around pairs of twos, threes and fours, as recommended already in the classical art of memory (Laugerud 2010, 46). In the preface to his Chronicon from 1130 (Zinn 1974, 219), Hugh of St Victor (c. 1096–1142) stated that orderly formulation of distinctions and separations is necessary to avoid confusion, and its result, ignorance and forgetfulness. An important way of doing this is through order and symmetry that also includes a numerical system, or a numerical grid (Carruthers 1996 [1990], 80–107). The medieval iconographies then, with their order, symmetry and schemata, served important and complex mnemonic pur­ poses that becomes clear when viewed from a mnemological perspective. The symbolic language of images has an inherent ambiguity, with different levels of meaning. Images of all kinds, symbols and allegories are, where memory is concerned, effective for many reasons. One of them is their aptitude for rhe­



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torical concentration, of being able to compress a large amount of content into one expression. This is an expression that is syntagmatic, in the sense that its references are a selection of several elements that belong together or are joined together (Laugerud 2016). This is also true in this painting from Kinsarvik. These symbols, the iconography, do not mean or signify just one thing, but many. There is no one-to-one relationship between symbols and their referents. The figure of St Peter, for instance, is not only referring to St Peter as a person in the Bibli­ cal history and a saint, and the Crucifixion is not only referring to a particular historical event. St Peter might also refer to and symbolise the Church and the Church’s authority supported here visually with the figure of Ecclesia. The Cruci­ fixion shows not only the event at Golgotha, but also symbolises the meaning of this event: Christ’s sacrifice for our sins and its salvific purpose. The frontal makes a strong ecclesiological point. An overall point is the understanding of the Church triumphant through the Cross, continuing the sal­ vific work of Christ in the world. The figure of Ecclesia has a chalice in her hand, significantly enough, holding the blood of Christ, just like the chalice on the altar in the church of Kinsarvik during the Eucharistic celebration. This is one of the many examples of the potentiality of meaning in images and their ability to con­ centrate complex meaning(s) in one expression. These symbols can be seen as containers of meaning that is exponential, productive, and dynamic, speaking through and in dialogue with the memory of the beholder (Kemp 1993). Paintings like this were supplemented with what we might call a constant pictorial catechisation, with repetitions of acts (liturgy and devotional practices), and stories and explanations (readings and sermons). This was not done in a unidirectional manner, where the clergy explained the meaning of the images in isolation. It was not so much a question of explaining what meanings were in the images, as much as filling the images with potential meaning. They were an integral part of a rhetorical (communicative) situation. The motifs and symbols themselves were meant to be internalised and used to build up an individual memory as part of a larger collective memory. The images made it possible to communicate and preserve a meaning content, and literally keep it in mind, i.e. in memory. One should also contemplate the images with the hugscotz augo – the inner eye (Gamal norsk homiliebok 1966, 97, line 10). In the medieval understanding, God communicated through the image by giving life to dead matter. Here we see a parallel to that which occurs during the celebration of the Eucharist, where the dead matter of the sacramental objects – the bread and the wine – are miraculously brought to life and becomes life-giving via the transubstantiation of the elements of communion. The image of the Cruci­ fixion within the octofoil looks almost like a host and, at the same time, it shows what the believer should see in the host that is being eaten. In the frontal, we can

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also see the four angels swinging their censers, just as the priest swings his censer during the Eucharistic celebration. This then is also an activation of several sen­ sorial memories. Strong multisensorial references are made, underscoring the importance of the sensorial and the body for memory (Laugerud 2015). This was a central element of medieval religiosity: “The liturgy lay at the heart of medieval religion, and the Mass lay at the heart of the liturgy.” (Duffy 1992, 91) In the same manner, the Church, both as a community and as a physical and visually manifest entity, was at the centre of society and the altar was at the centre of the Church. In the celebration of the Eucharist, God and humans communicated directly with one another via the visible signs. During mass Christ’s sacrifice on Calvary was re-presented and made effective. Memory takes place in time and is a temporal activity. Something of the past is activated in the present with a prospective perspective. It is a re-collection of a truth that eternally is (Watts 1983 [1954], 95). Memory was both of the past, the present and the future: “to remember the eternal joys of Paradise and the pains of Hell,” states Boncompagno da Signa (c. 1170–1240) in his Rhetorica Novissima from 1235 (Rhetorica novissima, 275). Through the sacrament of Communion the believer became physically united with the sacrificial body, i.e. with Christ’s suf­ fering, resurrection and glory. The sacrament was the visible physical sign of the sacred body, which was also physically present via its image on, for instance, the altar frontal like the one from Kinsarvik. The Eucharist is of course a central theme in the discussions of sensory processes and the senses in the Middle Ages due to its theological and salvific importance, and its sensual and commemorative character. This sacrament does, however, also reveal memory as being at the core of Christianity (Oexle 1995, 1999). The Sacrifice of the Mass – the Eucharistic celebration – is a continuing recollection, anamnesis, of Christ’s redemptive sacrifice for mankind. This is not a mere reminder of a past event, but a recollection of the deepest kind of truth made real and effectively present. In this liturgical celebration, all the senses are activated – smell, touch, taste, hearing, and seeing – in a kind of memory theatre as the one and only perfect memory. A painting like the one from Kinsarvik func­ tions then on many levels of meaning and mediation where the memory aspect is at the core of its understanding and use. This is also something that is important for the collective memory, the constitution of society both local and global, giving the individual a place in the world, an identity, and the means with which to navigate this world. Sermons, liturgical music, readings from biblical texts and religious images functioned as references of meaning intended to create cogni­ tive connections between the voice of the church-room and the believer. These references connected the contemporary believer, beholder, or listener to the uni­ versal history of salvation.



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4 Perspectives for future research The brief analyses above are just to hint at and exemplify some of the potential of memory studies and the use of mnemological perspectives in Nordic material. As pointed out in the short state of research section, this is still an open field of study. Nordic material has rarely been used or related to the larger European culture within medieval memory studies and all kinds of studies, of all sorts of material, would in general be relevant and interesting. It would for instance be a great potential here for the study of church paintings, like the Danish wall pain­ tings, and other church decorations to understand how the local Nordic cultures were integrated into a larger European culture, as I have tried to demonstrate above. In this context, it would also be interesting to see how and why old motifs and concepts were fused and developed. A mnemological approach would proba­ bly also give new perspectives to the studies and understanding of how so-called oral cultures might function and bridge the dichotomist oral/writing divide that still lingers on in many cultural studies. This is a divide that is too simplistic and neglects the importance of the visual and other sensorial media. The study of the visual and material aspects of manuscripts with a mnemological perspective is also related to this, and seems to be a very promising field of inter-disciplinary research. Memory studies in visual culture is a potentially large field, just waiting to be explored and related to other types of memory studies as presented within this handbook.

Works cited Primary sources Aristotle. On the Soul. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Vol. 1. Bollingen series, LXXI: 2. Princeton, NJ, 1995. Rhetorica novissima. Boncompagno da Signa. In Bibliotheca Juridica Medii Aevi. Vol. II. Ed. A. Gaudenzi. Bologna, 1892. Gamal norsk homiliebok. Cod. Am. 619 4to. Ed. Gustav Indrebø. Oslo, 1966 [1933]. Magnus Lagabøters Bylov. Transl. Knut Robberstad. Christiania, 1923. Norges Gamle Love indtil 1387. 2. Christiania, 1848. Norges innskrifter med de yngre runer. 1. Oslo, 1941. Thomas of Aquino. Summa Theologiae. Latin/English Edition of the Works of St. Thomas Aquinas, Vol. 13–20. The Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine. Lander, WY, 2012.

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Secondary sources Aavitsland, Kristin B. 2008. “Ornament and Iconography. Visual Orders in the Golden Altar from Lisbjerg.” In Ornament and Order. Essays on Viking and Northern Medieval Art for Signe Horn Fuglesang. Ed. Margrethe C. Stang and Kristin B. Trondhjem. 73–95. Berg, Kirsten M. 2010. “Homilieboka – for hvem og til hva?” In Vår eldste bok. Skrift, miljø og biletbruk i den norske homilieboka. Ed. Odd Einar Haugen and Åslaug Oddmundsen. Oslo. 35–76. Birkeli, Fridtjof. 1973. Norske steinkors i tidlig middelalder. Oslo. Bolzoni, Lina. 2002. La rete delle immagini. Predicazione in volgare dalle origini a Bernardino da Siena. Torino. Carruthers, Mary. 1996 [1990]. The Book of Memory. A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge. Carruthers, Mary. 1999 [1998]. The Craft of Thought. Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200. Cambridge. Danbolt, Gunnar. 1988. “Bilde som tale. St. Olavsantemensalet i Nidarosdomen.” Kunst og kultur 71.3: 138–158. Draaisma, Douwe. 2000. Metaphors of Memory: A History of Ideas about the Mind. Cambridge. Duffy, Eamon. 1992. The Stripping of the Altars. Traditional Religion in England c. 1400–1580. New Haven, CT, and London. Engel, William E. 2001/2002. “What’s New in Mnemology.” Connotations 11.2–3: 241–261. Erll, Astrid. 2005. Kollektives Gedächtnis und Erinnerungskulturen. Eine Einführung. Stuttgart. Erll, Astrid and Ansgar Nünning, eds. 2008. Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Media and Cultural Memory, 8. Berlin. Gabrielsen, Kristine Holme. 2007. “Vestlandets steinkors. Monumentalisme i brytningen mellom hedendom og kristendom.” Universitetet i Bergen Arkeologiske Skrifter. Hovedfag/ Master 2. 115–271. Hermann, Pernille. 2014. “Key Aspects of Memory and Remembering in Old Norse-Icelandic Literature.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Herrmann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 13–49. Hohler, Erla, Nigel Morgan and Anne Wichstrøm. 2004. Painted Altar Frontals of Norway 1250–1350. 1. London. Kemp, Wolfgang. 1993. “Memoria, Bilderzählung und der mittelalterliche Esprit de Système”. In Memoria. Vergessen und Erinnern. Ed. Anselm Haverkamp und Renate Lachmann. Poetik und Hermeneutik, 15. Munich. 265–282. Laugerud, Henning. 2010. “To See With the Eyes of the Soul. Memory and Visual Culture in Medieval Europe.” ARV. Nordic Yearbook of Folklore 66: 43–68. Laugerud, Henning. 2015. “Memory. The Sensory Materiality of Belief and Understanding in Late Medieval Europe.” In The Saturated Sensorium. Principles of Perception and Mediation in the Middle Ages. Ed. Henning Laugerud, Hans H. Lohfert Jørgensen and Laura K. Skinnebach. Aarhus. 246–272. Laugerud, Henning. 2016. “‘And how could I find Thee at all, if I do not remember Thee?’ Visions, images and memory in late medieval devotion.” In The Materiality of Devotion in Late Medieval Northern Europe. Images, Objects and Practices. Ed. Henning Laugerud, Salvador Ryan and Laura K. Skinnebach. Dublin. 50–69.



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Miles, Margaret. 1983. “Vision: The Eye of the Body and the Eye of the Mind in Saint Augustine’s De trinitate and Confessions.” The Journal of Religion 63.2: 125–142. Mitchell, Stephen. 2013. “Memory, Mediality, and the Performative Turn.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 282–305. Mitchell, William J.T. 1987. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago, Il. Mitchell, William J.T. 2002. “Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture.” In Art History, Aesthetics, Visual Studies. Ed. Holly, Michael Ann and Keith Moxey. Williamstown, MA. 231–250. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 2002. The Visual Culture Reader. London. Oexle, Otto G. 1995. “Memoria als Kultur.” In Memoria als Kultur. Ed. Otto G. Oexle. Göttingen. Oexle, Otto G. 1999. “Memoria in der Gesellschaft und in der Kultur des Mittelalters.” In Modernes Mittelalter. Neue Bilder einer populären Epoche. Ed. Joachim Heinzle. Frankfurt am Main. Oexle, Otto G. 2011 [1983]. “Die Gegenwart der Toten.” In Die Wirklichkeit und das Wissens. Otto G. Oexle. Göttingen. 99–155. Skinnebach, Laura Kartrine. 2013. “Practices of Perception – Devotion and the Senses in Late Medieval Northern Europe.” PhD thesis. Bergen. Stang, Margrethe C. 2009. “Paintings, patronage and popular piety. Norwegian altar frontals and society c. 1250–1350.” PhD thesis. Oslo. Tuhkanen, Tuija. 2005. “IN MEMORIAM SUI ET SUORUM POSUIT. Lahjoittajien muistokuvat Suomen kirkoissa 1400-luvulta 1700-luvun lopulle.” PhD thesis. Åbo. Watts, Alan. 1983 [1954]. Myth and Ritual in Christianity. London. Zinn, Grover A. 1974. “Hugh of Saint Victor and the Art of Memory.” Viator 5: 211–234.

Constructing the Past

Bjørn Bandlien

I: 22 History 1 Definition History usually refers both to the past itself, and to the study of the past. History as a modern science is the study of what has happened, how societies and cultures in the past have been organised, and how and why these have changed. Second, history also means the past that historians study. For example, the settlement of Iceland will be one object of historical study, while the remembrance of the settlement and the use of this event in the Middle Ages or later is another aspect of this second sense of history. History is related to historiography; the latter may refer: 1) to the process of writing about events in the past, for example, the metho­ dological and theoretical considerations of a scholar when studying and writing on the history of settlement of Iceland, or 2) to the changes of historical recons­ tructions of the past and the methods and tradition used in re-examining it, as in studies of what characterised the nineteenth-century historical works on the settlement of Iceland. This article will mainly focus on two aspects of history and its relation to memory studies in the Nordic Middle Ages: first, the development of the study of memory in the Middle Ages in historical studies, and second, cases related to how the past was handled in medieval Norse society and culture.

2 State of research History and memory studies In the nineteenth century, when history developed as a profession, historians most often dismissed the concept of memory. To study history was to reveal what had really happened, relying on chronicles and archives to peel off layers of myths and traditions to get to a kernel of truth from which nations could be built on. Maurice Halbwachs, who developed the sociology of memory in the 1920s, emphasised the opposition between memory studies and history. In his view, collective memories are in a fundamental way part of the present, where social groups retain from the past only what is still living. Historians, on the other hand, deal with the past as something dead and final. The historian can only reach the past by “placing himself outside the time lived by those groups that participated in the events concerned” (Halbwachs 1980 [1950], 107). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-028

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Several historians have sought to bridge this abyss between history and memory studies in the wake of Halbwachs. The French historian Marc Bloch, an influential medievalist and a friend of Halbwachs, argued that what characterised medieval society was the development of a cult of history, especially that Christian theology, practices and rituals, shaped the experience of the present and expec­ tations of the future in constant relationship to the past (Bloch 1954 [1949]). In the 1970s, Pierre Nora and Jacques Le Goff systematically integrated memory into history studies. For Nora, sites of memory (lieux de mémoire) in modern France connected the nations’ need not only to recall, but also wake up and emphasise certain key memories of the past. Certain events and individuals from the past were linked to sites, through the restoration of buildings, placing markers in the landscape, erecting statues, collecting objects of national interest, and so on. In the nineteenth century, such sites of memory joined the interests of the nation state, the newly developed science of history, and popular culture. Thus, regional, local and even individual pasts were intimately linked to the history of the nation. Pierre Nora further noted that such intimacy between nationalism and the birth of history as a science is difficult to break up. The self-reflexive science of historiography, however, has traced how the study of history has “alien impulses within itself and discovers that it is the victim of memories which it has sought to master” (Nora 1989, 10). This anxiety within history may be seen as part of a transition during recent decades from a nationalist and future-oriented regime of the past, to one focused much more on the present (Hartog 2015). History as a discipline is then one element in the production and shaping of memory. On the other hand, it also has broadened the study of the past to that of its impact and meaning in the present as memories, whether this is our present or that of the sagas (Tamm 2013). This shift has led historians to understand why and how the past is shaped and shared by communities in particular ways at different times. Control of a society’s memory is then understood as a political issue that not only depends upon, but largely conditions, the hierarchy of power (Connerton 1989, 1). Among medievalists, Jacques Le Goff was one of the first to explore how memory interacted with society and changed over time. For the medieval period, he discussed memory in relation to different practices, rituals and social changes, such as the Christianisation of memoria in rhetoric and the mnemotechnology in schools, the encounters of liturgical memory with a cyclical memory of the laity, and the memory of the dead (Le Goff 1992, 68–80). Several of these aspects have been explored further by, for example, Mary Carruthers on the role of mnemon­ ics and various schemes of remembering things, often using complicated mental images, as well as the role of memoria in prayers and preaching. Three other influential studies on medieval history should also be mentioned; James Fentress and Chris Wickham’s essay on Social Memory (1992) that emphasised memory



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as an active process shaped in relation to the needs of a community, Patrick Geary’s Phantoms of Remembrance (1994) that discusses charters, rituals, relics and donations to religious institutions, and Michael Clanchy’s From Memory to Written Record (2013 [1979]) on the growth of literacy as a medium for bureau­ cratic memory. These studies indicate how historians have integrated memory into studies of the past, and attempt to create a space between the disciplines of history and memory as Halbwachs understood them. Even though few historians would use the term collective memory, his perspectives continue to be influential. Peter Burke argues that social memory as an historical phenomenon in the tradition of Halbwachs is primarily about the transmission, uses and shaping of public memories. Remembrance within a social context is selective, and in an histori­ cal approach it is possible to reveal the principles of such selections, their varia­ tions between and within societies, and their changes over time. He sums up the approach of memory studies in past societies in three questions: what are the modes of transmissions of collective memories, what are the uses of these pasts, and, finally, what is suppressed into oblivion? (Burke 1997, 44–45) Changes in all three aspects are of importance and need to be seen in relation to each other, as well as to cultural, political and social factors. Such an approach may link the various elements that shapes people’s view of the past, such as institutions, rituals, relations, power and ideology, while at the same time analyse how indi­ viduals negotiated inherited perceptions of the past (Kansteiner 2002). Examples of such approaches in a West Norse context are discussed below.

Studies on history and memory in medieval Scandinavia There are few historians who have engaged explicitly with memory studies in medieval Norse society, but there have been several discussions of the uses and conceptions of the past relevant for historical studies. Aaron Gurevich, a Russian medievalist inspired by the history of mentalities and anthropology, argued that the conception of time in medieval Scandinavia was cyclical and linked to mythology and the sacred. He termed this concept of the past ‘family time’; each family group linked itself to a pedigree of ancestors that were remembered in various ways. The names of ancestors were handed down to new generations, the past was personified in a man whose character and deeds repeated that of his ancestor, and the graves and burial mounds were placed near the farmsteads of the living. Feuds and legal suits were events that repeated themselves and were arenas for showing such characters and deeds. Even political events and grand history, such as royal politics and the migration to Iceland, were linked to

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local events and were imprinted upon peoples’ memory. In this way, the past was intimately part of the everyday life of the present. The activities and rituals con­ nected to farms, sacral feasting, and the importance of memory at thing assem­ blies (through reciting oaths, laws, narratives and pedigrees), associated families to the wider community, as well as to legendary heroes and the sacred world. Thus, the “collective memory of real events of the past is being remade into the myth which deprives them of their individuality and which preserves only what conforms to the stand inherent in the myth” (Gurevich 1969, 50). Gurevich does not mention Halbwachs’ studies, but his use of the term family time is clearly related to the latter’s concept of collective memory as upheld and transmitted to the next generation through the family. In his study on Snorri Sturluson’s view of history in Heimskringla, Gurevich argued that family time dominates the per­ ception of the past. Although influenced by Christian theology and royal power, Snorri presented the history of the royal dynasty of Norway as linked to fate and more or less cyclical. One king follows another, rises to power, becomes tyranni­ cal and is replaced by another king who repeats the cycle (Gurevich 1971). Sverre Bagge, in his study on Heimskringla (1991), also concludes that Snorri was only marginally influenced by a Christian organisation of the past. Snorri used the past in three ways: first as legitimation of rights or claims to a kingdom, as norms for behaviour in the present, and as a source of wisdom (Bagge 1991, 205–206). Snorri rarely operates with divisions in time, although he referred to the transition from the age of cremation to the age of burial mounds, and to the changes of religion and customs from heathenism to Christianity. Otherwise, Heimskringla depicts the past as not qualitatively different from the present (Bagge 1991, 199–201). For example, the events following the death of King Sigurðr jórsalafari in 1130 are presented not as a turning point within a Christian timeframe, but rather in the same fashion as any other succession, introducing “a series of important events, because of his numerous descendants and their different fate and mutual rivalry” (Bagge 1991, 197). In contrast, the late twelfthcentury chronicler Theodoricus Monachus, associated with the Archbishopric of Nidaros, regarded King Sigurðr’s death as the start of a new period, introducing chaos from the rivalry among royal pretenders. In his view, only the authority of the Church could oppose and save the kingdom from this state of evil. Both Gurevich and Bagge conclude that Snorri’s use of the past was dis­ tinct from the clerical and continental tradition, and other scholars have seen the characteristics of saga writing as crucial in shaping Icelandic identity in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Margaret Clunies Ross has argued that when saga writers dealt with concerns such as the settlement of Iceland, genealogy and relations between districts and families, Norse myths were crucial interpreta­ tive tools (Clunies Ross 1998). As pointed out by Guðrún Nordal (2001), educated



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chieftains and powerful families in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Iceland used skaldic poetry to link themselves to the mythological and heroic past. The writing of history in medieval Iceland thus cannot be distinguished from literature or stories of entertainment; the intertextual references to past events made sense of, and add complexities to, the meaning of honour, conflicts and relations to foreign rulers and the wider world. In a discussion of sagas as truth or fiction, or some­ thing in between, Ralph O’Connor takes this one step further and argues that even late medieval romances, conventionally regarded as more fictional and unhis­ torical than the Íslendingasögur [sagas of Icelanders], were presented as stories of the past. For most of the audience, categories such as history, story, literature and fiction hardly were distinguishable from each other (O’Connor 2005). These studies thus emphasise the importance of literary intertextuality as crucial in Ice­ landers’ perceptions of the past and of their identity. However, O’Connor’s study challenges scholars to consider hagiography, legendary sagas and romances – tales filled with stories of trolls, knights, maiden kings and magic – as part of a past potentially marked by variety, contradictions and negotiations. Most scholars, including those already mentioned, emphasise some degree of interdependence between the regional peculiarities of Icelandic memory cultures and the intellectual culture of schools and courts elsewhere in Europe. An aspect of this is the Christianisation process and the introduction of the new, written medium on vellum, which differed substantially from the existing tradition of short runic inscriptions. Pernille Hermann points out that authors of the early sagas would use writing to recall the past, as this medium supported the author’s memory as in a storage box. At the same time, writers of historical works, such as Ari Þorgilsson and Snorri Sturluson, refer to so-called memory experts who were masters in recalling the past without the written medium (Hermann 2013, 2014). Such use of memory experts and oral methods of remembering alongside the written medium is visible in legal culture. Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir argues that law­ speakers were a connection between the traditional culture of oral remembrance and how this culture was later transmitted within the corpus of manuscripts. Judgements, inheritance, marriage contracts or purchase would be read aloud at thing assemblies or in front of a church, and lived side by side with legal docu­ ments. Written documents were, however, increasingly used as proof in both civil and ecclesiastical courts. The promulgation of Jónsbók, the new legal code intro­ duced on the instigation of the king of Norway in the late thirteenth century, was important for this development. This law made it mandatory to document prop­ erty rights in writing. Powerful families in Iceland started to collect legal docu­ ments in private archives, as well making their own copies of the law code. These families were also the ones that commissioned compilations of sagas, narratives that would include close depictions of disputes, negotiations at thing assemblies,

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and the failures or weaknesses of legal process. Among the aristocracy in Iceland, history and law became intimately connected; both were used to situate the fami­ lies in relation to the past (Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir 2014). One important question has been how remembrance in Iceland was affected by the growth of royal power after the submission to the king of Norway in 1262/64, and how this process was subsequently remembered (Byock 2004). Jürg Glauser has used Jan Assmann’s understanding of memory as made possible through an awareness of historical difference to the past. Such an awareness of the past pre­ supposes a sort of break, while cultural memory arises from creative approaches to overcoming this break. The submission of Iceland to the king of Norway is one such break, where the Íslendingasögur were used to create a new social space par­ ticularly connected to narratives of emigration, land-taking, rebuilding of society and religious conversion (Glauser 2000). One of the chieftains that was deeply affected by the growth of royal power and administration in Iceland was Sturla Þórðarson, nephew of Snorri Sturlu­ son and a prominent member of the Sturlung family. Gísli Sigurðsson (2014) has argued that Sturla was deeply concerned with tensions between kings and Icelanders in the past, especially stories of the settlers of Iceland in the ninth century. These were presented as people who had to flee Norway because the king’s growing power. For Sturla, this was reminiscent of his own position as lawman, historian, and chieftain, but also a royal official. The story of the settle­ ment of Iceland then became a part of how the Sturlungs shaped and used a polit­ ical confrontation of the past to provide a parallel for the present. Sturla linked his family with royal adversaries of the past and made a case for their just causes. His contemporary rival, Earl Gizurr Þorvaldsson of the Haukdælir family, was, on the other hand, associated with settlers who were notorious bullies. In this way, the increased pressure of the king on the Icelandic aristocracy both increased the interest in those chieftains who respected legal tradition and opposed unrea­ sonable commands, even from the king, and who was most suitable to govern Iceland on behalf of the kingdom. Else Mundal has explored further the complex relationship to the king and its relationship to the emergence of an Icelandic identity, distinct from Norwegians. In stories of Icelanders visiting the court in Norway, Norwegians are presented as having lost touch with the wisdom and heroic qualities of the past. Some Icelandic families sought to trace their origins not only to settlers from Norway but also in biblical history and to the myth of Troy, a genealogical interest wide­ spread in Europe from the twelfth century. This made some of the families more prestigious than others, and one people among others in Europe. Such common European pasts lived, however, side by side with those specific elements of the past that made Icelanders different (Mitchell 1991, 122–26 et passim; Mundal 1997,



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2010). The importance of memory as shaping communities and identities in these studies, are in most cases linked to uses of the past in the twelfth century and later. In a recent study, Erin Goeres (2015) uses the skaldic poems, mainly from Norway in the tenth and eleventh centuries, to discuss how the commemoration of a king’s ancestors legitimises the ruler’s political position but also how the skalds constructed a shared history and identity for the community of the retinue. She argues that the death of a king would often leave his retinue with the task to come to terms with his successor and remain a community, lest they be forgotten or lose control over how the skald himself, or his group, was remembered. This could be a precarious period, especially at a time when dynasties and institutions were weak and there was no self-evident continuity in personal relations between the retainers and the new ruler. The poems show a multitude in strategies to com­ memorate the dead king. Some, such as Eiríksmál and Hákonarmál, remembered the kings Eiríkr blóðøx and Hákon inn góði through mythic narratives, while other skalds balanced their grief for the dead ruler to the loyalty of his successor who in some cases was the rival to the previous king. In all of these cases, the poet had to relate to and engage with contemporary political conditions in his commemorative practice. The purpose of the memorial poems was to influence the shape of new social realities. Such strategic and creative use of the past linked to agency is in some sense distant from the collective memory of Halbwachs, but the social context, rituals, conventions and genres are still fundamental within the tradition of social memory.

3 Pre-modern Nordic material Social change and conflicting memories A tendency in these studies is to focus, with the exception of Goeres, on the stories of settlement, laws and relationship to the kings as remembered in the high Middle Ages. While especially Gurevich stressed the collective memory that endured into the Christian Middle Ages, more recent studies have linked the set­ tlement myths, legal cultures and genealogies to the changing political, social, and cultural conditions in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Such processes, it can be argued on the basis of these studies, made the interrelationship between not only oral and written modes of remembrance, but also of memory cultures within different groups, such as aristocratic families, kings, bishops, courtiers and warriors, more dynamic and complex. Such complexity should, from an his­ torian’s point of view, be connected to economic, political, social and cultural

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conditions and changes, conflicting and transforming memories analysed here from the point of view of history. Relations between different communities of memory and the many uses of the past can be explored in various ways. It would for instance be possible to dis­ tinguish between groups that used the past differently, for example, the Church, the Icelandic aristocracy, the king and the court. Another perspective would be to compare the interrelationship between and negotiations of such memorial communities and cultures of remembrance within certain historical contexts, perhaps especially in what would be characterized as turning points in history, such as the Christianisation, the internal struggles of Norway after the death of Sigurðr jórsalafari in 1130, or the submission of Iceland to the Norwegian king in 1262/64. An example of this point would be the situation in the twelfth century, a period characterised by clerical reforms, the introduction of monastic culture in the north, centralisation of power in the hands of a few families in Iceland, and the intense struggle for royal power in Norway. In this context, one would expect complex negotiations by different groups about memory. The clerical perspective on the past was influenced by the Augustinian view of history as a story of fall and redemption. To parallel biblical history, the pagan past was seen as more of a prelude to redemption, and the conversion of the people could potentially be seen as a parallel to the incarnation of Christ. The biblical past would be recalled especially in the performance of the mass, but an important part of history would also be linked to the cult of saints, the heroes of Christianity. In Passio Olavi, written shortly after the foundation of the Archbishopric of Nidaros in 1152, Archbishop Eysteinn of Nidaros (1157–1184) placed St Óláfr of Norway in the region closest to the ultimate North from where, according to the prophets in the Bible, evil originated (Passio Olavi, 67–68). St Óláfr overturned the reign of the boaster in the North, a reference to the enemy of God in Isaiah 14, and built God’s city in this cold and dangerous wilderness, thus acting more as an apostle than a warrior in turning history. His miracles, on the other hand, show how he acts in the present, as an active agent in the present for the faithful. In this context, the genealogy and the regional past of St Óláfr is irrelevant for Archbishop Eysteinn. Passio Olavi was mainly written for a clerical audience. Another, fairly contemporary version of the history of St Óláfr is found in Geisli, a drápa by the Icelandic skald Einarr Skúlason performed in Nidaros in 1153. Like Eysteinn, Einarr excluded the ancestors of St Óláfr, focusing on the saint’s deeds and mira­ cles. At the same time, Einarr succeeded in creating a memorial for St. Óláfr in the tradition of skaldic panegyric, referring explicitly to the skalds of the royal saint, Sigvatr Þórðarson and Óttar svarti. Especially in Sigvatr’s verses, Óláfr was remembered not only as a warrior within a group of retainers, but also as part of



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the community of saints (Jesch 2010; Goeres 2015, 145). Furthermore, in Einarr’s kennings the ruler is seen as the feeder of ravens and one who is generous with gold, and thus memorialising the king in a manner similar to other kings in panegyric poems by skalds. More innovative was Einarr’s kenning for St. Óláfr’s sword in stanza 48: gómsparra gylðis kindar [the gum-spar of the wolf’s offspring] (Geisli, 46). This image seems to presuppose the knowledge of mythology of the Fenrisúlfr among the audience, both cleric and lay. At the same time, the warriors were encouraged to join the army of St Óláfr against demonic forces (Weber 1997). The cathedral of Nidaros became a focal point both for the cult of the royal saint and for the legitimation of the power of his successors. As a site of memory, the altar of St Óláfr was created as an important part of the ritual commemoration of his sainthood. In Geisli, this community included the kings and their retainers, as when the rituals and banner of St Ólafr were invoked by rulers and warriors before a battle. The cathedral chapter of Nidaros seems to have increased its interest in the history of the Norwegian kingdom before St Óláfr’s rulership only from the 1170s, when an anonymous author wrote Historia Norwegie, followed by Theodoricus Monachus’ Latin chronicle of the Norwegian kings. In the latter case, the history was to be a written monument about the noble past of the Norwegian kings in explicit comparison to those of antiquity. On the other hand, the internal warfare and evil among candidates for the throne after 1130 was explicitly ignored by The­ odoricus since there was nothing to learn from these kings. This same concept of the past is found in the contemporary revision of the provincial laws, allegedly to restore the old and honourable legislation to end the recent chaotic conditions. Sverrir Sigurðsson (r. 1177–1202) seems to have both used and opposed this rhetoric of the past. In Sverris saga, Abbot Karl Jónsson of the Benedictine mon­ astery of Þingeyrar in northern Iceland used a complex web of allusions to the biblical, ancient, monastic, genealogical and heroic concepts of the pasts to legitimise Sverrir’s kingship. This was a Benedictine, rather than Augustinian, conceptualisation of the past that would have resonated with clerics, monks, and warriors (Bandlien 2013a). In an Icelandic context, this kind of history writing thrived in Þingeyrar monastery, while the historical writings at Skálholt in the south seemed more influenced by an Augustinian or even courtly use of history (Háki Antonsson 2012; Bandlien 2016). The internal struggles in the late twelfth century were thus not only to a fight between rivals for the throne, but also to the battle for history and memory. Such negotiations of the past seem to have continued at the Norwegian court into the thirteenth century. Kevin Wanner argues that this development was connected to the rise of other cultural tastes at the Norwegian court, especially after Earl Skúli Bárðarson’s death in 1240, making it harder for Icelanders to perform poems in

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the manner of Sigvatr Þórðarson or Einarr Skúlason. Snorri Sturlason sought the patronage of both Skúli and Hákon, but appears to have found only an eager audi­ ence in the former: “Snorri’s more ambitious use of metre and praise, the greater presence of Norse myth and legend in the sections of Háttatal devoted to the jarl reflects a confidence that Skúli possessed the cultural background needed to rec­ ognize and appreciate this material.” (Wanner 2008, 113) King Hákon, on the other hand, was trained in Latin and had probably learned some French. The lack of exemplary stories from sagas is striking in the learned Norwegian work Konungs skuggsjá [King’s Mirror], probably commissioned by King Hákon in the 1250s. The historical examples are mostly drawn from the Bible, not from the stories of Norwegian kings. During his reign, he showed more interest in continental and insular romances than in sagas, commissioning many translations during his reign. This was a past that was most useful, as the Norse translator of the Lais states in his prologue: “At hæve þæirra er i fyrnskunni varo likaðe oss at forvitna ok rannzaka þui at þæir varo listu­ gir i velom sinom glœgsynir i skynsemdom, hygnir i raðagærðom vaskir i vapnom hœvers­ kir i hirðsiðum millder i giofum ok at allzkonar drængscap hinir frægiazto.” (Strengleikar, 4) [“It pleased us to inquire about and examine the deeds of those who lived in olden days, because they were skilled in their arts, discerning in their reason, clever in their counsels, valiant with weapons, well-mannered in the customs of the court, generous with gifts, and most famous for every kind of nobility.” (Strengleikar, 5)]

These words stand in contrast to Marie de France’s own introduction to her Lais, where the world is seen as progressing in wisdom and courtesy. For the translator, however, the audience members should amend their own lives by knowledge of courtly tales of the past. While Earl Skúli’s fall in 1240 and the end of the Icelandic Commonwealth might be seen as a break between the Norwegian and Icelandic memory cultures, the relations between them seem to have remained interrelated and complex. After Iceland submitted to the Norwegian king in 1262/64, the Icelandic aristoc­ racy changed significantly in character. One aspect of this was that families who wanted to remain in power and increase their income had to become officials of the Norwegian king, whose main objective was to collect taxes and control the trade. The new service aristocracy of Iceland continued to distinguish themselves culturally from farmers and the old nobility by means of literature and stories of noble friendship and marriage. At the same time, the rivalry for positions and a favourable position with the king was intense. In this situation, the strategies of remembrance seem to have differed within the Icelandic elite.



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One of the aristocrats of the fourteenth century who seems to adapt to this new political situation, was Ormr Snorrason (d. c. 1402), a member of the power­ ful Skarðverjar family. The Skarðverjar was very much a family of great learning, power and wealth, but Ormr himself seems to have ignored much of his family history and the heroic stories of the past. Ormr held many offices during his career – sometimes having more than one office at a time. His loyalty to the newly appointed hirðstjóri [superior commissioner] must have shown him to be a valua­ ble servant for the king. Still, he too met resistance among some of the influential families, mainly in the northern part of Iceland. This tension culminated in the so-called Battle of Grund in Eyjafjǫrður in 1362. Ormr – at the time lawman of the southern and eastern parts of Iceland – barely escaped alive while the recently appointed hirðstjóri was killed. Killing the supreme official of the king was problematic, and the nobles who had won the battle shortly after sought peace, successfully, with the king. Seeing his enemies restored to honour, riches and offices soon after the humiliating events in Grund must have been a blow to Ormr. He seems to have recovered from the humiliation quite soon, however. It is telling that the ambitious law manu­ script known as Skarðsbók, probably commissioned by Ormr, was completed in 1363, only a year after the battle at Grund. This fact indicates that Ormr aspired to show his loyalty to the king. Eventually, he succeeded and was appointed hirðstjóri himself a few years later. Despite his recent tribulations and sufferings, Ormr must have shown himself to be a useful official for the king – or perhaps because he still aspired to show loyalty despite the humiliating events of the pre­ vious years. Still, the unpredictability of the king’s favour and strategies must have made Ormr deeply concerned about his future career. This seems to have been a recur­ rent theme in another manuscript he commissioned, the now lost *Ormsbók, that contained many chivalric sagas, some translated and some indigenous. One of the main themes in the sagas included in this manuscript was the importance of loyalty to the king, but also how knights had to defend the social order distant from the support of a powerful ruler (Bandlien 2013b). Ormr Snorrason is also regarded as the likely patron of Codex Scardensis (SÁM 1 fol.), a large collection of sagas of the apostles probably produced at the Augustinian monastery of Helgafell. Ormr’s consumption of histories of knights and apostles distinguishes him from other aristocrats at the time. Most strikingly, he did not seem to have used works on the Icelandic past or the legendary sagas that were popular at the time. Ormr probably knew of contemporary manuscripts produced among his rivals in Eyjafjǫrður, containing Íslendingasögur, such as Mǫðruvallabók, *Vatnshyrna, and Flateyjarbók. Still, his past was less oriented towards feuds and heroism, than histories associating him with the community

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of the court and the church. Ormr Snorrason’s divided identities, struggling with the tensions between the new and old nobility, between church and heroism, between law and conflicts, court and farm, provide an important background for his negotiations with the past. His memorial strategies seem to have differed, and distanced him, from those of other aristocratic families. It is illustrative that the Battle of Grund itself became the subject of poetry and tales. An otherwise unknown poet called Snjólfr composed a poem in runhent metre about it. Here, Ormr is not as especially brave, but pious on the verge of cowardice. He seems to be compared unfavourably to his ancestors and the heroes told of in myths, Íslendingasögur and Sturlunga saga. The royal official Haukr Erlendsson (d. 1334), for instance, associated himself and his family both to the settlement of Iceland, to royal service, law and the Euro­ pean past. While Ormr Snorrason distanced himself from a specific Icelandic identity through the past, Haukr rather sought to merge different notions of the past in his compilation Hauksbók. Thus, there could be different memorial strate­ gies among the Icelandic aristocracy after the submission to the king in 1262/64, using various elements of courtly, religious and family pasts.

4 Perspectives for future research The potential for further historical studies on memory in medieval Scandinavian society and culture scholarship is vast. Recent studies in history show a growing interest in the use of network analysis to understand different and complex rela­ tionships in a community. Such communities might be legal or political, urban or regional, cultic or ethnic, centred on the farm or the court. What is common to these communities is a sense of shared identities and a common past. Benedict Anderson labelled such communities, like the nation state, as imaginative com­ munities (Anderson 2006 [1991]). Anderson argued that larger imaginative com­ munities, such as the nation state, presupposed the printing press as an effective medium for sharing ideas and identities based on the past. Medievalists have built on this idea to show that there were other practices to build a community on a shared past, such as by customs, emotions, norms, ideals, communicated through ritualised acts, and legitimised and spread through images, narratives and laws. In the Middle Ages many individuals were parts of various communities and memorial practices. One example would be Arnórr jarlaskáld Þórðarson who lived in Orkney in the mid-eleventh century. He commemorated the kings of Norway in his poetry from a distance, not quite being part of the king’s inner circle. He was more personal in his remembrance of the earls of Orkney, who were his kinsmen



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and patrons. Still, this commemoration of them was also difficult, since the earls and their descendants could be bitter rivals. Furthermore, for a long period, the earls had a tense relationship with the king. Arnórr’s situation can be com­ pared to the story in Orkneyinga saga, where the Orkney earldom is presented as of Norwegian origin. The orientation of the Orcadians towards Scotland and Europe complicated the sense of a shared, stable identity mediated in poetry even more. Judith Jesch, in her important study on identity and memory in the Viking diaspora, argues that this myth concerned the earls and their power rather than an expression of a shared identity based on memory between Norwegians and Orcadians. Orkney remained politically linked to the Norwegian kingdom, at the same time as the cultural influences came from many other parts of Europe (Jesch 2015). To balance the commemoration of earls in relation to the past must have been difficult for Arnórr jarlaskáld. For historians, a better understanding of the complexities and interrelation­ ships of memory and communities should be a central task. Memory of the past as integrated in cultic, civic and court rituals, images and material culture, can be considered as one of the key elements in the formation of an individual’s sense of being part of a larger community. There is much, however, that suggests that such communities were divided from each other and sometimes in conflict. Close readings of sources and case studies in negotiations of memory, combined with comparisons and larger syntheses, such as that of commemorative skaldic verse by Goeres and the study of Jesch, would provide highly interesting results.

Works cited Primary sources Einarr Skúlason. Geisli. Ed. Martin Chase. In Poetry on Christian Subjects. Ed. Margaret Clunies Ross. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages, 7. Turnhout, 2007. 5–65. Passio Olavi. In Passio et Miracula Beati Olaui. Ed. Frederick Metcalfe. Oxford, 1882. 67–73. Strengleikar. Ed. and trans. Robert Cook and Mattias Tveitane. Oslo, 1979.

Secondary sources Anderson, Benedict. 2006 [1991]. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London. Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. 2014. “Legal Culture and Historical Memory in Medieval and Early Modern Iceland.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille

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Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 211–230. Bagge, Sverre. 1991. Politics and Society in Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla. Berkeley, CA. Bandlien, Bjørn. 2013a. “Hegemonic Memory, Counter-Memory, and Struggles for Royal Power: The Rhetoric of the Past in the Age of King Sverrir Sigurðsson of Norway.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85: 355–377. Bandlien, Bjørn. 2013b. “Arthurian Knights in Fourteenth-Century Iceland: Erex saga and Ívens saga in the World of Ormur Snorrason.” Arthuriana 23: 6–37. Bandlien, Bjørn. 2016. “Situated Knowledge: Shaping Intellectual Identities in Iceland, c. 1180–1220.” In Intellectual Culture in Medieval Scandinavia, c. 1100–1350. Ed. Stefka Georgieva Eriksen. Disputatio, 28. Turnhout. Bloch, Marc. 1954 [1949]. The Historian’s Craft. Trans. Peter Putnam. Manchester. Burke, Peter. 1997. Varieties of Cultural History. Oxford. Byock, Jesse L. 2004. “Social Memory and the Sagas: The Case of Egils saga.” Scandinavian Studies 76: 299–316. Clanchy. M. T. 2013 [1979]. From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307. 3rd ed. London. Clunies Ross, Margaret. 1998. Prolonged Echoes: Old Norse Myths in Medieval Northern Society, vol. 2: The Reception of Norse Myths in Medieval Iceland. Odense. Connerton, Paul. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge. Fentress, James and Chris Wickham. 1992. Social Memory. Oxford. Geary, Patrick J. 1994. Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium. Princeton, NJ. Gísli Sigurðsson. 2014. “Constructing a Past to Suit the Present: Sturla Þórðarson on Conflicts and Alliances with King Haraldr hárfagri.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 175–196. Glauser, Jürg. 2000. “Sagas of Icelanders (Íslendinga sögur) and þættir as the Literary Representation of a New Social Spaces.” In Old Icelandic Literature and Society. Ed. Margaret Clunies Ross. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 42. Cambridge. 203–220. Goeres, Erin Michelle. 2015. The Poetics of Commemoration: Skaldic Verse and Social Memory, c. 890–1070. Oxford. Guðrún Nordal. 2001. Tools of Literacy: The Role of Skaldic Verse in Icelandic Textual Culture of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. Toronto. Gurevich, Aaron Ya. 1969. “Space and Time in the Weltmodell of the Scandinavian Peoples.” Mediaeval Scandinavia 4: 42–53. Gurevich, Aaron Ya. 1971. “Saga and History: The ‘Historical Conception’ of Snorri Sturluson.” Mediaeval Scandinavia 4: 42–53. Háki Antonsson. 2012. “Salvation and Early Saga Writing in Iceland: Aspects of the Works of the Þingeyrar Monks and the Associates.” Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 8: 71–140. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1980 [1950]. The Collective Memory. Trans. Francis J. Ditter, Jr. and Vida Yazdi Ditter. New York. Hartog, François. 2015. Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experience of Time. New York. Hermann, Pernille. 2013. “Saga Literature, Cultural Memory, and Storage.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85: 332–354.



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Hermann, Pernille. 2014. “Key Aspects of Memory and Remembering in Old Norse-Icelandic Literature.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 13–39. Hermann, Pernille, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir, eds. 2014. Minni and Muninn: Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. Jesch, Judith. 2010. “The Once and Future King: History and Memory in Sigvatr’s Poetry on Óláfr Haraldsson.” In Along the Oral-Written Continuum. Ed. Slavica Rankovic, Else Mundal and Leidulf Melve. Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, 20. Turnhout. 103–117. Jesch, Judith. 2015 The Viking Diaspora. London. Kansteiner, Wulf. 2002. “Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies.” History and Theory 41: 179–197. Le Goff, Jacques. 1992. History and Memory. New York. Mitchell, Stephen A. 1991. Heroic Sagas and Ballads. Ithaca, New York. Mundal, Else. 1997. “Framveksten av den islandske identiteten, dei norske røtene og forholdet til Noreg.” Collegium medievale 10: 7–29. Mundal, Else. 2010. “Memory of the Past and Old Norse Identity.” In The Making of Memory in the Middle Ages. Ed. Lucie Doležalová. Later Medieval Europe, 4. Bosten, MA, and Leiden. 463–472. Nora, Pierre. 1989. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire.” Trans. Marc Roudebush. Representations 26: 7–24. O’Connor, Ralph. 2005. “History or Fiction? Truth-claims and defensive narrators in Icelandic romance-sagas.” Mediaeval Scandinavia 15: 101–169. Tamm, Marek. 2013. “Beyond History and Memory: New Perspectives in Memory Studies.” History Compass 11.6: 458–473. Wanner, Kevin J. 2008. Snorri Sturluson and the Edda: The Conversion of Cultural Capital in Medieval Scandinavia. Toronto. Weber, Gerd Wolfgang. 1997. “Saint Óláfr’s sword. Einarr Skúlason’s Geisli and its Trondheim performance AD 1153: A Turning Point in Norwego-Icelandic Skaldic Poetry.” In Sagas and the Norwegian Experience: 10th International Saga Conference. Ed. Jan Ragnar Hagland. Trondheim. 655–661.

Aidan Conti

I: 23 Medieval Latin 1 Definition Medieval Latin in the pre-modern North encompasses a range of text-types and media that offer a wealth of material related to memory studies. From runesticks inscribed with Catholic prayers found in the Hanseatic enclave of Bryggen to philosophical treatises written by Boethius of Denmark whose works were con­ demned by the bishop of Paris, the Latin language was familiar to and used by a broad spectrum of the population. The language was the vehicle for not only the liturgical worship of saints, the models of holiness in the region, but also for the works of perhaps the most internationally influential saint of the North, namely the Revelaciones of Birgitta. In short, Latin functioned in a variety of social con­ texts and therefore played an important role in shaping communicative and cul­ tural memories in the Nordic Middle Ages. Historically, the use of Latin in the premodern North was closely connected to the adoption of Christianity as a religion, and perhaps more specifically the consolidation of organisations and institutions that developed as the religion took hold. As others have noted, in particular Lars Boje Mortensen (2006), this process demonstrates a discernable pattern (albeit with regional peculiarities). Several of the kingdoms imported a first generation of foreign ecclesiastics before a subsequent generation of locals went abroad to study and returned thereafter writing myth- and legend-making works that incor­ porated the local into the ‘universal’. For this reason, the later twelfth and earlier thirteenth centuries in Norway and Denmark, the period when an initial wave of historical and legendary material was written by local writers in Latin, represent a particularly fruitful time for the study of the construction of cultural memory and its media. In Iceland, this role was largely fulfilled by vernacular writing (Hermann 2010). In Sweden and present-day Finland, Latin texts are recorded from a later period. In terms of cultural memory the focus on local legends in the form of hagiographic narratives is of particular importance.

2 State of research While Nordic medieval Latin in the past has been marginalised in literary study of the medieval North, a number of recent surveys, new studies and research tools have increased the visibility of the field. In the Oxford Handbook of Medihttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-029



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eval Latin Literature, Karsten Friis-Jensen (2012) provides a useful overview of Scandinavian Medieval Latin, describing in particular early Latin histories, as well as the works of a number of prominent figures such as Andrew Suneson (c. 1160–1228), Matthias of Linköping (c. 1300–1350) and Birgitta (c. 1303–1373). In addition, Gottskálk Jensson (2004) has addressed the lost Latin literature of medieval Iceland arguing that, if the material had survived, its place would have figured more prominently in pre-modern Nordic literary history. Perhaps the most important (and encompassing) tool for those interested in Nordic medieval Latin is Medieval Nordic Literature in Latin: A Website of Authors and Anonymous Works c. 1100–1530 (Borgehammar et al., 2012). Although, as the website notes, a few particularly notable figures are missing, such as William of Æbelholt, Birgitta and Matthias of Linköping, this critical resource provides overviews, historical intro­ ductions and bibliographical information for much of the Latin written in Scan­ dinavia in the Middle Ages. In addition to these publications, surveys of the Latin language and literature written in individual Nordic nations often have specific chapters addressing the national context for Latin. For example, the Norwegian translation of Tore Janson’s Latin: Kulturen, historien, språket has a chapter on Latin in Norway (Roggen and Sejerstad 2004). These publications have helped make Nordic medieval Latin more accessible and as a result more involved in contemporary research in memory studies. A number of recent studies have explored medieval conceptions of memory in Nordic Medieval Latin texts. Others have contextualised Nordic medieval Latin writing itself within the historical development of cultural memory within the medieval societies of the pre-modern North. The first type of study, rather textual in its orientation, is heavily indebted to Mary Carruther’s ground-breaking study, The Book of Memory (2008 [1990]), on the training and uses of memory in the medieval world, and Frances Yates’s wider ranging The Art of Memory (1966). This orientation has informed Pernille Hermann’s recent work (2009) which examines both vernacular (Old Norse) and Latin concepts of memory (and which also examines cultural memory) and Stephen Mitchell’s study incorporating a number of Latin works within remembering in pre-modern Scandinavia (2013). The second approach, more historical in its orientation, examines the role Latin material plays in the production of a cultural memory in contemporary and subsequent contexts. Cultural memory in this sense represents the handing down of collective knowledge and touches on the social roles that this collective memory enables and enacts (Assmann 2011). This approach to memory studies is highly dependent on the work of Jan Assmann, who has focused on past socie­ ties, and Aleida Assmann, who analyses and describes contemporary practices. The processes and practices through which a group transmits meaning over time (cultural memory) include rituals, images and other forms of communication;

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writing (in which Latin has been preserved for us) and its role in the formation of cultural memory is the focus of this chapter.

3 Pre-modern Nordic material Because Latin writing in the North is closely connected to Christianity, its insti­ tutions and their administration, the period in which these institutions are founded takes on particular significance for the formation of a cultural memory. For Norway and Denmark, a particularly important moment arrives in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. After local liturgical books were produced and local saints promulgated, local writers endeavoured to write local histories within a ‘universal’, that is within the perspective of Western Christendom, frame­ work. For the medieval North, during this period we see a nexus of texts, namely Sven Aggesen’s Brevis Historia Regum Dacie (or Compendiosa Regum Daniae Historia) (written between 1185 and 1202), Saxo Grammaticus’ Gesta Danorum (c. 1208–1219), Theodoricus Monachus’ Historia de antiquitate regum Norwagiensium (1177–1188) and the anonymous Historia Norwegie (c. 1150–1175). To see how these works contribute to the development of a written memory culture in Latin in the medieval North, the following pages with briefly consider 1) the arguments these works make for the necessity monuments that preserve a culture’s memory, 2) the tools they use to inscribe a national identity, that is political imagination, 3) their place in the textual landscape of medieval Scandinavia. Each of these historical works posits its own importance for the construc­ tion of a collective identity, using broadly similar terms and language to assert a perceived risk, namely that the past will be forgotten without such an historical enterprise (even as they admit the importance of oral sources for their present initiatives). For example, the Historia Norwegie equates a lack of written history with oblivion. The anonymous author states: “multorum magnificencias cum suis auctoribus ob scriptorum inopiam a memoria modernorum cotidie elabi perspexi” (Historia Norwegie, Prol.). [“I have observed that many men’s splen­ did feats, together with their performers, sink daily into oblivion among our con­ temporaries owing to the shortage of written records” (Historia Norwegie, Prol.)]. Theodoricus similarly echoes a concern in his prologue about the effacing of memory (in a quotation from Boethius). Moreover, Theodoricus stresses the use of the work for posterity, thereby asserting its importance for the passing on of knowledge over time: “Et quia pæne nulla natio est tam rudis et inculta, quæ non aliqua monumenta suorum antecessorum ad posteros transmiserit, dignum putavi hæc, pauca licet, majorum nostrorum memoriæ posteritatis tradere” (The­



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odoricus Monachus, Historia de antiquitate […], 1880, Prol.) [“And because no people is so rude and uncivilized that it has not passed on some monuments of its predecessors to later generations, I have thought it proper to record for posterity these relics of our forefathers” (Theodoricus Monachus, Historia de antiquitate […], 1998, Prol.)]. Sven Aggesen also compares the lack of contemporary written monuments in his Denmark to that which other peoples have produced, in this case peoples of the past: “diurnis suspiraui gemitibus, nostrorum regum seu principum immanissima gesta eterno deputari silentio” (Sven Aggesen, Brevis Historia, Præf.) [“Often, as I was studying the books of the ancients and discov­ ering numerous deeds of early times recorded in the most elegant language, I sighed continually at the perpetual silence to which the mightiest achievements of our own kings and chiefs have been consigned” (The works of Sven Aggesen, Prol.)]. Sven’s contemporary, Saxo similarly presents a literary monument as antidote to forgetting. The importance of a written history is implied through the comparison of neighbouring peoples: “huius gentis opinio potius uetustatis obli­ uiis respersa quam literarum monumentis predita uideretur” (Saxo Grammati­ cus, Gesta Danorum, Praef. 1.1) [“if our neighbours exulted in the records of their past exploits, the reputation of our people should not lie forgotten under ancient mould, but blest with a literary memorial.” (Saxo Grammaticus, The History of the Danes, Prol.)] Saxo’s reference to reputation can be read both as a contemporary lack (that is in reference to neighboring peoples) but also a lack that will be felt over time (to future generations). Indeed, this twofold purpose (and audience) is suggested in the first sentence of the work: “cetere nationes rerum suarum titulis gloriari uoluptatemque ex maiorum recordatio percipere soleant” (Saxo Gram­ maticus, Gesta Danorum, Præf. 1.1) [“other nations are in the habit of vaunting the fame of their achievements, and joy in recollecting their ancestors” (Saxo Grammaticus, The History of the Danes, Prol.)]. Each of these works then posi­ tions itself as a written monument that will transmit meaning over time, an echo of Assmann’s notion of cultural memory. These works also authenticate themselves by asserting they are a continu­ ation of an already existing tradition. Faithfully translating past records and copying past narratives, Saxo’s account, he claims, is guaranteed to give a faith­ ful understanding of the past (“presens opus […] fidelem uetustatis notitiam pol­ licetur [Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum, Præf. 1.3]). Sven likewise ensures readers that he will not add material but rather only relate what he has been able to ascertain by questioning old men and authorities (“quantum ab annosis et ueteribus certa ualui inquisitio percunctari, compendiose perstringam” [Sven Aggesen, Brevis Historia, Præf.]). Theodoricus similarly confirms that he has not invented material; he shifts all responsibility for veracity (or lack thereof) to his sources: “Veritatis vero sinceritas in hac nostra narratione ad illos omnimodo

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referenda est, quorum relatione hæc annotavimus” (Theodoricus Monachus, Historia de antiquitate […], 1880, Prol.) [“the degree of pure truth in my present nar­ rative must be placed entirely at the door of those by whose report I have written things down” (Theodoricus Monachus, Historia de antiquitate […], 1998, Prol.)]. Likewise the author of the Historia Norwegie asserts immunity against charges of lying stating because he has incorporated nothing new or unheard of from earlier ages, but has followed the statements of my elders in every respect (“cum nichil a me de vetustatis serie novum vel inauditum assumpserim, sed in omnibus senio­ rum asserciones secutus” [Historia Norwegie, Prol.]). To distinguish and define the community to which their cultural memories adhere, in other words to develop a political imagination, these histories employ common tools to inscribe group-markers of identity, in particular geography and genealogies. The Historia Norwegie, tracing the conversion of the land as its central narrative, endeavours to define the Christianized people and area; it aims “situm latissimi regionis circumquaque discribere eiusque rectorum gene­ alogiam retexere” (Historia Norwegie, Prol.) [“to describe the full extent of this wide-flung region, to recreate the genealogy of its rulers” (Historia Norwegie, Prol.)]. Indeed, all of these histories structure themselves around genealogies. In the Historia Norwegie and Saxo, legendary founders of the people, Nor and Dan, are included. In Theodoricus’ and Sven’s work, the scope narrows to historical rulers and their successors. Saxo’s work is remarkable in its approach in that it not only differentiates the Danes from other peoples, but also relates the Danes to neighbouring groups. For example, the Danes trace their beginnings from Dan and Angel, the eponymous founder of the English, thereby suggesting an ethnic link between the two people that has relevance for Saxo’s present. Only two of these histories offer extended geographies. Both the Historia Norwegie and Saxo offer surveys of the region to situate their people in their lands. These geographies not only function to delimit the territory of a people but to situate the ethnos in relation to its neighbours, such as, for example, the Finns (in Historia Norwegie) or the Swedes and others who speak similar languages (in Saxo). In writing these geographies, the histories not only inscribe a cultural identity for the memory of recently (relatively speaking) Christianised people, they do so while working within the geographical tradition of ancient cultural memory, “speaking the same words as the ancients in similar sacred contexts” (Mortensen 2005, 121). If we see in this florescence of history writing an attempt for a culture to express consciousness of its past, we must also acknowledge the limits of this expression. If part of cultural memory is maintained through cultural transfor­ mation (in this case texts) as well as institutional communication (that is the recitation and/or dissemination of those same texts in this case) (Assmann 1995),



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then we must admit that the circulation of these histories appears to have been rather restricted based on the manuscript transmission of the works themselves. Although it is clear (through citations and references) that these works were often known to subsequent generations, none of these works survives in complete form in the medieval manuscript record: the Historia Norwegie survives incomplete in only in one manuscript; Theodoricus’ work is found in a seventeenth-century transcript and copies derived thereof; the unique manuscript of Sven Aggesen’s short history disappeared after 1642; the only complete copy of Saxo’s work is the editio princeps from 1514. Information from fragmentary witness and indi­ rect textual traditions indicates that a readership for these works existed in the Middle Ages, but this readership appears limited. These texts appear to have been committed, entrusted and known within circles of ‘special carriers’ of cultural knowledge (ecclesiastics and their associates), but it is difficult to reconstruct the processes and frameworks for institutional communication which would dis­ seminate this knowledge more widely. Nonetheless, these histories should be seen as part of a broader communica­ tive dynamic that served to construct and reinforce local identities within wider networks. As Jan Assmann notes, social identity (or belonging) is not just a matter of texts, but a complex of shared symbols (such as rites, clothing, food, images) of cultural formation that when disseminated create and preserve collective identity (2011). Consequently, of particular importance in looking at the place of Nordic Medieval Latin in identity formation and replication is the cult of saints.

4 Perspectives for future research Indeed, significant recent studies have laid the historical and philological groundwork for comparative hagiographical studies of medieval Scandinavia. Sara Ellis Nilsson’s work (2015) examines the development of native saints in Scandinavia, particularly the ecclesiastical provinces of Lund and Uppsala, and analyzes the spread of their cults. Haki Antonsson (2010) offers a comparative overview for Scandinavia, while others describe individual national traditions with respect to local and native saints (such as Ommundsen 2013 for Norway). New editions and historical studies examine the formation of stories and tradi­ tions around especially notable figures of memory, the national saints, such as Olaf of Norway (Jiroušková 2014), Henry of Finland (Heikkilä 2005, 2009) and Erik of Sweden (Oertel 2016). This and similar work together with the recent trans­ lation of Assmann’s programmatic work (2011) offer opportunities to revisit the material with a sharper focus on the development of a cultural memory that was

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used in the construction of identities in the North. One example of this type of work examines how St Olaf became a symbol of national unity for the Norwegian elite and explores possibilities for examining the saint’s role in creating identities across the social spectrum (Mortensen 2010). In addition, research that works across languages (as called for in Mortensen and Lehtonen 2013) and can incor­ porate Latin and German, liturgy within literature, and the role of written culture, would offer a broader perspective on cultural memory in medieval Scandinavia. Indeed, the social contexts for language use offers opportunities for considering identities and the social groups involved in their formations within a common cultural memory. For example, the texts selected for runic inscription bespeak a particular communicative practice that helped form the public imagination and its communal memory. Moreover, some of the individual writing in medieval Scandinavia can be used to examine how an individual weaves social memory into her work. Laura Saetveit Miles’ recent article (2011), which does not explicitly invoke memory studies, nonetheless demonstrates how the memory of Mary’s relationship to motherhood shaped Birgitta’s own discourse on the subject in light of her own experience. Similar approaches to memory would be rewarding with respect to other writers and texts. Indeed, much work that touches on the intertextual can fruitfully inform and underpin renewed work on Nordic Medieval Latin, seeing that cultural memory focuses on “processes of transformation and enhancement, examining the decisive changes within the connective structure of a given society” (Assmann 2011, 10).

Works cited Primary sources Historia Norwegie. Ed. Inger Ekrem and Lars Boje Mortensen. Trans. Peter Fisher. Copenhagen, 2003. Saxo Grammaticus. Gesta Danorum. The History of the Danes. 2 Vols. Ed. Karsten Friis-Jensen. Trans. Peter Fisher. Oxford, 2015. Sven Aggesen. Brevis Historia Regum Dacie. In Scriptores Minores Historiæ Danicæ. Vol. 1. Ed. M. Cl. Gertz. Copenhagen, 1917–1918. [1970]. Sven Aggesen. The works of Sven Aggesen: twelfth-century Danish historian. Trans. Eric Christiansen. Viking Society for Northern Research. Text series, 9. Birmingham. 1992. Theodoricus Monachus. Historia de antiquitate regum norwagiensium. In Monumenta Historica Norvegiae. Ed. Gustav Storm. Kristiana (Oslo), 1880. [Reprint Oslo, 1973. 1–68. Theodoricus Monachus, Historia de antiquitate regum Norwagiensium. An Account of the Ancient History of the Norwegian Kings. Trans. and ed. David and Ian McDougall. Viking Society for Northern Research. Text series, 11. London. 1998.



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Secondary sources Assmann, Jan. 1995. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” New German Critique 65: 125–133. Assmann, Jan. 2011. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. Cambridge. Borgehammar, Stephan, Karsten Friis-Jensen, Lars Bojen Mortensen and Åslaug Ommundsen, eds. 2012. Medieval Nordic Literature in Latin: A Website of Authors and Anonymous Works c. 1100–1530. https://wikihost.uib.no/medieval/index.php/Medieval_Nordic_Literature_ in_Latin. (6 February 2017) Carruthers, Mary. 2008 [1990]. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge. Friis-Jensen. 2012. “Saxo Grammaticus.” In Borgehammer et. al., eds., Medieval Nordic Literature in Latin, . Gottskálk Jensson. 2004. “The Lost Latin Literature of Medieval Iceland: The Fragments of the Vita sancti Thorlaci and Other Evidence.” Symbolae Osloenses 79: 150–170. Haki Antonsson. 2010. “The Early Cult of Saints in Scandinavia and the Conversion: A Comparative Perspective.” In Saints and their Lives on the Periphery: Veneration of Saints in Scandinavia and Central Europe (c. 1000–1200). Ed. Haki Antonsson and Ildar Garipzanov. Turnhout. 17–37. Heikkilä, Tuomas. 2005. Pyhän Henrikin Legenda, Helsinki. Heikkilä, Tuomas. 2009. Sankt Henrikslegenden. Stockholm. Hermann, Pernille. 2009. “Concepts of Memory and Approaches to the Past in Medieval Icelandic Literature.” Scandinavian Studies 81.3: 287–308. Hermann, Pernille. 2010. “Founding Narratives and Representation of Memory in Saga Literature.” Arv 66: 69–87. Jiroušková, Lenka. 2014. Der heilige Wikingerkönig Olav Haraldsson und sein hagiographisches Dossier. 2 vols. Leiden. Miles, Laura Saetveit. 2011. “Looking in the Past for a Discourse of Motherhood: Birgitta of Sweden and Julia Kristeva.” Medieval Feminist Forum 47.1: 52–76. Mitchell, Stephen. 2013. “Memory, Mediality, and the ‘Perfomative Turn’: Recontextualizing Remembering in Medieval Scandinavia.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 282–305. Mortensen, Lars Boje. 2005. “The Language of Geographical Description in Twelfth-Century Scandinavian Latin.” Filologia mediolatina 12: 103–121. Mortensen, Lars Boje. 2006. “Sanctified Beginnings and Mythopoietic Moments. The First Wave of Writing on the Past in Norway, Denmark, and Hungary, c. 1000–1230.” In The Making of Christian Myths in the Periphery of Latin Christendom (c. 1000–1300). Ed. Lars Boje Mortensen. Copenhagen. 247–273. Mortensen, Lars Boje. 2010. “Writing and Speaking of St Olaf: National and Social Integration” In Saints and their Lives on the Periphery: Veneration of Saints in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe (c. 1000–1200). Ed. Haki Antonsson and Ildar Garipzanov. Turnhout. 207–218. Mortensen, Lars Boje and Tuomas Lehtonen. 2013. “Introduction: What is Nordic Medieval Literature.” In The Performance of Christian and Pagan Storyworlds. Ed. Lars Boje Mortensen and Tuomas Lehtonen. Turnhout. 1–41.

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Nilsson, Sara E. Ellis. 2015. “Creating Holy People and Places on the Periphery: A Study of the Emergence of Cults of Native Saints in the Ecclesiastical Provinces of Lund and Uppsala from the Eleventh to the Thirteenth Centuries.” PhD Thesis. University of Gothenburg. Oertel, Christian. 2016. The Cult of St Erik in Medieval Sweden: Veneration of a Royal Saint, twelfth-sixteenth centuries. Turnhout. 2016. Ommundsen, Åslaug. 2013. “The Cults of Saints in Norway before 1200.” In Saints and their Lives on the Periphery: Veneration of Saints in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe (c. 1000–1200). Ed. Haki Antonsson and Ildar Garipzanov. Turnhout. 67–93. Roggen, Vibeke and Sejerstad, Hilde. 2004. “Latin i Norge.” In Latin: Kulturen, historien, språket. Oslo. 191–199. Yates, Frances A. 1966. The Art of Memory. London.

Reinhard Hennig

I: 24 Environmental Humanities 1 Definition Environmental humanities is an umbrella term for sub-disciplines of the humani­ ties which deal with environmental questions. Regarding the pre-modern North, a main objective of inter- and transdisciplinary environmental humanities research, often involving social and natural sciences, is to create a long-term per­ spective on human-environment interactions in the past, and thus contribute to a better understanding of environmental change and socio-ecological resilience. Central questions in this regard concern the development, function and trans­ mission of long-time memories of human eco-dynamics, and thus of what can be called environmental memory. There is currently no generally accepted definition of environmental memory. Several related terms are in use, such as social-ecological memory or traditional ecological knowledge. It is clear, however, that an environmental memory is always derived from human perceptions of the environment. It is culturally con­ structed and strongly influenced by the social and cultural contexts in which it develops and is transmitted. Environmental memory therefore constitutes a spe­ cific form of cultural memory.

2 State of research It has been claimed that Old Norse myths contain memories of detrimental envir­ onmental and climatic change in the past (e.g. Gräslund and Price 2012). Most research on the importance of environmental memory for pre-modern Nordic societies, however, focuses on the Viking Age settlement of Iceland and the end of the Norse colonies in Greenland. One hypothesis is that when settlers began to arrive in Iceland in huge numbers from the 870s onwards, their lack of experience-based ecological knowl­ edge and thus of environmental memory relating to the island’s environment and climate led to initial adaptive difficulties and to a transgression of ecological boundaries. The Norse settlers established an agricultural system based on an imported environmental memory, derived from their places of origin. Icelandic landscapes probably appeared similar to them to the landscapes of Norway and the northern British Isles, entailing a danger of wrong conclusions by analogy https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-030

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when the settlers did not recognise differences in the composition, ecological resilience, and fertility of the soils. Land use practices that should be sustainable according to the settlers’ traditional ecological knowledge, based on long-term, multi-generational experience elsewhere, could lead to unexpected outcomes in Iceland, such as vegetation damage and soil erosion (Dugmore et al. 2005). Environmental memory as an impediment to successful adaptation in times of environmental and climatic change has been particularly intensively discussed in relation to the late medieval extinction of the Norse settlements in Greenland. A late medieval deterioration of the climate has long been viewed as a likely cause for the abandonment of the Norse settlements. It would have been impossible for the Norse settlers to anticipate this climatic change, since they, as relative new­ comers to the region, did not possess a long-term memory of previous changes and fluctuations there. Even new ecological knowledge specifically adapted to the Greenlandic environment developed by the Norse during the first centuries of settlement became useless when environmental risks and climatic variability occurred to an extent far exceeding the scope of their environmental memory. In recent decades, however, cultural peculiarities of the Norse society in Greenland have been suggested as more likely causes for the settlements’ end. It has been argued that the Norse continued to farm cattle and continue other resource use practices from mainland Scandinavia or Iceland, while refusing to adopt Inuit technology and with it a lifestyle that could demonstrably ensure survival in Greenland, even with a cooling climate. Conservatively clinging to an environmental memory derived from a different ecological and climatic context, it is argued, prevented the Norse from acquiring traditional ecological knowledge from another culture. This refusal radically increased their vulnerability to envi­ ronmental and climatic change, and in the end, the Norse “starved in the midst of unexploited resources, with a working model for maritime-adapted northern sur­ vival camped on their doorsteps” (McGovern 1994, 148; see also Diamond 2005; Nykvist and Heland 2014). This picture has, however, become more nuanced in recent research. It is now suggested that the Norse in Greenland showed a great willingness to adapt to changing environmental and climatic circumstances, in particular through spe­ cialising in hunting migratory seals. After 1425, however, when sea storminess increased, the climate cooled, and sea levels rose, seal hunting was impeded and the absolute limits of Norse adaptation capacity were reached (Dugmore et al. 2012).



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3 Pre-modern Nordic material Research on pre-modern Nordic environmental memory can draw on a range of sources with different characteristics. Archaeological and paleo-ecological mate­ rial, for example, can give indications of how land use models were transferred from one environmental context to another. Yet such material allows only indirect conclusions concerning the role that a particular environmental memory, as part of a broader cultural context, may have played in such processes. Place names and written Old Norse sources – such as laws, charters, and annals – allow more direct insight into, among other things, the evolution of resource use practices in adaptation to specific ecological and climatic conditions, and in many cases, they reflect the development and transmission of new forms of environmental memory. Even pre-modern Nordic texts of a more literary character contain a wealth of details concerning human-environment interactions, environmental and cli­ matic conditions, and environmental change, with the earliest examples being Ari Þorgilsson’s brief remark in Íslendingabók [Book of Icelanders] that at the beginning of the settlement period, Iceland had been covered with woods from the mountains to the seashore (Ch. 1). In some cases, texts narratively represent processes of memory that relate to environment aspects, for example, a descrip­ tion of how, after their return to Norway, three of Iceland’s earliest explorers have very different memories of the island’s environmental qualities (Landnámabók [Book of settlements], Ch. S5/H5). Literary genres such as the Íslendingasögur [sagas of Icelanders], the Samtíðarsögur [contemporary sagas] and the Biskupa sögur [sagas of bishops] are related to the real-world North Atlantic environment of the Viking Age and the Middle Ages. Yet their primary purpose, during both the time of writing and their later transmission, was not to transmit realistic descrip­ tions of past environments and of human-environment interactions. The Íslendingasögur present particularly good examples of the complexi­ ties involved in assessing environmental memory in pre-modern Nordic litera­ ture. Most of these texts not only relate to Iceland’s settlement period, but also to the non-human environment of that time. Some sagas contain relatively lengthy and detailed descriptions of the newly discovered land’s outward appearance, of available natural resources, and of how these were taken into use by the first settlers. Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar, for example, describes the initial presence of large woodlands and indicates a favourable climate with mild winters, stating that livestock brought to Iceland from Norway could graze in the open all year round. The saga also mentions abundant resources of driftwood, fish, marine mammals, and birds’ eggs, as well as farm land that could be used for grain culti­ vation (Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar, Ch. 24).

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Such literary descriptions raise questions about the origins of the environ­ mental memory they present. In the case of Egils saga, more than 300 years had passed between the time described and the time of writing. That some of the information contained in these texts has been confirmed through scientific methods, such as pollen analysis – for example, concerning the initial existence of extensive woodlands – may indicate that a reliable oral tradition of environ­ mental memory existed, dating back to the settlement period. As the Íslendingasögur frequently refer – implicitly and explicitly – to both other Icelandic and non-Icelandic written texts, intertextual relations could be another potential source for literary descriptions of the environment. It is likely that narrative patterns, schemes, and motifs from the huge variety of religious and historiographic texts available in Iceland, long before the first Íslending­ asögur were written, have influenced how past environments were described. This possible diachronic and transcultural dimension of intertextuality, and the genre-specific narrative conventions of the Íslendingasögur, allow insights into how the written experience of distinct Nordic environments came to be creatively connected to other available texts, and to both religious and secular medieval ideas about nature. Environmental memory in the Íslendingasögur can, however, also form part of the construction of collective identities. Euphemistic descriptions of the set­ tlement period environment, such as in Egils saga, could function as a counterdiscourse to the rather negative views of Icelandic environmental conditions and to the assumed scarcity of natural resources that are prevalent in non-Icelandic medieval texts about Iceland. Through literary representations of a highly favour­ able former environment, many of the Íslendingasögur try to create a different environmental memory that serves to establish the view that the original set­ tlers were wealthy individuals who migrated into even better natural conditions than those of Norway – not into relative material poverty, as the archaeological evidence suggests. Literary environmental memory in this way functioned as a part of the Icelandic elite’s attempt to construct a noble ancestry and collective identity for itself.

4 Perspectives for future research So far, research on environmental memory in relation to the pre-modern North is still in its beginning, and many possibly relevant sources have not yet been thoroughly explored. In particular, there is considerable potential for more exten­ sive integration of the rich Old Norse literary material into inter- or transdiscipli­



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nary research on environmental memory, linking written texts to, for example, archaeo­logical and paleoecological material. As the above discussion of the complexity of environmental representa­ tions in the Íslendingasögur illustrates, new approaches incorporating literary texts need to go beyond an assessment of environmental memory as real or fic­ tional. The environmental memory represented in such literary texts is linked to real world environments in various and creative ways, and neither factual nor fictional in a strict sense. If the narrative functions of environmental representa­ tions, possible intertextual relations, and respective social and historical context of a particular literary text are taken into consideration, a fuller understand­ ing can be achieved of the manifold and complex ways in which environmental memory functioned as a specific form of cultural memory in pre-modern Nordic societies. Such research can also create new insights into the role of narrative in the oral and written development and transmission of different forms of environ­ mental memories. Other Old Icelandic and Old Norwegian literary genres than the ones mentioned above, for example the fornaldarsögur [legendary sagas] or the riddarasögur [chivalric sagas], as well as Old Swedish and Old Danish texts have so far hardly ever been analysed regarding environmental memory. They too, however, might yield relevant insights into pre-modern Nordic perceptions of human-environment interactions and of environmental change. It is also noticeable that, in relation to Iceland’s settlement and the Norse colonies in Greenland, environmental memory in the pre-modern North so far has mainly been discussed as an impediment to adaptation to changing environ­ mental and climatic conditions. An aim for future research on pre-modern Nordic environmental memory could be to instead increasingly explore the function of environmental memory in creating the social preconditions for sustainable resource use and for socio-ecological resilience.

Works cited Primary sources Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar. Ed. Sigurður Nordal. ÍF, 2. Reykjavík, 1933. Íslendingabók. In Íslendingabók. Landnámabók. Fyrri hluti. Ed. Jakob Benediktsson. ÍF, 1. Reykjavík, 1968. 1–28. Landnámabók. In Íslendingabók. Landnámabók. Fyrri hluti. Ed. Jakob Benediktsson. ÍF, 1. Reykjavík, 1968. 29–397.

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Secondary sources Diamond, Jared M. 2005. Collapse. How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive. New York. Dugmore, Andrew J. et al. 2005. “The Norse landnám on the North Atlantic Islands: an Environmental Impact Assessment.” Polar Record 41: 21–35. Dugmore, Andrew J., Thomas H. McGovern, Orri Vésteinsson, Jette Arneborg, Richard Streeter and Christian Keller. 2012. “Cultural Adaptation, Compounding Vulnerabilities and Conjunctures in Norse Greenland.” PNAS 109.10: 3658–3663. Gräslund, Bo and Neil Price. 2012. “Twilight of the Gods? The ‘Dust Veil Event’ of AD 536 in Critical Perspective.” Antiquity 86: 428–443. McGovern, Thomas H. 1994. “Management for Extinction in Norse Greenland.” In Historical Ecology. Cultural Knowledge and Changing Landscapes. Ed. Carole L. Crumley. Santa Fe, NM. 127–154. Nordvig, Mathias. 2013. “Of Fire and Water. The Old Norse Mythological World-View in an Eco-Mythological Perspective.” PhD Diss. Aarhus University. Nykvist, Björn and Jacob von Heland. 2014. “Social-Ecological Memory as a Source of General and Specified Resilience.” Ecology and Society 19.2: art. 47.

Neighbouring Disciplines

Antonina Harbus

I: 25 Anglo-Saxon Studies 1 Definition Anglo-Saxon England covers the period from the settlement of Britain by Ger­ manic tribes, (mid fifth century), to the time of the Norman invasion (1066). The written record (seventh to eleventh centuries) encompasses texts in Old English, as well as in Anglo-Latin, and covers poetry (both secular and religious: ASPR), and prose, including histories, charters, glosses, medical texts, and others, some original, and others translated or adapted from Latin within learned Christian scribal contexts (see MCOE for the standard editions). Our chief source for the early history, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History (completed in 735, is a key document capturing a contemporary perspective on settlement and religious conversion, and functioned not only to record events, but also to shape and transmit cultural memory. Similarly, the existence of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in several different versions, along with other annals and chronicles, shows a widespread interest in recording local memory in specific and motivated ways (see van Houts 1999; Bre­ dehoft 2005). Along with the material culture from the period, written documents also served memorialising, as well as other, functions.

2 State of research Memory in Anglo-Saxon studies has been approached as an important thematic focus of Old English and Latin texts as a topic in its own right from a history of ideas perspective via attempts to imagine or reconstruct how and what the Anglo-Saxons remembered, and in terms of cultural memory and religious com­ memoration. Most recently, cognitive approaches to memory have permitted an even broader consideration of the act of remembering in Anglo-Saxon England, with all the constraints and enablers of studying a remote cultural context using the ideas and methods of cognitive science to develop a richer understanding of cultural norms, mental grammars, cognitive functioning, and social practices via the evidence of written and other material remains. While generally not afforded much, if any, attention in broader studies of memory of the Middle Ages (e.g. Carruthers 1990; Coleman 1992; Danziger 2008), Anglo-Saxon memory has been treated specifically from a wide range of perspec­ tives within a number of different fields – including literary studies, history, and https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-031

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archaeology – and has recently become an important focus of modern scholar­ ship. More particularly, work done in Anglo-Saxon studies has encompassed memory as a central preoccupation of poetic texts, especially those of an elegiac strain (Harbus 2002; Defour 2004; Buchelt 2007). This vernacular verse, which has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention, has been characterised as deeply retrospective, both individually and culturally: characters remember, and the texts enshrine cultural memory (Clemoes 1969; Godden 1985; Lapidge 1993, 2001). Scholars have long considered the likelihood that much of the poetry was com­ posed and presented orally, at least initially, and that the poetic lines and frag­ ments that recur throughout the corpus are evidence of a formulaic approach to verse-making to assist in memorability and recall (Fry 1981). From this evidence, scholars have suggested several conceptual metaphors to explain Anglo-Saxon understandings of memory (Kay 2000), including most recently the “hydraulic model” (Lockett 2011) and the idea of the “mind as an enclosure” (Mize 2006). Most recently, memory has been explored from a more fundamentally transdisci­ plinary angle, thereby permitting a further set of perspectives on mental process­ ing, perceptions, and mental and emotional states (Harbus 2012). Memory has also been studied as a major topic in Anglo-Saxon prose writ­ ings, including the portion which has been adapted from Latin texts. Much of the extant prose record explicitly deals with the subject of memory, or functions as an external memory or enduring cultural record (Bredehoft 2005; Foot 2006; Ruff 2005). In historical studies, the way memory operates within the transmission of ideas has been a preoccupation (van Houts 1999), and religious commemoration has also received considerable attention (Cubitt 2000a, 2000b; Jackson 2005). Similarly, written charters have been analysed as commemorations (Foot 2006). The memorialising function of material culture has been studied, especially from the evidence of funerary practices and other archaeological evidence (Wil­ liams 2001, 2003, 2006; O’Sullivan 2003; Devlin 2007; Thomas and Allen 2008). Medieval musicology also treats memory in relation to the memorialising record of material culture (Rankin 1984). Such fields, along with literary, linguistic and historical studies, numismatics, and other specialised topics, are well served by the annual annotated bibliographies found in the Old English Newsletter and the journal Anglo-Saxon England. The Dictionary of Old English (di Paolo Healey 1986-) will treat the lexical evidence relating to memory as it produces more mate­ rial, and will complement the available lexical tool, the Historical Thesaurus (Kay et al. 2009).



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3 Memory in Anglo-Saxon studies Memory can be analysed as a major thematic focus of the poetic traces of AngloSaxon England. The widely anthologised poem, The Wanderer, for instance, depicts a travelling exile, who remembers and dreams about, with longing regret, better times in the hall, within the secure social space of being a lord’s retainer (Harbus 1996). The memories are represented as being distinctively autobio­ graphical, and as deeply influencing the current reported mood of the speaker. Similarly, a woman’s mournful remembering is the focal point of The Wife’s Lament, another short lyric poem in the extant corpus (Green 1983; Shimomura 2006). Like the speaker of The Wanderer, this narrator expresses her isolation and loneliness, which trigger autobiographical remembering, in the cold early morning. Scholars have noted the recurrent use of external indicators such as iso­ lation and the cold morning as indices of such melancholy moods in Old English poetry (Stanley 1955; Timmer 1942). In a further example, the long epic poem Beowulf more broadly recalls a golden past age, as well as depicting characters remembering, in a more sus­ tained and deeply retrospective text (Carsley 1992; Liuzza 2005; Robinson 2001; Harbus 2002). The opening of the poem sets the events in the legendary past, and key characters recount memories that are afforded narrative importance. The mournfulness of this recall here and elsewhere in the extant corpus has prompted scholars to describe such reminiscence as inherently nostalgic, or at least senti­ mental (Orchard 2003; Bjork and Niles 1997; Trilling 2009). Even more interest­ ingly, reflection, remembering, and imagination are so prominent in the poetry as to suggest that the social function of such verse might include the provision of a forum for such retrospectivity, and the comparison of the legendary past with the present, or that these texts, like historical documents, function as repositories of cultural memory (Carsley 1992; Weimann 1994). Besides these and many other examples in poetic texts, in prose, the texts that were chosen for translation and transmission feature memory prominently. For example, Boethius’ Consolation of philosophy and Bede’s Ecclesiastical History are both deeply reflective and retrospective, as well as explicitly discussing the practice of memory (Ruff 2005).

4 Perspectives for future research Future research is likely to continue to open up the rich vein of inquiry facili­ tated by cognitive approaches (Harbus 2012), along with the ongoing and endur­

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ing literary, cultural, and historical analyses of the complex and prominent topic of Anglo-Saxon memory. Of particular interest in the future is the potential afforded by the idea of distributed cognition, or group memory (Barnier et al. 2008), and other transdisciplinary studies of mind, consciousness and memory (few of which have treated medieval cultures) as they are applied to literary and cultural analysis (Herman 2003, 2010; Richardson and Spolsky 2004). It is likely that Anglo-Saxon memory can come to be understood more fully via the combina­ tion of traces of the written and material culture with recent insights from cogni­ tive science into the evolved human function of remembering. In parallel, and just as importantly, more traditional and more specialised inquiries are likely to continue into the commemorative function of material items, and the importance of memory in the context of orally produced history and literature.

Works cited Primary sources ASPR. The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records. Ed. G. P. Krapp and E. V. K. Dobbie. New York, 1931–1942. MCOE. A Microfiche Concordance to Old English: The List of Texts and Index of Editions. Ed. Antonette di Paolo Healey and Richard L. Venezky. Toronto, 1980.

Secondary sources Barnier, Amanda, John Sutton, Celia B. Harris and Robert A. Wilson. 2008. “A Conceptual and Empirical Framework for the Social Distribution of Cognition: The Case of Memory.” Cognitive Systems Research 9: 33–51. Bredehoft, Thomas A. 2005. “History and Memory in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.” In Readings in Medieval Texts: Interpreting Old and Middle English Literature. Ed. David F. Johnson and Elaine Treharne. Oxford. 109–121. Bjork, Robert E. and John D. Niles, eds. 1997. A Beowulf Handbook. Lincoln, Nebraska. Buchelt, Lisabeth C. 2007. All About Eve: Memory and Re-Collection in Junius 11’s Epic Poems Genesis and Christ and Satan. New York. Carruthers, Mary J. 1990. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge. Carsley, Catherine A. 1992. “Reassessing Cultural Memory in Beowulf.” Assays 7: 31–41. Clemoes, Peter. 1969. “Mens absentia cogitans in The Seafarer and The Wanderer.” In Medieval Literature and Civilization: Studies in Memory of G. N. Garmonsway. Ed. Derek A. Pearsall and Ronald A. Waldron. London. 62–77. Coleman, Janet. 1992. Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past. Cambridge.



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Cubitt, Catherine. 2000a. “Memory and Narrative in the Cult of Early Anglo-Saxon Saints.” In The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages. Ed. Yitzhak Hen and Matthew Innes. Cambridge and New York. 29–66. Cubitt, Catherine. 2000b. “Monastic Memory and Identity in Early Anglo-Saxon England.” In Social Identity in Early Medieval Britain. Ed. William O. Frazer and Andrew Tyrrell. Leicester and London. 253–276. Danziger, Kurt. 2008. Marking the Mind: A History of Memory. Cambridge. Defour, Tine. 2004. “The Use of Memory in the Old English Bookmoth-Riddle: A Different Light on ‘Healthy Obscurity’.” Studia Germanica Gandensia 1.2: 17–32. Devlin, Zoe. 2007. Remembering the Dead in Anglo-Saxon England: Memory Theory in Archaeology and History. Oxford. Foot, Sarah. 2006. “Reading Anglo-Saxon Charters: Memory, Record, or Story?” In Narrative and History in the Early Medieval West. Ed. Elizabeth M. Tyler and Ross Balzaretti. Turnhout. 39–65. Fry, Donald K. 1981. “The Memory of Cædmon.” In Oral Traditional Literature: a Festschrift for Albert Bates Lord. Ed. John M. Foley. Columbus, OH. 282–93. Godden, Malcolm. 1985. “Anglo-Saxons on the Mind.” In Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England. Ed. Michael Lapidge and Helmut Gneuss. Cambridge. 271–298. Green, Martin. 1983. “Time, Memory, and Elegy in The Wife’s Lament.” In The Old English Elegies: New Essays in Criticism and Research. Ed. Martin Green. Madison, WI, and Teaneck, NJ. 123–132. Harbus, Antonina. 1996. “Deceptive Dreams in The Wanderer.” Studies in Philology 93.2: 164–179. Harbus, Antonina. 2002. The Life of the Mind in Old English Poetry. Amsterdam and New York. Harbus, Antonina. 2012. Cognitive Approaches to Old English Poetry. Cambridge. Herman, David, ed. 2003. Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Stanford. Herman, David, ed. 2010. The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English. Lincoln. van Houts, Elizabeth, ed. 1999. Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe 900–1200. Toronto. Jackson, Peter. 2005. “Retracing the Path: Gesture, Memory, and the Exegesis of Tradition.” History of Religions 45: 1–28. Kay, Christian J. 2000. “Metaphors We Have Lived By: Pathways Between Old and Modern English.” In Essays on Anglo-Saxon and Related Themes in Memory of Lynne Grundy. Ed. Jane Roberts and Janet Nelson. London. 273–285. Kay, Christian, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels and Irené Wotherspoon. 2009. Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary: With Additional Material from a ‘Thesaurus of Old English.’ 2 vols. Oxford and New York. Lapidge, Michael. 1993. “Beowulf and the Psychology of Terror.” In Heroic Poetry in the Anglo-Saxon Period: Studies in Honour of Jess B. Bessinger Jr. Ed. Helen Damico and John Leyerle. Kalamazoo, MI. 373–402. Lapidge, Michael. 2001. “Beowulf and Perception.” Publications of the British Academy 111: 61–97. Liuzza, Roy M. 2005. “Beowulf: Monuments, Memory, History.” In Readings in Medieval Texts: Interpreting Old and Middle English Literature. Ed. David F. Johnson and Elaine Treharne. Oxford. 91–108. Lockett, Leslie. 2011. Anglo-Saxon Psychologies in the Vernacular and Latin Traditions. Toronto.

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Mize, Britt. 2006. “The Representation of the Mind as an Enclosure in Old English Poetry.” Anglo-Saxon England 35: 57–90. Orchard, Andy. 2003. A Critical Companion to Beowulf. Cambridge. O’Sullivan, Aidan. 2003. “Place, Memory and Identity Among Estuarine Fishing Communities: Interpreting the Archaeology of Early Medieval Fish Weirs.” World Archaeology 35: 449–468. di Paolo Healey, Antonette, ed. 1986-ongoing. The Dictionary of Old English. Toronto. Rankin, Susan. 1984. “From Memory to Record: Musical Notations in Manuscripts from Exeter.” Anglo-Saxon England 13: 97–112. Richardson, Alan and Ellen Spolsky. 2004. The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture and Complexity. Aldershot and Burlington. Robinson, Fred C. 2001. “Retrospection in Old English and Other Germanic Literatures.” The Grove 8: 255–276. Ruff, Carin. 2005. “Despere in Loco: Style, Memory, and the Teachable Moment.” In Verbal Encounters: Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse Studies for Roberta Frank. Ed. Antonina Harbus and Russell Poole. Toronto. 91–103. Shimomura, Sachi. 2006. “Remembering in Circles: The Wife’s Lament, Conversatio, and the Community of Memory.” Source of Wisdom: Old English and Early Medieval Latin Studies in Honour of Thomas D. Hill. Ed. Charles D. Wright, Frederick M. Biggs and Thomas N. Hall. Toronto. 113–129. Stanley, Eric. 1955. “Old English Poetic Diction and the Interpretation of The Wanderer, The Seafarer, and The Penitent’s Prayer.” Anglia 73: 413–466. Thomas, John and Carol Allen. 2008. Monument, Memory and Myth: Use and Re-Use of Three Bronze Age Round Barrows at Cossington, Leicestershire. Leicester. Timmer, B. J. 1942. “The Elegiac Mood in Old English Poetry.” English Studies 24: 33–44. Trilling, Renee R. 2009. The Aesthetics of Nostalgia: Historical Representation in Old English Verse. Toronto. Warrington, P.F.T. 2006. “Memory and Remembering: Anglo-Saxon Literary Representations and Current Interpretations of the Phenomena Considered.” Ph.D Thesis, University of Leicester. Index to Theses 56: 189. Weimann, Robert. 1994. “Memory, Fictionality, and the Issue of Authority: Author-Function and Narrative Performance in Beowulf, Chrétien and Malory.” In Contexts of Pre-Novel Narrative: the European Tradition. Ed. Roy Eriksen. Berlin and New York. 83–100. Williams, Howard. 2001. “Death, Memory and Time: A Consideration of the Mortuary Practices at Sutton Hoo.” In Time in the Medieval World. Ed. Chris Humphrey and W. M. Ormrod. Woodbridge and Rochester, NY. 35–71. Williams, Howard. 2003. “Material Culture as Memory: Combs and Cremation in Early Medieval Britain.” Early Medieval Europe 12: 89–128. Williams, Howard. 2006. Death and Memory in Early Medieval Britain. Cambridge.

Sarah Künzler

I: 26 Celtic Studies 1 Definition Celtic studies as an (independent) academic field emerged from philological dis­ ciplines in the middle of the nineteenth century. It is concerned with the lan­ guages and culture(s) of the Celtic people(s) across Continental Europe, Ireland and the rest of the British Isles from c. 600 BC to the present, and therefore incorporates various academic disciplines. The ancient Celts were speakers of an Indo-European language who produced the artefacts of the Hallstatt (eighth to sixth century BC) and La Tène period (c. 450 BC to the Roman Conquest), and whose descendants have had a distinct cultural influence across Western Europe (especially the British Isles) to the present. The term Celt is variously defined from linguistic or archaeological perspectives but is not a self-definition. Many researchers now contend that there was never a unified Celtic culture across time and space, and that the linguistic and archaeological definitions of Celt(ic) do not necessarily overlap. Celtic studies research of the pre-modern period many focus upon philology in the broadest sense, literary analysis of secular and ecclesiastical written records (annals, [secular] prose literature, poetry, hagi­ ography, law texts, glosses, etc.), palaeography and codicology, archaeology, onomastics, history, folklore and mythology. It examines both the continental Celtic languages – Lepontic, Galatian, Celtiberian and Gaulish, all extinct prior to the Roman period – and the Celtic languages spoken today: Irish, (Scots) Gaelic, Welsh, Breton, Cornish and Manx (the last two having been ‘revived’). Recent approaches (such as the ‘Wiener Schule’) have outlined the possible benefits of closer collaboration between researchers of individual subjects and these could be especially fruitful in relation to memory studies, a still somewhat nascent area of concern in the field. The present article is primarily concerned with Irish lan­ guage sources of the pre-modern period, but will also draw limited attention to the Welsh material.

2 State of research At first glance, memory appears to be a comparatively under-researched topic in Celtic studies. This is surprising, given the prevalence of memory topoi in Celtic literatures (see 3.) and the importance of the oft-cited omni-competent men https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-032

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of learning and memory: the druids of ancient Gaul and the filid and bards of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. In addition, the references to remembering both on an individual and on a cultural level have, albeit implicitly, always featured in research, particularly in the study of Irish sources. Well-received works (Nagy 1997; Johnston 2013) raise a variety of memory-related issues, yet they seldom situate their analyses within a memory discourse or apply theoretical concepts from memory studies. Yet even if the subject has not, by and large, been addressed systematically as a cognitive process or from philosophical, cultural or rhetorical perspectives, researchers are by no means unaware of the importance memory played in Celtic culture(s), for instance, in relation to the preservation of inherited knowledge and lore. The lack of a systematic approach and the fact that many texts and transla­ tions are not readily available to researchers from other disciplines (a compara­ tively large number still await reliable [re-]editing) make it unsurprising that broad and interdisciplinary studies of memory and memoria generally do not contain any references to Celtic material (e.g. Carruthers 2008). This leaves a dis­ tinct gap in our understanding of medieval European memory cultures. A system­ atically executed memory-approach within Celtic studies could help make this material accessible to, and comparable with, research in other fields and thus lead Celtic studies to be adequately represented in an interdisciplinary context. In recent years, valuable work outlining the sources’ potential for memory studies approaches has, in fact, emerged. A collection of essays edited by Jan Erik Rekdal and Erich Poppe (2014) shows that an analytical engagement with medi­ eval Irish texts through the lens of Jan Assmann’s proposals on cultural memory can produce new approaches to the texts that enrich our understanding of the narratives. This is possible, however, only if theoretical frameworks are assessed and contrasted with the texts, rather than simply applied to them uncritically. In her contribution to Poppe/Rekdal’s work, Maria Tymoczko (2014) acknowl­ edged the benefits but also the difficulties of integrating Irish (and indeed Celtic) examples into interdisciplinary memory research. Dagmar Schlüter (2014, 2010a, 2010b) draws continuously on Assmann’s views on cultural memory, both in the study of whole manuscripts (The Book of Leinster) and individual texts (Acallam na Senórach, see below). Elva Johnston’s book-length study (2013) approaches various memory-related issues from the perspective of literacy and identity. Similar concerns are discussed in relation to place-names in the Dindshenchas lore (see below) by Morgan T. Davies (2013) and others. A point which complicates an overview of memory in Celtic studies is that the individual disciplines are researched to very different degrees. While the study of the Irish material has produced the largest amount of scholarship, Welsh and Scottish sources have also been the focus of a very diverse academic output that



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may be relevant to memory studies. Manx, Cornish and Breton offer compara­ tively little and late-attested material, and these have yet to be approached with regard to their mnemonic functions. Similarly, the continental Celtic languages are attested through inscriptions but neither the inscriptions themselves nor the monuments on which they are inscribed seem to have received any attention from archaeological or cultural perspectives related specifically to memory theories. This contrasts sharply with recent archaeological research also dealing with (but not exclusively so) Celtic sources (e.g. Williams 2006), which offers a wealth of ideas about mnemonic engagement with the landscape.

3 Pre-modern Celtic sources Given the enormous geographic and temporal diversity of sources in Celtic studies, it is necessary to limit this entry to selected central memory topoi in medieval Irish culture, supplemented with a few tentative references to Welsh material. The entry addresses both memory in and memory as literature, as in both cases, memory and literacy often appear in opposition to each other but, in this secondary-oral environment, “the oral and written were in continual interac­ tion” (Johnston 2013, 157). A common form of memory discourse in medieval Irish texts, both secular and hagiographical, is that of a sapiental pre-Christian character – whether revived or granted exceptionally long life by divine providence – relating his per­ sonal knowledge of pre-Christian times to a Christian saint (Nagy 1997). Examples of this are found in Bethu Phátraic [The life of Patrick] but also in the Fenian tale Acallam na Senórach [The colloquy of the ancients, thirteenth century]. Saints generally appear receptive to such stories and their acceptance serves to legitimise this incorporation into the Christian era (sometimes with angelic approval). It is telling that the memories thus related appear as authentic, i.e. autobiographic memories, with the characters having witnessed events with their own eyes. Their memory serves as a coherent linking device between past and present, but also functions on a socio-cultural level (forming a ‘konnektive Struktur’ [connecting structure], to draw on Jan Assmann’s terminology). Historical, legal and literary sources attest to the existence of the filid, the learned class consisting of poets, historians, and judges. Trained in ars memorativa for several years and of great social standing, they were considered highly competent in preserving the laws, genealogies and stories of old and in making them meaningful for the present. While the filid can be seen as the carriers of cul­ tural memory, they are by no means “memory-machines”, statically re-producing

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what they have memorised. Tymoczko (2014, 47) contends that the “filid had to know how to cater to diverse tastes, divergent local beliefs and attitudes, regional variations in legal frameworks, and different (often competing) power structures with varying cultural views in distinct parts of the island. […].” As such, they thus adapted their knowledge to individual circumstances, at times drawing attention to the constructed nature of cultural memory. Similar observations have been made in relation to Irish hagiographical material. As early as 1989, Máire Herbert argued that, for example, Fled Dúin na nGéd [The banquet of the ford of the geese] (eleventh or twelfth century), reflects present concerns explored through the lens of the past. Although Herbert does not reference memory studies, the article can easily be read as a monumental contribution to memory research. Furthermore, this appropriation of the past from the perspective of the present echoes conclusions in other disciplines (such as Scandinavian studies) and highlights the fluid boundaries between present political concerns and the creatively appropriated past. A strong link between lore and landscape is discernible in relation to the Dindshenchas [Lore of places.] Here, place-names recall events which occurred in the past, or, to quote Morgan T. Davies (2013), their “mapping-out of forma­tive historical events on the landscape […] makes the past present in a visible, endur­ ing, and authenticating way”, a process which closely relates to cultural memory. The place-names are frequently the result of creative etymology, e.g. a placename becomes re-analysed and linked to important figures. The Irish literati achieved great mastery in such etymological exercises, and the Dindshenchas demonstrates their imaginative and reflective use of language. They closely link people and land through the historical events which occurred, allegedly, in that place. As Proinsias Mac Cana (1983, 333) states, they form “an effective mnemonic index of a large part of native tradition”. The inhabited landscape – both through meaningful places but also through its names – thus becomes a witness to, and living memory of, the past. Such observations have also been made in archaeology, a field in which research on Celtic sources has perhaps most eagerly embraced memory themes. The work of the Discovery Programme has examined the royal (and many smaller) sites in Ireland, and Edel Bhreathnach in particular (1995) has discussed the inter­ face between landscape and literature in Irish cultural memory. Bhreathnach stresses that sites such as Tara were viewed and used differently through the ages and by different parts of society, clearly placing them in the discourse of con­ tinuously (re-)created mnemonic significance. More recently, J. P. Mallory (2016, 158) addressed the “back-projections” of tales onto existing monuments which already possessed an established aura of antiquity, thus highlighting the close mnemonic connection between narratives and landscape in medieval Ireland.



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In the case of medieval Welsh sources, analyses which provide fruitful ground for memory research focus frequently upon identity formation, often drawing on aspects of cultural memory and its political significance. The Latin historia was borrowed in the Roman period as ystyr, literally ‘meaning’ or ‘significance’ (see also R. R. Davies 1997, 16 for additional comments). Patrick Sims-Williams (1988, 98) argued that history thus explains meaning, and meaning is to be found in history, which makes a shared memory a defining feature of a Welsh people. The ninth-century Latin Historia Brittonum and Gododdin, attributed to Aneirin – the former outlining a purportedly authoritative history of Britain, the latter a verse poem praising the defeat of 300 British warriors who allegedly died in heroic defence of their borderlands and who, if it was not for the poem, may well have been forgotten – are two such ‘historical myths’ central to the cultural memory of the Welsh people under Norman/English domination. Around the year 1300, the creation of a Latin chronicle of Welsh history up to 1282 (based on monas­ tic annals) at Strata Florida abbey may be seen as a response to the conquest and subsequent elimination of the Welsh royal courts (Daniel Huws 2000, 76). At a similar time, work began upon the Hendregadredd manuscript, a compila­ tion of the works of the court poets associated with the Welsh rulers of the previ­ ous two centuries (probably also compiled at Strata Florida) classified by Daniel Huws (2000, 76) as “a more unusual monument [than the above-mentioned Latin chronicle] to the extinguished independent rule of Wales”, thus recognising the value of such sources for the social and cultural remembrance of pre-conquest Welsh culture. As in Ireland, the joint function of preserving and presenting memory was given to a specific group of highly trained men, the cyfarwyddiaid. These men were versed in poetry, mythology, story-telling and genealogy, drawing upon a vast corpus of triads, genealogies, foundation-legends and literary, toponymic and ono­ mastic lore (R. R. Davies 1997, 21). Their role was to preserve the Tri Chof (three memories): the deeds of heroes past, the Welsh language, and genealogy. Just as in the case of the Irish genealogies, genealogical knowledge of one’s family was hugely important in medieval Wales, allowing people to situate themselves in a shared past. The well-known Welsh Triads [rhetorical forms whereby objects or knowledge are presented in groups of three] may also be seen as mnemonic texts, yet this possibility appears not yet to have been addressed by scholars in any detail. Welsh ecclesiastical sources provide an equally fascinating ground for study. Christopher Brooke (1986) suggests that, for example, the Book of Llandaf (twelfth century), was written down long after the events it narrates for the purpose of strengthening Welsh claims in the light of the Norman conquest, and such sources may have liberally (re-)imagined the past to achieve this goal. In all of these cases, memory was hugely important in forming, and continuously re-

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forming, Welsh identity. The uneasy borders after the Norman conquest certainly increased the importance of a shared cultural memory and led to the formation of a thriving remembrance culture in medieval Wales. From a memory perspective, this emphasises the selectivity with which the medieval Welsh constructed their past and thus provides a prime opportunity to examine the ‘workings’ of cultural memory.

4 Perspectives for future research In future, scholarly attention to mnemonic aspects will lead to a more detailed understanding of cognitive and cultural aspects of memory and remembering in Celtic cultures. For example, case studies drawing on Jan Assmann’s theory of cultural memory could shed valuable light on the self-perception and self-con­ struction of Irish, Welsh and Scottish identity through literary, historical, and legal sources. Likewise, further studies concerned with the memory of literature may delineate how individual texts remained (or were repeatedly made) mean­ ingful over the centuries, and how cultural and political stimuli influenced the transmission of particular texts. Such areas linking memory with issues of iden­ tity and historical analyses could be considered in relation to Ireland, Scotland and Wales, where Celtic cultures were under Norman and English rule and thus frequently subject(ed) to political debates, many of which maintain their reso­ nance to this day. In turn, there are certain areas in which Celtic studies could greatly benefit from an inclusion of memory discourses and theories, as these could help unearth hitherto neglected concerns of pre-modern Irish and Welsh literature and hence open up new approaches to the sources. Especially the orality/literacy debate might evolve through a broader application of cultural memory theories. Ireland and Britain are extremely rich in monuments of Celtic origin (along with those of other cultures) and will provide stimulating grounds for study from the perspec­ tive of cultural geography and memory studies. Relating Irish, Welsh and Scottish (Christian) perceptions of history to medieval Irish memory culture may produce a more nuanced understanding of the concept of history and historiography at work in medieval North-Western Europe. By addressing the connection between Celtic memory culture and that of, for example, Scandinavian and English culture(s), a better understanding of the envi­ ronment which produced the sources can be reached. Ultimately, this can lead to a more nuanced perception of Celtic culture(s) and their role in a broader European discourse, highlighting the wealth, early date of attestation, and often complex



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transmission of Irish texts. If scholars continue the fruitful dialogue which has emerged in recent years, Celtic studies will be able to make invaluable contribu­ tions to the awareness of the various cultural forces at play in pre-modern Europe.

Works cited Secondary sources Bhreathnach, Edel. 1995. Tara. A Select Bibliography. Dublin. Brooke, Christopher. 1986. The Church and the Welsh Border in the Central Middle Ages. Woodbrigde, NH. Carruthers. Mary. 2008 [1990]. The Book of Memory. A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge. Herbert, Máire. 1989. “Fled Dúin na nGéd: A Reappraisal.” Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 18: 75–88. Davies, Morgan T. 2013. “Dindshenchas, Memory and Invention.” In Lochlann: Festskrift til Jan Erik Rekdal på 60-årsdagen. Ed. Cathinka Hambro and Lars Widerøe. Oslo. 86–104. Davies, R. R. 1997. “The Peoples of Britain and Ireland 1100–1400: IV Language and Historical Mythology.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6th Series 7: 1–24. Huws, Daniel. 2000. Medieval Welsh Manuscripts. Cardiff and Aberystwyth. Johnston, Elva. 2013. Literacy and Identity in Medieval Ireland. Woodbridge. Mallory, J. P. 2016. In Search of the Irish Dream Time: Archaeology & Early Irish Literature. London. Mac Cana, Proinsias. 1983. “Placenames and mythology in Irish tradition: places, pilgrimages and things.” North American Congress of Celtic Studies 1: 319–341. Nagy, Joseph Falaky. 1997. Conversing with Angels and Ancients: Literary Myths of Medieval Ireland. Dublin. Rekdal, Jan Erik and Erich Poppe, eds. 2014. Medieval Irish Perspectives on Cultural Memory. Münster. Schlüter, Dagmar. 2010a. History or Fable? The Book of Leinster as a Document of Cultural memory in Twelfth-Century Ireland. Münster. Schlüter, Dagmar. 2010b. “‘For the entertainment of lords and commons of later times.’ Past and remembrance in Acallam na senórach.” Celtica 26: 146–160. Schlüter, Dagmar. 2014. “Medieval manuscripts and cultural memory. The Case of the Book of Leinster.” In Medieval Irish Perspectives on Cultural Memory. Ed. Jan Erik Rekdal and Erich Poppe. Münster. 61–79. Sims-Williams, Patrick. 1988. “Some Functions of Origin Stories in Early Medieval Wales”. In History and Heroic Tale. A Symposium. Ed. Tore Nyberg, IØrn PiØ, Preben Meulengracht Sørensen and Aage Trommer. Odense. 97–131. Tymoczko, Maria. 2014. “The nature of tradition and cultural memory. Evidence from two millennia of Irish culture.” In Medieval Irish Perspectives on Cultural Memory. Ed. Jan Erik Rekdal and Erich Poppe. Münster. 15–60. Williams, Howard. 2006. Death and Memory in Early Medieval Britain. Cambridge. This entry was composed during an early post-doc mobility project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Thomas A. DuBois

I: 27 Sámi Studies 1 Definition Sámi, the indigenous population of the Nordic region, speak, or at least spoke in the past, a set of closely interrelated Finno-Ugric languages that are related more distantly to the Balto-Finnic languages and that differ markedly from Old Norse or any of its later linguistic offspring. Sámi have by no means lived in isolation from their neighbours, but rather, have interacted extensively with other Nordic peoples over the course of millennia.

2 State of research Research related in one way or another to the idea of Sámi memory has focused primarily on the musical genre known as joik (Tirén 1942; Ruong 1976; Kjellström et al. 1988; Jones-Bamman 1993; Arnberg et al. 1997; Stoor 2007). Sámi legends have also received considerable attention as localized renderings of collective memory, often deeply engaged with issues of the present (Cocq 2008). In the area of archae­ ology and religious studies, studies of pre-Christian sieidi sites as well as surviving shamanic drums reflect a strong ritual importance of acts of remembering and a readiness to concretise remembering in material artefacts (Manker 1950, 1957). Much of the research conducted to date seeks to document and explain Sámi notions and practices of memory in the manner of case studies, without explicit engagement with the theories of memory studies. The North Sámi verb to remember – muitit or mui’tet – bears close relation to the derivative verb muitalit [to narrate]. Both verbs describe an integrally per­ formative act, in which a person engages with the beings of the present and past and recalls or references them for concrete social purposes. In a sense akin to what Stephen Mitchell (2013, 291–293) has described for Old Norse memorial per­ formances, these acts of remembering are nearly always active and weighty. In describing the most significant musical genre within Sámi culture, the great Sámi intellectual Johan Turi (1854–1936) writes: “Sápmelaš lávluma dadjá juoigamin. Dat lea okta muitingoansta nuppiid olbmuid. Muhtumat muitet vášis ja muitet ráhkisvuođain, ja muhtumat muitet moraštemiin. Ja adnojit dat lávllut muhtun eatnamiin ja ealibiin – návddis ja bohccos – gottis.” (Turi 2011, 163) [Sámi singing is called joiking. It is a practice for recalling other people. Some are recalled with https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-033



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hate, and some with love, and some are recalled with sorrow. And sometimes such songs concern lands or animals: the wolf, and the reindeer, or wild reindeer. (Turi 2012, 161)] Turi’s statement appears in the first book ever written in a Sámi language – Muitalus Sámiid birra [An Account of the Sámi], first published in 1910 (Turi 2011, 2012) – a work that is regarded by Sámi scholars as both a scholarly work and a literary masterpiece. Turi’s intriguing definition of joik as muitingoansta [a way of remembering] has been followed and expanded by a wealth of later scholars noted above. Through the words used in a joik – often just a being’s name and a few words of description – as well as the musical realisation of these in terms of melody, rhythm, voice quality, and other performance aspects, a singer creates a portrait of the referent, making the being present to the community even if that being is distant in terms of time or space. Understanding the Sámi uses of joik, both in relation to narrative or material genres (see below) and in relation to inter­ national theories of memory represents an exciting but underexplored area of research.

3 Pre-modern Sámi material The Sámi people once lived across most of the landmass that today makes up Finland, Norway, Sweden, and the Kola Peninsula of Russia. Although Sámi is a Finno-Ugric language or language group, it possesses a substantial substrate lexicon that belongs to the language of the people who first lived in the Nordic region and with whom speakers of Finno-Ugric languages intermarried already millennia before the Common Era (Aikio 2012). The Sámi language also shows continuous and productive contact with neighbouring peoples, speakers of BaltoFinnic, Baltic, and Germanic languages. Where Sámi were once widespread throughout the Nordic region, encroachment from other populations eventually limited areas of Sámi settlement (Sápmi), to mostly northern or mountainous tracts. In the medieval era, Sámi lands were claimed by various kings of Russia, Sweden-Finland, and Denmark-Norway, with the northern boundaries between these various realms imprecise and undetermined until the eighteenth century (Hansen and Olson 2004). Sámi engaged in much commerce and exchange with their eventual neighbours, and social institutions, technology, and forms of Christianity were some of the cultural goods introduced by neighbouring popula­ tions and adapted in characteristically Sámi ways. Within the framework presented in his seminal work on memory, Jan Assmann (1997, 31–34) would classify Sámi joik not as memory but as tradition:

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an expressive demonstration of continuity that is enduring and unquestioned, constantly updated and maintained as a part of social life. Significantly, however, joik carried with itself, at least in some cases, strong juridical weight, helping underscore the rights or relations of living singers. Krister Stoor (2007, 170–172) has discussed this concept in his study of the Pite Sámi vuolle of Seldotnjuona, collected from Sara Maria Norsa of Árjepluovve (Arjeplog) parish in 1953. By joiking Seldotnjuona, Norsa reminded her listeners of her family’s longstanding use of the lands bordering on the Skellefteå watershed as the summer pasturing area for the family’s reindeer herd. In a 2011 Swedish Supreme Court decision that represented an important triumph for Sámi activists, the court recognised such musical performances as valid evidence for demonstrating Sámi continuity of use of certain lands and resources (Vinthagen Simpson 2011). While joiking has memorial purposes, then, it is also centrally a ritual, a symbolic communication. As such, it parallels a set of material sites in Sámi preChristian tradition that scholars have discussed using the Sámi term sieidi (see fig. 1). Anna Westman (2006) provides an excellent overview of these various ritual activities as practiced by Sámi in the era before Christianisation and into the period of missionisation and suppression (see also Manker 1957; Rydving 1995; Mebius 2003). Sieiddit were objects of stone or wood situated in the landscape. Offerings made to them in the form of portions of harvested food or libations aimed at remembering the assistance of supernatural beings in the procurement of food or luck and were meant to ensure continued prosperity in the future. When coupled with shamanic drums ritual objects that also provi­ ded maps of a wider cosmos and the shaman’s journeys through it (Manker 1938, 1950), sieiddit reflect a strong tendency in Sámi religion to situate acts of remem­ bering in material objects and places akin in some ways to what Pierre Nora (1998) has described as lieux de mémoire, realms or places of memory. In a different way, Sámi placenames, and legends associated with them, can constitute what Assmann would term cultural memory. In adapting Assmann’s ideas to Old Norse-Icelandic literature, Jürg Glauser (2000) regards the turbulent end of the Icelandic Commonwealth from 1262 to 1264 as the decisive break that necessitates the creation of a sense of Icelandic cultural memory in the genre of the Íslendigasögur. If such a sense of rupture is to be found in Sámi narrative, it is in the more insidious, but still devastating, process of colonial encroachment, in which Sámi gradually lost control of more and more of their lands and lives over the course of centuries. In placenames and legends connected with them, Sámi assert a sense of memory that reconnects them with lands that have been lost or that at the very least have become unwillingly shared with other peoples. With extensive lexicon for various landscape forms and details, Sámi place­ names can be richly descriptive. Terms like čohkka, čearru, duottar, oaivi, riidi,



I: 27 Sámi Studies: Thomas A. DuBois 

Fig. 1: Sieidi stone above Deatnu (Tana) River, Norway

Fig. 2: View of mountains and landscape around Lake Duortnos (Torneträsk), Sweden

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várdu and várri all refer to various aspects of the appearance, shape, or nature of upland terrain that an English-speaker might term as mountain. Terms like these help a knowledgeable listener picture a place. Sometimes, however, placenames can prove relatively opaque, as when they combine such physical descriptors with unfamiliar proper names or employ words that are no longer comprehensi­ ble to present-day Sámi (Svonni 2006, 2012). Understanding the backgrounds of such placenames is accomplished traditionally through legends shared between community members. Johan Turi includes a number of placename legends in his Muitalus. A number of these refer to beings known as stállu and čuđit (Gaski et al. 2004; Cocq 2008). Turi writes of a stállu who lived along the lake called Stalojávri, a body of water which makes up part of the great northern Lake Duortnos (Torneträsk, see fig. 2). In Sámi legendry, stállu is usually depicted as a large, ill-tempered, dangerous, dim-witted cannibalistic ogre. The čuđit figure as similarly dim-witted, overly confident foreign marauders, bent on killing Sámi and stealing their goods. Both legendary figures seem to reflect Sámi cultural memories of conflicts and encroachments incurred over the long process of colonisation, but neither can be explicitly tied to a single cultural group or historical moment. Significantly, both legend complexes tend to depict Sámi protagonists using their superior know­ledge of the local terrain to deceive and defeat outsider antagonists (DuBois 1995). In Turi’s stories about Stalojávri (Turi 2012, 142–145), a stállu living alongside the lake dug a boat trench there, piling up immense boulders too large for any ordinary person to move, evidence which can still be seen. In another of Turi’s accounts, when a stállu family living by the lake insisted on marrying their son to the daughter of a certain Sámi, the latter devised a plan to defeat and kill the stállu family and prevent the marriage. The stállu patriarch, once successfully killed, is sunk in the lake – explaining the lake’s lack of good fishing up to the present – while the stállu’s wife and son, the would-be bridegroom, are buried on the shore of the lake, where the presence of their remains causes local people living in the area to be particularly quarrelsome and hard to get along with. Turi notes: Stálut leat nohkan dál goase visot, muhto leat goit soames sámit velá stállui sohka. Ja dat lea šaddan dainna lágiin, go stálut leat náitalan sáminieidda[igui]n, ja de lea šaddan soames olbmot – bealli stállu ja bealli olmmoš. Ja sii leat veaháš iežálágážat go iežá olbmot – hámis ja luonddus. (Turi 2011, 148). [“The stálut are now almost all gone, but some Sámi are still related to them. And that came about when stálut married with Sámi girls, and people were born who were half stállu and half human. And they are different from other people both in appearance and nature.” (Turi 2012, 148)]



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As Cocq (2008) has shown, such tales may reflect deep cultural memories while also expressing some of the ongoing anxiety of Sámi at the turn of the twentieth century related to exogamy and the resulting loss of young Sámi into the growing Swedish and Finnish populations of the region. More explicit in its reference to Swedish colonisation is the legend that Turi relates concerning a certain man called Gova/Goava. This man’s names and actions, Turi asserts, are reflected in a number of the placenames near Duortnos, including a mountain Govavárri and a ridge Goavabuolža (Turi 2012, 153). Accord­ ing to Turi, the names recall a non-Sámi charlatan who came from outside the area and claimed to be collecting taxes for the crown. He gouged the local Sámi populace, charging them high taxes, which the frustrated but compliant Sámi duly paid. Eventually, one younger Sámi was able to ascertain that Goava was a fraud. He and the outraged Sámi community apprehended Goava and executed him by hanging him on the ridge now called Goavabuolža. Turi informs his reader: “Dan nama muitet velá dáláš nai olbmot, mat leat dán jagi eallime – j. 1908” (Turi 2011, 153) [“This name is still remembered by people of today who are alive in the year 1908” (Turi 2012, 153]. Goava’s name is also reflected, Turi writes, in the pla­ cenames Goavárri (a mountain), Goajávri (a lake), and Goamuotki (an isthmus). But younger people, Turi notes, know Goavabuolža as Skáhttobuolža, and call the valley near it Skáhtovuopmi, names deriving for the Swedish word for taxes: skatt. A perusal of Swedish state topographic maps published today will indicate the placement and contiguity of these various sites as understood by state author­ ities today. A historical linguist might reject Turi’s explanations for these placenames as folk etymologies. For instance, the major etymological database for Sámi lexicon, Álgu, maintained by the Finnish Institute for the Languages of Finland, sug­ gests that the root skáhttu corresponds not to the Swedish word for taxes but is derived from an old Scandinavian term for skates and rays, including the Sailray (Rajella lintea), common along the Norwegian coast (Álgu, skáhttu). Regardless of the actual etymology of these words, it is clear that Turi uses his knowledge of local placenames to narrate a significant element of Sámi history – namely, the oppressive system of tribute taking or taxation that Sámi were subjected to from the early middle ages onward, the so-called finnskatt-system, in which Sámi were obliged to pay taxes to one, and sometimes to several, foreign monarchs. In doing so, Turi creates a Sámi cultural memory lodged in the very landscape that colonisation aimed to seize. Stories about placenames are not the only variety of legend that suggests a disjunction of the sort described by Assmann with a resulting creation of cul­ tural memory (Assmann 1997). One can find it also in other legends that depict relations between Sámi and representatives of colonial power. Even in the late

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nineteenth century, J. Qvigstad could collect legends from northern Sámi about people who continued to rely on sieiddit for luck in their endeavours. Johan Nilsen Kitti told of one such man in a legend he related to Qvigstad in 1888. According to Kitti, two men go off to fish together. One of these is an elder and a Sámi tradi­ tionalist. The other is younger and either a non-Sámi or a Sámi who has embraced Christianity and is bent on suppressing old Sámi customs. On their first day of their fishing together, the men bring in a sizeable catch and are well pleased with their success. During the night, the older of the two men – the one who holds fast to old customs – steals away while his companion is seemingly asleep. He rows across the lake to the place where a sieidi stands. He greases the sieidi gratefully with fish fat as a way of thanking it and then returns to camp. His act, however, has not gone unnoticed: the younger man has seen it all. When the old man falls asleep, the younger man steals away himself, rows across the lake, and seizes the sieidi. Rowing back toward the camp, he maliciously drops the sacred object into the water. The sieidi, however, does not remain submerged: by the next morning it has returned to its proper place. Now, however, the men’s fishing luck has become much reduced: they can see fish, but cannot manage to catch many of them in their net. Nonetheless, come nightfall, the older man again makes off in secret to reward and placate the sieidi. And again, the young man reverses these honours by surreptitiously seizing the sieidi and dropping it into the centre of the lake. In the morning, it has again returned to its place. Kitti recounts the events of the climactic third day: Dan beaivve bivddiiga soai maiddá, muhto eaba soai ožžon maidege guliid, vaikko soai oin­ niiga hui ollu guliid álo go soai suohpuiga nuohti. Muhto go nuohtti bođii gáddái, de eaba soai ožžon maidege. De dajai nuorra olmmái: – Heittot bai leage du ipmil. Boares olmmái árvidii ahte su ipmil lei billistuvvon. Son suhtai nu sakka olbmásis ahte son áiggui su goddit. Nuorra olmmái fertii báhtarit, dađe buoret mađe farggabut. Boares olmmái bázii okto oktan nuhtiin ja fatnasiin. Muhto son oaččui nu olu guliid ahte son ii sáhttán rádjat. (Gaski et al. 2004, 103) [That day they fished again, but they caught nothing, even though they both saw a great many fish while they were setting the nets. But when they hauled the nets to shore, they hadn’t caught anything. Then the younger man said: – Weak indeed is your god. The old man guessed that his god had been damaged. He grew so angry at the man that he wanted to kill him. The young man ran off just as fast as he could. The old man stayed there alone with the nets and boat. And he caught so many fish that he couldn’t store them all. (author’s translation)]



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The story narrates a situation of conflict and disrespect created by the colonial process and suggests quietly the greater supernatural power of the old customs over the new. As these examples suggest, although folklore can sometimes encapsulate and express cultural memories that lie rooted in the historical past, oral tradi­ tion does not tend to work in precisely the fashion that historians expect of his­ torical accounts. Memories of past events become reshaped through the lens of later experiences, places and characters become forgotten or reassigned, events become normalised in ways that reflect cultural values as much or more than they reflect the actual events referred to in an account. On a symbolic level, it matters little who the actual stállu or čuđit were, or whether there really was a man named Goava, or whether a sieidi actually did return to its place after being seized and mistreated. What matters is how legends about these events and beings thema­ tise state colonisation and the economic predation and cultural suppression that Sámi faced over the course of centuries. Similarly, in Norwegian legendry, a long succession of periodic epidemics become tunnelled into a single, mythologised image of the Plague, one kept alive among a Norwegian populace by successive later, less virulent but still life-threatening epidemics like cholera or the flu (Alver 1989).

4 Perspectives for future research As the above discussion suggests, the question of memory affords a powerful but as yet little-used framework for examining various key aspects of pre-modern Sámi culture. Conceptualising important topics like joik, sieiddit and legendry in terms of their relation to acts of remembering opens up a valuable vista of understandings already implicit in Turi’s famous statement about joik. To date, such examinations have been few, although the work of Coppélie Cocq (2008) provides an excellent indication of some of the ways in which memory research can be applied to Sámi materials. The interesting case of the Skolt Sámi Archive further underscores this schol­ arly potential and indicates its ongoing significance in the present. The effort to recognize and preserve the handwritten archives of Skolt Sámi in the twentyfirst century can be seen as an important instance of applied memory studies. Understanding the nature of their neighbours in power – the penchant of colonial authorities for written documents – Skolt Sámi of the Suenjel siida, originally living in what is today part of Russia, Finland, and Norway, took steps to ensure that they would have instantiations of memory acceptable to authorities. Over the

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course of centuries, Suenjel Sámi demanded and then carefully preserved written statements from Russian officials regarding their community’s rights and privi­ leges, particularly as related to their reindeer pasture lands and fishing rights. The earliest document in the extant collection dates from 1601 and the latest from 1775. The fastidious caretakers of these records glued them together into a long scroll – today some nine meters in length. The scroll, carefully wound, was stored snugly in a wooden box and hidden in a location known at any given time to only three men of different families within the community. When the community was forced to leave their homes in 1939 due to war between Finland and the Soviet Union, they placed these treasured records in the Finnish National Archive for safekeeping. The Skolt lands were divided in the aftermath of the war between three countries, and many Skolt never got to return to their homeland. In 2012, the Skolt Archive was returned to the Skolt Sámi community of Finland, which in turn donated it to the Sámi Archives, established that same year. Since 2015, the Skolt Archive has been included in the UNESCO Memory of the World interna­ tional registry (UNESCO 2015). In the community’s application for Memory of the World status, community members Susanna Rauno, Petri Mentu and Suvi Kivelä produced a video, which became part of UNESCO’s permanent documentation of the archive (Rauno et al. 2015). In it, the Skolt Sámi narrator states (in (English): “When we remember how the ancestors protected the lands, we will remember our obligation to continue their way.” (Rauno et al. 2015) Her statement echoes that which ethnomusicologist Richard Jones Bamman heard from one of the joik singers he was recording in the early 1990s: “As long as we continue to joik, we will remember who we are.” (Jones-Bamman 1993) Remembering – be it in tradi­ tional Sámi ways, or in ways adapted from and more favoured by neighbouring peoples – is a Sámi imperative, in the past as now.

Works cited Primary sources Álgu-tietokanta. Kotimaisten kielten keskus. Helsinki, 2006. http://kaino.kotus.fi/algu/index. php?t=etusivu. (27 January 2017)



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Secondary sources Aikio, Ante. 2012. “An Essay on Substrate Studies and the Origin of Saami.” In A Linguistic Map of Prehistoric Northern Europe. Ed. Riho Grünthal and Petri Kallio. Suomalais-Ugrilaisen Seuran Toimituksia/Mémoires de la Société Finno-Ougrienne, 266. Helsinki. 63–117. Alver, Brynjulf. 1989. “Historical Legends and Historical Truth.” In Nordic Folklore, Recent Studies. Ed. Reimund Kvideland and Henning K. Sehmsdorf, in collaboration with Elizabeth Simpson. Bloomington, IN. 137–149. [Originally published as “Historiske segner og historisk sanning.” Norveg 9 (1962): 89–116.] Arnberg, Matts, Israel Ruong and Håkon Unsgaard, eds. 1997. Jojk. Kristianstad. Assmann, Jan. 1997. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen. Munich. Cocq, Coppélie. 2008. Revoicing Sámi Narratives: North Sámi Storytelling at the Turn of the 20th Century. Umeå. DuBois, Thomas A. 1995. “Outsider and Insider: An Inari Saami Case.” Scandinavian Studies 67.1: 63–76. Gaski, Harald, John T. Solbakk and Aage Solbakk, eds. 2004. Min njálmmálaš árbevierru. Máidnasat, myhtat ja muitalusat. Karasjok. Glauser, Jürg. 2000. “Sagas of the Icelanders (Íslendinga sögur) and þættir as the Literary Representation of a New Social Space.” In Old Icelandic Literature and Society. Ed. Margaret Clunies Ross. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 42. Cambridge. 203–220. Hansen, Lars Ivar and Bjørnar Olsen. 2004. Samenes historie fram til 1750. Oslo. Jones-Bamman, Richard. 1993. “‘As Long as We Continue to Joik, We’ll Remember Who We Are.’ Negotiating Identity and the Performance of Culture: The Saami Joik.” PhD dissertation. Seattle, WA. Kjellström, Rolf, Gunnar Ternhaf and Håkon Rydving. 1988. Om jojk. Hedemora. Manker, Ernst. 1938 . Die lappische Zaubertrommel, eine ethnologische Monographie. Bd. 1. Die Trommel als Denkmal materieller Kultur. Acta Lapponica, 1. Stockholm. Manker, Ernst. 1950. Die lappische Zaubertrommel, eine ethnologische Monographie. Bd. 2. Die Trommel als Urkunde geistigen Lebens. Acta Lapponica, 6. Stockholm. Manker, Ernst. 1957. Lapparnas heliga ställen. Kultplatser och offerkult i belysing av Nordiska museets och landsantikvariernas fältundersökningar. Stockholm. Mebius, Hans. 2003. Bissie. Studier I samisk religionshistoria. Östersund. Mitchell, Stephen. 2013. “Memory, Mediality, and the ‘Performative Turn’. Recontextualizing Remembering in Medieval Scandinavia.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 282–305. Nora, Pierre. 1998. Realms of Memory. Rethinking the French Past. Chicago, Il. Rauno, Susanna, Petri Mentu and Suvi Kivelä. 2015. The Skolt Sámi Archive. Youtube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKKJqu-vV_Q. (27 January 2017) Ruong, Israel. 1976. Om joikning. Stockholm. Rydving, Håkan. 1995. The End of the Drum-Time. Change among the Lule Saami, 1670–1740s. Acta Universitalis Upsaliensis. Historia Religionum, 12. Uppsala. Stoor, Krister. 2007. Juoiganmuitalusat – Jojkberättelser. En studie av jojkens narrativa egenskaper. Umeå.

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Svonni, Mikael. 2006. “Legenden om Riihmagállis – Mannen från Rávttasjávri.” In Grenzgänger. Festschrift zum 65. Geburtsdag von Jurij Kosmenko. Ed. Kristina Kotcheva Hornscheidt, Tomas Milosch and Mikael Riessler. Berlin. 315–329. Svonni, Mikael. 2012. “Language Change among the Jukkasjärvi Sámi.” Veröffentlichungen der Societas Uralo-Altaica: 233–242. Tirén, Karl. 1942. Die lappische Volksmusik. Aufzeichnungen von Juoikos Melodien bei den schwedischen Lappen. Acta Lapponica, 3. Stockholm. Turi, Johan. 2011. Muitalus Sámiid birra. Karasjok. Turi, Johan. 2012. An Account of the Sámi. Trans. Thomas A. DuBois. Chicago, Il. UNESCO 2015. “Archive of the Skolt Sámi Village of Suonjel Suenjel.” Memory of the World registry. http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/memoryof-the-world/register/full-list-of-registered-heritage/registered-heritage-page-1/ archive-of-the-skolt-sami-village-of-suonjel-suenjel/. (27 January 2017) Vinthagen Simpson, Peter. “Sámi Win Long Fight for Reindeer Grazing Rights” The Local Se. http://www.thelocal.se/20110427/33430. (21 January 2011) Westman, Anna. 2006. “Det rituella livet kring tusentalet.” In Sápmi Y1K – Livet i samernas bosättningsområde för ett tusen år sedan. Ed. Andrea Amft and Mikael Svonni. Umeå. 43–60.

In-Dialogue

Margaret Clunies Ross

I: 28 Reception Studies 1 Definition Theorised studies of both memory and reception are premised upon similar and compatible assumptions. Memories, whether they be personal or social, act upon conceptual schemata already in place in an individual’s or a society’s mental environment (Halbwachs 1950), although they may be strengthened, weakened or otherwise changed by pressures from external forces. Memory studies are con­ cerned to trace the development of different kinds and levels of memories and memorialisation over time, both within and beyond defined social groups and at the level of the individual. Like memory studies, reception studies consider the historical and ideological environments in which cultural goods are received, but here the focus is upon the act (or acts) of reception itself and the receiver (or receivers) of the work of art, concept or collective idea in question. The study of reception looks at the existing horizon of an individual’s or a group’s expec­ tations, which comprise their current knowledge and attitudes, to explain the nature of both the reception and the individual’s or group’s response to a cultural stimulus (Baldick 2015). It is also interested in ways in which the reception of a particular cultural good may bring about change in the meanings a society, or sub-set of society, may assign to it.

2 State of research Thus both memory and reception studies require an awareness of the intersec­ tion of cultural and historical knowledge, because both require a chronological perspective. Reception theory, in addition, insists that all versions of a cultural good’s reception are of equal value and interest, a view that lends itself to the pursuit of the reception and evaluation of specific works or concepts over time both within and beyond the originating author, work or society. A good many memory studies of recent decades have concerned the role of social groups in the construction of cultural memories and the various ways in which such collective group memories have fed into the development of national myths. Most of these have concentrated on myths of the nation that have emerged in Europe and elsewhere since the middle of the eighteenth century. There have been many fewer such studies of the construction of cultural memories in medi­ https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-034

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eval societies, partly because it is more difficult to demonstrate such national ideas as belonging to specific polities in the Middle Ages (cf. Smith 1999, 97–123). However, in respect of medieval Scandinavia, and particularly medieval Iceland, no such difficulty arises. It is easy to find the major criteria that define national consciousness and myth-making in the cultural records of medieval Iceland. These criteria include the following (cf. Smith 1999, 104): myths and memories of a common ancestry and an awareness of a population’s common history; the formation of a shared public culture based on a common language, religion and culture; a delimited home territory and a shared migration history; and a common legal order and an agreed story of its nature and origin. While there are disparate narratives subsumed within these specific tropes, they all have the common goals of presenting an agreed cultural history. A high percentage of Old Icelandic written texts comprises representations of the Icelanders’ past as seen from the medieval present, so the role of memory in the construction of that past is clearly of central importance. A number of recent studies have highlighted the significance of memory studies within various branches of knowledge and types of Old Norse texts, many but not all of them of Icelandic provenance. A case in point is the collection of essays enti­ tled Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture (Hermann et al. 2014). The authors analyse various bodies of text, mythical, historical, legal, genealogi­ cal and poetic, in the light of memory studies and in some cases (e.g. Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir 2014, 226–227) show how medieval memorisation continued into the early modern period. In the field of pre-modern Nordic studies there have been few overtly theo­ rised reception studies to date, but a great deal of modern scholarship, since the 1970s, that qualifies as reception-orientated, as indeed do those mentioned in the volume Minni and Muninn. In some cases (e.g. Glauser 1983, 61–63, 158–160), important works by reception theorists such as Hans Robert Jauss (1982 [1977]) and Wolfgang Iser (1978 [1976]) are cited overtly, but in many others that are intent upon a reception-focussed study, they are not mentioned by name. A good example is provided by Jón Karl Helgason’s study (1999), within the framework of translation theory, of the reception of Njáls saga. Another example is the manysided series of interpretations of the extant Old Norse narratives of how the kings Hálfdan svarti ‘the Black’ and his son Haraldr hárfagri ‘Fairhair’ came to power in Norway offered by the historian of religion Bruce Lincoln (2014). Lincoln does not mention reception theory as such, but his approach is very much receptionoriented: “Variants [...] reflect not only the narrators’ interests and situations of interest, but also their expectations and calculations considering the interests (and situations of interest) of the audience they hope to engage. Conversely, in reception the hearers selectively rework the story they have heard to make it



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better engage and reflect their actual – and not simply their presumed – interests and situation of interest, toward which end they ignore some details and focus on others, while creatively misapprehending others still” (Lincoln 2014, 105). One of the most significant ways in which Nordic, and particularly Icelan­ dic custodians of cultural memory created a national identity was through the creation of a canonical literature. This happened in the medieval period, but such an enterprise necessarily looked back to the pre-literate past, and created and remembered that past by narrating it in prose and often then encapsulating it in poetry embedded in the prose in a so-called prosimetrum. The measure of medieval Icelandic literature’s great enduring success is that the enterprise of cultural memorisation was also enabled to look forward into the future. At first that forward vision was confined to a reception within Iceland itself, because Ice­ landers were the only ones able to read and understand their medieval vernac­ ular manuscripts. But during the later sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries Icelandic scholars began to create a Humanist reception for their culture, first in the Scandinavian countries, particularly Denmark and Sweden, and then further abroad in Europe. They did this in several ways: by copying old manuscripts, by reworking medieval texts in ways that they found important and against a background of Humanist thought, and by choosing powerful patrons abroad to support and disseminate their work. The study of the post-medieval reception of Icelandic textual culture is one of the most active areas of reception studies within the whole field of Icelandic studies today, and much of it is being led by Icelandic scholars of the present day. The ongoing reception of this branch of Ice­ landic endeavour is, of course, the foundation of Old Norse-Icelandic studies as an academic discipline and as a recognised branch of world literature.

3 Pre-modern Nordic material Voices of the past: the vernacular Icelandic prosimetrum A large part of medieval Icelandic literature can be classified very broadly as his­ torical, if we understand by that term a society’s attempt to document its own past and that of its neighbours, whether in the mode of chronicle, biography, or imaginative reconstruction of social and family history. Even the so-called samtíðarsögur [or contemporary sagas] look backwards, to the recent past it is true, but they look back all the same. This is also true of the sagas of Icelandic bishops and the lives of foreign saints, both vernacular hagiographical genres. The late Preben Meulengracht Sørensen considered that one of the major roles of

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poetry in such a literature was to provide authenticating ‘voices of the past’ from a time before literacy using the Roman alphabet was practised in Scandinavia (Meulengracht Sørensen 2001). The conceptual framework of reception studies enables one to demonstrate how various literary strategies were developed to present the Nordic voices of the past in poetic form within prose settings of more recent creation. A reception framework is also able to show awareness of contem­ porary or near-contemporary literary developments in the wider medieval Euro­ pean context during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that may have influenced Icelandic prosimetrum, such as the growing focus upon the individual character in much twelfth- and thirteenth-century romance and the evolution of fictional writing in the same period. Many scholars have addressed these issues from a wider European perspective (e.g. Green 2002), while Clover’s analysis (1982) of the Icelandic saga in the context of both romance and historical writing remains influential as a background to such a study, as does that of Tulinius (2002) for the fornaldarsaga. Although some Icelandic sagas contain no poetry, a large number do. Where poetry and prose were combined in the medieval saga form, it was possible for authors to impart both depth of characterisation and authority to their writing in a way that could not have been achieved in a purely prose medium. In kings’ sagas and other historical writings, authority and authenticity of witness were provided by poetic statements of court skalds who claimed to have been present or as good as present at events and actions that a prose narrator could usually only vouch for at second hand (cf. Clunies Ross 2014; Heslop 2014; Poole 2014). Such a process of reception is absolutely dependent on the power and endurance of the collective memory of the courtly elite in Viking Age and early medieval Norway and Iceland, something that Snorri Sturluson in his Edda was concerned to ensure survived into the thirteenth century. The preservation of poetry within prose texts in the medieval period was not only an act of cultural conservation, however. Reception of the oral past in this manner changed the product itself in many ways, both at the point of record­ ing (being often chopped up from longer encomia into stanza-sized ‘bites’ or lausavís­ur, as they are called) and at the point or points of interpretation by authors and redactors of the prose texts into which they were assimilated. It may also be that certain styles of poetry were favoured over others in the prosimetri­ cal environment. Reception theory allows us to appreciate the many nuances of such an assimilation across the various sub-classes of the saga genre and to go beyond the simple distinction that a number of scholars have made between the ‘authenticating’ and the ‘situational’ use of poetry within saga texts (cf. Clunies Ross 2005, 69–82 and references given there). A study of the diverse ways in which the combination of poetry and prose interacted in saga texts and in the



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process changed them both may provide a key to the literary analysis of the par­ ticular contribution that poetry made to the rise of the saga form and how it had to change itself in the process of reception to fit the new prosimetrical medium in which it was preserved. Such a study has yet to be written, although important steps have been taken along the way (cf. O’Donoghue 2005).

The career, writings and influence of Magnús Ólafsson (c. 1573–1636) Magnús Ólafsson was a priest and minister at Laufás in northern Iceland from 1622 until the end of his life. He was the author of the so-called Laufás-Edda, an adaptation of the Codex Wormianus version (c. 1350) of the Edda of Snorri Sturlu­ son made for contemporary readers and scholars, an enterprise first suggested to him by another important figure in the reception history of medieval Icelandic textual culture, Arngrímur Jónsson (1568–1648). Magnús’s Edda was by no means a straight copy of the Wormianus text of Snorri’s Edda, however. He added to it some additional material on poetics which is not in any of the extant medieval manuscripts of the Edda (cf. Faulkes 1977–1979, I, 156–179), and he rearranged the text to give it a structure reminiscent of a dictionary or encyclopedia. It was in this form that Snorri’s Edda was received by the wider scholarly world in the seventeenth century and for quite some time afterwards, not in the form of any of the medieval manuscripts. In fact, the first edition of Snorri’s text to follow the manuscript that is now considered the best, R (Codex Regius of Snorri’s Edda, GKS 2367 4to), was that of Rasmus Rask in 1818. Magnús Ólafsson’s reception of Snorri’s medieval Nachlaß arguably suited the Humanist interests of his fellow scholars both in Iceland and in the rest of Europe more than if Snorri’s text in one of its medieval versions had served as the prototype for early modern editions. Magnús’s Edda was one of the most copied seventeenth- and eighteenth-century books in Iceland itself and occupied a position of great importance in the preservation of a large corpus of knowledge derived from the medieval period and even further back in the Icelandic tradi­ tions of poetic composition and cultural knowledge of language and poetry. At the same time that Magnús was preserving this important lore from the past, his own reception of it changed the product considerably. A bilingual version and Magnús’s Latin translation became the basis for the three-language-compilation of Stephan Stephanius (now lost), which was the major source for Peder Hansen Resen’s printed Edda Islandorum (for a stemma of the several versions see Faulkes 1977–1979, I, 92). Much of the basic research into Magnús’s Edda and Resen’s Edda Islandorum was carried out in the 1970s by Anthony Faulkes and published in two meticu­

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lous editions (Faulkes 1977–1979), in Resen’s case including a facsimile of the original 1665 text. These two editions include a great deal of information in their Introductions and notes about the various scholarly networks, both in Iceland and abroad, mainly in Denmark, that sustained the seventeenth-century recep­ tion of Snorri’s Edda and much else of the medieval Icelandic textual tradition. However, in the 1970s and 80s few scholars made much further use of the mate­ rial that Faulkes had provided, and it was not until more recent decades that a new interest among scholars has grown up (e.g. Lassen 2011; Malm 1996; Sverrir Tómasson 1996) in the nature of the Icelandic Humanist reception of the medieval textual past and has shown how it sparked particular reactions and responses both in Iceland and among the wider Scandinavian and European intelligentsia of the seventeenth century. This interest in the reception of a part-remembered, part-recreated textual tradition shows no signs of abating, and is likely to lead to further scholarly acts of recuperation in the future.

4 Perspectives for future research The research and reception strand of the research project the pre-Christian religions of the North The Pre-Christian Religions of the North project aims to provide a complete reas­ sessment of available evidence about early Nordic religion and myth, together with an account of their reception from the Middle Ages until the present time. It comprises three strands, Histories and Structures, Sources and Research and Reception, and will form a seven-volume series, beginning in 2018. The Research and Reception strand aims to trace the reception of the various cultural memo­ ries of the pre-Christian past in the North across the centuries, beginning with the earliest available records and taking the narrative up to the present day. In this study scholarly research into pre-Christian religion and myth is treated as a kind of reception, recognising that, especially in centuries before the nineteenth, it is difficult to distinguish cleanly between research in the modern sense and a more general reception, and recognising also that, although research may be conducted in a scientific frame of mind, an investigator’s approach is inevitably coloured to some degree by his or her intellectual background and conditioning. This will be the first project in the field of Scandinavian studies to take a long view of the reception of this subject. It will necessarily cast a critical eye on what people at various times and in various places claim to have remembered of the pagan past, whether in terms of ritual practices, beliefs or mythic narratives.



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In doing so, it will reveal the reasons why certain topics and explanatory frame­ works for the pre-Christian religions of the North appear again and again; it will also chart changes in the reception and changes in the tropes of cultural memory that lie behind the reception at different times and in different cultural environ­ ments. In addition, the project will follow the profound changes in the reception from a concern predominantly with religion to a concern predominantly with aes­ thetics that occurred in and after European Romanticism and which has led to a creative reception in all sorts of new genres and media over the last hundred years (see Clunies Ross 2018). There have already been numerous studies of the reception of Old Norse-Ice­ landic literature and myth in the period from the pre-Romantic mid-eighteenth century, through Romanticism and into the twentieth century. Some important reception studies include Beck (1934–1935), Clunies Ross (1998), Wawn (2000), and the German DFG-funded research project Edda-Rezeption, led by Julia Zernack of the University of Frankfurt, which has already published five volumes, beginning with Schulz and Heesch (2009). A number of these publications have demonstrated how selective the cultural memories drawn on by those responsible for this reception were, whether because few texts were then available, or because emerging nationalisms in the receiving linguistic communities turned the Nordic inheritance into propaganda for the receiving community’s own national history and mythology. However, there are still large gaps in the record of reception to be filled, and above all the various narratives of remembered reception need to be linked and filled out. Only then can people understand how and why their prede­ cessors thought in certain ways about pagan Nordic religion and myth and how what their predecessors thought and claimed to have remembered has impacted on their own understandings of the subject. This short account of the nexus between memory and reception studies in the pre-Modern North has necessarily taken a selective approach and given a small number of examples from Nordic studies of where the two theoretical frame­ works have been or are being combined. There are numerous others that could be mentioned, particularly among works that have something to say about either memory studies or reception or both, but do not invoke a transparent theoretical methodology. However, if there is one thing that emerges from this overview, it is that the field of pre-Modern Nordic studies is eminently suitable for study from the dual perspectives of memory and reception, because these were two of the major objectives of medieval Scandinavians themselves, and nowhere were these two goals more prominent than in Iceland.

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Works cited Secondary sources Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. 2014. “Legal Culture and Historical Memory in Medieval and Early Modern Iceland.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 211–230. Baldick, Chris, 2015. “Reception Theory”. In The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Ed. Chris Baldick. www.oxfordreference.com. 4th online ed. Oxford. (6 November 2016) Beck, Thor J. 1934–1935. Northern Antiquities in French Learning and Literature 1755–1855. A study in preromantic ideas. 2 vols. New York. Clover, Carol J. 1982. The Medieval Saga. Ithaca and London. Clunies Ross, Margaret. 1998. The Norse Muse in Britain 1750–1820. Trieste. Clunies Ross, Margaret. 2005. A History of Old Norse Poetry and Poetics. Cambridge. 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. 59–74. Clunies Ross, Margaret. 2018. Ed. The Pre-Christian Religions of the North. Research and Reception. 2 Vols. Turnhout. Faulkes, Anthony, ed. 1977–1979. Two Versions of Snorra Edda from the 17th Century. Vol. I. Edda Magnúsar Ólafssonar. Vol. II. Edda Islandorum, Völuspá. Hávamál. P. H. Resen’s editions of 1665. Reykjavík. Glauser, Jürg. 1983. Isländische Märchensagas. Studien zur Prosaliteratur im spätmittelalterlichen Island. Beiträge zur nordischen Philologie, 12. Basel and Frankfurt am Main. Green, D. S. 2002. The Beginnings of Medieval Romance: Fact and Fiction 1150–1220. Cambridge. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1950. La mémoire collective. Posthumous publication by Jeanne Alexandre, née Halbwachs. Paris. Hermann, Pernille, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir, eds. 2014. Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. Heslop, Kate. 2014. “Minni and the Rhetoric of Memory in Eddic, Skaldic, and Runic Texts.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 75–107. Iser, Wolfgang. 1978. The act of reading: a theory of aesthetic response. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. [German original 1976]. Jauss, Hans Robert. 1982. Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics. Trans. Michael Shaw. Minneapolis. [German original 1977]. Jón Karl Helgason. 1999. The Rewriting of Njáls saga. Translation, Politics and Icelandic Sagas. Topics in Translation, 16. Clevedon, Buffalo, Toronto and Sydney. Lassen, Annette. 2011. Ed. and trans. Hrafnagaldur Óðins (Forspjallsljóð). University College London. Lincoln, Bruce. 2014. Between History and Myth. Stories of Harald Fairhair and the Founding of the State. Chicago and London. Malm, Mats. 1996. Minervas äpple. Om diktsyn, tolkning och bildspråk inom nordisk göticism. Stockholm/Stehag.



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Meulengracht Sørensen, Preben. 2001. “The Prosimetrum Form 1: Verses as the Voice of the Past.” In Skaldsagas. Text, Vocation, and Desire in the Icelandic Sagas of Poets. Ed. Russell Poole. Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde, 27. Berlin and New York. 172–190. O’Donoghue, Heather. 2005. Skaldic Verse and the Poetics of Saga Narrative. Oxford etc. Poole, Russell. 2014. “Autobiographical Memory in Medieval Scandinavia and amongst the Kievan Rus’.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 109–129. Rask, Rasmus Kristian, ed. 1818. Snorra-Edda ásamt Skáldu og þarmeð fylgjandi ritgjörðum eptir gömlum skinnbókum. Stockholm. Schulz, Katja and Florian Heesch, eds. 2009. “Sang an Aegir”. Nordische Mythen um 1900. Heidelberg. Smith, Anthony D. 1999. Myths and Memories of the Nation. Oxford etc. Sverrir Tómasson ed. 1996. Guðamjöður og arnarleir. Safn ritgerða um eddulist. Reykjavík. Torfi H. Tulinius. 2002. The Matter of the North. The Rise of Literary Fiction in Thirteenth-century Iceland. Trans. Randi C. Eldevik. The Viking Collection, 13. Odense. Wawn, Andrew. 2000. The Vikings and the Victorians. Inventing the Old North in Nineteenthcentury Britain. Cambridge.

Jón Karl Helgason

I: 29 Popular Culture 1 Definition During the past two to three hundred years, a set of ideas about medieval Nordic culture and religion – primarily the Vikings and their Valhalla – have become a permanent part of our universal imagination. Books have certainly played a part in the shaping and dissemination of these ideas but instrumental for this process have been the increasingly powerful channels of mass media, implementing the audio-visual. In the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries these channels were mostly limited to the theatre and opera stages. Since then technical develop­ ments in the fields of printing, audio recording, radio transmission, animation, film-making, and television have opened up new avenues of propagation. Most recently, the digital revolution has extended these avenues and enabled new ones. At the outset, original works and adaptations by Northern European artists were characteristic for this line of production but as time passed popular interest in the Viking Age became more trans-national. Although occasionally concerned with history or medieval source texts, genres like Viking Films, Viking Metal, and Viking Video Games have developed their own poetics, narrative patterns, visual clichés and cultural stereotypes. For these and other reasons, it is worth asking whether products of popular culture featuring the Viking Age should be a distinct concern of memory studies.

2 State of research An important premise for most scholars working in the field is that memory is not only a personal phenomenon but also a collective one, invested in the stories we tell each other about our mutual past, and consequently imperative to our per­ sonal and collective identities. This explains why these scholars prefer the concept of memory to other and more traditional terms such as past, myths, history, adap­ tations, or tradition. While Maurice Halbwachs stressed that collective memory is defined by diverse social frameworks, such as family, religion and social class, Jan Assmann and Aleida Assmann have emphasised that cultural memory is conven­ tionally designed to shape and stabilise the self-image of a particular ethnic and national group. Hence, it seems contradictory to tie products of popular or mass culture, that are characteristically distributed globally, to collective memories. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-035



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Martin Zierold (2008, 401) addresses this apparent paradox in his critical review of memory and media cultures, pointing out that the terminology devel­ oped by the Assmanns was motivated by research on pre-modern societies and determines: “The last 80 to 100 years and with them nearly all occasions of memory transmitted by electronic media cannot be analysed with the terminol­ ogy of cultural memory.” And yet, a growing number of scholars are applying the concept of memory to studies of mass media and to individual genres of popular culture. As might be expected, this development has led to an “increasing ten­ dency to introduce further terms into the discourse,” as Zierold (2008, 401) points out, “terms which are rooted in but in some way expand on the first definition of communicative and cultural memory by Aleida and Jan Assmann”. Demonstra­ tive for this development is Alison Landsberg’s concept of ‘prosthetic memory’ and Karin Kukkonen’s term ‘popular cultural memory’. In her book on the transformation of American remembrance in the age of mass culture, Landsberg (2004, 8) explicates that the forces of modernity, in par­ ticular the cumulative flow of immigrants between cultures and “the changes wrought by modern mass culture have made Halbwachs’s notion of collective memory inadequate”. Kukkonen (2008, 262–263) similarly criticises the Ass­ manns for concentrating their research on high culture – “the literary canon or sites of national remembrance” – while failing “to account both for the long­ standing historic continuity of popular culture itself […] and for such repertoires of genres, topics and styles which have moved across the high culture/low culture divide”. Both of these scholars are nevertheless concerned with the relationship between memory and identity, and they seem to agree, as Landsberg (2004, 8) puts it, that “mass cultural technologies have the capacity to create shared social frameworks for people who inhabit, literally and figuratively, different social spaces, practices, and beliefs”. Primarily focusing on cinematic practices, Landsberg (2004, 12) maintains that film-makers are capable of presenting the past in a more powerful and memorable way than artists working with most other media: “the cinema trans­ ports people into lives that they have not lived in the traditional sense but that they are nevertheless invited to experience and even inhabit, albeit briefly”. Her primary idea is that by watching, for instance, heart-rending history movies such as Schindler’s List or The Pianist, any spectator, irrespective of his or her back­ ground, race or class, potentially can ‘take on’ memories of the Holocaust. The concept of prosthetic memory is to designate the effect of such realistic fictional representations: “Because they feel real, they help condition how a person thinks about the world and might be instrumental in articulating an ethical relation to the other” (Landsberg 2004, 21). Kukkonen, focusing on the international impact of an American comic books series, is less idealistic in her description of popular

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cultural memory. Still, she maintains that contemporary fan communities are capable of providing the individual with a social framework no less important than communal and national ones: Just as Halbwachs describes the individual as being embedded in the different social memo­ ries of his/her family, religion and class in Les cadres sociaux, so can today’s mass media recipients be members of various communities of popular culture, be they as diverse as samurai films and Western fairy tales. Also, these new community affiliations and iden­ tities always exist alongside the more classical formations of nation and social standing. (Kukkonen 2008, 270)

These two different approaches respectively highlight the material and social dimensions of mass media, both of which are important when we discuss the relationship between memory and popular culture. Although a specific medium has, due to technical advances and certain means of distribution, “a potential for memory-making” as Astrid Erll (2008, 395) puts it, it also has to be “realized in the process of reception”. As a result, Zierold (2008, 403–404) has per­ ceptively proposed an integrative concept of media which requires scholars in the field of memory studies to state “which specific aspect of the relation of the media and memory they want to focus upon. […] If this concept is taken seri­ ously, a fragmentary analysis of a single aspect of the media is insufficient; instead, the relationships among various phenomena have to be observed and described”. From this perspective, Landsberg can be criticised for placing too much emphasis on the cinematic medium, while disregarding how different groups of audience members relate in diverse ways to various productions of the international film industry. Kukkonen, on the other hand, can be criticised for overemphasising the social dimension of fan communities and even for level­ ling out the miscellaneous elements that may contribute to a collective identity of such groups (i.e. age, gender, class, taste, fashion, specialised knowledge, role playing). Landsberg’s analysis of the powerful impact of cinema is still worthy of special concern. Here, it may be useful to elaborate on Jan Assmann’s suggestion that the English words re-membering and re-collecting can be understood as implying the process of uniting dissected members or limbs of a body or collecting something that has been dispersed. To illustrate this point, Assmann describes an ancient Egyptian ritual designed to ensure Osiris, the god of the underworld, a continu­ ous presence in cultural memory. It began with the finding and embalming of the scattered limbs of the murdered Osiris, which were ritually joined together and animated. It ended with the resurrection of Osiris (the feast of “raising the Djed pillar”) and the elevation of Horus, his son and avenger, to



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the throne. The forty-two limbs of Osiris that were collected, joined together, and revived in the course of the ceremonies correspond to the forty-two provinces of the land. […] Osiris’s death and Horus’s accession to the throne is a political myth. (Assmann 2006, 14–15)

Similarly, different genres of popular culture require artists literally to re-member and re-call the past by animating ancient characters and their discourse. In her book on the processes of adaptation, Linda Hutcheon (2013, 13) explains: “To show a story, as in movies, ballets, radio and stage plays, musicals and operas, involves direct aural and usually visual performance experienced in real time.” The potential impact of popular culture on our imagination and, by extension, our collective and cultural memories, lies first in artists’ abilities to reinstate various important extra-textual aspects of the past that are not preserved in the medieval literary or material sources, and second, in the routine popular appeal of mass media. This process of performance is clearly acknowledged in Gordon Bottomley’s dedication to The Riding to Lithend, his 1909 dramatic adaptation of Njáls saga [The Saga of Njal]. Here, the playwright expresses his desire: “To body Hallgerd’s ruinous / Great hair and wrangling mouth for us”, and to “hear her voice deny again / That hair to Gunnar in his pain” (Bottomley 1953, 94, emphasis added).

3 Pre-modern Nordic material The conception of the pre-modern North in popular culture and mass media has only been a secondary concern of scholars writing on the post-medieval dissemi­ nation and reception of Scandinavian medieval literature. Some of the most com­ prehensive monographs on this topic primarily focus on textual adaptations of the Eddas and sagas in one culture during the eighteenth and nineteenth centu­ ries (cf. Mjöberg 1967–1968; Zernack 1994; Clunies Ross 1998; Wawn 2000; Barnes 2001). Heather O’Donoghue’s From Asgard to Valhalla (2007), Martin Arnold’s Thor: Myth to Marvel (2011) and Jón Karl Helgason’s Echoes of Valhalla (2017) are more cross-cultural and also take into account various products of twentiethcentury popular culture. Still, none of these books is really concerned with the concepts of collective or cultural memory. More relevant to the present inquiry are several recent essay-collections dealing with popular culture and the Middle Ages. These include David W. Marshall’s Mass Market Medieval (2007), Kevin J. Harty’s The Vikings on Film (2011), and Donna Weston and Andy Bennett’s Pop Pagans (2013). International circles of Viking Metal fans, which are examined in some of the chapters of Pop

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Pagans, are archetypal examples of the contemporary communities of media recipients that Kukkonen discusses in her treatment of popular cultural memory. Correspondingly, the great variety of popular films and television programs, many of which are considered in Vikings on Film, could explain why numerous people, from all around the world, may have developed a prosthetic memory (as Landsberg defines the term) of the Viking Age. At the same time, it is important to remember that most depictions of the Vikings in popular culture are not really meant to represent the past. Typically, these works confirm Kukkonen’s (2008, 262) useful observation: “Media texts refer to the conventions and codes establis­ hed through other texts, but they forget about the actual contexts and the speci­ ficity of their source texts”. This can be exemplified by two sets of cases: (A) the earliest comic story about of the Mighty Thor appearing in the American comic magazine Journey into Mystery # 83 (1962) and the Danish comic book Thors brudefærd (1980); (B)  the films The Viking (1928), The Vikings (1958), and Erik the Viking (1989). In the late Middle Ages and early modern era, the visualisation of Scandina­ vian Vikings and their gods was primarily based on a relatively few iconic illustra­ tions. The earliest of these are found in illuminated manuscripts, on pictorial or ornamented rune stones, and embroidered cloths, such as the Bayeux Tapestry. Although many of them have become cultural artefacts in their own right, recy­ cled again and again in younger manuscripts and printed books, fewer can be regarded as genuine depictions of the past they are supposed to represent. Trish Baer (2013, 50) has argued, for instance, that the well-known ‘original’ image of “the Deluding of Gylfi” from the fourteenth-century manuscript of Uppsalabók was probably “copied from another manuscript that was not a copy of The Prose Edda but was either religious or legal in nature”. During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, archaeological discoveries, illustrated editions, transla­ tions and adaptations of medieval texts, historical paintings and sculptures, as well as theatre and opera performances, accelerated this visual conception of the pre-modern North, developing many of the graphic clichés that are still funda­ mental for the popular conception of this material. In her article “The Invention of the Viking Horned Helmet”, Roberta Frank’s (2000, 199–200) has traced, for example, how this principal ‘logo’ of the Viking period was practically created by: […] Wagner’s costume designer, Professor Carl Emil Doepler, for the first Bayreuth produc­ tion (1876) of the full Ring des Nibelungen. Putting cow-horns on Nibelungenlied heads was a departure from tradition: until 1878 not a single illustrated version of that courtly southGerman poem had depicted such headgear. […] Within twenty years the horned helmet spelled “viking” in advertisements, in paintings, in popular histories and children’s books, even on a Scandinavian cruise menu (23 July 1895) of the Hamburg-America liner Columbia.



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Before the year 1876, most Vikings featured on popular illustrations or the stage had been wearing winged helmets, while the ones decorated with cow-horns were “reserved for early Britons and Gauls, who had some historic claim to them” (Frank 2000, 200). Jack Kirby’s (1962) drawing that introduced the Mighty Thor on the cover of Journey into Mystery # 83 can been seen as an extension of this older tradition (which certainly has never fully died out). But the Viking helmet is just one of several cultural references on this striking cover. The outfit of Mighty Thor, who is seen standing on the roof of a metropolitan high-rise, also consists of a cape, boots and tights, and the hammer he is precariously swinging around. Moreover, Thor is being attacked by armed green giants who are jumping from a rocket-like spaceship. These aliens curiously resemble the late medieval monolithic stone sculptures of Easter Island in the south-eastern Pacific Ocean. The integrative concept of media and memory, as proposed by Zierold, encourages us to consider concurrently all of these aspects and to analyse both their internal relationship and the way in which they evoked, probably in very different ways, the cultural memory of diverse groups of readers. While devoted students of Scandinavian mythology may have associated the hammer with Mjöllnir, the thunder instru­ ment of the pagan god Þórr, comic books buffs may have identified the hero’s cape, boots and tights as a typical gear of an American superhero. Furthermore, devoted fans of Jack Kirby may here have been reminded of the artist’s earlier works, not only his lesser known characterisations of Thor in at least three dif­ ferent stories from the 1940s and 1950s, where the thunder god is persistently wearing a horned-helmet (Helgason 2017, 18–29), but also Kirby’s representation of the frightful “Stone Sentinels of Giant Island” from the period 1959 to 1961 (cf. Kolkman 2004). A similar mismatch of cultural artefacts can be detected in Thors brudefærd, a comic book adaptation of Þrymskviða done by Peter Madsen and his co-creators of the Danish Valhalla-series. In addition to literally re-membering different gods and giants, including Þórr, Freyja, and Loki, Madsen (1980, 39 and 32) presen­ ted here both the band members of Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem from Jim Henson’s The Muppet Show and Scrooge McDuck’s Number One Dime from Walt Disney’s Donald Duck universe. The idea (aside from arousing merited smiles) was, predictably, to let the juvenile audience, irrespective of its nationality, feel more at home within the represented world of medieval Nordic myth. But the comic book also contained references to some objects that were both more locally Danish and antique. Hence, saxophonist Zoot of Dr. Teeth’s band seems to be playing a contracted Bronze Age lur [horn] from Brudevælte Mose at the weddingfeast in Thors brudefærd (Madsen 1980, 39). The image refers to the half a dozen curved brass horns that were found in a bog northeast of Lynge in Zealand at the

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end of the eighteenth century and later stored at the National Museum in Copen­ hagen (cf. Helgason 2017, 34–44). A set of interrelated cultural references appearing in the three different Viking Films further affirm how popular culture at the same time rejuvenates and generates cultural memory. One of the central props in Roy William Neill’s (1928) The Viking – a silent Technicolor cinematic adaptation of an American novel (Liljencrantz 1902) based on the Vinland sagas – is a map of Northern Europe and Greenland that stylistically resembles the much-debated ‘medieval’ Vinland Map (cf. Seaver 2004). In the film, Leif Ericsson (Donald Crisp) shows King Olaf Tryggvason (Roy Stewart) this mappa mundi before sailing from Norway on a royal mission to discover what lies to the west of the Atlantic Ocean. The decis­ ive difference between these two maps is that instead of displaying the strangely shaped isle found on the Vinland Map, the left-side of the atlas in Neill’s (1928, 21.19–21.23) movie shows a band of dragons being flushed by the sea over the edge of the world. This detail, probably stimulated by early twentieth-century misrepresentations of ‘Flat Earthism’ in Christopher Columbus’s times, rather than any medieval sources (cf. Garwood 2007), is a crucial prelude to the drama in the second half of the film. As Leif navigates further westwards, his crewmembers become increasingly worried that they are about to follow in the wake of the sea-dragons. This contributes to an atmosphere of imminent mutiny on board. This same idea surfaces in Richard Fleischer’s The Vikings, which is an adap­ tation of an American novel (Marshall 1951), itself loosely based on Ragnars saga loðbrókar [The Saga of Ragnar Hairy-Breaches]. The film opens with Orson Welles’s voice-over introduction, neatly decorated with an animated illustration that stylistically resembles the Bayeux Tapestry. Welles explains that since the Vikings did not know the compass, fog was particularly dangerous for their navi­ gation. “After all, the earth was flat. Sail too far off course and the black wind would blow them across the Poison Sea that lay to the west and over the edge of the world and into limbo” (Fleischer 1958, 01.21–01.21.33). In the animation, three Viking ships are seen sailing off the edge of the world and their crew-members scorched in black flames (or waves) of hell. In neither of these two films, do ‘real-life’ characters reach the world’s end, but surely the 1928 re-vised Vinland Map and the 1958 re-vised Bayeux Tapestry may have propagated the notion that the Vikings were Flat Earthers. The same is also the case with Terry Jones’s (1989, 1.23.49) comedy-fantasy film Erik the Viking in which a Viking ship positively sails off the world’s end that resembles the brink of a terrifying waterfall (see fig.  1). Miraculously, the good-hearted protagonist Erik (Tim Robins) does not perish with his Viking ship and crew but is able to navigate smoothly though the starry night on his way to Asgard. This may seem



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Fig. 1: The edge of the world: Scene from Terry Jones’s Erik the Viking (1989)

like a clear example of how cultural memory, however erroneous, is cultivated within different genres of popular culture.

4 Perspectives for future research Earlier, the question was raised whether products of popular culture featuring the Viking Age should be a distinct concern of memory studies. The examples above certainly confirm that comics, films and other products of popular culture both affect and are affected by memory. In her article, “Saga Literature, Cultural Memory, and Storage”, Pernille Hermann focuses on three fundamental ways in which Icelandic medieval prose literature and memory meet. Inspired by Erll and Nünning (2005), Hermann (2013, 335) discusses first the memory of literature, that is how a saga “borrows and uses words and passages, themes and struc­ tures from other texts”. Peter Madsen’s visual references to The Muppet Show and the Donald Duck universe, as well as the way in which he and his colleagues recycle Þrymskviða, are examples of this. Secondly, Hermann (2013, 340) analyses memory in literature, referring to “the many ways in which, in principle, both individual, collective, and cultural memory is represented in literature”. The use of the mappa mundi in Neill’s The Viking can be seen as an illustration of this. Finally, Hermann (2013, 344) explains how the sagas can be regarded as a

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medium of collective memory, “that is, channels that transmit and disseminate memory”. All of the works discussed above do this in one way or another. The integrative concept of media that Martin Zierold advocates encourages scholars of Scandinavian medieval literature, memory and popular culture to consider in their research not only how the Viking Age is narrated but also to pay attention to various extra-textual aspects. In this chapter, focus has been placed on visual elements but when scholars are dealing with music, theatre, opera and film, sound is also imperative. William Axt’s soundtrack for The Viking, for instance, recycles not only scores from Richard Wagner and Edvard Grieg, both of which composed music inspired by the Eddas and sagas, but also refrains from the American national anthem “The Star Spangled Banner” (Neill 1928, 1.29.12– 1.29.35, cf. Lunde 2010). Additionally, as Zierold (2008, 404) explains, “the analy­ sis of a certain media offer has to be considered against the background of the conditions of its production and distribution, and it has to be taken into account that various manners of reception and use in different social systems can follow.” This is, perhaps, the most challenging task of future research, as it may entail uses of methods that hitherto have been rarely adopted by scholars in the field of Old Norse Studies. We need not only to keep both our eyes and ears open when we study how popular culture re-members and re-calls the past, but also qualify our variable notions about collectivity and culture(s).

Works cited Secondary sources Arnold, Martin. 2011. Thor: Myth to Marvel. London and New York. Assmann, Jan. 2006. Religion and Cultural Memory. Ten Studies. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Stanford, CA. Baer, Trish. 2013. An Old Norse Image Hoard: From the Analog Past to the Digital Present. A Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Victoria. Victoria, BC. Barnes, Geraldine. 2001. Viking America: The First Millennium. Cambridge. Bottomley, Gordon. 1953. The Riding to Lithend. In Poems and Plays. Ed. Claude Colleer Abbot and Anthony Bertram. London and Edinburgh. Clunies Ross, Margaret. 1998. The Norse Muse in Britain: 1750–1820. Trieste. Erll, Astrid. 2008. “Literature, Film, and the Mediality of Cultural Memory.” In A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Ansgar Nünning and Astrid Erll. Media and Cultural Memory, 8. Berlin and New York, NY. 389–398. Erll, Astrid and Ansgar Nünning. 2005. “Where Literature and Memory Meets: Towards a Systematic Approach to the Concepts of Memory in Literary Studies.” In Literature, Literary History, and Cultural Memory. Ed. Herbert Grabes. REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, 21. Tübingen. 626–694.



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Fleischer, Richard, dir. 1958. The Vikings. Los Angeles, CA. Frank, Roberta. 2000. “The Invention of the Viking Horned Helmet.” In International Scandinavian and Medieval Studies in Memory of Gerd Wolfgang Weber. Ed. Michael Dallapiazza. Hesperides: Letterature e Culture Occidentali, 12. Trieste. 199–208. Garwood, Christine. 2007. Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea. New York. Harty, Kevin J., ed. 2011. The Vikings on Film: Essays on Depictions of the Nordic Middle Ages. Jefferson, NC. Hermann, Pernille. 2013. “Saga Literature, Cultural Memory, and Storage.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 332–354. Hutcheon, Linda, with Siobhan O’Flynn. 2013. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd edition. London and New York. Jones, Terry, dir. 1989. Erik the Viking. Stockholm and London. Jón Karl Helgason. 2017. Echoes of Valhalla. The Afterlife of the Eddas and Sagas. London. Kirby, Jack. 1962. “Introducing… the Mighty THOR!” Journey Into Mystery 83 (August): cover-page. Kolkman, Richard. 2004. “The Evolution of Thor & The Stone Men.” In The Collected Jack Kirby Collector. Ed. John Morrow. Raleigh, NC. III: 86–88. Kukkonen, Karin. 2008. “Popular Cultural Memory. Comics, Communities and Context Knowledge.” Nordicom Review 29: 261–273. Landsberg. Alison. 2004. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York. Liljencrantz, Ottilie A. 1902. The Thrall of Leif the Lucky: A Story of Viking Days. Chicago, IL. Lunde, Arne. 2010. Nordic Exposures: Scandinavian Identities in Classical Hollywood Cinema. New Directions in Scandinavian Studies. Seattle, WA. Madsen, Peter. 1980. Thors brudefærd. Based on a story by Per Vadmand, Hans RanckeMadsen, Peter Madsen and Henning Kure, colouring by Søren Håkansson, letters by Tore Bahnson, produced by Henning Kure. Valhalla 2. Bagsværd. Marshall, David W., ed. 2007. Mass Market Medieval: Essays on the Middle Ages in Popular Culture. Jefferson, NC. Marshall, Edison. 1951. The Viking. New York. Mjöberg, Jöran. 1967–1968. Drömmen om sagatiden, 2 vols. Stockholm. Neill, Roy William, dir. 1928. The Viking. Boston, MA, New York and Los Angeles, CA. O’Donoghue, Heather. 2007. From Asgard to Valhalla. The Remarkable History of the Norse Myths. London and New York. Seaver, Kirsten A. 2004. Maps, Myths and Men: The Story of the Vinland Map. Stanford, CA. Wawn, Andrew. 2000. The Vikings and the Victorians. Inventing the Old North in 19th-Century Britain. Cambridge. Weston, Donna and Andy Bennett, eds. 2013. Pop Pagans: Paganism and Popular Music. Durham and Bristol. Zernack, Julia. 1994. Geschichten aus Thule. Íslendingasögur in Übersetzungen deutscher Germanisten. Berliner Beiträge zur Skandinavistik, 3. Berlin. Zierold, Martin. 2008. “Memory and Media Cultures.” In A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Ansgar Nünning and Astrid Erll. Media and Cultural Memory, 8. Berlin and New York. 399–407.

Laurent Di Filippo

I: 30 Contemporary Popular Culture 1 Definition After being a character in the Marvel comics franchise, Þórr (Thor) has now become a movie star. Elves, dwarfs and trolls are playable characters in online role playing games. Óðinn (Odin) walks among humans in the best-selling novel, American Gods, and Ragnarr Loðbrók is the main character of an Irish-Canadian drama television series. As we can see, references to medieval Scandinavian stories are wide-spread nowadays in the cultural industry productions often called ‘popular culture’. One must be careful, however, when using this expres­ sion, which has various definitions (Storey 2008, 1–12) and implies answers to multiple questions regarding memory, which can be defined as the contemporary presence of representations of the past (Ricoeur 2000, 5). As Peter Burke (2008 [2004], 27) states, popular culture is often used as a ‘residual category’ which serves to designate the culture of the non-elite. Other terms have been proposed, such as sub-culture, alternative culture, counter-culture, but, when using notions of this kind, “we run the danger of assuming the homogeneity of the excluded” (Burke 2008 [2004], 27). Thus, they should not be used as strict delineating cat­ egories; rather, researchers should attempt to understand the formation of these categories and the relations between them. The term popular culture is often opposed to a higher standard of culture, sometimes called elite culture or learned culture, leading to a hierarchical vision where productions designated as popular are considered inferior. That is why pro­ ductions designated as popular culture in the sense of a ‘residual category’ are not usually considered as official sets of resources for institutional memory, like national memory. They do not offer official testimony of the past. On the contrary, popular culture is linked to mass production and “commercialisation of culture and leisure” (Strinati 2004 [1995], 1). The term refers to the processes of reproduc­ tion and diffusion of media products as “consequences of industrialisation and urbanisation” (Strinati 2004, 5). Such phenomena participate in the process of globalisation (Appadurai 1996) and refer to cultural identity and community con­ structions. In this sense, it can be used to understand how the diffusion of cul­ tural products serves to spread and share cultural references through the notion of ‘collective memory’ suggested by Maurice Halbwachs (1950). But despite this collective aspect, researchers should not assume the homogeneity of memory. On the contrary, differences are as important as similarities in understanding the conflicts emerging from attempts to build a collective memory. Memory may be https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-036



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linked to a group (Ricoeur 2000, 146–151), but popular culture does not have a fixed set of productions and even less common practices among social actors. Stuart Hall argues that the term popular is often associated with the manipu­ lation and devaluation of the majority of people by the minority who control the media. He discusses this notion and insists that people, especially the labouring or working class, should not be taken for ‘cultural dopes’. Instead, researchers should consider the resistance that these people show to media determinism. He points out the power struggles and processes of legitimation by highlighting the dialectic between “containment” and “resistance” (Hall 1998 [1981], 443). In other words, Hall deals with the question of how signification is constructed: is it imposed by an objective order or is it the result of subjective and personal appropriations and transformations? This question is transposable with memory studies, as it leads to an examination of power relations and the construction of legitimacy in memo­ rial activities. The meaning of memory in popular culture products must therefore be understood as a conversation between the activities of the producers and the various appropriations of the consumers. In other words, there is a subjective part in the construction of memory that must be taken into account. In a similar way, for Michel de Certeau (1990 [1980]), popular culture is the culture of ordinary people that is constituted and renewed through everyday activities. He defines consumption as an appropriation, that is an active process through which people take over merchandised products. With his idea of ‘arts of doing’, Certeau’s reflections address the question of the production of everyday life culture. Memory can be understood as the construction processes of a rela­ tionship between the past and the present in which the former serves the latter (Baussant 2007, 389). This notion intersects with popular culture in research questions about understanding how cultural elements are used and always renewed in everyday life to build and maintain links between the past and the present.

2 State of research Peter Burke (2008 [2004], 67) remarked that “there is a strong popular interest in historical memory”. Jerome de Groot (2009) has shown several ways in which contemporary popular culture offers to consume history and heritage, and inter­ disciplinary research crossing religious studies with cultural studies is still a young field (Clark 2012, 1). Nevertheless, in Scandinavian studies, some attention has already been given to popular productions, even if they do not always directly address the question of memory.

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Much research focuses on content analysis, influences and transformations. The appropriation and international diffusion of Thor within the Marvel fran­ chise, an American comics company, is a good example of the history of reception of Norse elements worldwide (Arnold 2011). Several examples can also be taken from fantasy literature. The major example is, of course, J. R. R. Tolkien’s writings, which borrow much of their content from various traditions, especially Norse medieval literature (Simek 2005). But other fantasy authors also borrowed from such sources, such as Georges R. R. Martin’s novels A Song of Ice and Fire, which gained popularity thanks to their adaptation as a TV show, Game of Thrones (see Larrington 2016). As one can see, many productions that are part of the so-called popular culture do not deal with memorial issues but make use of Norse elements in new contexts and build an image of Norse traditions as a set of resources from which one can freely draw. As a consequence, most of the academic work address­ ing popular culture does not integrate the question of memory and tradition and mostly deals with literary influences, receptions and adaptations. The Texan author, Robert E. Howard, often considered one of the found­ ing fathers of fantasy literature, especially the American sub-genre Sword and Sorcery, must also be taken into account (Parsons 2015). He is the creator of numerous characters including Conan, the famous barbarian. The setting of Conan’s stories, the Hyborian Age, is a pre-cataclysmic version of our own world, during which the events that occur gave birth to the myth and legends that we know. In other words, in his fictional world, Howard develops a euhemeristic vision (Di Filippo 2016, 170–179). Deeper interdisciplinarity and crossed meth­ odological approaches allow for the interpretation of his work, from a sociologi­ cal point of view, as the result of social activities taking place in the ‘art worlds’ (Becker 1982) of literature, as well as the diffusion taking place within an evolving franchise and transmedia context, and the variety of appropriations by consum­ ers (Di Filippo 2016). Understanding the transmission processes as contributing to the construction of memory is thus not limited to only a few disciplines, and especially not just to history. The inclusion of several research fields gives a more precise understanding of memorial processes. Peter Burke (2008 [2004], 67) explains the popular interest in memory as a probable “reaction to the acceleration of social and cultural change that threat­ ens identities by dividing what we are from what we were”. Some research objects make clear references to Norse cultural elements within identity construction processes, as in the case of music, especially in Metal and its sub-genres, Pagan Metal and Viking Metal, which use romantic representations of the North and binary oppositions between pagan religions and Christianity (Bénard 2004, 2009; Heesch 2010). This kind of dualism also appears in recent neo-pagan reconstruc­ tion religious movements, which have roots in nineteenth-century Romanticism



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(François 2007; von Schnurbein 2016) and can now be found even on Brazilian internet websites (Antunes and Pires Boulhosa 2011). In such cases, the discourse itself can be impregnated with the social actors’ need to construct a collective memory for themselves and/or their audience, and this discourse must therefore be contextualised in order to understand the external constraints on it (Baussant 2007) and their adaptation and transformation during specific social situations and interactions. For example, Anders Breivik used references to Norse myths from the music of the video game Age of Conan in his manifesto to promote the fight against Islam and multiculturalism (Di Filippo 2016, 355). This use is not an expression of the video game itself. It must be understood in relation to farright political opinions that Breivik developed in contact with other political dis­ courses. As the variety of examples shows, references to medieval Scandinavian nar­ ratives may take many forms. Research must take this diversity into account as it questions the homogeneity of so-called popular and collective memory. Going a step further, one should consider how memory is used to promote a sense of belonging in a group, both in space and time, and what mechanisms are used by social actors to reach this goal, in order to understand the ideology that drives them.

3 Pre-modern Nordic material References to Old Norse stories are used in various ways, sometimes to depict a Norse setting, such as in the TV series Vikings. In cases like these, memory studies should focus on how the representations, the mise en scène, and the discourses surrounding cultural productions, influence the collective representations of the past. At other times, Norse components stand among numerous references to various ancient traditions. This is the case in many role playing games, from Dungeons and dragons (TSR 1974) to massive multi-player online role playing games like World of Warcraft (Blizzard 2004). Some components are used to depict the Northern regions of fantastic worlds, as in Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures (Funcom 2008), and others elements, such as runes and berserkers, are now so wildely spread that their origin in Old Norse language and texts is no longer relevant. For example, the series of Japanese role playing games Suikoden (Konami 1995) are centred around the story of the ‘true runes’ and their bearers. The term berserker can also be used to qualify Asian-type warriors and even animals (Di Filippo 2016, 255–257). They are now part of a wider ‘geek aesthetic’. Through the mediation of literature, and especially the fantasy genre inspired by

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J. R. R. Tolkien, creatures such as elves, dwarfs, trolls, and giants can be found in numerous productions, even in futuristic cyberpunk worlds like games and novels of the Shadowrun franchise (FASA 1989). One can even find references to Norse traditions in movies like Mad Max: Fury Road. Its ‘war boys’ are a group of men fighting for the dictator “Immortan Joe”. Their dream is to die fighting and go to Valhalla, where they will be “Mcfeasting” with other ‘immorta’. This is a reference to both Old Norse mythology and the fast food brand McDonald. This post-apocalyptic setting shows how the destruction of the world led to a blending of traditions. At the same time, it offers social critique by showing that modern fast food is so widespread that it takes the form of a modern myth, in the sense of Roland Barthes, which could be mistaken for ancient literary traditions. Such blending leaves trails through which one can study cultural hybridity (Burke 2009) and how Norse elements mix more or less easily with other traditions. It also serves to underscore the fact that memory is the result of transformations which took place throughout time. The majority of these borrowings stand as un-contextualised elements. As many researchers have pointed out, memory goes along with forgetting (Ander­ son 1991 [1983], 204; Todorov 2004 [1995], 14; Augé 2001 [1998]; Ricoeur 2000, 536). Researchers should therefore take into account both processes in their study to understand what part of culture is transmitted and what part is forgotten or left aside. In the previously mentioned examples, many references are used without specifying their sources or their original contexts, a fact that leads to a loss of knowledge about the status of elements that are borrowed.

4 Perspective for future research Several perspectives are opened by the numerous ways in which contemporary popular culture productions make references to Old Norse traditions and litera­ ture. First of all, the increasing variety of references to Old Norse should encou­ rage Scandinavian scholars to study how elements from the literate class in medieval Scandinavia became part of widespread cultural productions, which are reproduced in industrial quantities and shape a growing part of modern leisure activities and create interest in the North among people of all ages. Cultural dyna­ mics of this sort illustrate the changes and variations of culture and class through time. In terms of memory studies, such reception stresses the fact that the same documents and resources are used as memorial references by various groups throughout history. The conditions of memorial dynamics (Baussant 2007) evolve



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as different people are put in contact with traditional cultural elements and sources. Another entry point already proposed by Terry Ray Clark (2012, 1) suggests that the study of ideology still needs to be developed for products beyond neopagan practices or music. But, in order to avoid so-called media-determinism, social actors should not be taken as cultural dopes. Individuals are able to rec­ ognise fiction and games as such, and keep a certain distance when consuming representations as commercial goods (for detailed references on such topics see Di Filippo 2016, 277–282 and 470–473). Using sociological and ethnographical methods, such as interviews, observation and even participant observation, it is possible to avoid oversimplified interpretations based on content analysis alone, especially when studying contemporary practices. Such methods will allow the study of situated uses of memorial phenomena. None of those practices stand alone, but they are related to many other activi­ ties. That is why researchers in the field of Scandinavian studies ought to study more deeply how modern knowledge of Old Norse tales, traditions, history and myths is constructed for the general public. Many dictionaries and encyclopae­ dias, as well as online sources such as Wikipedia, offer simplified information. For example, despite the fact that the modern use of ‘myth’ was fashioned during the nineteenth century (built on Greek and Latin etymons) and no such word existed in Old Norse, the term is still widely used to describe medieval narratives, even among specialists, and gives a false idea of the function of those texts and their sources (Di Filippo 2016, ch. 1). In this case, the study of linguistic categories and their evolution will help to understand how people express and categorise their ideas about memory and how the past is represented. Finally, Scandinavian scholars should themselves take an active part in memory processes as cultural ‘passeurs [conveyors/transmitters]’, as there are no strict lines between learned and popular culture but instead, they nourish each other over time.

Works cited Secondary sources Anderson, Benedict. 1991 [1983]. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London. Antunes, Gabriela and Patricia Pires Boulhosa. 2011. “Neo-paganism and Nordic Mythology on the Brazilian Internet.” In Eddische Götter und Helden. Milieus und Medien ihrer Rezeption. Eddic Gods and Heroes. The Milieux and Media of their Reception. Ed. Katja Schulz. Heidelberg. 367–380.

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Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis. Arnold, Martin. 2011. Thor. Myth to Marvel. London and New York. Augé, Marc. 2001 [1998]. Les formes de l’oubli. Paris. Becker, Howard Saul. 1982. Art Worlds. Berkeley, CA. Bénard, Nicolas. 2004. “De la légende Viking au Hard-Rock: les références culturelles du Métal Nordique.” Nordiques 5: 55–68. Bénard, Nicolas. 2009. “Les mythologies Hard Rock et Métal: Bricolage identitaires ou récit original?” Sociétés 104: 65–72. Baussant, Michèle. 2007. “Penser les mémoires.” Ethnologie française, XXXVII.3: 389–394. Burke, Peter. 2008 [2004]. What is Cultural History? Cambridge and Malden, MA. Burke, Peter. 2009. Cultural Hybridity. Cambridge and Malden. de Certeau, Michel. 1980 [1990]. L’invention du quotidien. 1. Arts de faire. Paris. Clark, Terry Ray. 2012. “Introduction: What is Religion? What is Popular Culture? How are they Related?” In Understanding Religion and Popular Culture. Theories, Themes, Products and Practices. London and New York. 1–12. Di Filippo, Laurent. 2016. Du mythe au jeu. Approche anthropo-communicationnelle du Nord. Des récits médiévaux scandinaves au MMORPG Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures. PhD Thesis in communication studies and scandinavian studies: University of Lorraine/ University of Basel. François, Stéphane. 2007. Le Néo-paganisme. Une vision du monde en plein essor. Apremont. de Groot, Jerome. 2009. Consuming History. Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture. Oxford and New York. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1950. La mémoire collective. Paris. Hall, Stuart. 1998 [1981]. “Notes on deconstructing the popular”. In Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. A Reader. Ed John Storey. Harlow. 442–453. Heesch, Florian. 2010. “Metal for Nordic Men: Amon Amarth’s Representations of Vikings.” In The Metal Void. First Gatherings. Ed. Niall W. R. Scott. Oxford. 71–80. Larrington, Carolyne. 2016. Winter is Coming. The Medieval World of Game of Thrones. London and New York. Parsons, Deke. 2015. J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard and the Birth of Modern Fantasy. Jefferson, NC. Ricoeur, Paul. 2000. La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. Paris. von Schnurbein, Stefanie. 2016. Norse Revival. Transformations of Germanic Neopaganism, Leiden and Boston, MA. Simek, Rudolf. 2005. Mittelerde. Tolkien und die germanische Mythologie. Munich. Storey, John. 2008. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. An Introduction. 5th ed. Harlow. Strinati, Dominic. 2004 [1995]. An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture. London and New York. Todorov, Tzvetan. 2004 [1995]. Les abus de la mémoire. Paris.

Part II: Case Studies

Media Mediality

Gísli Sigurðsson

II: 1 Orality 1 Introduction In a culture where stories, poetry or general knowledge cannot be stored in books on shelves (or online), people use other methods to accumulate their knowledge and keep it alive in a systematic fashion. Memory studies have drawn attention to various interactive techniques that have been applied in order to structure and remember what has to be remembered; names and a variety of stories and poetry are set up in lists with some inner coherence, such as family ties or regnal years, and/or attached to landscapes, buildings, traditions and rituals (Assmann 2011; Connerton 1989; Schama 1995). It is not essential that these memory tools are physically present in the real world because they can equally well be imagined buildings where what is to be remembered is associated with an imagined loca­ tion. The underlying principle is that of interactivity; what you already know, i.e. see in front of you or can reconstruct in your mind, helps to call forth the items to be remembered (Yates 1966). This is a general principle that can be applied to words and music, associated with seasons of the year, certain traditional move­ ments, rituals and customs. The general method can be used to build up a com­ plicated and interactive network of stories and other essential knowledge within the relevant culture. A landscape is named and the name is explained with a story about an event that is associated with certain people that are connected with other people through family ties that lead you to still other stories about those individuals that are saved in a different landscape which also has a name and so on (Severi 2012).

2 Case study The principle of interactive memory outlined above is helpful in understanding the notion of building routes through landscape/space, time, and families in order to help people to orientate themselves in their environment. This environ­ ment could be their social reality, or the physical landscape, which they travel, utilise for providing food and know where and how to avoid immediate dangers. Genealogies can in addition help to keep track of a sense of time and chronology in the past, for as long as people know stories and family trees that are mean­ ingful in their immediate environment. In the public sphere, the ruling years of https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-037

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kings, earls or other officials (such as the lawspeakers in Iceland), can be used as stepping stones into the past (well-known from Ari fróði’s (the knowledgeable) Íslendingabók [book of Icelanders] from the third decade of the twelfth century where he adjusts the chronology of Icelandic history by reference to the law­ speakers who were voted in for terms of three years at a time). The Icelandic sagas, as well as the eddic and skaldic poetry, were commit­ ted to writing in the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, at a time when the old interactive knowledge and memory-system of the oral culture was still alive in a society that was beginning to produce books. The production of books gradually pushed the old system out to the margins – as literature and learn­ ing spread through Europe with the Church and Christianity in the Middle Ages. The literature that we refer to as Icelandic was written with techniques and ideas inspired by traditions of writing composition in the Church inherited from the ancient Greeks and Romans. These traditions include a beginning, middle, and end, arranged to fit a scroll or book. The book is not dependent on the memory techniques of oral cultures. It applies new rules as there is no longer any danger of forgetting anything that has been committed to the parchment. The book stands there for anyone to read without having to be constantly told and retold, associated with places, events, daily or other regular behaviour, phenomena in the sky or on earth, or living indi­ viduals and their passed away relatives in a complicated web of interconnected­ ness that can perhaps be compared to the chaotic internet – where any visitor can click from one connecting link to another, ending up far away from the beginning. Memory studies have showed us that oral stories and poetry are not just dependent on the actual words that flow from people’s lips and are received by other people’s ears. Nothing is just oral in the sense that everything people remember is associated with something in their environment. It may even be claimed that some texts are written in the environment, that the landscape is the manuscript even though the texts are not written with letters, runes, symbols or pictures of some kind (Astvaldur Astvaldsson 2006). That is how mankind kept track of its memories and accumulated knowledge and science for millennia. The limits for how long bits and pieces of knowledge or information can survive with this method remains unknown. Australian Aboriginal stories suggest that they remembered the lower sea levels of the past for about 7,500–13,400 years – as has been demonstrated in recent research on sea-level change (Reid et al. 2014). The spread from Central Asia to Northern Scandinavia and the Americas of minor details in myths about the cosmic hunt associated with the Big Dipper and Orion respectively can hardly be explained without assuming an understanding of these star signs from before mankind crossed the Bering strait roughly 15,000 years ago (Berezkin 2005). Attempts have even been made to push the continuity of such



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memory back to the migration of the ancestors of mankind who moved out of Africa at the dawn of humanity with ideas about the Pleiades already formulated and on their lips, ready to pass them on to younger generations (d’Huy and Berez­ kin 2016–2017). In all three cases the peoples who were telling the stories had the subject in front of their eyes all through the ages. The written originals in the land- and skyscape were therefore never lost. Knowledge of orality and of its part in the transmission of stories and poems changed sharply with the advances made by Milman Parry and Albert Lord, whose joint work became well-known with the publication of Lord’s The Singer of Tales in 1960. These advances prompted various scholars in classics and medie­ val studies to apply the methods of Parry and Lord to times when ancient texts were first set down in written form (Foley 1988). Many scholars of classical phi­ lology realised that in order to understand written texts and their possible oral origins, they would have to turn to anthropological field studies of living cultures. Comparisons with these cultures proved very useful in understanding how old written texts came to be. In the field of Old Norse/Icelandic literature, the impact of these oral studies became felt in works by Robert Kellogg, Theodore M. Anders­ son, Lars Lönnroth, Carol Clover, Tommy Danielsson, Gísli Sigurðsson and many others as outlined in Clover and Lindow (2005). If it is assumed that written texts from the Middle Ages existed against a back­ ground of oral narratives and poetic traditions similar to what we have in writing, the writing of the medieval texts was a different creative process from what goes on when someone produces a piece of writing in our culture. In oral societies, stories and poems exist and form a part of different performances by different individuals in different contexts – with writing playing no part. People had par­ ticular ideas about the past, then just as now, and passed these ideas on through oral narratives. Oral stories expressed ideas about the gods and the world without printed books, maps, or tables. Court rulings were made on the basis of oral laws. There were no books with numbered clauses for lawmen to use as citations. People carried out religious observances, recited genealogies, passed on naviga­ tional information, and acquired knowledge of distant lands, astronomy, poetics, and rhetoric – all without ever setting eyes on a written textbook or hearing it read aloud. Yet knowledge was preserved in an organized fashion. In oral societies, knowledge was not, any more than in modern society, public property for all to use. Rather, it was preserved by specially trained individuals who had consciously devoted themselves to this learning and to whom society turned for knowledge of it. The Icelandic sagas, for example, tell us that young boys were expected to learn the law and did so by being tutored by legal experts. From Snorri Sturluson’s (1178/9–1241) Edda, which was written as a textbook for young poets to tell them about the mythological background for professional

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poetic language, and to show examples of the acceptable metres in a tract of 102 verses, it is clear that systematic thinking about the art and practice of courtly poetry was part of the training of the skalds. It is unthinkable that so highly developed an art form as the dróttkvætt (the courtly metre) could have flourished without this kind of professional training. Genealogy was central to defining one’s rights and obligations within society, not just in the duty of vengeance, but also in inheritance and maintenance. Pro­ ficiency in these areas bore practical dividends (Gísli Sigurðsson 2004, 6–17, 53–66). At the same time, the body of oral memory about the past was subject to the individuals who maintained it, to the prevailing political and social condi­ tions, and to the audience. Memory underwent constant change in oral culture. What is transmitted orally can thus both be ancient and modern, Christian and Pagan, at the same time and not necessarily one or the other (Gísli Sigurðsson 2013). Stories and poems pass on ethical values, teaching new generations how to conduct themselves within society and how public life operates. The Íslendingasögur [sagas of Icelanders] pass on accepted precepts of social behaviour, regarding the resolution of feuds through the offices of the law, as well as in pre­ serving practical knowledge of land use, routes, and other everyday information (Gísli Sigurðsson 2004, 39, 57). Adoption of writing brought important changes. In the Middle Ages, the most visible early effects lay in religion. The new faith spread hand in hand with the Bible. Without the Bible, Christianity as we know it would be unthinkable – just as the Quran was inextricably linked to the spread of Islam. Literacy enhanced the power of the clergy that based its power and social status partly on the book as an object. Initially, book learning was of importance only within the Church, but as writing began to spread into other areas of life, the status of individuals and of groups depended on their mastery of the new technology. The power struggle between the old oral secular culture and the new emerging book-culture with its power base in the church can most readily be observed by scrutinizing references to lawspeakers in the sources. Lawspeakers were memory specialists who had been elected to their post for three years at the time with the obligation of remembering and reciting the oral law, and who thus held a most venerated and prestigious post. Young lawmen were trained by spending time with their elders, as can be seen by a reference to Færeyinga saga [The Saga of the Faroe Islanders] (Ch. 57) when Þóra daughter of Sigmundr Brestisson asks her nine year old son what he has learned so far from Þrándr í Götu: “en hann kvezk numit hafa allar saksóknir at sœkja ok réttarfar sitt ok annarra; lá honum þat greitt fyrir” (Færeyinga saga, 115) [“and the boy reported that he had learned all about prosecuting lawsuits, his own legal rights and the legal rights of others. Þrándr had made everything clear to him.” (Faroe-Islander Saga, 121)] She then asks about reli­



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gious instruction and the boy recites the Creed as he has learned it from Þrándr. The mother objects by saying: “‘ok þykki mér engi mynd á’, segir hon, ‘á kredó’” (Færeyinga saga, 116) [“‘that’s not the way the Creed goes’.” (Faroe-Islander Saga, 122] To which Þrándr responds, giving us a glimpse into authority and the fluidity of the oral tradition: “‘nú hefi ek mína kreddu, en þú þá er þú hefir numit, ok eru margar kreddur, ok er slíkt’, segir hann, ‘eigi á eina lund rétt’” (Færeyinga saga, 116) [“I have my own creed, and you have the version you learned, but there are several versions, and so there is not one right way to recite it.” (Faroe-Islander Saga, 122)] With increased understanding of orality, there is no reason to assume that oral lawmen regarded the novelty of being able to write the law down as a step forward, relieving them of an imagined burden of memory by enabling them to start relying on a book as a repository for their fund of knowledge. It would be more accurate to claim that they were losing authority and status when they could be challenged with a fixed text in a book – as Þóra can do in Færeyinga saga. From what can be read in the meagre sources, the lawspeakers appear to always have been representatives of whatever groups enjoyed most influence in the country at the time. In order to achieve influence in Icelandic society in the thirteenth century it was necessary for a person like Snorri Sturluson (who came from the secular Sturlung family but who was brought up among chieftains at a centre of clerical learning to become an oral poet and a secular politician) to have mas­ tered the literate culture that had come with the Church in the eleventh century and had gained increasing importance throughout the twelfth. Those who did not care to take advantage of the opportunities provided by this ecclesiastical innovation found themselves at a disadvantage in the struggle for power and influence, and their descendants were doomed to obscurity unless they could ally themselves through marriage to those who had heeded the call of the times and learned to read and write. Those who did so (like Snorri and others) then went on to use this new technique to achieve immortality by recording, shaping and fixing in permanent form knowledge that previous generations had kept alive without the aid of writing – and without any idea of what they were missing. A struggle between the clergy and lawspeakers from secular backgrounds can even be detected in the first decades of the age of writing. People with close connections to the Church were instrumental in taking down the law from the memory of lawspeakers (who thereby lost their right to arbitrate in disputes over the letter of the law). They recorded it in books which then took over the func­ tion of deciding on the legality of particular provisions (with the bishop’s book at Skálholt taking precedence where books differed). A previously powerful family of lawspeakers that showed no signs of having adopted the technology of writing gradually lost its influence as the twelfth century progressed – not least in the records of those who came after them.

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The way these earlier lawspeakers and masters of memory were spoken of in the written sources reflects this interpretation of the development of writing. It seems that the lawspeakers were treated differently by later writers according to whether or not they were connected in any way with the Church and the book learning that went with it. Other than their genealogies, as good as nothing is known of the eleventh- and twelfth-century lawspeakers who had no connections with the Church, but from these genealogies they appear to fall into two groups, those said to be descended from well-known early settlers, and those descended from or associated with a family of lawmen headed by a certain Gunnarr the Wise that seems to have enjoyed considerable influence in the second half of the elev­ enth century and on into the twelfth, but then disappears entirely from the politi­ cal scene once the written law texts have become fully established towards the end of the century. These people, who in their time must have been major figures in society, appear to have been of little interest to the saga writers and ruling élite of the thirteenth century, judging from their absence from the genealogies presented in the written sources. After the first writing of the laws early in the twelfth century there appears to have been a transitional period in which lawspeakers from established families and the descendants of Gunnarr the Wise alternated with priests without inher­ ited influence but with command over the technological innovation of the age, i.e. they could read and write. This, of course, is not a unique case of mastery of a new technology enabling people to rise swiftly up the social ladder at the expense of more conservative groups with an entrenched position bolstered by family connections and accumulated wealth. The clash between literate priests and orally trained lawspeakers appears emblematically in Íslendingabók in the passage where Ari describes how the laws were read out aloud for confirmation by clerics at the Alþingi (assembly) the summer after they had first been written down, while the lawspeaker, the man who had previously had the honoured duty of reciting the law from memory, stood by and listened. There is no way of knowing what passed through his mind that June day on the plains of Þingvellir, but perhaps it occurred to him then and there that this new technique would sooner or later render his oral skills redundant, when any little priestling could read from a book what he had spent his youth learning by heart without even knowing what writing was (Gísli Sigurðsson 2004). In the Middle Ages, traditional oral lore was believed to hold genuine memory from the past. It is easy to identify innumerable historical errors in this lore and therefore the tendency has been to reject the testimony of oral sources en bloc. Contemporary writers like Ari fróði and Snorri Sturluson would find themselves in opposing camps of the Authors’ Union, with Ari in the scholarly wing and Snorri in the creative one. But if this union had existed in medieval times, Snorri



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would probably have felt nonplussed if he had been rejected for membership in the scholars’ section. The most promising approach to the oral background of medieval texts is to look to contemporary oral cultures for features that are traceable to the oral background of the texts. The most distinctive characteristic seems to be variation, or the absence of fixed form. Oral performances are fluid and constantly chang­ ing, depending on the performer, the audience, and the setting. Yet scholars must be exceedingly cautious in using detailed information from one culture to shed light on another. One principle is beyond dispute: it is impermissible to postulate something for oral art forms of former ages for which there are no living examples in present oral cultures. A literate person in a society that is still largely oral can take existing oral forms and adapt them to the new possibilities that open up with writing, creating new forms of art and learning that look both back to preliterate times and forward to the new world: the world of the book. Literature can yield a rich harvest when those who hold the quill have the knowledge and imagination to harness a living tradition of oral stories and poems and perfect the process of reshaping and rein­ terpretation that is necessary to convert them from one medium to another, from orality to vellum manuscript.

Works cited Primary sources Færeyinga saga. In Færeyinga saga,Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar eptir Odd munk Snorrason. Ed. Ólafur Halldórsson. ÍF, 25. Reykjavík, 2006. 1–121. Faroe-Islander Saga. A New English Translation.Trans. Robert K. Painter. Jefferson, NC, 2016.

Secondary sources Assmann, Jan. 2011. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization. Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. Cambridge. [German orig. 1992] Astvaldur Astvaldsson. 2006. “Reading without Words. Landscapes and Symbolic Objects as Repositories of Knowledge and Meaning.” In Kay Pacha. Cultivating Earth and Water in the Andes. Ed. Penelope Dransart. Oxford. 107–114. Berezkin, Yuri. 2005. “The Cosmic Hunt. Variants of a Siberian – North-American Myth.” https://www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol31/berezkin.pdf (5 December 2017). Clover, Carol and John Lindow, eds. 2005. Old Norse-Icelandic Literature. A Critical Guide. With a New Preface by Theodore M. Andersson. Toronto.

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Connerton, Paul. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge. Foley, John Miles. 1988. The Theory of Oral Composition. History and Methodology. Bloomington and Indianapolis. Gísli Sigurðsson. 2004. The Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition: A Discourse on Method. Transl. Nicholas Jones. Publications of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature, 2. Cambridge, MA. [Icelandic orig. 2002] Gísli Sigurðsson. 2013. “Past Awareness in Christian Environments. Source-Critical Ideas about Memories of the Pagan Past.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 400–410. D’Huy, Julien and Yuri E. Berezkin. 2016–2017. “How Did the First Humans Perceive the Starry Night? – On the Pleiades.” The Retrospecitve Methods Network Newsletter 12–13: 100–122. Lord, Albert B. 1960. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, MA. Reid, Nicholas, Patrick Nunn and Margaret Sharpe. 2014. “Indigenous Australian Stories and Sea-Level Change.” In Indigenous Languages and their Value to the Community. Ed. Patrick Heinrich and Nicholas Ostler. Okinawa. 82–87. Schama, Simon. 1995. Landscape and Memory. New York. Severi, Carlo. 2012. The Chimera Principle. An Anthropology of Memory and Imagination. Trans. Janet Lloyd. Chicago. [Italian orig. 2004] Yates, Frances. 1966. The Art of Memory. London.

Lena Rohrbach

II: 2 Writing and the Book 1 Introduction The institution of cultural memory, as opposed to communicative memory, has been inextricably linked in memory theory with the cultural technique of writing. Jan Assmann emphasizes that cultural memory is dependent on external objects that serve as carriers of memory and “may be transferred from one situation to another and transmitted from one generation to another” (Assmann 2010, 111; see also Hermann 2013, 334). One such mobile external carrier is the book, which quickly developed into the standard carrier for written texts after it came into use in late Antiquity. The antique and medieval codex consisted of gatherings of varying material (initially wax tablets and papyrus, in the Middle Ages predomi­ nantly parchment, towards the end of the medieval period also paper) that were compiled and bound together (Jakobi-Mirwald 2004, 113–120). The material qual­ ities of the codex made it easier to retrieve and refer to passages than on a scroll and allowed for intricate arrangements of texts within the three-dimensional space of the book (on the three-dimensional quality of the book, see Rohrbach 2010, 120–121). Furthermore, the medium of the book allowed for comprehensive compilations of texts that a single scroll could not hold (Skeat 1994, 263–264). In the pre-modern North, the medium of the book was introduced together with the advent of writing in the Latin alphabet in the wake of Christianity. The oldest Nordic manuscripts date from the twelfth century, and since then the number of books produced grew steadily throughout the Middle Ages. The majority of the medieval Nordic codices comprise more than one text. Pernille Hermann (2013, 347) described the pre-modern Norse textual corpus as a storehouse for knowl­ edge and emphasized that the inherent interpretative quality of writing enabled a more complex engagement with the past than other external media of memory. From a more explicitly material perspective, the selection and arrangement of texts in a book might be approached as material manifestations of organization of this storehouse that allow insight into underlying conceptualisations of cultural memory.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-038

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2 Case study One fruitful case for the study of the construction and conceptualisation of memory in the context of Old Norse studies concerns compilations of sagas that deal with the lives and miracles of the three Icelandic saint bishops: Jón Ögmundsson (1052–1121), Þorlákr Þorláksson (1133–1193) and Guðmundr Arason (1161–1237). These sagas are handed down in a limited group of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century manuscripts (all datings in this chapter according to www. onp.ku.dk). Some of these manuscripts contain only one saga , some are only pre­ served in fragmentary form and thus do not allow insights into the compilation in which the sagas were placed originally. But in the majority of the manuscripts, the sagas are compiled together with a varying selection of texts. A comparative study of the arrangement of these texts in the manuscript tradition ought to allow insights into how the three saint bishops were remembered and conceptualised. AM 219 fol. (c. 1370–1380) is one of two medieval manuscripts transmitting at least fragments of the sagas of all three Icelandic saints. The manuscript is today organised chronologically following the birth and death dates of the three bishops. It is impossible to tell whether this was indeed the original order, due to the fragmentary state of the manuscript. A comparison with four other man­ uscripts of biskupasögur [sagas of bishops] containing more than just one text leads to the conclusion that this order is not the most probable one. These manu­ scripts, AM 645 4to (c. 1220 and 1225–1250), AM 234 fol. (c. 1340), Holm perg 5 fol. (c. 1350–1365) and AM 657 c 4to (c. 1340–1390) are all compilations featuring sagas of saints of different kinds as well as other types of texts, and they are all characterized by the ahistorical arrangement of their material, at least when a linear understanding of history is applied. Table 1: Contents of AM 645 4to (c. 1220 and 1225–1250) Folios

Text

Historical period

1r–11v

Jarteinabók Þorláks biskups

1133–1193

11v–24v

Clemens saga

AD 50–97

25r–30r

Pétrs saga postola

30r–33r

Jakobs saga postola

33r–35v

Bartholomeus saga postola

35v–41r

Mattheus saga postola

41r–43r

Andreas saga postola

43r–51v

Niðrstigningar saga

55v–66v

Martinus saga biskups

AD 316–397



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AM 645 4to (table 1), the oldest of the four codices, comprises a text of the older collection of miracles of Saint Þorlákr (Jarteinabók Þorláks biskups), Clemens saga, which is a saga about the sainted Pope Clement I (AD 50–97), followed by a number of postolasögur [sagas of apostles], followed by Niðrstigningar saga, a translation from the gospel of Nicodemus that tells about Jesus’ descent into hell, followed by Martinus saga biskups about St Martin of Tours, the prototype of all saint bishops, who lived during the fourth century. The manuscript consists of two codices: the last two texts and the end of Andreas saga postola are written in a different hand of a slightly younger date, and the text of Andreas saga overlaps in the two parts (https://handrit.is/is/manuscript/view/en/AM04-0645). Anne Holtsmark (1938, 9) argued that both parts were written at the episcopal see of Skálholt. Irrespective of the separate origin of the two parts, AM 645 4to stages Þorlákr as the successor of St Martin, the apostles and Pope Clement (Ásdís Egils­ dóttir 2002, c). The arrangement of the codex reveals that we are not dealing with a historical, but rather a typological, ahistorical construction of this succession. Table 2: Contents of AM 234 fol. (c. 1340) Folios

Text

Historical period

Feast days

1r–19v

Antóníus saga

d. AD 357

17 January

19v–28v

Páls saga postola

25 January

28v–55v

Maríu saga

2 February

55v–67r

Jóns saga helga A

1052–1121

3 March

67r–73r

Ágústínus saga

AD 354–430

28 August

74v–78v

Vitae patrum

79r–81v

Thómas saga erkibiskups

1118–1170

29 December

A similar arrangement can be discerned in AM 234 fol. (table 2). The compila­ tion in this manuscript begins with the saga about St Anton the hermit who died in AD 357 followed by sagas about the apostle Paul and holy Mary, followed by Jóns saga helga, which in turn is followed by Ágústínus saga and a fragment of the Old Norse translation of Vitae patrum. The codex ends with the saga of St Thomas Becket (1118–1170), thus reaching nearly contemporary times. According to marginalia in the manuscripts and to Árni Magnússon’s notes, this codex used to be even more comprehensive and used to belong to the episcopal see at Skál­ holt (see https://handrit.is/is/manuscript/view/en/AM02-0234). Árni Magnússon received the manuscript in pieces and reassembled it. He had some doubts as to whether the last two texts originally formed the beginning of the codex, as the recto-page in front of Vitae patrum that forms the beginning of a quire, is blank.

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But in both arrangements, the order of the texts in the codex jumps within history from the beginnings of Christianity to contemporary times and back and yet again forward in time. A chronological order was thus not at work in the making of this compilation. A closer study of the order of texts reveals that it follows the order of the Church year, an arrangement that is also present in AM 235 fol., a codex of Heilagra manna sögur [saints’s sagas] that also includes (a fragment of) Jóns saga helga (see Foote 2003, ccxvi). The texts are compiled according to the feast days of the saints in the course of the year. The identification of this order supports Árni Magnússon’s assumption that Vitae patrum used to form the beginning of the codex, as in this order Thómas saga erkibiskups would open up as the first saint in the Church year, beginning with Christmas. Table 3: Contents of Holm perg 5 fol. (c. 1350–1365) Folios

Texts

Historical period

1v–46v

Guðmundar saga biskups

1161–1237

46v–48r

Guðmundar drápa

48r–58v

Jóns saga helga B

58v–59v

Biskupatal

59v–60r

Postulatal

60r–60v

Vígslupallar: Ordines

60v–68v

Þorláks saga helga A

1133–1193

68v–71r

Játvarðar saga

1042–1170

1052–1121

Holm perg 5 fol. (table 3) is the second of the two medieval codices that comprise sagas of all three Icelandic saints (and Arngrímur Brandsson’s Guðmundar drápa [poem about Guðmundr]). It also contains a list of the apostles (Postulatal), a list of Icelandic, Greenlandic and Norwegian bishops and abbots, Vígslupallar, which is a short treatise on the different ecclesiastical orders, and Játvarðar saga, the saga of Edward the Confessor (1042–1066) (for a detailed discussion of the codex, see Jón Helgason 1950). Again, the historical range of the codex reaches from the beginnings of Christianity to near contemporary times, and the geograpical scope is both universal and local. This time, the order of the codex follows neither the biographical dates of the saints nor the liturgical calendar and appears rather arbitrary. Thus, in this codex, the three Icelandic saints are, on the one hand, again placed in context with both the apostles and a contemporary English saint, and, on the other hand, accompanied by chronological lists of local bishops and abbots, together with a treatise on the duties and rights of ecclesiastical officials. Thus, in this manuscript, the three Icelandic saints are commemorated simulta­



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neously in a typological manner and in the context of local ecclesiastical history and organization. Table 4: Contents of AM 657c 4to (c. 1340–1390) Folios

Texts

1r–3r

Mikjáls saga

3v–9v

Maríu saga egypsku

10r–13r

Eiríks saga víðförla

13r–51v

Guðmundar saga helga

The arrangement of the fourth codex, AM 657c 4to (table 4), seems at first sight even more random. The original codex contained, as it is preserved today, a version of Guðmundar saga helga [saga of St Guðmundr], the saga of archangel Michael, Maríu saga egypsku [saga of Maria from Egypt] and Eiríks saga víðförla [saga of Eiríkr the traveller]. It thus spans local historiographic-hagiographic material in Heilagra manna sögur to the oscillating Eiríks saga viðförla, a fornaldarsaga [legendary saga] with a salvation-historical subtext that tells about a journey to paradise. The underlying concept of this codex thus again seems to be a typological one. The heterogeneity of the codex was even more distinct, when Árni Magnússon found the codex. The notes that he attached to this manu­ script reveal that the codex also included, at that point, a copy of the riddarasaga [romance] Vilhjálms saga sjóðs [saga of Vilhjálmr purse] in a hand dated to 1590– 1610 (https://handrit.is/is/manuscript/view/AM04-0657c). One might assume that at some point in the seventeenth century somebody deemed it appropriate to gather the marvel stories about Christian saints, archangels and wonderous journeys to paradise together with the marvels and adventures of Vilhjálmr. If so, the conceptualisation of the texts – and the life of St Guðmundr – in the original codex would have remained ahistorical in the early modern age as well. Yet another constellation appears in Reykjarfjarðarbók (AM 122 b fol.), dated to the last quarter of the fourteenth century. Reykjarfjarðarbók is the only codex containing both ecclesiastic and secular contemporary sagas, when thinking along the established subgenres of saga literature (critical as to this dichotomic distinction, see Úlfar Bragason 2005, 427). The codex contains Sturlunga saga – that in itself is a compilation of individual sagas in chronological order that deal with Icelandic history of the twelfth and thirteenth century – as well as fragments of Árna saga biskups [saga of bishop Árni] and Guðmundar saga biskups. Due to the fragmentary nature of all the texts, it is impossible to tell how the codex was originally organised. A chronological ordering of the material, following the

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chronological organisation of Sturlunga saga, would have Árna saga biskups as the last element of the codex, as Árni was bishop of the southern diocese of Skálholt from 1269 to 1298. Irrespective of whether this was the actual organisation of the codex, the assemblage of texts reveals an interest in local contemporary history of both secular and ecclesiastical nature and thus a conceptualisation and remem­ brance of the life of Guðmundr that differs considerably from the other compila­ tions studied in this chapter. In Reykjarfjarðarbók [book from Reykjarfjǫrðr], both Guðmundr and Árni are remembered as agents in Icelandic history rather than as timeless, typological figures, an approach that reflects the active involvement of these two bishops in the political struggles of their time (Cormack 2005, 27). Neither Jón nor Þorlákr are ever conceptualized in this earthly, historical manner. The placement of the sagas of the three Icelandic saints in most of the com­ pilations reveals that the three bishops were predominantly remembered in an ahistorical, typological framework of an international scope. The material quali­ ties of the book allow for the possibility of adding extra layers of meaning to a text by placing it in a specific textual environment. The other works that surround a text can reveal conceptualisations of that text and, as a consequence, also the organisation of the storehouse of memory at a given time.

Works cited Primary sources AM 122 b fol. (Reykjarfjarðarbók) AM 219 fol. AM 234 fol. AM 645 4to AM 657c 4to Holm perg. 5 fol.

Secondary sources Ásdís Egilsdóttir. 2002. “Formáli.” In Biskupa sögur II. Ed. Ásdís Egilsdóttir. ÍF, 16. Reykjavík. vi–cli. Assmann, Jan. 2010. “Communicative and Cultural Memory.” In Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (in collaboration with Sara B. Young). Media and Cultural Memory/Medien und kulturelle Erinnerung, 8. Berlin and New York. 109–118.



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Cormack, Margaret. 2005. “Christian Biography.” In Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture. Ed. Rory McTurk. Oxford. 27–42. Foote, Peter. 2003. “Formáli. Jóns saga Helga.” In Biskupa sögur. Ed. Jónas Kristjánsson, Sigurgeir Steingrímsson, Ólafur Halldórsson and Peter Foote. ÍF, 15. Reykjavík. ccxiii– cccxxi. Jón Helgason. 1950. “Introduction.” In Byskupa sögur. MS. Perg. fol. no. 5 in the Royal Library of Stockholm. Corpus Codicum Islandicorum Medii Aevi, 19. Copenhagen. 7–22. Hermann, Pernille. 2013. “Saga Literature, Cultural Memory and Storage.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 332–354. Holtsmark, Anne. 1938. “Introduction.” In A Book of Miracles. Ms. No. 645 4to of the Arna-Magnæam Collection in the University Library of Copenhagen. Ed. Anne Holtsmark. Corpus Codicum Islandicorum Medii Aevi, 12. 5–27. Kaalund, Kristian. 1889–1894. Katalog over den Arnamagnæanske Håndskriftsamling. 2 vols. Copenhagen. Jakobi-Mirwald, Christine. 2004. Das mittelalterliche Buch. Funktion und Ausstattung. Stuttgart. Rohrbach, Lena. 2010. “Pragmatik in Szene gesetzt. Mediale Dimensionen spätmittelalterlicher Handschriften des Jyske Lov.” In Opuscula XIII. Ed. Britta Olrik Frederiksen and Jonna Louis-Jensen. Bibliotheca Arnamagnæna, 47. Copenhagen. 119–172. Skeat, T. C. 1994. “The Origin of the Christian Codex.” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 102: 263–268. Úlfar Bragason. 2005. “Sagas of Contemporary History (Sturlunga saga).” In Old NorseIcelandic Literature and Culture. Ed. Rory McTurk. Oxford. 427–446. www.handrit.is (22 December 2016) www.onp.ku.dk (22 December 2016)

Lukas Rösli

II: 3 Manuscripts 1 Introduction Manuscripts, as carriers of text (Kehnel and Panagiotopoulos 2015), are spatial objects in which memory is externally stored in written form to prevent it from falling into oblivion (Hermann 2009, 288–289, 293). This understanding of the connection between writing and memory corresponds to Mary Carruthers’ line of argumentation, who doubts “[…] that literacy and memory are per se incompat­ ible, and that a ‘rise of literacy’ will therefore bring with it a consequent devalor­ izing and disuse of memory” (Carruthers 1990, 10), and Jan Assmann’s theoretical considerations on ‘cultural memory’ (Assmann 2011, 6–11). Such memory, written down in manuscripts, is spatially organised, as the manuscript page – made of vellum, parchment or paper – represents in its visual dimension the surface area upon which scripture is placed (Hermann 2014, 29). In order to emphasise the spatial quality and dimension of both the written text as an artefact and the world created as the diegesis of the story on the written page, Vitoria Borsò defines the writing or in-scribing of space in literature as topo-graphy (Borsò 2007, 279). On the manuscript page, letters are arranged in order to result in a coherent text structure to form a meaningful whole, and by distinctive layout structures sup­ porting the process of reading and remembering. Moreover, scripture is able to refer to landscapes and to whole worlds, both inside and outside a text in a manu­ script, but writing may also depict and create spaces on its own (Kiening 2008, 2009). When memory is set out in writing it is organized in a creative and dynamic manner, often in the form of a narrative, pursuant to actual needs (Hermann 2009, 293) in order to establish a certain form of reality, which is reassured through the manuscript itself. Manuscripts – as technological media of storage, as media­ tor of cultural meaning, as a tools to form traditions, and to refer to a culture or society, and as an instrument to create a certain past (Assmann 2011, 9) – are the ideal research subjects to analyse cultural memory in a spatial context, as well as to investigate the spatial structures of texts and characters used in manuscripts to assist and evoke memory. The textualisation of memory, however, its inscription into the spatiality of a manuscript, does not prevent a narrative, which was intended to be remembered, from falling into oblivion. In the case of Old Norse-Icelandic manuscripts, there are many examples of incomplete manuscripts where leaves are missing – such lacunae lead to an alteration in the spatial extent of memory in the manuscript – or where whole manuscripts, once known to scholars, have been lost forever, for https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-039



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example, due to the Copenhagen Fire of 1728 (Már Jónsson 2012, 203–209). Such a total loss of manuscripts, on the one hand, changes the “textual arenas” and the “textual memory spaces” (Glauser 2007, 20) of Old Norse-Icelandic literature. On the other hand, and in the case of the Copenhagen Fire, at least one narrative from a manuscript was re-remembered, as Jón Ólafsson from Grunnavík, a scribe in the service of Árni Magnússon, produced a ‘copy’ of a part of Heiðarvíga saga [the saga of the slaying on the heath] from memory (Jónas Kristjánsson 1997, 225; Gunnar Karlsson 2000, 159; Finlay 2003, 62–63), after both his previously pro­ duced copy and a part of the last existing textual witness of Heiðarvíga saga went up in flames. Thus, the remaining text carrier of the saga’s narrative is a memoryhybrid, combining the memory of a written narrative from the thirteenth century with a re-remembered and re-written narrative from the eighteenth century in the textual space of one single manuscript.

2 Case study Manuscript, signature, materiality, and spatial memory As noted above, manuscripts not only refer to memory in the form of spatially laid out, written texts and their contents, but also as a spatial repository of memory in a material-specific context. Given the fact that manuscripts are always unique documents, every single manuscript requires a distinctive signature (Jørgensen 2013, 68–69). The contemporary signature of a manuscript, which can be looked up in the catalogue of a library or the database of an archive to get an idea where to locate the manuscript in the spacious rows of bookshelves, often carries memories of the past at the same time, at least in the case of Old Norse-Icelan­ dic manuscripts. A signature like GKS 1005 fol., for example, is not only a refer­ ence to Flateyjarbók [book of Flatey] and a representative function for the actual object of the manuscript, it also transmits a spatial memory concerning a former repository, as the abbreviation GKS stands for “Gammel kongelig Samling”, the Old Royal Collection at the Royal Library in Copenhagen. Since 21 April 1971, the manuscript called Flateyjarbók is included in the Arnamagnæan Manuscript Col­ lection at Stofnun Árna Magnússonar í íslenskum fræðum located in Reykjavík (see fig. 1). Furthermore, the above mentioned specific date can without doubt be identified as one of the “islands of time expand[ing] into memory spaces of ‘retrospective contemplativeness’” (Assmann 1995, 129) in the modern history of Iceland, as on this day the Icelandic newspaper Morgunblaðið (21. April 1971) pre­ sented a reproduction of a page of Flateyjarbók on their front page, which shaped

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Fig. 1: “Handritin heim!” The return of manuscripts from Copenhagen to Reykjavík in 1971

the collective memory of Icelanders up to today, as this specific manuscript had further impact on modern Icelandic literature (Glauser 2011, 7–10) and stands as a symbol for the independence of Iceland (Rowe 2005, 403–404); however, the signature corresponding to Flateyjarbók still refers to the manuscript’s former spatial connection to the Royal Library in Denmark. Nonetheless, scholars most often refer to the manuscript with the signature GKS 1005 fol. as Flateyjarbók. The name attached to the manuscript, Flateyjarbók, does not refer to the place where it was written, but to a rather late place where the manuscript was kept (Würth 1995, 171), before it was presented to Bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson in 1647, who gave it as a present to King Frederik III of Denmark in 1656 (Rowe 2005, 13), who included the manuscript in the Royal Library. All these different places, from the monastery of Þingeyrar or the nearby farm at Víðidalstunga, where the manuscript in its original form was most likely written (Rowe 2005, 11), to today’s location in Reykjavík, are part of the spatial memory attached to GKS 1005 fol. (see fig. 2). The material dimension of Flateyjarbók’s spatiality changed during the late Middle Ages, however, unlike many other Old Norse-Icelandic manuscripts, “no leaf is missing and each word is still legible” (Rowe 2005, 11). In its original form Flateyjarbók, written between the years 1387 and 1394, contained 202 leaves in 26 quires, “[…] beautifully illuminated with historiated initials”, and “with the text laid out in two columns to the page” (Rowe 2005, 11–12). During the fifteenth century, 23 leaves, spread over three quires, were added to the manuscript (Würth 1995, 171). This material expansion of the manuscript contains narratives contin­ uing the original content of the manuscript in a chronological order (Würth 1995,



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Fig. 2: The arrival of Flateyjarbók and the eddic poems in Reykjavik in 1971

174), enlarging the spatial and temporal conditions of Flateyjarbók. Due to the dif­ ferent texts and genres (Rowe 2003, 103) collected in this largest of all medieval Old Norse-Icelandic manuscripts, Flateyjarbók can be referred to as some sort of medieval reference library, presenting a huge textual memory space in the mate­ rial space of one single manuscript. At the same time, the material presence of Flateyjarbók is alive with an overlapping of spatial memories of repositories from the past and the present reflected in its provenance and in the different names attached to the manuscript. In 2009 the Arnamagnæan Manuscript Collection located in Denmark and Iceland was added to the UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register (Glauser 2011,  9), which offers the Old Norse-Icelandic manuscripts official worldwidestatus as recognised cultural and collective memory, and integrates the physical places of the two collections into the rather abstract space of a global world herit­ age network.

Spatially structured memory in manuscripts: Paratexts A text, and this also applies to manuscripts, is rarely presented as a mere sequence of verbal statements, but most often structured by additional informa­

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tion – called paratexts – such as titles, illustrations, or diagrams, “to ensure the text’s presence in the world” (Genette 1997, 1). According to Genette, the paratext is a ‘threshold’ that mediates between the inside and the outside of a text (Genette 1997, 1–2). Paratexts structure both the spatial, textual layout in a manuscript as well as its textual memory by referring into the narrative as well as into the world outside the diegesis, both linked closely to the cultural and collective memory of a literary community. In the following, some paratextual features in the Uppsala redaction of the Prose Edda (DG 11 4to) will be discussed to elaborate on the connection between memory, space, and the paratexts in a manuscript (see colour plate 13). The Uppsala redaction, written around 1300, is the oldest known manuscript of the Prose Edda narrative, which may, due to its hybridity of genres, be considered a representative example of Old Norse-Icelandic literature (Glauser 2016, 8). Fur­ thermore, the Prose Edda – especially in the form of the redaction under discus­ sion – is a highly self-referential text, where the complexity and the multidimen­ sional nature of storytelling is made visible in different medial forms (Glauser 2009, 173), also referring to memory. On folio 1 verso of the manuscript DG 11 4to a faded line of text, reading “Hier er vnder pryamvs konvngr” [Here below is king Priamos] (Grape 1977, xviii, expanding of abbreviation according to transcription), is written above a drawing of a bishop, which, according to Grape (1977, xviii) was not drawn before the fif­ teenth century. Nonetheless, due to its spatial proximity between the text and the drawing on the page, and due to the statement in the text (“Here below is king Priamos”), the bishop is identified with king Priamos (Glauser 2013, 112). Moreo­ ver, the short text line can be read as an excerpt from the narrative in the prologue to Gylfaginning [the tricking of Gylfi], where Priamos is mentioned in only one single sentence being the high king of Troy and the father of king Menon’s wife (Heimir Pálsson 2012, 8). The excerpt, which is of the same type as the subheads structuring the continuous text and which might act as an aid to memory, widens the space of the text due to the doubling of the name Priamos, which appears as a prefix to the narration. Furthermore, Glauser (2013, 112–113) points to the fact, that in the Uppsala redaction’s short paragraph called “Ættartala Sturlunga” [Genealogy of the Sturlungs] (Heimir Pálsson 2012, 118–119) Priamos of Troy is mentioned in a line of ancestry beginning with Adam, continuing with Jupiter and Óðinn, and leading to the clan of the Sturlungs, including Snorri Sturluson (DG 11 4to, 25v). The genealogy connects different memory cultures (Christianity, Greco-Roman antiquity, Icelandic Middle Ages) and textual memory spaces (the Bible, ancient Greco-Roman mythology, Old Norse mythology, and contemporary Icelandic narratives from the so-called Sturlungaöld [age of the Sturlungs]) with the memory spaces (Garden of Eden, Troy, Ásgarðr, and Reykholt) attached to



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these texts and cultures. Furthermore, it combines different parts in the text of the manuscript DG 11 4to, in both narratological and spatial dimensions, with one another, as well as with other texts and narratives, creating a spatial and multidimensional net of memory and cultural references. The bishop, recognisable through the mitre and the crozier, points with two fingers of his right hand to the next folio (2 recto) of the manuscript, as if pre­ senting the text to someone or referring to the beginning of the text of the rubric on the top of fol. 2 recto. According to Glauser (2013, 110), this gesture of presen­ ting a text can be read as a very early record of reception, if Grape’s dating of the drawing is correct. The manuscript DG 11 4to, whose provenance cannot be traced back earlier than the seventeenth century (Heimir Pálsson 2012, xxx), was presented to the Danish historian Stepahanius by Brynjólfur Sveinsson, bishop at Skálholt, in 1639 (Heimir Pálsson 2012, xxxii). Rösli (2015, 52–54) points to the fact, that the drawing might subsequently be interpreted as a visualisation of this handing over of the manuscript. Both interpretations refer to the spatial signifi­ cance of both the paratextual layout and its mnemonic significance of the text’s presentation to the world. The famous rubric on fol. 2r, often discussed as evidence for the authorship of the Prose Edda’s narrative (Faulkes 2005, xii–xvi; contradicted by Rösli 2015, 54–56), is remarkable concerning its statements with respect to spatial memory: Bók þessi heitir Edda. Hana hefir saman setta Snorri Sturluson eptir þeim hætti sem hér er skipat. Er fyrst frá ásum ok Ymi, þar næst skáldskapar mál ok heiti margra hluta. Síðast Háttatal er Snorri hefir ort um Hákon konung ok Skúla hertuga. (Heimir Pálsson 2012, 6) [This book is called Edda. Snorri Sturluson has compiled it in the manner in which it is arranged here. First it is about Æsir and Ymir, next Skáldskaparmál (‘poetic diction’) and (poetical) names of many things. Finally Háttatal (‘enumeration of verse forms’) which Snorri has composed about King Hákon and Duke Skúli. (Heimir Pálsson 2012, 7)]

The rubric’s first sentence – “Bók þessi heitir Edda.” – not only mentions the proper name of the manuscript as Edda for the first time in Icelandic literature (Glauser 2013, 110), it also refers to the object status of the manuscript as book in its material and spatial dimension (Glauser 2009, 165–166), including its layout and narrative. Thus, the text, as the rubric maintains, is intended to be remem­ bered as a book, or rather, through this very manifestation of the text’s spatial layout in the manuscript DG 11 4to, not just as a story, a story which might be transmitted and remembered in an oral form. Today, however, the word Edda is used to refer to the grand narrative of Old Norse mythology, including the Poetic Edda, rather than to the Uppsala redaction of the Prose Edda. This argumenta­ tion is supported by the rest of the rubric, using a distinctive poetologic terminol­ ogy to express the book’s compiled character, or rather that it was ‘put together’

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(setja saman) and ‘composed’ (yrkja) (Glauser 2009, 166) in the exact manner as manifested in the textual layout of the manuscript DG 11 4to. The rubric, being a paratext in the form of an incipit, mentions three specific parts of the text (“fyrst frá ásum ok Ymi, þar næst skáldskapar mál ok heiti margra hluta. Síðast Háttatal” [First it is about Æsir and Ymir, next Skáldskaparmál (the language of poetry) and (poetical) names of many things. Finally Háttatal (‘list of verse-forms’)]), which structures the manuscript in its spatial and textual layout, while simultaneously remembering this structure and divisions following the rubric. Furthermore, the three names mentioned in the rubric (Snorri Sturluson, King Hákon Hákonson, and Duke Skúli Bárðarson from Norway) refer both to the narrative of the last part of the text (Háttatal), in which Hákon and Skúli are the main topic of Snor­ ri’s metapoetic poem, as well as to the cultural memory of Old Norse-Icelandic society during and after the Sturlungaöld, when these three men took part in the changing of the spatial structures of power in Iceland and Norway due to their leading roles in that era’s discourse of power.

Works cited Primary sources Faulkes, Anthony, ed. Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Prologue and Gylfaginning. London, 2005. Grape, Anders, ed. Snorre Sturlasons Edda. Uppsala-Handskriften DG 11, II. Uppsala, 1977. Heimir Pálsson, ed. Snorri Sturluson. The Uppsala Edda. Trans. Anthony Faulkes. London, 2012. Morgunblaðið. Miðvikudagur 21. apríl 1971. http://timarit.is/view_page_init. jsp?pageId=1420575. (15 October 2017)

Secondary sources Assmann, Jan. 1995. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” New German Critique 65: 125–133. Assmann, Jan. 2011. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization. Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. New York. Borsò, Vittoria. 2007. “Topologie als literaturwissenschaftliche Methode: die Schrift des Raums und der Raum der Schrift.” In Topologie. Zur Raumbeschreibung in den Kultur- und Medienwissenschaften. Ed. Stephan Günzel. Bielefeld. 279–295. Carruthers, Mary. 1990. The Book of Memory. A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge. Finlay, Alison. 2003. “Interpretation or Over-Interpretation? The Dating of Two Íslendingasögur.” Gripla XIV: 61–91.



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Genette, Gérard. 1997. Paratexts. Thresholds of Interpretation. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Literature, Culture, Theory, 20. Cambridge and New York. Glauser, Jürg. 2007. “The Speaking Bodies of Saga Texts.” In Learning and Understanding in the Old Norse World. Essays in Honour of Margaret Clunies Ross. Ed. Judy Quinn, Kate Heslop and Tarrin Wills. Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe, 18. Turnhout. 13–26. Glauser, Jürg. 2009. “Sinnestäuschungen. Medialitätskonzepte in der Prosa-Edda.” In Greppaminni. Ritgerðir til heiðurs Vésteini Ólasyni sjötugum. Ed. Margrét Eggertsdóttir, Árni Sigurjónsson, Guðrun Ása Grímsdóttir, Guðrun Nordal and Guðvarður Már Gunnlaugsson. Reykjavík. 165–174. Glauser Jürg. 2011. Island – Eine Literaturgeschichte. Stuttgart and Weimar. Glauser, Jürg. 2013. “Unheilige Bücher. Zur Implosion mythischen Erzählens in der ‚ProsaEdda‘.” Das Mittelalter, 18.1: 106–121. Glauser Jürg. 2016. “Mittelalter (800–1500).” Skandinavische Literaturgeschichte. Ed. Jürg Glauser. 2nd updated and enlarged edition. Stuttgart. 1–51. Gunnar Karlsson. 2000. Iceland’s 1100 Years. The History of a Marginal Society. London. Hermann, Pernille. 2009. “Concepts of Memory and Approaches to the Past in Medieval Icelandic Literature.” Scandinavian Studies 81.3: 287–308. Hermann, Pernille. 2014. “Key Aspects of Memory and Remembering in Old Norse-Icelandic Literature.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 13–39. Jónas Kristjánsson. 1997. Eddas and Sagas. Iceland’s Medieval Literature. Trans. Peter Foote. Reykjavík. Jørgensen, Jon Gunnar. 2013. “Håndskrift- og arkivkunnskap.” In Handbok i norrøn filologi. Ed. Odd Einar Haugen. 2nd ed. Bergen. 28–75. Kehnel, Annette and Diamantis Panagiotopoulos. 2015. “Textträger – Schriftträger: Ein Kurzportrait (statt Einleitung).” In Schriftträger – Textträger. Zur materialen Präsenz des Geschriebenen in frühen Gesellschaften. Ed. Annette Kehnel and Diamantis Panagiotopoulos. Materiale Textkulturen, 6. Berlin, Boston and Munich. 1–13. Kiening, Christian. 2008. “Die erhabene Schrift. Vom Mittelalter zur Moderne.” In SchriftRäume. Dimensionen von Schrift zwischen Mittelalter und Moderne. Ed. Christian Kiening and Martina Stercken. Medienwandel – Medienwechsel – Medienwissen, 4. Zürich. 8–126. Kiening, Christian. 2009. “SchriftRäume. Inszenierung und Deutung der Buchstaben (1500–1800).” In Raumkonzepte. Disziplinäre Zugänge. Ed. Ingrid Baumgärtner, Paul-Gerhard Klumbies and Franziska Sick. Göttingen. 29–49. Már Jónsson. 2012. Arnas Magnæus Philologus (1663–1730). The Viking Collection. Studies in Northern Civilization, 20. Odense. Rösli, Lukas. 2015. Topographien der eddischen Mythen. Eine Untersuchung zu den Raumnarrativen und narrativen Räumen in der Lieder-Edda und der Prosa-Edda. Beiträge zur Nordischen Philologie, 55. Tübingen. Rowe, Elizabeth Ashman. 2003. “Fornaldarsögur and Flateyjarbók.” Gripla XIV: 93–105 Rowe, Elizabeth Ashman. 2005. The Development of Flateyjarbók. Iceland and the Norwegian Dynastic Crisis of 1389. The Viking Collection. Studies in Northern Civilization, 15. Odense. Würth, Stefanie. 1995. “Flateyjarbók.” Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde. Vol. 9. Ed. Heinrich Beck, Dieter Geuenich and Heiko Steuer. Berlin and New York. 171–174.

Sarah Künzler

II: 4 Skin

1 Introduction As the largest visible part of the human body, located at the “fleshy interface between bodies and worlds” (Ahmed and Stacey 2001, 1), skin epitomises the border between the individual and the world it inhabits. Although skin in itself has no intent to signify, given its visible location and inscribable nature, it is hardly surprising that it occupies a central role in human identity formation. Conscious and meaningful modifications to the skin can be applied for various reasons: for aesthetic or ritual purposes or to express affiliation with a particu­ lar group, and such practices can be linked to memory topoi in various ways. Invol­untarily marked skin – scars or burns obtained in violent encounters or acci­ dents – can likewise be read within discursive constructions of identity, as these markings can be said to (quite literally) (re-)present narratives of personal lives. Such observations have led researchers from various disciplines – literary criti­ cism, manuscript studies, anthropology, sociology, and so on – to engage with skin through memory studies. The breadth of their work shows that skin comes to embody critical aspects of human identity and can be read through very diffe­ rent strategies. Useful frameworks for thinking about the mnemonic qualities of human skin in medieval texts are Ahmed and Stacey’s (2001) ideas about dermo­ graphies, Eglinger’s (2007) thoughts about the poetic dimensions of palimpsestic bodies in literature and thoughts on ‘skin memories’ voiced in sociology (Prosser 2001). Benthien’s (2001) broad analysis has demonstrated the prevalence of skinmetaphors in modern art and thought, yet studies focussing on the mnemonic qualities of skin in pre-modern sources are comparatively slow to emerge, with the exception of a growing awareness of medieval manuscripts as “books of skin” (Walter 2013; Kay 2017). Yet Kay’s recent work (2017) has shown that (post-) modern approaches to skin as “both a surface of inscription and an envelope of identity” can be critically yet fruitfully related to medieval sources.

2 Case study: Skin memory in Old Norse-Icelandic sagas For reasons of space, this entry focuses exclusively on Old Norse-Icelandic sagas, although skin-metaphors can be found across medieval Norse literature. In the https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-040



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sagas discussed here, skin may mediate in a literal sense in that it transmits meaning: it can become inscribed with mnemonic prompts through wounds and scars or it can partake in social or personal acts of remembering. This fact may not be surprising, as both vellum and human skin preserve narratives through their materiality (in a literal and metaphorical sense respectively). Recent schol­ arship (Walter 2013; Kay and Rubin 1994) has postulated that to the medieval mind, writing and reading are intimately connected to vellum, and such crafted animal skin may have been readily perceived as the bearer and transmitter of cultural memory. As Kay (2017, 3) has pointed out, the Latin term pellis was used for human and animal skin as well as for parchment, which could aid mental connections between their potential mnemonic qualities. The following short discussions will demonstrate how two fornaldarsögur [legendary sagas] and one original riddarasaga [knight’s saga] reflect on such general frameworks. Ásmundar saga kappabana [The saga of Asmund the Champion Killer] is a fornaldarsaga Norðurlanda preserved from the fourteenth century onwards. The saga narrates how two half-brothers, Hildibrandr and Ásmundr, come to meet in single combat after a series of slayings and retributions. Ásmundr finally slays Hildibrandr and only at this point in the narrative is their relationship disclosed to him. A sub-plot of the saga is concerned with how Ásmundr contends for the hand of Queen Æsa in rivalry with the Danish suitor, Eyvindr skinnhöll [Eyvindr fur]. Yet unbeknownst to Eyvindr and the people at court, Æsa only seeks to marry a husband who is able to avenge the death of her father, who was killed by Hildibrandr. The martial Ásmundr is clearly more suited to this task than the noble, proud Eyvindr. However, although Ásmundr is the son of Queen Hildr and the warrior Áki, his royal lineage has not yet been revealed to the court at this point in the narrative. The rich Eyvindr is thus perceived as socially superior, and Æsa cannot freely choose Ásmundr over Eyvindr. Yet she declares that she will marry the man who presents the more beautiful arms (fegri hendr) when he returns from Viking adventures. When the suitors revisit the court a year later, Eyvindr’s arms have been well protected as he stayed with the cooks and wore gloves; a somewhat comical replication of his name. Ásmundr, on the other hand, presents arms that are marked by scars and blood, as he valiantly took part in combat. The discrepancy is visualised in the saga as follows: Æsa in fagra mælti: vel hafa þessar hendr varðveittar verit ok eru hvítar ok fagrar, hafa litt litat sik í blóði né ófegrðar í höggum; sjám nú, Ásmundr! þínar hendr, segir hón. Hann rétti fram sínar hendr ok vóru þær öróttar ok heldr döckvar af blóði ok vápnabiti, ok er hann brá frá klæðunum, þá vóru þær hlaðnar hringum gullz til axlar. (Ásmundarsaga kappabana, 86–87).

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[Asa the Fair said. “These hands are well-kept, both white and fair. They have neither been stained with blood nor scratched by blows. Let’s see your hands, Asmund.” He held up his hands. They were scarred and darkened by blood and wounds, but when he pulled up his sleeves, gold rings could be seen on his arms all the way up to the shoulders.” (The Saga of Asmund the Champion Killer, 92)]

Given the striking difference between their skins, the audience at the contest (as well as perhaps the audience of the text) may expect Eyvindr to triumph, espe­ cially since Æsa’s assessment of Eyvindr’s arms as hvítar ok fagrar [white and beautiful] echoes the exact term she stated in her conditions, fagr. In addition, Æsa herself is referred to as Æsa in fagra [Æsa the beautiful], a detail which creates a strong lexical connection between her and Eyvindr. The deciding factor in Æsa’s quest is clearly the adjective fagr, which has a primary meaning of ‘beautiful, fair, fine’ and associated connotations of ‘bright’, ‘splendid, marvellous, shining’ and even ‘pleasant, agreeable’. Eyvindr’s arms clearly appear to reflect these connotations. In contrast, Ásmundr’s arms are strewn with scars and (dried) blood, resulting in a darkish and uneven surface. Yet since Æsa is looking for an avenger rather than a beautiful husband, she chooses Ásmundr over Eyvindr, perhaps playing on a secondary meaning of fagr in that his arms are more ‘agreeable to her’. She seals this with the following judgement: “Þá mælti konungsdóttir: þat mun þó mitt atkvæði, at Ásmundar hendr sé fegri með öllu saman, ok ertu, Eyvindr! fráráðinn þessum ráðahag.” (Ásmundarsaga kappabana, 87) [Then spoke the king’s daughter: “This is my decision now, that all in all Ásmundr’s arms are more agreeable/beautiful/marvellous and you, Eyvind, are hence excluded from this marriage.” (author’s translation)] In Ásmundar saga kappabana, skin is clearly perceived as a social signifier working on two distinct levels – colour and surface structure. Yet it is perhaps only within the Viking atmosphere of the saga and Æsa’s agenda that Ásmundr’s arms visualise a more agreeable personality. Marked by scars, his arms incorpo­ rate his martial achievements and give trusted testimony to the combats he took part in. They are a prime example of a skin on which past events are inscribed – what Ahmed and Stacy (2001, 15) understand as dermographia, that is, marked skin that is a result of such writing – but likewise also a material surface to be read from. Skin here functions as part of heroic identity construction as well as in a mnemonic discourse, and both are interrelated. And in this highly specific context, it is Ásmundr’s marked skin, and not Eyvindr’s fair skin, which is evalu­ ated positively. A contrary assessment of scarred and wounded skin, as well as a contrary process of inscription, is found in Sigurðar saga þǫgla [The saga of Sigurðr the silent], one of the oldest original riddarasögur (dating back to c. 1350). The saga features a maiden-quest narrative that bases itself around the mutilation of two



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princes, Hálfdan and Vilhjálmr, initiated by Halfdan’s proposal to the haughty meykóngr [maiden-king] Sedentiana. Their brother, Sigurðr (a kolbítr [coal biter] and thought to be both mute and dumb), subsequently conquers and marries Sedentiana in a typical meykóngr-narrative resolution. The maiming is described in gruesome detail: their hair is shorn and their heads are tarred, their abdo­ mens and Hálfdan’s genitals are scorched, they are partially flayed to the bone, and owls are scratched in their backs with swords. Sedentiana clearly states the aim of this gruesome mutilation, which she hopes will put a stop to marriage proposals: “at þetta mune letia annann og enn þridia. at gerazt suo kynduger at forskammazt eigi at bera slic ord fyrir minn eyru” (Sigurðar saga þǫgla, 127) [this will prevent a second or third man to be so guileless and not ashamed when he carries such words to my ear (author’s translation)]. She utilises the brothers’ bodies as monuments of her power by exploiting the fact that ‘skin remembers’, and anything that is inscribed deep enough can never be fully erased. The brothers are treated by doctors who can be trusted to keep their shame­ ful appearance a secret. The issue of hiding their altered bodies from view is thus raised immediately after the mutilation, and is developed further at various points in the saga. For example, when they return to their father after the propo­ sal, the king expresses his surprise that their failure to win Sedentiana should not be more visible on their bodies. The only way in which Hálfdan and Vilhjálmr can counteract Sedentiana’s plan is to keep their bodies hidden at court: if no one sees their skin, it cannot fulfil the purpose for which it was marked. Given the emphasis on visually perceiving noble bodies at court which is prevalent in medieval texts, the mutilation has a profound effect on their ability to participate in their social role, which generates a pronounced link between skin, its mnemo­ nic abilities, and identity. Over a considerable period of time, the brothers are successful in keeping their bodies hidden from view. On a particularly hot day, however, Hálfdan and Vilhjálmr go for what they think is a private swim in a lake. Yet unbeknownst to them, they are observed by their brother, Sigurðr, as they strip naked, while recollecting what has led to their mutilated appearances. Vilhjálmr does not want the mutilation to be voiced even in presumed privacy. Hálfdan, on the other hand, perhaps jokingly asks his brother about his marked skin, simultaneously explaining and visualising it: huat merkir su hinn Rauda og hinn Rosaliga krijngla med samansnerctu skinne sem syniz á þijnum kuide. e(dur) huar fyrir ber þu suo harlost höfudit. edur huat merkir sáá hinn Raude Ristne fugl sem mier syniz pentadur vera á þijnu bace. Geysi hagur hefir sá pictur verit er suo fagurt förm framde á þijnum lijkama. (Sigurðar saga þǫgla, 131)

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[What does this red and rosy ring which has become visible on your stomach mean? Or why do you have such a hairless head? Or what does this red, scratched bird mean, which looks as if it has been painted on your back? The painter must have been incredibly skilled if he could draw such a fine shape onto your body. (author’s translation)]

After Vilhjálmr rebukes him for such foolish questions, Hálfdan recollects the acts of assault they suffered. When the brothers realise that a knight is hiding in a nearby tree, they fear their secret will be revealed. However, when Vilhjálmr identi­ fies this knight as their brother, Sigurðr, they are relieved, because they still believe him to be mute. At this point, all three brothers appear somehow ‘maimed’ and for all of them, this has a profound, debilitating influence on their social role. Indeed, if the observer Sigurðr really were mute, his knowledge would stay confined to his own body. This suggests that while Hálfdan’s and Vilhjálmr’s skin retains the memory of their mutilation, other bodies are also involved in the reading of skin, and here in particular, the reading is as important as the act of disfiguration. At this point in the narrative, it is revealed that Sigurðr is by no means mute and dumb but simply a late developer, and he immediately sets out to avenge his brothers. It is only because Sigurðr sees their mutilation and simultaneously hears what caused it – and understands the impact this has on his brothers – that he begins to fulfil a heroic role. The scene is an example of a painful memory being etched on the skin of characters as well as (equally irrevocably) on their brainmemory: it shows that skin may trigger remembering even though the characters themselves would rather forget. This accentuates an awareness of the indelible nature of marked skin on a social as well as on a personal level. Both sagas support Eichhorn-Mulligan’s (2006) observation that in Old Norse-Icelandic literature, the body, and particularly the skin, speaks the truth and does not lie. Because the skin retains signs and evokes memories, bodies are a guarantee for, and visible proof of, the truthful narration of events, and the skin is read in mnemonic contexts to affirm this. Broader studies examining skin in medieval literature and culture (e.g. Walter 2013) are vital in developing such readings, especially since more detailed, close readings of individual texts are only beginning to emerge (Künzler 2016). In these two texts, skin provides a memory of an individual character’s bio­ graphy (martial encounters or maltreatments). It thus comes to visualise his-story (female characters in this corpus to whom this applies being unknown to the author at present) by bringing “to its surface a remembered past” (Prosser 2001, 52). The latter example shows that skin may be viewed as a canvas on which power can be inscribed, yet common to both texts is the awareness of a central aspect which has not yet been fully addressed in literary criticism: that skin triggers remembering, not just literally, by retaining signs, but also metaphorically, by signifying indivi­ dual biographies on its surface. Skin then becomes the body’s memory of our lives,



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as Prosser (2001, 52) phrases it. Prosser’s observations confirm Eglinger’s (2007) proposition of poetic dimensions inherent in palimpsestic bodies (not limited to the skin) within a metaphoric memory tradition. Both concepts enable an appreciation of a body which physically changes yet retains signs, and hence embodies different layers of meaning. Yet once human skin is inscribed, the marks cannot be erased or even separated completely but rather combine to create an effect of amalgamation. A third remarkable but rather different discourse of skin connected to memory topoi is found in Ála flekks saga [The Saga of Ali Flekk], an original riddarasaga originating around 1400. The eponymous hero Áli is born with a flekkr [birthmark or mole] on his face. The saga features various expulsion and re-integration plots which Áli must overcome in order to participate in his father’s kingdom. It is also characterised by a large number of folkloristic elements such as the expulsion of a child at birth, the werewolf motif, and instances of hamhleypa [shape-shifting]. The first of these motives is tied to the first cycle of expulsion and reintegration and, although other such cycles are also connected to bodily form and memory, it is here that Áli’s skin is of central importance. Because of a prophecy uttered by her husband, the queen is forced to abandon her newborn son in the forest, where he is found and raised by an elderly, childless couple. Although they provide a good home for the boy, they appear unable to name him as every night the name they gave the child during the day slips into forgetfulness: “En hvert þat nafn, sem þau gáfu honum at kveldi, mundu þau aldri at morni.” (Ála flekks saga, Ch. 2) [“but whatever name they gave him that night, they had forgotten the next morning” (The Saga of Ali Flekk, Ch. 2)]. Only the name Áli seems to ‘stick’ to the boy, as voicing the visible mark allows the couple to remember the name. When Áli has grown into a boy, he visits the royal court during a feast and the queen recognises her son because of this same birthmark. Both the naming and the reintegration of the hero at court (similarly integral for Áli’s identity) thus depend on a mark on the skin, which triggers remembering on the part of the old couple and the queen respectively. Skin and remembering are closely linked in this saga, and (contrary perhaps to modern perceptions) the flekkr is never perceived as a flaw. The topos of recognising a royal figure because of a birthmark is also found in texts from other literary traditions (e.g. the Middle English romance Havelok the Dane). In this case, it is not the palimpsestic nature of skin that is foregrounded, i.e. the skin’s ability to absorb different layers of marking over time, but the durability of marks, such as birthmarks or moles, on the surface of the skin. Yet in all cases, the visual appearance of skin and the markings thereon trigger individual remembering or mnemonic processes which are important for the cha­ racters both on a personal as well as on a social level. Skin therefore does not just provide a border for the individual, it also helps to situate this individual in a social, family and even cultural context, and memory is a central part of such processes. In

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these sagas, skin not only lies at the interface between individual and world, it also constitutes a visual biographic record (Prosser 2001, 52). Reading such instances of mnemonic skin in pre-modern Nordic culture can contribute to our understanding and appreciation of the sources, which are complex artefacts consisting of various layers of inscriptions – much like some of the manuscripts which preserve them.

Works Cited Primary Sources Ála flekks saga. In Drei Lygisögur. Ed. Åke Lagerholm. Halle/Saale, 1927. 84–120. Ásmundarsaga kappabana. In Zwei Fornaldarsögur. Hrólfssaga Gautrekssonar und Ásmundarsaga kappabana nach Cod. Holm 7, 4to. Ed. Ferdinand Detter. Halle, 1891. 79–100. Sigurðar saga þǫgla. In Late Medieval Icelandic Romances. II. Ed. Agnete Loth. Copenhagen, 1963. 93–259. The Saga of Ali Flekk. In Six Old Icelandic Sagas. Trans. W. Bryant Bachman, Jr. and Guðmundur Erlingsson. Lanham, MD, New York, 1993. 41–61. The Saga of Asmund the Champion Killer. In Six Old Icelandic Sagas. 1993. 85–102.

Secondary Sources Ahmed, Sara and Jackie Stacey. 2001. “Introduction”. In Thinking Through the Skin. Ed. Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey. London. Benthien, Claudia. 2001. Haut. Literaturgeschichte – Körperbilder – Grenzdiskurse. Reinbek. Eglinger, Hanna. 2007. Der Körper als Palimpsest. Die poetologische Dimension des menschlichen Körpers in der skandinavischen Gegenwartsliteratur. Madison, WI. Kay, Sarah. 2017. Animal Skins and the Reading Self in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries. Chicago. Kay, Sarah, and Miri Rubin. 1994. “Introduction.” In Framing Medieval Bodies. Ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin. Manchester. 1–9. Künzler, Sarah. 2016. Flesh and Word. Reading Bodies in Old Norse-Icelandic and Early Irish Literature. Berlin. Eichhorn-Mulligan, Amy. 2006. “Contextualizing Old Norse Bodies”. In The Fantastic in Old Norse-Icelandic Literature. Vol. 1. Ed. John McKinnell, David Ashurst and Donata Kirk. Durham and York. 198–207. Prosser, Jay. 2001. “Skin Memories.” In Thinking Through the Skin. Ed. Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey. London. 52–68. Walter, Katie L. 2013. Reading Skin in Medieval Literature and Culture. New York.1

* This entry was composed during an early post-doc mobility project funded by the Swiss Nati­ onal Science Foundation.

Sandra Schneeberger

II: 5 Textual Performativity 1 Introduction The aim of this entry is to shed new light on one of the most famous texts of the medieval North: The Prose Edda. Jürg Glauser (2014, x) says, “the main work of Nordic literature on the topic of mythography and poetics, the Prose Edda, is to an extraordinary degree a theory of memory […].” Such a definition deserves a closer look. The Prose Edda exists in four medieval compilations and is usually specified as an ars poetica for the art of skaldic poetry. At the centre of this case study stands Gylfaginning [the tricking of Gylfi], a mythographical account of the Norse world and its inhabitants. These myths can be considered the content basis for the composition of skaldic poetry. In Gylfaginning, as well as in the other texts within the Prose Edda, different forms of thinking about the art of poetry and nar­ ration are on display. Very often, the texts claim a close relationship between the power of language and the conditions and functions of memory, not surprisingly, as the art of skaldic poetry is in its essence a medium for remembrance. At the end of Gylfaginning, a very specific situation in which memory relates to the power of language is addressed. The concept of ‘textual performativity’, as used in German medieval studies, serves as the theoretical background for a close reading of this scene.

2 Case study Textual performativity The notion of performativity is to be found in many disciplines and in a variety of uses. A general definition provided by Cavanaugh (2015) maintains, “Performa­ tivity is the power of language to effect change in the world: language does not simply describe the world but may instead (or also) function as a form of social action.” Starting point of the discourse was John L. Austin, who tried to define the term ‘performative’ (1967/1955). Subsequently, concepts of the performative and performativity (on the difference see Velten 2012, 250) received wide attention, for example, in the studies of theatre, ritual and gender. In literary studies – in German medieval studies in particular – the term performativity has undergone a separate development, as it focusses on performativity of and in written texts https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-041

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rather than on performative speech acts in everyday circumstances. Speech acts in a written environment require different conditions in order to be meaning­ ful and successful. The German medievalists Cornelia Herberichs and Christian Kiening therefore speak of textual performativity: Wer die Performativität literarischer Texte genauer beschreiben will, muss sich fragen, inwiefern diese nicht einfach ein lebensweltliches Agieren, Spielen oder Vorführen abbil­ den, sondern spezifische mediale Formen und Zeichengefüge sind, in denen Dynamiken und Vollzüge sich auf je eigene Weise ereignen. (Herberichs and Kiening, 2008, 12) [Those who want to describe the performativity of literary texts more precisely need to ask themselves in what way they do not just show real life acting, playing or displaying, but are specific medial forms and sign structures, in which dynamics and executions occur in their own way. (author’s translation)]

With respect to creating a comparable terminology, Herberichs and Kiening (2008, 13–19) concentrate on three aspects of textual performativity. All three are interconnected and responsible for the performative potential of a text: 1. “Doing something as saying something” (“Sagen als Tun”). That is, the attention is on the legitimation processes and the lending of validity in and through texts, a para­ doxical situation, since a text states its legitimacy – as a storehouse for knowl­ edge, for example – at the very moment it creates this storehouse. 2. “Repetition/ Iterability” (“Wiederholung/Wiederholbarkeit”), where the textual strategies are of interest, which make clear that the connection to literary traditions is taken as a precondition for further storytelling. And 3. “Framing” (“Rahmung”). Language only becomes action within specific frames. In texts, frames (in form of paratexts, for example) make the act of narration itself visible. A literary staging of legitima­ tion processes, as well as the use of intertextuality and framing strategies, will be concerned with specific forms of remembrance, and they help gain a better understanding of how a text thinks about memory in general. Using these three aspects of textual performativity in the following close reading of one scene of Gylfaginning illuminates how the text portrays memory as related to language. The text seems to equate the power of language to change the world (through storytelling and skaldic poetry for example) with memory and understands it as necessary tool for active canon building.

Performing memory in and through Gylfaginning The conclusion of Gylfaginning provides an interesting opportunity to look at memory with the help of the concept of textual performativity. At the end of the foundational stories of the Norse cosmos, Gylfi asks the three Æsir kings what



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will happen after the world is burned. They answer with the story of a new begin­ ning, in which the world and several survivors reappear out of the sea: Víðarr ok Váli lifa svá at eigi hefir særinn ok Surtalogi grandat þeim, ok byggja þeir á Iðavelli, þar sem fyrr var Ásgarðr. Ok þar koma þá synir Þórs, Móði ok Magni, ok hafa þar Mjǫllni. Því næst koma þar Baldr ok Hǫðr frá Heljar. Setjask þá allir samt ok talask við ok minnask á rúnar sínar ok rœða of tíðindi þau er fyrrum hǫfðu verit, of Miðgarðsorm ok um Fenrisúlf. Þá finna þeir í grasinu gulltǫflur þær er Æsirnir hǫfðu átt. (Edda 1982, 53–54) [Vidar and Vali will be alive, the sea and Surt’s fire not having harmed them, and they will dwell on Idavoll, where Asgard had been previously. And then Thor’s sons Modi and Magni will arrive, bringing Miollnir. After that Baldr and Hod will arrive from Hel. Then they will all sit down together and talk and discuss their mysteries and speak of the things that had happened in former times, of the Midgard serpent and Fenriswolf. Then they will find in the grass the golden playing pieces that had belonged to the Æsir. (Edda 1995 [1987], 56)]

In the diegetic world of the story within the story, memory is depicted as a shared narrative activity with the function to order the past and legitimate authority. After ragnarøkkr [lit., the twilight of the gods], the world of the Æsir is nearly eliminated. The surviving Æsir remember it through a narrative act whereby they recreate the former world and visualise the lost past. They are directly related to it, as eyewitnesses and carriers of the rúnar [old wisdom/secrets]. In their discus­ sion, the sons of the Æsir legitimate their affiliation to the prior elite. Accord­ ing to the text, the oral memory process is framed by external memory aids, real objects like Þórr’s hammer and the golden playing pieces, both representations of the former elite culture. Iðavǫllr, the place where the discussion takes place supports the importance of this event and adds meaning and validity to the stories, because it is the centre of the former culture. Yet, this place is not Ásgarðr anymore, and is thus open for new narratives. Here, the paradoxical characteris­ tics of such a memory process are emphasised: although the rúnar must be kept alive, they need actualisation in order to be relevant for new circumstances. The culturally important place as starting point for the new Æsir culture parallels the textual design principle of Gylfaginning. Citations of eddic verses connect the text with the literary tradition but they are used in a different way and generate new meaning in this context. The Æsir kings succeeded with the storytelling about the Norse cosmos. Gylfi travels home and passes the stories on. The sudden disappearance of the place where the storytelling happened seems not to bother him. But for the recipient of Gylfaginning, it is an important moment to consider the development and charac­ teristics of memory:

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Því næst heyrði Gangleri dyni mikla hvern veg frá sér, ok leit út á hlið sér. Ok þá er hann sèsk meir um þá stendr hann úti á sléttum velli, sér þá ønga hǫll ok ønga borg. Gengr hann þá leið sína braut ok kemr heim í ríki sitt ok segir þau tíðindi er hann hefir sét ok heyrt. Ok eptir honum sagði hverr maðr ǫðrum þessar sǫgur. (Edda 1982, 54) [Next Gangleri heard great noises in every direction from him, and he looked out to one side. And when he looked around further he found he was standing out on open ground, could see no hall and no castle. Then he went off on his way and came back to his kingdom and told of the events he had seen and heard about. And from this account these stories passed from one person to another. (Edda 1995 [1987], 57)]

On the one hand, the empty field on the frame level resembles in its function Iðavǫllr in the story within the story, a place highly related to the stories of the past, functioning as start point for new narratives. On the other hand, it shows that all memory is just fiction and delusion. Throughout Gylfaginning, it becomes clear that the Æsir kings do not have a concrete plan for their stories. They adapt them depending on Gylfi’s questions and create the Norse cosmos by telling about it. The Æsir kings are aware of the power of their storytelling and follow up the process of active canon building: En Æsir setjask þá á tal ok ráða ráðum sínum ok minnask á þessar frásagnir allar er honum váru sagðar, ok gefa nǫfn þessi hin sǫmu, er áðr eru nefnd mǫnnum ok stǫðum þeim er þar váru, til þess at þá er langar stundir liði at menn skyldu ekki ifask í at allir væri einir, þeir Æsir er nú var frá sagt ok þessir er þá váru þau sǫmu nǫfn gefin. (Edda 1982, 54–55) [But the Æsir sat down to discuss and hold a conference and went over all these stories that had been told him, and assigned those same names that were mentioned above to the people and places that were there, so that when long period of time had passed men should not doubt that they were all the same, those Æsir about whom stories were told above and those who were now given the same names. (Edda 1995 [1987], 57)]

On the frame level, too, memory is a shared oral action. But in this situation, the intentional moment of such a reconstructive process is highlighted. The Æsir kings know that the performative power of language only succeeds within the right frames. Thus, they decide to support their words with memory aids: they inscribe their stories into the world, in place- and personal names. Lukas Rösli (2015, 96–97), awards the narrative a high degree of self-referentiality: “[...] die Asenkönige erkennen, dass diese Geschichten erst dann glaubwürdig und für die Rezipienten erinnerbar werden, wenn sie Personen und Orte gemäss ihren Erzählungen benennen” [[…] the Æsir kings recognise, that these stories only become credible and memorable for the recipients, if they name persons and places according to their stories (author’s translation)]. This self-referentiality is highly performative as it becomes visible in different frames, repetitions and moments, where saying equals doing.



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Conclusion These scenes attest to Gylfaginning’s high degree of textual performativity. They make also clear how important this is for an adequate memory process. The sur­ viving Æsir in the mythological account and the Æsir kings of the frame level both try to order the past and use it as legitimation for their authority in the present day. By highlighting the interplay of the power of language and the conditions of memory making, the function of the whole Prose Edda can be broadened. The work tries to keep the art of skaldic poetry alive and valuable for society (e.g. Nordal 2001, 41–44). Because Norse mythology is the groundwork for skaldic poetry, the old stories need to be remembered. Aspiring skalds find everything they need to know well-ordered within one manuscript. The Prose Edda actively builds a canon for the mastery of the skaldic poetry and can be understood as storehouse for its knowledge. Not only is it a storehouse, but it also discusses the conditions of being a storehouse; thus, it might be defined as a theory of memory. The memory process in this written context is as performative as the one of the (fictional) oral past: Framing paratexts and the complex reuse of literary tradi­ tions deliver necessary actualisation of the old stories about the Norse cosmos. Now it is an act of writing that succeeds: by reading, copying and using the Prose Edda, the stories of the Æsir will be told again and again.

Works cited Primary sources Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Prologue and Gylfaginning. Ed. Anthony Faulkes. Oxford, 1982. Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Ed. and trans. Anthony Faulkes. London, 1995 [1987].

Secondary sources Austin, John L. 1967 [1962]. How to Do Things with Words. The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Cambridge, MA. Cavanaugh, Jillian. 2015. “Performativity.” In Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology. http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199766567/ obo-9780199766567-0114.xml. (8 December 2016) Glauser, Jürg. 2014. “Foreword.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. vii–x.

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Guðrún Nordal. 2001. Tools of Literacy. The Role of Skaldic Verse in Icelandic Textual Culture of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. Toronto. Herberichs, Cornelia and Christian Kiening. 2008. “Introduction.” In Literarische Performativität. Lektüren vormoderner Texte. Ed. Cornelia Herberichs and Christian Kiening. Medienwandel – Medienwechsel – Medienwissen, 3. Zürich. 9–23. Rösli, Lukas. 2015. Topographien der eddischen Mythen. Eine Untersuchung zu den Raumnarrativen und narrativen Räumen in der Lieder-Edda und der Prosa-Edda. Beiträge zur Nordischen Philologie, 55. Tübingen. Velten, Hans Rudolf. 2012. “Performativity and Performance.” In Travelling Concepts for the Study of Culture. Ed. Birgit Neumann and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin. 249–266.

Karl G. Johansson

II: 6 Text Editing 1 Introduction The tradition of manuscript studies might not be the first area of research one would think of when the field of memory studies is discussed. From the perspec­ tive of memory studies, however, that manuscript studies obviously are involved in both re-constructing, studying and producing memory – both individual and collective, as well as cultural, memory (see e.g. Assmann 2011, 15–110, and Halb­ wachs 1992) – seems rather unproblematic. The manuscript as an artefact can be studied as a source of memory and interpreted as such, but it is also the carrier of texts that on many levels provides valuable sources of information. The text in a medieval manuscript obviously represents a construction of memory from the conception of the manuscript, and the text can represent re-constructions or rewritings of memory, oral or written, in a longer tradition. The layers of possible interpretation can easily become overwhelming, and the overall aim of manu­ script studies has been to order the material and edit the texts, either as recon­ structions of works in critical editions or as the text appears in the individual manuscript. This ordering makes another aspect of the traditions of manuscript studies relevant to mention in our context, the role of the edition in itself as a reconstruction of memory produced in our own time.

2 Case study Recover, order, edit, comment There are four central approaches of traditional manuscript studies that should be treated here in relation to memory studies, although it should be noted that there has been little theoretical discussion in the field. Rather than constructing a particular memory, scholars working in the field would have been convinced that their task “consisted in establishing a more positive, all encompassing, and expli­ cative memory” (Nora 1989, 9). Implicitly, never the less, the study of manuscripts inevitably involves the construction of memory. The medieval manuscripts from the Nordic realm extant today are only a small part of the mass of manuscripts produced in the vernacular and in Latin. Time has taken its toll and today much of the extant manuscript material is in a fragmentary shape; perhaps we could, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-042

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with Pierre Nora, talk of the manuscripts as lieux de mémoire (see e.g. Nora 1989,  7). A first task for manuscript studies has therefore been to recover texts from the fragmentary materials, what from the perspective of memory studies equates to establishing cultural monuments, or reconstructions of the past (see e.g. Assmann 2011, 37). In the early Renaissance, the main focus was on the clas­ sical Greek, Latin, and to some extent Hebrew, texts, but soon also the vernacular literatures from the Middle Ages were approached with similar intentions (see e.g. Turner 2014 and Bod 2013). A thorough and very useful discussion of the early classical scholarship is offered by Reynolds and Wilson 1968). A second objective in traditional manuscript studies has been to order the fragments in a way that makes them available to further scrutiny. This part of the philological approach involves producing catalogues of fragments and manuscripts, enhancing the quest for sources to the oldest texts and the most original form of each work. The focus has been on establishing the relation between witnesses to the individual work and to order them with the aim to reconstruct a text that is hypothetically as close as possible to the original, what generally is referred to as the archetype. In this quest there has always also been a tendency to establish a vernacular canon of what has been considered to be the most worthy contributions to the vernacu­ lar literature. A central aspect of traditional manuscript studies has been to edit the individual work from the material recovered and ordered. This edition could, as Odd Einar Haugen has stated in a defence of the tradition, be seen as “a text that never was” (Haugen 2010, 41). In common for most editions is, however, the tendency that the reconstructed text of the edition is subsequently understood by scholars to be representative of the original work. The fourth objective of manu­ script studies has been to form a commentary on the extant manuscript texts. In the Scandinavian tradition this has primarily been done in the introduction to editions of works or manuscript versions.

Canon vs cultural history In the quest for reconstruction there has often been a focus on the canonical works, as for example the Íslendingasögur [sagas of Icelanders] of the Icelandic material, while the larger aspects of cultural history have often been treated with less energy. This has to some extent contributed to a reconstruction of the medieval literary canon based on nineteenth-century ideas of the singular and individual author. Manuscript studies in collaboration with literary studies has contributed to the construction of a memory of the Middle Ages where an idea from Romanticism of a reconstructed work and an author has been central rather than the transmission and mediation of texts in a tradition of great variance (see also Glauser 1998).



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In a Scandinavian perspective, interest in reconstructing the past as found in medieval manuscripts took its starting point in Renaissance antiquarianism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with, for example, the humanists of Bergen (for a treatment of the Norwegian humanist tradition, see Jørgensen 2007, 97–125). In Sweden and Denmark, the crucial period is the second half of the seventeenth century when medieval manuscripts were collected and studied as records of competing glorious pasts by Swedish and Danish scholars, in itself a period of reconstructing a collective memory. Already in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, the first Scandinavian texts were edited, and learned men in the two competing powers strived to out-do each other in interpretations of prose and poetry found in the old manuscripts. It is only in the nineteenth century that modern philology and manuscript studies are established. With the national romantic ideas, a new project was presented for the study of vernacular literatures throughout Europe. In classical as well as vernacular philology there emerged new methodological approaches parallel to the ones that were established in the sciences. Methods for textual criticism and the establishing of critical editions were presented which were con­ sidered to be objective and capable of providing empirical results. In a book with the title The Powers of Philology. Dynamics of Textual Scholarship, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht defines philology as “referring to a configuration of scholarly skills that are geared toward historical text curatorship” (Gumbrecht 2003, 2). Gumb­ recht distinguishes four major implications of this narrow definition (2003, 2–4): 1. philological practice has an affinity with those historical periods that see themselves as following a greater cultural moment, a moment whose culture they deem to be more important than the cultural present 2. because of its emergence from a desire for the textual past, philology’s twopart core task is the identification and restoration of texts from each cultural past in question 3. the identification and restoration of texts from the past – that is, philology as understood in this book – establishes a distance vis-à-vis the intellectual space of hermeneutics and of interpretation as the textual practice that her­ meneutics informs 4. it follows from everything that I have said so far about philology that such craft and competence play a particularly important and often predominant role within those academic disciplines that deal with the most chronologi­ cally and culturally remote segments of the past [...] In relation to the second implication Gumbrecht explicitly states that “[i]denti­ fying fragments, editing texts, and writing historical commentary are the three basic practices of philology” and also the historicizing of texts and taking part

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in the teaching of this cultural context (Gumbrecht 2003, 3). In a comment to his third implication, Gumbrecht rather arrogantly states that “[r]ather than rely on the inspiration and momentary intuitions of great interpreters, as, for example, New Criticism did, philology has cultivated its self-image as a patient craft whose key values are sobriety, objectivity, and rationality” (Gumbrecht 2003, 3–4). Gum­ brecht’s discussion of the power of philology and the philological task of histori­ cizing leads him to conclude that “[h]istoricizing means to transform objects from the past into sacred objects, that is, into objects that establish simultaneously a distance and a desire to touch” (Gumbrecht 2003, 7). This view can be compared with Assmann’s statement that: The foundational mode always functions – even in illiterate societies – through fixed objec­ tifications both linguistic and nonlinguistic, such as rituals, dances, myths, patterns, dress, jewelry, tattoos, paintings, landscapes, and so on, all of which are kinds of sign systems and, because of their mnemotechnical function – supporting memory and identity – capable of being subsumed under the general heading of memoria. (Assmann 2011, 37)

We could easily add manuscripts and editions to this list, observing both of them as monuments of the past.

The philological project in Scandinavia As mentioned above, manuscript studies seen in a historical perspective have never really been explicitly aware of the theoretical aspects of establishing the memory of the past, as a way of recovering the constructions of memory from the past and thereby taking part in producing a new version of the collective memory. Many earlier philologists would (and some would still) claim that the study of manuscripts and the texts they carry is an objective feat which requires no the­ oretical reasoning and the methods of which has no implications for what we recover. In the nineteenth century there was an awareness of the linguistic chal­ lenges of the material and the approaches established were obviously in relation to the theoretical discussions of the day. It was, however, the empirical aspects of the sciences that were adopted and the ideal was positivistic, claiming that there is one truth that can be recovered if the material is ordered and thoroughly observed. Manuscript studies therefore focused on the observable aspects of the manuscripts and their texts. The development in palaeographic studies estab­ lished methods to distinguish various scripts and to identify and date individual scribes. This work was of course of great value for the study and understanding of written material from the Middle Ages, but the interest of the scholar was often limited to the identity of scribes and the dating of manuscripts, while aspects



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concerning the medieval use of writing to construct images of the past as part of the contemporary world view was not often, if ever, discussed. Similarily, in the study of the artefacts, the manuscripts carrying texts, scholars produced cata­ logues and descriptions of individual manuscripts that still are useful for schol­ ars approaching the material. Methods were developed to describe bindings and the formats and layout of pages, but the meaning of these formal aspects of the manuscripts beyond pure description was seldom the object of inquiry.

Manuscript studies and memory The idea of reconstructing a text that is allegedly as close as possible to the origi­ nal from the establishing of a ‘stemma codicum’ in search of an ‘archetype’ was formed more explicitly in the period of nineteenth-century Romanticism, and it has played a major role in creating editions of medieval texts. The whole idea, however, does seem to contradict our present view of the Middle Ages as a culture of textual variance rather than stability. The reconstruction in itself, therefore, would seem to be that of a memory based on our contemporary ideas of texts (or rather works) as invariable entities. It could therefore be argued that any edition (and in the extention any translation) of a medieval work, whether it is based on a single manuscript text or is the result of the text critical efforts of the phi­ lologist must be seen as a re-construction of memory in our own time. Rather than representing a medieval memory, it is our construction of a memory of the Middle Ages, provided to form an image (or a monument) in our imagination of this period. As a next step, it is important to stress the importance of theoretical aware­ ness among researchers working within the field of memory studies. The edition is no clear-cut route to insights in the memory culture, neither of oral traditions preceding the medieval manuscripts or the manuscript culture itself. To re-con­ struct memory from an oral culture based on editions formed in the nineteenth, twentieth or twenty-first centuries with the various ideological preconceptions they are based on requires cautiousness. A romantic idea of the author formed by the nineteenth century or of an oral tradition preceding the writing down on parchment with several centuries have obviously influenced the way the edited text was formed in the earliest modern editions, while an ideal from the natural sciences has been highly influential in the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, the methods employed by philologists adhering to New Philology or Material Philology claim to ‘go back to’ the manuscript culture, but it should be obvious that these methods are still part of our own quest to produce memory for our own time. The possibility of providing an edition of a work found in the

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manuscript culture objectively and without any preconceptions appears to be an illusion. For the philologist scrutinising the work of a medieval literate person or preparing an edition of this work based on manuscript texts it is important, however, to be aware of these constraints in order to clearly state hers or his posi­ tion as a scholar. This statement must be taken seriously also by the researchers from other disciplines studying past times based on editions. If the edition is a constructed memory from our own time, it is clear that whatever evidence it pro­ vides of medieval memory must be carefully excavated by the scholar.

Works cited Secondary sources Assmann, Jan. 2011. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization. Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. Cambridge. Bod, Rens. 2013. A New History of the Humanities. The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present. Oxford. Glauser, Jürg. 1998. “Textüberlieferung und Textbegriff im spätmittelalterlichen Norden: Das Beispiel der Riddarasögur.” Arkiv för nordisk filologi 113: 7–27. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. 2003. The Powers of Philology. Dynamics of Textual Scholarship. Urbania, IL. Halbwachs, Maurice 1992. On Collective Memory. Ed. and trans. Lewis Coser. Chicago, IL. [French orig. 1925] Haugen, Odd Einar. 2010. “Stitching the Text Together. Documentary and Eclectic Editions in Old Norse Philology.” In Creating the Medieval Saga: Versions, Variability and Editorial Interpretations of Old Norse Saga Literature. Ed. Judy Quinn and Emily Lethbridge. Odense. 39–65. Jørgensen, Jon Gunnar. 2007. The Lost Vellum Kringla. Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana, 45. Copenhagen. Nora, Pierre. 1989. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire.” Representations. Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory 26: 7–24. Reynolds, L. D. and N. G. Wilson. 1968. Scribes and Scholars. A Guide to the Transmission of Greek & Latin Literature. Oxford. Turner, James. 2014. Philology. The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities. Princeton, NJ.

Svanhildur Óskarsdóttir

II: 7 Miracles

1 Introduction: Martyrs and memory St Cecilia is one in a group of Roman virgin martyrs whose vita et passio was trans­ lated into Old Norse. These stories are set in the first centuries of the Christian era and are meant to reflect the persecutions of early Christians. Each revolves around a young Christian woman of noble birth who, as a part of her faith, wishes to remain chaste. This decision goes against that which society intends for her, but rather than give up her virginity, she endures all kinds of torture before dying a martyr’s death for her faith. Her grave – or another significant place associated with her martyrdom – becomes a place where people come to pray and where miracles occur. The Life of St Cecilia describes how the saint, at the end of her life, donates her house to the service of God and how Pope Urban I has it converted to a church in her name (Ceciliu saga meyiar, Ch. 13 [Life of St Cecilia]). As Christian­ ity established itself, such shrines became key elements in the development of the cult of the saints; a locus where the boundaries between earthly existence and the other world were erased, and where the saint and significant events in his or her life and passion were remembered and celebrated (Brown 1981, Ch. 1). With time, supporting and controlling such sites became crucial for church leaders and other patrons. While the act of remembering the sufferings of a martyr and recalling their deeds would initially have been carried out by eye-witnesses and other contem­ poraries to the events, it would gradually transcend the individual, move into the social sphere and become part of that which nowadays is referred to as cultural memory. Cultural memory, in the words of Ann Rigney “is the historical product of cultural mnemotechniques and mnemotechnologies, from commemorative rituals to historiography, through which shared images of the past are actively produced and circulated” (2004, 366). The stories of the martyrs were written down, translated and transmitted alongside the practices associated with the commemoration of their ordeals, to which also belonged entreaties for their inter­ cession on behalf of the sinner. Stories of such intercession could be integrated into the narrative tradition and used to reinforce religious behaviour as well as enhance the status of certain places – or indeed, people.

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2 Case study: Icelandic miracles of St Cecilia at Húsafell In one of the manuscripts of the Old Norse Ceciliu saga meyiar the narrative is augmented by two miracles set in Borgarfjörðr in Iceland. The first one describes the plight of a certain Þorgils who is struck with severe pain in one knee. Þorgils is taken to his kinsmen at Húsafell, the farmer Þórarinn and his son Brandr, where he arrives a few days before the feast of St Cecilia. The text mentions that Brandr’s mother and Þórarinn’s wife, Guðrún Óspaksdóttir, “hafdi mikla virding a Ceciliu ok let heilagt dagh hennar ok fastadi fyrir” (Ceciliu saga meyiar, Ch. 14) [had a great veneration for Cecilia, observed her feast and fasted before it (author’s transla­ tion)] and adds that this was before the feast of the saint became a Holy Day of Obligation. Þorgils observes the fast. During the night he experiences a vision in which two evil-looking men drag him out of his bed and out of the farmhouse, threatening to bring him to Hell. Þorgils calls on God and his saints for mercy and intervention, but to no avail, and one of the demons proceeds to tear Þorgils’ heart out of his chest. He then sees St Cecilia appear. She sends the demons off in a flight, puts Þorgils’ heart back into his chest and explains to him that through his sins he invoked the anger of God. By taking his heart the demon removed his intellectual abilities (“þa tok hann vit fra þer”) so that Þorgils would have woken from his sleep an imbecile. But because he had observed her feast she deigned to answer his prayers. She then tells him to fast with six other men for six days before the feast of St Andrew (which was the next Holy Day of Obligation, 30 November). He is to repeat this for three years and make known his reason for doing it. She also asks him to give a candle for her own feastday, one which matches the perim­ eter of his leg (i.e. made with the thread used to measure it, see Finucane 1975, 1, n. 5). She heals Þorgils’ leg and endows him with healing powers of his own. When he awakes he finds himself cured. He lives another three years and dies on the eve of the feast of St Andrew, at the end of his commitment, in other words. The second miracle tells the story of the couple Hallbjörn and Vilborg who live at Hvammr in Hvítársíða. One night in November Hallbjörn dreams he is tramp­ led by a flock of lambs. Terrified, he decides to observe the feast of St Cecilia by fasting, although this had not been his custom. He awakes and, remembering his vow, fulfills it. A few days later he is struck with a severe headache which renders him deaf. This goes on for a fortnight until St Cecilia appears to him in his sleep and offers him this advice: “far þu upp til Husafellz ok lat Brand Þorarinsson gera at þer, en ek man beina at med honum, þviat ek a þar heima” (Ceciliu saga meyiar, Ch. 15) [Go up to Húsafell to seek the attention of Brandr Þórarinsson. I shall help him, for that is my home (author’s translation)].



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On the seventh day of Christmas, Vilborg and Hallbjörn set off, despite other peoples’ reservations. They stop for the night at the farm Ás and reach Húsafell the following day. Vilborg asks Brandr to heal Hallbjörn but he says he does not have the knowledge to do this. He tries, nevertheless, but without success. The following evening, Vilborg again asks Brandr if he can offer Hallbjörn any assis­ tance. He suggests that they and their entire household should observe the feast of St Cecilia for as long as they live and fast for six days before it. They are also to make a candle corresponding to the size of Hallbjörn’s head and send it to Húsafell each winter in time for the saint’s feast. In the night, St Cecilia appears to Hallbjörn and says that he will now be rewarded for his fasting before her feast earlier in the winter. She lays her hands on his head and his ears and when he wakes, Hallbjörn is well again. Both miracles mention that the events they describe take place before the feast of St Cecilia was adopted in Iceland. They may therefore be seen as accounts of how the cult of the saint takes root in Iceland (Cormack 1994, 23) and of which people were instrumental in that process, namely the family at Húsafell. The first miracle attributes the cult of St Cecilia at Húsafell to the mistress of the house, Guðrún Óspaksdóttir. It is evident, however, that her husband Þórarinn concurs with his wife’s custom, for he supports Þorgils when the latter decides to fast although other people fear the fasting might be detrimental to his health. Brandr, the son of Guðrún and Þórarinn, plays a major role in the second miracle, along with his son Sighvatr the priest. When St Cecilia appears to Hallbjörn and orders him to go to Húsafell, she is referring him to Brandr to be healed. Brandr is not capable of healing Hallbjörn on his own, however; input from the saint is needed. Conversely, one could say, Cecilia needs or uses Brandr to strenghten her cult, for it is not until Brandr has suggested that Vilborg and Hallbjörn (and their house­ hold) take up veneration of the saint that Cecilia heals Hallbjörn. So whereas the stories portray Guðrún as a pioneer in the veneration of St Cecilia, her son may be seen as promoting the cult. This accords well with information from other sources which state that Brandr Þórarinsson established a church at Húsafell. The oldest charter for the church claims it was drawn up by Brandr himself and ratified by bishop Klængr Þorsteinsson (DI I, 217), which would date it to before Klængr’s death in 1176, a few years before the feast of St Cecilia was adopted into the Icelandic calendar in 1179. The charter does not specify the patrons of the church at Húsafell, but it may be inferred from the later Vilchinsmáldagi [inventory of bishop Wilkin, 1391– 1405] (1397) that it was dedicated to St Cecilia and the Blessed Virgin Mary, as the inventory lists images of those two saints among the the church’s possessions. An inventory from 1504 reveals that the image of St Cecilia was considerably grander than that of the Virgin. Its estimated value was two hundred in the historical Ice­

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landic currency of the time (approximately the equivalent of 1,75 cows), and the church also owned a special cloth, almost 2 metres long, to drape over it, which gives an idea of its size. Cecilia thus seems to have been the main patron of the church at Húsafell and that may have been so from the beginning. Among the church’s books in 1504 is a “seceliukuer” (DI VII, 738), which refers to a liturgical book, either one to be read from or to be sung from. The church at Saurbær in Eyjafjörður, which was also dedicated to Cecilia, possessed both an officium for St Cecilia (“ceciliu historiu ä kuere”) and a copy of Ceciliu saga (DI III, 524). Observing the feast of a saint is in essence a commemorative ceremony, both social and individual, in which texts play a crucial role. A series of lessons from the saint’s life (vita) form a part of the liturgy, as do rhymed offices based on the legend. Miracles typically make up part of the text and may serve to draw atten­ tion to a specific time, persons, or place associated with the saint. By attaching miracles associated with Húsafell to the legend of St Cecilia people made sure that the family of Húsafell would be remembered together with the saint on her feast day. The tradition of the miracles therefore accomplishes two things. Firstly, by bringing the saint closer to home, as it were, it reinforces the cult of St Cecilia, the ceremonies, and the behaviour associated with it (fasting, giving of candles, celebration of mass). The miracles also emphasize how important it is for the individual to remember the feast and the accompanying fasts and show that a person is rewarded for doing so. It is interesting in this context that Þorgils (who in his vision loses his heart and with it his vit) and Hallbjörn (who turns tempora­ rily deaf) are both threatened with losing capacities which are among the three parts of the human intellect according to St Cecilia in her saga: mannvit [innate knowledge], that which we have not learnt; minni [memory], that which we have been taught; and skilning [understanding], through which we process what we see and hear (Ceciliu saga meyiar, Ch. 5). Secondly, the miracles remind people of the role played by the family at Húsafell in the establishment of the cult. In that way, information which once presumably formed a part of the com­ municative memory of the family at Húsafell and the people of the district tran­ scends into cultural memory which is anchored to Húsafell and its surroundings (cf. Assmann 1995, 128–129). In the second miracle, especially, information about farms and routes in the district are included: we learn that Hallbjörn and Vilborg live at Hvammr and that their journey takes them first to Vilborg’s brother at Ás (probably the farm now known as Stóri-Ás which later became the site of a church dedicated to St Andrew) and then on to Húsafell. In the miracle, St Cecilia states explicitly that Húsafell is her home – a statement which takes on added signifi­ cance in the light of Ceciliu saga’s conclusion, where she bequeaths her house to God – and Brandr specifies that the candle Hallbjörn and Vilborg are to make is for the church at Húsafell. (In the first miracle there is no stipulation as to the



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church for which Þorgils is to make the candle, but the audience would probably understand it as being Húsafell since it was the only church in the area dedicated to St Cecilia.) Votive gifts were an important source of income for the churches, so Brandr and his family had a vested interest in promoting the cult of St Cecilia by showing how their patron saint had early on performed miracles on people at Húsafell. The implication of the miracles is that Húsafell was not only the loca­ tion of a church dedicated to St Cecilia, it was a place where she worked her mira­ cles, her home. Guðrún, Þórarinn and Brandr had taken her in. We have no way of knowing when the miracles where written down, but with their codification the connection between St Cecilia and the Húsafell family had been solidified. The written text became the means to fix and transmit memories of the establishment of the church at Húsafell across time (Rigney 2004, 369). The miracles are preserved in one manuscript only, Stock. Perg. fol. no. 2, written by three scribes sometime in the period 1425–1445. (The other two manuscripts of Ceciliu saga are AM 429 12mo, which does not contain the miracles, and AM 235 fol. which is defective at the end so it cannot be determined whether or not the miracles followed the saga in that manuscript.) One of the scribes, and the one responsible for the Cecilia miracles, was Ormr Loptsson. Ormr belonged to one of the most powerful families in Iceland in the fifteenth century. He owned the farm Staðarhóll in Saurbær in Dalasýsla where the manuscript may have been written. Marginal entries suggest, at least, that the manuscript was in Dalasýsla for some time until it was passed on to people living in Ísafjarðardjúp (Foote 1962, 12–14). The inclusion of the Húsafell-miracles in a manuscript written in Dalasýsla may have had a specific significance for people of that district, because the family of Húsafell had a direct link to the area according to Laxdæla saga: “Óspakr hét sonr Bolla ok Þórdísar; dóttir Óspaks var Guðrún, er átti Þórarinn Brandsson; þeira sonr var Brandr, er setti stað að Húsafelli; hans sonr var Sighvatr prestr, er þar bjó lengi.” (Laxdœla saga, Ch. 78) [“Bolli and Thordis had a son named Ospak, whose daughter Gudrun was married.to Thorarin Brandsson. Their son Brand endowed the church at Husafell. His son Sighvat became a priest and lived there for a long time.” (The saga of the people of Laxardal, Ch. 78)] Guðrún was thus the great-granddaughter of Guðrún Ósvífursdóttir of whom Laxdæla saga says that she became a devouted Christian (trúkona mikil) and spent long hours praying in the church at night (Ch. 76). Towards the end of saga we are told that when Guðrún Ósvífursdóttir died she was buried at Helgafell and that her son, Gellir Þorkelsson, established a splendid church there. People who were aware of Guðrún Óspaksdóttir’s ancestry, whether through oral tradition in the west of Iceland or through familiarity with Laxdæla saga, would presumably view the Cecilia miracles in the light of the family’s associa­ tion with Christianity at the time when the new faith was taking hold. The inclu­

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sion of the miracles in a fifteenth-century manuscript, produced for a family in the upper eschelons of Icelandic society at the time, therefore served to reinforce the idea that the family most prominent in the district in the eleventh and the twelfth century were pious people, instrumental in consolidating Christianity in the country. No wonder, perhaps, that the saints were on their side. In this way the miracles could be used to strengthen the identity of a late medieval family concerned with maintaining their status in society – and their standing with God.

Works cited Primary sources Ceciliu saga meyiar. In Heilagra manna søgur. Ed. C. R. Unger. Christiania, 1877. I: 276–297. DI = Diplomatarium Islandicum. Copenhagen, 1852–1972. Laxdœla saga. In Laxdœla saga, Halldórs þættir Snorrasonar, Stúfs þáttr. Ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson. ÍF, 5. Reykjavík, 1934. 1–248. The Saga of the People of Laxardal. Trans. Keneva Kunz. In The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. 5. Ed. Viðar Hreinsson. Reykjavík, 1997. 1–120.

Secondary sources Assmann, Jan. 1995. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” New German Critique 65: 125–133. Brown, Peter. 1981. The Cult of the Saints. Its Rise and Function in Late Antiquity. Chicago. Cormack, Margaret. 1994. The Saints in Iceland. Their Veneration from the Conversion to 1400. Subsidia hagiographica, 78. Brussels. Finucane, R. C. 1975. “The Use and Abuse of Medieval Miracles.” History 60: 1–10. Foote, Peter, ed. 1962. Lives of Saints. Perg. Fol. Nr. 2 in the Royal Library, Stockholm. Copenhagen. Rigney, Ann. 2004. “Portable Monuments. Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans.” Poetics Today 25.2: 361–396.

Ásdís Egilsdóttir

II: 8 Hagiography 1 Introduction The book and the written word were highly respected within Jewish-Christian communities. The book often symbolises the word of God, his commands or his wisdom, which should be constantly kept in mind and remembered (Hubrath 1996, 25–26). Saints’ lives and other religious texts offer numerous insights into medieval mnemonic culture. Although this chapter focuses mainly on learned memory (memoria artificialis) as opposed to natural memory (memoria naturalis), there are other aspects to consider. Miracles were originally oral stories told by people who believed that they had received help in their needs by the interven­ tion of a saint. They are stories that are likely to have been told and spread orally even after they had been written down by clerical authorities. Those who heard miracle stories were likely to relate to them and keep them in their memories. Prayers were memorised and an important part of religious instruction. Calen­ dars served as an aid to commemorate saints on their annual feast-days. Hand­ books and florilegia served as a memory aid. Educational material was organised in small units to ease memorisation (Ásdís Egilsdóttir 2009a; 2009b; 2013). Chris­ tian texts indicate that their writers were familiar with mnemonic technique and the usage of loci (Ásdís Egilsdóttir 2006, 217–223). The first half of the preface to Stjórn (a translation of the Old Testament from Genesis to II Kings, with additional material from Peter Comestor and Vincent of Beauvais), which is a loose transla­ tion of the preface to Historia scholastica (a biblical paraphrase with additional material to make a universal history) by Peter Comestor, describes four ways of interpreting and understanding the scriptures. The preface shows how knowl­ edge is organised to be mentally viewed as parts of a room, floor, walls and ceiling (Stjórn, 1–2). A similar example is the homily Kirkjudagsprédikun (Church dedica­ tion homily) (Íslensk hómilíubók, 147–153; Ásdís Egilsdóttir 2006, 219). Here, parts of a building serve as a memory aid and tools for religious instruction.

2 Case study The following is a study on how memory imagery and metaphors are represented in Icelandic hagiography. As a paradigm, hagiographers had various hagiographic and biblical material both at hand and kept in their memory (Ásdís Egilsdóttir https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-044

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2013). To be able to shape their material according to hagiographic tradition, the writers needed knowledge of the Bible and hagiographic literature. Translated and vernacular religious literature contains numerous biblical references and the same reference is often differently phrased, possibly as a result of mnemonic transmission (Carruthers 1990, 82, 96, 157–174). There are biblical references in all vernacular Icelandic saints’ lives. The oldest text, Þorláks saga helga [saga of St Þorlákr] from around 1200, has about forty references. The unknown hagiogra­ pher probably knew a substantial amount of verses by heart. Jóns saga helga [saga of St Jón] is the life and miracles of St Jón Ögmundar­ son (1052–1120), consecrated in 1106 as the first bishop of Hólar. In 1200, his earthly remains were disinterred and washed and the Alþingi [general assem­ bly] officially recognised his cult. A Latin life was written by Gunnlaugr Leifsson (d.  1218/1219), a Benedictine monk of the cloister in Þingeyrar. Jóns saga helga now exists in three recensions, a thirteenth-century Icelandic version that proba­ bly represents best the original Latin version and two versions from the fourteenth century. The chapters in the version attributed to Bergr Sokkason (version L) that describe education and learning give special emphasis to memoria imagery and metaphors based on mnemonic technique, with its ingenious visual and pictorial methods. The image of the memorial storehouse, in various forms, is frequent in pre-modern mnemonic practice. Containers or boxes of different sizes where things are neatly kept in order, appears in several forms, such as thesaurus (store­ house), cella (see below), cellula (small cella), arca (box) or scrinium (bookcase). Bees and beehives are also frequent images (Carruthers 1990, 35–44, 191–192). Bees collect honey and keep it in the compartments of the beehives. A common metaphor for study and stored information is that of a bee collecting nectar with which she makes honey to pack her cella or the thesaurus with wisdom. Cella means storeroom, but cellae are also small rooms or huts for people, as in monas­ tic use. The compartments made by bees for their honey were also called cellae. Jóns saga helga gives the following description of the industrious activities and learned atmosphere at Hólar: þegar signum var til tíða gǫrt, skunduðu allir þegar ór sínum smákofum til kirkjunnar, sætligan seim sem þrifit býflygi til býstokks heilagrar kirkju meðr sér berandi, hvert þeir hǫfðu saman borit ór lystuligum vínkjallara heilagra ritninga [emphasis added]. (Jóns saga, Ch. 28) [when the sign was given for divine service, they hastened from their small huts to church, like industrious bees carrying sweet honeycomb with them to the hive of holy chapel, whither they collected from the delightful wine cellar of sacred writings. (author’s translation)]



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Books, knowledge and memory were also compared to meadows and flowers. Flowers were picked and collected, the corn, the food which the meadows pro­ duced, was digested. The young Jón is a model student: Sem herra Ísleifr byskup undirstóð hversu vel Jón fóstri hans færði sér til nytsemðar þá góða hluti sem hann kenndi honum ok hversu vel þat sáðkorn fagrliga plantaðiz í hjartans akri sem hann hafði nógliga í sáð meðr sínum ágætum kenningum ok fagrligum dœmum [emphasis added]. (Jóns saga, Ch. 6) [As lord bishop Ísleifr perceived how well his foster-son Jón made use of the good things which he taught him and how well that seed corn planted itself beautifully in the field of the heart which he had carefully sown with his excellent teachings and fair examples.] (author’s translation)]

In this passage, hjarta [heart] and akr [field] are intertwined as memoria images. To keep something in the heart was understood throughout the Middle Ages to be a synonym for memorising. King David appeared to Bishop Jón in a dream, playing a harp, and the bishop remembered the tune: “Af því bjóð, herra konungr, at mér sé nǫkkur harpa fœrð at ek prófi í yðru augliti hvárt nǫkkur partr þessa himneska hǫrpuslags hefir í mínu hjarta eptir dvalst.” [emphasis added] (Jóns saga, Ch. 9) [Please, my Lord, have a harp brought to me so that I can prove before you if any part of this heavenly harp music has remained in my heart. (author’s translation)] Writing in the heart is also a common biblical metaphor (Carruthers 1990, 34–45; Hubrath 1996, 25–26). Priests and laymen alike gather wisdom with minnissjóðr (memory as collection of coins) as the equivalent of the memoria-metaphor sacculus, a bag used to carry books as well as coins (Jóns saga, Ch. 28). Jóns saga helga illustrates and accentuates Bishop Jón’s piety and edu­ cational zeal. The bishop engaged two foreign teachers to teach in the school, Gísli inn gauzki to teach Latin and grammatica, and Rikini (probably from from Elsass-Lothringen) to teach music and versificatio. The humble young priest and teacher, Gísli, is said not to have relied on his memory while preaching (Jóns saga, Ch. 24). The more experienced Rikini, on the other hand, was so “minnigr at hann kunni utanbókar allan sǫng á tólfmánuðum” (Jóns saga, Ch. 28) [had such a good memory that he knew by heart all songs for the twelve months of the year (author’s translation)]. According to Jóns saga helga, not only the students benefitted from the teaching of Hólar: a church builder learned grammatica by listening to stu­ dents being taught (Jóns saga, H, Ch. 18). The narrative states that the grammatica “[...] loddi honum [...] vel í eyrum” [stayed well in his ears (author’s translation)], which emphasises that he remembered what he had heard, although neither clas­ sical nor medieval tradition regarded an “ear of the mind” equivalent to that of the “eye of the mind” (Carruthers 1990, 27). However, by listening and remembe­ ring he gained knowledge of Latin as well as if he had been among the students

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of the school. The hagiographer continues to make use of memoria-imagery when describing the teaching of the masters, by describing how students should: “fylla vanðlaupa síns hjarta af þeim molum viskubrauðs er þeirra kennifeðr brutu þeim til andligrar fœðu, af hverjum sáum blómberanligan akr guðligrar miskun­ nar meðr fǫgrum ilmi víða upp runninn.” [emphasis added] (Jóns saga, Ch. 28) [fill the wicker-basket of his heart with the crumbled bread of wisdom which their instructors broke up as spiritual food for them, as a result of which we saw a blossoming field of divine mercy sending up sweet fragrances (author’s translation)]. The words of the preachers at Hólar were listened to, processed and transfor­ med into memory. When describing the impressive preaching of the teacher, the hagiographer writes: “[...] saddi hann þeira hug ok hjǫrtu gnógliga meðr andligri fœðslu guðligra orða.” [emphasis added] (Jóns saga, Ch. 24) [he fulfilled the minds and hearts of the people with the spiritual food of divine words (author’s transla­ tion)]. This could be an example of the common digestion-rumination metaphor. Memory is depicted as a stomach where stored texts taken from a meadow of books or learning are digested (Carruthers 1990, 38–40, 160–165). In Jóns saga helga, natural memory is represented by the oral, local tradition used as a source by the hagiographer (Ásdís Egilsdóttir 2006, 223–224). Memories of local people, especially women, contributed to collective memory that shaped the narrative, together with hagiographic and biblical motifs.

Works cited Primary sources Íslensk hómilíubók. Fornar stólræður. Ed. Sigurbjörn Einarsson, Guðrún Kvaran and Gunnlaugur Ingólfsson. Reykjavík, 1993. Jóns saga Hólabyskups ens helga. Ed. Peter Foote. Editiones Arnamagnæanæ, Series A, 14. Copenhagen, 2003. Stjórn. Ed. C.R. Unger. Christiania, 1862.

Secondary sources Ásdís Egilsdóttir. 2006. “From Orality to Literacy: Remembering the Past and the Present in Jóns saga helga”. In Reykholt som makt og lærdomssenter i den islandske og nordiske kontekst. Ed. Else Mundal. Reykholt. 215–228. Ásdís Egilsdóttir. 2009a. “Study, Memorize, Compose.” In Studi Anglo-Norreni in onore di John S. McKinnell: “He hafað sundorgecynd”. Ed. Maria Elena Ruggerini and Veronka Szöke. Cagliari. 378–386.



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Ásdís Egilsdóttir 2009b. “Orðið og bókin”. In Greppaminni. Rit til heiðurs Vésteini Ólasyni sjötugum. Ed. Margrét Eggertsdóttir, et al. Reykjavík. 43–51. Ásdís Egilsdóttir. 2013. “Translatio. Dýrlingar færðir heim.” Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar Háskóla Íslands: Studia Theologica Islandica 36.2: 39–52. Carruthers, Mary. 1990. The Book of Memory. A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge. Hubrath, Margarete. 1996. Schreiben und Erinnern. Zur “memoria” im Liber Specialis Gratiae Mechthilds von Hakeborn. Paderborn.

Media Visual modes

Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen

II: 9 Images

1 Introduction: Images – vision – memory To the Latin Middle Ages, the mental faculties of memoria and imaginatio, memory and imagination, were deeply intertwined and integrated in function. In his commentary on memory, the influential scholastic philosopher and the­ ologian Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) made it clear that without images neither understanding nor remembrance can occur (Lentes 2002, 181–183, quoting from Thomas’ De memoria et reminiscentia commentarium). External physical pictures are processed by the inner vision of imagination to be stored in memory, which forms part of the internal sensory faculties, the inner sensorium, that constitutes the basis of human perception and cognition (Skinnebach 2015, 164; Laugerud 2015, 263–264). Inward and outward sensation depend on each other. Without the accompanying processes of imagination and memorisation, which comprise the Gestaltung, the shaping and the storage of perceived images, no vision and sensory perception can take place – and no material imagery will be experi­ enced as recognisable depictions. This is why man himself will gradually iden­ tify with and become like the images that he admits into his malleable mind and organ of recollection. Whoever looks at Christ – the most memorable and iconic figure of medieval visual culture – and truly absorbs his image, will ultimately be transformed into Christ’s own likeness (Lentes 2002, 182). The picture is a mirror through which man becomes what he sees, what he envisions and what he recalls. Below, we shall inspect an illustrative case of this imaginative and recol­ lective transformation.

2 Case Study: Pictorial and visual mediation of memory In the words of Jean-Claude Schmitt, “images make the past present. [...] Thanks to memory, the past becomes images” (Schmitt 2013, 18–19). Thus, the history of memory intersects with and is shaped by the history of media, specially and spe­ cifically the history of images. Medieval memory is structured and organised by a historical media matrix that evolves around ritual media, narrative media or cult media capable of producing images with a strong performative, embodied and corporeal presence. In a Christian media environment, images and visual memo­ https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-045

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rials aim to produce seemingly authentic and reliable memories with a believ­ able presence. The object of memory – say, the Passion of Christ – is mediated and implanted so as to make its recollection seem immediate and natural to the subject of memory, that is, a believer or a congregation, who as a result can seem to know and remember Christ by themselves and be able to identify with this remembrance. “[A]ll Christian images perform a work of memory. [...] Christian images fulfil a function of recordatio: they must record, bring back to life, make present, transmit the memory of the past gesta of Christ and the saints.” (Schmitt 2013, 20).

Anamnesis as performative memory: “do this in remembrance of me” Due to this process of commemorative mediation and authentication, eventu­ ally medieval memory is Christianised, also in Scandinavia, hence naturalising a Christocentric structure of recollection and a ritualised mode of commemoration, encountered both within the church and in court protocol, both in the religious and the secular spheres of life. Christianity is fundamentally a religion of anamnesis, a culture of remembrance, and so are Christian images (Laugerud 2010). Referring to the memorial sacrifice of the liturgy of the Eucharist, the Christian concept of anamnesis has its origin in ritual, more precisely in Christ’s words at the Last Supper, where, according to Luke and Paul, he took the bread of com­ munion, broke it and said: “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remem­ brance of me.” In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.” (1 Corinthians 11:24–25, echoing Luke 22:19–20). This programmatic memo­ rial proclamation is ritualised from the onset to evoke the rite of communion. When Jesus supposedly said these words, he already enacted his own anamnesis, staging its commemorative repetition in the future. His last supper also became his first memorial, instituting an iconic scene to be performed over and over again: a very striking and memorable image of the Church as a mystical body united by a communal act of bodily consumption, a corporeal covenant sealed by the oral incorporation of the sacrament and the indigestion of the Saviour’s sacrificial body and blood. By specifying that we do this in remembrance of him (and not merely read or behold this in remem­ brance of him), the Lord-performer instituted an embodied and physical act of recollection, implying that the faithful actively partake in the performative image rather than passively contemplating it. When Christ’s sacrifice on the cross was remembered and actualised during Mass, the Christian himself would literally remember and re-embody the incarnate Saviour, participating in the re-enactment



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of select moments of his life, passion and actions. The consuming congregation recalled and, as it were, resurrected Christ by materially absorbing his body to let it live in their own members. They honoured and revived his memory by becom­ ing him, that is, by identifying corporeally with him through sensory embodi­ ment. Communion was a ritual – and an image – of embodied and digestive memory, no less. To do memory was to devour, digest and incarnate once again.

Visual anamnesis: the rich and the poor man’s memory Throughout the Christian Middle Ages, this work of memory was also performed by pictures, notably ritual images, cult images and passion images. On the one hand, serial depictions of narrative scenes or tableaux with several figures would record and recall the dramatic historia of biblical myth, sacred legend, mira­ cles or martyrdom. On the other hand, iconic figures more or less en face would present the ideal imago of saints, mediators and Christ’s hypostatic appearances to be remembered by the spectator as a holy presence in the image, either majes­ tic and awe-inspiring or intimate and personally appealing (Kessler 2000,  1; Belting 1994,  10). Scandinavian imagery was no different in this respect, but sometimes strategies of visualisation and memorisation particular to the region were employed. This applies for instance to the late medieval tradition of mural painting, which used to cover the walls and vaults of Danish and Swedish parish churches with a sprawling multitude of profuse, fanciful and humorous motifs centred on our bodily existence and experience – sometimes hieratic and holy, at other times colloquial and vernacular, sometimes pastoral and moralising, at other times diabolical and devilish, sometimes virtuous and edifying, at other times grotesque, licentious and sexually abusive. The mnemonic function of such murals was often of a moral character with graphic images reminding viewers of divine or saintly models of desirable conduct as well as the carnal consequences of not abiding by their ethical standards and honourable constitution. Eschatological reminders abound as the iconographi­ cal end point of biblical cycles, but also models of a Christian (or emphatically profane and unchristian) way of living, stemming from daily life in a rural society. Here, the viewer may have seen himself or herself reflected in depicted person­ ages of either high habitus or low intentions, pictorial exemplars or mirrors of pious aspiration or ungodly depravation. These mirroring mementos were meant to recall exemplary ways to live and act, sometimes echoing the preoccupations of a memento mori [remember (that you have) to die] or ars moriendi [the art of dying], at many other times though aspiring to a sort of ars vivendi [art of living] or even memento vivere [remember (how) to live] (Jørgensen 2004). This is vividly

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illustrated by the example of the rich man’s prayer and the poor man’s prayer, a pictorial version of the motif of the good and the bad prayer (‘Das gute und das schlechte Gebet’) prevalent in Northern Europe and especially in the area of South-Eastern Denmark around 1500 (Wildhaber 1967; Hammer 1990; Jørgensen 2004, 9–15). This antithetical Mahnbild is found within the circle of the so-called Everlöv/Brarup-Elmelunde workshop or group in the churches of Elmelunde, Fanefjord, Keldby, Tingsted, Åstrup, Everlöv and Röddinge, and formerly also in Tirsted, Nørre Alslev and Särslöv, located on the southern isles of Denmark or in Scania in present-day Sweden (see colour plate 18). The rich and the poor man’s prayers enact a socio-historical norm of how to bear Christ in mind and promote this Christocentric memory construct by showing his crucified body as an immediate object of the good prayer and the accompanying mnemonic practice. It shows how to do the memory of Christ when practising prayer in the right way with body and soul wholly committed to the memorial task. Image and word, visuality and orality, physicality and spir­ ituality, consumption and contemplation, ritual and devotion, are all engaged in the tangible work of memory. The poor man humbly kneels on the ground with his pitiful rosary sliding through his fingers to commemorate and venerate Jesus, portrayed either as the naked, suffering body on the cross or as the bleeding Man of Sorrows. In both cases, the Saviour’s invoked presence stems from an image with a ritual motif in front of which the praying takes place, be it the crucifix on the Calvary, that is, in the middle of the church, or the oft depicted Mass of Pope Gregory the Great when the Eucharistic body of Christ materialised itself out of a sacrificial Host or an image on the altar, according to a fifteenth-century legend reworked from earlier sources. Rich in piety but poor in materiality, the impoverished follower prays “deus p[ro]pici[us] esto michi peccato[ri]”, or, alternatively, “deus gracia esto mihi pec­ catori” [God, have mercy on me, a sinner], as does the humbled prototype in Luke 18:13. His earnest supplication is directed at the Saviour’s five wounds, reminis­ cent of commemorative devotion to each of the painful gashes in contemporary Danish prayer books, such as Johanne Nielsdatter’s prayer to the five wounds of Jesus Christ (Middelalderens danske Bønnebøger, I: 76–77). In his devout com­ passion, he truly remembers the pain and passion of the Lord on the cross. His thoughts and imploring words penetrate the bleeding body, illustrated by five conspicuous rays expressly projected from his mouth to the most sacred wounds as he addresses, recollects and envisions these, one by one. This oral radiation is a manifest performance of the emotional and memorial activity required to really absorb the Saviour’s image and participate in its invocation of the bloody sacrifice, that is, its anamnesis of Christ’s person and deeds. This is an image of anamnesis in action, anamnesis performed, so to speak – a meta-picture of



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‘pictorial memory’ in operation, to use Jan Assmann’s phrase (Assmann 1995, 129, discussing Aby Warburg). But anamnesis, as we have seen, involves sensory embodiment. The most absorbing recollection of Corpus Christi mirrors and resurrects it in the body of the beholder. Indeed, the radiating rays carrying the good prayer may also be perceived as flowing the other way and transmitting the Eucharistic blood of the sacrificial body to the mouth of the devotee in response to his oral commitment. He sees, he prays, he remembers, he drinks, he consumes, he communes (in both senses of communication and Communion). The rays used to stand out in a bright red colour, which would call to mind the blood gushing from Christ’s lesions, as well as the bodily matter of the Holy Sacrament ingested by the communicant. As a result of this incarnate interchange, Jesus even appears to turn himself towards the poor man to meet his devouring devotion. In the end, the poor recollector starts to look like poor Jesus, imitating him in both poverty, humility and physi­ ognomy. Through the act of recordatio Christi, he fulfils the compassionate visual identification and embodied remembrance in the so-called imitatio Christi. By means of pictorial recollection, he himself becomes Christ – or an alter Christus. The rich man, on the other hand, does not become another Christ through his somewhat superficial and misled prayer. He does not look like Christ, because he seems to have forgotten Christ in his heart. His piety is poor. Despite kneeling with his fine rosary and saying “misere[re] mei deus” (Psalm 51:1) [Have mercy on me, O God], his penitence is not truly focused at the Lord. His prayer is revealed to be an outward show, a mere bodily and material posture, but there is no inward truth in his performance, even if he is not aware of this slippage himself. He does not meet the commemorative conceptions and ideals, which he none­ theless helps institute and maintain through his opposed, negative example. Equipped as a wealthy farmer, a well-dressed merchant or a local proprietor, he only manages to think of his earthly possessions: his horse, clothes, money chest, food and occasionally the maid preparing the meal. Here, no visual communion takes place because there is no remembrance, no sincere anamnesis. He does not really see the tortured body in front of him, because he is absorbed in his own bodily needs. Nevertheless, by forgetting about Christ’s suffering, he helps his recipients remember and see. To really see is to remember – and not to see is to forget. To really remember is to become – and not to remember is to perish, in an eschatological sense. As a final reminder, Thomas Lentes recalls what is at stake in this motif of visualised memorisation, rich and poor, good and bad: Das Gebet wird […] ein Vorgang der Memoria […]. In der Memoria des Menschen entschei­ det sich sein Heil, und es liegt ganz bei ihm, welchen Bildern er bei der Imagination und Memoria im Gebet folgt. Zudem gilt: Das Gedächtnis des Heils ist primär Bildgedächtnis

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im Innern des Menschen. […] Der innere Mensch als Projektionsfläche von Bildern. (Lentes 2002, 185–186, 215) [The prayer becomes [...] a performance of Memoria [...]. In the memory of man his salvation is determined, and it is really up to him which images he follows in his prayer by the acts of Imaginatio and Memoria. Moreover, the memory of salvation is primarily pictorial memory [Bildgedächtnis] within the interior of man. [...] Inner man as a projection panel of images. (author’s translation)]

To be worthy of salvation, man needs to remember that he is made in God’s image, using exemplary imagery to realise and recollect his origins as an imago Dei. Even today, we ought not to let that slip into oblivion.

Works cited Primary sources Middelalderens danske Bønnebøger. Ed. Karl Martin Nielsen. Vol. I–V. Copenhagen, 1946–1982.

Secondary sources Assmann, Jan. 1995. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” New German Critique 65: 125–133. Belting, Hans. 1994. Likeness and Presence. A History of the Image before the Era of Art. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Chicago. Hammer, Karen Elisabeth. 1990. Sakrale Wandmalerei in Dänemark und Norddeutschland im ausgehenden Mittelalter. Eine Studie zu den Malereien der Elmelundegruppe in Sakralräumen Süddänemarks unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Kirche zu Fanefjord sowie der norddeutschen Wandmalerei. Ammersbek bei Hamburg. Jørgensen, Hans Henrik L. 2004. I kroppens spejl. Krop og syn i senmiddelalderlige danske kalkmalerier. Aarhus. Kessler, Herbert L. 2000. Spiritual Seeing. Picturing God’s Invisibility in Medieval Art. Philadelphia, PA. Laugerud, Henning. 2010. “Memory Stored and Reactivated. Some Introductory Reflections.” ARV: Nordic Yearbook of Folklore Studies, 66. Uppsala. 7–20. Laugerud, Henning. 2015. “Memory. The Sensory Materiality of Belief and Understanding in Late Medieval Europe.” In The Saturated Sensorium. Principles of Perception and Mediation in the Middle Ages. Ed. Hans Henrik L. Jørgensen, Henning Laugerud and Laura K. Skinnebach. Aarhus. 246–272. Lentes, Thomas. 2002. “Inneres Auge, äußerer Blick und heilige Schau. Ein Diskussionsbeitrag zur visuellen Praxis in Frömmigkeit und Moraldidaxe des späten Mittelalters.”



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In Frömmigkeit im Mittelalter. Politisch-soziale Kontexte, visuelle Praxis, körperliche Ausdrucksformen. Ed. Klaus Schreiner and Marc Müntz. Munich. 179–220. Schmitt, Jean-Claude. 2013. “Images and the Work of Memory, with Special Reference to the Sixth-Century Mosaics of Ravenna, Italy.” In Memory and Commemoration in Medieval Culture. Ed. Elma Brenner, Meredith Cohen and Mary Franklin-Brown. Farnham. 13–32. Skinnebach, Laura Katrine. 2015. “Devotion. Perception as Practice and Body as Devotion in Late Medieval Piety.” In The Saturated Sensorium. Principles of Perception and Mediation in the Middle Ages. Ed. Hans Henrik L. Jørgensen, Henning Laugerud and Laura K. Skinnebach. Aarhus. 152–179. Wildhaber, Robert. 1967. “Das gute und das schlechte Gebet. Ein Beitrag zum Thema der Mahnbilder.” In Europäische Kulturverflechtungen im Bereich der volkstümlichen Überlieferung. Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag Bruno Schiers. Ed. Gerhard Heilfurth and Hinrich Siuts. Göttingen. 63–72.

Stephen A. Mitchell

II: 10 Óðinn’s Ravens 1 Introduction: Óðinn’s ‘Thought’ and ‘Memory’ The possibility that memory as such was embodied in pre-Christian Scandinavia is an intriguing antidote to the popular modern image of the Viking Age as one of mere savagery. As apparently represented in a variety of Viking Age art objects, Óðinn (Odin), the chief god of the pre-Christian mythology, was, according to post-conversion sources, associated with two intelligence-gathering ravens, Huginn and Muninn, whose etymons are widely interpreted as representing ‘thought’ and ‘memory’ (cf. Mitchell 2018).

2 Case study: Huginn and Muninn In the nineteenth century, Jacob Grimm, noting the comparable Greek tradition of Apollo’s raven messenger, suggested that in the Old Norse case, the ravens’ names place the active intellectual processes, animus, cogitatio, represented by hugr, against the power of reason and the intellect as a whole, mens, represented by munr, thus directing our thinking about Óðinn’s helpers towards a consideration of humanity’s capacity for cogitation and sapience, broadly speaking, the requi­ site constituent functions of “the mind” (Grimm 1966 [1882], I: 147). E. H. Meyer builds on St Augustine’s attempt to analogise the concept of God to the human mind in De Trinitate (On the Trinity XIV.8), and argues that the ravens should be understood as Memoria ‘memory’ and Intelligentia ‘intelligence, understand­ ing’, which, together with Voluntas ‘will, purpose’, are used by St. Augustine to explain the Holy Trinity (Meyer 1891, 232). Early philological interpretations readily accepted that the etymon of Huginn is indeed hugr ‘thought’, whereas Muninn has given rise to more controversy. Gering and Sijmons (1927, 194) suggest that it derives from munr, which they suggest be understood as ‘discernment’ (Unterscheidungsvermögen). For his part, Albert Morey Sturtevant (1954, 68) argues that munr “does not primarily refer to the intellectual faculties but rather to the emotions, i.e., ‘mind’ in the sense of ‘soul, heart, desire, love’, etc.” Moreover, Sturtevant specifically rejects Lee M. Hollander’s use of ‘remembrance’ for Muninn in his translation of The Poetic Edda (1928), noting that although there must be a connection to the verb muna ‘to remember’, the noun munr “never had the sense of ‘memory’.” https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-046



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Simek (1993, 164) doubts that any attempts to connect the ravens’ names to personifications of Óðinn can be correct, since he views the names as “unlikely to have been invented much before the ninth and tenth centuries”. Noting the Vendel era (AD 550–790) helmet plate in Figure 1, as well as the iconography of various golden bracteates, Simek suggests that “This could lead to the suppo­ sition that the ravens were originally not only Odin’s companions on the battle field, but also Odin’s helpers in animal form in his veterinary function” (Simek 1993, 164). The weight of scholarly opinion over the decades has, however, tended to follow Hollander’s lead: Finnur Jónsson apparently derives Muninn from muna ‘to call to mind, remember’ and glosses the name as “den erindrende” [the remem­ bering one] (Finnur Jónsson and Sveinbjörn Egilsson 1931, 414). In his etymologi­ cal dictionary, Jan de Vries (1961, 395) also accepts the connection with muna without comment, as have several recent mythological handbooks (e.g. Clunies Ross 1994, 213; Orchard 2002, 115). In fact, Óðinn’s ravens are today – albeit not without controversy – commonly referred to in Anglophone contexts as ‘Thought’ and ‘Memory’, which probably reflects many medieval Icelanders’ understanding of the name associations as well. After all, the popular, generally held medieval view need not necessarily have been, and often was not, the same thing as the modern scientific conclusions about word histories (witness, e.g. Snorri’s implied Æsir < Ásía). Thus, an historically correct etymology of a word’s origins can be a very different thing from what later native speakers might have believed and how they may have used the term. Having considered the Huginn and Muninn issue, Lindow (2014, 41) notes, “it seems to me on balance likely that pre-Christian poets and medieval men of letters alike could hardly have overlooked the parallel between hugr/Huginn and muna/Muninn even if one departs from a noun and the other a verb”. These two partially overlapping categories, ‘Thought’ and ‘Memory’ project a powerful image of how the mind can be conceived. Indeed, viewing the mind as consisting of 1) an active thinking component and 2) the power of recollection continues to be valued in modern usage. The entry for mind in The Oxford English Dictionary, for example, divides the various elements into these same two cate­ gories: connotations touching on “Senses relating to memory” and connotations concerned with “Senses relating to thought” (Simpson and Weiner 1993). Com­ bining, on the one hand, cerebration, actual mental activity, or ‘thinking’, with, on the other hand, the capacity to recall past events, ‘memory’, is thus one means of ‘thinking about thinking’, a problem with manifestly deep roots in Indo-Euro­ pean linguistic and cognitive configurations (cf. Buck 1949, 1198–1199, 1202–1203, 1228–1229). Seen in this broader historical perspective, Huginn and Muninn may

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Fig. 1: Vendel period helmet plate featuring a mounted warrior and two flying birds

then ‘simply’ be the particular Nordic visualization of a much more general and much more archaic pattern. Beyond these ‘mind’-oriented roles in Norse literature, Huginn and Muninn were used by poets in more quotidian ways, as e.g. so-called ‘beasts of battle’; typical of such collocations is Munins tugga ‘[battle-slain] corpse’ [lit. ‘Muninn’s (the carrion eater’s) chewed mouthful’] (see Finnur Jónsson and Sveinbjörn Egils­ son 1931).

Textual references The thirteenth-century Icelander Snorri Sturluson describes Óðinn’s avian helpers as follows, “Hrafnar tveir sitja á ǫxlum honum ok segja í eyru honum ǫll tíðindi þau er þeir sjá eða heyra. Þeir heita svá: Huginn ok Muninn. Þá sendir hann í dagan at fljúgja um allan heim ok koma þeir aptr at dǫgurðarmáli. Þar af verðr hann margra tíðinda víss. Því kalla menn hann hrafna guð […]” (Gylfaginning [the tricking of Gylfi], 32) [Two ravens sit on his [i.e. Óðinn’s] shoulders and speak into his ear all the news they see or hear. Their names are Hugin and



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Munin. He sends them out at dawn to fly over all the whole world and they return at the [morning]-meal. As a result, he gets to find out about many events. From this he gets the name the raven-god […] (Gylfaginning), 33]. It is easy to see why the ancient Scandinavians would have favoured the raven in such zoomorphic contexts: opportunistic, gregarious, omnivorous, quar­ relsome, thieving, intelligent, and adaptable as these birds are, there is much about the raven that must have appealed to the mentality of the ancient Scandi­ navians. That this common but remarkable bird is also capable of vocalizations, even imitating the human voice, made the raven a perfect choice for its role in Óðinn’s obsessive attempts to be informed about events. The Old Norse texts make it clear that although the literal functions of the ravens as ‘eyes in the sky’ for Óðinn are similar, Huginn and Muninn are not understood to be identical or synonymous. Immediately following his descrip­ tion of Óðinn’s ravens (above), Snorri cites this verse, also known from the eddaic poem, Grímnismál: Huginn ok Muninn fljúga hverjan dag jǫrmungrund yfir; óumk ek of Hugin, at hann aptr né komit, þó sjámk ek meirr of Munin. (Grímnismál, St. 20) [Hugin and Munin fly every day over the vast-stretching earth; I fear for Hugin that he will not come back, yet I tremble more for Munin. (Grimnir’s Sayings, 51)]

A stanza preserved in another thirteenth-century Icelandic text, The Third Grammatical Treatise, also mentions these same birds, and it too hints at their func­ tions: Flugu hrafnar tveir af Hnikars ǫxlum; Huginn til hanga, en á hræ Muninn (Málhljóða- og málskrúðsrit, 66) [Two ravens flew from Hnikar’s [Óðinn’s] shoulders; Huginn to the hanged and Muninn to the corpses. (author’s translation)]

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Yet another thirteenth-century Icelandic text mentions these ravens and helps explain the verse in The Third Grammatical Treatise: in Ynglinga saga, Snorri Sturluson writes, Óðinn hafði með ser hǫfuð Mímis, ok sagði þat honum mǫrg tíðendi ór ǫðrum heimum, en stundum vakði hann upp dauða menn ór jǫrðu eða settisk undir hanga. Fyrir því var hann kallaðr draugadróttinn eða hangadróttinn. Hann átti hrafna tvá, er hann hafði tamit við mál. Flugu þeir víða um lǫnd ok sǫgðu honum mǫrg tíðendi. Af þessum hlutum varð hann stórliga fróðr. Allar þessar íþróttir kendi hann með rúnum ok ljóðum þeim, er galdrar heita. Fyrir því eru Æsir kallaðir galdrasmiðir. (Ynglinga saga, Ch. 7) [Óðinn kept Mímir’s head by him. And it told him much news from other worlds, and some­ times he awakened the dead from the earth or sat himself under hanged men. Because of this he was called draugadróttinn (‘lord of ghosts’) or hangadróttinn (‘lord of the hanged’). He had two ravens which he had trained to speak. From these he became extremely wise. All these skills he taught along with runes and those songs that are called galdrar (‘magic spells’). Because of this the Æsir are called galdrasmiðir (‘magic makers’). (Ynglinga Saga, Ch. 7)]

Here we see the full range of Óðinn’s information-gathering functions, inclu­ ding roles for the dead; it is surely unlikely to be sheer coincidence that Óðinn as “Lord of Ghouls or of the Hanged” immediately precedes the statement that the carrion-eating ravens are those who keep the god informed. In Norse tradi­ tion, Óðinn’s designation as the god (or lord) of the hanged (hangatýr, hangaguð, hangadróttinn) is generally understood in thanatological terms, wherein he seeks information from the dead and from sacrificial victims (and other hanged men) as they hover between life and death, caught between two worlds, much as he gains runic knowledge through his own self-sacrifice by hanging on Yggdrasill, the World Tree (cf. Schjødt 2008, 173–206; Patton 2009, 213–238, That Huginn in the stanza from The Third Grammatical Treatise should fly to the hanged, where he too will presumably gather information, is very much in keeping with the projection of the more active intellectual processes associated with his etymon. Muninn, on the other hand, flies to the hræ, translated above as ‘corpses’, but which might also be glossed as ‘carrion’ or ‘dead bodies’, and significantly, a word that can also imply the ‘wreck’ or ‘fragment’ of something, all senses that carry with them a feel for the elegiac or memorial function approp­ riate to a mythological bird connected with the notion of memory. Far from being obscure in its intentions, the stanza from The Third Grammatical Treatise speaks directly, if with typically veiled and murky Norse phraseology and images, to the nature, meaning and function of the twinned Huginn and Muninn (on this point, cf. Mitchell 2018). As Hermann summarizes the Nordic case, “Óðinn is anxious that Muninn will not come back, which hints at the relative superiority of memory



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Fig. 2: The small silver figure called ‘Odin fra Lejre’ discovered in 2009, exhibited at Lejre Museum, Denmark

over thought. Asked rhetorically: what is thought without memory, which brings the past into the present?” (Hermann 2014, 17).

Material evidence A distinguishing feature of these ravens is their frequent appearances on materi­ als objects. Thus, for example, Óðinn is shown together with Huginn and Muninn in an eighteenth-century Icelandic manuscript, Stofnun Árna Magnússonar á Íslandi (SÁM) 66 (see colour plate 15), labelled with their names and even citing Gylfaginning’s wording about them. In fact, possible iconographic treatments of these two special ravens have been argued for a variety of art objects, includ­ ing bracteates, stone carvings, brooches and helmet plates, often from the Viking

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Age and other even earlier periods than the medieval literary evidence (e.g. Vang Pedersen 1990; see the review in Simek 1993, 164). The helmet plate from the pre-Viking Age site at Vendel discussed above (see fig. 1), for example, shows a mounted warrior, a snake-like creature, and two flying birds, which are often suggested as representing Huginn and Muninn (although they are also easily explained as akin to the so-called ‘beasts of battle’ trope). Among the most magnificent, and controversial, of these paired bird items is one discovered in 2009 at Gammel Lejre, a significant Viking Age manorial site in Denmark, and one often portrayed in medieval literature as an ancient royal residence. Quickly dubbed ‘Odin from Lejre’ (see fig. 2), and subsequently dated to the first half of the tenth century, it is a small silver object, with niello inlay, c. 1.75 cm in height and weighing 9 grams (Christensen 2009). Interpretations of this object and its possible representation of Óðinn have spawned a substantial debate among scholars (e.g. Christensen 2010; Sonne 2010; Arwill-Nordbladh 2012; Osborn 2015; Sommer and Warmind 2015; Mitchell 2018), but no one has seriously doubted that the avian images on it are most likely intended to repre­ sent ravens speaking into the ears of the seated figure, whether that figure is to be understood as Óðinn, a sorceress, or some other mantic character. A similar grouping of figures appears on objects found at the trade town of Hedeby and on Lolland, Denmark, leading Peter Pentz, curator at the Danish National Museum, to note at the time of a new discovery in 2016 near Nybølle on Lolland, “De tre amuletter har det til fælles, at de har to ravne siddende på stoleryggen, og det leder straks tankerne hen på Odin og hans to ravne” (Laursen 2016) [The three amulets have in common that they have two ravens sitting on the back of a chair, and that quickly leads one’s thoughts to Odin and his two ravens].

Works cited Primary sources Grímnismál. In Eddukvæði. Ed. Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason. ÍF. Reykjavík, 2014. I: 367–379. Grimnir’s Sayings. In The Poetic Edda. Transl. Carolyne Larrington. 2nd rev. ed. Oxford, 2014. 47–56. Gylfaginning. In Snorri Sturluson. Edda: Prologue and Gylfaginning. Ed. Anthony Faulkes. 2nd ed. London, 2005. Gylfaginning [The Tricking of Gylfi]. In Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Transl. Anthony Faulkes. London and Melbourne, 1987. Málhljóða- og málskrúðsrit: grammatisk-retorisk afhandling af Óláfr Þórðarson. Ed. Finnur Jónsson. Historisk-filologiske meddelelser, 13:2. Copenhagen, 1927.



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Ynglinga Saga. In Snorri Sturluson. Heimskringla. I. The Beginnings to Óláfr Tryggvason. Ed. Alison Finlay and Anthony Faulkes. 2nd ed. London, 2016. 6–47. Ynglinga saga. In Snorri Sturluson. Heimskringla I. Ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson. ÍF, 26. Reykjavík, 1962 [1941]. 9–83.

Secondary sources Arwill-Nordbladh, Elisabeth. 2012. “Ability and Disability. On Bodily Variations and Bodily Possibilities in Viking Age Myth and Image.” In To Tender Gender. The Pasts and Futures of Gender Research in Archaeology. Ed. Ing-Marie Back Danielsson and Susanne Thedéen. Stockholm Studies in Archaeology, 58. Stockholm. 33–60. Buck, Carl Darling. 1949. A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages. A Contribution to the History of Ideas. Chicago. Christensen, Tom. 2009. “Odin fra Lejre.” ROMU: Årsskrift fra Roskilde Museum: 7–25. Christensen, Tom. 2010. “Gud, konge eller...’.” Arkæologisk forum 22: 21–25. Clunies Ross, Margaret. 1994. Prolonged Echoes. I. Old Norse Myths in Northern Society. The Viking Collection, 7. Odense. Finnur Jónsson and Sveinbjörn Egilsson, eds. 1931. Lexicon poeticum antiquae linguae septentrionalis. Ordbog over det norsk-islandske skjaldesprog. 2nd rev. ed. Copenhagen. Hermann, Pernille. 2014. “Key Aspects of Memory and Remembering in Old Norse-Icelandic Literature.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 13–49. Gering, Hugo and Barend Sijmons. 1927. Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda. I. Götterlieder. Halle. Grimm, Jacob. 1966 [1882]. Teutonic Mythology. Trans. James Steven Stallybrass. New York. [German orig. 1835] Laursen, Camilla. “Sjælden stol-amulet fundet på Lolland.” Posted at TV Øst (Seneste nyt) on 4 August 2016; available at http://www.tveast.dk/artikel/sjaelden-stol-amulet-fundetpaa-lolland. (27 February 2018). Lindow, John. 2014. “Memory and Old Norse Mythology.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 92–111. Meyer, Elard Hugo. 1891. Germanische Mythologie. Berlin. Mitchell, Stephen A. 2018. “Óðinn’s Twin Ravens, Huginn and Muninn.” In Gemini and the Sacred. Twins and Twinship in Religion and Myth. Ed. Kimberley C. Patton. London. Orchard, Andy. 2002. Cassell’s Dictionary of Norse Myth and Legend. London and New York. Osborn, Marijane. 2015. “The Ravens on the Lejre Throne: Avian Identifiers, Odin at Home, Farm Ravens.” In Representing Beasts in Early Medieval England and Scandinavia. Ed. Michael D. J. Bintley and Thomas J. T. Williams. Anglo-Saxon Studies, 29. Woodbridge. 94–112. Patton, Kimberley C. 2009. Religion of the Gods. Ritual, Paradox, and Reflexivity. Oxford and New York. Schjødt, Jens Peter. 2008. Initiation between Two Worlds. Structure and Symbolism in Pre-Christian Scandinavian Religion. The Viking Collection, 17. Odense.

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Simek, Rudolf. 1993. Dictionary of Northern Mythology. Cambridge. Simpson, J. A. and E. S. C. Weiner, eds. 1993. Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford. Sommer, Bettina and Morten Warmind. 2015. “Óðinn from Lejre – or?” Nvmen 62: 627–38. Sonne, Lasse Christian Arboe. 2010. “Den lille sølvfigur fra Lejre. Bemærkninger til tolkningen af en mulig Odin-figur.” 1066 Tidsskrift for Historie 40 (3): 32–39. Sturtevant, Albert Morey. 1954. “Comments on Mythological Name-Giving in Old Norse.” Germanic Review 29: 68–71. Vang Pedersen, Peter. 1990. “Odins ravne/Odin’s ravens.” In Oldtidens ansigt (Faces of the Past). Ed. Poul Kjærum and Rikke Agnete Olsen. Copenhagen. 160–161. de Vries, Jan. 1961. Altnordisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. Leiden.

Anne-Sofie Gräslund

II: 11 Ornamentation 1 Introduction From time immemorial man has felt a need to depict humans, animals, objects, or other things. Images are absolutely necessary for collective memory in oral socie­ ties, to support memory when it comes to story-telling. Sometimes the depictions may have been done as l’art pour l’art, but mostly the resulting picture probably had a special meaning. This is true in particular for animal ornaments of the first millennium AD, often regarded as one of Scandinavia’s great contributions to the world of art. Animal ornaments consist of motifs, designed with a strong feeling for style, different in different periods of the millennium. That it was a material expression of élite status from c. 400 to c. 1200 demonstrates that ornamentation possessed ideological meaning (Hedeager 2004). Moreover, the ideals of style change: after a tight, more geometric style comes a softer style with more swelling lines (Almgren 1987). Ornament motifs persist, based on memory and old tradi­ tions, but with new, or at least developed, elements in each phase. It is a question of continuity or change, or perhaps both. In the case of change, however, there is seldom a total break: the memory of past practice and style is still present. In terms of memory studies, ornament motifs belong to what Jan Assmann calls “the memory of things”, noting that the same items are what Maurice Halbwachs refers to collectively as entourage materiel [material surroundings]. “The world of things in which we live,” Assmann continues, “has a time index that refers not only to our present but also, and simultaneously, to different phases and levels of our past.” (Assmann 2011, 6)

2 Case study Ornament The Nordic animal ornament started in the Migration Period (AD c. 375–550) with influences from Scythian, Celtic, Oriental, and Roman art mixed with a domestic preference for animal heads as end parts in jewellery and tools. The concept of animal ornaments means that the body of an animal (or parts of it) constitutes the motif but is still totally subordinate to the ornament itself.

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During the Migration and Vendel Periods (the latter c. 550–750), variants of animal-style appeared in rapid succession. The Swedish archaeologist Bernhard Salin divided the Migration- and Vendel Period animal ornament into Styles I, II and III (Salin 1904). His classification is still used, although with some refinement. At the beginning of the Viking Age, Style III (or E, following a more elaborate system) continued to be popular. It is characterized by band-shaped animals in profile. An innovation in the early Viking Age was the gripping-beast style, where the animal is seen en-face with a round face, huge round eyes, and legs ending in paws, which grip the edge of the ornament panel, neighbouring animals, or its own body tightly. Some of the artists and craftsmen of this period apparently adopted both the idea of continuity/memory and change/innovation in their work. The wood-carving from the ship burial at Oseberg (dated by den­ drochronology to 834) shows fine examples of both the old style E and the new gripping-beast style, placed in framed fields, often on the same surfaces of the ship itself, or on various posts, sledges, and a wagon. Something similar can be seen on metal mounts of a horse bridle from a grave at Broa on Gotland. It is inter­ esting how these innovations could occur within the old traditional style of the band-shaped animal – how should we understand the role of apprenticeships? Did new practitioners learn their skills from old masters (cf. Mitchell 2013, 288) and then find it tempting to combine the old style with modern ideas? In the late Viking Age, from c. 950, a new motif appeared in animal orna­ ment: a large quadruped struggling with a serpent, probably influenced by Christian art on the continent, symbolizing the struggle between good and evil. Ultimately of Oriental origin, the motif, sometimes called the ‘great beast style’, became common in Scandinavia in the late tenth and the eleventh centuries. It was first known as the Mammen style, characterised by double contour lines, spiral-shaped shoulders and hips, and by the development of neck and tail lobes into luxuriant acanthus-shaped crests. The younger Ringerike style is very close to Mammen style but gives an even more powerful impression. Neck crests, tails and wings end in leaves, palmettes and richly ramified tendrils. The influence of plant ornament is quite obvious and elegant. Urnes style, named after the decoration on a stave church in western Norway, is the last of the Viking Age animal ornament styles (see colour plate 4). It is an extremely elegant style, the great beast is transformed to a graceful deer with a long neck and a slender head, including serpents laid out in soft figure-eight loops and coils. Most of the Upplandic rune stones are decorated in this style (e.g. U 489), so the term ‘rune stone style’ sometimes occurs (see fig. 1). Rune stones in Södermanland are decorated in Ringerike style to a high degree. It has been argued that this difference is geographic (Christiansson 1959), but in the view of the present author it is chronological. Through stylistic analysis of the



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Fig. 1: Upplandic rune stone decorated in the Urnes style (U489)

zoomorphic rune stone ornament, it has been possible to suggest a chronology. The Upplandic rune stones consist of seven different groups, which can be com­ pared to artefacts, dated at excavations through stratigraphy or find combina­ tions (Gräslund 2006). The Urnes style was also used in crafts, jewellery and other metal items where the slender shape of the head and the large almondshaped eye are easily recognizable.

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Animal ornament did not disappear completely with the transition to the Middle Ages. Some of the oldest ecclesiastical objects in Scandinavia, dated to the twelth century, are fine examples of animal art, often combined with new Romanesque art. Later in the Middle Ages, animal art seems to have been regar­ ded as pagan, and therefore unsuitable for ecclesiastical use, but for many centu­ ries it was used in peasant society. Comparison of the ornaments of the old portal of the Urnes stave church from the second half of the eleventh century with the ornaments of the portal of Ål stave church from the twelfth century (Hedeager 2004, 220) seems at first sight to suggest rather similar styles with large loops, but the difference in motifs is obvious. On the later portal, the ornamentation consists of branches and plants – the animals have disappeared.

Figurative art There is not much left of figurative or narrative art from Scandinavia in the second half of the first millennium. The Gotlandic picture stones, dating from the fifth (ev. third, Andrén 2012, 50) to the eleventh century, are an outstanding excep­ tion (Herlin Karnell 2012).They consist of slabs of limestone engraved with pic­ tures. The early ones often had a sun symbol in the shape of a circle with whirls and a rowing ship. The ship has been interpreted as funerary vessel, taking the dead to the afterlife. The connection to death and burial indicates their memorial intent. The journey of the sun in the firmament has been interpreted as a ritual of the sun cult from the Bronze and early Iron Age (Kaul 2004; Andrén 2012). Rituals are typical examples of memorial situations. The younger picture stones show images often composed in horizontal panels with swarms of human figures, animals and ships in scenes. The meanings of these images would certainly have been well-known to the audiences of that time but are often enigmatic to us today. Some representations belong to mythology and heroic poetry, e.g. the legend of the blacksmith, Völund, on a picture stone from Ardre church, where the decapi­ tated princes lie outside the smithy while the blacksmith, transformed into a bird, carries the princess away. Certainly, this story was part of cultural memory, passed over from generation to generation. Motifs often present on the younger picture stones, and therefore in all probability parts of the cultural memory, include a rider welcomed by a lady with a drinking horn, perhaps a valkyrie, and a sailing ship with a crew of many armed men. Late Viking Age rune stones (erected c. 975–1130) were also memorial monu­ ments. Their primary function was to commemorate deceased family members. The large Jelling stone (DR 42) from c. 970 is regarded as the beginning of the fashion of raising memorial stones. As the rune stones are closely related to



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Christianisation, another function seems to be a demonstration of their new faith by converts. But, interestingly enough, they did it in an old domestic way: they erected a stone. This is a reminiscence of the early Iron Age custom of raising bauta-stones. Most of the rune stone decoration is ornamental but there are several exam­ ples of figurative/narrative art as well, e.g. the carvings showing parts of the Eddic legend of Sigurðr the dragon-slayer. The most famous such tableau is carved on a large rock at Ramsund in Södermanland (Sö 101), with very clearly depicted scenes from the legend. We see Sigurðr impaling Fáfnir with his sword, then roasting the dragon’s heart, and licking his finger with the dragon’s blood, which allows him to understand the birds warning him about Reginn, the smith. The decapitated Reginn lies with his tools around him. Sigurðr’s horse, Grani, is depicted, bound to a tree with treasure on his back. The introduction of Christianity is of great relevance for medieval Scandi­ navian cultural memory, as it led to a challenge in explaining the meaning and content of the pre-Christian past (Hermann and Mitchell 2013, 262). It has been pointed out that the message of the missionaries was probably received and inter­ preted by the Scandinavians from an Old Norse perspective (Nordberg 2010). This is called Interpretatio Scandinavica, meaning that, in the beginning, important parts of the Christian message were transformed into a Norse version of Christia­ nity, a fusion of pagan and Christian beliefs and rituals, fractions of which were later preserved in folklore (Gräslund 2016). Images of human figures carrying processional crosses occur, e.g. on U 631 from Kalmar church in Uppland, Gs 18 from Hille in Gästrikland and DR 290 from Sövestad in Skåne. The picture U 529 in Sika, Frötuna parish, Uppland probably represents a church with an on-going service, the priest at the altar, and the con­ gregation in the nave. A Norwegian rune stone from Dynna in Hadeland (N 68), erected by a mother to commemorate her daughter, has the most fascinating clear Christian repre­ sentation: a star, the Christ child, the three magi and the crib, i.e. the Christmas gospel. It has been pointed out that the stable rather looks like a Viking Age long house (Herschend 2005, 69), a fine example of transformation of the unknown foreign to something well-known and domestic. Some motifs taken up in early Christian art have a background in pre-Chris­ tian symbolism, e.g. the ship with the pre-Christian tradition of bringing the dead person to the afterlife. On runestone ships, the sail could either be provided with a cross or shaped as a cross. In Christian iconography, the ship is a symbol of the Church. Another runestone motif is a peacock, in ancient India regarded as a sunbird, a symbol of love and long life. This symbolism was taken up by early Christianity through Hellenistic and Roman culture. As the flesh of the peacock

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was believed to never decay, it became a symbol of immortality. Images of cocks occur on top of crosses on runestones. They have also a long history of pre-Chris­ tian use both in the Orient and the Mediterranean area as symbols of protection and vigilance. The cock that sits on Mímameiðr’s highest bough (perhaps another name for the World Tree, Yggdrasill) watched and gave warning. In Christian ico­ nography, the cock was a symbol of watchfulness and vigilance. Several textile tapestries have been preserved (Franzén and Nockert 1992): the ninth-century Norwegian Oseberg tapestry, depicting a procession and a sac­ rificial scene with human beings hanging in a tree; the northern Swedish Över­ hogdal tapestry in Härjedalen, 14C-dated to 1040–1170; and the Skog wall-hang­ ing from Hälsingland, 14C-dated to the thirteenth century. The last two objects display pictures of animals and human beings, trees, church buildings, and so on, and are interpreted as depicting the Conversion with both pagan and Chris­ tian elements.

Conclusion Arguing that cultural memory represents an exterior dimension of human memory, Jan Assmann  (2011, 6–7) notes that it is only one of several such dimensions. The others he cites are mimetic memory, communicative memory, and ‘the memory of things’. The existence, display and use of ornamented objects in the various Nordic styles from c. 400 to c. 1200 clearly suggests ‘the memory of things’; on the other hand, their actual production, that is, the creative actions through which such objects come about, is presumably a form of mimetic memory. In address­ ing how these dimensions ultimately contribute to the production of cultural memory, Assmann comments, When mimetic routines take on the status of rituals, for example, when they assume a meaning and significance that go beyond their practical function, the borders of mimetic action memory are transcended. Rituals are part of cultural memory because they are the form through which cultural meaning is both handed down and brought to present life. The same applies to things once they point to a meaning that goes beyond their practi­ cal purpose: symbols; icons; representations such as monuments, tombs, temples, idols; and so forth, all transcend the borders of object-memory because they make the implicit index of time and identity explicit. This aspect is the central point of Aby Warburg’s ‘social memory’. (Assmann 2011, 6–7)

Nordic animal ornamentation and figurative art of the first millennium were simultaneously traditional, innovative, adoptive, and adaptive, and functioned in their grandest specimens as important material expressions of élite status. But



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such artistic representations “transcend the borders of object-memory” through another role, one intimately related to concepts of cultural identity and cultural memory, especially if by cultural memory, we mean, with Assmann, the handing down of meaning.

Works cited Primary sources D = Danmarks Runeindskrifter. Copenhagen, 1941–1942. N = Norges innskrifter med de yngre runer. Oslo, 1941–. Samnordisk runtextdatabas, Institutionen för nordiska språk, Uppsala universitet http://www. nordiska.uu.se/forskn/samnord.htm. (6 Februrary 2018). Sveriges runinskrifter, published by The Royal Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities, Stockholm, provides the numbers of the Swedish rune stone corpus by province: Gs = Gästriklands runinskrifter, 1981. Sö = Södermanlands runinskrifter, 1924–1936. U = Upplands runinskrifter, 1940–1958.

Secondary sources Almgren, Bertil. 1987. Die Datierung bronzezeitlicher Felszeichungen in Westschweden. Acta Musei Antiquitatum Septentrionalium Regiæ Upsaliensis, VI. Uppsala. Andrén, Anders. 2012. “Från solnedgång till solnedgång. En tolkning av de tidiga gotländska bildstenarna.” In Gotland’s Picture Stones – Bearers of an Enigmatic Legacy. Ed. Maria Herlin Karnell. Visby. 49–58. Assmann, Jan. 2011. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization. Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. Cambridge and New York. Christiansson, Hans. 1959. Sydskandinavisk stil. Studier i ornamentiken på de senvikingatida runstenarna. Uppsala. Franzén, Anne-Marie and Margaretha Nockert. 1992. Bonaderna från Skog och Överhogdal och andra medeltida väggbeklädningar. Stockholm. Gräslund, Anne-Sofie. 2006. “Dating the Swedish Viking-Age rune stones on stylistic grounds.” In Runes and their Secrets. Ed. Marie Stoklund et al. Copenhagen. 117–139. Gräslund, Anne-Sofie. 2016. “Late Viking Age Christian Identity.” In Shetland and the Viking World. Papers from the Seventeenth Viking Congress, Lerwick. Ed. Val E. Turner, Olwyn A. Owen and Doreen J. Waugh. Lerwick. 181–187. Hedeager, Lotte. 2004. “Dyr og andre mennesker – mennesker og andre dyr. Dyreornamentikkens transcendentale realitet.” In Ordning mot kaos. Studier av nordisk förkristen kosmologi. Ed. Anders Andrén, Kristina Jennbert and Catharina Raudvere. Vägar till Midgård, 4. Lund. 219–252.

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Herlin Karnell, Maria, ed. 2012. Gotland’s Picture Stones – Bearers of an Enigmatic Legacy. Visby. Hermann, Pernille and Stephen A. Mitchell. 2013. “Constructing the Past: Introductory Remarks.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 261–266. Herschend, Frands. 2005. Ackulturation och kulturkonflikt. Fyra essäer om järnåldersmentalitet. Occasional Papers in Archaeology, 38. Uppsala. Kaul, Fleming. 2004. Bronzealderens religion. Studier af den nordiske bronzealders ikonografi. Copenhagen. Mitchell, Stephen A. 2013. “Memory, Mediality and the ‘Performative Turn’: Recontextualizing Remembering in Medieval Scandinavia.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 282–305. Nordberg, Andreas. 2010. “Runstenar och själabroar – kyrklig strategi och förkristet gensvar.” In Bro till evigheten. Brons rumsliga, sociala och religiösa dimension under vikingatid och tidig medeltid. Ed. Andreas Nordberg and Lars Andersson. Stockholm. 75–82. Salin, Bernhard. 1904. Die altgermanische Thierornamentik. Typologische Studie über germanische Metallgegenstände aus dem IV. bis IX. Jahrhundert, nebst einer Studie über irische Ornamentik. Stockholm.

Media Visual modes Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen

II: 12 Animation

1 Introduction: The living dead in living memory The memory of the dead was a central feature of medieval culture and society, whether it evoked a deceased relative to be delivered from purgatory, a departed ancestor of the aristocracy represented in a noble effigy, a pious benefactor recorded in prayers and donor images, a martyred saint preserved in relics and visited by throngs of pilgrims at the shrine, or Christ himself commemorated and made present again in the memorial sacrifice of the Mass. Whereas western modernity has mostly not embraced the notion – much the less the existence – of the living dead, this transgressive state of being was nurtured and enacted by medieval families, congregations, and communities, to whom the predecessor, the giver, the royal person, the holy man, and the divine Saviour were still active agents operating through their living and embodied memory. The conditions of death, departure, and absence were not as absolute and irrevocable as today. Death was not the unambiguous end of life as such.

2 Case Study: Memory as animation In what Otto Gerhard Oexle terms Die Gegenwart der Toten – the contempora­ neous presence of the dead – the dynamics of memory and memorial practices amounted to an invigorating animation of absent persons (Oexle 1983, 1995, 33–37). The Totenkult and Totenmemoria – the cultus and memoria of the dead – became fundamental constituents of a Christian cult of saints and sanctity, in which holiness was cultivated and venerated as a powerful virtue conferring new life upon seemingly dead matter and perished persons, who would otherwise remain forgotten and inert. The dead were animated as influential participants in the society of the living, maintaining the “[...] rechtlichen und sozialen Status der Toten als Subjekten der Gesellschaft durch die Memoria der Lebenden” (Oexle 1995, 34) [the legal and social status of the dead as subjects of society through the memory and memorial practices of the living] (see also Oexle 1983, 22, 26–35). To be dead was also to be alive; to be remembered was to be re-animated. “Im Zentrum der Memoria steht das Gedächtnis der Toten: die Toten werden in der Memoria der Lebenden gegenwärtig. Immer wieder geht es aber auch um die Gegenwart der Abwesenden.” (Oexle 2011, 365) [At the centre of memory is the https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-048

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commemoration of the dead: the dead become present in the memory of the living. Time and again, it is also about the presence of the absent.] According to Oexle, the cultural function of memoria was to establish and sustain the commu­ nity of the living, the dead, and the absent. Acts of commemoration instituted a ritual and social state of normalised liminality connecting those who were alive in the flesh with those who were not, that is, those who were alive instead in memorial animation. The medieval Erinnerungsgemeinschaft [community of rec­ ollection and remembrance] implied a communion of the living and the dead, the present and the absent (Oexle 1994, 132, discussing Assmann). Presence and absence, life and death, were entangled and embedded within each other. Life was pervaded by afterlife, and afterlife in turn vibrated with life. Memorial enactments, monuments, and services created Living Memoria, with the telling title of a recent volume (Weijert et al. 2011). To recall was also to re-embody, revive, and resurrect. The active work of memory negotiated absence with presence, death with life, oblivion with animation. Absence was tempered with memorial presence. Commemoration of the defunct was constitutional to Christianity and kept the community alive across the mortuary threshold. This is paralleled even within other domains of retention and retrieval, such as medicine or representation. In medical discourse, memory was perceived as instigated and operated by the so-called vital spirit, linking body and soul (Brenner et al. 2013, 2). Moreover, discussing the temporal nature and memorial function of medieval representation, Mary Carruthers has noted how signs – especially words and images, letters and pictures – were understood to make things present again to the recipient, animated, as it were, through the enterprise of memori­sation (Car­ ruthers 2008 [1990], 275–276). Whether performed by the mind contemplating signs or by the body engaged in commemorative rituals, the act of recollection brought the absent into presence. In bringing back what was no longer there (the mortal) or what was out of reach (the immortal), medieval memory exhibited a strong sense of vitality. The presence of an absence – thus may a memory be defined. “The presence of an absence”, that is also precisely how art historian Hans Belting defines the image in his anthropological discussion of the nature of visual representation, be it a physical image or a mental image, such as for instance a memorial re­presentation. Originating in the animated Totenbild – the effigy of the dead – of ancient Totenkult, the anthropomorphous image comes to take the place of an absent body, animating the corporeal medium of the statue or picture as a substi­ tute for the depicted and departed person (Belting 2001, 2005, 2011). The pictorial medium is at its root a memorial medium: a vehicle or host of the living image, endowed with the social agency, the power and the presence of the bygone person. Resurrected, remembered, and re-embodied in the image, the dead exchanges his



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inanimate physical body for a vicarious pictorial body, an animated model of and stand-in for the portrayed persona. In a medieval context, the image reliquary would be a prototypical example of this animation as it continued to perform the sacred powers and deeds of the holy man, whose absence was recollected, yet transformed and replaced by the vigorous presence of the saintly relics within the active image. The memorial figure was a living dead in itself, a liminal agent animating lifeless matter into lively charisma or ‘virtus’, that is to say, the divine power and gracious agency of the revered person. As sites of resurrection, agents of conjuration, inspirited and enlivened images were imbued with anima – that is, literally ‘life’, ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’; derived from Latin: air, breath, life spirit, vital principle (Jørgensen 2016, 2017). In the following, we will exemplify this vivid principle – memory as animation – with a major Scandinavian contributor to mnemonic and commemorative practices in the later Middle Ages.

Monastic memory: Birgitta’s animated recollection of the Passion of Christ A place to look for specialised and systematically exercised memory work, per­ formed with body and mind, was monastic institutions such as the Bridgettine order founded by Birgitta of Vadstena (Bridget of Sweden) and ratified by the papacy in 1370. The recollection of death and the dead was strongly present in the prescribed layout and furnishings of a Bridgettine double monastery where the nuns lived an ascetic and mortified life reminding them that they were the living dead, who had renounced mundane existence and already died for the world. At the Danish Mariager Cloister, founded 1446 in Eastern Jutland, rows of burial chapels flanked the lay congregation, while mortuary sculpture made the absent Christ present from beyond the grave. Every day a little earth was thrown onto a symbolic coffin or open tomb to remember the perishable nature of mortals in a live act of memorialisation: an animated memento mori [remember (that you have) to die], i.e. a reminder of the inevitability of death, absence made present in a ritual gesture of remembrance. A morbid bier with soil usually placed at the church entrance would have been carried in procession to enact a new sister’s initiation into the order, recalling her mortality and animating her transition from decaying flesh to eternal life (Carlsen 2010). Paradoxically, the void of death was animated into a living memory, with a typically Bridgettine sense of drama and staging, already ordained in the Rule of the Order of the Most Holy Saviour, which Christ himself had revealed to Birgitta in her Revelationes celestes [Heavenly Revelations] (“Ordo Sanctissimi Salvato­ ris”, Chs. XI, XXVII; see Regvla Salvatoris, 113–117, 133–134 [The Rule of the Savior, 131–134, 143–144]).

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Nowhere was the drama of death recorded more emphatically and animated more vigorously than in Birgitta’s repeated revelations of the Passion of Christ at the Calvary (see e.g. Revelaciones, I, Chs. 10–11, Pp. 263–272; IV, Ch. 70, Pp. 208– 212; VII, Ch. 15, Pp. 164–168; [Liber Caelestis, I, Chs. 10–11, Pp. 65–71; IV, Ch. 70, Pp. 125–128; VII, Ch. 15, Pp. 234–238]). The visionary recollection of the excrucia­ ting pain, cruel torture and tormented suffering endured by the Redeemer before and during the crucifixion replaces his corporeal absence with a lively portrayal of his injured skin, scourged limbs, blood-dripping sense organs and grievous bodily condition, conveyed with a violent and piercing presence to the appalled seer (and her monastic reader or listener). Evocative details of his agonised body envision and recall what the Saviour had to suffer for our individual salvation, such as eyes, ears, mouth and tongue filled with blood, bringing his sacrifice to mind in a one-to-one connection with the recipient and her sinful senses, limbs and organs. As an incarnate memory instrument, the body of the Passion is dra­ matised and animated to re-actualise and re-member the events and the reality of the Passion. Corpus Christi is memory: an embodied act of commemoration, a vehicle of compassion, a corporeal animation of anamnesis in action, a presence of an absence resurrected in revelatory body images and indelible physical appa­ ritions. Composed of a series of striking tableaux with memorable visualisations of the torn and lacerated torso (‘I saw how…’) rather than prolonged passages of narrative sequence, the Golgotha visions form haunting memory images in accordance with current rhetorical prescriptions for an effective ars memorativa or art of memory. Birgitta’s followers may have abstained from most sensual aspects of life, but their sensory recapture and recreation of Christ were all the more vivid and vibrant. This also applies to Bridgettine imagery as such, which assumed a compa­ rable mnemonic function. According to Peter Parshall, late medieval depictions of the Passion codified the figure of Christ for worshippers as a mnemotechnic display of a set of memory cues, specific details and condensed excerpts of the narrative to invoke the full span of the Passion as well as the figurative origins of the Gospel account in Old Testament prophecy such as Isaiah 53:2–5. Especially, the unforgettable image of the afflicted and despised Man of Sorrows derived from Isaiah hinted at various moments of the ‘perpetual Passion’ and offered “[...] a net of codified mnemonic cues”, which “might have served as the matrix of a diagram that could then be read centrifugally to encompass the whole of the Passion story” (Parshall 1999, 464–465, 469). In Mariager Cloister, this actualisation and animation of Christ in his per­ sistent suffering was performed for the sisters by a still extant, more than lifesize, wooden sculpture of their heavenly, yet also very corporeal bridegroom in the shape of a seated Man of Sorrows from around 1500 (see colour plate 19).



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Exhibiting a ferocious expression of bodily pain, the mutilated figure also acts as a commemorative diagram of the Redeemer’s injuries, humiliations, and how he acquired them according to Birgitta’s testimony: the crown of thorns recounts the mocking of Christ; his bruised and sore skin, the scourging; his bound hands and naked exposition, the Ecce Homo; his worn knees and the spikeblock, the bearing of the cross; his gaping nail wounds, the crucifixion; his crater of a sidewound, Longinus’ lance spearing his heart; his facial despair, the pitiful state of his death agony; his flesh ploughed up around the wounds in the feet, the weight of his body on the cross as witnessed by Birgitta; his stretched sinews, the distortion of his limbs when nailed to the cross in Birgitta’s visions; his protruding ribcage with countable bones, the Passion prefiguration of Psalm 22:16–18; his pierced foot sole, the Old Testament prototypes of the flagellation wounds “from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head” in Job 2:7 and Isaiah 1:6 (Kaspersen 1980; Marrow 1979, 47, 171–172). In his gruesome recapitulation of all these mythical moments and iconic stages of the Passion, the sculpted image of Corpus Christi is a living memory of dying. The deadly presence of his physical pain – animated by our intimate recollection of bodily pain – makes him seem all the more alive. A mechanism with a hidden vessel in his chest may even have allowed him to bleed from the sidewound, thus making him perform an actual incarnation, materiali­ sation and realisation of the animate memory of Christ, as if the evoked memory itself became a living reality. Pictured as deceased and fatally disfigured yet at the same time living and present – paradoxically both dead and alive, mortal and immortal, human and divine – he is the ultimate example of “Die Gegenwart der Toten”, the presence of an absence, memory as animation.

Works Cited Primary sources Liber Caelestis. In The Revelations of St. Birgitta of Sweden. I–III. Ed. and trans. Denis Searby and Bridget Morris. Oxford, 2006, 2008, 2012. Regvla Salvatoris. In Sancta Birgitta. Regvla Salvatoris. Ed. Sten Eklund. Opera Minora Sanctae Birgittae, 1. Samlingar utg. av Svenska Fornskriftsällskapet. Serie 2. Latinska skrifter, VIII:1. Lund 1975. Revelaciones. In Sancta Birgitta. Revelaciones. Samlingar utg. av Svenska Fornskriftsällskapet. Serie 2. Latinska skrifter, VII:1, 4, 17. 1. Ed. Carl-Gustaf Undhagen. Uppsala, 1978; 4. Ed. Hans Aili. [Uppsala], 1992; 7. Ed. Birger Bergh. Uppsala, 1967. The Rule of the Savior. In The Revelations of St. Birgitta of Sweden. IV. Ed. and trans. Denis Searby and Bridget Morris. Oxford, 2015.

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Secondary sources Belting, Hans. 2001. Bild-Anthropologie. Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft. Munich. Belting, Hans. 2005. “Image, Medium, Body. A New Approach to Iconology.” Critical Inquiry 31.2: 302–319. Belting, Hans. 2011. An Anthropology of Images. Picture, Medium, Body. Trans. Thomas Dunlap. Princeton, NJ. Brenner, Elma, Meredith Cohen and Mary Franklin-Brown, eds. 2013. Memory and Commemoration in Medieval Culture. Farnham. Carlsen, Per Sloth. 2010. Mariager Kloster. Birgittinerordenen og Bygningshistorien. Mariager. Carruthers, Mary. 2008 [1990]. The Book of Memory. A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge. Jørgensen, Hans Henrik Lohfert. 2016. “‘Toys that ask for love’. En animationsteori for teknobilleder, biobilleder & kultbilleder.” Kunst og Kultur 99.3: 164–176. Jørgensen, Hans Henrik Lohfert. 2017. “Live Matter and Living Images. Towards a Theory of Animation in Material Media.” Konsthistorisk tidskrift / Journal of Art History 86.3: 251–270. Kaspersen, Søren. 1980. “Den hudflettede Kristus på korset. Et birgittinsk indslag i den sengotiske kunst i Norden?” In Kristusfremstillinger. Ed. Ulla Haastrup. Copenhagen. 127–147. Marrow, James H. 1979. Passion Iconography in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance. A Study of the Transformation of Sacred Metaphor into Descriptive Narrative. Kortrijk. Oexle, Otto Gerhard. 1983. “Die Gegenwart der Toten.” In Death in the Middle Ages. Ed. Herman Braet and Werner Verbeke. Leuven. 19–77. Oexle, Otto Gerhard. 1994. “Die Memoria Heinrichs des Löwen.” In Memoria in der Gesellschaft des Mittelalters. Ed. Otto G. Oexle and Dieter Geuenich. Göttingen. 128–177. Oexle, Otto Gerhard. 1995. “Memoria als Kultur.” In Memoria als Kultur. Ed. Otto G. Oexle. Göttingen. 9–78. Oexle, Otto Gerhard. 2011. “Fama und Memoria der Wissenschaft in der Kunst der Frühen Neuzeit.” In Living Memoria. Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Memorial Culture in Honour of Truus van Bueren. Ed. Rolf de Weijert et al. Hilversum. 365–377. Parshall, Peter. 1999. “The Art of Memory and the Passion.” The Art Bulletin 81.3: 456–472. Weijert, Rolf de, Kim Ragetli, Arnoud-Jan Bijsterveld and Jeannette van Arenthals, eds. 2011. Living Memoria. Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Memorial Culture in Honour of Truus van Bueren. Hilversum.

Karoline Kjesrud

II: 13 Marian Representations 1 Introduction: Sculptures of Mary Sculptures of Mary were the main devotional objects in medieval churches, and numerous representations are found all over Europe in stone, plaster, and, most frequently, in wood. The sculptures were part of a broader social context: they were the focus of repetitive rites and prayers, which placed them in a continu­ ously dialogic relation with the past. From an ecclesiastical perspective, Marian sculptures were meant to serve as manifestations of the Divine, but the performa­ tive character of the rituals associated with them also made their presence alive to spectators (Freedberg 1989). Today medieval sculptures are often confined to museums, or they are returned to their original churches, as objects of his­ torical identity rather than divine presence. People have constructed images of Mary for centuries, always in accordance with the past, the present, and the future. Today the concept of Mary includes a wide range of qualities: she is the Mother of God, Virgin, Bride, the Church, and a Daughter. The various qualities of Mary came to be memorised at different times and in different places through­ out history in an accumulative manner. Old dogmas were revitalised in dialogue with contemporary contexts, and with current criticism and/or appropriation of cultural memory. This case study explores how the continuous production of Marian sculptures can be taken to exemplify cultural memory in relation to Mary. As formulated by Jan Assmann, “Cultural memory works by reconstructing, that is, it always relates its knowledge to an actual and contemporary situation. True it is fixed in immovable figures of memory and stores of knowledge, but every contemporary context relates to it differently, sometimes by appropriation, some­ times by criticism, sometimes by preservation or by transformation” (Assmann 1995, 130). Earlier scholarly approaches to the Norwegian Marian sculptures have focused on production, stylistic features, and continental influence (Blindheim 1952, 1998). Placing the sculptures in the frame of memory studies allows for an investigation of the sculptures’ meaning both in their synchronic and diachronic contexts, and of how inherited dogmas concerning Mary have been reconfigured throughout many centuries.

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2 Case study: Marian motifs Marian sculptures were commissioned by the individual churches, and they can be said to reflect the identity of the churches at the time they were produced (Hall 2000, 4). At the same time, their appearances adjusted to the continuous devel­ opment of cultural and societal prioritisations in cultural transmission (Row­ lands 1993). Put forward by those who commissioned the sculptures, selective reconstructions of the past that suited contemporary cultural and political land­ scapes were employed, while the viewers memorised their messages through, for example, emotional engagement and repetitive rituals. The sculptures’ ability to attract the viewer lay in formal language (iconography, movement), the contex­ tual and performative environment, and continuous adjustments to these situa­ tions). Some churches acquired several Marian sculptures over time, displaying her in a variety of positions, whereas other churches never had more than one. Marian sculptures have been produced in specific representational forms, or socalled motifs. The motifs displayed on the sculptures showed change from period to period, and can be studied as part of a development of how Mary was remem­ bered through the centuries.

The Ruling Mary The earliest Marian sculptures executed in Norway, dated to the late twelfth century and early thirteenth century, display the motif of the Ruling Mary (see colour plate 20). The wide distribution of this motif in the period may be analysed as a contemporary construction of Mary, which made use of past theological con­ siderations and was influenced by the current social and political context. Theo­ logical discussions about Mary have been written on the Continent from the apos­ tolic age up to today (Gambero 1999 [1991], 2005 [2000]; Graef 2009 [1963, 1965]). The first formal statement regarding Mary’s position was made at the church council in Ephesus in AD 431. At this meeting, Mary was declared Theotokos, the one who gave life to God, the mother of God. Mary’s uniqueness was further expounded at the church council in Chalcedon in AD 451, where her perpetual virginity, Aei-parthenos, was confirmed. By being a virgin and the mother of an emperor, that is, of Christ ruling in heaven, Mary was used, it is argued, to connect Christianity with older female goddesses, and former female rulers. These qual­ ities were expressed through the choice of iconographic details that constructed Mary as a ruling queen, Maria Regina, and that ensured the memory of former female rulers who were understood to live on in her appearance. The earliest representations of Mary in Byzantium were made in the iconographic patterns



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of Byzantine empresses through features associated with wealth and power. Mary was especially distinguished by her red and gold crown and clothes, adorned with pearls and gems (Lawrence 1925). Furthermore, when the church was organised in Rome, it made use of the motif depicting the enthroned Mary as the mother of God to win terrain (Warner 1983 [1976], 104). The old dogma of Mary as the Mother of God made her a proper symbol of a divine container, a tabernacle, and thus an appropriate symbol for the Church itself. Being a symbol of the Church, the motif of the Ruling Mary displayed in the sculptures is a reflection and thus a memory of the Church’s self-image at the time: powerful, wealthy, and enthroned. Originally the gold coating, precious stones and Mary’s crowned and enthroned appearance appealed to the viewers’ idea of wealth and power. The heavily worn sculptures of today have only fragments of the original paint and reflect another kind of author­ ity – that of age. They have value as past communication. The sculptures of the Ruling Mary were acquired after 1152/1153, when the Norwegian Church was organised by the pope under a separate archbishopric in Nidaros, and subsequently became a more centralised institution, seeing a closer interaction with the pope in Rome. The commissioner of the sculptures may have interpreted the images in connection with past theological debates and empha­ sised what they found valuable at this time. The sculptures were actively used in sermons and liturgy. The Old Norse Messuskýringar [ritual descriptions] from the mid-twelfth century say that Mary preserved people from evil, and that she was the one who gave birth to the Son whose flesh is eaten during Mass, which may be a selective interpretation of the dogma of Mary as Theotokos, the Mother of God. The sculptures were accordingly worshiped with modesty and respect.

The memory of the Victorious Mary In the next century, past theological discussions were again brought up and the Marian sculptures from this period similarly reflect a reconfiguration of former ideas. In the period from 1250 to 1270, the motif of the Victorious Mary (see fig. 1) gained ground. The Victorious Mary is a slight transformation of the Ruling Mary from the former century. A century of repetitive rituals ensured that the memory of the Ruling Mary lived on in the Victorious Mary. Mary is still displayed in an enthroned position, bearing a crown on her head and a sceptre in her right hand. Christ also bears a crown, and the mother and child are both luxuriously dressed. The contact between mother and son is more active than in former sculptures. Christ is depicted as a young adult, sitting on Mary’s left knee and making a bles­ sing gesture with his right hand and holding a book, representing wisdom, in his left hand.

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Fig. 1: Mary from Hedalen church (C 11264)



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Scholars have argued that movement in a static sculpture facilitates move­ ment in the spectators (Freedberg 1989; Concerto et al. 2015), and thus the new movement in the sculptures may indicate a closer contact between the sculptu­ res and the congregation. From the thirteenth century, the implementation of hagiographical ideals in ecclesiastical settings is noticeable. Saintly role models exemplified behaviour and activated the congregation in the liturgy, as did the church interior, and the Marian sculptures. The churches that were already in possession of a Maria Regina could adjust to the emphasised memory of the Vic­ torious Mary through performative rituals, homilies, and liturgical practice. In this same period, a number of churches also acquired the Calvary group in the entrance to the Chancel, in which the Mourning Mary was presented by the side of the Crucified Christ. This representation could be a way to channel a certain criticism of the formal and elevated memory of Mary. In this motif lies another possible appeal to the audience through emotion. The memory of Mary continued to live on in repetitive rituals and by engaging emotions. Numerous miracles were written down as testimonies of the effects of praying to Marian images. Bishops, priests and a growing monastic milieu in Norway tried to equate the Church’s authority with the king’s, and they reconstructed a former memory of the Mother of God. In the 1260s, an initiative of rewriting the laws officially led to a discussion of the Church’s jurisdiction. By the end of the thirteenth century, the Church received its own rights for jurisdictions, and the Church’s use of the Victo­ rious Mary as a symbol of the past seems to reflect an attempt at revitalizing the position for the church. The reconstruction of the superior and Victorious Mary may also be related to kingship. In 1260, a new law of succession placed the first­ born son of a king as the rightful successor to the throne. This law strengthened the idea of Christ as principal ruler, and that the king should be like him, but it also strengthened the idea of Mary as the queen’s role model. The Mother of God and the Mother of the King became even stronger models for the rightful queen, and Mary’s qualities of wealth and authority were evoked, for example, in the coronation ritual. From 1261, the ritual included the queen (Ingeborg Eriksdatter) as well as the king, which created a joint symbolic language joining the Queen of Heaven and earthly queens. The memory of the Victorious Mary and the divine Mother and Son relationship was remembered through earthly ruling kings and queens. The Victorious Mary and her divine Motherhood has been part of the ideal Mary ever since.

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The memory of Mary as a daughter During the fourteenth century and after, a new image of enthroned divinity entered the church. Anne, the mother of Mary, took the central position and was often seated on a throne (see fig. 2). Anne has her daughter Mary on one knee and Christ on the other. This group demonstrates a reconfiguring of new ideas in continuous dialogue with the past Ruling Mary and Victorious Mary. Centu­ ries of miraculous experiences in front of the sculptures, and rituals that high­ lighted the Ruling Mary as a mirror of Heaven, made people wonder why Mary was chosen to be the mother of God. To answer this question, the early dogma of Mary being Aei-parthenos, a virgin before and after giving birth to Christ, was brought up with another focus, namely her own divine nature from her child­ hood. In Maríu saga [The saga of Mary], an Old Norse vita about Mary in the tradi­ tion of the Protevangelium Jacobi (Gospel of James), the superiority of Mary from childhood onwards answered these questions and was put forward in the liturgy and in sermons in the fourteenth century. In this narrative, the story about Anne and the conception of Mary was presented as a model for Christ’s conception in Mary: En litlu síðarr sýndiz enn sami engill Anne konu Joachims ok mællti svá: “Hræz eigi þú, Anna! er þú sér guðs engil, ok ætla eigi mik ógurlict skrimsl vera, því at ek em einn guðdóms kraptr af ótalligum guðs þiónum, er at stöndum lofi guðs nótt ok dag í hans augliti. Ek fœri bœnir yðrar í auglit dróttins. En nú em ek sendr af honum til yðvar at segia þér fögnut þinn, því at þit Joachim munut dóttur eiga, ok skal María heita. Hon mun framarr verða blezut af guði en allar konur aðrar. Þegar mun hon vera fylld af gipt ens helga anda, er hon er borin, ok skal vera fœrð til musteris dróttins, þá er hon er þrevetr at alldri; þar mun hon upp vaxa til mikilla góðra luta, þar mun hon þióna guði bæði nætr ok daga i föstum ok bœnum. [...]” (Maríu saga, Ch. 2) [A little later did the same angel appear in front of Anne, Joachim’s wife, and said: “Do not get afraid, Anne! What you see is God’s angel, and do not believe I am a ghost, since I am divine power and one of the uncountable servants of God who praise God day and night in his presence. I am the one who bring your prayers to the Lord. And yet he sent me to you with a message that you and Joachim will have a daughter who’s name shall be Mary. She will be blessed by God above all other women. Once she is born she will be filled with all gifts of the Holy Spirit, and she should be introduced to the Lord’s temple at the age of three. There she will grow up to great deeds, and she will be able to serve God both days and nights by fasting and praying. [...]” (author’s translation)]

The memory of the holy conception paved the way for a second divine conception. The reconstruction of the conception of Mary explained Mary’s worthiness of car­ rying the son of God in human shape. Lay people found a new way of interacting with the Divine in the fifteenth century through Anne and the memory of Mary’s



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Fig. 2: Anne, the mother of Mary, from Skjervøy church (C 2998)

origin (Nixon 2004). Through a focus on genealogy and family, she appeared one step closer to the people. The memory of the enthroned Mary lived on in the throne of Anne. This new arrangement familiarised Mary’s divinity and sublimity, and again, it seemed to reconfigure a self-image of the church based on former ideas and in correla­ tion with contextual prioritisations. The Church had room for all people, and the people would find comfort in a human Mary, who was chosen by God to be a container of the Divine, and who also engaged with a wide range of emotions. In Protestant Norway, the knowledge and position of Anne was not further

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transmitted in ecclesiastical settings after the Reformation, and the transmission of the apocryphal stories about Mary ended. Today, centuries after the Reforma­ tion, the concept of Mary allows for a wide range of associations with all of her different qualities that emerged at different times in correlation with a conti­ nuously changing cultural context. To conclude, the Marian sculptures are objects expressing social, political and religious prioritisations in cultural transmissions. The Marian sculptures show how cultural memory works by reconstructing the past in relation to the present, and how cultural memory is actualised in the viewer through performati­ vity, repetitive rituals and emotional engagement. Theological debates made the intellectual dimensions of Mary’s different appearances possible. The iconogra­ phic pattern reflects the time of production, whereas the continuously changing ecclesiastical circumstances and additional texts and practice in liturgy and per­ formances could add new meaning to old sculptures. Today, Marian sculptures raise myriad associations with Mary’s qualities. Their shifting appearances due to different emphases of old dogmas at various times, as well as their worn state, speak to the change, but also continuity, of their functions over time.

Works cited Primary sources Maríu saga. Legender om jomfru Maria og hendes jertegn. Ed. Carl Richard Unger. Christiania, 1871. Messuskýringar. Liturgisk symbolic frå den norsk-islandske kyrkja i millomalderen. Oslo, 1952.

Secondary sources Assmann, Jan. 1995. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” New German Critique 65: 125–133. Blindheim, Martin. 1952. Main Trends of East-Norwegian Wooden Figure Sculpture in the Second Half of the Thirteenth Century. Oslo. Blindheim, Martin. 1998. Painted Wooden Sculptures in Norway c. 1100–1250. Oslo, etc. Concerto, Carmen et al. 2015. “Neural Circuits Underlying Motor Facilitation during Observation of Implied Motion.” Somatosensory & Motor Research 32.4: 207–210. Freedberg, David. 1989. The Power of Images. Studies in the History and Theory of Response. Chicago. Gambero, Luigi. 1999. Mary and the Fathers of the Church. Trans. Thomas Buffer. San Francisco, CA. [Italian orig. 1991]



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Gambero, Luigi. 2005. Mary in the Middle Ages. Trans. Thomas Buffer. San Francisco. [Italian orig. 2000] Graef, Hilda. 2009 [1963, 1965]. Mary. A History of Doctrine and Devotion. Notre Dame, IN. Hall, Stuart. 2000. “Who Needs ‘Identity’?” In Identity. A Reader. Ed. Paul du Gay, Jessica Evans and Peter Redman. London. 15–30. Lawrence, Marion. 1925. “Maria Regina.” The Art Bulletin 7.4: 150–161. Nixon, Virgina. 2004. Mary’s Mother. Saint Anne in Late Medieval Europe. University Park, PA. Rowlands, Michael. 1993. “The Role of Memory in the Transmission of Culture.” World Archaeology 25. 2: 141–151. Warner, Marina. 1983 [1976]. Alone of All Her Sex. The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary. New York.

Media Narrating the past

Vésteinn Ólason

II: 14 Dialogues with the Past 1 Introduction Memory is an integral part of the narrated universe of the so called ‘sagas of Ice­ landers’ (Íslendingasögur), also called ‘family sagas’, as well as a key element in their presentation of a past world. The sagas are based on oral tradition, and it is a complicated and controversial issue how this oral tradition became the basis of written narratives that were formed by literary and social influences (Anders­ son 1964; Meulengracht Sørensen 1993; Vésteinn Ólason 1998, 2007). The sagas present their narratives as history, although they include much that in modern terms would be defined as fiction. For an understanding of the function and nature of memory in these texts, Jan Assmann’s distinction between individual and communicative memory, on the one hand, and cultural memory, on the other, is useful: In his words “cul­ tural memory” is “a collective concept for all knowledge that directs behavior and experience in a society and one that obtains through generations in repeated societal practice and initiation” (Assmann 1995, 126). This distinction underlines the difference between narratives about events from a recent or relatively recent past and a corpus of deep-rooted traditions and ideas about the past shared by a community. The sagas are texts created from traditional tales and cultural memory, while individual and communicative memory play an important role in their world.

2 Case study Revenge ethics and memory in Íslendingasögur Free and self-respecting individuals in saga society remembered and cherished the glory of their forefathers, which was the basis of the family’s honour. More­ over, it was crucial for them to remember every act that reduced their personal honour or that of their kin; such acts threatened the social status of the suffer­ ing individual and his family and disturbed the balance of power. The laws pro­ scribed how balance could be restored by material compensation, but in serious cases, which involved manslaughter or other grave offenses, a new manslaughter and even a prolonged feud frequently followed. Revenge was not supposed to be https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-050

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an unpremeditated act triggered by anger, as expressed in Grettis saga, where it is said that “‘Þræll einn þegar hefnisk, en argr aldri.’” (Grettis saga, Ch 15) [“‘Only a slave takes vengeance at once, and a coward never.’” (CSI, 2, 68)] This emphasis on controlled emotions, here formulated in a saying, reveals that revenge is not (only) a personal act, but has a social dimension. A disturbed balance can only be corrected by restoration of honour, and honour (sómi, sœmð) is measured by the esteem (virðing) of society. The social esteem of a family is kept alive in the collective memory of the community, while the corpus of oral traditions about the past preserves the accepted norms in cultural memory. Memory and wisdom are explicitly connected in Njáls saga as in many other medieval Icelandic texts (Hermann 2014, 15–20). When Njáll is introduced into his saga, it is mentioned that he was both wise and had a long memory (Njáls saga, Ch. 20; CSI 3, 25). When remembering is emphasised in a saga it is a foreboding of feud. In Njáls saga, Hallgerðr and Bergþóra, the ladies of two households, have thrown insults at each other during a feast at Bergþóra’s home, and Hallgerðr takes her leave with these words: “‘Mun þú þat, Bergþóra,’ sagði Hallgerðr, ‘at vit skulum eigi skilðar.’” (Njáls saga, Ch. 35) [“Keep this in mind, Bergthora,” said Hall­gerd: “we’re not finished yet.” (CSI 3, 40)]. The scene marks the beginning of a feud between the two women, in which seven men are killed. It demonstrates that not only men, but proud women will remember insults and may take or initi­ ate revenge. In the following conflict the male heads of the two feuding house­ holds, the friends Gunnarr and Njáll, keep a distance and restore the balance with compensations after each killing. This creates a conflict between Hallgerðr and Gunnarr – a conflict within a family that cannot be resolved by accepted methods. The ethics of revenge were not preserved in a written code, but as an inte­ grated element of traditional narratives. The cultural memory that preserved and recreated tales about conflicts highlighted certain acts in such a way that they carried an implicit moral judgement. Such a judgement is often explicitly stated by reference to public opinion: “Víg Hǫskulds spurðisk um allar sveitir ok mæltisk illa fyrir.” (Njáls saga, Ch. 112 [“The slaying of Hoskuld was known of and spoken badly of in all parts of the land.” (CSI, 3, 134)] Memory thus plays a double role in the sagas, an individual and a collective one. Individuals remember their grievances and act on them. The community remembers significant events and makes judgements. In this collective evalu­ ation of events an act is judged as honourable or dishonourable, moderate or excessive in the light of norms created and upheld in stories about the past. Thus, collectively remembered events are gradually integrated into cultural memory and eventually imitated in new narratives. This is strikingly illustrated in a scene in Njáls saga. Gunnarr’s farm, Hlíðarendi, has been surrounded by enemies when



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he is alone at home with his wife Hallgerðr and his mother Rannveig. One of his attackers has succeeded in cutting the string of his bow: Hann mælti til Hallgerðar: “Fá mér leppa tvá ór hári þínu, ok snúið þit móðir mín saman til bogastrengs mér.” “Liggr þér nǫkkut við?” segir hon. “Líf mitt liggr við,” segir hann, “því at þeir munu mik aldri fá sóttan, meðan ek kem boganum við.” “Þá skal ek nú,” segir hon, “muna þér kinnhestinn, og hirði ek aldri, hvárt þú verr þik lengr eða skemr.” “Hefir hverr til síns ágætis nǫkkut,”segir Gunnarr, “ok skal þik þessa eigi lengi biðja.” Rannveig mælti: “Illa ferr þér, ok mun þín skǫmm lengi uppi.” (Njáls saga, Ch. 77) [Gunnar spoke to Hallgerd: “Give me two locks of your hair, and you and my mother twist them into a bowstring for me.” “Does anything depend on it?” she said. “My life depends on it,” he said, “for they’ll never be able to get me as long as I can use my bow.” “Then I’ll remind you,” she said, “of the slap on my face, and I don’t care whether you hold out for a long or a short time.” “Everyone has some mark of distinction,” said Gunnar, “and I won’t ask you again.” Rannveig spoke: “You are evil, and your shame will live long.” (CSI, 3, 89–90)]

When Gunnarr slapped Hallgerðr, several years earlier, she promised to remem­ ber her shame: “Hon kvazk þann hest muna skyldu ok launa, ef hon mætti” (Njáls saga, Ch. 48) [Hallgerd said she would remember this slap and pay it back if she could (CSI, 3, 57)]. When Gunnarr’s life is threatened and he asks a favour of her, she sees an opportunity to get even. An attentive reader will also remember that directly or indirectly Hallgerðr has caused the deaths of two previous husbands, and in both cases a slap in her face was being revenged. These events are notori­ ous in the community, as is shown by the words of Njáll’s wife Bergþóra in Ch. 35. Moreover, Hallgerðr’s sending a slave to steal food, which caused Gunnarr’s anger when he slapped her, triggered the feud that ends with the situation where Gunnarr is killed. Thus, the memory of the characters themselves as well as the reader’s memory of previous events makes of the chain of events a tight web within the saga and in the reading experience. Rannveig’s words about a shame that will live long, which conclude the dia­ logue, invoke the wider context of collective memory and judgement. Her words predict that Hallgerðr’s reaction shall not only be remembered by the characters involved but be preserved in communal memory with a moral stigma attached to it as an example of a scandalous breaking of norms. The verdict is expressed in the word skǫmm [shame]. The story will be told again and again as an example of shameful behaviour and even as a piece of advice to women how not to behave.

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Reflection and ambiguity as a dialogue with cultural memory An individual who is reflecting upon his or her own past and wondering if s/he has acted correctly or wisely can metaphorically be presented as conducting an inner dialogue with a past version of himself or herself. Such a dialogue will reveal changes in attitude to the cultural memory that guided the individual’s past actions. This is, obviously, characteristic of confessional autobiographical work, St Augustine’s Confessiones being an early example, well-known in the Middle Ages. In traditional heroic narrative, the morality of the heroes and their actions is not called into question, if they act heroically, do what heroic ethics demand, even when life is at stake. In the same context, unheroic or shameful acts are condemned. Cultural memory thus functions as an important element of support for the social fabric: the bard or the teller of tales preserves and per­ forms a monologue where everything seems straightforward. Such harmony is disturbed when the ideal act of the ideal hero is presented in an ambiguous or even ironic light. In that case the storyteller or author is distancing himself or herself from the basic values of cultural memory, or, perhaps, beginning to ques­ tion them while still emotionally bound by them. In some of the sagas, revenge ethics seem to be straightforward: a man does what a man has got to do, even when this leads to his own destruction. In Gísla saga, Gísli is presented as someone who tries to act morally and do his duty in accordance with traditional morality, which his father has instilled in him, as Gísli says in his last verse (Gísla saga, Ch. 36; CSI 2, 47). The saga narrator and even Gísli himself are nevertheless aware of the tragic and paradoxical conse­ quences that may follow when conflict arises within a family, in his case when loyalty is divided between two different brothers in law. Gísli kills one brotherin-law in revenge for another, but abstains from vengeance when revenge ethics demand that he should kill his brother’s killers, who in this case happen to be the sons of the brother-in-law for whose revenge he had offered his freedom and put his life at stake (Vésteinn Ólason 1999; other scholars read the saga as directly critical of Gísli’s behaviour, e.g. Andersson 1969). Gísla saga discreetly invites the reader to take part in a dialogue about the limits of revenge morality, about bor­ derline cases that have parallels in heroic poetry. This dialogue demonstrates a scrutiny of the revenge ethics, which are consolidated in cultural memory. Njáls saga is more explicit about the negative aspects of revenge ethics than most other sagas, even to the point of posing the question of revenge by man­ slaughter versus forgiveness. The saga describes the fighting skills of Gunnarr, a heathen, with relish, and yet he is quoted as saying: “‘Hvat ek veit,’ segir Gunnarr, ‘hvárt ek mun því óvaskari maðr en aðrir menn sem mér þykkir meira fyrir en ǫðrum mǫnnum at vega menn’” (Njáls saga, Ch. 54) [“What I don’t know,” said



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Gunnar, “is whether I am less manly than other men because killing troubles me more than it does them.” (CSI, 3, 66)]. The Christian reader is here reminded that a noble heathen may feel if not know that killing is wrong, a sin in Christian terms. In contrast to Gunnarr, Njáll lives to be baptized, and in his final years, he tries to establish peace based on forgiveness and reconciliation. Disruptive forces and values inherent in cultural memory are, however, stronger than his good will, and he perishes with his family when his farm is burnt down. In his final hours Njáll makes two important statements. The first is overtly Christian: he says to the people who fear the fire: “Verðið vel við ok mælið eigi æðru, því at él eitt mun vera, en þó skyldi langt til annars slíks. Trúið þér ok því, at guð er miskunnsamr, ok mun hann oss eigi bæði láta brenna þessa heims ok annars.” (Njáls saga, Ch. 129) [“Bear this bravely and don’t express any fear, for it’s only a brief storm, and it will be a long time before we have another like it. Have faith that God is merciful, and that he will not let us burn both in this world and in the next.” (CSI, 3, 155)]. The second is Njáll’s answer when the leader of the attackers, offers him to leave the fire: “Eigi vil ek út ganga, því at ek em maðr gamall ok lítt til búinn at hefna sona minna, en ek vil eigi lifa við skǫmm.” (Njáls saga, Ch. 129) [“I will not leave, for I’m an old man and hardly fit to avenge my sons, and I do not want to live in shame.” (CSI, 3, 156)] Njáll thus gives two, seemingly contradictory, reasons for his willingness to accept his own death in the fire: he seeks salvation through a kind of martyrdom and thereby avoids committing the sin of revenge, and yet he accepts the force of revenge ethics and their social validity. He wants to avoid the shame that would befall him through his inability to avenge his sons if he lived on as a member of society. His two statements belong to a dialogue between a new Christian understanding of life and the need for revenge that was a cornerstone of a society that lived on in him through the force of cultural memory and must have been emotionally understood if not uncritically accepted, when the saga was written. According to this interpretation, Njáll was intellectually influenced by a Christian world view that directly opposed the values inherent in the cultural memory of his society to which he was still emotionally bound. That moral dilemma per­ sisted for a long time in Christianised societies in which revenge ethics were a part of cultural memory (Lönnroth 1976, 143–148). The dialogue between two radically different ideologies that we find in Njáls saga is, indeed, a dialogue with the values of the past as preserved in cultural memory, to which the saga has an ambivalent attitude. In no other saga is this dialogue as clearly expressed as in Njáls saga, but it is present in a more dimly veiled form in many Íslendingasögur. When the sagas were written more than two centuries had passed since the country was Christianised, but they show the strength of a cultural memory formed by centuries of life in a primitive society

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without a central power structure. The much debated ‘truth’ of the sagas lies in their genuine representation of the force of cultural memory in times of upheaval.

Works cited Primary sources CSI = The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. 5 vols. Ed. Viðar Hreinsson. Reykjavík, 1997. Gísla saga. In Gísla saga Súrssonar. Fóstbrœðra saga. Þáttr Þormóðar. Hávarðar saga Ísfirðings. Auðunar þáttr vestfirzka. Þorvarðar þáttr krákunefs. Ed. Björn K. Þórólfsson and Guðni Jónsson. ÍF, 6. Reykjavík, 1943. Grettis saga. In Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar. Bandamanna saga. Odds þáttr Ófeigssonar. Ed. Guðni Jónsson. ÍF, 7. Reykjavík, 1936. Njáls saga. In Brennu-Njáls saga. Ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson. ÍF, 12. Reykjavík, 1954.

Secondary sources Andersson, Theodore M. 1964. The Problem of Icelandic Saga Origins. A Historical Survey. New Haven, CT, and London. Andersson, Theodore M. 1969. “Some Ambiguities in Gísla saga. A Balance Sheet.” Bibliography of Old Norse-Icelandic Studies 1968: 7–42. Assmann, Jan. 1995. “Cultural Memory and Cultural Identity.” New German Critique 65: 125–133. Hermann, Pernille. 2014. “Key Aspects of Memory and Remembering in Old Norse-Icelandic Literature.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 13–39. Lönnroth, Lars. 1976. Njáls saga. A Critical Introduction. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London. Meulengracht Sørensen, Preben. 1993. Fortælling og ære. Studier i islændingesagaerne. Aarhus. Vésteinn Ólason. 1998. Dialogues with the Viking Age. Narration and Representation in the Sagas of the Icelanders. Reykjavík. Vésteinn Ólason. 1999. “Gísli Súrsson – a flawless or flawed hero?” In Die Aktualität der Saga. Festschrift für Hans Schottmann. Ed. Stig Toftgaard Andersen. Berlin and New York. 163–175. Vésteinn Ólason. 2007. “The Icelandic Saga as a Kind of Literature.” In Learning and Understanding in the Old Norse World. Essays in Honour of Margaret Clunies Ross. Ed. Judy Quinn, Kate Heslop and Tarrin Wills. Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe, 18. Turnhout. 27–47.

Torfi H. Tulinius

II: 15 Trauma 1 Introduction Awareness of trauma and its effects on the human psyche has always been part of the human experience, although not theorised as in modern times. This fact also holds true for saga authors in thirteenth-century Iceland, and is relevant for understanding the relationship between literary production and the memory of traumatic events.

2 Case study: Trauma, poetry and sagas Poetics of trauma Eyrbyggja saga [the saga of the people of Eyri] tells of a conflict between the inhab­ itants of the farms of Fróðá and Mávahlíð (Eyrbyggja saga, Chs. 16–22). At one point, Þorbjörn the farmer of Fróðá, demands to search the other farm for stolen goods. Þórarinn, the farmer of Mávahlíð, previously characterised as a peaceful man, protests but is ready to let the illegal procedure happen, until his mother accuses him of having a woman’s temperament. A fight ensues, which is rapidly stopped by the women of the farm by throwing clothing on the men’s weapons. After the intruders have departed, a woman’s hand is found on the ground. When Þórarinn discovers that his wife was maimed while intervening in the skirmish, he sets out to overtake his enemies, coming upon Þorbjörn and his companions who are laughing about what happened to Þórarinn’s wife. He attacks them, split­ ting his neighbour Þorbjörn’s head open with his sword, and he and his men kill most of their assailants (Eyrbyggja saga, Ch. 18). The episode is remarkable for its sixteen skaldic stanzas, known collectively as the Máhlíðingavísur [the stanzas from Mávahlíð]. in which Þórarinn gives an account of the events that have taken place to his mother, wife, brother-in-law and uncle (Vésteinn Ólason 1989; Poole 1985; O’Donoghue 2005, 93–111). He has not previously been characterised as a poet and it is only after the killings that he suddenly breaks out in poetic expression. Skaldic poetry routinely contains graphic evocations of warriors feeding carrion birds by slaying their enemies, with the accompanying mention of blood and severed body parts. This is also the case for the Máhlíðingavísur. They diverge from the tradition, however, by https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-051

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constantly referring to Þórarinn’s peaceful nature and reluctance to engage in violence. In a study of the episode, Heather O’Donoghue shows how the poetry and the surrounding prose work together to create a portrait of a highly individualised reluctant combatant (O’Donoghue 2005, 100), adding that “speaking in verse is a powerful means of conveying the elevated and detached nature of Þórarinn’s res­ ponse, as well as allowing access to his entirely personal reaction to the events” (O’Donoghue 2005, 98). Building on O’Donoghue’s work, it can also be argued that both types of dis­ course show an understanding of the nature of trauma and its effects. One aspect is the delay between the events and their retelling by Þórarinn. While they take place, he is caught up in a series of acts that seem to some extent to be outside his own sense of events. The stanzas, all performed after the events they describe, are therefore both telling others what happened and at the same time generating Þórarinn’s own memory of the events. This is particularly true of the first few stanzas which are more obscure and difficult to decode than the subsequent ones, as if the poet is struggling to bring together the elements of his experience. Here, the fragmentation characteristic of the dróttkvætt form (courtly metre) echoes the way perception is scattered under great stress. Another feature of skaldic poetry, the standard use of the third person by the poet when referring to himself, is also evocative of traumatic memory, as the subject often dissociates while the event is taking place, i.e. withdraws psychologically and observes the event as if it is hap­ pening to somebody else (van der Kolk 2014, 66). So is the focus on senses, body fragments, and bodily fluids. This is consistent with psychiatrist Besser van der Kolk’s formulation: “Sights, sounds, smells, and touch are encoded as isolated, dissociated fragments, and normal memory processing disintegrates” (van der Kolk 2014, 60). All of these aspects come together in the following stanza: Knátti hjörr und hetti, hræflóð, bragar Móða, rauk of sóknar sœki, slíðrbeittr staðar leita; blóð fell, en vas váði vígtjalds náar skaldi, þá vas dœmisalr dóma dreyrafullr, of eyru. (Eyrbyggja saga, Ch. 18) [The sword of the poet [my sword] razor sharp, found a spot under the helmet; corpse-torrent [flood] flowed over the warrior;



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Blood fell over [his] ears and yet the danger of the battle tent [sword] was near the poet. Then the judgement hall of decisions [the head] was full of gore. (O’Donoghue 2005, 99)]

The kennings used to denote the act of killing are quite unconventional. The way the razor-sharp sword opens up the opponent’s skull is described with precision, as well as the flow of blood over his body, with special focus on his head, the blood pouring over the ears of the dead man and filling his mouth. The overwhel­ ming image is that of the effusion of blood, repeated no less than three times in the stanza: over the warrior, over his ears and filling his mouth. The fragmen­ tation of the opponent’s body is also evoked as well as the poet’s sense of great personal danger. This last aspect is also unusual in a skaldic stanza and adds to the impression of an awareness of the effects of trauma on the human psyche. As the following stanzas unfold in the narrative, they become less preoccu­ pied with violence and less fragmented. It is as if Þórarinn is progressively reco­ vering from his traumatic experience and reconstructing himself as he revisits and consigns to memory, through the composition and performance of poetry, the life-changing events that have taken place, while at the same time attempting to make sense of them.

Performing grief and memory A compelling episode of Sturla Þórðarson’s Íslendinga saga [saga of the Iceland­ ers] is the attack and burning of Gissur Þorvaldsson’s home Flugumýri in 1253. The attack takes place the night after a wedding celebration. Gissur narrowly escapes but his wife and three sons are killed, leaving him a widower without issue. Sturla’s account is sober, though he does ask God to forgive the assailants (Sturlunga saga, Ch. 174). Sturla had attended the wedding feast himself – as it was his daughter who was marrying one of Gissur’s sons – but had left by the time of the attack. His account is based on what people present have told him, among them probably his daughter, Ingibjörg, rescued from the burning farm by one of the assailants. Sturla’s description of Gissur’s return to his farm, the morning after the attack, is deservedly famous (Sturlunga saga, Ch. 174). Gissur watches the roasted trunk of his son, cooked in his armour, being carried out followed by what remains of his wife, i.e. only her breasts. He says to his cousin who accompanied him: “Páll frændi, hér máttu nú sjá Ísleif son minn og Gró konu mína.” [“Look cousin, here you can see my son Ísleifr and my wife Gró” (author’s translation)]. Then he turns his head and tears seem to be flying from his eyes.

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The role of language in Gissur’s behaviour is striking. Confronted with the horror of what has happened to his loved ones who have now been reduced to fragments of cooked flesh, Gissur protects himself from the impact of reality on his psyche by speaking and naming these pieces of meat. By naming them, they remain the persons he loved. The pain resulting from Gissur’s trauma is acute. Some days or weeks later, it finds expression in a skaldic stanza: Enn mank böl þats brunnu bauga Hlín ok mínir, – skaði kennir mér minni minn –, þrír synir inni. Glaðr munat Göndlar röðla gnýskerðandi verða, – brjótr lifir sjá við sútir sverðs –, nema hefndir verði. (Sturlunga saga, Ch. 175, St. 79) [I still remember the misery when my wife (Bauga-Hlín) and three sons were burned inside. My loss teaches me to remember. The warrior (destroyer of shields of battle) will not be glad unless revenge is done. He lives in sorrow. (author’s translation)]

Gissur is a member of the Icelandic aristocracy which cultivates the art of skaldic poetry (Guðrún Nordal 2001, 162–163). Gissur’s stanza is not as fragmented as Þórarinn’s nor does it confront its audience with the immediacy of the physical effects of violence. It is also noteworthy that Gissur seems to be referring to a well-known aphorism attributed to Cicero: Qui doluit, meminit (He who suffers, remembers), in the line “skaði kennir mér minni minn” [my loss teaches me to remember] (Hermann Pálsson 1983, 49). The idea of a relationship between mental anguish and memory is well understood by the author, Sturla Þórðarson, who shows great interest in the way Gissur handles his pain, and seems fascinated by Gissur’s resilience. Even during the night of the attack, after he has attained safety, he is said to deport himself in a manly way despite his ordeal (Sturlunga saga, Ch. 413). Later he is quoted as saying that whatever happened to him it never affected his sleep. Sturla descri­ bes him as being “mikill borði” [with high sides] (Sturlunga saga, Ch. 416). It is a metaphorical expression derived from navigation and calls to mind the image of a ship which floats high on the sea and therefore provides protection to those on board from dangerous waves or enemy attacks (Cleasby and Vigfússon 1962 [1874], 72).



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Research on resilience, i.e. the ability to overcome the effects of a traumati­ sing experience, indicates that the more mature the individual is and the better the circumstances of his upbringing were, with strong attachments to others while growing up, the better he can deal with trauma. Gissur is from a rich and powerful family and when he is introduced into the saga he is said to be much loved by his father (Sturlunga saga, Ch. 199). It is likely that Gissur had strong mental defence mechanisms. But Sturla is also sensitive to signs that the events had affected his behaviour. Gissur flies into a rage when his efforts to seek revenge are not successful (Sturlunga saga, Ch. 176), though the rage is immediately quenched when he learns that one of the highest born of his assailants, Kolbeinn Dufgusson, is within reach. It is Gissur himself who discloses in a second stanza another effect of the trauma to which he has been subjected – depression. Borg lét brennuvarga bjórstofnandi klofna Sónar sex ok einum, – sák deili þess –, heila. Bergstjóra gleðr báru blikstríðanda síðan hregg, en hafnak muggu heldr, síz Kolbein felldum. (Sturlunga saga, Ch. 176, St. 80) [The poet (the founder of the beer of Són) had the skulls of the burners (fort of brains) cleft open. I saw it. Poetry (snow of the governor of mountains) cheers up the warrior (the breaker of gold), since Kolbeinn was slain. I refuse sadness. (author’s translation)]

Here Gissur expresses satisfaction over the slaying of seven of his assailants. He can now leave depression behind. The phrase “hafnak muggu” [literally, I refuse snowfall], is interpreted as a weather metaphor for low spirits. After having com­ posed and performed this stanza, Sturla says that Gissur takes a mistress, “og unni henni brátt mikið” (Sturlunga saga, Ch. 416) [whom he soon loved very much. (author’s translation)]. Through revenge, this resilient man has conquered his mental pain and renewed his appetite for life. The practice of poetry allows him to deal with his private pain. But the trauma is also public. He is a chieftain and his enemies have proven to be more efficient and ruthless than he. Revenge is necessary to restore his position as one of the

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most powerful men in Iceland. This fact meant breaching a truce that had been made at the initiative of the local bishop. The latter is so angry at Gissur that he excommunicates him (Sturlunga saga, Ch. 416). Opinions diverged on how legiti­ mate Gissur’s revenge was, as his assailants were avenging close kinsmen and friends that Gissur had killed. Having themselves obtained vengeance, they had been willing to make a settlement with Gissur (Sturlunga saga, Ch. 414). Making his private pain publicly known by ensuring that stanzas about his painful mem­ ories and how revenge eased his suffering would have been to his advantage in his dealings with the bishop, as it would have increased public sympathy for his cause and enabled him to pursue his plans for revenge. Skaldic poetry was a means to do that, as stanzas such as Gissur’s were relatively easy to understand and would have circulated widely at the time. An example of this are stanzas also preserved in Sturla’s Íslendinga saga, composed after the attack on the farm of Sauðafell in 1229 (Sturlunga saga, Chs. 217–220). Jonathan Grove has analysed this episode and shown the “perceived congru­ ence and continuity between the discourse of skaldic poetry and the reciprocal violence of feud” in thirteenth-century Iceland (Grove 2008, 125). Both are, in Grove’s terms, ‘modes of performance’ in the honour-based society of Common­ wealth Iceland. Sturla’s account shows the interpenetration of the public and the private in the story of these dramatic events and the accompanying poetry. In a period when both church and monarchy are trying to curb the violence of the armed lay elite, Gissur not only performs his determination to exact revenge, but also his genuine personal grief. These two examples show an awareness among medieval Icelanders of what trauma can do to a person’s psyche, even though this awareness is not expressed in modern terms. They recognized the relationship between memory and trauma and were equally aware of the connection between the practice of poetry and expressing and overcoming trauma.

Works cited Primary sources Eyrbyggja saga. In Eyrbyggja saga. Brands þáttr ǫrva. Eiríks saga rauða. Grænlendinga saga. Grænlendinga þáttr. Ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson and Matthías Þórðarsson. ÍF, 4. Reykjavík, 1957 [1935]. 1–184. Sturlunga saga 1. Ed. Jón Jóhannesson, Magnús Finnbogason and Kristján Eldjárn. Reykjavík, 1946.



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Secondary sources Cleasby, Richard and Guðbrandur Vigfússon. 1962 [1874]. An Icelandic-English Dictionary. Oxford. Grove, Jonathan. 2008. “Skaldic Verse-Making in Thirteenth-Century Iceland. The Case of the Sauðafellsferðarvísur.” Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 4: 85–131. Guðrún Nordal. 2001. Tools of Literacy. The Role of Skaldic Verse in Icelandic Textual Culture of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. Toronto. Hermann Pálsson. 1983. “Eftir Njálsbrennu.” Andvari 118: 47–50. O’Donoghue, Heather. 2005. Skaldic Verse and the Poetics of Saga Narrative. Oxford. Poole, Russell. 1985. “The Origins of the Máhlíðingavísur.” Scandinavian Studies 57: 244–285. van der Kolk, Bessel. 2014. The Body Keeps the Score. Mind, Brain and Body in the Transformation of Trauma. New York. Vésteinn Ólason. 1989. “‘Máhlíðingamál’: Authorship and tradition in a part of Eyrbyggja saga.” In Úr Dölum til Dala. Guðbrandur Vigfússon Centenary Essays. Ed. Rory McTurk and Andrew Wawn. Leeds Texts and Monographs, 11. Leeds. 187–203.

Yoav Tirosh

II: 16 Icelanders Abroad 1 Introduction The Icelandic sagas of various classes provide rich case studies for cultural memory, as varied reflections of how the Icelanders viewed their own past, and how they constructed the representation of that past to suit their present. The kings’ saga Morkinskinna (‘rotten parchment’, a misleading name for the early thirteenth-century saga, whose earliest attestation can be found in the similarly named late thirteenth-century manuscript GkS 1009 fol.) is celebrated for its rich þættir, i.e. episodes/short stories/tales (Harris 1972; Ármann Jakobsson 2013) that relate the stories of Icelanders at the court of the Norwegian kings. One such story is commonly called Hreiðars þáttr heimska [the tale of Hreiðarr the fool], and takes place during the joint rule of King Magnús góði Ólafsson and King Haraldr harðráði Sigurðsson in c. 1046. This story concerns a seemingly foolish Icelander who manages to win king Magnús’ favour. Hreiðarr’s decisions, words, and char­ acter development all reflect a conscious design of a kind of Icelander of the past, who remains true to his roots, and gains success and riches thanks to this dedica­ tion. He is an exaggerated, alternative model of behaviour for Icelanders of Morkinskinna’s present to follow, and an indication of how the saga’s author wished to represent his own past. Hreiðars þáttr exemplifies how some Icelanders used their ancestors abroad as models of behaviour, shaping and guiding their way through a complicated present.

2 Case study: Hreiðars þáttr and cultural memory To construct Hreiðarr as a figure of cultural memory, worthy of being remembered, the author needed to establish him as such from the onset. Hreiðarr – or rather, his brother Þórðr – is thus introduced: “Þórðr hét maðr. Hann var Þorgrímsson, Hreiðarssonar, þess er Glúmr vá.” (Morkinskinna. I, Ch. 26) [There was a man named Þórðr. He was the son of Þorgrímr, who was the son of the Hreiðarr whom Glúmr killed. (Morkinskinna, Ch. 24)]. This Glúmr could be Víga-Glúms saga’s [Killer Glum’s Saga] violent protagonist (Two Icelandic Stories, 81). This serves to localise the story, since Glúmr lived in Eyjafjarðadalr, nearby Svarfaðardalr, where Hreiðarr eventually settles down. Additionally, the older Hreiðarr could arguably have been the Norwegian friend of Eyjólfr, Glúmr’s father, thus provid­ https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-052



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ing the brothers with a Norwegian origin. That the referenced Glúmr is indeed Víga-Glúmr is also suggested later in the story when Hreiðarr’s laugh is a prelude to a kill; this is a characteristic that is connected to Glúmr and his son Vigfúss. In these few short sentences, Þórðr and Hreiðarr are provided with a possible origin story, and are grounded in the Icelandic saga landscape. Víga-Glúmr’s indirect presence in the story could also remind the audience about his initial awkward reception in Norway, and emphasise the clumsy component apparent in many portrayals of Icelanders abroad (Gilbert 1991). Thus, the Icelandic audience is set up to see itself in Hreiðarr (Ármann Jakobsson 2014, 290), an image of themselves. The brothers Hreiðarr and Þórðr provide positive and negative examples models of behaviour, one to be remembered, and another to be forgotten and repressed (Rigney 2004, 181–182). As Maurice Halbwachs has it: “A society can hardly adapt itself to new conditions without redesigning its structure either by modifying the hierarchy and the relations among its various parts or by amalgam­ ating, in whole or in part, with neighboring societies.” (Halbwachs 1992 [1925], 156). Hreiðarr represents a more flexible kind of identity, willing to modify itself but staying true to a certain tradition, while Þórðr represents an amalgamated personality, wishing to shed away that which makes him Icelandic. The clear­ est manifestation of this can be found in the brothers’ dialogue after the king invites them to stay with him over winter. Þórðr demands that Hreiðarr changes his clothes into something more presentable. He wishes that Hreiðarr integrate rather than set himself apart from the other courtiers. Hreiðarr responds: “Eigi getr þú allnær at ek muna skrúðklæðin á mik láta koma” (Morkinskinna. I, Ch. 26) [You’re not close to the mark if you think that I am going to dress up in fine clothes (Morkinskinna, Ch. 24)], but agrees to wear vaðmálsklæði (clothes of homespun)]. This choice of clothes assures that he looks distinguished enough for the court, but is also distinguishable from the other courtiers. Appearance plays an important role in shaping people’s memory (Connerton 1989, 10–12, 72–104), and the author’s choice to have Hreiðarr insist on wearing vaðmál (homespun), one of Iceland’s main exports to Norway in the thirteenth century (e.g. Smith 2015), is not coincidental, as it is a material that would be associated with Icelanders. If Þórðr is the image of the successful and complacent Icelander, who tries to be just as Norwegian as the Norwegians, Hreiðarr embraces those attributes that single him out at court, and eventually comes out on top. Following this scene, Þórðr exits from the narrative without a word, and is only mentioned by the king once negatively; meanwhile Hreiðarr gains the intimacy of a king and receives a poet’s reward for a poem he recites. At the end, he is related to have come back to Iceland and continued his family’s line (Two Icelandic Stories, 17; Sauckel 2016, 68; Tirosh 2017).

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Finer clothes do not make a man, and Hreiðarr’s behaviour stands out. When he is provided with a horse on the way to a meeting between the two reign­ ing kings, he wears the animal out and the king refuses to provide him with a new one. Hreiðarr then decides to walk and not only manages to keep up, but also exhausts the other courtier’s horses when they race with him. On the one hand, this is meant to emphasise Hreiðarr’s physical oddness, but, on the other hand, later in Morkinskinna similar behaviour is related to the “óvitr” [unwise] King Haraldr gilli (Morkinskinna. II, Ch. 86). This parallel between Hreiðarr and a Norwegian king is not unique; from the very onset of the Morkinskinna narra­ tive King Magnús góði himself is referred to as the Russian king Jarizleifr‘s fól [fool] by fellow courtiers (Morkinskinna. I, Ch. 1). This also positions Hreiðarr as close to the figure of the courtly fool, a position that in Scandinavia seems to have been tied to the royal skáld (Otto 2001, 15–16; Hastrup and Ovesen 1976, 21). That Hreiðarr recites a praise poem to King Magnús at the end of the þáttr strengthens this interpretation of his character. The courtly fool had unique access and close­ ness to the king. The foolish behaviour that accompanies Hreiðarr throughout his stay at the court is not a disadvantage, then, but rather one that brings him closer, both in proximity and in literary representation, to Morkinskinna’s kings. This closeness allows Hreiðarr to pass judgement on kings, and assess their value and behaviour, as is well demonstrated in a scene when he assesses King Magnús’ body after he has him undressed (Ármann Jakobsson 2001, 39–40), and later when he composes an odd but successful praise poem in the king’s honour. In his confrontation with King Haraldr harðráði a similar assessment takes place. After he kills a retainer of King Haraldr, Hreiðarr must flee and hide from his wrath. Haraldr, however, finds the hiding place, and when he confronts Hreiðarr, the latter’s response is to ask for forgiveness through the gift of a gilded pig figu­ rine. The king at first admires the figurine, and circulates it around the room to his followers, which mirrors Hreiðarr’s circumspection of King Magnús earlier in the saga. But when it comes back to Haraldr, he examines it more closely and realises that it has teats, meaning that it is a sow. The revelation of the mammal’s true sex infuriates the king and he again sets out to kill Hreiðarr. The insult would have been obvious to the thirteenth-century audience raised in an era when comparisons to female animals were forbidden by law. Hreiðarr’s insult is even keener since it refers to the nickname of Haraldr’s father Sigurðr sýr, meaning sow (Morkinskinna, 433, note 8). This name reminds Haraldr of his heathen origins, since the nickname refers to the female goddess Sigurðr worshipped, and also implies an additional insulting meaning to his father’s nickname. Throughout Morkinskinna, Haraldr is presented as a king who is highly concerned with the way in which his memory is preserved. He is aware that Hreiðarr’s act of artis­ tic creation and performance binds his memory with the sow figurine, which



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explains his extreme and violent reaction to it. Hreiðarr is thus positioned as the Icelander who controls and shapes the memory of kings through the act of crea­ tion. Not everybody can gain such a position, as is apparent in narratives such as Sturlunga saga’s [the saga of the Sturlungs] Sturlu þáttr [the tale of Sturla], where the saga author gains the audience and eventual friendship of a hostile king through his unique storytelling abilities. Such abilities were firmly grounded in knowledge of ancient lore, as Snorri Sturluson’s Edda project makes clear (Torfi H. Tulinius 2009; Wanner 2008). At the end of the þáttr, King Magnús gifts Hreiðarr with a small island off the coast of Norway, to which Hreiðarr responds: “þar skal ek samtengja með Nóreg ok Ísland” (Morkinskinna. I, Ch. 26) [With that I will link Norway and Iceland. (Morkinskinna, Ch. 24)]. When Magnús hears this, he quickly decides to buy back the island from Hreiðarr. This scene might have reminded the saga’s audience of Norwegian intervention in Iceland, both at the time of composition (first decades of the thirteenth century), and the time of the first extant manuscript (late thir­ teenth century) (Hermann Pálsson 1992, 160–169). Hreiðarr could be reminding King Magnús of his father Óláfr helgi’s failed attempt at acquiring the island of Grímsey off the coast of Eyjafjǫrðr, an attempt that is framed in Heimskringla (Circle of the world, a kings’ saga) as a defining moment for Icelandic identity and independence (Heimskringla. II, Ch. 125). This discourse of islands as a space of resistance to royal power seems to have been common in Old Norse literature (Poilvez 2017). Hreiðarr could thus be implying to Magnús, and the saga’s con­ temporary audience, that it is wisest not to meddle with the ownership of an island (Morkinskinna, 78). Hreiðarr’s characterisation serves the Morkinskinna’s author’s goal of estab­ lishing a clear notion of Icelandic identity and uniqueness. Hreiðarr’s role as a fool of sorts allows him to gain access to the king that his brother Þórðr could only dream of. While Morkinskinna is not telling its audience to behave like fools, it is telling them to embrace their Icelandic roots, grounded firmly in the past. The elusiveness of intentionality does not allow us to know whether or not Morkinskinna’s author had intended to embody Hreiðarr with so much meaning; but by mediating this image of the past and creating the unique character of Hreiðarr, the text becomes an expression of cultural memory that shapes the audience’s understanding of their past and present.

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Works cited Primary sources Heimskringla. II. Ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson. ÍF, 27. Reykjavík, 1945. Morkinskinna. The Earliest Icelandic Chronicle of the Norwegian Kings (1030–1157). Ed. and trans. Theodore M. Andersson and Kari Ellen Gade. Islandica, 51. Ithaca, NY, 2000. Morkinskinna. I. Ed. Ármann Jakobsson and Þórður Ingi Guðjónsson. ÍF, 23. Reykjavík, 2011. Morkinskinna. II. Ed. Ármann Jakobsson and Þórður Ingi Guðjónsson. ÍF, 24. Reykjavík, 2011. Two Icelandic Stories. Hreiðars þáttr, Orms þáttr. Ed. Anthony Faulkes. London, 1978.

Secondary sources Ármann Jakobsson. 2001. “The Amplified Saga. Structural Disunity in Morkinskinna.” Medium Aevum 70: 29–46. Ármann Jakobsson. 2013. “The Life and Death of the Medieval Icelandic Short Story.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 112.3: 257–291. Ármann Jakobsson. 2014. A Sense of Belonging. Morkinskinna and the Icelandic Identity c. 1220. Trans. Fredrik Heinemann. The Viking Collection, 22. Odense. Connerton, Paul. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge. Gilbert, Anthony J. 1991. “The Icelanders Abroad: The Concept of Social and National Identity in Some Icelandic Þættir.” Neophilologus 75: 408–424. Halbwachs, Maurice 1992. On Collective Memory. Ed. and trans. Lewis Coser. Chicago, IL. [French orig. 1925] Harris, Joseph. 1972. “Genre and Narrative Structure in some Íslendinga þættir.” Scandinavian Studies 44: 1–27. Hastrup, Kirsten and Jan Ovesen. 1976. “The Joker’s Cycle.” Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 7.1: 11–26. Hermann Pálsson. 1992. “Hirðskáld í spéspegli.” Skáldskaparmál 2: 148–169. Otto, Beatrice K. 2001. Fools Are Everywhere: The Court Jester around the World. Chicago. Poilvez, Marion. 2017. “Outlaws of the Northern Seas. A Comparison in the Norse Corpus.” In Northern Atlantic Islands and the Sea. Seascapes and Dreamscapes. Ed. Andrew Jennings, Silke Reeploeg and Angela Watt. Newcastle upon Tyne. 97–112. Rigney, Ann. 2004. “Portable Monuments. Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans.” Poetics Today 25.2: 361–396. Sauckel, Anita. 2016. “‘Von unberechenbarem Wesen?’ – Der literarische Trickster in den Isländersagas.” Nordeuropa Forum. Zeitschrift für Kulturstudien. Journal for the Study of Culture: 56–73. Smith, Michèle Hayeur. 2015. “Weaving Wealth. Cloth and Trade in Viking Age and Medieval Iceland.” In Textiles and the Medieval Economy: Production, Trade, and the Consumption of Textiles, 8th–16th Centuries. Ed. Angela Ling Huang and Carsten Jahnke. Oxford. 23–40. Tirosh, Yoav. 2017. “Scolding the Skald. The Construction of Cultural Memory in Morkinskinna’s Sneglu–Halla þáttr.” European Journal of Scandinavian Studies 47.1: 1–23.



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Torfi H. Tulinius. 2009. “Pierre Bourdieu and Snorri Sturluson. Chieftains, Sociology and the Development of Literature in Medieval Iceland.” In Snorres Edda – i europeisk og islandsk kultur. Ed. Jon Gunnar Jørgensen. Reykholt. 47–72. Wanner, Kevin J. 2008. Snorri Sturluson and the Edda. The Conversion of Cultural Capital in Medieval Scandinavia. Toronto.

John Lindow

II: 17 Folk Belief 1 Introduction Folk belief is understood here as a set of shared conceptions that has persisted over time regarding such matters as supernatural beings. In the pre-modern North this set of conceptions can seemingly be traced from the onset of modern­ ism as far back as our textual and linguistic analytic apparatus will take us – and possibly forward into modernism as well, when certain markers of the supernatu­ ral were transferred to ethnic out-groups (Lindow 1995; Tangherlini 1995). The supernatural beings of nature were not always visible, had powers beyond those of humans, and were threatening but could also be helpful. They lived in water, mountains, and forest – in short, usually where humans did not, although there were also spirits in and around the household. The dead probably comprised another such group. All the Nordic languages have some version of the word ‘troll’ (linguistic continuity) and many versions of ‘trolls’ (conceptual continuity). In its temporal and geographic expanse, this kind of continuity constitutes an extreme example of collective memory. It was probably facilitated through encounters people believed they had with supernatural beings, in which individual experi­ ence was interpreted through cultural norms and traditions (collective memory as Halbwachs 1992 thought of it) and perpetuated by the individual remembering and describing the encounter during her/his lifetime (Assmann’s communicative memory – see e.g. Assmann 2008); by the individual’s family doing the same both during and after the individual’s lifetime (this would continue to be com­ municative memory, but it is likely that as the end of the time frame for com­ municative memory was reached – c. 80 years according to Assmann – collec­ tive memory would then replace it if the incident had cultural value); and by the circulation of numerous such stories through time and space – again, as part of cultural memory. Folklorists call such stories ‘legends’ by which they mean short believable narratives. Their location within cultural memory is consistent with the fact that there were storytellers who specialized in legend (Tangherlini 1994), despite the conversational nature of the genre.

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2 Case study The short Icelandic narrative Bergbúa þáttr [The Tale of the Mountain-Dweller], found in the extant copies of the lost medieval manuscript Vatnhshyrna and in the vellum Pseudo-Vatnshyrna (AM 564a 4to), both from the end of the fourteenth century, is a short Icelandic text describing an encounter between two humans and a supernatural being. It is set in the area around Djúpafjörður in the southern part of the west fjords at the eastern end of Breiðafjörður. It tells about an other­ wise unknown man named Þórðr who sets off to church one winter night on some high holy day. He brings an unnamed servant with him. Caught in a blizzard, they hide in a cave and commend themselves to God’s protection. In the night they see two huge eyes, far apart (clearly those of a giant or troll), and they hear this being recite a poem repeated three times; the last stanza urges them to learn it. In the morning they continue to the church but have missed the service. On their way home, they find no cave where they think it should be. Þórðr subsequently moves his homestead closer to the church. He has learned the poem, and he prospers, but the servant does not learn it, and he dies within a year. In discussing the closely related Kumlbúa þáttr [The Tale of the Cairn-Dweller] (Lindow 2011) and, years ago, Þorsteins þáttr skelks (Lindow 1986), Lindow argued that we can easily recognise the paradigm set forth by the folklorist Lauri Honko and others for narratives about experience with the supernatural (Honko 1964; see also Honko 1963). Honko was refining the notion of the ‘memorate’, a term coined by the folklorist Carl Wilhelm von Sydow (1934) to denote a first-hand account of a personal experience but later narrowed primarily to supernatural experience, probably because the first scholar to discuss the concept, Gunnar Granberg (1935a), took his examples from his dissertation on encounters between humans and the Swedish skogsrå [forest spirit] (Granberg 1935b). Obviously with the term ‘memorate’ von Sydow was thinking about the memory an individual has of his or her own experiences, but the memory must be told (it is an ‘account’), and it therefore falls neatly into Assmann’s concept of communicative memory (2008), especially insofar as the account is open to feedback from those who hear it told (see the next paragraph). Honko’s model constituted an early attempt at a cognitive approach to folk belief and religion. According to this model, encounters with the supernatural tended to occur to a person when cultural norms were at stake and the person was under some kind of stress, ordinarily in poor perceptual conditions. The encounter is triggered when only one sense (usually sight or hearing) picks up what Honko calls a ‘releasing stimulus’. Honko hypothesised that the person then complements the releasing stimulus with culturally-bound notions that depend on location: in a graveyard one would see a ghost, in the Nordic forest a troll –

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and in the North American forest, one might add, Bigfoot. After the encounter, other community members may reinterpret the experience using additional cul­ tural norms (here is the feedback), and a narrative about it could enter oral tradi­ tion (a channel for cultural memory, at least for certain genres). Furthermore, the cultural norms of oral tradition exist in both individual and collective memory, and it goes without saying that memory is a factor in the transmission and main­ tenance of oral traditions. In Bergbúa þáttr, the cultural norm of attending mass on a holy day is at stake. Þórðr and his servant are under stress, both from the storm and from the fact that they are spending the night in a cave and will miss the church service they set out to attend. Although they first hear noises in the cave, the releasing stimulus is visual, namely the sight of the two huge eyes. Folklorists following Honko’s model might argue that Þórðr and the servant saw dim flickers of light and interpreted them as two huge eyes. Typically for Icelandic saga style, the author of the text says nothing about the owner of the eyes other than that he was unlikely to have a narrow face, but the folk belief, seated in both cultural and individual memory, would make identification of the being as a giant or troll instantaneous. Indeed, Þórðr and the servant never see any more of this being than the eyes, and the rest of their experience is auditory. The poet identifies himself, in his first verse, as Hallmundr. Here we can assume that Þórðrr and the servant, or more accurately the audience of the text, brought to bear additional cultural knowledge – embedded in memory – which we can grasp through the intertextuality of the literary record. Grettis saga tells of one Loptr, who later calls himself Hallmundr, a friend of Grettir’s and both a cave-dweller – (some 120 kilometres southeast of Djúpafjörður) – and a poet who left behind verses from an ævikviða [dying man’s poem about his life and deeds]. Ch. 57 tells us that Grettir composed a flokkr [poem without a refrain] about Hallmundr, and the two lines cited from it accord closely with lines in the very first stanza that Þórðr and the servant hear. Supported by these literal lieux de mémoire, as Nora (2006) understood them (sites in the landscape that are in effect triggers for community memory), conceptions of a cave-dwelling Hall­ mundr must have comprised part of the collective memory of western Iceland, and a lava field with several lava tube caves near where the Hallmundr of Grettis saga lived bears the name Hallmundarhraun. Although the name is first attested from the nineteenth century, the lava field itself is much older, probably from the tenth century (Þórhallur Vilmundarson 1991, ccvii–ccx). What the troll recites, and what the humans hear three times, is twelve stanzas in the elaborate skaldic meter dróttkvætt, with however the last line of each stanza repeated, a device commonly associated with verse spoken by super­ natural beings. We now know it as Hallmundarkviða, after the supernatural poet’s



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name. Despite efforts, the poem still appears to defy a unified interpretation (Guðmundr Finnbogason 1935; Hawes 2008). The first six stanzas bring to bear imagery of a catastrophic volcanic eruption with significant loss of life, and in the second six the poet speaks of his personal experience and also twice mentions the pre-Christian giant-slaying god Þórr (Thor). The final half-stanza contains the challenge to learn the poem. The verb used in the imperative is nema, the primary meaning of which is ‘take’ but which in context can mean ‘learn’, with the con­ notation ‘learn by heart, memorise’. In poetic contexts, it might sometimes too be read as ‘understand’ (see e.g. Finnur Jónsson 1931, 425 s.v. nema 9; Cleasby and Vigfusson 1957, 453 s.v. nema B). This polysemy throws an interesting light on the process of interpreting oral poetry: does understanding require memorisation, or memorisation require understanding, or are the two more or less identical? Constraints of space preclude further discussion, but it is worth noting in passing that skaldic poetry in the high middle ages in Iceland preserved memory going back probably as far as the ninth century in Norway. Bergbúa þáttr poses a particular dilemma. Should one learn a poem from a supernatural poet in a dark wintry cave, with verses that even mention Þórr? Later folklore can help with this question: generally it turns out to be wise to obey the injunctions of supernatural beings. Although the situation sometimes appears ambiguous – in some legends, people eat the food of the supernatural beings and prosper; in others, they do so and go crazy – there is usually an underlying nar­ rative logic. Thus, in the so-called migratory legend type that Reidar Christiansen called “Food from the fairies”, one plot mechanism has two persons request food from the trolls. One eats and later prospers, the other does not do so, and his crops fail (Christiansen 1958, 107). This is a simple matter of good manners: one should not ask for something and then spurn it. While Þórðr and the servant did not request the poem, Þórðr told his servant that they should stay in the cave rather than leave and risk getting lost, and this statement amounts to a tacit will­ ingness to hear the poem, and, thus, to be open to learning it. Þórðr passes the test. He learns the poem and prospers. The unnamed servant fails the test and dies within a year. What the text ultimately shows is the value of the oral transmission of verse and, more generally, of other cultural goods, including presumably genealogies, legends and folktales, and so forth. To learn and to transmit verse – that is, to participate in the oral tradition that encoded knowledge – is to live; to fail to do so is to die. By invoking God’s protection over a moment when he learns a poem with non-Christian and pre-Christian imagery, Þórðr, through the author of Bergbúa þáttr, shows the value of collective memory, enabled through individual memory, in the specific social circumstances of medi­ eval Iceland.

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Works cited Primary sources Bergbúa þáttr. In Harðar saga, Bárðar saga, Þorskfirðinga saga, Flóamanna saga. Ed. Þórhallur Vilmundarson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson. ÍF, 13. Reykjavík, 1991. 439–450. Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar. Ed. Guðni Jónsson. ÍF, 7. Reykjavík, 1936.

Secondary sources Assmann, Jan. 2008. “Communicative and cultural memory.” In Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (in collaboration with Sara B. Young). Media and Cultural Memory/Medien und kulturelle Erinnerung, 8. Berlin and New York. 109–118. Christiansen, Reidar Th. 1958. The Migratory Legends. A Proposed List of Types with a Systematic Catalogue of the Norwegian Variants. FFC, 175. Helsinki. Cleasby, Richard and Gudbrand Vigfusson. 1957. An Icelandic-English Dictionary. 2nd ed. with supplement by Sir William Craigie. Oxford. Finnur Jónsson. 1931. Lexicon poeticum antiquae linguae septentrionalis. Ordbog over det norsk-islandske skjaldesprog. 2nd ed. Copenhagen. Granberg, Gunnar. 1935a. “Memorat und Sage. Einige methodische Gesichtspunkte.” Saga och sed 1935: 120–127. Granberg, Gunnar. 1935b. Skogsrået i yngre nordisk folktradition. Skrifter utgivna av Gustav Adolfs Akademien för folklivsforskning, 6. Uppsala. Guðmundur Finnbogason. 1935. “Hallmundarkviða.” Skírnir 109: 172–181. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1992. On Collective Memory. Ed. and trans. Lewis Coser. Chicago, IL. [French orig. 1925] Hawes, Janice. 2008. “The Land Spirit’s Rebellion. Icelandic Independence and Religious Conflict in Bárðar saga.” In Translatio. Or the Transmission of Culture in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Ed. Laura H. Hollengreen. Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, 13. Turnhout. 143–159. Honko, Lauri. 1963. Geisterglaube in Ingermanland. FFC, 185. Helsinki. Honko, Lauri. 1964. “Memorates and the Study of Folk Belief.” Journal of the Folklore Institute 1: 5–19. Lindow, John. 1986. “Þorsteins þáttr skelks and the Verisimilitude of Supernatural Experience in Saga Literature.” In Structure and Meaning in Old Norse Literature. New Approaches to Textual Analysis and Literary Criticism. Viking Series, 3. Ed. John Lindow, Lars Lönnroth and Gerd Wolfgang Weber. Odense. 264–280. Lindow, John. 1995. “Supernatural Others and Ethnic Others. A Millenium of World View.” Scandinavian Studies 67.1: 8–31. Lindow, John. 2011. “Meeting the Other. The Cases of Kumlbúa þáttr and Draumr Þorsteins Síðu-Hallssonar.” In Myths, Legends and Heroes. Studies in Old Norse and Old English Literature in Honour of John McKinnell. Ed. Daniel Anlezark. Toronto. 77–90. Nora, Pierre. 2006. Rethinking France. Les Lieux de mémoire. Vol. 2. Space. Chicago.



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von Sydow, Carl Wilhelm. 1934. “Kategorien der Prosa-Volksdichtung.” In Volkskundliche Gaben John Meier zum siebzigten Geburtstage dargebracht. Ed. Erich Semann and Harry Schewe. Berlin and Leipzig. 253–268. [Reprint in Carl Wilhelm von Sydow. Selected Papers on Folklore. Copenhagen. 60–88.] Tangherlini, Timothy R. 1994. Interpreting Legend. Danish Storytellers and their Repertoires. New York and London. Tangherlini, Timothy R. 1995. “From Trolls to Turks. Continuity and Change in Danish Legend Tradition.” Scandinavian Studies 67.1: 32–62. ÞÓrhallur Vilmundarson. 1991. “Formáli. Bergbúa þáttr og Kumlbúa þáttr.” In Harðar saga, Bárðar saga, Þorskfirðinga saga, Flóamanna saga. Ed. Þórhallur Vilmundarson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson. ÍF, 13. Reykjavík. cciii–ccxii.

Carolyne Larrington

II: 18 Emotions 1 Introduction Old Norse culture is one of memory, at an individual and collective level. Although we think of memory as primarily a cognitive process, involved encod­ ing, retrieval, source information and detail, it is, like many cognitive processes, intimately bound up with emotion. Emotion triggers memory; memory elicits emotion, for the neural networks which are activated in the remembering process are closely inter-related with emotion systems (Damasio 1999; Brandsma et al. 2015). Remembering past emotions as well as experiencing fresh emotion when recalling – or being reminded about – past events produces behaviour in the form of utterances and actions.

2 Case study Guðrún Ósvífrsdóttir is the heroine of Laxdœla saga [The Saga of the People of Laxardal]. After her husband Bolli has been murdered in the course of the feud kindled by Bolli’s killing of Kjartan Óláfsson, Guðrún behaves oddly (Laxdœla saga, Ch. 55). In a shockingly brutal and provocative move, Helgi Harðbeinsson uses the sash tied around Guðrún’s pregnant womb to wipe Bolli’s lifeblood from his spear. Instead of weeping, clapping her hands together and loosening her hair – features of female mourning behaviour in eddic poetry – Guðrún looks at Helgi and smiles. Then she walks alongside the murderers, chatting with them before turning back to deal with the aftermath of the slaying (Sif Rikhardsdót­ tir 2015). The killers are puzzled: can Guðrún really feel so little at the death of her husband? They assume that Guðrún must not mind Bolli’s death: “‘svá sem þeir hefði ekki at gǫrt, þat henni væri í móti skapi’” (Laxdœla saga, Ch. 56) [as if they had done nothing at all to offend her” (The Saga of the People of Laxardal, Ch. 56)]. Halldórr Óláfsson, one of the vengeance party’s leaders, understands her response: “‘hygg ek, at henni gengi þat meir til leiðiorðs við oss, at hon vildi vita sem gørst, hverir menn hefði verit í þessi ferð’” (Laxdœla saga, Ch. 56) [“‘I suspect […] that she saw us off […] [because] she was intent on finding out exactly who had taken part in the attack’” (The Saga of the People of Laxardal, Ch. 56)]. As Halldórr recognises, Guðrún is engaged in committing the avengers’ identi­ ties to memory. Given that Helgi Harðbeinsson has not long been in Iceland, she https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-054



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needs to ascertain his identity – and probably that of Helgi’s brother-in-law, Þor­ steinn svarti. Twelve years later, when Bolli’s posthumous son is old enough for vengeance, Guðrún summons up those memories of who exactly was involved. In negotiation with Snorri goði, she determines who will pay the price for Bolli’s killing; Helgi, as he prophesies when Guðrún smiles at him, is the chosen victim (Laxdœla saga, Ch. 59). Trauma is what is remembered in Old Norse literature: losses, of those whom people love, of farms they have struggled to make viable, of precious items brought home to Iceland from Norway. Memory-tokens, the bloody clothing in which a husband or father died, do not literally trigger memories in those to whom they are displayed, for the dead are not consigned to oblivion. When Guðrún calls her sons to her onion patch and shows them Bolli’s “línklæði, skyrta og línbrœkr […] blóðug mjǫk,” (Laxdœla saga, Ch. 60) [“garments of linen, a shirt and breeches much stained with blood” (The Saga of the People of Laxardal, Ch. 60)] the move comes as no surprise to them. Although her sons react with strong emotion – and the pragmatic observation that they are young and have little support – we should not infer that they had forgotten about their father. This day has been long expected; reminding, not remembering, is at stake in such hvǫt [whetting]scenes. Memory is rendered vivid, public, and intimately bound up with emotions of shame as well as grief: a potent combination that produces in the brothers a feeling that they identify as harmr [grief] to Þorgils Hǫlluson, who agrees – for his own strategic reasons – to help them in their vengeance (Laxdœla saga, Ch. 60). Men and women only need to be reminded about past events when a power­ ful social and emotional response is called for: a combination of shame, grief and, above all, anger in order to trigger revenge. In contrast, forgetting, although a key element in both memory and emotion processing, is culturally imagined as dif­ ficult to achieve. For both the eddic heroic characters, Sigurðr Fáfnisbani (slayer of Fáfnir) and Guðrún Gjúkadóttir, according to Vǫlsunga saga [The saga of the Völsungs] and the eddic poems upon which it draws, memories must be erased so as to move forward into a new present. Óminnis veig [liquor of not-memory] is part of Guðrún’s mother Grímhildr’s pharmacological repertoire, deployed to erase Sigurðr’s memory of Brynhildr, and her daughter’s memory of the trauma of losing her husband, murdered by her brothers (Völsunga saga, Chs. 28, 34; Quinn 2010). Yet, such is the enduring persistence of memory that in both cases the drink works imperfectly. At the end of his double wedding feast, Sigurðr remem­ bers all the oaths that he and Brynhildr had formerly sworn to one another. The memory-repression effect of his mother-in-law’s drink has become internalised and habitual; Sigurðr decides to let things be. When Brynhildr challenges him in a private conversation, Sigurðr’s emotional response to the memory of their past – and its highly problematic relation with the present – is written on his

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body: “en svá þrútnuðu hans síður at í sundr gengu brynjuhringar.” (Völsunga saga, Ch. 31) [“his sides swelled so that the chain-mail of his byrnie split apart”]. The act of remembering invites action; Sigurðr suggests that they abandon their spouses and marry one another, but Brynhildr refuses such dishonour. Neither can survive this impasse. Grímhildr administers the memory-suppressant once again when her daugh­ ter returns from Denmark; her aim is to erase her daughter’s resistance and ready her to marry again (Völsunga saga, Ch. 34; Cronan 1985). Guðrún is thus anaes­ thetised to her hostile feelings specifically about her brothers, relinquishing the idea of vengeance on them and reluctantly acquiescing in the complex exchange of women that Atli demands in recompense for the loss of his sister (Cronan 1985, 178; Quinn 2009). The horror of kin-murder and oath-breaking, a memory repressed with respect to her brothers’ past behaviour, breaks out again in her prophecy about Gunnarr and Högni’s fate at Atli’s hands (Völsunga saga, Ch. 35; see also Guðrúnarkviða II [Second Poem of Guðrún], Sts. 31–31, 37–44). More effective in assuaging the memory of loss is the time Guðrún spends in Denmark with Þóra, the king’s daughter, where she embroidered scenes from Sigurðr’s kingroup’s glorious past. Guðrún’s celebration of her husband’s ancestors is ther­ apeutic (Larrington 2012, 257–261). The act of commemoration, whether in the textile art of Guðrún’s tapestry or in poetic form, gives consolation to the creators for their loss. That the loved one is remembered, that their heroic deeds are reified in lasting, culturally valued forms soothes the trauma of bereavement (Harris 2006; Goeres 2015). Guðrún’s own laments, in Guðrúnarkviða I and II [First and Second Poems of Guðrún], and in Guðrúnarhvǫt [The Whetting of Guðrún] are, as female utterances, transitory and unmemorable; for, as Tacitus observes in the Germania: “Feminis lugere honestum est, viris meminisse.” (Germania, Ch. 27) [“Lamentation becomes women; men must remember.”] Skalds commemorate in lasting verse; women’s allusive creations in wool and silk are less assured of preservation. Emotionally intense memory is not simply the province of the individual. Old Norse-Icelandic culture remembers hugely traumatic events, memorialised within different genres and triggering different associations. The battle of Stiklastaðir and the conversion of the Icelanders are both remembered with strongly emo­ tional inflections in historical accounts and in the Íslendingasögur [the sagas of Icelanders] (Whaley 2000). The cultural realisation that conversion involves losses as well as gains is thematised in Norna-Gests þáttr [The tale of Gestr of the norns], a short fiction composed around 1300. At Óláfr Tryggvason’s court, memories of the past have become occluded and the present is over-valued. The splendid ring Hnituðr, presented to the king by his lieutenant, is thought to be of unparalleled quality until Norna-Gestr is asked to account for his lack of admira­



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tion for it. Gestr not only recalls the deeds of long ago that he participated in – adventures with Sigurðr, Starkaðr and the sons of Ragnarr loðbrók, which the rest of the court seem to have forgotten – but he can also prove his participation with various memory-objects: a lock from Grani’s tail, a ring from Fáfnir’s gold-hoard, and one of Starkaðr’s molars, now preserved as a bell-weight in a Danish church. Gestr’s memories are no longer traumatic, but rather function as entertainment, bringing communal merriment to the court – though the king is watchful lest he dwell on the wrong sort of material. The emotions of Sigurðr, Guðrún and Bryn­ hildr are emptied of impact; their travails become mere sensationalism. Memory is narrativised and inflected by its tellers. A particularly fourteenth-century awareness of the ways in which the past can be made contingent in later tellings is at stake here when, as Norna-Gestr relates, the giantess of Helreið Brynhildar [Brynhildr’s Ride to Hel] adds a curse to her clearly voiced disapproval of Brynhil­ dr’s behaviour: “fyrir þat skal ek ljóða á þik með hefndarorðum þeim, at öllum sér þú at leiðari, er slíkt heyra frá þér sagt.” (Norna-Gests þáttr, Ch. 9) [for that reason I shall enchant you with words of vengeance, that you shall be more hateful to everyone who hears such things said of you. (author’s translation)]. Brynhildr’s reputation, the way that the culture remembers her, as recast by the giantess, is thus transmitted via Norna-Gestr onwards to the fourteenth-century saga author. “Just like our more mundane memories, recollections of emotional traumas are constructions, not literal recordings,” notes Daniel Schacter (1996, 217). Old Norse-Icelandic culture developed generically various and effective modes for thinking about memory and feelings, coming to understand the constructed and conflicted nature of what is remembered – and who does the remembering.

Works cited Primary sources Eddukvæði. I–II. Ed. Jonas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason. ÍF. Reykjavík, 2014. Germania. In Tacitus. Agricola, Germania, Dialogues. Ed. and trans. E. H. Warmington and M. Hutton. 2nd ed. Loeb Classical Library, 35. Cambridge MA and London, 1970. Guðrúnarhvǫt. In Eddukvæði. II: 402–406. Guðrúnarkviða I. In Eddukvæði. II: 329–334. Guðrúnarkviða II. In Eddukvæði. II: 352–361. Helreið Brynhildar. In Eddukvæði. II: 349–351. Laxdœla saga. Ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson. ÍF, 5. Reykjavík, 1934. Norna-Gests þáttr. In Fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda. I. Ed. Guðni Jónsson. Reykjavík, 1954. 305–335. Völsunga saga / The Saga of the Völsungs. Ed. Ronald G. Finch. London, 1965.

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Secondary sources Brandsma, Frank, Carolyne Larrington and Corinne Saunders, eds. 2015. Emotions in Medieval Arthurian Literature. Body, Mind, Voice. Cambridge. Brandsma, Frank, Carolyne Larrington and Corinne Saunders. 2015. “Introduction.” In Emotions in Medieval Arthurian Literature. Ed. Frank Brandsma, Carolyne Larrington and Corinne Saunders. Cambridge. 1–10. Cronan, Dennis. 1985. “A Reading of Guðrúnarkviða Önnor.” Scandinavian Studies 57.2: 174–187. Damasio, Antonio. 1999. The Feeling of What Happens. Body, Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York. Goeres, Erin Michelle. 2015. The Poetics of Commemoration: Skaldic Verse and Social Memory, c. 890–1070. Oxford. Harris, Joseph. 2006. “Erfikvæði – myth, ritual, elegy.” In Old Norse Religion in Long-Term Perspectives. Origins, Changes and Interactions. An international conference in Lund, Sweden, June 3–7, 2004. Ed. Anders Andrén, Kristina Jennbert and Catharina Raudvere. Vägar till Midgård, 8. Lund. 267–271. Larrington, Carolyne. 2012. “Völsunga saga and Ragnars saga and Romance in Old Norse: Revisiting the Relationship.” In The Legendary Sagas. Origins and Development. Ed. Annette Lassen, Agnete Ney and Ármann Jakobsson. Reykjavík. 251–270. Quinn, Judy. 2009. “The Endless Triangles of Eddic Tragedy. Reading Oddrúnargrátr.” In Studi anglo-norreni in onore di John S. McKinnell. Ed. Maria Elena Ruggerini. Cagliari. 304–326. Quinn, Judy. 2010. “Liquid Knowledge. Traditional Conceptualisations of Learning in Eddic Poetry.” In Along the Oral-Written Continuum: Types of Texts, Relations, and Their Implications. Ed. Slavica Ranković, Leidulf Melve and Else Mundal. Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, 20. Turnhout. 175–217. Schacter, Daniel L. 1996. Searching for Memory. The Brain, the Mind, and the Past. New York. Sif Rikhardsdottir. 2015. “Translating Emotion: Vocalisation and Embodiment in Yvain and Ívens saga.” In Emotions in Medieval Arthurian Literature. Ed. Frank Brandsma, Carolyne Larrington and Corinne Saunders. Cambridge. 161–179. Whaley, Diana. 2000. “A Useful Past. Historical Writing in Medieval Iceland.” In Old Icelandic Literature and Society. Ed. Margaret Clunies Ross. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 42. Cambridge. 161–202.

Bjørn Bandlien

II: 19 Remembering Gendered Vengeance 1 Introduction In studies of gendered memory in medieval Europe, historians have argued that a shift took place at the turn of the millennium. Women are seen as having been more involved in shaping historical thought during the early Middle Ages, when political thinking was fashioned in the aristocratic households, and had a more central position in the transmission of family history in an oral culture. Patrick Geary argues that the masculinization of European memory culture gained speed, especially in the eleventh century, caused by state bureaucracy, where lit­ eracy and written chronicles informed the history of kings and Christianity and replaced oral history (Geary 1994). Elisabeth van Houts, however, has argued that written culture did not simply replace oral culture outside the monasteries and cathedral schools. Although we might assume that men wrote most of the chronicles and sagas, women conti­ nued to be important in the production of works of history and religious texts, often as commissioners or as part of the audience that the author or writer had in mind. In her study of who influenced and decided what was to be remembered, she emphasises that women played an active part in the production of memory in monasteries and in aristocratic families (van Houts 1999). In the context of medieval Nordic studies, several scholars have argued for a masculinization of memory during the Middle Ages, linked to two processes. First, Christianization and the growth of learned culture and Christian worldview influenced history writing and the roles played by men and women in the past. The memory of female inciters in the sagas, that is, women who incite, or whet, men to take vengeance, has been suggested as one example. Jenny Jochens has argued that such scenes are not a reflection of women’s prominent position in Icelandic society as ‘guardians of honour’, but were rather used by authors influ­ enced by theological notions of history to blame women for all the wrongs in the past, for making men kill other good men (Jochens 1986). Second, Iceland came under the king of Norway in 1262/64 with taxes, royal institutions, legal courts and officials, rather than being ruled by a wider group of dominant families. As political positions now had become reserved for men and the male line in aristocratic families, controlling women, their bodies and their reproductive abilities became more important. Conceptions of women in the past would then be divided into those seen living according to a submissive and ascetic ideal, on the one hand, and the character of women as sinners and troub­ https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-055

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lemakers on the other. The topos of the so-called maiden kings [meykonungar] of the late medieval indigenous riddarasögur [sagas of knights] – proud women who acted as men refusing to marry, but who were eventually subdued by cunning suitors – could then serve as an allegory of the shift from the remembrance of strong women to the ideal of the ascetic, submissive housewife in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Bagerius 2009). Both of these explanations portray women as victims of a masculine takeover of memory, one to the learned Christian culture and another to the growth of royal authority over the Icelandic aristocracy. Here, it will be argued that stories of the heroic, female inciters of the past were not only part of the masculinisation of memory culture in medieval Iceland, but could also be used in certain circum­ stances by women to legitimise and contextualise their own actions.

2 Case Study: Remembering vengeance in late medieval Iceland Among the most memorable scenes in the corpus of Íslendingasögur [sagas of Icelanders] are undoubtedly those involving female inciters or whetters. These women are often wives or widows who show their discontent with the failure of their husbands or male relatives to avenge a murder or spiteful words. A famous example comes from Njáls saga (Ch. 116), where Hildigunnr incites her kinsman Flosi to avenge Hǫskuldr, her slain husband. Flosi promises to pursue her case at the legal assembly to the full extent of the law, or else arrive at a settlement that all good men will consider honourable. Unsatisfied with this promise, Hil­ digunnr brings the bloody cloak that her husband wore when he was killed; the cloak itself was a gift from Flosi to Hǫskuldr. She had indeed saved the cloak for this conversation; she throws it over Flosi’s shoulders, with its clooted blood showering all over, and Hildigunnr says that he will be a níðingr to all if he will not avenge the murder of Hǫskuldr. Hildigunnr’s role as a curator of cloaks serves within the saga to bring a physical reminder to proper, honourable behaviour, standing in cntrast to Flosi’s reference to legal settlement. Similar scenes are found in other sagas, often linked to a physical token of past wrongs that has to be revenged. A well-known example is found in Óláfs saga helga [the saga of St Óláfr] in Heimskringla, where Sigríðr, whose son is killed, takes care of the murder weapon and later hands it over to her brother-in-law Þórir hundr. This act eventu­ ally leads to the famous battle of Stiklastaðir, where King Óláfr Haraldsson was martyred (Óláfs saga helga, Ch. 123).



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In a comparison of the Icelandic law collection (Grágás) and the early Norwe­ gian provincial laws, Else Mundal points out that women had different legal rights in Iceland and Norway, mainly with respect of their role as witnesses in court cases. Although Grágas was probably based on Norwegian laws, the Icelandic law code restricts the access of women in the legal courts, whereas they could appear as witnesses in the Norway (Mundal 1994). This social and cultural background for this difference has not been fully explained, but it is seems to be the case that it was the Icelanders who restricted women their access at assemblies, rather than Norway being more acceptable to women’s legal status. Eyrbyggja saga [The Saga of the People of Eyri] (Ch. 38), offers one explanation of the restriction of women bringing murder cases at court, referring to a murder of an honourable chieftain with only women left to pursue the case and claim inheritance. Such a great man deserved more, and after this failure, women were banned from bringing murder cases. This was a story that might show some uneasiness with the differences between Norwegian and Icelandic practice, but still legitimised the restrictions in Iceland. In stories from the past, however, it could be shown how women lamented, commemorated and incited men to take revenge, rather than letting cases be settled at assemblies, where women had less influence and were excluded from narratives of court cases, such as when Njáll negotiated cases at the assembly in Njáls saga. After the Icelanders’ submission to the Norwegian king and the rise of an aristocracy in royal service, we would expect stories of conflicts and conflict reso­ lutions to be associated with the masculine sphere, with officials as the prime agents, and an increased remembrance of conflict resolutions at the assemblies. This is partly the case, as written records testify to the use of the literacy in record­ ing property cases, testaments, and settling conflicts. Still, narratives in the later Middle Ages included women as agents in many of these documents, as initiators of negotiations, as well as of settlements and stories of vengeance outside the court (Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir 2013). Moreover, the rivalry between those families with offices, resources, trade and the goodwill of the king may have made the remembrance of honour, household, and feud relevant also in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Helgi Þorláksson 1997). One woman who was remembered in relation to the character of the female inciter is Grundar-Helga. She had a vital role in the opposition in Northern Iceland against the hirðstjóri [the king’s representative on Iceland], Smiður Andrésson, in 1362. Smiður had gathered a large following to confront several opposing mag­ nates in the north. According to later sources, Smiður and his followers were well-received by Helga, who ran the farm at Grund. Smiður demanded that Helga should spend the night with him and that her serving women were to accompany his men. Before that came to pass, Helga brought them a good meal and plenty to

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drink. However, in secret she sent some of her servants to the neighbouring farms with a message to come fully armed. Smiður Andrésson and the lawman, Jón Guttormsson, were caught by surprise and killed, while another lawman, Ormr Snorrason, managed to escape to the church close to the farm. The battle was commemorated in a poem shortly after the events, later included in the Flatey Annals. The poet accused Ormr in particular of behaving in a cowardly manner. Helga, on the other hand, was in later versions remem­ bered as a guardian of the farmers in Northern Iceland against injustice (Einar Bjarnason 1974). After the battle, there was something of a race of the survivors to the king of Norway to present their version of the story and get him on their side. Initially, the northern magnates succeeded in getting royal favour, while Ormr Snorrason only recovered his position from the king with some difficulty. From what we know of Ormr’s literary interests, he seems to have distanced himself from narratives of family and honour in the past. Instead, he commissioned man­ uscripts that emphasized the importance of royal authority, legal order, and reli­ gious heroism, for instance, *Ormsbók, now lost, that contained riddarasögur, a large codex of laws, and a collection of postola sögur (sagas of the Apostles). Here, women played minor roles in conflict resolutions in the context of feuds between farms and families, and do not legitimize the actions of female heroism displayed by Grundar-Helga. The version that supported the heroic memory of GrundarHelga, on the other hand, can be seen in context of the continued interest in the Icelandic past. The poem on the Battle of Grund in 1362 and Flatey Annals is asso­ ciated to a literary community that included the manuscripts Flateyjarbók [book of Flatey], a collection of mainly kings’ sagas that emphasized the relations of Icelanders with the king, and Möðruvallabók, containing Íslendingasögur such as Laxdœla saga and Njáls saga. Although we might presume that these man­ uscripts and annals were written by learned men, the deeds of Grundar-Helga would have had more chance to be approved and her role enhanced in a context where aristocratic families were in conflict. One of the members of the rich and powerful Skarðverjar family, and a descendant of Ormr Snorrason, was Ólöf Loftsdóttir (d. 1479). She married Björn Þorleifsson who later became involved in a conflict that also included her broth­ ers. Ólöf was t hen confronted with a dilemma that she and her contemporar­ ies would have recognized from both the Íslendingasögur and the kings’ sagas – should she support her husband or her brothers? From the sources, it is clear that she sided with her husband in the conflict. Even though other women of powerful families chose to side with their biological kin, Ólöf is still not remembered as disloyal or shifty, rather the opposite. When her husband was killed by English merchants in 1467, she was depicted as the leader of the resistance against the foreigners. As well as being interpreted in an avenging context, her actions were



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commemorated within something close to a national discourse. Although associ­ ated mostly with religious literature (her brother is named in a large manuscript containing saints’ lives, while her grandson later wrote two legendaries), she became remembered as representative of Icelanders’ resistance to foreign power (Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir 2013). Such positive memory of her support of her husband in his conflict against her brothers, and instigating vengeance upon the English, parallels the depictions of feuds of the past, that is, her significance in the later narratives indicates an intertextual relationship with stories featuring women’s vengeful roles in narratives of the heroic past. It is difficult to establish if Ólöf herself legitimized her actions in this context, but this was a way to commem­ orate female vengeance that could certainly be found sensible to an audience beyond herself and her immediate family. Some aristocratic women in the late Middle Ages also engaged in sponsor­ ing the production of courtly literature, so, for example, Margrét Vigfúsdóttir (d. 1486) at the farm Möðruvellir fram in Northern Iceland. Margrét was the prob­ able owner of a manuscript of riddarasögur (Holm perg. 7 fol.), as well as being associated with codices containing legendary sagas (AM 343 4to), kings’ sagas (AM 81a fol.) and Konungs skuggsjá (AM 243a fol.). Margrét is herself connected to stories of how she incited vengeance on Bishop Jón Gereksson in 1433. Jón had been the Archbishop of Uppsala, but was found unsuitable to this position and was instead appointed Bishop of Skálholt in 1421. According to later sources, Jón wanted to make Margrét his mistress, but she fiercely refused his advances. He then burned the farm, and killed Margrét’s brother. Margrét then promised to marry the man who avenged her brother. The avenger was Þorvarðr Loftsson, brother of the aforementioned Ólöf, and in 1436, he married Margrét. The life of Margrét Vígfúsdóttir was thus commemorated within a narrative structure similar to the female inciter in the Íslendingasögur, and with affinities to the remembrance of her sister-in-law Ólöf Lóftsdóttir, as well as GrundarHelga. Margrét Vigfúsdóttir’s vow to marry any man that would avenge her, is reminiscent of the trials of suitors in the riddarasögur proving their worth before marriage. Still, the reason for her incitement, or whetting, against Bishop Jón is the killing of her brother, and in the context of family vengeance, even though she was part of a community that knew and cultivated the stories of maiden kings that were forced into submission. In the world of Ólöf and Margrét the gendered memory was in some sense polyphonic and contextual. Sagas commemorating whetting women continued to be copied and read, alongside sagas about ascetic saints, peace-making prin­ cesses, dangerous troll-women, and fierce maiden kings that had to be subdued (Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir 2013, 137). Memories surrounding the vengeance of Margrét differs in this respect from the use of the past by the lawman Ormr

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Snorrason, who lost the battle of Grund, who understood the events in the mas­ culinized institutions of the king and law that were legitimised by other narra­ tives of the past. This contrast also implies that, rather than a linear development from a gendered memory culture based on orality to a literate and masculine one, late medieval audiences related to layers of multifaceted memories that were gen­ dered in various ways. Rather than being victims of a masculinising process of memory, women such as Margrét, Ólöf and Grundar-Helga were themselves agents in the produc­ tion of the past, for instance, as commissioners of literature. Furthermore, they were part of a society that, albeit governed by royal officials, was marked by family alliances and feuding, and where men and women were part of a web of alliances and textual communities (Orning 2017). Thus, late medieval Icelandic women can be seen as agents within a complex and diverse culture of memory, where actions of power or opposition in certain situations could be legitimised through the memory of the female inciter, even centuries after the first wave of saga writing in Iceland.

Works cited Primary sources Brennu-Njáls saga. Ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson. ÍF, 12. Reykjavík, 1954. Eyrbyggja saga. In Eyrbyggja saga, Brands þáttr ǫrva, Eiríks saga rauða, Grœnlendinga saga, Grœnlendinga þáttr. Ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson and Matthías Þórðarson. ÍF, 4. Reykjavík, 1935. 1–186. Óláfs saga helga. In Heimskringla. II. Ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson. ÍF, 27. Reykjavík, 1945.

Secondary sources Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. 2013. “Cultural Memory and Gender in Iceland from Medieval to Early Modern Times.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 378–399. Bagerius, Henric. 2009. Mandom och mödom. Sexualitet, homosocialitet och aristokratisk identitet på det senmedeltida Island. Gothenburg. Einar Bjarnason. 1974. “Árni Þórðarson, Smiður Andrésson og Grundar-Helga.” Saga 12: 88–108. Geary, Patrick J. 1994. Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium. Princeton.



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Helgi Þorláksson. 1997. “Konungsvald ok hefnd.” In Sagas and the Norwegian Experience. 10th International Saga Conference. Preprints. Ed. Jan Ragnar Hagland. Trondheim. Houts, Elisabeth van. 1999. Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe 900–1200. Toronto. Jochens, Jenny. 1986. “The Medieval Icelandic Heroine, Fact or Fiction.” Viator 17: 35–50. Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir. 2013. Women in Old Norse Literature. Bodies, Words, and Power. London and New York. Mundal, Else. 1994. “Kvinner som vitne i norske og islandske lover i mellomalderen.” In Sagnaþing helgað Jónasi Kristjánssyni sjötugum 10. apríl 1994. Ed. Gísli Sigurðsson, Guðrún Kvaran and Sigurgeir Steingrímsson. Reykjavík. 593–602. Orning, Hans Jacob. 2017. The Reality of the Fantastic: The Magical, the Social and Political Universe of Late Medieval Saga Manuscripts. The Viking Collection, 23. Odense.

Slavica Ranković

II: 20 Remembering the Future 1 Introduction Whether or not they have known or suspected authors, traditional narratives such as the Íslendingasögur [sagas of Icelanders] are in an important sense cultural products that evolved over time and involved entire (synchronic and diachronic) networks of contributors. Moreover, their focus on the origins of Iceland – their raison d’être as ‘tales of the tribe’ – made them the primary vehicles of communal identity negotiations, which is also to say, medieval Icelandic collective memory. Therefore, for those of us studying the sagas or other such wondrous creations of the “distributed author” (cf. Ranković 2007), collective memory is a useful, even indispensable conceptual tool. And yet, ever since its impactful appearance in the works of Maurice Halbwachs (e.g. 1992 [1925]), this term has also been criti­ cised as dangerously anthropomorphic, curiously detached from, and thereby reductive of, individual agency in the processes of remembering (e.g. Gedi and Elam 1996). Owing to unprecedented investments in recent times in brain science research (e.g. the ongoing Blue Brain Project, in which scientists are engaged in an epic attempt to create a synthetic brain by using artificial neural networks that comprise biologically realistic models of neurons) and equally unprecedented investments in the trans-disciplinarity and accessibility of knowledge, we are now in a position to better understand the dynamics between the individual and collective memory.

2 Case study Cognitive science research in collective memory One common thread running throughout current research is a deeper-thanever appreciation for the multifarious ways in which memory, this most inti­ mately experienced faculty of our individual brains, can be viewed as a collec­ tive phenomenon. Already, at the basic physiological level, our brains, these “parliament[s] of […] selfhood”, as Ian McEwan (2011, 262) called them in a recent novel, bear architectural and functional resemblance to a society, constituting entire communities of more or less densely interconnected neurons and neuron populations. And despite these vast expanses being encased within the single nut­ https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-056



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shells of our skulls, according to the extended mind thesis, cognitive processes, including re­collection, take place beyond these boundaries. Rather, our brains exhibit “the general tendency […] to lean heavily on environmental supports” (Clark and Chalmers 1998, 8), whether these include surrounding landscapes, objects, or indeed other people. Speaking of the latter, one important sense in which individual memory is profoundly collective concerns the fact that, despite being born with the ready physiological apparatus for remembering, children still must learn how to use it, with significant adults supplying narrative scaffolding for children’s self-stories. According to the psychologist Katherine Nelson, the approximate age at which autobiographical memory emerges is three-and-a-half years, which coincides with the period in which parents and other “adults typi­ cally begin to talk with children about their memories” (2003, 131). Moreover, the extent to which children’s autobiographical memories will indeed be self-focused is culturally conditioned, depending on different societies’ construals of self. Psychologists have observed significant disparities in this respect between, for example, Euro-American societies where individualism is a dominant trend and East Asian cultures “that give prominence to interpersonal harmony and collec­ tivity” and where “individuals tend to perceive themselves in terms of their social roles and relationships” (Wang 2011, 3). Namely, the experiments have shown that children from Western societies tend to cast themselves as main protagonists of their autobiographical accounts, emphasising personal aspects of experienced events, while their East Asian counterparts appear to be more attuned to social interactions, focusing on “event information related to important others and the community over the long term” (Wang 2011, 8). The influence of other people on what, how and why we remember is not confined to childhood but continues throughout our lives and is so strong, in fact, that it has apparently prompted the neuroscientists Yadin Dudai and Micah Edelson to question what should be their very area of expertise, entitling a recent paper: “Personal memory: Is it personal, is it memory?” (2016). Their own studies of social manipulation of memory and the related research on social contagion and induced forgetting (cf. Hirst and Brown 2011) show a pronounced susceptibi­ lity of individuals to social information. By comparing experiment participants’ pre-group remembrances of shared events (e.g. relating to their experiences of 9/11) with those that they proffered following group discussions of these memo­ ries, scientists have noticed a marked tendency towards social alignment of the post-group accounts. In their illuminating review of this research, Hirst and Brown (2011) conclude that, facilitating shared remembrances and shared amne­ sias alike, one likely purpose of memory’s (in)famous malleability is to lead to socially negotiated renderings of the past, which in turn reinforces shared iden­ tity and fosters social unity. Dudai and Edelson (2016) come to similar conclusi­

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ons, suggesting in addition that there may be an evolutionary advantage to this strong influence of inter-personal information on the protean nature of memory, both in terms of longevity, ensuring “that the accumulation of memory over time far exceeds the capacity and life span of the individual brain” (Dudai and Edelson 2016, 280), and in terms of social adaptability and cohesion, “allowing rapid adjustments of past representations to accommodate for changes in the present environment” (Dudai and Edelson 2016, 280). To those of us studying traditional narratives such as the sagas, this ‘use of the past’ to cope with the present is a familiar and well-studied phenomenon (e.g. see Ranković 2010, 15–18), but approaching it from an evolutionary vantage point might remove the persisting sting of mortification at these texts’ ‘constructiven­ ess’, which is sometimes still interpreted as a failure to represent the past faith­ fully – as though there is such a thing as past other than the past as remembered. In other words, this perspective might stop us from asking wrong questions from our material. Indeed, the motivation behind Dudai and Edelson’s provocative title is not to express desperation at the ‘fallibility’ of memory nor at the dreaded image of a human being as a faceless, socially controlled drone bereft of distinct perso­ nality, but to fundamentally challenge our received assumptions about memory as a personal record, a storage of facts about our pasts. If anything, rather than being under any sort of threat, our individual idiosyncrasies are a given, they come as an immediate consequence of each of us occupying a particular, unique place in our natural and cultural milieus. The paradox is, however, as Hirst and Brown (2011, 95) point out, “that the same attitudes, schemata, and social and physical environments that promote individual differences can also transform initially disparate memories into shared recollections”. In other words, the very same malleable memory mechanisms that make us individuals, also makes us social beings. Instead of “a private library capturing our individual pasts”, Dudai and Edelson (2016, 280) suggest that we conceive of memory as a “multi-node network” whose prime objective may not be veracity, but rather “assimilation of culture or norms”, as well as “future planning and imagination”. Here Dudai and Edelson touch on another seismic shift in recent memory studies, namely, the change of focus from memory as past to remembering the future, i.e. the crucial role of memory in anticipating future needs and simulating possible scenarios (cf. Merck et al. 2016). While the connection may be common­ sensical enough, recent studies show that it is also quite literal, as fMRI scans revealed that the neural activity of experiment participants activated the same core brain network regardless of whether they were asked to remember a past event or imagine a future one. It has also been found that people suffering from amnesia and other conditions that affect recollection of the past, also have severe problems imagining the future (cf. Addis et al. 2007). This has prompted neuro­



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scientists to view the evolutionary rationale behind memory as ultimately futurerather than the past-orientated, since our ability to recall past events and thus better prepare for what is coming increased our chances of survival. “Indeed”, Addis et al. (2007, 1374) assert, “there is no adaptive advantage conferred by simply remembering, if such a recollection does not provide one with informa­ tion to evaluate future outcomes”.

Íslendingasögur and remembering the future Such fundamental shifts in current scientific understanding of the function and purpose of memory can impact the ways we read and relate to the texts and other artefacts of communal memory we study. Perhaps the most important change these new insights bring is that of perspective, with our corpora emerging not as repositories in which the past is supposed to be preserved, resplendently entom­ bed, but as fossils of living memory, memory hard at work, ever re-evaluating social norms and attitudes, ever re-living the past in the context of the present, but ultimately turned towards the future, trying to figure out who ‘we’ were, so that we can home in on who we want to be. Poetic and narrative patterns, much like neuronal connections and memory traces run across and thickly populate Old Norse texts, with each enactment of a particular expression, motif or a theme being an occasion of both iteration and change of communal memories. From this perspective, the spaces or tensions between the more ‘compliant’ (iterative) and the more ‘rebellious’ (experimental) employments of familiar expressions and narrative patterns potentially index for us moments of intense pondering, a dilemma, a community trying to make ‘its mind’ up about an issue, social practice or aesthetic convention. For example, should a woman’s main loyalties lie with her blood or marriage kin? Is killing one brother-in-law to avenge another a duty or a betrayal? Should a hero restrain himself after an insult, or instantly let the enemy feel the full wrath of his temper? Is a glorious death always preferable to swallowing one’s pride and living to fight another day? If the blár [blue-black] cloak is the garb of the male avenger, what does it mean for a woman to don one? Are things better left unsaid, so that readers can revel in their own inferences, or should they be wooed with lavish expression: “gó elris hundr alla þá nótt óþrot­ num kjǫptum ok tǫgg allar jarðir með grimmum kulðatǫnnum” (Fóstbrœðra saga, Ch. 4) [“the wind, like a wild cur, howled constantly and with relentless force the whole night long, and gnawed at the ground with its cold and savage jaws” (The Saga of the Sworn Brothers, Ch. 4)]? The sagas engage such important questions in a manner resembling the current meteorological practice of ‘ensemble forecasting’: much as the inces­

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sant simulations of ever so slightly varied atmospheric conditions are used to predict the weather, the sagas can be seen to ‘run’ similarly varied social sce­ narios multiple times, so as to reconfirm the areas of communal stability and, more importantly, home in on and explore its volatile and vulnerable points. And just like minute variations in seed weather conditions can with equal probabil­ ity lead to sunshine and tornados, faint differences in the initial plot or charac­ ter set up can result in vastly different narrative outcomes. Thus, as William Ian Miller observes (2014, 147; also see 41, 43, 112, and 144), even though Njáls saga’s dangerous beauty, Hallgerðr, and Laxdœla’s [The saga of the people of Laxardal] equally smart and captivating Guðrún behave almost identically (e.g. they both commit theft, avenge their husbands’ slaps and engineer killings of their enemies), Guðrún’s slightly superior skill in managing social perceptions enables her to have “every Hallgerdian deed of hers accrue to her benefit”. And thus, one is condemned, the other exalted. Nevertheless, while on the whole Hallgerðr may emerge as a villainess and Guðrún as a heroine, the two sagas endow each char­ acter with enough depth and complexity to make the reader contemplate the deli­ cate thin lines that divide these two strong women who otherwise both encroach upon the socially more established models of female behaviour. And indeed, probing models of female behaviour is one major area of interest to both sagas, as attested to by their long and impressive casts of other engaging female char­ acters who share many of Hallgerðr and Guðrún’s traits, only differently dosed. Thus, for example, Njáls saga’s Hildigunnr and Laxdœla’s Melkorka have the same regal beauty, dogged determination and fierce pride, though perhaps not the same social ambition nor the same talent for long-term planning (or rather, scheming). Conversely, Njáll’s wife Bergþóra, Auðr/Unnr the Deep-minded and Þorgerðr Egilsdóttir may not be as handsome as the others, but are equally self-willed, while also generally exhibiting more self-control and commanding a greater authority over their menfolk. It is as though through these historical and imagined figures the two sagas are homing in on a set of female trait dials, trying out different settings in constructing their characters and seeing how they play out in social situations typical of the saga world: wooings and betrayals, wedding feasts and funeral rites, management of household duties and duties of revenge-taking. What makes Hallgerðr and Guðrún the fascinating oddities that invite special study and comparison is that most of their often contradictory ‘trait buttons’ seem to be turned on maximum, thus enabling the exploration of the very edges of possible female behaviour in medieval Iceland.



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The example of Grettis saga As another example, let us consider in a little more detail Grettis saga’s [The saga of Grettir the Strong] sophisticated engagement with what can be perceived as the eternal question of whether a human being is a mere plaything of the god(s), chance, fate (or whatever name we choose to give forces beyond our control), or whether we are the masters of our destinies and it is our own actions and character traits that determine our fates. In Grettis saga this boils down to what Peter Foote also deemed its “central problem” (1965, x), namely, the question of whether the causes for the eponymous outlaw’s downfall are predominantly supernatural (e.g. Glámr’s curse, witchcraft, ill luck), or whether instead he falls victim to his own irresponsible deeds and unbridled temper. While most commentators acknowl­ edge that both ‘external’ and ‘internal’ causes play a role, the opinions tend to vary when it comes to apportioning the more precise measure of influence to each type. At different periods and with changing scholarly fashions, the consensus tended to favour now ‘internal’, now ‘external’ causes, thus resulting in a ‘her­ meneutic pendulum’ of sorts (cf. Ranković 2017). Beyond the usual dynamics of scholarly discourse whereby new generations of critics tend to react against their immediate precursors, what seems to power this interpretative pendulum from within the saga itself is the painful ambiguity (rendered nevertheless, with utmost precision) in the two scenes in which the ‘outer’ and the ‘inner’ causes (evil agents and Grettir’s temper) dangerously collide, breeding fatal consequences for the hero. One of these scenes is set in the Trondheim cathedral (Ch. 39) where, pre­ paring to undergo an ordeal that would enable him to clear himself of the charge that he had deliberately burnt twelve of his countrymen to death, Grettir is sud­ denly derailed by a barrage of insults thrown at him by an evil spirit in the guise of an ugly young lad. The hero loses control and strikes the ‘boy’, which then results in an all-out rumpus that forces the presiding King Óláfr to abort the ordeal, thus forever robbing Grettir of an opportunity to prove his innocence. If this first occa­ sion on which Grettir is said to become skapfátt [literally ‘temper-less’] leads to the sentence of full outlawry, thus signifying his demise as a social being, the second (and the only other) instance in which this particular adjective is applied to the hero will quite literally lead to his death. There (Ch. 79), incensed by his thrall’s impudent remarks, his vision obscured by the fog, Grettir hacks at a log whose evil effect he otherwise twice successfully evaded earlier in the chapter, instantly recognising behind it the malevolent intent of the sorceress who had enchanted it. In the present scene, however, angry and distracted Grettir pays no heed to the log and so his axe glances off its slippery side (smoothened by the witch just for this purpose) biting into his right leg, thus causing him a wound that will fester and (more than any surprise attack by his enemies) ultimately cost him his life.

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On the surface of things, there should be nothing in these two scenes to sur­ prise us about Grettir’s rash reactions. After all, the saga is replete with condem­ ning comments – the narrator’s, other characters’, even the hero’s own – regar­ ding the notorious brittleness of his temper. And yet, Grettir’s behaviour here is surprising, since, in sharp contrast to these overt pronouncements, the reader will have learnt that, a few childhood incidents notwithstanding, whenever Grettir’s temper is actually tested in the saga, he shows himself to be an avid practitioner of the ‘no reaction’ code of conduct that all worthy saga heroes follow when their honour has been offended, which is to retain their self-control and, as testify the formulaic expressions one encounters across the saga corpus, at first pretend not to see, hear, know, take notice or be aware of the affront (lét/lætr sem hann heyrði/viti/vissi/sé […] ekki/eigi; hann gaf sér ekki/eigi/fátt (at)). The revenge, of course, is sure to follow soon, but in a society where vengeance is instituted to serve justice rather than venting of personal rage, this initial restraint becomes the crucial signal on the part of a hero that he knows the difference and will only act with a cool head and a clear mind (cf. Miller 1990). Thus, for example, out of respect for Þorkell at whose farm in Norway he was a guest, Grettir pati­ ently endured the escalating taunts and insults by his host’s overbearing relative Bjǫrn (“eigi lét Grettir sem hann vissi, hvat Bjǫrn brakaði um þetta” (Grettis saga, Ch. 21) [“Grettir acted as though he did not know about Bjorn’s boasts” (The Saga of Grettir the Strong, Ch. 21)]. Similarly, when the hero witnessed Oddr the Pauperpoet cheating his brother Atli at a horse-fight, we are told that “eigi lét Grettir sem hann sæi þat” (Ch. 29) [Grettir pretended not to have noticed this], while upon hearing the offensive remarks made by Þorbjǫrn the Traveller about his frail old father, Grettir “gaf sér ekki at” (Ch. 37) [took no notice] and let Þorbjǫrn finish his story first. That, contrary to the raised expectations, this sort of controlled behaviour turns out to be the norm rather than the exception is a narrative device that enhances Grettir’s stature as a hero, for exercising self-control must surely be a greater struggle for him than for those of his peers already blessed with milder temperaments. However, this also raises the question of what, then, was so det­ rimentally challenging about the two mentioned pivotal scenes to make the hero unable to contain his rage. As this question has been discussed at length elsewhere (cf. Ranković 2017), only a succinct version of its answer is offered here. Namely, when viewed against the semantic horizon of expectations raised by the ‘no reaction’ narrative pattern, it soon becomes clear that the two fatal scenes both lack a crucial ingredient for this pattern to unravel – an adequate adversary. Insolent farm-boys and old logs (or, rather, impudent thralls) hardly constitute fitting opponents for a hero, and so the vital cue that enables the heroic restraint formula to properly play out is missing. In other words, Grettir fails to restrain himself on these two occasions



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not because they were especially difficult to rise up to, but just the opposite: because the offence perpetrators did not appear to merit the effort. One can only fully appreciate this possibility when it is taken into account that not a single instance can be found in this long saga in which its hero does not exercise at least some form of restraint when provoked by a peer – even if it is only to throw a barbed verse instead of a barbed spear at his enemy. Of course, in confron­ ting malevolent spirits and witchcraft, Grettir has met more than his match, yet because these came in the guise of an impertinent boy and a crude old stub of a tree, there was nothing to suggest to Grettir that heroic restraint is called for. And this is precisely where the ultimate unfairness of evil is most keenly reflec­ ted: not simply in that it preyed on Grettir’s temper (his acknowledged weakest spot), but in how it masked momentous events as insignificant, making the hero misread. And so, in a strange concoction of narrative precision and ambiguity, the two scenes simultaneously condemn and vindicate Grettir, for he loses his temper indeed, but not in the way that should matter in his social world since, in principle, he commits no transgression against the ‘no reaction’ code, and though he ultimately loses his life-long battle against his own fiery nature, he does not fail in his primary role, which is that of a hero. Thus, as in the cases of Hallgerðr and Guðrún, Grettis saga navigates towards this impossible narrative spot, an insoluble paradox, allowing the reader to explore the very edge of the known ethic and aesthetic space.

Conclusion As in all great literature, it is precisely this kind of exploration of social, ethic and aesthetic spaces rather than arrival at a definitive position that matters most. After all, due to the intractable number of life’s contingencies, any answers to all-important questions can only ever be provisional, temporary, and so the task of the sagas (or indeed any such sites of communal identity negotiations), is to proffer the space for the relevant old dilemmas to be enacted afresh (with ever new sets of subtle variables), as well as for the discovery of new ones. And while we might well continue to choose our particular positions on the hermeneutic pendulums at the hypothetical extremes of which either Grettir’s temper or his ill fortune are responsible for his doom, and Hallgerðr and Guðrún are either vil­ lainous temptresses or feminist icons, making such interpretative commitments may no longer constitute our primary task as saga scholars. Rather, at least from this perspective on our corpora not as historico-fictional records of the past but as snapshots of working memory, it might be to pay more mind to the strenuous nature of any such commitments (made only ever in relation to what we happen

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to leave out), as well as to the ethic and aesthetic forces (whether complementary or contradictory) that inhabit the narrative spaces of these pondering pendulums.

Works cited Primary sources Brennu-Njáls saga. Ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson. ÍF, 12. Reykjavík, 1954. Fóstbrœðra saga. In Vestfirðinga sǫgur. Ed. Björn K. Þórólfsson and Guðni Jónsson. ÍF, 6. Reykjavík, 1943. 119–276. Grettis saga Ásmundarssonar. In Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar, Bandamanna saga. Odds þáttr Ófeigssonar. Ed. Guðni Jónsson. ÍF, 7. Reykjavík, 1936. 1–290. Laxdœla saga. Ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson. ÍF, 5. Reykjavík, 1934. The Saga of Grettir the Strong. Trans. Bernard Scudder. In The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, including 49 Tales. 2. Ed. Viðar Hreinsson. Reykjavík, 1997. 49–191. The Saga of the Sworn Brothers. Trans. Martin S. Regal. In The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, inlcuding 49 Tales. 2. Ed. Viðar Hreinsson. Reykjavík, 1997. 229–402.

Secondary sources Addis, Donna R., Alana T. Wong and Daniel Schacter. 2007. “Remembering the past and imagining the future: Common and distinct neural substrates during event construction and elaboration.” Neuropsychologia 45: 1363–1377. Blue Brain Project. http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/. (8 March 2018) Clark, Andy and David Chalmers. 1998. “The Extended Mind.” Analysis 58.1: 7–19. Dudai, Yadin and Micah G. Edelson. 2016. “Personal memory: Is it personal, is it memory?” Memory Studies 9.3: 275–283. Foote, Peter. 1965. “Introduction” to The Saga of Grettir the Strong. Ed. Peter Foote. Trans. George Ainslie Hight. London. i–xv. Gedi, Noa and Yigal Elam. 1996. “Collective Memory – What Is It?” History and Memory 8.2: 30–50. Halbwachs, Maurice 1992. On Collective Memory. Ed. and trans. Lewis Coser. Chicago, IL. [French orig. 1925] Hirst, William and Adam Brown. 2011. “On the Virtues of an Unreliable Memory. Its Role in Constructing Sociality.” In Grounding Sociality: Neurons, Mind and Culture. Ed. Gün R. Semin and Gerald Echterhoff. New York and London. 95–113. McEwan, Ian. 2011. Solar. London. Merck, Clinton, Meymune N. Topcu and William Hirst. 2016. “Collective mental time travel: Creating a shared future through our shared pasts.” Memory Studies 9.3: 284–294. Miller, William Ian. 1990. Bloodtaking and Peacemaking. Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland. Chicago and London. Miller, William Ian. 2014. “Why is Your Axe Bloody?” A Reading of Njáls Saga. Oxford.



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Nelson, Katherine. 2003. “Self and Social Functions. Individual Autobiographical Memory and Collective Narrative.” Memory 11.2: 125–136. Ranković, Slavica. 2007. “Who Is Speaking in Traditional Narratives? On the Distributed Author of the Sagas of Icelanders and Serbian Epic Poetry.” New Literary History 38.2: 239–307. Ranković, Slavica. 2010. “Communal Memory of the Distributed Author. Applicability of the Connectionist Model of Memory to the Study of Traditional Narratives.” In The Making of Memory in the Middle Ages. Ed. Lucie Doležalová. Later Medieval Europe, 4. Leiden and Boston. 9–26. Ranković, Slavica. 2017. “The Exquisite Tempers of Grettir the Strong.” Scandinavian Studies 89.3: 375–412. Wang, Qi. 2011. “Autobiographical Memory and Culture.” Online Readings in Psychology and Culture. 5.2: 1–12. http://dx.doi.org/10.9707/2307-0919.1047. (8 March 2018)

Space Nature

Mathias Nordvig

II: 21 Nature and Mythology 1 Introduction There are very few written sources detailing the memory of eruptions in the early period of human habitation in Iceland, at least in a non-opaque language; however, it seems that there are traces of volcanic activity in Old Norse mythology (Nordvig 2013, 2015, 2017; Nordvig and Riede 2018). In the following, the vol­ canic sequence in Vǫluspá [The Seeress’s Prophecy] is analysed as a mytholo­ gised memory of the Eldgjá eruption, which occurred in 934–940. The volcanic sequence in Vǫluspá comprises the stanzas 46–51 in the Konungsbók (Codex Regius) version, and stanzas 39–44 in the Hauksbók version, typically stanzas 47–52 in standardised versions and translations (e.g. The Seeress’s Prophecy, 2014). It is suggested that these stanzas in Vǫluspá (the stanza numbers of the Konungsbók version will henceforth be used) comprise a geo-myth about the Eldgjá event, in which early Icelandic culture, lacking vocabulary and under­ standing of volcanism, formulated a mythic sequence that detailed the eruption in response to it. This act created a mythic language about geological activities on a par with what has been observed among multiple cultures across the world (Vitaliano 1973; Haas and Walker 2003; Barber and Barber 2004; Piccardi and Masse 2007; Cashman and Cronin 2008; Hamacher and Norris 2011; Reid and Nunn 2016) with which Icelanders could express the experience of volcanic erup­ tions. This language seems to have persisted and also occurs in Bergbúa þáttr [The tale of the mountain-dweller] (Árni Hjartason 2014; Nordvig 2017), which will be used as a point of reference for the geo-mythological language in Vǫluspá. In that regard, it is suggested that Vǫluspá (Sts. 46–51) has functioned as the earli­ est memory space (Assmann 2006) for a volcanic eruption in Iceland.

2 Case Study: Volcanism and memory in Old Norse poetry Eldgjá in Icelandic memory In AD 934 a fissure swarm opened in the south-eastern part of Iceland, on the ridge between Mýrdalsjökull and Vatnajökull. The eruption, which has been named Eldgjá, lasted until AD 940, and is believed to have been more impactful than the https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-057

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famous 1783–1784 Skaftáreldar eruption (Stothers 1998). Only geological analyses are available to furnish an understanding of the impact of this eruption, as there is hardly any written material addressing it in detail. Landnámabók [book of set­ tlements] mentions that the settler Molda-Gnúpr was forced to move from Höfða­ brekka because of an eruption that corresponds to Eldgjá both in time and place (Landnámabók, Ch. 329). The Skaftáreldar eruption has been researched in great detail (Witze and Kanipe 2014), and the impact of this eruption was immense. Its fluoride and sulphur emissions took the lives of ca. 20% of the Icelandic popula­ tion (Vasey 1996), and at least 100,000 mainland Europeans (Grattan et al. 2003; Grattan and Torrence 2007). Temperatures in Europe dropped, and vegetation in Scotland turned grey (Payne et al. 2013). Skaftáreldar erupted with a column of 12–15 kilometres, and fire fountains of some 800 to 1400 meters (Þór Þórðar­ son and Self 1993, 233). Estimates of the Eldgjá eruption claim that it was similar in magnitude (Zielinski et al. 1995, 132). It erupted along a 75-km fissure quite close to the Skaftáreldar fissure, and discharged massive quantities of volcanic ejecta combined with glacial meltwater, substantially changing the landscape in south-eastern Iceland (Larsen 2000; Þór Þórðarson et al. 2001). Eldgjá seems to have emitted approximately 19.6 km3 of lava and roughly 20,000 km2 tephra (Þor­ valdur Þórðarson and Ármann Höskuldsson 2008, 212). Regions as far away as the Middle East and China reported crop failure, famine, and disease during this period (Stothers 1999; Fei and Zhou 2006). Although Icelandic literature from the medieval period does not award the eruption much attention, it is notable that Íslendingabók [book of Icelanders] claims that Iceland was fully settled in 930 (Íslendingabók, Ch. 1). A volcanic eruption sporting 800–1400-meter-high fire-columns could perhaps have been a contributing factor in deterring more migrants from coming to Iceland after 930. As such, it is possible that the cut-off year for further migration to Iceland by Ari fróði, the author of Íslendingabók, is part of a memory of the Eldgjá event. If Vǫluspá indeed contains some volcanic imagery (Phillpotts 1905; Sigurður Nordal 1927, 100–104; Davidson 1964, 208–209; Simek 2007, 303–304), it could be in the form of a memory space for Eldgjá. A memory space, as it is defined by Egyptologist Jan Assmann in Religion and Cultural Memory, is a window into the memory of thousands of years (Assmann 2006, 28). While Assmann’s theory concerns written texts, it is evident that texts that have existed in oral form before being written down may function as such a memory space (Nordvig 2013, 20–24; see e.g. also Barber and Barber 2004). It is likely that short, mythologized narra­ tives about Eldgjá could have existed in early oral form as this kind of memory space.



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Eldgjá and Vǫluspá The composition date of Vǫluspá is disputed (e.g. Dronke 1997), but the para­ phrasing of stanza 57 from Vǫluspá by Arnórr Jarlaskáld [earl’s skald] (c. 1012– 1073) in Þorfinnsdrápa 24 [poem about Thorfinn] suggests that a version of the poem could have been in existence in his lifetime. Þorfinnsdrápa is presumed to have been composed in 1065, and Vǫluspá has been suggested by John McKinnell to originate in the last half of the tenth century, at least after 962–965 (McKin­ nell 2008, 6–8). Most importantly, Arnórr’s reference from Vǫluspá is the fol­ lowing: “Bjǫrt verðr sól at svartri; / søkkr fold í mar døkkvan” (Þorfinnsdrápa, St. 24) [“The bright sun will turn to black; earth will sink in the dark ocean” (Þorfinnsdrápa, 258)]. In Þorfinnsdrápa this signals the birth of Þorfinn, but it also indicates that a phenomenon that darkens the sun’s rays and the ground sinking into the sea is a pregnant image to Icelanders in the eleventh century. It is possible that this has its origins in the experience of the Eldgjá eruption. Vǫluspá contains a sequence of events leading up to Ragnarök in stanzas 46 to 51, whose images may be interpreted in context of a volcanic sequence. Stanza 46 relates that Yggdrasill shivers because a jǫtunn (giant) is lose. In the Hauksbók [book of Haukr] version of Vǫluspá, stanza 39 includes the detail that Surtar sefi [Surtr’s kin] swallows those who tread the road to Hel. In combination, this can be understood as the initial series of tremors which occur before a volcanic erup­ tion (Encyclopedia of Volcanoes, 1985, 1017–1019): the movements of a demon underground causes tremors, and spreads the fire that will burst from the ground. This may be compared with stanza 1 of the volcanic poem in Bergbúa þáttr: “gnýr, þás gengr enn hári / gramr um bratta hamra; / hátt stígr hǫllum fœti / Hall­ mundr í gný fjalla / Hallmundr í gný fjalla.”’ (Bergbúa þáttr, St. 1) [“Round the high crags hastens | the hoary one; echoes roar: Hallmund, through the rocks / resounding, treads loudly, / resounding, treads loudly.” (The Tale of the Mountain-Dweller, St. 1)]. The tremors are addressed once again in stanza 50 of Vǫluspá, in a phrasing that is close to stanza 1 in Bergbúa þáttr: “Gnýr allr jǫtunheimr” (Vǫluspá, St. 50) [“All Giantland groans.” (The Seeress’s Prophecy, St. 48)] The dwarfs, the underground inhabitants, react to this: “stynja dvergar / fyr steindu­ rum” (Vǫluspá, St. 50) [“The dwarfs groan before their rocky doors” (The Seeress’s Prophecy, St. 48)]. The stanza also directs attention to the gods who are realizing what the tremors mean: “Hvat er með ásum? / Hvat er með álfum?” (Vǫluspá, St. 50) [“What of the Æsir? What of the elves?” (The Seeress’s Prophecy, St. 48)]. They convene at the assembly, and discuss the matter. This reaction is seen in similar cases in other cultural narratives about volcanoes, such as the Plains Indians’ stories of the Mazama event in North America.

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Another detail that is stressed in such narratives is the reaction of animals: whimpering and barking dogs (Beaudoin and Oetelaar 2006, 37). This detail appears in stanza 47, where Garmr barks before Gnipahellir. The word garmr (dog) occurs in the kenning glóða garmr (dog of embers), and Gnipahellir is often interpreted as the opening to the underworld (Lexicon Poeticum 1966, 173 and 192), although this notion is also contested (Simek 2007, 100). The word gnipall is attested as meaning ‘fire’ in the þulur, and it is possible that this is the first part of the name Gnipahellir (Lexicon Poeticum 1966, 192), however, it could also be the word gnípa, which means mountain peak (Lexicon Poeticum 1966, 192 and Zoëga 2004, 168). Either translation may sustain a volcanic image: if Gnipa- originates in gnipall, it may mean Fire-cave; if it originates in gnípa, it can mean Mountainpeak-cave, suggesting a caldera in both instances. If the tradition already associ­ ates Garmr with ‘dog of embers’, it is possible that the image of the barking dog before Gnipahellir is supposed to allude to the warning signs of barking dogs as well as the notion of an erupting caldera where the sounds are likened to barking dogs: the barking dog of the underworld. Finally, stanza 47 details the premonitions of these images: “Fjǫlð veit hon frœða, / fram sé ek lengra / um ragna røk rǫm sigtíva.” (Vǫluspá, St. 47) [“much wisdom she knows, I see further ahead / to the terrible doom of the victorious gods.” (The Seeress’s Prophecy, St. 49)]. The mountain-dweller’s poem in Bergbúa þáttr gives similar premonitions: “Undr láta þar ýtar / enn, er jǫklar brenna; / Þó mun stórum mun meira / morðlundr á Snjógrundu / undr, þats æ mun standa, / annat fyrr of kannask, / annat fyrr um kannask.” (Bergbúa þáttr, St. 5) [“One more marvel for men: / to learn of glaciers burning, / But the oak of battle / knows an older wonder; greater far, it traces / will always stand in Snow-land, / always stand in Snow-land.” (The Tale of the Mountain-Dweller, St. 5) This indicates that the detailing of the wonders experienced in the eruption should be remembered. The premonition of the destruction of the gods in Vǫluspá (St. 49) suggest that the detailing of tremors and sounds in the preceding stanzas would be a memory that suggests this destruction, similar to stanza 5 in Bergbúa þáttr. Hrymr is the first jǫtunn figure mentioned; he drives with his shield in front in Vǫluspá (St. 50). As a character, Hrymr is elusive (Simek 2007, 163; Lexicon Poeticum, 1966, 288), but his name might mean ‘ancient one’ (Sigurður Nordal 1927, 96). This image could be associated with an ash plume or pyroclastic flow (e.g. Encyclopedia of Volcanoes, 1985, 945–955), however, it is the following details that are more telling of volcanic associations: “snýsk Jǫrmungandr / í jǫtunmóði; / ormr knýr unnir, / enn ari hlakkar, / slítr nái neffǫlr, / Naglfar losnar.” (Vǫluspá, St. 48) [“the great serpent writhes in giant rage; / the serpent churns the waves, the eagle shrieks in anticipation; / pale-beaked he tears the corpse, Naglfar breaks loose.” (The Seeress’s Prophecy, St. 50)]. The imagery of a serpent and an eagle seems to allude to



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the cosmic order described in Grímnismál (St. 32) [Grimnir’s Sayings], where the squirrel Ratatoskr carries insults between the eagle in the top of Yggdrasill and the serpent by the roots of the tree (see also Schjødt 1983; Larrington 2002). The serpent represents the underworld as much as the sea, while the eagle represents the sky as much as being a symbol of death as a bird of prey. The envisioning of a volcanic eruption as a convergence of the upper and the lower world in a battle is a very common theme across the world (Barber and Barber 2004, 6). The reference to the eagle’s screeching once again brings attention to noises, however, the term neffǫlr [pale-beaked], is particularly interesting: while fǫlr means ‘pale’, it is also used to describe something that is covered with ashes, fǫlskaðr, and it denotes the concept ‘white ashes’ too, fǫlski (Zoëga 2004,157). The idea of an eagle causing an eruption is not only ancient, but attested in another form in Old Norse literature. Eagles are involved with eruptions in multiple mythologies in Europe and North America (Barber and Barber 2004, 219–230), and in the European context, the idea of Boreas Aquilo, the eagle of the northern wind, seems to have been widely appropriated in volcanic contexts (Nordvig 2015, 84). In Iceland, specifically, this notion is expressed in Konungs Skuggsjá [the king’s mirror] (Ch. 14), and in the Icelandic annals, where a curious description of an eruption in Hekla in 1341 states that men saw birds, big and small, fly in the ashes (Islandske Annaler indtil 1578, 1888, 401). A shrieking eagle with an ash-pale beak may therefore not be far from the idea of a volcanic plume. The idea of a flying supernatural volcanic being is also expressed in Bergbúa þáttr (St. 7). Loki and ‘Muspells lýðir’ advance upon the world in Vǫluspá (St. 49). They sail in the ship Naglfar, a ship that Snorri Sturluson explains as made from the nails of the dead, a notion that accords with Scandinavian folklore (Krohn 1912, 154–155). It is possible, however, that Naglfar denotes a studded ship or a ship made of nails (Nordvig 2013, 2015), especially when considered in the context of the word for ‘sword’ listed in the Þulur, naglfari. This means ‘studded with nails/ spikes’ (Lexicon Poeticum,1966, 422). Muspells lýðir means ‘people of Muspell’, indicating a congregation of beings associated with the Nordic mythological fireworld and fiery destruction, perhaps Surtr’s kin (Nordvig 2013, 138–140). Loki, the mythological being responsible for earthquakes (Edda, Ch. 50), advances on a spike-ship with Surtr’s fire-kin. This is followed by Surtr in stanza 51: “Surtr ferr sunnan / með sviga lævi, / skínn af sverði / sól valtíva; / grjótbjǫrg gnata, / enn gífr rata, / troða halir helveg, / en himinn klofnar.” (Vǫluspá, St. 51) [“Surtr comes from the south with the harm of branches, / the sun of the slaughter-gods glances from his sword; / the rocky cliffs crack open and the troll-women are abroad; / men tread the road to hell and the sky splits apart.” (The Seeress’s Prophecy, St. 52)] This stanza has been interpreted as a volcanic eruption by various scholars (Phillpotts 1905;

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Sigurður Nordal 1927; Nordvig 2013, 2015, 2017; Nordvig and Riede 2018). It seems to recount magnanimous fire-columns spewing from fissures opening in the ground, and ashes creating a ‘bishop’s ring’, an intensely bright corona around the sun (Beaudoin and Oetelaar 2006, 43). Surtr is associated with volcanism in several instances. Stanza 10 in Bergbúa þáttr suggests that the jǫtunn creating the eruption in that poem journeys to the company of Surtr: “niðr í Surts ens svarta / sveit í eld enn heita, / sveit í eld enn heita.” [“[My spirits sink – with reason – / on my way] earth-inward / to black Surt’s conflagration, / to black Surt’s confla­ gration.” (The Tale of the Mountain-Dweller, St. 10)] The place-name Surtshellir attributed to the volcanic cave in Hallmundarhraun by the foot of Eiriksjökull and Langjökull is another indication of a longstanding tradition for associating Surtr with volcanism, dating back to the period of land-taking, as it is mentioned in Landnámabók (Phillpotts 1905, 16–18; Nordvig 2013, 140). Surtshellir has recently been noted as a site of ritual response to volcanic activity in the pre-Christian period by archaeologist Kevin P. Smith (Smith 2014).

Vǫluspá – a mythic reaction to the Eldgjá memory With a possible date of composition in the late tenth century, Vǫluspá is quite close to the Eldgjá event in time. It is obvious that the poem is not as such created to address the Eldgjá eruption – it is preoccupied with other themes of human exist­ ence, such as morality and perhaps the religious changes in that period (McKin­ nell 2008). It seems possible, however, that it inscribes a sequence of volcanic activity into the poem as the initial process of Ragnarök. This may be a response to the experience of the eruption itself. Breach of taboo, social and moral ques­ tions, religious themes, are all stable components in human responses to vol­ canic eruptions (Cashman and Cronin 2008; Chester 2005; Chester and Duncan 2010; Chester et al. 2012). This is also the case in Bergbúa þáttr, which takes place as two men are on their way to church; the Mountain-dweller expresses remorse in stanza 11; and in stanza 12, he disclaims his loneliness, living in the lava-field as an outcast; finally, he calls for remembering the details of the eruption so that its warning signs may not be forgotten: “[F]lokk nemið it eða ykkat, / élherðar, mun verða […]” (Bergbúa þáttr, St. 12) [“Learn by heart thsi flokk, / fighters! If you fail / punishment you’ll suffer.” (The Tale of the Mountain-Dweller, St. 12)]. It is possible that the sequence in Vǫluspá (Sts. 46–51), which seems to be a mytholo­ gized description of a volcanic eruption, could have been designed for a similar purpose; to remember the Eldgjá eruption. This can also explain why it is found in a poem that is otherwise preoccupied with the most important aspects of social interaction and morality.



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Like so many other volcano-narratives across the world (Vitaliano 1973; Barber and Barber 2004; Piccardi and Masse 2007; Cashman and Cronin 2008; Hamacher and Norris 2011), Vǫluspá (Sts. 46–51) formulates a sequence of events guided by supernatural beings: 1) tremors are felt and underground noises are heard – the jǫtunn moves underground, Yggdrasill shivers, dogs (Garmr) take notice and have strong reactions – premonitions are spoken by those who know the past (the vǫlva); 2) the upper- and the lower-world are in uproar, and the first visual signs appear – the giant Hrymr, the grey-beaked eagle; 3) this signals the coming of the fire-beings, Loki and the people of Muspell, they advance; 4) the gods, represent­ ing the human community, discuss what is happening; Jǫtunheimr groans, the dwarfs groan from their dwellings; 5) finally, the eruption comes with Surtr. The entire event is formulated in mythological terminology for two reasons: 1) by using mythology, the primary narratives of human communities, the event becomes more memorable; 2) there is simply no other explanation for a volcanic eruption to pre-scientific peoples than one that invokes the actions of supernatu­ ral beings. This is an example of human response to violent geological activities, where the event is mythologized for mnemonic purposes. As such, the sequence of a mythologized eruption in Vǫluspá (Sts. 46–51) may be considered a memory space for a large-scale eruption in Iceland in the early period of settlement.

Works Cited Primary sources Bergbúa þáttr. In Harðar saga, Bárðar saga, Þorskfirðinga saga, Flóamanna saga. Ed. Þórhallur Vilmundarson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson. ÍF, 13. Reykjavík, 1991. Edda. Prologue and Gylfaginning. Ed. Anthony Faulkes. London, 2005. Islandske annaler indtil 1578. Ed. Gustav Storm. Christiania, 1888. Íslendingabók. In Íslendingabók. Landnámabók. Ed. Jakob Benediktsson. ÍF, 1. Reykjavík, 1986. 1–28. Konungs Skuggsiá. Ed. Ludvig Holm-Olsen. Oslo, 1945. Landnamabók. In Íslendingabók. Landnámabók. Ed. Jakob Benediktsson. ÍF, 1. Reykjavík, 1986. 29–397. The Seeress’s Prophecy. Trans. Carolyne Larrington. In The Poetic Edda. Rev. ed. Oxford, 2014. 4–12, 274–281. The Tale of the Mountain-Dweller. Ed. Marvin Taylor. In The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, including 49 Tales. II. Ed. Viðar Hreinsson. Reykjavík. 1997. 444–448. Vǫluspá. In Eddukvæði. I. Ed. Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason. ÍF. Reykjavík, 2014. 291–316.

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Þorfinnsdrápa. Ed. and trans. Diana Whaley. In Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas. 2. From c. 1035 to c. 1300. Part 1. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages, 2:1. Ed. Kari Ellen Gade. Turnhout, 2009. 229–260.

Secondary sources Árni Hjartason. 2014. “Hallmundarkviða, eldforn lýsing á eldgósi.” Náttúrufræðingurinn. Tímarit hins Íslenska náttúrufræðifélags 84: 27–37. Assmann, Jan. 2006. Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies. Transl. Rodney Livingstone. Stanford, CA. Barber, Elizabeth J. W. and Paul T. Barber. 2004. When They Severed Earth from Sky. Princeton, NJ. Beaudoin, Alwynne B. and Gerald A. Oetelaar. 2006. “The Day the Dry Snow Fell. The Record of a 7627-year-old-disaster.” In Alberta Formed, Alberta Transformed. Vol. 1. Ed. Michael Payne, Donald Wetherell and Catherine Cavanaugh. Alberta. 36–53. Cashman, Katharine V. and Shane J. Cronin. 2008. “Welcoming a Monster to the World. Myths, Oral Tradition, and Modern Societal Response to Volcanic Disaster.” Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Activity 176: 407–418. Chester, David K., and Angus M. Duncan. 2010. “Responding to Disasters Within Christian Tradition, With Reference to Volcanic Eruptions and Earthquakes”. Religion 40.2: 85–95. Chester, David K., Angus M. Duncan and Heather Sangster. 2012. “Human Responses to Eruptions of Etna (Sicily) During the Late Pre-Industrial Era and Their Implications for Present-Day Disaster Planning.” Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research 225–226: 65–80. Chester, David K. 2005. “Theology and Disaster Studies. The Need for Dialogue.” Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research 146: 319–328. Davidson, Hilda R. E. 1964. Gods and Myths of Northern Europe. Harmondsworth. Dronke, Ursula. 1997. The Poetic Edda. Volume II. Mythological Poems. Oxford. Encyclopedia of Volcanoes. Ed. Haraldur Sigurðsson. New York, 1985. Fei, Jie, and Jie Zhou. 2006. “The Possible Climatic Impact in China of Iceland’s Eldgjá Eruption Inferred from Historical Sources.” Climatic Change 76.3: 443–457. Grattan, John, S. Taylor and Michael Durand. 2003. “Illness and Elevated Human Mortality in Europe Coincident with the Laki Fissure Eruption.” In Volcanic Degassing. Special Publications 213. Ed. Clive Oppenheimer, David M. Pyle and Jenni Barclay. London. 410–414. Grattan, John and Robin Torrence. 2007. “The Long Shadow. Understanding the Influence of the Laki Fissure Eruption on Human Mortality in Europe.” In Living under the Shadow. Cultural Impacts of Volcanic Eruptions. Ed. John Grattan and Robin Torrence. Walnut Creek, CA. 153–174. Haas, Ain, Andres Peekna and Robert E. Walker. 2003. “Echoes of Ancient Cataclysms in the Baltic Sea.” Folklore 23: 49–85. Hamacher, W. Duane and Ray P. Norris. 2011: “Australian Aboriginal Geomythology.” Journal of Cosmology 13: 3743–3753. Krohn, Kaarle. 1912. “Das Schiff Naglfar.” Finnisch-Ugrische Forschungen. Zeitschrift für Finnisch-Ugrische Sprach- und Volkskunde 12: 154–155.



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Larrington, Carolyne. 2002. “Vafþrúðnismál and Grímnismál. Cosmic History, Cosmic Geography.” In The Poetic Edda: Essays on Old Norse Mythology. Ed. Paul Acker and Carolyne Larrington. New York. 62–77. Larsen, Gudrún. 2000. “Holocene Eruptions within the Katla Volcanic System, South Iceland. Characteristics and Environmental Impact.” In Jökull 49: 1–28. Lexicon poeticum antiquae linguae septentrionalis. Ordbog over det norsk-islandske skjaldesprog. 1966. Ed. Finnur Jónsson [Sveinbjörn Egilsson]. 2nd ed. Copenhagen. McKinnell, John. 2008. “Völuspá and the Feast of Easter”. Alvíssmál 12: 3–28. Nordvig, A. Mathias Valentin. 2013. “Of Fire and Water. The Old Norse Mythical Worldview in an Eco-Mythological Perspective.” Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation. Aarhus. Nordvig, A. Mathias Valentin. 2015. “What Happens When ‘Hider’ and ‘Screamer’ Go Sailing with Noisy? Geomythological Traces in Old Icelandic Mythology.” In Past Vulnerability. Ed. Felix Riede, Aarhus. 75–88. Nordvig, Mathias. 2017. “Creation from Fire in Snorri’s Edda. The Tenets of a Vernacular Theory of Geothermal Activity in Old Norse Myth.” In Old Norse Mythology – Comparative Perspectives. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Jens Peter Schjødt with Amber J. Rose. Cambridge, MA and London. 269–288. Nordvig, Mathias and Felix Riede. 2018. “Are there echoes of the AD 536 event in the Viking Ragnarok myth? A critical appraisal.” Environment and History, 24. Payne, Richard J., Kevin J. Edwards and Jeff J. Blackford. 2013. “Volcanic Impacts on the Holocene Vegetation History of Britain and Ireland? A Review and Meta-Analysis of the Pollen Evidence.” Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 22.2: 153–164. Phillpotts, Bertha S. 1905. “Surt.” Arkiv för Nordisk Filologi 21: 14–30. Piccardi, Luigi and W. Bruce Masse, eds. 2007. Myth and Geology. Geological Society Special Publication no. 273. London. Reid, Nicholas J. and Patrick D. Nunn. 2016. “Aboriginal Memories of Inundation of the Australian Coast Dating From More Than 7000 Years Ago.” Australian Geographer 47: 11–47. Schjødt, Jens Peter. 1983. “Livsdrik og vidensdrik.” Religionsvidenskabeligt tidsskrift 2: 85–102. Sigurður Nordal. 1927. Völuspá. Copenhagen. Simek, Rudolf. 2007 [1993]. Dictionary of Northern Mythology. Cambridge. Smith, Kevin P. 2014. “Den of Thieves of the Temple of Doom? The Creation of Mythic Landscapes at Surtshellir Cave, Iceland.” Paper given at Society for American Archaeology 79th Annual Meeting, April 27, 2014. Austin, TX. Stothers Richard B. 1998. “Far Reach of the Tenth Century Eldgjá Eruption, Iceland.” Climatic Change 39.4: 715–726. Stothers, Richard B. 1999. “Volcanic Dry Fogs, Climate Cooling, and Plague Pandemics in Europe and the Middle East.” Climatic Change 42.4: 713–723. Þór Þórðarson and S. Self. 1993. “The Laki (Skaftár Fires) and Grimsvötn Eruptions in 1783–1785.” Bulletin of Volcanology 55: 233–263. Þór Þórdarson et al. 2001. “New Estimates of Sulfur Degassing and Atmospheric Mass-Loading by the 934 Ad Eldgjá Eruption, Iceland.” Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research 1081.4: 33–54. Þorvaldur Þórðarson and Ármann Höskuldsson. 2008. “Postglacial Volcanism in Iceland.” Jökull 58: 197–228.

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Vasey, Daniel E. 1996. “Population Regulation, Ecology, and Political Economy in Preindustrial Iceland.” American Ethnologist 23.2: 366–392. Vitaliano, Dorothy B. 1973. Legends of the Earth. Their Geologic Origins. Bloomington, IN. Witze, Alexandra and Jeff Kanipe. 2014. Island on Fire. London. Zielinski, Gregory et al. 1995. “Evidence of the Eldgjá (Iceland) Eruption in the GISP2 Greenland Ice Core: Relationship to Eruption Processes and Climatic Conditions in the Tenth Century.” The Holocene 5.2: 129–140. Zoëga, Geir T. 2004. Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic. Toronto.

Bernadine McCreesh

II: 22 Climate and Weather 1 Introduction Memory can be manipulated. As Ann Rigney (2008, 346) says: “Research has shown that the canon of memory sites with which a community identifies is reg­ ularly subject to revision by groups who seek to replace, supplement or revise dominant representations of the past as a way of asserting their own identity.” In medieval Iceland, it was memories of the meteorological conditions of bygone days which were manipulated. When Iceland was settled between AD 874 and AD 930, the country was start­ ing to enjoy an interlude of mild weather often referred to as the Medieval Warm Period. Temperatures were at their highest from the mid-tenth to the early twelfth century; relatively clement weather interspersed with cooler episodes continued until the mid-thirteenth century, when a cooling trend set in (Áslaug Geirsdóttir et al. 2009). The belief that God was in direct control of the weather was widespread in Christian countries in the Middle Ages (Kieckhefer 1989, 46). Medieval Icelanders seem to have thought that He brought about only favourable conditions, for, with the exception of a deadly storm in Ch. 85 of Guðmundar saga Arasonar [The Life of Gudmund the Good, Bishop of Holar], which Guðmundr’s biographer claimed was sent in response to the bishop’s prayers, all Icelandic weather miracles depict an improvement in the prevailing conditions, often after the supplicant has made a vow to donate something to the Church (e.g. Íslendinga saga [The Saga of the Icelanders], Ch. 196; Guðmundar saga dýra [The Saga of Guðmund dýri], Ch. 14; Þórðar saga kakala [The Saga of Þórð kakali], Ch. 25). For people who believed that God brought good weather, the fact that the climate was more clement in pre-Christian than in Christian days must have been something of a theological embarrassment. The Church’s response to the problem was to try, through the use of literature, to erase memories of the warmer weather of former times from the collective consciousness of the Icelandic people.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-058

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2 Case study: Memories of the medieval warm period Glimpses of medieval warm period conditions can be found in Landnámabók [Book of Settlements], our main source of information about Settlement Era Iceland. Although mentions of specific meteorological conditions are rare in this book, the state of the climate – that is, weather patterns over an extended period – can be deduced from indirect references to arable land (Landnámabók, Chs. S115/ H87, S255/H219) and from accounts of how livestock fared in winter: animals were capable of surviving, and in some cases flourishing, out of doors (Landnámabók, Chs. S18/H18, H24, H184, S179/146). The trustworthiness of Landnámabók memo­ ries is a matter of debate among climatologists: Markús A. Einarsson (1984, 679) dismisses them as “unreliable”, while H. H. Lamb (1982, 166) goes to the other extreme and uses an anecdote about a man swimming out to fetch a ram from an island to calculate the probable temperature of sea-water at that point. The author of one thirteenth-century saga, Þorgils saga ok Hafliða [The Saga of Þorgils and Hafliði] in the Sturlunga compendium, notes that conditions had dete­ riorated between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. He states that there had been no barren fields at Reykjahólar some hundred years earlier, and people expected to be able to offer guests fine feasts (Þorgils saga, Ch. 10). An increasing popula­ tion forcing farmers to cultivate less fertile land, combined with a shorter growing season as the climate became colder, would indeed have meant that there was less food available for feasting in the thirteenth century than the twelfth. A different picture of the early twelfth century is presented in Jóns saga helga [The saga of St Jón of Hólar], written to commemorate Jón Ögmundarson, Bishop of Hólar from 1106 to 1121. According to this saga, spring was late in coming one year, and Jón made a vow to build a church and endow it with a farm if the weather improved. Within a week of the laying of the foundations, the drift-ice vanished and grass began to appear, providing pasture for starving sheep (Jóns saga, Ch. 13). The problem is that the deterioration of the climate, with the subse­ quent return of the sea-ice, did not start until nearly 1150 and Jón died in 1121. In addition, Icelandic annals make no mention of a particularly bad winter between the ‘snow winter’ of 1078 (Islandske Annaler [Annals of Iceland], 110) and large quantities of ice in 1145 (Islandske Annaler, 114). Although it is not impossible for there to have been the odd bad winter between these years, it seems more likely that Jón’s biographer invented a weather miracle based on contemporary condi­ tions for a bishop whom people had not expected to see canonised and did not know much about. By so doing, he produced false or constructed memories about what the weather had been like in the early twelfth century.



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The Íslendingasögur [sagas of Icelanders] tell us little about Settlement Era conditions. Out of some forty sagas that have come down to us, only five comment on the weather encountered by the first settlers. Some writers, such as the author of Brennu-Njáls saga [Njal’s Saga], begin their narrative after the country had been settled, and others, such as the author of Kormáks saga [Kormak’s Saga], do not mention the weather; nevertheless, five out of forty is still a small number. Of these five, Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar [Egil’s Saga, Ch. 29], Vatnsdœla saga [The Saga of the People of Vatnsdal, Chs. 10, 15] and Eyrbyggja saga [The Saga of the People of Eyri, Ch. 4] describe conditions similar to those in Landnámabók. The later sagas – Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar [The Saga of Grettir the Strong, Ch. 9] and Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss [Bard’s Saga, Ch. 3] – paint a bleak picture of stormy and unwelcoming seas and snow-covered mountains. Even though a priest who went to Greenland in the fourteenth century describes it as warmer than Iceland or Norway (Mathers 2009), that country is also depicted as icy and inhospitable in an episode in Flóamanna saga [The Saga of the People of Floi, Chs. 23–24] which tells how some early converts to Christianity fared after being shipwrecked off the Greenland coast. Although the author of Eyrbyggja saga depicts mild conditions in the days of the settlement, when he describes Conversion Era weather (late tenth and early eleventh century), he seems, like the author of Jóns saga helga, to have based his account on contemporary conditions, describing bays and fjords which have frozen over (Eyrbyggja saga, Chs. 37, 45) and even a severe storm and drift-ice (Eyrbyggja saga, Ch. 57). References to drift-ice are surprising because most of the action in Eyrbyggja saga takes place on the Snæfellsnes peninsula in the west of Iceland, one of the last parts of the country to be visited by sea-ice. In addition, research into the Icelandic climate has produced evidence of cold intervals c. AD 900, 1050–1100 and 1150, but nothing around AD 1000 (Áslaug Geirsdóttir et al. 2009). There are various reasons why the climate of settlement days might not be mentioned or why the Conversion Era might be depicted as icy. One possibility is that people no longer remembered what the weather had been like in the past; they may have assumed that contemporary conditions were in effect. Another possibility is that, although tales about the mild climate of bygone days were still circulating, authors used to the harsh conditions of their own time had doubts about the veracity of such tales and so did not include them in their narratives. There is, however, a third possibility. Two of the three sagas which mirror what is found in Landnámabók were written by people with a particular interest in the country’s pagan past. Egils saga, in the form in which it has come down to us, is generally thought to be the work of the historian Snorri Sturluson who rehabilitated the pagan gods in Heimskringla [Circle of the world] and the Snorra

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Edda (Prose Edda), making them once again a respectable topic for literature. The person who composed Vatnsdœla saga, in addition to being interested in the country’s non-Christian past, seems to have influenced or been influenced by Landnámabók. Writers who depict the climate of earlier times as similar to that of the thir­ teenth and fourteenth centuries are people whose works have a religious bias. Jóns saga helga is a saint’s life. In Eyrbyggja saga, not only are the Christian and pagan supernatural contrasted (McCreesh 1978–1979, 273–274), but the story of the hauntings at Fróðá (Eyrbyggja saga, Ch. 51–55) has an exemplum-like quality, illustrating not only how corpse-bearers should be treated, but also what could happen if covetousness prevented the last wishes of the dead from being carried out. Grettis saga can be interpreted from a Christian standpoint (McCreesh 1981). Bárðar saga ends on a Christian note when Bárðr appears in a dream to afflict his son with sore eyes (augnaverkr) for becoming a Christian, thus effectively making him a martyr to the new religion, for the young man succumbs to his illness (Bárðar saga, Ch. 21); in addition, the miracle in which the priest Jósteinn divides the seas when he and his companions are trapped by the tide (Bárðar saga, Ch.  21) resembles the story of Moses dividing the waters of the Red Sea (Exodus 14.21–22). Flóamanna saga has many of the traits of a saint’s life; moreo­ ver, both Sayers (1994) and Grønlie (2012, 20) think that the cold and ice in Green­ land should be interpreted figuratively rather than literally, the frozen wastelands of the Far North being the Icelandic equivalent of the desert in which hermits of the Christian church attained saintliness. It looks, therefore, as if the depictions of early settlers encountering stormy seas, snowy mountains and ice represent a deliberate attempt by authors with an interest in Christian teaching to make their listeners believe that the climate had been no better in pre-Christian or early Christian days than at the time at which they were writing. Only three writers depict favourable conditions when the first settlers arrive, and even then the most religiously inclined of the three describes icy seas as Christianity is being introduced. Authors with a more secular bent simply avoid the topic of meteorological conditions in the past, an approach which would eventually erase memories of more clement days from the collective consciousness of the Icelandic people. As far as the weather was concerned, in medieval Iceland memory was manipulated to make history conform to theology.



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Works cited Primary sources Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss. In Harðar saga, Bárðar saga, Þorskfirðinga saga, Flóamanna saga. ÍF, 13. 99–172. Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar. Ed. Sigurður Nordal. ÍF, 2. Reykjavík, 1933. Eyrbyggja saga. In Eyrbyggja saga, Brands þáttr ǫrva, Eiríks saga rauða, Grænlendinga saga, Grænlendinga þáttr. Ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson and Matthías Þórðarsson. ÍF, 4. Reykjavík, 1957 [1935]. 1–184. Flóamanna saga. In Harðar saga, Bárðar saga, Þorskfirðinga saga, Flóamanna saga. ÍF, 13. 229–327. Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar. In Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar, Bandamanna saga, Odds þáttr Ófeigssonar. Ed. Guðni Jónsson. ÍF, 7. Reykjavík, 1936. 1–290. Guðmundar saga Arasonar. In Byskupa sögur 2. Ed. Guðni Jónsson. Reykjavík, 1953. 167–389. Guðmundar saga dýra. In Sturlunga saga, 1. 160–212. Harðar saga. In Harðar saga, Bárðar saga, Þorskfirðinga saga, Flóamanna saga Ed. Þorhallur Vilmundarson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson. ÍF, 13. Reykjavík, 1991. 1–97. Islandske Annaler indtil 1578. Ed. Gustav Storm. Christiania, 1888. Íslendinga saga. In Sturlunga saga. 1. Ed. Jón Jóhannesson, Magnús Finnbogason and Kristján Eldjárn. Reykjavík, 1946. 229–534. Jóns saga ins helga. In Biskupa sögur 1. Ed. Peter Foote. ÍF, 15.2. Reykjavík, 2003. 173–316. Landnámabók. In Íslendingabók, Landnámabók. Ed. Jakob Benediktsson, ÍF, 1. Reykjavík: 1968. 29–397. Vatnsdœla saga. In Vatnsdæla saga, Hallfreðar saga, Kormáks saga, Hrómundar þáttr halta, Hrafns þáttr Guðrúnarsonar. Ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson. ÍF, 8. Reykjavík, 1939. 1–131. Þorgils saga ok Hafliða. In Sturlunga saga. 1. Ed. Jón Jóhannesson, Magnús Finnbogason and Kristján Eldjárn. Reykjavík, 1946. 12–50. Þórðar saga kakala. In Sturlunga saga. 2. Ed. Jón Jóhannesson, Magnús Finnbogason and Kristján Eldjárn. Reykjavík, 1946. 1–86.

Secondary sources Áslaug Geirsdóttir et al. 2009. “A 2000 Year Record of Climate Variations Reconstructed from Haukadalsvatn, West Iceland.” Journal of Paleolimnology 41.1: 95–115. Grønlie, Siân. 2012. “Saint’s Life and Saga Narrative.” Saga-Book 36: 5–26. Kieckhefer, Richard. 1989. Magic in the Middle Ages. Cambridge. Lamb, H. H. 1982. Climate, History and the Modern World. London and New York. Markús A. Einarsson. 1984. “Climate of Iceland.” In Climates of the Oceans. Ed. Harry van Loon. World Survey of Climatology, 15. Amsterdam. 673–697. Mathers, Derek. 2009. “A Fourteenth-Century Description of Greenland.” Saga-Book 33: 67–94. McCreesh, Bernadine. 1978–1979. “Structural Patterns in the Eyrbyggja Saga and Other Sagas of the Conversion.” Mediaeval Scandinavia 11: 271–280.

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McCreesh, Bernadine. 1981. “Grettir and Glámr – Sinful Man Versus the Fiend. An Allegorical Interpretation of a Fourteenth-Century Icelandic Saga.” Revue de l’Université d’Ottawa / University of Ottawa Quarterly 51: 180–188. Rigney, Ann. 2008. “The Dynamics of Remembrance. Texts Between Monumentality and Morphing.” In Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (in collaboration with Sara B. Young). Media and Cultural Memory/Medien und kulturelle Erinnerung, 8. Berlin and New York. 345–353. Sayers, William. 1994. “The Arctic Desert (Helluland) in Barðar Saga.” Scandinavian-Canadian Studies 7: 1–24.

Gísli Sigurðsson

II: 23 Skyscape 1 Introduction The main source for Old Norse mythology is the Edda ascribed to the politician, lawman, poet, and writer Snorri Sturluson (1178/79–1241). In Gylfaginning (Gylfi’s Illusion), the first major part of Snorri’s Edda, many of the mythological phenom­ ena described and referred to as staðir [places] and salir [halls] are said to be á himni [in the sky]. Through the magic of storytelling, Gylfi is instructed that, in mythological terms, the rainbow should be referred to as the bridge Bifröst which the gods ride from the earth to the sky. The same illusion can then be applied to everything else described in the text as being á himni. What you see in the sky (where the Milky Way, as well as the stars and planets, are the visible objects) is not what it appears to be in human terms (the notion of different terms in different worlds for the same phenomena is well-established in the Eddic poem Alvíssmál [All-Wise’s Sayings]) but rather the mythological phenomena as explained in the text. This illusion about the sky as the setting for myths is not spelled out as clearly in the mythological poems of the Elder (or Poetic) Edda – even though the poems should probably be read with the same explanatory model for a better understanding of what is going on in the texts. From the point of view of memory studies, this aspect is exceptionally important as it reflects how memory of myth­ ological names and narratives is attached to fixed and moveable phenomena in the visible sky above – for interactive retrieval.

2 Case study The myths of mankind are reflections of different interpretations of the world and how it appears to people unaffected by modern science. Mankind lives on the surface of the Earth, with dwarfs, elves, trolls, and other similar creatures. Divine beings are active in the sky, beyond our reach: the Sun, the Moon and the five visible planets (Mercury/Óðinn, Venus/Freyja, Mars/Týr, Jupiter/Þórr, and Saturn) are moving around in a different fashion from the evolving fixed stars on the firmament (which appear to be behind or above the planets). The fixed stars have been arranged into patterns in people’s minds for as long as we have records. Different cultures interpret these as recognisable features. These pat­ terns are universally arranged into two kinds of constellations: one is along the https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-059

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path of the moveable planets or main divinities (known as the solar signs of the Zodiac), and the other is the constellations above and below the sun’s path in the sky (Selin 2000). The constellations are referred to as sólmörk and stjörnumörk respectively in the astronomical texts. The terms were first translated into Old Icelandic in the manuscript Gks 1812 4to from around 1200 (with marginal and additional notes from slightly later), and later reworked in several younger manu­ scripts, published as Rím I–III and Rímbegla in Alfræði íslenzk. Far away, beyond the horizon where the sky and earth meet on the other side of the outer ocean and uninhabited territories, the gods are said to be fighting their continuous and ever­ lasting battle against the evil forces, known as jötnar [giants] in Norse mythology. Systematic and exact assembling of data about celestial phenomena was practiced by all peoples from time immemorial. The difference between that and scientific work in our time was that the measurements and observations were interpreted in a different paradigm. The language and terminologies of varied mythologies were the accepted frame of reference. People in the northern hemi­ sphere were looking at similar data, but they interpreted it with different mytho­ logical terms (Chamberlain et al. 2005; Campion 2012).

Myths and the sky One of the most interesting aspects of medieval Icelandic literature is not that it reflected the book-learning of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but rather how much of the old and now lost oral knowledge system is still reflected in it. The system was recorded by the people themselves who belonged to and were brought up in the culture, as opposed to being collected by an external observer. An outsider in a culture, such as a missionary, an anthropologist, or a col­ lector of folklore can record pieces of oral lore, poetry and stories, but cannot, as is widely reported in writings about fieldwork (Georges and Jones 1980), use the insider’s knowledge of the culture to provide the context for restructuring and reformulating the material for the written medium. What makes Snorri’s Edda so valuable in this context is that it is put together by an individual brought up and trained in an oral culture that nourished the art of skaldic poetry by keeping the old mythological interpretation of the world alive – at the same time as it was made clear that it should not be believed in. Snorri was also learned enough in the book culture of the Church to realise the potential of the book as the new medium for learning. His Edda should therefore be read as an attempt to present his previously oral mythological knowledge in a new manner, restructured and formulated like never before in a new medium: the book (Gísli Sigurðsson 2018).



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From the perspective of interactive oral memory, how places and phenom­ ena are attached to locations in the sky is of interest in Gylfaginning. Rather than residing in a spiritual and invisible world beyond our reach, the gods and their dwellings are literally said to be á himni where they can be observed from earth. These are (beside the rainbow): Gods, birds (eagle, falcon, swans), animals (dogs, wolves, horses, deer, worms, oxen), tree, wells, places (staðir), halls (salir), a blowing horn (lúður) and a jötunn – in addition to the well-known eyes of Þjazi in Skáldskaparmál [The Language of Poetry] the second main part of the Edda) that were turned into two stars, and the star “er heitir Aurvandilstá” (Skáldskaparmál, Ch. 17) [that is called the toe of Aurvandill (author’s translation)], the location of which remains a mystery. The sky itself is made of the skull of Ymir and lights are assigned a place (staðr) and a path in the sky in Gylfaginning. From their movements, the calcu­ lation of time is worked out (Ch. 8): the Sun gets halls (salir) and the stars get places (staðir). These are key terms in Gylfaginning for locations and phenom­ ena in the sky. Night and Day are drawn into the sky and around earth every day (Ch. 10) and in Ch. 11, the siblings, Moon and Sun, are put up in the sky; Sun is drawn by horses and lights up the worlds, while Moon governs the lunar cycle. Moon is accompanied by two children, Bil and Hiúki, who carry the tub Sœgr on their shoulders with the pole Simul. “Þessi börn fylgja Mána, svá sem sjá má af jörðu” (Ch. 11) [These children go with Moon, as can be seen from earth (author’s translation)]. Sun is running across the sky between two wolves, in terror of her death, Skoll is after her and Hati ahead (Ch. 12). From nineteenth-century folklore in Iceland, we know that this mythological terminology is meant to refer to the moon- and sun-halo, as well as the moon- and sundogs respectively, all of which are still visible to the naked eye in certain weather conditions. Often a line can also be observed between the ‘dogs’ on either side, suggesting the idea of the pole Simul being used to describe it. If it were not for this language continuity in Iceland into the nineteenth century, it would be far-fetched to suggest such a literal and straight-forward interpretation of these fanciful mythological stories (Gísli Sigurðsson 2014).

The world of the gods in the sky The most spectacular phenomenon in the sky, according to Gylfaginning, is the ash tree, Yggdrasill, described in Chs. 15 and 16 as “höfuðstaðrinn eða helgistaðrinn” [the main place or the sacred place (author’s translation)]. Its branches spread all over the world and stand above the sky. The gods convene by the ash, which has three roots. One is in the sky, and below that is the holy well “Urðar brunnr”

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[Urðr’s well (author’s translation)]. The gods use eleven named horses to ride to the well on Bifröst/Ásbrú while Þórr walks, wading named rivers on the way – presumably in the sky too. Many beautiful staðir in the sky are guarded by godly forces. A beautiful salr is below the ash by Urðar brunnr, from which three maidens/norns come: Urðr, Verðandi, Skuld. Many other great things are told about the ash in the sky in Ch. 16: An eagle sits in its branches, and between the eagle’s eyes sits the hawk, Veðurfölnir. The squirrel, Ratatoskr, runs up and down the heavenly tree, from the eagle at the top, down to Níðhöggr, who gnaws one of the three roots of the ash, surrounded by countless worms (or snakes). Four named deer are feeding in the branches and the norns pour white mud over the ash, so that everything becomes as white as the transparent eggshell membrane. Two swans live on the well. No great stretch of the imagination is required to accept Björn Jónsson’s (1994 [1989]) suggestion that this white transparent tree in the sky should be understood as a mythological interpretation of the Milky Way. The Milky Way/ Ash of Yggdrasill then serves as a visible memory tool in the sky, around which all the mythological lore in Gylfaginning is structured. This is similar to what is done in modern naked-eye stargazing for beginners: the instructor starts by pointing out something easily detectable in the sky. In the past, before the days of light and industrial pollution, the Milky Way would have been easily seen. Today, very few individuals in the western world on the Northern hemisphere have seen the Milky Way in all its glory and therefore find it difficult, if not impossible, to understand this aspect of Gylfi’s illusion. Table 1: Additional mythological staðir and salir in the sky, according to Gylfaginning More staðir said to be in the sky

More salir said to be in the sky

–– Álfheimur with ljósálfar/lightelves –– Breiðablik where Baldr lives (a salr before ragnarök) –– Glitnir all covered with gold –– Himinbjörg at the end of the sky, where Heimdallur lives and Bifröst comes to heaven –– Gjallarhorn is Heimdallur’s horn –– Valaskjálf belongs to Óðinn, silver-covered –– Sökkvabekkur – sky not specified

–– Hliðskjálf (Óðinn’s high-seat) is in salr –– Gimli on the southerly end of the sky (in the third sky called Víðbláinn), most beautiful of all and brighter than the sun (a staðr after ragnarök) –– Sessrúmnir is Freyja’s salr in her “bær/ farm” in the sky, Fólkvangur (Fólkvangur is a salr in Grímnismál) –– Glitnir where Forseti lives (also referred to as a dómstaðr for gods and men –– Brimir on Ókólnir –– Bilskirnir – sky not specified –– Fensalir, Frigg’s bær – sky not specified –– Sindri á Niðafjöllum – sky not specified –– NN on Náströnd – sky not specified



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In addition to the staðir and salir in Table 1, Njörðr lives in the sky at Nóatún (Ch. 23); the name of the ox, Himinhrjótr (Ch. 48), suggests that he is in the sky; and the upper part of Fenrisúlfr’s mouth reaches the sky (Ch. 51). Interestingly, one staðr is said to be í lopti (in the air): Hliðskjálf (Óðinn’s high seat). The meaning of the word is obscure (Holtsmark 1964, 39–42). It could, however, be a compound of words meaning side and tremble, suggesting that this might possibly be the long sought-after reference to the trembling phenomena with parallel lines in the air, the northern lights. In modern times, the five visible planets bear the names of Roman gods in western cultures. When continental astronomical texts were translated in Iceland around 1200 in the manuscript Gks 1812 4to, the planets were called by the Norse gods’ names, similar to the names of the days of the week: Mercury is translated to Óðinn, Venus to Freyja, Mars to Týr, Jupiter to Þórr, but it says no day is dedi­ cated to Saturn in the Norse language (Alfræði íslenzk, Rím I: 79, l. 2–14, 63). Schol­ ars from Jacob Grimm to the present have addressed the date for when the days of the week in Northern Europe were first referred to by the equivalent planets’/ god’s names, as in southern Europe. They have argued either for an early date or some time close to the arrival of Christianity in the North (Sonne 2014). The problem with this discussion is that the lack of sources makes it very difficult to argue for the origins of the names of the weekdays and planets. There is no reason to believe that the pre-Christian Norse used other names for the planets than the ones that are registered in the earliest available sources. Nor is there any reason to assume that someone tried to make up new names for something as prominent and visible to all as the planets. It is therefore relatively safe to assume that the terminology for the planets had a long oral history behind it when it first appeared in the sources – just as the rest of the vocabulary did. In addition, the astronomi­ cal text has references to earlier men, that is the pagans, who gave names to the solar signs. They felt the names reflected different weather and vegetation in each month: “Heidner menn gafu nöfn solmerkium efter þvi sem þeim þotti vedrattu farit eda groda hvern manudh”. (Alfræði íslenzk, Rím I: 53). Another observation demonstrates that there is an underlying indigenous terminology about the sky, which translations replaced. Andromeda is in the Milky Way, “þar sem ver kollvm ulfs kiopt” (Alfræði íslenzk, Rím I: 74) [where we call the wolf’s mouth (author’s translation)], identified as the Hyades in a list of astronomical glosses in Gks 1812 4to (Alfræði íslenzk, Rím I: 72). There are also terminologies about the sky reflect­ ing notions about rivers up there: “er ver kollvm vagn ok kvennavagn, ok ormr sa, er liggr imillvm þeira ok vm þær sem kroccot áá” (Alfræði íslenzk II: 250) [that we call wagon and women’s wagon [Ursa minor], and the worm that lies between and around them like a swaying river (author’s translation)]. Other well known

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indigenous terms about celestial phenomena are: Fiskikarlar (Orion’s Belt), Leiðarstjarna (Polar, or North, Star) and Karlsvagninn (The Big Dipper). The world of the gods is in the sky, as it can be perceived from earth, and that may explain why mythology persisted after the advent of Christianity. The mythology (without the religious content) was required knowledge among the professional poets, as is made explicitly clear in Skáldskaparmál: En þetta er nú at segja ungum skáldum þeim er girnask at nema mál skáldskapar ok heyja sér orðfjölða með fornum heitum eða girnask þeir at kunna skilja þat er hulit er kveðit: þá skili hann þessa bók til fróðleiks ok skemtunar. En ekki er at gleyma eða ósanna svá þessar sögur at taka ór skáldskapinum for[nar ke]nningar þær er höfuðskáld hafa sér líka látit. En eigi skulu kristnir menn trúa á heiðin goð ok eigi á sannyndi þessar sagnar annan veg en svá sem hér finnsk í upphafi bókar er sagt er frá atburðum þeim er mannfólkit viltisk frá réttri trú [...] (Snorri Sturluson, Edda. Skáldskaparmál, 5) [But these things have now to be told to young poets who desire to learn the language of poetry and to furnish themselves with a wide vocabulary using traditional terms; or else they desire to be able to understand what is expressed obscurely. Then let such a one take this book as scholarly inquiry and entertainment. But these stories are not to be consigned to oblivion or demonstrated to be false, so as to deprive poetry of ancient kennings which major poets have been happy to use. Yet Christian people must not believe in heathen gods, nor in the truth of this account in any other way than that in which it is presented at the beginning of this book, where it is told what happened when mankind went astray from the true faith [...] (Snorri Sturluson, Edda. 1987, 64–65)]

This is not to say that poets first started to learn the language and vocabulary of poetry systematically when it had been assembled and arranged in this book. Before the writing of the Edda, the only option for those who aspired to become professional poets was to listen to and learn from their elders in order to acquire knowledge and receive training in the oral and highly skilled verbal art and ken­ nings of the “major poets”. In this light, the Edda reflects a systematic insider’s representation in writing of a previously oral system of knowledge that had used the sky above as a frame of reference since time immemorial. This line of thinking leads us to the conclusion that the Edda should be read as an authority on the state of traditional knowledge about the sky and the myths about the sky, as the person who dictated it chose to tell others at the time of writing (the myths are thus not reconstructed or composed based on older textual sources). We have no way of determining what is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in this wealth of stories. People are not wrong about their own tradition, but they never prac­ tice it exactly the same way as some other person, either contemporary or from another period. They can, however, continue to associate it with the same loca­ tions (staðir, salir, stars and planets) in the sky for a very long time, thus ensuring some stability as the myths are in a sense ‘written’ in the sky. Everyone personal­



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ises the tradition and uses it in his or her own context and new ‘myths’ are con­ stantly in the making for those who observe the apparent mixture of regular and irregular movements of the heavenly bodies. The sooner the study of and discus­ sion about the mythology of the Eddas moves in the direction of some consensus around this basic model or new paradigm, based on the notion of the sky as a tool of memory for mythology, the greater advances can be made in this field of study.

Works cited Primary sources Alfræði íslenzk. Ed. Natanael Beckman and Kristian Kålund. Copenhagen. 1914–1916. Faulkes, Anthony. Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Trans. Anthony Faulkes. London. 1987. Gylfaginning. In Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Prologue and Gylfaginning. Ed. Anthony Faulkes. Oxford, 1982. Skáldskaparmál. In Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Skáldskaparmál I. Ed. Anthony Faulkes. London, 1998.

Secondary sources Björn Jónsson. 1994. Star Myths of the Vikings. Swan River. [Icelandic orig. Stjarnvísi í Eddum 1989] Campion, Nicholas. 2012. Astrology and Cosmology in the World’s Religions. New York. Chamberlain, Von del, John B. Carlson and Jane M. Young, eds. 2005. Songs From the Sky. Austin, TX. Georges, Robert A. and Michael O. Jones. 1980. People Studying People: The Human Element in Fieldwork. Berkeley, CA, and London. Gísli Sigurðsson. 2014. “Snorri’s Edda. The Sky Described in Mythological Terms.” In Nordic Mythologies. Interpretations, Intersections, and Institutions. Ed. Timothy R. Tangherlini. Berkeley, CA. 184–198. Gísli Sigurðsson. 2018. “Snorri Sturluson and the Best of Both Worlds.” In Snorri Sturluson and Reykholt. The Author and Magnate, his Life, Works and Environment at Reykholt in Iceland. Ed. Guðrún Sveinbjarnardóttir and Helgi Þorláksson. Copenhagen. 291–317. Holtsmark, Anne. 1964. Snorres mytologi. Oslo. Selin, Helaine, ed. 2000. Astronomy across Cultures. Dordrecht. Sonne, Lasse C. A. 2014. “The Origin of the Seven-Day Week in Scandinavia.” Viking and Medeval Scandinavia 10: 187–209.

Space Landscape

Stefan Brink

II: 24 Onomastics 1 Introduction Place names are geographical memory pegs in our living landscape, the environ­ ment which has been used, cultivated, and traversed by human beings for thou­ sands of years. Without these geographical memory pegs or ‘spatial etiquettes’, it is impossible for us to orientate ourselves in the world; moreover, these names must be memorised and used collectively to be functional. Basically, we humans ‘translate’ identified features in our surroundings into language, i.e. place names, so that we can function spatially, thus, a transfer of landscape to mindscape. This point in turn leads to a key problem in onomastics, namely, how and for what periods of time can a name be collectively remembered, that is, what para­ meters dictate the longevity of a name? There are two aspects to this problem, issues which are decisive and also mutually dependent. The first is the spread of, or spatial knowledge of a name, that is, the number of people who are acquainted with and use a certain name, so-called ‘name users’ (Swedish namnbrukare), as well as their ‘collective’ (Swedish namnbrukarkrets). This point then leads to the other aspect, the hypothesis that the more ‘name users’ a name has, the greater the chance for the name to be used over time, and hence to be collectively remem­ bered, ‘name continuity’ as it is called (Swedish namnkontinuitet) (Brink 1984; Strid 2003). This point ties in with an insight by the Norwegian onomastician, Magnus Olsen (1926), who grouped place names in three categories, which he called the ‘route names’ (Norwegian Veiens navn), ‘local district names’ (Norwe­ gian Bygdens navn) and ‘names related to a farm’ (Norwegian Gardens navn). Names of the first category are well-known over a large area and follow along the transportation routes, have many ‘name users’, and consist mainly of the names of rivers, lakes, fjords, islands, and so on; these names have the potential to survive at a high rate. Names in the second category are well-known in their region and somewhat beyond, such as the names of hamlets, farms, mountains, lakes, forests, streams and the like. In contrast, names in the third category are used more or less only by the people living on a particular farm and perhaps their neighbours, that is, names of fields, meadows, ponds, paths, groves, bogs, pastures, and other features of the farm. This situation mirrors thae fact that some island names are believed be from the Bronze Age (and thus more than 2500 years old), the earliest settlement names are dated to the Iron Age (hence c. 1000–1500 years old), while names of meadows and fields can easily be changed, and seldom are older than from the Middle Ages (c. 500–800 years old, but more often much younger). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-060

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2 Case study To begin with some toponymic elementa: Since toponyms are unique designa­ tions for places and areas which have been identified by people for some reason, and subsequently been given a name, it is not only the linguistic entity, the name, that interests scholarship, but also the actual denotatum, the location in reality. Place names have this dual function, i.e. as a reference and a location. Something must be of importance at that spot for it to be given a name, perhaps its appear­ ance, shape, biology, geology, topography, ownership, or because something happened there. A background exists for the appellation and the place or area has therefore by definition some – real or imagined – invested ‘quality’. This fact has been utilised as a starting point for identifying, analysing and representing such sites especially in the arts, in painting, and in literature. It goes under the concept of loci memoriae, places with some memory. Very often these loci are striking, emotional, or odd, such as war memorials, other kind of remem­ brance places such as Auschwitz, Renaissance landscapes, stations of the Life of Christ, battlefields, tombs, and so on (see e.g. Mudimbe 1993; della Dora 2011). The concept and term is defined and discussed already by classical writers, such as Cicero and Quintilian (den Boer 2008, 19–20). In French, one speaks in the same way about lieux de mémoire, which has become a popular phrase in e.g. the arts world (see Nora 1978, 1984, vii-xlii, 1993). The concept of ‘places with memory’ has also been important, and contin­ ues to be, in literature. In literary theory and the philosophy of language, one of the concepts used is chronotope, which describes how configurations of time and space are represented in language and discourse. The term was introduced by the Russian literary scholar Michael M. Bakhtin (1981, 84–85). It is very useful for toponymy, where it is more profitably used in a somewhat narrower sense, that is, as a place where time and space merge and become ‘charged’ in some way, what has been described as “places in the landscape where time and space coincide and fuse together, where time materializes and where history petrifies into monu­ ments” (Brink 2001, 81). The use of place names as memory pegs can be illuminated by two Nordic cases. Of course, any place name in the world could be used for this exercise, since they are all a kind of memorials, loci memoriae. The first case highlights a settlement district scattered with place names of (pre-)historical significance, which would have been obvious to the people living there in prehistoric times, that is, where these names had a real function as geographical memory pegs in the environment; the second case discusses a name category which might be said to be connected to the concept of loci memoriae in the arts for exceptional sites, such as burials, war memorials, etc., namely, place names for prehistoric



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burial mounds which have a name, and where the first element in the name of the mound is the name of the person who is supposed to be buried there and whom people have wished to commemorate.

Case 1: A mythological landscape The first case offers an analysis of a settlement district in northeast Västergöt­ land, Sweden (cf. Brink 1996; 1997; 1999, 427). This district is today named after the old administrative district Vadsbo, which had its central place at Vad, east of Lake Östen (see fig. 1). In the Middle Ages, Västergötland was divided into bo districts (Sahlgren 1925). Vadsbo is a settlement around Lake Östen and along the river Tidan. The area would have had an older settlement district name (Swedish bygd), but that name is unknown. During prehistoric times, Vadsbo was a coher­ ent settlement in a kind of natural basin, with a small lake at the bottom. The vital communication route in and out of this settlement has been via the river Tidan to Lake Vänern. In a highly strategic location, where the river Tidan debouches into Lake Vänern, we find a settlement †Tuna, bearing a typical prehistoric central-place element. This settlement must have been a king’s or chieftain’s farm, or a central place of some other kind. Today this settlement is incorporated into the town of Mariestad. Just south of †Tuna, along Tidan, is the hamlet Karleby, which is another ‘central-place indicator’. The first element in the name is plural of karl, which – occurring as they are always in these central-place complexes – most probably is to be seen in conjunction with the Anglo-Saxon ceorl, both emanating from a PGmc *karlaz. A ceorl had often a military function in the Anglo-Saxon fyrd and in a king’s or a lord’s retinue (Abels 1988, 37–42, 160–170, and passim). These two names, *Tuna and Karleby, ‘breath’ power, and *Tuna is probably to be seen as some kind of power base for this area. If we follow the river Tidan to Lake Östen, we find a settlement situation around the lake with names which is fascinating: Ullervad (< Ullarvi) ‘pagan cult site dedicated to the god Ullr’, Frösvi ‘the cult site dedicated to the god Frø’, Frölunda ‘the cultic grove dedicated to the goddess Freyja’, Odensåker ‘the arable land connected to the god Óðinn’, Odenslunda ‘the grove dedicated to the god Óðinn’, Närlunda ‘the cultic grove dedicated to the goddess *Niærþer’ and then also the elusive Götlunda ‘the grove of the people gøtar’ or ‘the cultic grove dedi­ cated to a god *Gøti’. Notable is also the fact that Lake Östen obviously had an older name, ‘Odens sjö’ (Linde 1982, 8), according to old documents, hence ‘the lake dedicated to the god Óðinn’. On the east side of Lake Östen, we also have two remarkable ancient monuments, a huge ship-setting (55 × 18 m) called Ran­

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Fig. 1: Map of Vadsbo

stena domarring, consisting of 24 large stone boulders (1 ½–3 m high), and by the church in Flistad, a huge burial mound (30 × 5 m) called Kung Ranes hög. This King Rane is a mythical king found in local legends (Linde 1982, 55). To this extraordinary concentration of cultic place names can be added several suggestive cultic place names just outside the outfall of the river Tidan in Lake Vänern. Here we find two islands, the larger called Torsö ‘the island dedi­ cated to the god Þórr’, and a smaller Onsö (probably) ‘the island dedicated to the god Óðinn’. Notable is also that the central settlement on Torsö is Hov, which, in this kind of toponymic setting, should likely be understood in a cultic context (Vikstrand 1992, 2001).



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For us, today, these names are – if and when we are able to etymologise them  – historical evidences representing a pre-Christian mythological worldview of the people living here in the Iron Age. Each and every name contains a memory, (pre-)historic information relatable to other Old Norse mythological evidence, which was present when the name was coined (which is the crucial moment in the toponymic process, what is called the proprialisation, when the etymological meaning becomes petrified and embedded in the name, and when the linguistic entity loses the original meaning and becomes a proprium). For the people who coined these names, each name was living testimony to their mythology or religion, whether the name denoted a grove which they thought belonged to a certain deity, or a location where he or she was believed to be easier to contact, or a cult site where one made offerings to a certain god or goddess, and so on.

Case 2: Mounds and memory The second case concerns names given to burial mounds. These names are of two kinds: those that relate to a supposed king and those that contain a man’s name. These place names can be understood to have been given the name of the pre-his­ toric person who was buried in the mound, but as, at least for the mound names containing king’s names, we can be fairly sure that these have been coined much later by knowledgeable antiquarians, who have linked Svía kings mentioned in the Icelandic sagas with monumental burial mounds in Sweden. Here we have memory, not as (true) history, but as (fictional) mythology, or what in cultural memory studies is understood as such appellations touching on the relationship between present and the past, not the past per se. As for the second category, the person remembered in the name might have been a historical person buried in the mound and commemorated in the name, but it is nearly always impossible to substantiate such a claim.

Kung Björns hög, or Hågahögen, Uppsala West of Uppsala stands an enormous burial mound called Kung Björns hög (Almgren 1905; Lamm 1989). It is assumed to be alluded to in Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks as Haugi (Ch. 11): Eiríks synir Bjarnarsonar váru þeir Ǫnundr uppsali ok Bjǫrn konungr; þá kom Svíaríki enn í brœðraskipti; þeir tóku ríki eptir Eirík Refilsson. Bjǫrn konungr eflði þann stað, er at Haugi heitir; hann var kallaðr Bjǫrn at Haugi; með honum var Bragi skáld. (Saga Heiðreks Konungs ins Vitra, 61)

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[The sons of Eirík son of Björn were Önund of Uppsala and King Björn, and in those days Sweden came again to be divided between brothers; they had the kingdom after Eirík the son of Refil. King Björn built the place called Barrow, ad he was called Björn of the Barrow. (The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise, 61)]

This is the story of the two brothers, Anund and Björn, of the Uppsala royal lineage, who shared the power in Uppsala after the death of their father Eiríkr, were Anund sat in (Old) Uppsala and Björn at Haugi, hence in tradition, identi­ fied with the huge mound at Håga. Unfortunately, this mound has been excavated and can be shown to be from the Bronze Age (Almgren 1905; Lamm 1989), so there is definitely no king Björn from the Viking Age buried here (at least not in a primary burial).

Björn Järnsidas hög, Munsö King Ragnarr loðbrók had, according to the sagas, several sons. Two of them are the herostratic Björn Járnsiða and Hásteinn, particularly known for their c. 860 raids in France, Portugal, Spain and Italy (Simek 2014, passim). In Ragnars saga loðbrókar and Ragnarsonar þáttr, we are told that after raiding all over Europe, Björn came back to Sweden and took over the kingdom of the Svear, and accord­ ing to legend was buried in the mound called Björn Järnsidas hög at Husby, on Munsö. The legend and other traditions says that Björn Järnsida was the first in a new royal dynasty called the Munsöätten, mentioned already by the Swedish antiquarian Johan Peringskiöld (1725).

Anundshögen, Västerås, Västmanland North-east of the city of Västerås is the well-known Anundshögen, placed in a necropolis with mounds, ship settings, standing stones, and so on. It is the old thing assembly place for a hundred (Old Swedish hundari), and very likely the general assembly for the province. It was used as a hundred assembly even into the Middle Ages. The site is to be seen in conjunction with Tuna and its most interesting setting suggests that it was a central-place complex (Brink 1996, 238). The huge mound is by tradition linked to the Swedish legendary king Anund, also called Bröt- or Braut-Anund (Peringskiöld 1725). According to Snorri in Heimskringla, Anund was the king in Tiundaland in Uppland, and he was given this bi-name following his grand efforts at making new roads (braut); moreover, according to Snorri in Ynglingasaga, he was the one who created a system of royal farms (husabyar) in every large district (‘storbygd’) (Brink 2000).



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Ottarshögen, Vendel In the Vendel district of Uppland, there is a large ‘king’s mound’ called Ottars­ högen. It was excavated and dated to the beginning of the seventh century (Lindqvist 1917, 1936; Ljungkvist 2005). The identification of the mound with someone named Ottar has a long history. The name is known in local tradition already in the middle of the seventeenth century, and is mentioned by Johan Peringskiöld in 1725 (Lindqvist 1917, 129). Hence, there is a local tradition to tie an Ottar to this mound. The tradition has named this king Ottar Vendelkråka, a name used already by Snorri in Ynglingasaga. In Ynglingatal, stanza 15 says: Fell Óttarr / und ara greipar / dugandligr / fyr Dana vâpnum. / Þann hergammr / hrægum fœti / víðs borinn / á Vendli sparn. / Þau frák verk / Vǫtts ok Fasta / sœnskri þjóð / at sǫgum verða, / at eylands / jarlar Fróða / vígfrǫmuð / of veginn hǫfðu. (Ynglingatal, St. 15) [The valiant Óttarr fell beneath the talons of the eagle before the weapons of the Danes. The battle-vulture [RAVEN/EAGLE], come from afar, trod him with flesh-hung foot at Vendill. I have learned that these deeds of Vǫttr and Fasti became legends for the Swedish people, that the jarls of Fróði from the island had killed the inciter of war [WARRIOR]. (Ynglingatal, P. 34)]

Here Ottar is linked to the name Vendil, and in tradition this has been identified with Vendel in Uppland, and not ‘Vendel’ (now Vendsyssel) in northern Jutland. Since Ottar is mentioned as one of the Yngling kings in Ynglingatal, together with such kings as Aðils, Egill, Aun the Old, and so on, and that three of them also are found in Beowulf, as Ongentheow, Ohthere and Eadgils, some scholars take for fact that there has existed a king among the Svíar called Ottar, and some even have discussed the possibility (in fact, been convinced) that this king is buried in the large mound in Vendel in Uppland (Lindqvist 1917, 142). Other comparable examples include Ingjaldshögen on Fogdö, Söderman­ land, identified with king Ingjald Illråde, and Kung Nordians hög in Åshusby, Uppland, identified with some king Nordian, but locally the mound was called Kung Nores hög already 350 years ago (Peringskiöld 1725, 8). The name(s) are probably to be understood in light of the parish name Norrsunda and the nearby Norsa (< Nor-Husar) as a folk-etymological reinterpretation. To this list might be added Inglingehögen in Ö. Torsås in Småland, in local tradition called Kung Inges hög (Nerman 1935), a name which is greatly interesting in conjunction with the eponymous *Ingi, Old Norse Yngvi, as an epithet for the Svía kings, and Lumbers hög, in Norra Vånga, Västergötland, in local tradition called Lurs hög or Lusse hög, which has been linked to the famous lawmaker Lumber in the Old Västgöta law. Apart from these names alluding to some (mythical) king we have a few names that are not linked with some legendary king, but rather to an unidenti­

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fied individual: Hilleshög (Hilløshøgh 1359, hillisø sokn 1375; OSwedish Hildishøgh) on Färingsö in Lake Mälaren. According to the medieval forms, this name con­ tains the man’s name Old Swedish Hildir. The question is thus if we here have the name of the man buried in the mound, or, if not, in what way this Hildir is connected with the mound. Vämmenhög (Old Danish Væmundæhøg) in Skåne contains the man’s name Væmundr, and the same questions arises here as for Hilleshög. Several such names exist in Scandinavia, as well as elsewhere in nort­ hern Europe, with a name of a burial mound which contains as the first element a man’s name. To sum up, these loci memoriae are remembrance places in the form of a burial mound, of which some can be linked to a person, buried in the mound (?) or in some other way linked to the burial mound, such as in Hilleshög and Väm­ menhög. In many cases these, often huge so-called ‘King’s Mounds’, have been identified with a legendary king (e.g. Ottar, Nordian, Anund, Björn Járnsida), pro­ bably all of which can be understood as secondary, ‘learned’ identifications by antiquarians and locals with knowledge in ancient historyand lore. Yet there are some mounds which in modern research continue to be discussed as actually containing the remains of the king mentioned in the name of the mounds; if this is so, it is unfortunately impossible to prove.

Works cited Primary sources Saga Heiðreks Konungs ins Vitra. The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise. Trans. Christopher Tolkien. London etc., 1960. Ynglingatal. Ed. and trans. Edith Marold, John Faulks et al. In Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas. 1. Part 1. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages, 2:1. Ed. Diana Whaley. Turnhout, 2012. 3–60.

Secondary sources Abels, Richard. 1988. Lordship and military obligation in Anglo-Saxon England. Berkeley. Almgren, Oscar. 1905. Kung Björns hög och andra fornlämningar vid Håga. Kung. Vitterhets, Historie och Antikvitetsakademien. Monografier, 1. Stockholm. Bakhtin, Michael M. 1981. The dialogic imagination. Four essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. University of Texas Press Slavic series, 1. Austin, TX.



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den Boer, Pim. 2008. “Loci memoriae – Lieux de mémoire.” In Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Media and Cultural Memory/Medien und kulturelle Erinnerung, 8. Berlin and New York. 19–26. Brink, Stefan. 1984. “Absolut datering av bebyggelsenamn.” In Bebyggelsers og bebyggelsenavnes alder. Ed. Vibeke Dalberg et al. Norna-rapporter, 26. Uppsala. 18–64. Brink, Stefan. 1996. “Political and Social Structures in Early Scandinavia. A Settlementhistorical Pre-study of the Central Place.” Tor. Journal of Archaeology 28: 235–281. Brink, Stefan. 1997. “Västsvenska namnmiljöanalyser.” In Ortnamn i språk och samhälle. Hyllningsskrift till Lars Hellberg. Ed. Svante Strandberg. Nomina Germanica, 22. Uppsala. 61–84. Brink, Stefan. 1999. “Social order in the early Scandinavian landscape.” In Settlement and Landscape. Ed. Charlotte Fabeck and Jytte Ringtved. Højbjerg. 423–439. Brink, Stefan. 2000. “Forntida vägar.” Bebyggelsehistorisk tidskrift 39: 23–64. Brink, Stefan. 2001. “Mythologizing Landscape. Place and Space of Cult and Myth.” In Kontinuitäten und Brüche in der Religionsgeschichte. Ed. Michael Stausberg et al. Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde. Ergänzungsbände, 31. Berlin. 76–112. della Dora, Veronica. 2011. “Inverting Perspective. Icons’ performative geographies.” In Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds. Geography and the humanities. Ed. by Stephen Daniels et al.. Abingdon. 239–246. Lamm, Jan Peder. 1989. “Hågafyndet tyvärr aktuellt igen.” Fornvännen 84: 201–206. Linde, Gunnar. 1982. Ortnamn och kulturminnen kring sjön Östen. Skövde. Lindqvist, Sune. 1917. “Ottarshögen i Vendel.” Fornvännen 12, 127–143. Lindqvist, Sune. 1936. Uppsala högar och Ottarshögen. Stockholm. Ljungkvist, John. 2005. “Uppsala högars datering och några konsekvenser av en omdatering till tidiga vendeltiden.” Fornvännen 100: 245–259. Mudimbe, Valentin Yves 1993. “From ‘primitive art’ to ‘memoriae loci’.” Human Studies 16: 101–110. Nerman, Birger. 1935. “Inglingehögens och Inglingeklotets ålder”. Fornvännen 30: 84–92. Nora, Pierre. 1978. “La mémoire collective.” In La Nouvelle Histoire. Ed. Jaques Le Goff. Paris. 398–401. Nora, Pierre. 1984. “Présentation” [and] “Entre mémoire et histoire: La problématique des lieux.” In Les lieux de mémoire, 1: La République. Ed. Pierre Nora. Paris. vii-xlii. Nora, Pierre. 1993. “La notion de lieu de mémoire est-elle exportable?” In Lieux de mémoire et identités nationales. Ed. Pim den Boer and Willem Frijhoff. Amsterdam. 3–10. Olsen, Magnus. 1926. Ættegård og helligdom. Norske stedsnavn socialt og religionshistoriskt belyst. Instituttet for sammenlignende kulturforskning. Serie A, Forelesninger, 9a. Oslo. Peringskiöld, Johan. 1725. Ättartal för Swea och Götha konungahus, efter trowärdiga Historier och Documenter. Stockholm. Sahlgren, Jöran. 1925. “Nordiska ortnamn i språklig och saklig belysning, 7: Sunnerbo, Vadsbo och Lungbo. Ett bidrag till bo-indelningens historia.” Namn och bygd 13: 129–148. Simek, Rudolf. 2014. “Memoria Normannica.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout, 133–154. Strid, Jan-Paul. 2003. “Varför topolingvistik?” Sydsvenska ortnamnssällskapets årsskrift: 66–74.

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Vikstrand, Per. 1992. “Ortnamnet Hov – sakralt, terrängbetecknande eller bägge delarna?” In Sakrale navne. Ed. Gillian Fellows-Jensen and Bente Holmberg. Norna-rapporter, 48. Uppsala. 123–139. Vikstrand, Per. 2001. Gudarnas platser: förkristna sakrala ortnamn i Mälarlandskapen. Acta Academiae Regiae Gustavi Adolphi, 77. Uppsala.

Rudolf Simek

II: 25 Cartography 1 Introduction Pre-modern mapmaking must be understood to differ fundamentally from our modern concepts in which maps are based on some common fundamental principles that include projection, scale and largely standardised symbols and legends to achieve a realistic depiction of whatever the map in question is trying to convey. Medieval maps, whether local or regional maps or world maps, the socalled mappae mundi, had a two-fold and totally different purpose: On the one hand, many maps served as paratexts, i.e. non-verbal markers in the manuscripts, that enabled readers of manuscripts to identify text passages dealing with geo­ graphy/chorography, ethnography, or cosmography. They could also serve as a symbolic representation of the physical earth. Such maps were usually very simple mappae mundi showing the three continents in the accepted medieval T-O-scheme: a circle with a T in it, dividing the world into the three continents Asia above and Europe and Africa, divided by the T, below. On the other hand, more detailed maps attempted to show places of either historical, biblical or contemporary relevance, whether they were regional or world maps. In the latter function, maps play an important role in the transmis­ sion of both historical as well as geographical knowledge throughout the Middle Ages. They were used to show places of biblical or apocryphal interest, such as the distribution of the apostles’ graves in the world, places known from classi­ cal history and romance (such as the legends of Alexander the Great), as well as giving information that derived from encyclopaedic knowledge concerning places, peoples, animals, and monsters. As such they helped to transmit both the image (through the iconographic means on the map) and the situation within memory and its written descriptions (through the captions) of the items in ques­ tion. The importance of historical and biblical as well as – in some cases – more recent political information on the maps serves to reinforce the memory of such places and as such has a relevant place in medieval memorial culture. The more detailed and larger the mappae mundi are, the more the recall of memory is geared towards content, the smaller and more symbolic the maps get, the more they serve as paratexts. In both cases, they reinforce the possibilities for access­ ing written memories.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-061

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2 Case study Medieval maps in Iceland Several quite distinctive medieval Icelandic world maps on parchment (and copies of these in early modern paper manuscripts) are preserved, but only one of them, the large map in GkS 1812 4to, 5v–6r, is comparable with the more detailed mappae mundi of continental origin (see colour plate 12). It should be noted that three of the various maps found in Icelandic manuscripts are from GkS 1812, 4to, a manuscript consisting of three fragments originating from the period between 1200 and 1350, and (partly wrongly) bound together in the later Middle Ages. Its texts and over 20 preserved illustrations seem to reflect the rather narrow tradition of large illustrated early medie­ val encyclopedias (Simek 1990, 30), as well as a strong local connection to the monastery in Helgafell in Western Iceland and the dominant families in that part of the country. Its entries on death dates, contained in an obituary in the oldest part of the manuscript, stress its function as a repository of memory of the local dead, as well as of knowledge. One of the simpler maps is of the very simplest T-O-type, depicting only the three continents of medieval cosmography, Asia, Africa and Europe, marked by their initials A, A, and E respectively (GkS 1812, 11r, thirteenth century, as well as its paper copy in AM 252 4to, 58, from c. 1700). In the medieval Icelandic manu­ scripts, this simple T-O-map does not serve as a paratext for a section on cos­ mography, as for example in the encyclopaedic tradition, represented by a large number of manuscripts of Isidore’s Etymologiae, but follows a different tradition of works on astronomy, in which the simple maps are used as a symbol for the globe of the earth within astronomical and cosmographical drawings. This tiny map was inserted into the centre of a drawing illustrating the four cardinal direc­ tions, the four main winds, the ages of man, the four temperaments, and so on, and serves as the geographical centre of these universal distinctions and as the constant reminder of their physicality (Simek 1990, 508–510). How memory worked via maps of the T-O-Type is made clear by Snorri Sturlu­ son’s brief description of the known world in the prologue to Snorra Edda, where his description seems to echo that of Isidore in the Etymologiae (1987 [1911], Vol. 2, XIV) but differs in the order of the description: Verǫldin var greind í þrjár hálfur. Frá suðri í vestr ok inn at Miðjarðarsjá, sá hlutr var kallaðr Affrica. […] Annarr hlutr frá vestri ok til norðrs ok inn til hafsins; er sá kallaðr Evropa eða Enea […] Frá norðri ok um austrhálfur allt til suðrs, þat er kallat Asia (Edda, 4)



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[The world was divided into three regions. From south to west and in up to the Mediterra­ nean sea: this part was called Africa. […] The second part from west and to the north and in up to the sea, this is called Europe or Enea. […] From the north and over the eastern regions right to the south, that is called Asia. (Edda. Snorri Sturluson, 2)]

Here, the memorised contents serve as an anchor for Snorri’s description of the world, both in context and in content: the context is that of many prologues and introductions to historical chronicles, cosmographical treatises and even ency­ clopaedic collections and therefore recalls the (Latin) text of these wide-spread genres. The content, closely following the structure of Isidore and other texts, recalls and evokes to memory a picture of the earth and its continents. A similar, but slightly more graphic description is found at the beginning of his Ynglinga saga [Saga of the Ynglings] in Heimskringla [Circle of the world]. This could likewise reflect some of the mappae mundi from the earlier Middle Ages, which show a much indented circle of inhabited land: Kringla heimsins, sú er mannfólkit byggir, er mjök vágskorin; ganga höf stór or útsjánum inn í jörðina. Er þat kunnigt, at haf gengr frá Nörvasundum ok alt út til Jórsalalands. Af hafinu gengr langr hafsbotn til landnorðrs, er heitir Svartahaf. Sá skilr heimsþriðjungana: heitir fyrir austan Ásíá, en fyrir vestan kalla sumir Európá, en sumir Eneá. (Ynglinga saga, 1941, Ch. 1) [The disc of the world that mankind inhabits is very indented with bays. Large bodies of water run from the ocean into the land. It is known that a sea extends from Nǫrvasund (the Straits of Gibraltar) all the way to Jórsalaland (Palestine). From the sea a long gulf called Svartahaf (the Black Sea) extends to the north-east. It divides the world into thirds. To the east is the region called Asia, and the region to the west some call Europe, and some Enea. (Ynglinga saga, 2014, Ch. 1)]

A different type of map is represented by a third map from medieval Iceland which, like the two previously mentioned, is also preserved in GkS 1812 4to f. 11v from the thirteenth century (with a direct copy in AM 252 fol, 59v, c. 1700). This one is rather different from the T-O-maps, and it illustrates the five climatic zones of the globe, not only the three known continents within the temperate zone of the northern hemisphere, but also showing an inhabitable zone situated in the southern hemisphere. The thirteenth-century copy of this map was also polychro­ matic, traces of which are still visible: a red equatorial zone marked as meginhaf (equatorial ocean) and two blue polar zones; in between, two moderate zones are marked as “sudr byggilig halfa” [southern inhabitable continent] and “nordr byggilig halfa” [northern inhabitable continent]. In his Liber floridus, the Flemish monk Lambert of St Omer, names this presumed landmass in the southern hemi­ sphere “temperata australis habitabilis sed incognita filiis ade” (Lambertus, 228r) [The southern moderate habitable land, but unknown to the sons of Adam

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(author’s translation)] (similar on the maps 24v, 92v–93r, 225r, 227r). Zonal maps became slightly more frequent in the twelfth century, following older examples in the works of Macrobius, such as in the Philosophia mundi written by the French scholastic Willliam of Conches (c. 1080/1090-after 1154), who was very much at the intellectual forefront of his days (Simek 1990, 20, 34–35). The two Icelandic zonal maps thus record the state of a twelfth-century Western European intellec­ tual development, preserving it for the rest of the medieval period, as the exten­ sive use of the oldest part of the manuscript GkS 1812 4to goes to show. An even more advanced state of map-making which also shows the medi­ eval world view, is represented by two other small mappae mundi depicted within astronomical drawings in Old Norse manuscripts (and representing a fourth type of map found there). The first of these is one of the relatively rare combinations of T-O- and zonal maps, preserved both in AM 736 I 4to, 1v, from the early four­ teenth century (with a paper copy in NkS 359 4to, 15) and in the contemporary manuscript AM 732 b 4to, f. 3r. Both show a zonal map of the earth with the five climatic zones, but with the northern moderate zone additionally divided into the three continents, whilst the southern moderate zone bears the inscription “synnri bygð” [southern habitable [zone]] referring to an – as yet undiscovered – continent in the southern hemisphere (Simek 1990, 406–411). The combination through the division of the northern moderate zone into three continents (thus combining a T-O-map with the zonal system) is an achievement of the Renais­ sance of the twelfth century in Western Europe. This type of map is encountered particularly in the encyclopaedic Liber floridus (c. 1120). The same thirteenth-century codex (GkS 1812) also contained the largest of all medieval Icelandic maps spread over a double page in the manuscript (GkS 1812 4to, 5v–6r). This map contains well over 120 entries, making it even by conti­ nental standards one of the more detailed maps, but unusually it shows no icono­ graphic details. Names are given on the map in a mixture of Latin and Old Norse. It simply lists names of countries for the three known continents, giving them in reasonably appropriate areas on the map. It also contains some information that would have been difficult to find on continental maps, not only for Scandinavia, but also for Eastern Europe, where Permia (“hic habitant Biarmones”) and Kiev (“kio”) are mentioned. A typical medieval map, well founded in the learned tradi­ tion, it brings together various types of learned memory on one double page. It mentions the monstrous races of India and a people in Africa, where little chil­ dren play with poisonous snakes, all part of the scholarly lore of the continental Middle Ages. Another map preserving knowledge from the very beginning of the eleventh century is the map of Jerusalem found in a variety of Icelandic manuscripts. This map exhibits a state of knowledge from the period of the first crusade, when Jeru­



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salem fell to the crusaders on 15 July 1099. This information, however, probably did not reach Iceland directly via one of the many Norman participants in this crusade, but was rather gleaned from a Norman crusader history, the Gesta Francorum Jerusalem expugnantium, written by Fulcher of Chartres in the years imme­ diately following the crusade in which he himself participated. Soon after this history of the First Crusade was written, it was included in Lambert’s autograph copy (and all subsequent copies) of the Liber floridus (Liber Floridus, 110v–128v; Derolez 1978, 209–210), reaching Iceland in a copy of this work. Even though it is missing from the autograph together with a whole quire of text (Derolez 1998, 107; Simek 1995 [1992]) three out of the existing 15 copies of this plan of Jerusalem, all dating from the earlier fourteenth century, were preserved in Iceland. The most prominent of these is the Hauksbók manuscript written and/or commissioned by law man Haukr Erlendson (AM 544 4to, fol. 19v; the others are AM 736 I 4to, fol. 2r and AM 732 b 4to, fol. 8v, both also early fourteenth century). In all the maps mentioned, the only indication that Icelandic authors wanted to add information deriving from their own indigenous knowledge to the geo­ graphical memory inherited from Western Continental Europe is the small number of place names mentioned above on the largest of the mappa mundi. They did not only add the Permians and Kiev, but also quite a comprehensive list of the Scan­ dinavian countries, complete with two names for Iceland, whose classical name Thule (here mistakenly mixed up with an Indian island and thus spelt Thile) was included as well as the native name Island (Kedwards 2015, 71–73). It seems from these entries that names from literary sources – where the Fornaldar sögur [leg­ endary sagas] frequently mention Permia, and the konunga sögur [kings’ sagas] Kiev) had a higher (scholarly) validity than those from the turn-of-the-millenium expeditions westward, which were part of the mental map of Icelanders all the same, but only rarely (as in the two Vinland sagas) made it into saga literature.

Maps in late and post-medieval Iceland By the early fifteenth century, a change of the medieval attitude toward mapmaking had apparently taken place. Claudius Clavus, a Danish cartographer born in 1388, was obviously able to collect material from Icelanders and Norwegians concerning the geography of Iceland and Greenland, and although the names he used for promontories and other landmarks were made up from runes and words from Danish folksongs, the information he collected enabled him to make lists of coordinates and maps based on the Ptolemean tradition. His maps and tables were distributed widely in Central and Southern Europe, where map makers like the Germans Nikolaus Germanus (c. 1420–c. 1490) and Henricus Martellus

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included maps of Northwestern Europe in their atlases which did not only show Iceland and Greenland but also the transatlantic Norse discoveries of the late Viking Age, an interesting addition to the current European world views. They also depicted the interesting medieval idea that Greenland was actually part of Northern Europe – by means of a land-bridge which reached from Permia all the way to Greenland, thus forming the wide bay called Gandvik [magical bay]. This world view is reflected in the maps of Henricus Martellus which in turn were based on calculations made by Claudius Clavus, and are also still apparent in the early modern Icelandic Skálholt maps, but not, however, in the medieval Central European maps of the same time (such as the widely distributed early Ptolemaic map in Hartmann Schedel’s Chronicon universale of 1492). Because of the voyages of discovery undertaken by Viking Age Icelanders and Greenlanders, Northwestern regions were obviously better known to Scandinavians than to any other European scholars. Additional information, supposedly provided by bishop Johannes Magnus, but also by much older sources such as Saxo Grammaticus, was used by the Bavarian Jakob Ziegler in yet another map of the transatlantic regions produced in 1532 probably for Vienna University, where he was teaching at the time. It shows an enormous landmass in the Northwest, obviously combining Greenland and Newfoundland to Gronlandia, the southern coast of which is marked terra bacallaos, linked to mainland Scandinavia by a short land bridge (Dreyer-Eimb­ cke 1987, 50–51 and map 7; Kompassrosen, 57). The memory of the discoveries of the early eleventh century (as preserved in the cosmographies in AM 736 I, 4to, 1r and AM 208, 8vo, 24v–25v as well as, in literary shape, in the Vinland sagas) was reflected in the Scandinavian mapmak­ ing of the late Middle Ages and early modern era, resulting in the maps of Iceland which were produced at the bishopric of Skálholt even after the reformation of 1551, particularly the one created by the Icelandic scholar Sigurdur Stefánsson in 1579. Its original is lost, but a manuscript copy has been preserved in the hand­ written description of Greenland by Björn Jonsen of Skarsaa from 1669 (manu­ script GkS 2881 4to in the Royal Library in Copenhagen, 17). Copies of this map were later printed by bishop Theodor Thorlacius in 1670 in a very similar form, and show all the discoveries of the early eleventh century marked in the west of Iceland: Helluland, Markland, and a Latinised promontorium Vinlandiae (the headland of Vinland) far southwest of Iceland. From this it is thus clear that the memory of discoveries made west of the North Atlantic by early medieval farmers from Iceland and Greenland survived for well over six centuries. The Icelandic mapmaking tradition of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries remained appar­ ently uninfluenced by the discoveries of Columbus around 1500. By this time, however, Iceland, which had indeed been part of scholarly Europe in the Middle



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Ages, had become to a large degree disengaged from the developments of the early Modern Age on the continent, insofar as the geographical innovations of the sixteenth century did not influence Icelandic mapmaking. Nor did Icelandic specialised knowledge (such as the position of Greenland and Vinland) make a major impact on state-of-art continental map production beyond what had been transmitted from the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.

Works cited Primary sources AM 544 4to (= Hauksbók. Ed. Finnur Jónsson. Copenhagen, 1892–1896) AM 736 I 4to AM 732 b 4to GkS 1812 4to GkS 2881 4to Isidor. Etymologiae. In Isidori Hispalensis episcopi Etymologiarum sive Originum libri XX. Ed. Wallace Martin Lindsay. Oxford, 1987 [1911]. Kompassrosen. Orientering mot Nord. Oslo, 2009. Lambertus Audomarensis Lamberti S. Avdomari canonici Liber floridus. Ed. Albert Derolez. Gent, 1968. Edda. In Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Prologue and Gylfaginning. Ed. Anthony Faulkes. 2nd ed. London, 2005. Edda. Snorri Sturluson. Trans. and ed. Anthony Faulkes. London, 1995. Ynglinga saga. In Snorri Sturluson. Heimskringla. I. Ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson. ÍF, 26. Reykjavík, 1941. 9–83. Ynglinga saga. In Snorri Sturluson. Heimskringla. I. Trans. Alison Finlay and Anthony Faulkes. London, 2nd ed. 2014. 6–47.

Secondary sources Derolez, Albert. 1978. Lambertus qui librum fecit. Een codicologische studie van de Liber floridus-autograaf. Brussels. Derolez, Albert. 1998. The Autograph Manuscript of the Liber Floridus. A Key to the Encyclopedia of Lambert of Saint-Omer. Turnhout. Dreyer-Eimbcke, Oswald. 1987. Island, Grönland und das nördliche Eismeer im Bild der Kartographie seit dem 10. Jahrhundert. Wiesbaden. Kedwards, Dale 2015. “Iceland, Thule, and the Tilensian Precedent in Medieval Historiography.” Arkiv for nordisk filologi 130: 57–78. Simek, Rudolf. 1990. Altnordische Kosmographie. Studien und Quellen zu Weltbild und Weltbeschreibung in Norwegen und Island vom 12. bis zum 14. Jahrhundert.

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Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde, 4. Berlin and New York. Simek, Rudolf. 1995 [1992]. “Hierusalem civitas famosissima.” Codices manuscripti 16.12: 121–153.

Judith Jesch

II: 26 Diaspora 1 Introduction The term ‘diaspora’ is nowadays used in a variety of contexts, both historical and contemporary, usually but not always involving the movements of people (Kalra et al. 2005, 8–10; Cohen 2008; Kenny 2013). Here it is understood as a phenom­ enon that has its origins in human migration, but which transcends the actual process of migration so that the focus is rather on the effects of migration. While migration involves the movement and resettlement of groups of people from one location to another (or to a multiplicity of locations), diaspora is about those groups’ consciousness of their connections with the people and traditions of their original location (or homeland) and migrants of the same origin in other loca­ tions, and this consciousness will depend in part on memory. Not all migrations lead to diaspora, but migration is a prerequisite for diaspora. In contrast to migra­ tion, which tends to be unidirectional, diaspora is characterised by a reciprocal relationship with the homeland and with other locations peopled by migrants of the same origin. Diaspora is thus a concept that can help to explain the world created by the migrations of the Viking Age (Jesch 2015). This can be done most easily in the case of Iceland, but there is plenty of scope for further research to investigate the workings of diaspora in the various parts of the Viking world, such as the British Isles, or Greenland, or the East. Iceland, both as a population and a nation, came into being as a result of the Viking Age migrations. Diaspora theory provides a framework within which to understand, among other things, medieval Icelandic literary production and its relationship to memory. This literature is considerable in both quantity and chronological extent and can by no means entirely be attributed to diasporic pro­ cesses. However, it is noticeable that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in particular, there was extensive literary interchange between the diasporic lands of Iceland and Orkney and the homeland of Norway, which seems to have acted as a spur to later literary developments in Iceland (Jesch 2009). This suggests that the literature of thirteenth-century Iceland which deals with the beginnings of Iceland is more than just a historical memory of the Viking Age migrations. Memory is central to diaspora, as there must always be a memory of the place that has been left, but diaspora involves more than just a historical memory of that place and that leaving. Diaspora is multilateral, reciprocal and ongoing. It goes beyond simple historical memory because it causes memory to be refreshed, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-062

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or (re-)invented, through diasporic contacts across time. It is proposed here that the concept of diaspora provides a framework within which to understand and explain the strong preoccupation with the past that is such a salient feature of several Old Icelandic literary genres, including the Íslendingasögur [sagas of Ice­ landers]. Unlike old views of the sagas as somehow mere receptacles for preserv­ ing traditions about the past (based on a simple historical memory of that past), the explanatory power of diaspora theory is that it does not underestimate the significance of the present in which the sagas (and here particularly the Íslendingasögur) were written and consumed, while still focusing on the past that they describe. But also in contrast to theories of cultural memory (e.g. Assmann 1995), which emphasize the present in which texts were produced, a diasporic understanding of the sagas of Icelanders encompasses the whole period from the described past through to the time of writing. This enables us to see the sagas as neither a simple, transmitted memory of the past, nor as a thoroughly contempo­ rised past, but as something in between, as exemplified in the saga accounts of the settlement of Iceland.

2 Case study The settlement of Iceland It is a commonplace for medieval Icelandic texts to note that the previously uninhabited island was settled from Norway in the time of King Haraldr hárfagri [Finehaired], as already in Ari Þorgilsson’s early twelfth-century Íslendingabók [The book of Icelanders] (Ch. 1). Some Íslendingasögur further specify that people fled Norway because of the tyrannical behaviour of its king, as articulated by Ketill flatnefr [Flatnose] in Laxdœla saga (Ch. 2): “Sannspurðan hefi ek fjándskap Haralds konungs til vár; […] lízk mér svá, sem oss sé tveir kostir gǫrvir, at flýja land eða vera drepnir hverr í sínu rúmi.” [“Of King Harald’s animosity towards us there is proof enough; [...] We seem to have two choices before us: to flee the country or to be killed off, one by one.” (The saga of the people of Laxardal, Ch. 2)] The old man does not take the advice of his sons to go to Iceland, preferring Scot­ land, and some of the family duly go there first, though Ketill’s descendants do all end up in Iceland, to become the protagonists of the saga which deals with their complex relationships and feuds. Grettis saga [The saga of Grettir the Strong] (Chs. 1–5) shows some Vikings leaving Norway because of Haraldr to raid around Ireland and the Hebrides before eventually settling in Iceland. In Eyrbyggja saga [The saga of the people of Eyri] (Ch. 1) the noble Norwegians who left their ances­



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tral estates are said variously to have gone east across the Keel to Sweden, or west across the sea to the Hebrides or Orkney, before going on to Iceland (Ch. 6). Simi­ larly, Færeyinga saga [The saga of the Faroe Islanders] gives Haraldr’s tyranny as the explanation for the settlement of the Faroe Islands “and other uninhabited lands.” (Ch. 1). Others go more or less straight to Iceland, as in Egils saga [Egil’s saga]) (Chs. 25–27). There are numerous references in Landnámabók [The book of settlements] to settlers who emigrated for the same reason (Sturlubók [Sturla’s book] version, Chs. 29, 84, 85, 112, 134, 135, 139, 144, 149, 154, 156, 159, 161, 166, 225, 241, 267, 341, 344, 356, 359, 371, 378, 392, and similarly in other versions; see also Boulhosa 2005, 172–173, 176, 228–232). Given the frequency of this explanation for the settlement of Iceland, it is a little surprising to find in other texts that some of Iceland’s first settlers were in favour with, and indeed positively encouraged to emigrate by, the Norwegian king. In Vatnsdœla saga [The saga of the people of Vatnsdal] (Chs. 8–12) Ingimundr inn gamli (the Old) emigrates to Iceland at the instigation of his great friend the king, but reluctantly. As well as Ingimundr, the sons of Haraldr’s closest follower Rǫgnvaldr Mœrajarl [Earl of More and Romsdal] also end up in either Iceland or Orkney, according to the same saga (Ch. 9) and Landnámabók, too (Sturlubók, Chs. 124, 309–310, Hauksbók [Haukr’s book], Ch. 354). Scholars have viewed Haraldr’s tyranny as a foundation myth, a story that explained Iceland’s past in a way that was relevant in the thirteenth century, in particular, concerning the relationship of Icelanders to the Norwegian monarchy (Kreutzer 1994, 461; Sverrir Jakobsson 2016, 183–187). While Kreutzer attributed the few positive examples to the interests of minority pro-Norwegian parties in thirteenth-century Icelandic politics, Sverrir Jakobsson viewed them rather as remnants of a slightly earlier time when Iceland had a more relaxed relationship with Norway, before the issue started coming to a head in the second quarter of the thirteenth century and leading to increased anxiety. Neither scholar, however, interprets this as a historical memory from the time of the settlement. Either of their interpretations could be accommodated to Jan Assmann’s model (1995, 130) of cultural memory, a phenomenon which “always relates its knowledge to an actual and contemporary situation.” As Sverrir Jakobsson put it (2016, 188), “The history of the early Norwegian kings was [...] highly relevant to the history of the settlement of Iceland, which was in itself an issue of much con­ temporary relevance.” Although he does mention Landnámabók, the only one of the Íslendingasögur he discusses is Egils saga, so there is no explanation of what relevance the foundation myth might have to later sagas such as Grettis saga, written well after the Norwegian issue had been resolved by the incorporation of Iceland into the kingdom of Norway. Are we to assume that the foundation myth has become a blind motif, or does this cultural memory have some other sig­

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nificance in the fourteenth century, or whenever that saga came into being? This is a question that the foundation myth/cultural memory theory does not really answer. What Assmann calls “collectively shared knowledge” (1995, 130) is, in such interpretations, a reflection of “the self-image of the group through a pre-occupa­ tion with its own social system” (Assmann 1995, 135). There is little room in such a model for discussion of where that self-image came from and this is echoed in the recent tendency of saga scholars to view the texts mainly as sources for the times in which they were written rather than the times they purport to describe. The question of where the saga-writers got their information from regarding the settlement of Iceland and the reasons for it is one that cannot be solved by the cultural memory model, irrespective of whether that information is correct or not. However, the model of diaspora, which also involves a form of memory, has the power not only to explain what Assmann (1995, 129) calls “the contempo­ rized past” but also to place the Icelandic saga versions of this past into a broader context than that of the supposed time of their composition in the thirteenth or fourteenth century. The two unique Icelandic historiographical works, Íslendingabók and Landnámabók, provide some of this context of understanding for the sagas. The collective nature of the Icelanders’ memories about their origins is illus­ trated in Landnámabók, a compendium of the first settlers of Iceland and their family relationships. This occasionally specifies a place of origin for the first set­ tlers, usually though not always in Norway (Jesch 2015, 196; 2016, 142–143) and sometimes overlaps with those Íslendingasögur which feature the earliest set­ tlers. The thirteenth- and fourteenth-century versions of Landnámabók evolved from a catalogue of settlers into something approaching a historical narrative. A comparison with a twelfth-century historical work with a similar theme, Ari Þor­ gilsson’s Íslendingabók, sheds light on the connections between such a collective memory and diaspora. Íslendingabók presents a monolithic idea of Iceland having been discovered and settled by one man, Ingólfr, followed by an orderly migration from Norway, led by four distinguished Norwegians (including one woman), Ketilbjǫrn, Hrol­ laugr, Auðr and Helgi enn magri [The Lean] (Ch. 1 and “Ættartala”, 26–27). The narrative that emerges from Landnámabók, on the other hand, is more complex and can be seen to have developed in the late thirteenth-century Sturlubók and the early fourteenth-century Hauksbók, when they are compared to the third medieval version of the text, Melabók [Book of Melar], which appears to have a more archaic structure in that it is a purely geographical catalogue. The devel­ oped versions add to this catalogue chapters on Iceland and its location, followed by a series of voyage and discovery narratives. They also re-arrange the geography



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of the text by starting with Ingólfr’s settlement, in the middle of the Southern Quarter (Sturlubók and Hauksbók, Chs. 1–10), rather than at the quarter boundary as seems to have been the original arrangement, represented in Melabók (Ch. 1). In doing this Sturlubók and Hauksbók follow Ari in privileging Ingólfr’s settlement, but at the same time they complicate matters by telling the stories of several dis­ coverers before him who did not make permanent settlements in Iceland (Jesch 2015, 193–195). About a quarter of the 399 chapters in Sturlubók give information about the settlers such as where they originated and where they departed from on their way to Iceland, the places they stopped off along the way, and whether they were pagan, Christian or undecided. We are also given a sense of the motivations behind their migration to Iceland, often expressed in political terms, such as the opponents and supporters of the Norwegian king as discussed above. Lándnámabók thus presents a much more diffuse and less linear model of the settlement of Iceland than Ari’s picture of an orderly migration from Norway. It shows a migration that took place from many different points of origin, by many different types of people, who had different reasons for going there. The migration hap­ pened as a result of information trickling back to many parts of the Viking world from the first explorers who arrived in Iceland either by accident or because of curiosity. This model suggests that the settlement of Iceland was not so much a unique migrational event, as a consequence of the Viking diaspora (Jesch 2015, 190–199). The differing interpretations of the discovery and settlement of Iceland in Íslendingabók in the twelfth century and Landnámabók in the thirteenth/four­ teenth highlight the differences between migration and diaspora. Ari wrote at a time when Iceland was just over two centuries old and still in the process of nation-building. He locates the infant polity in relation to world history and aims to pinpoint its origins in terms of a migration from Norway and the re-establish­ ment of Norwegian law in the new land. He does not acknowledge that any Ice­ landers were Christians until the conversion of 999 established a new kind of collective identity. Ari’s four prominent settlers demonstrate the transplantation of social and family structures that would be expected of a straightforward migra­ tion, as each settler is identified by a patronymic and is said to be the ancestor of a particular group of people (Íslendingabók, “Ættartala”, 26–27). Two of them have high-ranking social origins, and all four are said to be Norwegian, ignoring the strong British Isles element in the personal history of both Helgi and Auðr suggested by other sources. In creating the Icelandic nation and an Icelandic identity, Ari builds on a model of migration from a single country, followed by a linear development of the migrant society. Ari’s Íslendingabók could be said to be a work of cultural memory, of the ‘contemporised past’.

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Landnámabók, on the other hand, is a work of collective scholarship extend­ ing over several generations, constantly being revised up into the fourteenth century (and later). Different sections of the text have different characteristics, suggesting it was put together on a local or regional basis first, before becoming a grand catalogue of the settlement of the whole of Iceland. Whether or not the local and probably oral traditions on which it is based are individually true in any objective sense, the overall picture it presents of the settlement of Iceland is plau­ sible and likely to represent the historical reality, suggesting a strong element of historical memory in its compilation. Once it became known that there was an opportunity to claim virgin land on an island in the North Atlantic, this oppor­ tunity drew people from the Viking diaspora as well as from their Scandinavian homelands. The Icelanders were well aware of their origins in this diaspora, and the traditions recorded in Landnámabók reflect their consciousness of connec­ tion both to the people and traditions of their homeland and to others elsewhere in the world who shared the same connection, at the time of writing as well as at the time of the settlement, based on continuing connections between the two, as well as memories of the settlement. Like Landnámabók, the Íslendingasögur are set in the Viking Age, two or three centuries before the time in which they were written, and often feature characters originating in the British Isles, or engaged in Viking activities both in the British Isles and further afield. Icelanders of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries were still in touch with diasporic communities in the north and west of the British Isles, the Faroes and Greenland, indeed they wrote sagas about all of these places. In Orkney, or Shetland, or Faroe, or Greenland, Icelanders met people who spoke the same language as they did, who used the same onomasticon or set of names and naming elements, who had the same or a similar legal system, who wrote using runes, and who still remembered the old myths and legends, even though they had also all become Christians at about the same time as the Icelanders. This North Atlantic community, originating in the diaspora, was held together first by the consciousness of Norwegian origin, and then by the rule of the Norwe­ gian king until it gradually fell apart, starting with the cessation of the Hebrides to Scotland in the late thirteenth century and ending with the extinction of the Greenland colony sometime in the fifteenth. By then, Icelanders were no longer part of a diaspora.

Diasporic networks in the Íslendingasögur The Íslendingasögur, even those that do not mention the settlement, are all set in a period between the settlement and the early to mid-eleventh century, soon after



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the conversion to Christianity. While some kings’ sagas and related texts such as Orkneyinga saga [The saga of the Orkney Islanders] extend into the mid-twelfth century, and thus much closer to the time of writing, the Íslendingasögur are set off from the contemporary concerns of their Icelandic audience by a gap of around two centuries (a gap which is only partly filled by the Contemporary Sagas). Even when they are mainly concerned with doings in Iceland, the Íslendingasögur are set in a world in which people travel back and forth across the North Atlantic community as outlined above, and could in a general sense be said to be about that community. Within this larger community, the Sagas of Icelanders reveal a close-knit society which came into being in Iceland as the result of a complex migration process, and it is clear that they are intimately bound up with the creation of this society. They depict a variety of interrelationships between characters, and a recent study using network analysis suggests that the networks deducible from the sagas correspond closely to real-life social networks (Mac Carron and Kenna 2013). Since the networks depicted in the sagas ostensibly existed two to three hundred years before the sagas were written, it is important to ask what the nature of this realism is. Did the authors collectively manage to make up thousands of characters and thereby produce something similar to real-life social networks? Or did they have a historical memory of, or access to information about, the social networks of their ancestors two or three centuries earlier and, if so, how did this work? A combination of diaspora theory and recent work on authorship suggests a possible answer which does not rely on either a simple understanding of histori­ cal memory nor on cultural memory. The Íslendingasögur are well-known to be anonymous works, despite the efforts of some editors over the years to assign them named authors, but to focus on authorship in this way may be to misunderstand how the sagas came into being. Slavica Ranković has argued (2006, 42) that “the remarkable representa­ tional complexity and realism of the sagas” is facilitated by what she calls their “distributed authorship”. They are produced by a “network of authors (oral storytellers, writers, scribes)” and have evolved through time, in a context in which their listeners/readers have knowledge that is relevant to, but goes beyond what is in, the text. These are the processes that enable the realistic depiction of social networks, as the sagas are the products of a community, a network, that existed in both space and time. These networks relate not only to the Icelanders’ his­ torical memory of their migration, but also to the more recent past of thirteenthand fourteenth-century saga authors and indeed they link the two, enabling the sagas’ depictions of a past that is still linked to the present. The implications of this understanding of the sagas is that they are neither entirely of the age in which they are set, nor entirely of the age in which they were

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written. Rather, they are a product of the Viking diaspora, of a community with a high degree of awareness of how it came into being and a strong interest in its own origins. The social networks of the sagas are new social networks peculiar to Iceland, not those transplanted from the homelands, since, as Landnámabók makes clear, the first settlers came from many different parts of the Viking world. The Íslendingasögur, rather than constructing these social networks out of thin air, come into being both as a result of and in order to record such networks, as indicated by the genealogies that are such an obsession of most sagas as well as Landnámabók. The Íslendingasögur, unique in world literature, are cultural innovations brought about by new material conditions, the new material condi­ tions being the coming together of people of various origins in a new land and the consequent necessity of establishing new networks not necessarily related to those of the homeland (Kalra et al. 2005, 37).

Past, present and diaspora in the Íslendingasögur The interweaving of past and present that is characteristic of diaspora can be seen in many sagas which seem to combine memories of the past with current preoccu­ pations, exemplified here through two locations which feature in Icelandic sagas and which have been discussed in more detail in Jesch (2015). The first of these is the northern Norwegian settlement of Vágar in Lofoten, which has two strong associations in a variety of Icelandic texts, including several Íslendingasögur, namely with historical memories of militant paganism, but also a more contem­ porary interest in the fish trade (Jesch 2015, 64–68). The associations of Vágar with paganism are mainly from the kings’ sagas, but a broader view of northern Norway and Lofoten in Landnámabók confirms its double association of pagan­ ism and fishing in Icelandic minds regarding the settlement period, whereas the projections of the fish trade into the past world of the Íslendingasögur resonates with the then-burgeoning industry of cod fishing. The other example is Mousa Broch, an iconic location in Shetland that plays a significant role in the narra­ tives of both a Viking Age (Egils saga, Ch. 33) and a more recent (Orkneyinga saga, Ch. 93) elopement (Jesch 2015, 167–169). While the latter is perhaps more likely to have happened than the former, and is of less consequence to the overall narra­ tive, the use of the Mousa elopement motif in Egils saga is significant in that it ties together many of the characters and locations of the saga in a single, symbolic, central point in a typically diasporic linking. It could be said that Egils saga is the classic saga of the Viking diaspora, with its extensive version of the tyranny of Haraldr motif, and a chain of events that ranges geographically across the Viking world. A possible factor in this is



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its frequent citation of skaldic poetry, mostly though not always by Egill himself. Guðrún Nordal has noted a correlation between those sagas that have an inter­ est in “stories of the settlement” and those that also have an interest in skaldic poetry and pagan myth (Nordal 2013, 206), all of which are characteristic of Egils saga, and this knowledge of poetry may be one of the clues to diasporic memory. The distribution of skaldic composition during the Viking Age, and its continued development and recording after the Viking Age certainly reflects the connec­ tions established in the Viking diaspora, stretching from Sweden via Denmark, Norway and the British Isles to Iceland and even Greenland. The vast majority of this poetry is recorded in Icelandic manuscripts, embedded in Icelandic prose narratives, mainly sagas. But as the poets of Orkney and the runic inscriptions of Bergen show, interest in this endeavour spread beyond the saga-writers of Iceland (Jesch 2015, 174–182). The Icelanders were not merely recording inherited traditions or historical memories, but actively participating in a wider cultural endeavour that was both up-to-date and yet focused on the past. It is not only the beginnings of the sagas that reveal the Icelanders’ con­ sciousness of their place in the Viking world, for quite a number of sagas end with major or minor characters disappearing to Norway, Denmark, the British Isles or the East, never to return to Iceland. This pattern can even be found in sagas that do not take an interest in the settlement period. Guðrún Nordal has noted (2013, 201, 206) the special character of sagas from the eastern fjords of Iceland, which are generally interested neither in skaldic poetry nor in the settlement story. Yet we find in these a small concatenation of sagas in which a major character goes to Norway at the end of the saga and is explicitly said not to have returned (Þorsteins saga hvíta [The saga of Thorstein the White], Ch. 7; Droplaugarsona saga [The saga of the sons of Droplaug], Ch. 15; Gunnars þáttr Þiðrandabana [The tale of Gunnar, the slayer of Thidrandi], Ch. 7). Even without displaying an interest in why and how their ancestors first went to Iceland, these and other sagas show an abiding connection with the wider Viking world, and the Norwegian homeland, reflecting the continuing diasporic experiences of Icelanders in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

Conclusion This pervasive connection that the Íslendingasögur make between the high medi­ eval literary context in which they were written and the Viking Age past that they depict is a product of the Viking diaspora, which created lasting and wideranging cultural and linguistic networks and reciprocal connections between the Scandinavian homelands and the various regions settled by Scandinavians in the

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Viking Age. The medieval Icelanders’ interest in their Viking Age past was thus not simply a historical memory of that distant past, whether that was an accu­ rate memory transmitted through time or a cultural memory constructed at the time of writing, nor was it an invention to explain the present. Rather, it was a product of those diasporic relationships which began in the Viking Age and con­ tinued long afterwards. These relationships maintained and encouraged a sense of commonality and belonging in the present, based on a shared past, which goes beyond just a historical memory of that past. In this context, an evolving form of memory based on collective traditions, some of them originating in that past, was refreshed and maintained through the processes of diaspora, and made a major contribution to the development of Icelandic literature, especially those sagas set in the Viking Age past.

Works cited Primary Sources Droplaugarsona saga. In Austfirðinga sǫgur. Ed. Jón Jóhannesson. ÍF, 11. Reykjavík, 1950. 135–180. Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar. Ed. Sigurður Nordal. ÍF, 2. Reykjavík, 1933. Eyrbyggja saga. In Eyrbyggja saga, Brands þáttr ǫrva, Eiríks saga rauða, Grœnlendinga saga, Grœnlendinga þáttr. Ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson and Matthías Þórðarson. ÍF, 4. Reykjavík, 1935. 1–186. Færeyinga saga. In Færeyinga saga, Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar eptir Odd munk Snorrason. Ed. Ólafur Halldórsson. ÍF, 25. Reykjavík, 2006. 1–121. Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar. In Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar, Bandamanna saga, Odds þáttr Ófeigssonar. Ed. Guðni Jónsson. ÍF, 7. Reykjavík, 1936. 1–290. Gunnars þáttr Þiðrandabana. In Austfirðinga sǫgur. Ed. Jón Jóhannesson. ÍF, 11. Reykjavík, 1950. 193–211. Íslendingabók. In Íslendingabók, Landnámabók. Ed. Jakob Benediktsson. ÍF, 1. Reykjavík, 1968. 1–28. Landnámabók. In Íslendingabók, Landnámabók. Ed. Jakob Benediktsson. ÍF, 1. Reykjavík, 1968. 29–397. Laxdœla saga. In Laxdœla saga, Halldórs þættir Snorrasonar, Stúfs þáttr. Ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson. ÍF, 5. Reykjavík, 1934. 1–248. Orkneyinga saga. In Orkneyinga saga, Legenda de Sancto Magno, Magnúss saga skemmri, Magnúss saga lengri, Helga þáttr ok Úlfs. Ed. Finnbogi Guðmundsson. ÍF, 34. Reykjavík, 1965. 1–300. The Saga of the People of Laxardal. Trans. Keneva Kunz. In The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. 5. Ed. Viðar Hreinsson. Reykjavík, 1997. 1–120. Vatnsdæla saga. In Vatsndœla saga, Hallfreðar saga, Kormáks saga, Hrómundar þáttr halta, Hrafns þáttr Guðrúnarsonar. Ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson. ÍF, 8. Reykjavík, 1939. 1–131. Þorsteins saga hvíta. In Austfirðinga sǫgur. Ed. Jón Jóhannesson. ÍF, 11. Reykjavík, 1950. 1–19.



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Secondary sources Assmann, Jan. 1995. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” New German Critique 65: 125–133. Boulhosa, Patricia. 2005. Icelanders and the Kings of Norway. Medieval Sagas and Legal Texts. Northern World, 17. Leiden. Cohen, Robin. 2008. Global Diasporas. An Introduction. 2nd ed. London. Guðrún Nordal. 2013. “Skaldic citations and settlement stories as parametres [sic] for saga dating.” In Dating the Sagas: Reviews and Revisions. Ed. Else Mundal. Copenhagen. 195–212. Jesch, Judith. 2009. “The Orcadian Links of Snorra Edda.” In Snorra Edda i europeisk og islandsk kultur. Ed. Jon Gunnar Jørgensen. Reykholt. 145–172. Jesch, Judith. 2015. The Viking Diaspora. London. Jesch, Judith. 2016. “The Concept of ‘Homeland’ in the Viking Diaspora.” In Shetland and the Viking World. Ed. Val E. Turner, Olwyn A. Owen and Doreen J. Waugh. Lerwick. 141–146. Kalra, Virinder S., Raminder Kaur and John Hutnyk. 2005. Diaspora & Hybridity. London. Kenny, Kevin. 2013. Diaspora. A Very Short Introduction. Oxford. Kreutzer, Gert. 1994. “Das Bild Harald Schönhaars in der altisländischen Literatur.” In Studien zum Altgermanischen. Festschrift für Heinrich Beck. Ed. Heiko Uecker. Ergänzungsbände zum RGA, 11. Berlin. 443–461. Mac Carron, Pádraig and Ralph Kenna. 2013. “Network analysis of the Íslendinga sögur – the Sagas of Icelanders.” The European Physical Journal B, 86: 407.doi: 10.1140/epjb/ e2013-40583-3. (17 July 2017) Ranković, Slavica. 2006. “Golden Ages and Fishing Grounds: The Emergent Past in the Íslend­ ingasögur,” Saga-Book 30: 39–64. Sverrir Jakobsson. 2016. “The Early Kings of Norway, the Issue of Agnatic Succession, and the Settlement of Iceland.” Viator 47.3: 171–188.

Christian Krötzl

II: 27 Pilgrimage 1 Introduction Pilgrimages were, at least from the twelfth century onwards, one of the most important elements of mass mobility in medieval society, meaning that they were also one of the most widely spread forms of collective memory. Commemorating the saints and their deeds was the essential motivation, and the pilgrimage itself was a physical way of experiencing this memory by approaching the shrine and the relics of a saint as closely as possible (Sumption 1975; Schmugge 1988; Webb 2002). Memory studies have, however, not dealt much with medieval pilgrim­ ages, and few historians working on hagiography and pilgrimages have made use of the concept of memory. Pierre Nora’s claim of a fundamental opposition between memory and history has not been helpful and is outdated in regard to modern research, but remains still influential. Nora’s own concept of material, symbolic and functional lieux de mémoire could offer, on the other hand, a fruit­ ful approach to study of medieval pilgrimages and hagiography (Nora 1989; Erll 2008; Confino 2008; Olick 2008). In Scandinavia, the cult of saints and the pilgrimages enjoyed popularity already from the very beginning of its Christianisation, as elements of the old and the new faith coexisted for generations. Scandinavians became soon a visible element on the pilgrimage routes to Rome, Santiago de Compostela, Jerusalem and other places. Pilgrimages to locations associated with indigenous saints developed as well, prime examples including the shrine of St Olav in Trond­ heim and later to Vadstena, the motherhouse of the Ordo Sanctissimi Salvatoris founded by St Birgitta of Sweden. The participation of women in such religious journeys is remarkably high when compared to other regions of Europe, both in pilgrimages within and outside Scandinavia (Krötzl 1994, 2013, 2016). The memory of pilgrimages was regularly evoked in sermons, and visible in frescoes and sculptures of the Holy Cross, or of St James or St Bridget in their attributes of pilgrimage. Pilgrim badges as a sign of memory were worn by those who had returned home, and were taken even to the grave, as frequent archaeo­ logical finds all over Scandinavia show. Guilds dedicated to saints in many towns in the North were yet another form of collective commemoration and also of mutual help for prospective pilgrims. Successful pilgrimages were remembered by friends and neighbours, and propagated as an example to follow, as close analysis of miracle collections and other sources could show. In contrast to many other parts of Europe, the pilgrimage movement in Scandinavia showed no weak­ https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-063



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ening until the disrupture caused by the Reformation (Andersson 1989; Krötzl 2012).

2 Case study: Pilgrimage and memory in the medieval North Interestingly enough, already the earliest preserved sources on Scandinavian pilgrims are strongly linked to memory issues. A late eleventh-century Swedish rune-stone from Uppland (U 136) had been commissioned by Astrid and her three sons to commemorate her husband Eysteinn, who “went to Jerusalem and died in Greece”: “astriþr lat raisa staina þasa at austain buta sin is suti iursalir auk antaþis ubi i kirkum” [Ástríðr had these stones raised in memory of Eysteinn, her husbandman, who went to Jerusalem and met his end up in Greece. (SRD, trans­ lation with emendation)]. On another rune-stone from the same period (U 605), a powerful woman evokes her forthcoming pilgrimage to Jerusalem: “iskirun harþiR totiR lit risti runiR ati sik sialfan hn uil austr fara auk ut til iursala fair risti runiR” [Ingirún(?), Harðr’s daughter, had the runes carved in memory of herself. She wants to travel to the east and abroad to Jerusalem. Fótr(?) carved the runes. (SRD)] This inscrip­ tion is a remarkable act of commemoration by a self-conscious woman who could by no means be sure of returning from the long journey. The close connection between pilgrimage and memory is also highlighted in the list of names of approximately 700 pilgrims from nearly all parts of eleventhcentury Scandinavia, which can be found in the liber memorialis [book of memory] of the monastery at Reichenau (Liber confraternitatum Augiensis; Krötzl 1992). Memory or confraternity books, which are preserved throughout the Middle Ages from all monastic branches and regions, are a very important source, underlining the importance of collective memory in medieval society at large. The Scandina­ vian pilgrims left their names in commemoration of their pilgrimage to Rome or Jerusalem. Around one-third of the names are female, pointing to the strong posi­ tion of women in these long-distance pilgrimages undertaken by Scandinavians.

Abbot Nikulás’s itinerary A most interesting source is the pilgrimage itinerary – Leiðarvísir [road map] – composed by Nikulás, the abbot of the Benedictine monastery of Munkaþverá in

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Iceland, from around 1140. It describes his journey from Iceland via Germany to Rome and to the Holy Land (Werlauff 1821, 15–32; critical edition Kålund 1908, 12–23; Magoun 1944; Hill 1983; Wilkinson 1988, 215–219; Krötzl 1992, 224–225; Simek 1990; Marani 2012; Scheel 2016, 599–601). Accounts and descriptions of pilgrimage journeys can be seen as one of the widely spread genres of ‘memory literature’ that existed from late Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages. Their primary scope was to give a description of a pilgrimage journey, and, in the case of an itinerarium, to serve also as a guide-book for subsequent pilgrimages. The Benedictine abbot from Iceland follows, on one side, quite closely the model of earlier itinerary descriptions, which he apparently knew well. For the northern portion, from Iceland and Norway to the south of Denmark, he describes the route just briefly, in a technical manner, with day-journeys from one place to another. From Saxony onwards he adds, however, a layer of ecclesiastical geography, with the main churches and their bishoprics along the route, from Stade and Pader­ born to Cologne, Switzerland, Italy and the Holy Land. In Aachen he recalls also the coronation of the emperor by the archbishop of Cologne (Kålund 1908, 14). As in earlier pilgrim’s itineraries, the core element of the description is, however, the hagiographical layer of the many saints along the route. Nikulás’s journey goes from one saint to another, by recalling their memory through a short description of the relics. The numerous saints and their relics in the churches of Rome are a typical part of the text, as well as the lengthy description of the Holy Land and its relics (Kålund 1908, 17–19, 21–23). As a pilgrim’s guidebook, the itin­ erary by Nikulás is also particularly interesting because of its practical informa­ tion on various routes, a western and an eastern route over the Alps, a deviation to Santiago de Compostela (e.g. “I Lunu koma leidir saman af Spani ok fra Jacobs” (Kålund 1908, 16 [In Luni the routes from Spain and Santiago meet (author’s translation)], or various possibilities to travel from Rome to the Holy Land. In various places, Nikulás recalls the memory of Northern rulers. Most promi­ nently he refers to the Danish king Eiríkr, whom he mentions in several locations from northern Germany to the Mediterranean. In addition to his establishing an archbishopric in Denmark, Eiríkr is especially credited with fostering pilgrimages by people from the North. In Lucca, Eiríkr is said to have promised a free dona­ tion of wine to every pilgrim who speaks Danish. In Piacenza, he is said to have commissioned a hospice, where the pilgrims from the North could get food and shelter. Nikulás refers even to the death of king Eiríkr in a garrison of the Vikings (Varangians) on Cyprus: I Kipr er borg, er Beffa heitir, þar er Veringia seta, þar andadiz Eirikr Dana konungr Sveins son brodir Knutz ens helga. Han lagdi fe til i Luku, ath hverr madr skylldi drecka vin okeypis ath ernu af danskri tungu, ok hann lét gera spital VIII milum sudr fra Plazinzoborg, þar er



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hverr madr feddr. Honum veitti Paschalis papa ath fera erchistól af Saxlandi i Danmork. (Kålund 1908, 21) [In Cyprus there is a town, which is called Beffa, there is the seat of the Varangians, there the Danish king Eiríkr Sveinsson, the brother of the holy Knútr died. He donated money in Lucca, so that each man of Danish [Norse] tongue should drink wine for free, and he had a hospice built eight miles south of Piacenza, where each man is fed. Pope Paschalis allowed him to move the archbishopric from Saxony to Denmark. (author’s translation)]

Another Nordic ruler proudly mentioned is king Sigurðr of Norway, whom Nikulás credits (falsely) with the conquest of Jaffa during the Crusades: “Þa er Iaffa, hana kristnadi Baldvini Iorsala konungr ok Sigurdr konungr Magnus son Noregs konungr” (Kålund 1908, 21) [Then comes Jaffa, it was christianised by Baldwin, king of Jerusalem, and Sigurðr Magnússon, Norway’s king (author’s translation)]. While these remarks recall a Nordic, but still clearly Christian memory, there are other parts of the text, where the Icelandic abbot seems to refer in a similarly proud manner to the saga myths and the Vikings and their deeds. Near Mainz, at a non-identified location, he recalls the killing of the dragon Fáfnir by the hero Sigurðr (“Þá er IIII daga for til Meginzo-borgar […] ok þar er Gnita-heidr, er Sigurdr va ath Fabni” (Kålund 1908, 13) [Then there is a journey of four days to Mainz […] and there is Gnita-heath, where Sigurðr defeated Fáfnir (author’s translation)]. In Luni, near La Spezia, Nikulás mentions a cave, where the hero Gunnar was thrown into a pit full of snakes: “I Lunu-sondum kalla sumir menn ormgard, er Gunnar var i settr” (Kålund 1908, 16) [In Luna-sandar some people say the snake pit was in which Gunnar was put (author’s translation)]. An astonishing re-inter­ pretation of historic memory is also linked to Avenches in nowadays Switzerland, where Nikulás had travelled via Strasbourg and Basel. Avenches [Aventicum] had been the capital of the Roman province of Helvetia, but fell into decay during the early Middle Ages and has remained a small town ever since. Many kilometres of the town wall, as well as numerous other Roman ruins, are, however, still visible today and apparently prompted the Icelandic abbot to the conclusion that the Vikings must have been responsible for the destruction of this once mighty town. “Þa er dag-for til Vivilsborgar, hon var mikil, adr Lodbrokar-synir brutu hana, enn nu er hon litil” (Kålund 1908, 14–15) [Then there is a journey of one day to Avenches, which was big until the sons of Ragnar Hairy-breech destroyed it, but it is small now (author’s translation)]. He is here drawing on Ragnars saga loðbrókar ok sona hans (Ch. 14) [The saga of Ragnar Hairy-breeches and his Sons] as the source of his knowledge. In some places Nikulás also evokes the geographical memory of the Northern travellers by direct comparisons, as when talking about Sicily: Þa er skamt til […] Sikileyiar, þar er iardelldr ok votn vellandi sem á Islandi.” (Kålund 1908, 20)

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[Then there is a short way to Sicily, where there are volcanoes and hot springs as in Iceland. (author’s translation)], There are also a few remarks on people and culture, as in northern Germany, where he praises the people of Saxony as ‘culti­ vated’ and very similar to the Northerners. A little southwards, he notes a change of language use, although it remains unclear where exactly: “Aa Saxlandi er þiod kurteisuzt, ok nema þar Nordmenn mart eptir ath breyta […] Nu skiptazt tungur” (Kålund 1908, 13) [In Saxony the people are very cultivated and the Nordic people can there learn much how to behave […] Now the languages change (author’s translation)]. An interesting remark from a Benedictine abbot is his comment on Siena, where he refers not only to the beauty of the town, to the church of the Holy Virgin and to the bishops see, but also to the exceptional beauty of its women. “Þa er Langa-syn, god borg, þar er byskups stoll ath Mario kirkiu, þar ero konur venstar” (Kålund 1908, 17) [After that comes Siena, a good town, where there is a cathedra at the Church of Our Lady, there the women are most beautiful (author’s translation)]. Throughout his itinerary, Nikulás systematically uses the Nordic forms of place-names, thus continuing a tradition known from saga texts. This practice can be seen as a way of creating cultural affinity with far-away places by giving them a Nordic character and evoking the memory of earlier travellers from the North. The names are often Nordic adaptations of existing names, such as Poddubrunnar [Paderborn], Kolnis-borg [Cologne], Boslara-borg [Basel], Langbarda­ land [Lombardia], Mélans-borg [Milano], Jofor-ey [Ivrea], Papeyiar [Pavia] or Langa-syn [Siena] but also truly Nordic forms, as Sax-elfr [Elbe)], Mundja [Alps] or Miklagard [Constantinople]. In some places Nicholas points deliberately to these differing name-forms, as for a gulf on Cyprus, used by the Varangian garrison and their ships: “Þar gengr hafs-botn, er Nordmenn kalla Átals-fiord, enn Grickir kalla Gullus Satalie” (Kålund 1908, 21) [There there is a gulf, which the Nordic people call Atalsfjord, but the Greeks call it Gullus Satalie” (author’s translation)]. We note in the text of the Icelandic abbot a system of double or even mul­ tiple layers of memory-orientation. On one side we have, as in other pilgrim’s itineraries, the Christian layer of names of places and persons, the grid of ecclesi­ astical geography (churches, bishop’s sees), supplemented by the layer of hagiogeographical memory (the saints and their relics). In addition to this, there is, however, the systematic use of Nordic forms of place-names, the remembering of the deeds of Nordic rulers, as well as the evocation of achievements of Vikings and saga heroes in central and southern Europe. One could speak of an appro­ priation of distant locations, regions and cultures by means of creating a grid of geo-cultural lieux de mémoire, based on both Christian and pre-Christian ele­ ments, which were not in contrast, but complemented each other.



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Works cited Primary sources Kålund, Kristian (ed.). Alfræði íslenzk. Islandsk encyklopaedisk litteratur. 1. Cod. Mbr. AM. 194, 8vo. Copenhagen. 1908. Liber confraternitatum Augiensis. Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Libri Memoriales et Necrologia, Nova Series, 1. Hannover. 1979. SRD = Samnordisk runtextdatabas. http://www.nordiska.uu.se/forskn/samnord.htm. (January 2018) Werlauff, E. C. 1821. Symbolae ad geographiam medii aevi. Copenhagen. Wilkinson, John (ed.). Jerusalem Pilgrimage 1099–1185. London. 1988. [partial English trans. of Nikulás’s Leiðarvísir]

Secondary sources Andersson, Lars. 1989. Pilgrimsmärken och vallfart. Stockholm. Confino, Alon. 2008. “Memory and the History of Mentalities.” In Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Media and Cultural Memory, 8. Berlin and New York. 77–84. Erll, Astrid. 2008. “Cultural Memory Studies: An Introduction.” In Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Media and Cultural Memory, 8. Berlin and New York. 1–15. Hill, Joyce. 1983. “From Rome to Jerusalem. An Icelandic Itinerary of the Mid-twelfth Century.” Harvard Theological Review 76: 175–203. Krötzl, Christian. 1992. “Wallfahrt und Ferne.” In Wallfahrt und Alltag in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit. Ed. Gerhard Jaritz and Barbara Schuh. Wien. 219–236. Krötzl, Christian. 1994. Pilger, Mirakel und Alltag. Formen des Verhaltens im skandinavischen Mittelalter. Helsinki. Krötzl, Christian. 2012. “How to Choose a Saint? On Propagation, Advice and Decision-Making in Medieval Communities.” In Hagiography and Popular Culture. Ed. Paolo Golinelli. Bologna. 371–387. Krötzl, Christian. 2013. “Hagiographica Septentrionalia. Scandinavia and the Baltic Sea area.” Sanctorum 10: 127–142. Krötzl, Christian. 2016. “Quer durch Europa. Santiagopilger aus Skandinavien.” In Kulturelle Topographien des Jakobsweges. Ed. Javier Gómez-Montero. Frankfurt am Main. 41–58. Magoun, Francis P. 1944. “The Pilgrim-Diary of Nikulas of Munkathvera. The Road to Rome.” Medieval Studies 6: 314–354. Marani, Tammaso. 2012. “Leiðarvísir. Its Genre and Sources, with Particular Reference to the Description of Rome.” Durham E-Theses. http://www.medievalists.net/2014/04/leidarvisir-genre-sources-particular-reference-description-rome/ (January 2018) Nora, Pierre. 1989. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations 16: 7–24.

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Olick, Jeffrey K. 2008. “From Collective Memory to the Sociology of Mnemonic Practices and Products” In Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Media and Cultural Memory, 8. Berlin and New York. 151–161. Scheel, Roland. 2016. Skandinavien und Byzanz. Bedingungen und Konsequenzen mittelalterlicher Kulturbeziehungen. Historische Semantik, 23. Göttingen. Schmugge, Ludwig. 1988. “Kollektive und individuelle Motivstrukturen im mittelalterlichen Pilgerwesen.” In Migration in der Feudalgesellschaft. Ed. Gerhard Jaritz and Albert Müller. Frankfurt. 263–289. Simek, Rudolf. 1990. Altnordische Kosmographie. Studien und Quellen zu Weltbild und Weltbeschreibung in Norwegen und Island vom 12. bis zum 14. Jahrhundert. Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde, 4. Berlin. Sumption, Jonathan. 1975. Pilgrimage. An Image of Mediaeval Religion. London. Webb, Diana. 2002. Medieval European Pilgrimage, c. 700–c. 1500. Houndmills.

Tracey Sands

II: 28 Pilgrimage – Gotland 1 Introduction Pilgrimage is often defined as a journey to a holy site, for the purpose of perfor­ ming religious devotions, with the intention of returning home again (see, for example, Molland 1982 [1956–1978], 13: 292). At its most basic level, the goal of the pilgrim is clearly to gain access to the presence of the holy/sacred. That pre­ sence may be constituted in a number of ways. In many cases, pilgrims journeyed (or journey) to sites that played a central role in the life and passion of Christ. In other cases, perhaps more common in medieval Christendom, the holy was encountered in the form of relics, most often the purported bodily remains of holy persons, i.e. saints. As Pierre Nora remarks, such memory sites, such lieux de mémoire “originate with the sense that there is no spontaneous memory, that we must deliberately create archives, maintain anniversaries, organize celebration” and so on (Nora 1989, 12; cf. Nora 1997 [1984–1992]). Pilgrims seeking the sacred presence typically traveled well-established and recognized regional and inter­ national routes. Such journeys could be motivated by a number of factors, inclu­ ding indulgences (a reduction in the time the soul would be required to spend in Purgatory) granted by clergy for visits to specific sites, often at prescribed times; penance for specific sins or crimes; or the fulfillment of a vow, often connected to prayers for help of various kinds, including healing. In many cases, pilgrimage clearly involved a component of entertainment or adventure, as is evident from Geoffrey Chaucer’s famous Canterbury Tales.

2 Case study: St Olofsholm At least until the rise of the cult of St Birgitta of Vadstena at the end of the four­ teenth century, the most important Nordic pilgrimage site was the shrine of the martyred Norwegian king, St Olav (Olav Haraldsson, d. 1030 at Stiklestad), at Nidaros. In spite of his Norwegian nationality, St Olav achieved an exceptional level of popularity in medieval Scandinavia, and was in many circumstances regarded as a patron saint for the entire Nordic region, though he was also strongly associated with Norwegian law and kingship, and came from an early point to be known as the rex perpetuus Norvegiae, such that later kings were perceived as deriving their kingship from him (see Gjerløw et al. 1982 [1956–1978], 12: 561–588; https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-064

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Blom 1982 [1956–1978], 13: 306–310; Antonsson 2007, 103–121). In contrast to the relics of many other saints, which were often widely distributed across the Chris­ tian world, the bodily remains of St Olav appear to have been preserved intact at Nidaros, which no doubt contributed to the centrality of this shrine (see Ekroll 2002, 87). Various pilgrimage routes to Nidaros crossed the medieval Nordic king­ doms, often following routes the king himself was said to have traveled during his lifetime. Despite the importance of the shrine at Nidaros, however, this case study will focus on a lesser-known pilgrimage to St Olav that appears not to have been a part of the established routes to Nidaros. Documentation of a pilgrimage to Akergarn, later known as St Olofsholm, on the northeastern coast of Gotland, is limited to a series of episcopal letters addressed to the clergy and inhabitants of Gotland (DS 336, 362, 625, 702, 4436, 9274) by various bishops of Linköping (and confirmed, in one case, by the papal legate William of Sabina), the earliest dated 1246 and the last from the 1370s (see colour plate 16). In each case, the documents concern not the pilgrimage itself, but rather the income of the altar dedicated to St Olav, “Altare S. Olavi in Ackergarn […]” [the altar of St Olav in Akergarn]. No letters of indulgence are known to have encouraged devotees to make their way from Visby or other parts of Gotland to the relatively remote northeastern corner of the island, nor is there any evidence that the pilgrimage was either promoted nor discouraged by the clergy. Though medieval sources never explicitly mention pilgrimage, the discus­ sion concerning the income of the altar of St Olav, together with the documented remains of a large stone church at St Olofsholm are strong proof that there was pilgrimage to this site (see also Pernler 1977, 15). Recent excavations confirm that an exceptionally large stone church was built there between the later twelfth and early thirteenth century, replacing an earlier wooden church dated to the middle of the eleventh century (Carlsson et al. 2014, 1–8). The construction of the second church, given that it would have been one of the largest Gotlandic churches of its time, though Akergarn never became a parish of its own, is something approach­ ing proof positive of significant pilgrimage to the site. It is difficult to tell whether the pilgrimage to Akergarn is originally associ­ ated with St Olav, or whether that develops over time. It is clear, however, that the pilgrimage was in full swing during the middle of the thirteenth century, when the bishop of Linköping sought to divert the income of the altar of St Olav to Solberga, the (apparently) newly founded community of Cistercian nuns, whose convent lay just outside of Visby. While the altar of St Olav was likely a recipient of significant donations, it does not appear to have been the only place in the church where gifts were deposited, nor is it clear that it was the only altar in the church (see Yrwing 1978, 202–203).



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In addition to the series of documents concerning the distribution of funds, two other important texts are clearly associated with pilgrimage to Akergarn, though again, neither mentions pilgrimage. The first of these is the so-called Guta saga, whose third chapter tells of the visit of St Olav (thus titled in the text) to Akergarn, during his flight from Norway to Novgorod (c. 1029). Whether this text is dated to the 1220s (see, for example, Pernler 1977, 15) or to the 1270s (see Stobaeus 2010; Mitchell 2014, 158, note 8), it is clearly contemporary with active pilgrimage to Akergarn. According to Guta saga, St Olav converts an important Gotlander, Ormika of Hejnum, either to Christianity or to “his” (i. e. Latin, or Roman Catholic) version therof, and moreoever exchanges gifts with him. Ormika builds a church (“bynahus”) on the site, which may or may not, according to Guta saga, be the first church on Gotland (see Peel 1999, 8–9). In Mitchell’s interesting reading, the Guta saga account not only supports the tendency of the saga as a whole to represent Gotland as largely autonomous in relation to neighboring political powers, it moreover inscribes Gotland into the life of St Olav, according the island a significant role in the narrative history of this enormously important saint (Mitchell 2014, 166). A second text associating Akergarn with St Olav, this time explicitly giving Olav a good deal of the credit for the christianisation of Gotland (at least in part a mission by sword) is Strelow’s Cronica Guthilandorum from 1633. As Mitchell has discussed, this text appears to draw on oral traditions not necessarily derived from Guta saga, some of which may have existed by the time Guta saga was composed (see Mitchell 2014, 166). Both of these texts under­ score an important, explicit connection between St Olav and Akergarn, and both further emphasize the site’s importance for Gotland as a whole, as a major locus for the introduction of Christianity to Gotland. There is no medieval record of the routes by which pilgrims approached St Olofsholm. It is interesting, however, that in the neighboring parish of Lärbro, an unusual, octogonal tower was added to the parish church in the fourteenth century. It has been suggested that the tower is modeled on the cathedral at Nidaros, and that it may have housed a chapel dedicated to St Olav (Wollin 1935, 98). Was this intended to commemorate a living memory that Lärbro, too, played a role in Gotland’s christianisation, and deserved a part of the pilgrims’ devotions and donations? According to Strelow (1633, 131), St Olov’s battle for the souls of the Gotlanders took place in “Laeder­ bro”. Do the cultural memories recorded by Strelow derive from the fact that the tower was built in Lärbro, perhaps to capitalise on the pilgrimage to Akergarn? Or does the building of this tower and chapel suggest that such narratives were already in circulation in the fourteenth century? Like all pilgrimage, that to Akergarn must have arisen from a sense that this was a site of memory, connected to a holy presence. What can have been the source of that presence? The written sources from the thirteenth century onward

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agree in associating Akergarn with St Olav, though the likely accuracy of the accounts in Guta saga and Strelow has been extensively discussed, and to say the least, questioned. Pernler has pointed out that the cult of St Olav does not seem to be one of the earliest known saints’ cults in Gotland, based on early church dedications, and suggests that the Guta saga account may derive from the saint’s growing popularity in the early thirteenth century (Pernler 1981). Interestingly, oral traditions collected in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries point out a location near the ruined church in Akergarn as the site where St Olav first bap­ tised the Gotlanders (Säve 1874, 249–250). There may be other possibilities for an early awareness of St Olav, possibly via Novgorod, given that a Latin (Roman Catholic) church dedicated to St Olav is known to have existed in Novgorod by the early twelfth century, and is appar­ ently the same church assigned to the Gotlandic trading yard by the later part of that century (Jackson 2010, 147, 158–160). It is interesting, in this context, that both Guta saga and Strelow mention that Olav is in transit to Novgorod when he visits Akergarn. Does the pilgrimage to Akergarn suggest a specific tie between that location and the Gotlandic trade with Novgorod, before or as the Hanseatic center of Visby gradually monopolised the previously less centralised Gotlandic trading economy? It appears, nonetheless, that Visby’s increasing stranglehold on the Gotlandic economy, culminating in the civil war between the town and countryside in 1288 (see Yrwing 1978, 103–105, 119–132), may have contributed to the economic decline that appears evident in the episcopal letters from the later thirteenth century onwards. In spite of this, there is evidence that the chapel at Akergarn was still in use as late as 1536, when it was plundered. The items lost to this plunder include five bells, large and small, a large quantity of candles and wax, vestments (or possibly altar clothes), and 3 chests or other wooden vessels for the collecting of donations. It is not clear whether the chapel still attracted pilgrims at this time, or whether it was used only by residents of the local area (Siltberg 1997, 69–71). By Strelow’s time, the chapel was a ruin (Strelow 1633, 132). Whatever factors gave rise to the pilgrimage to St Olofsholm/Akergarn, the site was clearly an important one for the people of medieval Gotland. The dating of the earlier wooden church to the middle of the eleventh century makes it rea­ sonable to connect this site with the beginnings of Christian worship in Gotland, as suggested by two of the most important texts from medieval and early modern Gotland, which identify Akergarn as (one of) the site(s) where Christianity first became a part of Gotlandic life. Whether St Olav was associated with Akergarn in the minds of the people who built the first church there, or whether, as Pernler has suggested, traditions concerning him are a slightly later addition to Gotlan­ dic religious life, it is evident that these must have been well established before the writing of Guta saga, and most likely by the time the stone church was built



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around the beginning of the thirteenth century. Whether or not the chapel at St Olofsholm and the pilgrimage it attracted arose from an actual episode in the life of Olav Haraldsson, king of Norway, it is clear that they would become a central locus for the memory of St Olav and his special relationship with Gotland. Like other acts of Christian religious devotion, pilgrimage is concerned with the salvation of souls. By participating in this ritual, Gotlanders revived and to a degree reenacted a memory deeply connected to a specific event in a specific place, which defined their collective identity as Gotlanders (and thus, a com­ munity with a special relationship to the great intercessor St Olav) (cf. Assmann 1995). Given its religious significance, it should not be overlooked that the pil­ grimage and the devotions/donations associated with it were also intended to remind the saint himself of his special bond to the people whose ancestors he helped to convert.

Works cited Primary sources DS = Diplomatarium Svecanum/Svenskt diplomatarium. Vol. I-XI. Stockholm, 1829–. Guta Saga. The History of the Gotlanders. Ed. and trans. Christine Peel. London, 1999. Strelow, Hans Nielssøn. Cronica Guthilandorum. Visby, 1978. [Facsimile of original 1633 edition]

Secondary sources Assmann, Jan. 1995. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” New German Critique 65: 125–133. Blom, Grethe Authén. 1982 [1956–1978]. “Pilegrimsveier.” In Kulturhistorisk leksikon for nordisk middelalder fra vikingetid til reformatjonstid. Ed. Johannes Brøndsted et al. Copenhagen. 13: 306–310. Carlsson, Dan et al. 2014. Rapport Arendus 2014: 39, Hellvi, S:t Olofsholm. Arkeologisk undersökning Dnr 431-280-14. Ekroll, Eystein. 2002. “Skt Olavs skrin i Nidaros.” In Pilgrimsvägar och vallfartskonst. Studier tillägnade Jan Svanberg. Ed. Margareta Kempff Östlind. Stockholm. 63–94. Gjerløw, Lilli et al. 1982 [1956–1978]. “Olav den hellige.” In KLNM. XII: Cols. 561–583. Haki Antonsson. 2007. St. Magnús of Orkney. A Scandinavian Martyr-Cult in Context. Leiden and Boston. Jackson, Tatiana N. 2010. “The Cult of St Olaf and Early Novgorod.” In Saints and their Lives on the Periphery. Veneration of Saints in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe (c. 1000–1200). Ed. Haki Antonsson and Ildar H. Garipzanov. Turnhout. 147–167.

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Mitchell, Stephen A. 2014. “The Mythologized Past. Memory in Medieval and Early Modern Gotland.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 155–174. Molland, Einar. 1982 [1956–1978]. “Pilegrim.” In Kulturhistorisk leksikon for nordisk middelalder fra vikingetid til reformatjonstid. Ed. Johannes Brøndsted et al. Copenhagen. 13: 292–295. Nora, Pierre. 1989. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire.” Representations. Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory 26: 7–24. Nora, Pierre. 1997 [1984–1992]. Les lieux de mémoire. 3 vols. Paris. Pernler, Sven-Erik. 1977. Gotlands medeltida kyrkoliv. Visby. Pernler, Sven-Erik. 1981. “Sankt Olav und Gotland.” In St. Olav, seine Zeit und sein Kult. Visby. 101–114. Säve, P. A. 1874. “Några ord om konung Olof Haraldssons uppträdande på Gotland.” Svenska fornminnesföreningens tidskrift 6: 247–255. Siltberg, Tryggve. 1997. “Gotlandskyrkorna, grevefejden och nyupptäckta dokument om krigshändelser 1463, 1536 och 1563.” In Archiv und Geschichte im Ostseeraum. Festschrift für Sten Körner. Ed. Robert Bohn, Hain Rebas and Tryggve Siltberg. Frankfurt. 67–83. Stobaeus, Per. 2010. “Gutasagan – några tankar om dess uppkomst och ålder.” In Kust och kyrka på Gotland. Historiska uppsatser. Ed. Per Stobaeus. Visby. 77–95. Wollin, Nils. 1935. “Lärbro kyrka.” In Sveriges kyrkor. Gotland. Vol. II. Rute Setting. Ed. Johnny Roosval. Stockholm. Yrwing, Hugo. 1978. Gotlands medeltid. Visby.

Ann-Mari Hållans Stenholm

II: 29 Landscape and Mounds 1 Introduction Death is a crisis for the family concerned, with much at stake, in both social and judicial senses, and rights and loyalties based on kinship and ancestry are often renegotiated. The burial ceremony is a ritualised practice to master this situation by creating a memory monument. The landscape of this case-study is the Iron Age in the Mälaren region of eastern central Sweden, a landscape of genealogies, where social memories of ancestry were created, preserved, and passed on to the next generation on farmstead burial-grounds (e.g. Artelius, 2004). The aim is to analyse the creation of such social memory on the burialgrounds of a single village called Ärvinge. This micro-historical study focuses on the concept of the burial mound itself, those buried in the mounds, and the families who buried their dead. The burial mound is the ultimate monument of memory. It was highly visible in the landscape and often attracted burials long after the first one (e.g. Pedersen 2006; Thäte 2007; Bratt 2008). Recent research has concluded that mounds were re-used, as graves were placed on top of older graves (Hållans Stenholm 2012). Within archaeology, it has been shown convinc­ ingly that the mound was a marker of allodial rights (odal), which originated in the early Iron Age (Zachrisson 1994). The burial mound thus had a distinct role in a geographically-rooted and -created genealogy.

2 Case study: Locally created memories through mounds Ärvinge was the largest village in its settlement district during the Iron Age and supposedly also the earliest established, between AD 100 and 200. Within the historic boundaries of Ärvinge, there are five farms, which are represented archaeologically by six burial grounds (see fig. 1, table 1). Farm A is the earliest established, followed by Farm B. Judging from the con­ tinued use of the burial ground, the two farms lasted for almost 1000 years, while the younger farms of this dispersed village lasted for much shorter periods. All of these burial grounds have been fully excavated, but archaeological knowledge of the individual farms is only marginal. The settlement and the burial grounds were close to each other, which can be seen in the landscape surveys and in the https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-065

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Fig. 1: The burial-grounds in Ärvinge. The boundaries, roads and village-sites after maps from the early twentieth century

Table 1: The number of mounds and the percentage of the total by location and period of the burial-grounds in Ärvinge 100–550 AD Farm (no. of burialground)

Number of graves

Where of mounds

The amount of mounds %

550–800 AD Number of graves

Locations of mounds

The amount of mounds %

800–1050 AD Number of graves

Where of mounds

The amount of mounds %

A (156)

56

6

11

16

9

56

55

19

34

B (157AB)

42

1

2

34

6

18

44

7

16

C (158-160- 21

3

14

49

16

33

14

3

21

162) D (163)

15

E (221, 218) –

1

7

2

–

–

1

–

–

–

–

13

–

–

2+

–

–



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 609

excavations of the burial grounds where graves from the Viking Period are super­ imposed on older parts of the settlement (Biuw 1992). All farms have one site for burial, except maybe the last established farm, which probably had two burial grounds that succeeded each other chronologi­ cally. The later site had burials in a Christian ritual context (Farm E). Christian burials are also found on other burial grounds, but to a different extent. Only two of the farms in Ärvinge are characterised by mound burials: the oldest farm, and the longest-lived Migration Period farm (Farms A and C). During the early Iron Age, ancestors were buried in several mounds on these farms, in contrast to the other farms, where just one mound was erected during the same time. The latest established farm never buried their dead in mounds (Farm E) (see table 2). Table 2: Foundation, use and ending of the burial-grounds in Ärvinge (lighter shades are more hypothetical than the dark shades) Farm (no. of burialground)

100– 200 AD

200– 400 AD

400– 550 AD

600– 700 AD

700– 800 AD

800– 850 AD

850– 900 AD

900– 950 AD

950– 1000 AD

1000– 1050– 1100– 1050 1100 1150 AD AD AD

A (156) B (157AB) C (158160-162) D (163) E (221, 218)

The farms in the village of Ärvinge, and especially its first established farm, have many mound burials compared to the neighbouring farms in the settlement dis­ trict, where there is usually only one mound (although in some cases, as many as four or five mounds are on burial grounds established in the early Iron Age). Considering that the mound is a marker of old inherited property rights, it makes sense that the very first farm in the village of Ärvinge, and maybe also in the whole area, created numerous mound-memories on the landscape. The lack of mounds at the farm established in the late Iron Age is also logical under this theory. The reason behind the multiple mounds at Farm C, however, is not as obvious, although it could be the very first farm in a new village near Ärvinge. This is indicated by the location of Farms C and D, which are further from the other farms and close to the border of the historical domain of Granby. The new village,

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therefore, may have been named Granby (Vikstrand 2013, 159). This village was small but during the Vendel Period, the women here were buried with brooches of the highest quality when compared to those from the rest of Ärvinge (Biuw 1992, 89). The number of mounds and the status of the women are possibly connected to what is probably an old assembly site in Granby (Grænbythyngstad) (DMS, 318). Perhaps the meaning of the mound-burial in Ärvinge differed from the same burial practice in Granby. This possibility is suggested by a difference in refer­ ences made by and to the mounds. Unlike the mounds in Granby, the ones in Ärvinge attract burials later on, and the mounds are also connected to older graves by superimposition. If the mounds represent created memories to legitimise rights through gene­ alogies, who then were the forefathers/mothers buried in these mounds? A criti­ cal archaeological discussion is ongoing about whether it is possible to under­ stand the living identities and roles of the people buried. Is the grave a material manifestation or an ideological manipulation of reality? It is also about socially constructed gender and gender roles. The assumption of this case-study is, however, that the buried people themselves, their grave goods, and the grave finds correspond in some way to the positions of the dead while they were alive, either real or ideal. One social aspect of the buried is their biological sex. Burials in mounds have been seen as reserved for men, even though later research has acknowledged the presence of women. 56 percent of those buried in mounds in Ärvinge have had their sex determined osteologically. It was, however, not possible to determine the sex of those buried in the mounds from the early Iron Age, including un-cre­ mated burials. Archaeological interpretation of gender is sometimes possible on the basis of combinations of finds. That has, however, only been used in discus­ sions of graves from the early Iron Age, and sometimes also un-cremated graves. In Ärvinge, women were buried in mounds during the late Iron Age, but there are great differences between the farms. In the first established farm (Farm A), there are almost as many women as men buried in mounds. During the Vendel Period, more women are represented, and during the Viking Period, there are more men, but the differences are small. From the Vendel Period, when the mound includes 56 percent of all graves on this burial ground, it is obvious that the women seem to be important as foremothers. Even the ones interred in a Christian-like way were, to a considerable degree, buried in mounds in this burial ground (more than 50 percent); however, their sex was not determined. This picture is very different from the one on the second oldest farmstead (Farm B). The burials in mounds on this site during the late Iron Age are predomi­ nantly male, except one woman who was buried together with a man. This male dominance corresponds with the picture in the early Iron Age, where two men



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furnished with spearheads were buried in stone-settings, distinguished on the burial ground. This could be a sign of a genealogy based on men. On the farmstead founded in the Migration Period in Granby (Farm C), the situation is similar but not as pronounced. Here two women compared to seven men are buried in mounds during the late Iron Age. During the early Iron Age, however, a women in a stone-setting is bestowed with the most elaborate burial of all. She was placed on a lynx skin and had a gold pendant round her neck. Considering that another woman was buried in the same grave and also on a lynx skin, possibly several generations later during the late Iron Age, this must have been a memorable woman, despite not being buried in a mound. The differences between the farms could possibly indicate that the men and women had differing roles in social memory and genealogies. Regardless of whether the individual buried in a mound was a man or a woman, they all seem to hold a special role and position in society. This is indicated by the often extraor­ dinary character of both grave goods (the personal belongings of the dead) and grave gifts (gifts from the surviving relatives) in the mounds. The first kind of find indicates that those buried had a special position and role in the household in life, while the second kind seems more related to the view of the dead by the sur­ viving relatives, and their material resources, including sacrificed animals. Four or more species of sacrificed animals are rare and very exclusive. In 488 cremated burials from the Iron Age in this settlement district, nearly half lacked sacrificed animals all together or included just one species (Sigvallius 1994, 84–86). As many as 70 percent of the mounds in Ärvinge have four or more sacrificed species of animals or one or more of the following finds indicating status – birds of prey, two dogs, weaponry, horse equipment, bear and lynx skins, gaming pieces, brooches, and needles. These finds also occur with people buried in stone-settings, but to a much lesser degree (40 percent). The mound seems to entail status and wealth.

Genealogies in geography In a micro-study of this sort, the relationship between social memory, moundburial and landscape turns out to be complex. Different farms within the same domain had different strategies for creating social memories, probably related to whether there were connections to old ancestries or not, but also surely due to the success of each generation. The first farm in the village of Ärvinge had a strategy of its own, probably due to its old ancestry. It stood in splendid isolation for as much as perhaps six generations before the second farm was established close by. The mound burial was characteristic for the creation of social memory on this farm, and women

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were as present as men. This is possibly a sign of the inheritance of allodial rights from both the maternal and paternal line within the family of this farm. In con­ trast to this strategy, the latest established farm in Ärvinge lacks old ancestry and consequently also mounds. A village like Granby with a lot of mound burials is completely different, even though it can be said to have old ancestry, if not as old as Ärvinge. In this case, the hosting of the assembly place might have affected the strategies for creating memories in this particular village. Since the burial ground is such an intimate part of the landscape of the farm during the Iron Age, the relationships between the dead and the living are crucial for understanding the creation of social memory, that is, memories about kin, affinity, and ideas of forefathers/mothers with social, religious and judicial dimensions. In this regard, the burial mound was an important monument of memory contextualised in the landscape, and through it, genealogy was rooted in geography.

Works cited Secondary sources Artelius, Tore. 2004. “Minnesmakarnas verkstad. Om vikingatida bruk av äldre gravar och begravningsplatser.” In Minne och myt. Konsten att skapa det förflutna. Ed. Åsa Berggren, Stefan Arvidsson and Ann-Mari Hållans. Vägar till Midgård, 5. Lund. 99–120. Biuw, Anita. 1992. Norra Spånga. Bebyggelse och samhälle under järnålder. Stockholmsmonografier, 76. Stockholm. Bratt, Peter. 2008. Makt uttryckt i jord och sten. Stora högar och maktstrukturer i Mälardalen under järnåldern. Stockholm studies in archaeology, 46. Stockholm. DMS. 1992. Det medeltida Sverige.1:7. Uppland:7 Attundaland. (Spånga sn). Stockholm. Hållans Stenholm, Ann-Mari. 2012. Fornminnen. Det förflutnas roll i det förflutna och kristna Mälardalen. Vägar till Midgård, 15. Lund. Pedersen, Anne. 2006. “Ancient mounds for new graves. An aspect of Viking Age burial customs in southern Scandinavia.” In Old Norse Religion in Long-Term Perspectives. Origins, Changes, and Interactions. An international conference in Lund, Sweden, June 3–7, 2004. Vägar till Midgård, 8. Lund. 346–353. Sigvallius, Berit. 1994. Funeral Pyres. Iron Age Cremations in North Spånga. Theses and Papers in Osteology, 1. Stockholm. Thäte, Eva S. 2007. Monuments and Minds. Monument Re-use in Scandinavia in the Second Half of the First Millenium AD. Acta Archaeologica Lundensia Series in 4o, 27. Lund. Vikstrand, Per. 2013. Järnålderns bebyggelsenamn. Om bebyggelsenamnens uppkomst och ålder i Mälarlandskapen. Institutet för språk och folkminnen. Namnarkivet i Uppsala. Serie B, 13. Uppsala. Zachrisson, Torun. 1994. “The Odal and its Manifestation in the Landscape.” Current Swedish Archaeology 2:219–238.

Lisa Bennett

II: 30 Saga Burial Mounds 1 Introduction Using all forty Íslendingasögur [sagas of Icelanders] as the testing ground, one recurring motif in this large body of literature is viewed from a cultural memory perspective in order to determine if it can shed light on medieval mentalité. How might thirteenth- and fourteenth Icelanders have collectively remembered signi­ ficant events in their nation’s past in literature, most notably the conversion to Christianity (c. 1000) – do these sagas reflect perceptions of Icelandic national identity in that period, and if so, how? A sustained interest in the pagan past underscores depictions of Iceland’s history in the sagas; even so, the conversion appears to serve as a crucial mnemonic break that affects the way saga authors remembered their pagan ancestors and, by extension, conceptualized themsel­ ves as Icelanders. The approach taken here follows that of Pierre Nora, which views such breaks with the past as catalysts in creating lieux de mémoire: sites of cultural memory that simultaneously store and allow for the communication of symbolic cultural structures, e.g. national stories and myths, and help engender a collective sense of shared history and identity in the present. The location of burial mounds within the sagas might in this sense be regarded as lieux de mémoire. In the Íslendingasögur, burial mounds are ever-present; they loom large, literal and figurative reminders of ancestry on the landscape (Siewers 2003, 23–25). That they are situated at roadsides, on headlands, and just beyond hayfield walls might be seen as reflecting the tensions that remain in the Ice­ landers’ collective psyche centuries after their system of beliefs has changed. Although burial mounds and the pagan figures they encapsulate co-exist with Christians in the sagas, they are also remembered as being separated by distinct boundaries: earth, stones, roads, walls, and the conversion to Christianity.

2 Case Study Commemoration and communication of stories in writing plays a significant role in embodying cultural memory and in shaping a collective’s awareness of the imagined community in which they live. As Jan Assmann observes, “Only with the emergence of writing does cultural memory ‘take off’ and allow the horizon of symbolically stored memory to grow far beyond the framework of knowledge https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-066

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functionalised as bonding memory.” (Assmann 2006, 21) In other words, as Renate Lachmann explains, Literature is culture’s memory, not as a simple recording device but as a body of commemo­ rative actions that include the knowledge stored by a culture, and virtually all texts a culture has produced and by which a culture is constituted. Writing is both an act of memory and a new interpretation, by which every new text is etched into memory space. (Lachmann 2008, 301)

What is crucial is that between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, the Íslendingasögur were written down, and that in taking these stories down in writing the authors or compilers may have also recorded traces of thirteenthand fourteenth-century perspectives on the past that may tell us more about the period in which the authors lived than the one in which the stories were set (Jochens 1993, 202). In many respects, this case study’s stance also echoes that of William Ian Miller: “The family saga world is thus not merely the world of the author’s time; it is an amalgam representing the effects of temporal compression that included whatever the culture knew or wished to believe about its own past.” (Miller 1990, 50) In writing or compiling or transcribing these shared narratives, the saga authors seemed to fill the role of rememberer of stories on behalf of the society in which they lived. Thus, when speaking of cultural memory, Icelandic identity or mentalité, this study consistently refers to the saga authors – but when doing so, much as Eric Bryan has done in his work, parentheses are implied: “the saga writers (and the society they represent)” (Bryan 2007, 24). Any cultural memories and/or any traces of mentalité found in the sagas are examined as representative of the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Icelandic imagination. The depiction of burial mounds in the sagas is potentially a reflection of the saga authors “employ[ing] rather than invent[ing] a remembered past” (Byock 2004, 299) in order to reconcile their pagan heritage with their Christian present. There is little doubt, of course, that pagan Norwegians and Icelanders were buried in mounds or cairns; the continued presence of these mounds on the land­ scape more than confirms this reality. Furthermore, in terms of narrative logic, one would expect heathen characters to bury their dead in such a manner, often accompanied by grave goods; likewise, it makes sense for Christian characters to transport their dead to the nearest churchyard. It is unsurprising, then, that burial mounds feature prominently in pre-Christian sections of the saga narra­ tives and church burials in the latter chapters. Twenty-seven of the forty Íslendingasögur mention sixty-one burials in mounds. These are: Flóamanna saga [The saga of the people of Floi], Hávarðar saga [The saga of Havard of Isafjord], Finnboga saga ramma [The saga of Finnbogi



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the mighty], Kjalnesinga saga [The saga of the people of Kjalarnes], Þorskfirðinga saga [Gold-Thorir’s saga], Þórðar saga hreðu [The saga of Thord menace], Gunnars saga Keldugnúpsfífls [The saga of Gunnar, the fool of Keldugnup], Vatnsdœla saga [The saga of the people of Vatnsdal], Heiðarvíga saga [The saga of the slayings on the heath], Kormáks saga [Kormak’s saga], Hœnsa-Þóris saga [Hen-Thorir’s saga], Hrafnkels saga [The saga of Hrafnkel Frey’s Godi], Eyrbyggja saga [The saga of the people of Eyri], Gísla saga Súrssonar [Gisli Sursson’s saga], Harðar saga [The saga of Hord and the people of Holm], Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss [Bard’s saga], Víglundar saga [Viglund’s saga], Svarfdœla saga [The saga of the people of Svarfadardal], Njáls saga [Njals’s saga], Egils saga [Egil’s saga], Ljósvetninga saga [The saga of the people of Ljosavatn], Reykdœla saga ok Víga-Skútu [The saga of the people of Reykjadal and of Killer-Skuta], Vápnfirðinga saga [The saga of the people of Vopnafjord], Droplaugarsona saga [The saga of Droplaug’s sons], Fljótsdœla saga [The saga of the people of Fljotsdal], Laxdœla saga [The saga of the people of Laxardal], and Grettis saga [The saga of Grettir the strong]. Of these, eighteen are described generically, with slight variations on the phrase, as being carried out “sem siðvenja var til” [according to the custom of the time]. Such phrases appear in Vápnfirðinga saga, Kjalnesinga saga, Þórðar saga hreðu, Gunnars saga, Vatnsdœla saga, Kormáks saga, Gísla saga, Egils saga, Laxdœla saga, and Flóamanna saga. In other cases, the method of burial is even less clear than these vague gestures at pagan ritual; for instance, there is little to no detail about the type of burial in Harðar saga, Ch. 8, Flóamanna saga, Ch. 24, Kjalnesinga saga, Ch. 11, Heiðarvíga saga, Ch. 5, Vápnfirðinga saga, Chs. 3, 14, and Hávarðar saga, Ch. 21. Meanwhile, in Reykdæla saga og Víga-Skútu, Áskell the goði handpicks his own burial site when he and a band of his men reach a place called Leyningsb­ akki: “þá mælti Áskell, at þar vildi hann vera grafinn, þá er hann andaðisk, ok þótti þar vera gott landslag, ok sagði, at hann vildi ekki fé hafa með sér” (Ch. 16) [Áskell said he wanted to be buried there when he died, and he thought it was a good landscape, and he said he did not want to have any treasures [grave goods] with him]. Áskell’s assessment is striking: what is it about this particular location that makes it a good landscape for burial? In her analysis of this passage, Laura A. Taylor contends that the goði is thinking ahead, establishing land rights for the long-term. The dead, she argues, want to lay claim to the land their bodies will inhabit and/or to continue owning property their families have inhabited for years; moreover, in death they want to be afforded the same spectacular views of the surrounding landscape they enjoyed in life (Taylor 2016, 154–155). For the present argument, however, what also makes this a good locale for Áskell’s burial mound is its prominence. It is not just a place from which he can continue to overlook his lands; it is a place from which his mound can easily be seen.

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Likewise, when his father dies, Egill has “þar gera haug á framanverðu nesinu; var þar í lagðr Skalla-Grímr ok hestr hans ok vápn hans ok smíðartól” (Reykdæla saga, Ch. 58) [a mound made near the edge of the headland, where Skalla-Grímr was laid to rest with his horse and weapon and blacksmithing tools]. Situating burial mounds in named or noticeable locations quite literally prevents them, and the person within them, from being forgotten too easily: “Arnkell var lagiðr í haug við sæinn út við Vaðilshöfða, ok er þat svá víðr haugr sem stakkgarðr mikill” (Eyrbyggja saga, Ch. 37) [Arnkell was laid in a burial mound by the sea out on Vaðilshöfði [headland], and the mound seems as large as a great haystack]. There is no out of sight, out of mind when saga characters are confronted with great hillocks like this one in Eyrbyggja saga, nor any looming on headlands, islands, or shorelines, each containing the bodies of their ancestors, as in Grettis saga Chs. 18–19, Harðar saga og Hólmverja, Ch. 25, Þórðar saga, Ch. 5, and Kjalnesinga saga, Ch. 5. One purpose of memorials – literal or literary – is to mark a person’s exist­ ence as much as to commemorate their passing. They are a means of commu­ nication that speak to the living about the continued significance of the dead. Thus, the saga narratives also contain episodes in which burial mounds are situ­ ated in high-traffic areas, such as roadsides, where they are certain to be seen. In Vatnsdæla saga, for instance, “Ingólfr bað hann sik grafa í öðru holti en þeir váru grafnir frændr hans, ok kvað þá hugkvæmra Vatnsdalsmeyjum, ef hann væri svá nær götu” (Ch. 41) [Ingólfr asked to be buried on another hill from the one where his kinsmen were buried, and he said that he’d be remembered by Vatnsdal maidens, if he [i.e. his grave] was near the road]. Similarly, Flóamanna saga depicts Hrafn’s burial mound being built “austan götuna, en fyrir vestan er Atlahaugr ok Ölvishaugr ok Hallsteinshaugr” (Ch. 9) [east of the road, while to the west are Atli’s, and Ölvir’s, and Hallstein’s mounds]. Taylor interprets the road in this episode as a moral barrier between good and bad characters; for his crimes, she argues, Hrafn is buried where he fell instead of with his kin (Taylor 2016, 162). Perhaps this form of exile after death is indeed a means of condemning Hrafn for the wrongs he’s committed in life. Regardless, locating these four mounds along­ side a thoroughfare encourages us to view them, to use Pernille Hermann’s terms, as “mnemonic images […] a condensed image of a narrative, that is, an image of memory, which supported the storage of the mythic narrative” (Hermann 2014, 24). For characters travelling on this road, the sight of these mounds may have triggered memories of the circumstances that led to their construction. For saga audiences, these mounds – located near, but nevertheless away from paths upon which the living tread – may have also signified the physical, temporal, emo­ tional, and religious differences between the people entombed within and those negotiating the earth around them.



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The placement of burial mounds in the sagas seems to encapsulate the Ice­ landers’ persistent memory of their pagan past, while perhaps also marking an uneasy coexistence with it. There is a sense of being distanced from what these memorials represent, despite their continued presence in the literal and literary landscape. Mounds are visible features in both contexts, but in the sagas, they are often situated off the beaten path: undeniably there, but kept at arm’s length. These burial sites are not always isolated the way those of revenants like Glámr, Raknar, and Þórólfr bægifóts are (Grettis saga, Ch. 35; Bárðar saga, Ch. 18; Eyrbyggja saga, Ch. 34), nor are they erected in foreign countries (Svarfdæla saga, Ch. 6), nor in deserted places like sandbanks and dunes (Svarfdæla saga, Ch.18; Gísla saga Súrssonar, Ch. 13). Some pagans, like Hrafn in the example from Flóamanna saga above, are buried upon the same spot they were slain (Þórðar saga, Ch. 8, 9, 13; Laxdæla saga, Ch. 24; Droplaugarsona saga, Ch. 11; Egils saga, Ch. 55; Gull-Þóris saga, Ch. 15; Hrafnkels saga, Chs. 5, 14). In other cases, burial mounds are erected closer to home, but still clearly útangarðs “outside the fence”. For instance, Finnbogi buries his nephew a short distance away from his home at Borg (Finnboga saga, Ch. 35); Skeggi was “heygðr fyrir norðan garð” (Þórðar saga hreðu, Ch. 14) [buried in a mound to the north of the farmyard], while in Fljótsdæla saga, Ch. 7, Droplaugarsona saga, Ch. 11, and Harðar saga og Hólmverja, Ch. 19, mounds are built just beyond the confines of the hayfield wall. By con­ trast, after Eyjólfr drowns in Valla-Ljóts saga, he is buried within his own hay­ field – yet the narrator makes a point of observing that he “var prímsigndr áðr” (Ch. 2) [had already taken the sign of the cross] by then. The narrator’s explanation in this instance highlights the cultural tensions that seem to remain in the Icelanders’ collective psyche centuries after their system of beliefs has changed. In the narrative period immediately preceding the conversion (c. 950–1000) saga authors seemed to want to remember their pagan ancestors as acting in ways that anticipated the change in faith (Bennett 2014); Áskell’s request not to be buried with grave goods, seen in the passage from Reykdæla saga discussed above, aligns with this pattern as his burial occurs soon before Christianity was legally accepted at the Alþingi. Other heathens, such as Valgarðr in Njáls saga, are urged to renounce their beliefs, yet they are neverthe­ less buried in mounds soon after (Ch. 107). In Eiríks saga, newly Christian Green­ landers were buried in unconsecrated ground near the farms where they died in order to await the arrival of the priests who would perform burial rites (Ch. 6). Meanwhile in Kjalnesinga saga, Búi, a man who had been baptised and never made pagan sacrifices (blótaði), was not taken to church like other Christians, but instead “þá lét Helga húsfreyja grafa hann undir kirkjuveggnum inum syðra ok leggja ekki fémætt hjá honum nema vápn hans” (Ch. 18) [Helga, lady of the house, had him buried under the church wall on the south side, and no valuables

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[i.e. grave goods] except his weapons were with him]. This conflation of pagan and Christian burial practices is also evident in Egils saga. Although Egill is ini­ tially buried in a mound wearing fine clothes and accompanied by weapons, his bones are soon transported to the church at Mosfell – although, as was the case with Búi, his bones were buried “niðr í útanverðum kirkjugarði” (Ch. 86) [by the outer edge of the churchyard]. These examples might be read as reflecting the saga author’s remembering the pagan past from a Christian perspective, and his attempting to reconcile these two standpoints. He does not want to jettison pagan ancestors from Icelandic history; instead, as P. H. Sawyer argues, it appears as though he is trying to “define their place in Christian history” (Sawyer 1982, 10). It must not be forgotten, of course, that the pagans depicted in the Íslendingasögur are the products of Chris­ tian minds. The profound social transformation these pagans underwent was not only an historical phenomenon, centred around the year 1000; it was also taking place in the memories of the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century people involved in plucking this time of transition from the stream of history in order to revisit and commemorate it in the sagas. Certainly, the appearance of burial mounds persists after conversion has occurred in these stories, but obvious regressions in spiritual practice are quickly explained away by the narrators, as in Njáls saga, Ch. 105, Gunnlaugs saga, Ch. 3, Fóstbræðra saga, Chs. 2, 9, 18, Grænlendinga saga, Ch. 6, Eyrbyggja saga, Ch. 54, and Grettis saga, Ch. 78. Yet it is not just their con­ tinued presence, but the authors’ ambivalence towards these heathen creations that makes them so fascinating from a cultural memory perspective.

Works Cited Primary sources Eyrbyggja saga. In Eyrbyggja saga, Brands þáttr ǫrva, Eiríks saga rauða, Grœnlendinga saga, Grœnlendinga þáttr. Ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson and Matthías Þórðarson. ÍF, 4. Reykjavík, 1935. 1–186. Finnboga saga. In Kjalnesinga saga, Jökuls þáttr Búasonar, Víglundar saga, Króka-Refs saga, Þórðar saga hreðu, Finnboga saga, Gunnars saga keldugnúpsfífls. Ed. Jóhannes Halldórsson. ÍF, 14. Reykjavík 1959. 251–341. Flóamanna saga. In Harðar saga, Bárðar saga, Þorskfirðinga saga, Flóamanna saga [etc.]. Ed. Þórhallur Vilmundarson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson. ÍF, 13. Reykjavík, 1991. 229–327. Reykdæla saga ok Víga-Skútu. In Ljósvetninga saga með þáttum, Reykdœla saga ok Víga-Skútu, Hreiðars þáttr. Ed. Björn Sigfússon. ÍF, 10. Reykjavík, 1940. 149–243. Vatnsdæla saga. In Vatsndœla saga, Hallfreðar saga, Kormáks saga, Hrómundar þáttr halta, Hrafns þáttr Guðrúnarsonar. Ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson. ÍF, 8. Reykjavík, 1939. 1–131.



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Þórðar saga hreðu. In Kjalnesinga saga, Jökuls þáttr Búasonar, Víglundar saga, Króka-Refs saga, Þórðar saga hreðu, Finnboga saga, Gunnars saga Keldugnúpsfífls. Ed. Jóhannes Halldórsson. ÍF, 14. Reykjavík 1959. 161–250.

Secondary sources Assmann, Jan. 2006. Religion and Cultural Memory. Ten Studies. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Stanford. Bennett, Lisa. 2014. “Burial Practices as Sites of Cultural Memory in the Íslendingasögur.” Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 10: 27–52. Bryan, Eric Shane. 2007. Between God and Churches. Christianity, Paganism, and the Trajectory of Belief in Old Norse Myth, Literature and Later Folktales. PhD Diss. Saint Louis, MO. Byock, Jesse L. 2004. “Social Memory and the Sagas. The Case of Egils saga.” Scandinavian Studies 76: 299–316. Hermann, Pernille. 2014. “Key Aspects of Memory and Remembering in Old Norse-Icelandic Literature.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 13–39. Jochens, Jenny. 1993. “Marching to a Different Drummer. New Trends in Medieval Icelandic Scholarship. A Review Article.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 35.1: 197–207. Lachmann, Renate. 2008. “Mnemonic and Intertextual Aspects of Literature.” In Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Media and Cultural Memory, 8. Berlin and New York. 301–310. Miller, William Ian. 1990. Bloodtaking and Peacemaking. Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland. Chicago and London. Sawyer, P. H. 1982. Kings and Vikings. Scandinavia and Europe, AD 700–1100. London and New York. Siewers, Alfred K. 2003. “Landscapes of Conversion. Guthlac’s mound and Grendel’s mere as expressions of Anglo-Saxon nation-building.” Viator 34: 1–39. Taylor, Laura A. 2016. The Representation of Land and Landownership in Medieval Icelandic Texts. PhD Diss. 602157040.pdf – PDF – ORA – University of Oxford, Oxford. (8 October 2016).

Space: Landscape Torun Zachrisson

II: 31 Sites

1 Introduction In pre-Christian Scandinavia there existed a memorial culture linked to ritualised acts in accordance with ancient customs, forn siðr (on the latter, see Sundqvist 2005). To behave within the physical and symbolic boundaries that siðr pre­ scribed constituted the very framework that formed social order (Blomkvist 2016, 150–152). Memorial rituals often took place at burial grounds during the Viking Age (AD 750–1050), and grave mounds in particular seem to have been used in this way (Hållans Stenholm 2012, 234; Zachrisson 1994, 2017). This case study demonstrates how the great mounds and halls in Old Uppsala in central Sweden, erected AD 550–650, were used for expressing cultural memory (Jan Assmann 2010). By the construction of monumental halls, rulers created arenas for expressing both power and authority, as well as for memory production. The halls left material traces, which makes possible consideration of whether they were also maintained and used in the Viking Age, or if they were abandoned and either remembered or forgotten (cf. Aleida Assmann 2010, 98).

2 Case study: Old Uppsala as a cultural memory site During the Viking Age, Old Uppsala was a large cultic center and a royal seat where mythical kings had reigned and been buried (Sundqvist 2002, 56; Sundqvist 2016, 42). The establishment of a settlement with an adjacent burial ground on the ridge, Högåsen, probably took place in the early 400s AD. But the site was exten­ sively reworked at the end of the sixth and beginning of the seventh centuries. Within a few generations, one family managed to make a powerful monumentali­ sation of the site by erecting mounds and significant hall buildings. The largest of the burial mounds – Väst-, Mellan, Öst- and Tingshögen, as well as the recently discovered Nordhögen – all seem to have been erected in this period (Ljungkvist and Frölund 2015, 6). Furthermore, the two largest mounds were enlarged during the period of monumentalisation (Ljungkvist 2013). During the Viking Age, none of the splendor once buried with the ancient rulers was visible to the viewer, yet the former rulers’ legitimacy and author­ ity were manifested through the line of huge burial mounds on the crest of the https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-067



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ridge, mounds which stood out in silhouette against the sky for everyone who approached the site. In the Viking Age, this was the largest cluster of monumental burial mounds anywhere in Sweden and the cemetery remained in continuous use (cf. Ljungkvist 2013, 36–41; Bratt 2008, 161). Eight huge mounds, including a founder’s grave, projected the family’s genealogy (Ljungkvist 2013, 57). After c. AD 500, males were preferably buried in grave mounds (Bratt 2008, 74). For farmers, mounds symbolised social status and property rights (e.g. Zachrisson 1994, 2017). For the rulers of Old Uppsala, the size of the grave monuments made clear that their claims were unusually grand, and linked to their dominion over the territory. The grave mounds also gave legitimacy to the idea of the realm as patrimony and odal [allodium] (Sundqvist 2002, 151–156; Sundqvist 2016, 448– 452). All the largest burial mounds appear to have been built during the initial phase (AD 550–650) and thus must have marked the foundation of the realm and of the royal site. Later rulers do not seem have been buried in the same monu­ mental way, but must instead have relied on the authority of the monumental memorials created by earlier rulers. At the beginning of the Viking Age, there was a great hall building in Old Uppsala, built on a high artificial terrace, and adjacent to it were two large ter­ races that held workshop buildings (see fig. 1). They had been erected during the monumentalisation of the site around AD 600, as shown through archaeologi­ cal investigations. The great hall was 50 meters long and 4–12 meters wide, with markedly curved walls and narrow ends. It was externally covered with wooden planks and ornamented with iron details. Inside, the hall was whitewashed and impressively high and spacious (Ljungqvist and Frölund 2015, 11–13, 26). When entering the hall, memories of the founders and their successors must have been especially vivid, since the building had been in continuous use since the earlier monumentalisation era. The hall undoubtedly functioned as the site of formal­ ised memory production, where commemorative minni toasts had been drunk and poetry composed. Important events that had taken place, such as weddings, acts of diplomacy, decisions concerning martial activities, and the outcome of harvests probably structured the memories. In the beginning of the Viking Age (c. AD 790/800), the hall was destroyed in a heavy fire. The heat was so great that the walls were partly turned into slag (Ljungkvist, personal communication). Something unusual must have happened as the hall was never re-erected. A hall symbolised the ruler (Herschend 1998, 14–31) and was, like the realm, inherited. In Scandinavia, it was customary that when an old hall was demolished, a new hall was immediately erected on the same site, and the hearth and high-seat were re-used, probably emphasising con­ tinuity and masking disruptions (Hållans Stenholm 2012, 184–185). Perhaps this hall had been attacked and disgraced by an enemy; this could undermine the

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Fig. 1: Old Uppsala in the late eighth century: A) Southern terrace, great hall, B) Northern terrace with large workshop building, C) Western terrace, workshop, D) Two concentrations of graves at the vicarage, E) Högåsen cemetery with the three royal mounds and the Thing mound, F) stone paved areas, G) Nordhögen, recently discovered mound, once considerably larger, H) Probable walls or roads

power and authority of a ruler (cf. Sundqvist 2016, 178). But it is also possible that the hall was burnt down on purpose by ‘its own people’, perhaps due to troub­ les in the male line of inheritance. If so, the hall symbolically ‘died’ with its last owner. Despite the fact that the royal manor had been in continous use, the arti­ ficial hall plateau was not now re-used for buildings, neither during the remain­ der of the Viking Age nor during the early medieval period. Some 500 years after the high hall burned down, in late medieval times, the site was once again used for buildings and cellars. A later Viking Age hall ought to be somewhere in the surroundings, but has not yet been found (Ljungkvist and Frölund 2015, 16–18; Ljungkvist 2013, 59). The activities at the site shows that the great hall was kept in memory. The abandonment of the site was clearly ritualised. After the burning, the site was cleared of debris. Thereafter unburnt lower jaws of cattle and horses were placed on top of the remains of the hall. These were likely the remains of com­ munal meals consumed during the rituals, where perhaps also the gods were thought to be present. Furthermore, iron objects related to the gates and exte­ rior of the hall – a spearblade mount, volute shaped spiral decorations, as well



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as hinges and nails  – were deposited at the site. The dating of the deposited animal bones to c. AD 772–876 indicate that this could have occurred in con­ nection with the clearing of the site. Finally, the whole of the burnt hall founda­ tion was sealed with a 0.3 m thick layer of clay (Ljungkvist and Frölund 2015, 16–18). This can be interpreted as a way of purifying the site. The rituals show that the hall was actively forgotten (cf. Aleida Assmann 2010, 98). The site was left as a 500 square meter empty space, still identifiable due to the foundation terrace. Yet both the hall and the ritual closing must have been kept in memory, as a later deposit of animal bones dated to AD 1022–1150 was placed on top of where the former wall of the hall was once located (Ljungkvist and Frölund 2015, 19–20). The written sources recall the memory of several halls at Old Uppsala. One is said to be especially impressive and is described by the author of Skjǫldunga saga [saga of the Skjoldungs] as “domus magnifica” [magnificent house], while Saxo refers to it as “Athisli forte penates” [Aðils’ strong house, hall] (Skjǫldunga saga, 30; Saxo 2.6.3; Sundqvist 2016, 208). Possibly it is the same building that Snorri Sturluson c. 1230 mentions as “konungs hǫll” [king’s hall] during Hrólfr Kraki’s visit to the Uppsala king Aðils (see Ynglinga saga [saga of the Ynglingar] 56–59; Snorra Edda, Skáldskaparmál [the language of poetry] Ch. 44; see Sundqvist 2016, 208). The very same king Aðils is said to have died when he fell from his horse riding around the hall of the dís. This contemporary hall was possibly named after Freyja (Ynglinga saga, Ch. 29, see Sundqvist 2016, 124–125). Old Uppsala was, according to the written sources, the seat of a renowned royal family, the Ynglingar (Sundqvist 2002). They were considered to have mythi­ cal origins and to be descendants of the god Freyr. Among the Goths and the Lombards, a royal family normally reigned for three, or at most four, generations, about as long as communicative memory is accessible by an interaction between three generations (Jan Assmann 2010, 111). The Yngling dynasty, by contrast, was the sole ruling family for many generations, making them comparable to the Merovingian kings in France and to Anglo-Saxon dynasties (Wickham 2009, 113, 202). By virtue of their long history, any ruler who represented the Ynglin­ gar would have had special opportunities to stage and maintain cultural memory (cf. Jan Assmann 2010, 111), of themselves as of deceased rulers, and their rela­ tionships with the living community of people that constituted the kingdom, and to the other world. The site of Old Uppsala must have been especially apt for this purpose, as it was perceived as the heart of the realm. The realm was Svetjud (Old Swedish Svethiudh) which included at a minimum Mälardalen and is mentioned in a contemporary written source from AD 551 as Suetidi by the Gothic historian Jordanes (Svennung 1964, 93, 101). Svethiudh [the Svea people], is composed of the name Svear and an old word thiudh for ‘people’,

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meaning ‘we ourselves’ (Andersson 2004, 5). It was well-known abroad, which the international names for Sweden show. They are all, e.g. Suède, Schweden and Sweden, based on OSw Svethiudh (SOL 2003, 306). People were regularly reminded of Old Uppsala due to the large assembly held there that lasted nine days and took place every nine years. It coincided with the astronomical eight-year lunar cycle, which in turn formed the basis of timereckoning. The assembly took place at the third full moon, around mid-March. The assembly was called Disthingen underlining its pre-Christian origin, and it was associated with the female deities, ON dísir. The assembly is believed to have consisted of two thing meetings framing a seven-day market and eight nights of sacrifices (extensively in Nordberg 2006, 76–77, 96–98, 107–112; Sundqvist 2002, 100). These gatherings were likely identical with the “allra Svía þing” mentioned by Snorri Sturluson (Ynglinga saga, 1941, Ch. 34; [“the assembly place for all the Svíar” (Ynglinga saga, 2016, Ch. 34)]; see also Óláfs saga helga, Chs. 72, 77, 80, 88, 94 [Óláfr Haraldsson (the Saint), Chs. 72, 77, 80, 88, 94]; see Nordberg 2006, 110). The recurrent feast and the preparations everyone made for the trip to it would have activated the memory function of the site. Oral traditions in the seventeenth century preserve the mnemonic techniques used to decide when to travel to this assembly. It was necessary to perform astro­ nomical observations, but this was not as hard as it may seem, an old informant told Olof Rudbeck in the late 1600s. In clear weather, one simply needed a runic staff and observations of the moon. If cloudy, one measured with the thumb and forefinger the distance in rooster’s steps – hanefjät – between the sun and moon thus determining when the full or new moon had or should occur (in Nordberg 2006, 52–54). An old name, Disthingstungel, is preserved for this lunar phenom­ enon in oral memory in old Swedish dialects (Sundqvist 2016, 322, n. 31). Old Uppsala was a central hub in the worldview of the inhabitants of Svetjud. The calendrical cultic feasts regularly reinforced the collective identity of the Svear, their bond to their ruler, and reminded people of their relations to the Oth­ erworld. This relationship was re-negotiated in the early eleventh century when a Christian monumental rune stone was erected in Old Uppsala, probably close to a presumed early wooden church (U978; Gräslund 2013, 124; Zachrisson 2013, 175; cf. Hagenfeldt and Palm 1996) (see colour plate 9). During the tenth and eleventh centuries, people in the region of Mälardalen were pre-occupied with the past, and performed rituals at burial grounds that had long been in use. This prob­ ably reflects the encounter between pre-Christian memorial practices attached to graves and the Christian memoria-tradition. The latter specified when, where and how the remembrance would be performed, and who would create, preserve and transmit the memory (Hållans Stenholm 2012, 231). Late Viking Age Christian runestones had a similar primarily commemorative function and reflected the



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practise of remembrance of the dead (Jesch 2005). During this period, important aspects of control over genealogical memory were transferred from the farms to the church and its clergy. For the majority of settlements, the close spatial con­ nection that had existed between the farm and its burial ground during the late Iron Age (AD 550–1050) was lost (Hållans Stenholm 2012, 230–231). Although the religious change during the late Viking Age may have been far from a straightfor­ ward process, the Christian memoria tradition gradually took over (Ljung 2016). However for the elite in Old Uppsala, the close connection was still visible in the landscape, while at the same time, the old pre-Christian monuments at the site interacted with the Christian memorials. A stone cathedral was placed on a former hall terrace surrounded by the monumental burial mounds as a reminder of the ancient monuments’ importance in order to give legitimacy both to the past and the present, while a rune stone was incorporated in the church building and served as tabletop for the altar (U 978).

Works cited Primary sources Jordanes. Getica. Om goternas ursprung och bedrifter. Trans. A. Nordin. Stockholm, 1997. Óláfr Haraldsson (the Saint). In Snorri Sturluson. Heimskringla. II. Trans. Alison Finlay and Anthony Faulkes. London, 2014. 3–278. Óláfs saga helga. In Snorri Sturluson. Heimskringla. II. Ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson. ÍF, 27. Reykjavík, 1945. Saxo Grammaticus. The History of the Danes, Book I–IX. Ed. Hilda Ellis Davidson. Trans. Peter Fischer. Cambridge, 2008 [1996]. Skjǫldunga Saga. Danakonunga Sǫgur. (Skjǫldunga Saga. Knýtlinga Saga. Ágrip af Sǫgu Danakonunga). Ed. Bjarni Guðnason. ÍF, 35. Reykjavík, 1982. Ynglinga saga. In Snorri Sturluson. Heimskringla. I. Ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson. ÍF, 26. Reykjavík, 1941. 9–83. Ynglinga saga. In Snorri Sturluson. Heimskringla. I. Trans. Alison Finlay and Anthony Faulkes. London, 2nd ed. 2014. 6–47. Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Skáldskaparmál. 1 Ed. A. Faulkes. London, 1998. U 978 = Upplands runinskrifter. Sveriges runinskrifter. Vol. 9. Ed. E. Wessén and S. B. F. Jansson. Stockholm, 1953–1958.

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Secondary sources Andersson, Thorsten. 2004. “Svethiudh, det svenska rikets kärna.” Namn och bygd 92: 5–18. Assmann, Aleida. 2010. “Canon and Archive.” In A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin. 97–107. Assmann, Jan. 2010. “Communicative and Cultural Memory.” In A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin. 109–118. Blomkvist, Torsten. 2016. “Att hasla voll inför fältslag.” In Krig och fred i vendel- och vikingatida traditioner. Ed. Håkan Rydving and Stefan Olsson. Stockholm. 144–166. Bratt, Peter. 2008. Makt uttryckt i jord och sten. Stora högar och maktstrukturer i Mälardalen under järnåldern. Stockholm Studies in Archaeology, 46. Stockholm. Gräslund, Anne-Sofie. 2013. “Kristna inslag i Gamla Uppsala och dess närområde.” In Gamla Uppsala i ny belysning. Ed. Olof Sundqvist and Per Vikstrand. Uppsala. 113–134. Hagenfeldt, Stefan E. and Rune Palm. 1996. Sandstone Runestones. The Use of Sandstones for Erected Runestones. Sällskapet Runica et Mediævalia, 2. Stockholm. Hållans Stenholm, Ann-Mari. 2012. Fornminnen. Det förflutnas roll i det förkristna och kristna Mälardalen. Vägar till Midgård, 15. Lund. Herschend, Frands. 1998. The Idea of the Good in Late Iron Age Society. OPIA, 15. Uppsala. Jesch, Judith. 2005. “Memories in Speech and Writing.” Hikuin 32: 95–104. Ljung, Cecilia. 2016. Under runristad häll. Tidigkristna gravmonument i 1000-talets Sverige. Stockholm Studies in Archaeology 67: 1–2. Ljungkvist, John. 2013. “Monumentaliseringen av Gamla Uppsala.” In Gamla Uppsala i ny belysning. Ed. Olof Sundqvist and Per Vikstrand. Uppsala. 33–68. Ljungkvist, John and Per Frölund. 2015. “Gamla Uppsala – the emergence of a centre and a magnate complex.” Journal of Archaeology and Ancient History 16: 2–30. Nordberg, Andreas. 2006. Jul, disting och förkyrklig tideräkning. Kalendrar och kalendariska riter i det förkristna Norden. Acta Academiae regiae Gustavi Adolphi, XCI. Uppsala. SOL 2003. Svenskt ortnamnslexikon. Ed. Mats Wahlberg. Språk- och folkminnesinstitutet. Uppsala. Sundqvist, Olof. 2002. Freyr’s Offspring. Rulers and Religion in Ancient Svea Society. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Historia Religionum, 21. Uppsala. Sundqvist, Olof. 2005. “Siðr.” In Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde. Vol. 28. Berlin and New York. 273–276. Sundqvist, Olof. 2016. An Arena for Higher Powers. Ceremonial Buildings and Religious Strategies for Rulership in Late Iron Age Scandinavia. Leiden. Svennung, Josef. 1964. “De nordiska folknamnen hos Jordanes.” Fornvännen 59: 65–102. Wickham, Chris. 2009. The Inheritance of Rome. Illuminating the Dark Ages 400–1000. London. Zachrisson, Torun. 1994. “The Odal and Its Manifestation in the Landscape.” Current Swedish Archaeology 2: 219–238. Zachrisson, Torun. 2013. “Gamla Uppsala – på nytt.” In Gamla Uppsala i ny belysning. Ed. Olof Sundqvist and Per Vikstrand. Uppsala. 161–205. Zachrisson, Torun. 2017. “The background of the odal rights: an archaeological discussion.” Danish Journal of Archaeology 6/2: 118–132.

Pernille Hermann

II: 32 Memorial Landscapes 1 Introduction The Glavendrup site on Funen in Denmark provides an illustrative example of how collective memories materialise physically, and how landscapes carry memories through time. The rune stone at the site, which is dated to the period AD 900–950, commemorates a deceased person, and as such it is typical of the memory culture that existed when the stone was raised. Over the years, the Glav­ endrup stone faded into oblivion until a much later point in history, when it was rediscovered and used as a building block in support of a national identity.

2 Case study: The Glavendrup rune stone Constructing memory Like most other stones raised in Scandinavia from the mid-tenth to the early twelfth century, the Glavendrup stone (DR 209 / Fyn 26) is a memorial over a dead person; however, in contrast to most other stones it is accompanied by a 60-meter long stone setting with the form of a ship. Despite not being as impressively large as another tenth-century stone setting in Denmark, the Jelling construction – and despite not having attracted as much attention or as early as the Jelling monu­ ment – Glavendrup is one of the “stateligste vikingetidsmonumenter” [most stately Viking Age monuments] (Lerche Nielsen 1997, 40). The relatively lengthy inscription on the stone hints at the character of the memory community that established the monument: […] raknhiltr : saǀti : stain þansi : auft ǀ ala : saulua kuþa ǀ uia l(i)þs haiþuiarþan þiaǀkn […] ala : suniʀ : karþu ǀ kubl : þausi : aft : faþur ǀ sin : auk : hans : kuna : auft ǀ uar : sin : in : suti : raist : runǀaʀ : þasi : aft : trutin : sin ǀ þur : uiki : þasi : runaʀ […] at : rita : sa : uarþi : is : stain þansi ǀ ailti : iþa aft : anan : traki (Danske Runeindskrifter) [Ragnhildr placed this stone in memory of Alli the Pale, priest of the sanctuary, honourable þegn of the retinue. Alli’s sons made this monument in memory of their father, and his wife in memory of her husband. And Soti carved these runes in memory of his lord. Þórr hallow these runes. A warlock be he who damages(?) this stone or drags it (to stand) in memory of another. (Trans. Danske Runeindskrifter)]

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-068

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From the inscription we understand that the monument commemorated a man called Alli. Behind the monument’s construction stood a women Ragnhild, Alli’s wife, and his sons, together with the rune-carver Soti, one of Alli’s men. Alli is called þegn, indicating that he belonged to a social elite (Lerche Nielsen 1997, 44–45; Imer 2016, 144). Ragnhild and the sons had a strong desire to control and preserve the memory of Alli. The inscription covers all three sides of the stone, and on the section incised on its smallest side, perhaps considered its edge or its margin, is a warning to anyone who would damage or remove the stone to commemorate somebody else (see fig. 1). The warning takes the form of a curse; and – even if the meaning of the word rita is subtle and non-transparent – it was undoubtedly used derogatorily and did not promise well for a potential intruder (Imer 2016, 256). Ragnhild was the prime force behind another stone as well – the Tryggevælde stone (DR 230), which was engraved by the same rune expert, Soti. The Tryg­ gevælde stone, also with a stone setting, commemorated another (earlier or later) husband of Ragnhild. Ragnhild was one of a number of female rune stone spon­ sors, whose activities show that the “memorial web” (Andrén 2013, 267), consist­ ing of thousands of rune stones in Scandinavia, was to some extent gendered, that is, controlled and shaped by authoritative women of high social standing (cf. Mitchell 2013, 294–295). The inscription, which indicates the importance of a tangible monument for safekeeping Alli’s memory, is self-referential and reveals an awareness that the monument was a powerful medium of memory (Mitchell 2013, 283–284). Twice the text refers to stain þansi (this stone) and draws attention to the physical materiality of the monument; it mentions kubl þausi [these kumler] and focuses on the stone setting that accompanies the rune stone (Wimmer 1899–1901, 381); and twice it refers to runaʀ [the runes], firstly, when drawing attention to their coming into being as carved letters (that is, the rune master Soti’s engraving activity) and secondly, when it makes a reference to the holy protection of the letters by the pre-Christian Norse deity Þórr. The stone and the ship setting were placed next to two Bronze Age mounds, with one of them situated at the end of the stone setting opposite to the end where the rune stone is located. The practice of linking new monuments to older ones and of reusing monuments of the past is well-known, even if it is not obvious what the intention behind such practices of reuse, or of “archaeological over­ lays”, were. Ann-Mari Hållans Stenholm has argued that they expressed a delib­ erate negotiation with the past, writing that “The interpretations connected to the practice of overlays can in very general terms be characterized by the con­ cepts of ‘association’ and ‘disassociation’. ‘Association’ creates a sense of affin­ ity and recognition while ‘dissociation’ is a construction of alienation” (Hållans



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Fig. 1: The back of the Glavendrup stone and its edge, with one side of the recon­ structed ship setting in the background, and the Bronze Age mound furthest back in the picture

Stenholm 2006, 344). Whether Ragnhild’s choice of location implied association, i.e. memory, or disassociation, i.e. forgetting and erasure, it suggests that power and authority were imbued into the construction of Alli’s memory through a dia­ logue with the past. Not only the site but the stone itself reveals signs of earlier uses too, for bowl-formed holes on its surface suggest that it had been used for cultic activity in the Bronze Age (Jacobsen and Moltke 1942, 993). The inscription has the character of a palimpsest, as it overwrites and yet leaves visible signs of older layers, thus at one and the same time, creating a new memory while also continuing the memory of the earlier ‘inscription’. The Glavendrup site clearly indicates the importance of physical monuments for commemoration of the dead, and – as Jürg Glauser has written – “Graves and barrows (legstaðir and haugstaðir) are the media from which memory is consti­ tuted: it is around them that the memory of the dead […] crystallizes” (Glauser 2007, 19). Remains not only of Bronze Age burials, but also of burials from the Iron Age have been found at the Glavendrup site. However, archaeological exca­ vations carried out in the 1950s revealed no signs of Viking Age burials, implying that – even if Alli’s memory was anchored to this particular location – his body may have been placed elsewhere.

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The fruitfulness of attaching memories to places was recognised already by authors in Greek and Roman antiquity, who formulated and explained how delib­ erate and careful organisation of things on spatial surfaces was an aid to memory. This technique, ars memoria, was used primarily for creating mnemonic places in the mind, but the relevance of external physical places was talked about as well; essentially the mnemonic techniques they described were based on the univer­ sal experience that place and memory are tightly interwoven. For instance, the Roman rhetorian Quintillian wrote that: Nam cum in loca aliqua post tempus reversi sumus, non ipsa agnoscimus tantum, sed etiam, quae in his fecerimus, reminiscimur personaeque subeunt, nonnunquam tacitae quoque cogitations in mentem revertuntur (Quintilian, 220–221) [For when we return to a place after considerable absence, we not merely recognise the place itself, but remember things that we did there, and recall the persons whom we met and even the unuttered thoughts which passed through our minds when we were there before. (Quintillian, 220–221)]

Places store memories and they function as objects that remind and facilitate the mental process of calling back memories. Quintillian’s mentioning of the unut­ tered thoughts that may occur when returning to a place hones in on – not merely deliberately and consciously stored memories – but also on those experiences that are processed unconsciously. This phenomenon relates to the relevance of sensory perception for memory, to how what is seen, heard, smelled, felt, and so on will trigger memories, and to how bodily recognition, affects and emotions are prone to support the preservation of memory. Such experiences, we can assume, would have been relevant for those who met at Alli’s memorial. The Glavendrup monument gathered past, present and future: it echoed mul­ tiple meanings and engaged in a dialogue with the past (whether Alli’s memory was constituted by association or disassociation with the past); it was oriented towards the memory community’s own present and the people who established the monument, whose memory was literally incised into the monument together with Alli’s; and it was orientated towards the future, when revealing a wish to protect the stone and keep the monument untouched in the future. The monu­ ment drew this world and the Otherworld together as well, both in the sense that the ship setting indicated Alli’s transfer to the world of the dead, and in presup­ posing Þórr’s divine protection of the site; and it communicated both horizontally (in temporal terms) and vertically (in spatial terms between this and the other world).



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Constructing and supporting a national memory The collective memory of a group of people is created by the social frameworks in which individuals interact, and it is when memory, figuratively speaking, takes concrete, physical form that it can be shared: Our memory, which we possess as beings equipped with a human mind, exists only in constant interaction not only with other human memories but also with ‘things’, outward symbols. With respect to such things as Marcel Proust’s famous madeleine, or artefacts, objects, anniversaries, feasts, icons, symbols, or landscapes, the term ‘memory’ is not a metaphor but a metonym based on material contact between a remembering mind and a reminding object. Things do not ‘have’ a memory of their own, but they may remind us, may trigger our memory, because they carry memories which we have invested in them […]. (Jan Assmann 2008, 111)

As formulated in the quote, things – and we could add, places and monuments – do not have a memory in themselves, and they are only meaningful as long as memories are attached to them by groups of people. We do not know when the culture that preserved Alli’s memory dissolved. But the monument did not con­ tinue to attract attention, and for centuries it was – not deliberately destroyed – but left in the soil as a trace of the past empty of meaning and relevance. In the late eighteenth century, the stone was known by locals in the Glavendrup area, and in 1806, it was for the first time investigated and described by profession­ als, among them, historian and antiquarian L.S. Vedel Simonsen and philologist Rasmus Rask (Wimmer 1899–1901, 369–372). Other scholars and antiquarians visited the site in the following years, among them, historian and archaeologist J.J.A. Worsaae. In 1864, the British philologist George Stephens journeyed there in order to be able to include the Glavendrup stone in his comprehensive work OldNorthern Runic Monuments (1867–1868) (see fig. 2). At that time the stone was raised from the soil and placed on a small mound at the spot that had been its original location; Stephens described the efforts it took to take the boulder out of the sandy ground, and informs his readers that “At last the final ‘lift’ was given, and it was ‘opened’ to Sun and Science on the Year-day of the Danish Ground-law, June 5th 1864, – about 1000 years since it first was raised and carved!” (Stephens 1867–1868, 693). This renewed interest in the restoration of the monument happened at a time of political turbulence and deep crisis in Denmark, when the realm was considerably reduced by the loss of the duchies of Slesvig, Holsten and Lauenborg to Germany. Inge Adriansen has written that: “Opsætningen af runestenen på en ophøjet placering kan tolkes som et forsøg på indad at vinde, hvad udad var tabt. Forestillingen om nationens glor­ værdige fortid kunne trøste i nederlagspræget samtid” (Adriansen 2010, 34) [The

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Fig. 2: Drawing of the Glavendrup monument by Magnus Petersen from Illustreret tidende 1875. Magnus Petersen was the illustrator of George Stephens’ Old-Northern Runic Monuments (1867–1868). Note the figure in the middle of the picture, looking at the monument and contemplating the past and nature.

placement of the rune stone on an elevated point can be interpreted as an attempt to win inwardly what was lost outwardly. The imagination of a past of glory could give comfort in a time of defeat (author’s translation)]. This was a time when there was a general inclination to look back to the greatness of the Viking Age past, a trend already implemented earlier in the century in philosophical treat­ ments, poetry and works of history by, among others, Adam Oehlenschläger, N.F.S. Grundtvig, and J.J.A. Worsaae, works that offered a relevant context for this rejuvenation of the Glavendrup stone. The huge stone, measuring close to 190 cm above the earth and having a width of up to nearly 160 cm stood as an impressive monument over the majestic deeds of antiquity. In the years between 1915–1946, a memorial park was established in close proximity of the stone, and the rune stone and the reconstructed stone setting were accompanied by a number of memorials over events of significance in Danish history. The initiative to the memorial park came from a local society called Glavendrupstenen (Glavendrup Stone), established in 1906 (Nielsen 1927).



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Fig. 3: View of four of the memorials in the park, and a glimpse at the ship setting in the background

The events that were selectively chosen to represent the foundational building blocks of Denmark were: the changes in the constitution of 1915, the reunion of Southern Jutland with Denmark in 1920, the 1100-year anniversary for Christian mission in Denmark, the 400-year anniversary for the Reformation, and, finally, the liberation of Denmark at the end of the Second World War (Adriansen 2010) (see fig. 3). When the new memorials were crafted, formal, textual and contentelements were borrowed from the rune stone, and an intertextual dialogue was established with the rune stone, which physically stood at the one end of the park, but which was mentally its center. For example, on the reunion stone from 1920, which is red granite like the rune stone, the lines on the front are incised vertically in a way typical for runic monuments, and the inscription creates a frame following the stone’s surface (a framing that is however, not used on the Glavendrup stone). Like on the rune stone the people behind this memorial inscribed their own memory in the monument and on the lower part of the front surface, it reads “Foreningen Glavendrupstenen satte mindesmærket” [the Glav­ endrup Stone Society raised this memorial] (Hermann 2017, 19). The integration of these elements into the memorial park confirmed the rune stone’s transformation into a national symbol; and with this new context,

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it even more clearly stood out as a reference point that would support a sense of a shared past. To borrow Pierre Nora’s term, it became a lieux de mémoire (a site of memory) that symbolised a national Danish identity. Regarding Nora’s distinc­ tion between ‘constructed’ and ‘imposed’ symbols, it resembles the former more than the latter, and qualifies as a symbol that grew out of “a combination of cir­ cumstances, the passage of time, human effort, and history itself” (Nora 1998, x; cf. Nora 1989). The Glavendrupdigtet [the Glavendrup poem], a 42-strophe poem, which was read aloud at a gathering in the memorial park in 1927 gives some insight into the function and relevance of the rune stone in its new context (Nielsen 1927, 5–12). The poem confirms that the stone was indeed central to the foundation of the park, and it shows that a time/space configuration centering on place continuity and temporal depth were key issues for the Glavendrup society’s self-image: Her er et gammelt Mindested fra fjerne Fortids Dage om Oldtidsfolkets Maal og Med, som Slægten ofte dvæler ved, naar den sig ser tilbage. (Nielsen 1927, 5) [Here is an ancient memorial from the days of old about the activities of men of antiquity which the generation often ponder upon when they look back. (author’s translation)]

The past carried authority, and “Oldtidsfolket” [men of antiquity] functioned as a mirror for the present. The laconic content of the runic inscription was elaborated on, and it appears that the Viking Age past was a model for the youth, which drew “Styrkesaft” [strength juice] and “Manddomskraft” [manhood power] from the heroes of antiquity (Nielsen 1927, 11). Despite all the complex issues and unsolved questions about the meaning of the inscription and the historical function of the monument (see Lerche Nielsen 1997), the poem narrows the focus and reveals that the dominant idea behind the integration of the rune stone into the memorial park rested on a heroic narrative of the past. The content of the inscription was fictionalized, and in several strophes, we hear about Alli and Ragnhild, the great men and women of antiquity, about heroic death, burials, gods, valhal and the rune master Soti:



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Og Alle hed den Herre, som var Gudehusets Vogter. Han søgte straks sin Helligdom, naar træt og mødig hjem han kom fra vilde Viking-Togter. (Nielsen 1927, 5) [And Alli was the name of the man who guarded the holy house. He soon looked for his holy site, when tired and sorrowful he came home from fierce Viking expeditions. (author’s translation)]

With the establishment of the memorial park, what in the tenth century had been closely intertwined with family memory now became a component of a national imagination. But like the memory that Ragnhild created for Alli, the memory that materialised in the Glavendrup park was not cared for with the same energy after some decades (Boman 2005, 29); nevertheless, this locally-based contribution to a national meta-narrative left behind a collection of memorials in the landscape. Monuments can exist as passively stored memories without any actuality to their various presents (A. Assmann 2008, 98), yet later generations may insert them into new contexts, imposing new meanings on what appear to be mere relics of the past. The memorial landscape in Glavendrup goes back to the Bronze Age, but the memories that have been attached to the place have been fluctuating and ramified. One of the latest and current initiatives at the site (since 2015) has been the organisation of a Viking moot (see colour plate 11). Whereas the national memorials created in the first half of the twentieth century have become somewhat ‘overwritten’ and have fallen out of the frames of attention of these new activities, the rune stone has kept its position as the focal point of the site, and its capacity to trigger the interrelated faculties of imagination and memory of new generations is intact. In its new context, the rune stone func­ tions as a provider of authenticity to the activities, which allow for experiment, gaming, and participation (for relevant notions of authenticity, see Wang 1999). With the Viking moot, the Glavendrup site has become one of many examples of Viking heritage tourism (cf. Hannan and Halewood 2001), and the interests and forces behind it have changed from the wish to construct and support a national identity to a wish to arose the past to life through re-enactment, living history, and event culture, fields that in contemporary culture provide increasingly popular conditions for preserving, constructing, and negotiating the memory of Alli, Ragnhild and Soti and their time.

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Works cited Primary sources Quintilian. The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian. Vol. 4. Trans. H. E. Butler. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, 1961. DR = Danske Runeindskrifter. http://runer.ku.dk/Search.aspx. (8 April 2018)

Secondary sources Adriansen, Inge. 2010. Erindringssteder i Danmark. Copenhagen. Andrén, Anders. 2013. “Places, Monuments, and Objects. The Past in Ancient Scandinavia.” Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 267–281. Assmann, Aleida. 2008. “Canon and Archive.” In Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Media and Cultural Memory, 8. Berlin and New York. 97–107. Assmann, Jan. 2008. “Communicative and Cultural Memory.” In Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Media and Cultural Memory, 8. Berlin and New York. 109–118. Boman, Mogens. 2005. Runestenen i Glavendrup. Gentofte. Glauser, Jürg. 2007. “The Speaking Bodies of Saga Texts.” In Learning and Understanding in the Old Norse World. Essays in Honour of Margaret Clunies Ross. Ed. Judy Quinn, Kate Heslop and Tarrin Wills. Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe, 18. Turnhout. 13–26. Hannan, Kevin and Chris Halewood. 2001. “Viking Heritage Tourism. Authenticity and Commodification.” Annals of Tourism Research 28: 563–580. Hermann, Pernille. 2017. “Glavendrupstenen: Forbandelse og forvandling.” In Skandinavische Schriftlandschaften. Vänbok till Jürg Glauser. Ed. Klaus Müller-Wille, Kate Heslop, Anna Katharina Richter and Lukas Rösli. Tübingen. 16–21. Hållans Stenholm, Ann-Mari. 2006. “Past memories. Spatial returning as ritualized remembrance.” In Old Norse Religion in Long-term Perspectives. Origins, Changes, and Interactions. Ed. Anders Andrén, Kristina Jennbert and Catharina Raudvere. Lund. 341–345 Imer, Lisbeth. 2016. Danmarks runesten. En fortælling. Copenhagen. Jacobsen, Lis og Erik Moltke. 1942. Danmarks runeindskrifter. Text. Copenhagen. Lerche Nielsen, Michael. 1997. “Runologien mellem sprogvidenskaben og arkæologien – med et sideblik på de forskellige tolkninger af Glavendrupindskriften.” In Beretning fra det Sekstende Tværfaglige Vikingesymposium. Højberg. 37–51. Mitchell, Stephen. 2013. “Memory, Mediality, and the ‘Performative Turn’. Recontextualizing Remembering in Medieval Scandinavia.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 282–305. Nielsen, Rasmus. 1927. Glavendrupdigtet og Glavendruplundens historie. Odense. Nora, Pierre. 1989. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire.” Representations. Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory 26: 7–24.



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Nora, Pierre. 1998. “Introduction.” In Realms of Memory. Vol. III. Ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman. New York. ix–xii. Ning, Wang. 1999. “Rethinking Authenticity in Tourism Experience.” Annals of Tourism Research 26.2: 349–370. Stephens, George. 1867–1868. The Old-Northern Runic Monuments of Scandinavia and England. Vol. 2. London and Copenhagen. Viking moot. http://www.vikingmagasin.dk/events/danmark/glavendruplunden.htm and http://nordfynsvikingemarked.dk/nordfyns-vikingemarked-2017/. (8 April 2018) Wimmer, L.F.A. 1899–1901. De danske Runemindesmærker. Copenhagen.

Action Using specialist knowledge

Russell Poole

II: 33 Skalds 1 Introduction Expertise in the cultivation and retention of cultural memory (as defined by Assmann 2011 [1992], 50 et passim) in Iceland was not an entirely ‘specialist’ activity or exclusive to elite families or schools but instead rather widely distri­ buted amongst the general population. Icelanders are credited with acting as a pan-Scandinavian treasure-house of memory by Saxo Grammaticus (2005, 74–77) and Theodoricus (Turville-Petre 1967, 169–170). Occasionally the preservation of memories is due to people of a specific district (Gísli Sigurðsson 2000). Areas of expertise included genealogy, myths, legends, historical events, the law, and pro­ perty holdings. In his Íslendingabók [book of Icelanders] Ari Þorgilsson mentions three informants, all notable for their capacious memories (Íslendingabók,  4). The lǫgsǫgumaðr (law-speaker) was tasked with reciting one third of the laws by memory at each annual Althing [general assembly] (Dennis et al. 1980, 11–12). Especially notable and prominent among the specialists in memory were poets, standardly referred to by the native term ‘skalds’. Numerous skalds are mentioned in sagas, poetic treatises, and other sources (Gade 2000). Skaldic cultivation of memory was practised not only in Iceland but also widely in Norway and likewise by Icelandic and Norwegian skalds operating in the Viking diaspora, e.g. the British Isles.

2 Case study: The skalds In all the Scandinavian countries and Iceland, the role of the skald as holder of cultural memory appears to have been current from the late Viking Age, over­ lapping to some extent with the roles of the þulr [ceremonial poet] and the rune-carver or rune-master. Skalds appear to have gone out of fashion early in Denmark and although they are likely to have persisted longer in Sweden the extant corpus of Swedish-origin skaldic material is negligible. By contrast, a large – albeit fragmentary – corpus of works composed in Norway and Iceland is extant, with Icelanders dominant after the tenth century. The high numbers of skalds and volume of production can be attributed in part to rewards from foreign rulers. The role of skalds dwindled with the rise of Latin-based scribal memory in the twelfth century. Despite efforts at reinvigoration in early thirteenth-century https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-069

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Iceland by chieftain and poet Snorri Sturluson and his kinsman Sturla Þórðarson it entered a final decline in the late Middle Ages. Founding myths exist for the roles of ‘memory specialist’, poet, and rune carver encapsulated in the one deity, Óðinn (Odin). The accounts of his commun­ ing with the head of Mímir, his theft of the poetic mead, and his carving runes in the eddaic poem Hávamál [words of the high one] construct him in roles linked to cultivation of memory. Skaldic poems typically memorialise historical events, notably battles. In the remains of such poems the narration proceeds episode by episode, with a concise recording of just a few telling facets – typically names of peoples, persons and places, principal actions, and an indication of the outcome. Sometimes the spe­ cific personalities of leaders and rulers were memorialised, as by Eyvindr skál­ daspillir Guta saga [plunderer of skalds] in his Hákonarmál [words on Hákon] and lausavísur [free-standing verses] on Hákon Aðalsteinsfóstri (foster-son of Æthel­ stan, king of England) (Hákonarmál, 178–179; lausavísur, 218–219). Occasionally actions on the part of a leader are recorded as questionable, as in Sigvatr Þórðar­ son’s Flokkr about Erlingr Skjálgsson, which canvasses Óláfr Haraldsson’s part in the death of this prominent and much admired chieftain. Another important category of information was genealogical, sometimes combined with an account of the ruler’s death in each generation, as in the Ynglingatal [list of of the Ynglin­ gar (Yngling dynasty)] of Þjóðólfr ór Hvini and Háleygjatal [list of the earls of Hálogaland] of Eyvindr skáldaspillir. Occasionally place-names are prominently recorded, as in the Knútsdrápa [ode to Cnut (Canute the Great)] of Óttarr svarti [the black], which cites Scandinavian forms of such names as Lindsey, Brentford, and Norwich (Townend 2012). Similarly, ethnic names sometimes assume promi­ nence, as in Hallfreðr Óttarsson’s Óláfsdrápa [ode to Óláfr (Tryggvason)], which specifies the Norse forms of such ethnic designations as Welsh, Cumbrian, Hebri­ dean, and Irish (Óláfsdrápa, 387–388). A sustained effort at recording chronology is seen in the editorially entitled Víkingarvísur (verses on a viking expedition) of Sigvatr Þórðarson, which puts Óláfr Haraldsson’s youthful battles into a fixed numerical sequence. Skalds variously represent themselves as participants in the events they put on record – and thus eye-witnesses – or else as persons who are passing on reports that they have heard from the actual participants. In the former case expressions such as sá ek “I saw” are used to introduce episodes, in the latter frá ek “I heard”. Skalds who travelled may have undertaken the special task of ‘familiarisation’ with foreign countries, as is seen pre-eminently in the Vestrfararvísur [western journey verses] and Austrfararvísur [eastern journey verses] of Sigvatr Þórðar­ son. It might be that in this respect the function of skalds overlapped with that of expert way-finders, interpreters, intermediaries, and heralds – social agents who



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must have cultivated and relied on capacious memories but concerning whom little testimony exists in the primary sources. On occasion the function of the skald was to declare the ‘true story’ that ought to be remembered by subsequent narrators and reported back home, in cases where competing accounts vied for credence. A classic case is the declaration by Hallfreðr Óttarsson in his Erfidrápa [memorial ode] Óláfs Tryggvasonar that the king indeed died at the Battle of Svǫldr, rather than escaping from it and going into exile as some reports would have it (Erfidrápa Óláfs Tryggvasonar, 425–441). These themes in the poetry no doubt contributed to foster the practice amongst narrators of historical prose of selectively quoting from skaldic poems to demonstrate the veracity of their story. Sometimes the act of memorialisation covers not merely official memories but also autobiographical memories (Poole 2014), as for instance in a series of reminiscent lausavísur attributed to Rǫgnvaldr Kali, earl of Orkney. Poets also saw to the memorialisation of what we would term myths and legends and other traditional material. In the poetic corpus as extant, eddaic (i.e. freer verse-form) treatments of such subject-matter prevail but some instances in more tightly organised verse-forms such as dróttkvætt [court recitation] do occur, notably the Haustlǫng [autumn-long, i.e. poem whose composition took an entire autumn] of Þjóðólfr ór Hvini and the Þórsdrápa [ode to Þórr (Thor)] of Eilífr Goðrúnarson. The sources are almost completely silent as to the skalds’ acquisition and practice of memory skills. While some skaldic self-reflection on the formation and preservation of memories is extant, it consists mostly of injunctions to the audience to listen attentively so as to learn the poem being performed, along with assertions that the person praised will never be forgotten or eclipsed. Such state­ ments are to a degree reflexive, paying tribute as they do not merely to the virtue of the leader but also to the skill of the poet in forming and transmitting the cul­ tural memory that enables such enduring fame. The poet might also appeal to the audience’s recall of memorable scenes, thus cultivating shared memories. Some­ times the poet triggers these memories by invoking visual features, such as the conspicuous wounds or plundered items that comrades carry on their persons. This kind of visual anchor-point for memory might also take the form of an arte­ fact or presentation object, as in the early genre designated in scholarship by the non-native term ‘ekphrasis’ [verbal account of an object of visual art]. The earliest extant example is the Ragnarsdrápa [ode to Ragnarr)] of Bragi Boddason, which describes depictions of mythical and legendary scenes on a presentation shield. Formulism at the lexical and metrical level (over-speculatively termed ‘oral formulism’), although often claimed for traditional poetries elsewhere in the world, appears not to have been a significant factor in facilitating either the origi­ nal composition and performance or the memorisation of skaldic verse, whether

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on the part of the poet or the audience. Instead formulism is at the thematic level, represented with particular strength by the kenning and the type-scene. Kennings, though perhaps not reducible to an integral ‘kenning system’, depend on structural principles that must have been readily memorised. Likewise, the array of noun synonyms on which kennings are built was capable of rote assimi­ lation through þulur [singular þula, metrical list of poetic synonyms]. Predomi­ nant amongst the type-scenes is the birds and beasts of battle devouring corpses and the king giving his followers gold. Such scenes would have been intrinsically memorable, thanks to their affective content. They are often reduced to kenning format rather than being developed in full narrative mode: thus a leader might be referred to by words expressing the concept ‘giver of gold’. The memorial prowess of the skalds may also have been assisted by highly patterned verse-forms, notably dróttkvætt, where such features as structural alli­ teration and hendingar [internal rhymes], strict syllable-counting, constraints on placement of finite verbs, and the limited array of acceptable metrical patterns might be seen as conferring mnemonic properties. Certainly the constraints of the verse-form were regarded by Snorri Sturluson as a guarantee that the memories encapsulated in the verse were the authentic words of the poet and could not have been tampered with by later transmitters (Snorri Sturluson 1945, 5). Caveats must however be registered against too credulous an acceptance of these claims in modern scholarship. Cases where lines or even longer sections of stanzas in the strict dróttkvætt verse-form have undergone re-wording are clearly attested in the paradosis (for an example, cf. Poole 2005, 179–181); it stands to reason that if not Snorri himself then at least some of his contemporaries must have been aware of this possibility, having done their own share of guesswork repairs on damaged older verses. Also, not all verse-forms could be described as strict enough to safeguard the poet’s original phrasing against alterations: historical poems in, for example, the relatively loose and forgiving fornyrðislag measure do occur, notably in the twelfth century, and here wholesale re-composition could have occurred without detection. As a final instance of the memorial powers of skaldic verse, we might spe­ culate that the remarkable continuity of this poetic art contributed toward the preservation of the Icelandic language itself in a form that became semi-fixed lexically and morphologically at its medieval stage – a manifestation of cultu­ ral memory where the very medium of memory is itself preserved in the face of radical change elsewhere.



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Works cited Primary sources Íslendingabók. In Íslendingabók, Landnámabók. Ed. Jakob Benediktsson. ÍF, 1. Reykjavík, 1968. 1–28. Eyvindr skáldaspillir. Hákonarmál. Ed. R. D. Fulk. In Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas. 1. 171–194. Eyvindr skáldaspillir. Lausavísur. Ed. R. G. Poole. In Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas. 1. 213–235. Hallfreðr vandræðaskáld Óttarsson. Erfidrápa Óláfs Tryggvasonar. Ed. Kate Heslop. In Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas. 1. 400–441. Hallfreðr vandræðaskáld Óttarsson. Óláfsdrápa. Ed. Diana Whaley. In Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas. 1. 387–399. Óttarr svarti, Knútsdrápa. Ed. Matthew Townend. In Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas. 1. 767–782. Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas. 1 From Mythical Times to c. 1035. Ed. Diana Whaley. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages, 1. Turnhout, 2012. Saxo Grammaticus. Gesta Danorum. Danmarkshistorien. Ed. Karsten Friis-Jensen. Trans. Peter Zeeberg. Copenhagen, 2005. Sigvatr Þórðarson. Flokkr about Erlingr Skjálgsson. Ed. Judith Jesch. In Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas. 1. 629–642. Snorri Sturluson. Heimskringla. Ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson. ÍF, 26. Reykjavík, 1945.

Secondary sources Assmann, Jan. 2011. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. New York. [German orig. 1992] Dennis, Andrew, Peter Foote and Richard Perkins. 1980. Laws of Early Iceland. Winnipeg. Gade, Kari Ellen. 2000. “Poetry and its Changing Importance in Medieval Icelandic Culture.” In Old Icelandic Literature and Society. Ed. Margaret Clunies Ross. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 42. Cambridge. 61–95. Gísli Sigurðsson. 2000. “Oláfr Þórðarson hvítaskáld and Oral Poetry in the West of Iceland c. 1250. The Evidence of References to Poetry in The Third Grammatical Treatise.” In Old Icelandic Literature and Society. Ed. Margaret Clunies Ross. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 42. Cambridge. 96–115. Poole, Russell. 2005. “The Nesjavísur of Sigvatr Þórðarson.” Medieval Scandinavia 15: 171–198. Poole, Russell. 2014. “Autobiographical Memory in Medieval Scandinavia and amongst the Kievan Rus’.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 109–129. Turville-Petre, Gabriel. 1967. Origins of Icelandic Literature. Oxford.

Bergsveinn Birgisson

II: 34 Kennings 1 Introduction Skaldic Poetry Old Norse skaldic poetry possesses great theoretic and heuristic value for the study of memory, not least due to the fact that the oldest examples of this genre are said to have been generated in an oral society, and could thus have been imbued with mnemo-techniques under such circumstances. There can be little doubt but that skaldic poetry was meant to be memorized by heart and passed through generations without significant emendations. This attitude can be detected among medieval writers of konungasögur [kings’ sagas] and Íslendingasögur [sagas of Icelanders], who employed the oldest examples of this poetry (from the ninth century) as historical data or notes for reconstructing major historical events. Scholars have pointed out that the higly advanced metre most common in the genre, dróttkvætt, with prescriptive rules for rhyme, alliteration, and fixed number of syllables in each line, must have been of great help in memorising and rendering the stanzas stable during their oral transmission (Frank 1978, 25; Fidjestøl 1993, 7; Kuhn 1983, 253). Since every second word basically rhymes in dróttkvætt, it is clear that it would generate a different Oral Theory than the one based on the thousand-line epic poetry of the Balkan (cf. Lord 1991, 20–21, for a comparison between the Greek and Germanic situations).

2 Case study: Memory and Old Norse skaldic poetry The Kenning While some studies have emphasised the mnemonic assistance provided by the strict metre in question, less attention has been given to the visual imagery of skaldic poetry in these regards. There is a consensus among schol­ ars that the image is a key concept in the classical memoria-traditions, the rule is to see for one’s inner eye that which is to be remembered (Yates 2001 [1966], 187), indeed this seems to be a universal when it comes to memory. The Old Norse tradition is no exception to this rule, since the very word for image, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-070



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mynd, has etymological connections both with muna [‘remember’] and minni [‘memory’]. Imagery is usually associated with metaphorical expressions in verbal art, and in skaldic poetry we find poetical images in metaphorical figures known as kennings. As long as scholars were convinced of the infallibility of classical aes­ thetics, poetical circumlocutions such as ‘horse of the sea’ were condemned as ‘immature attempts’ to make beautiful metaphors (Finnur Jónsson 1920, 385), and the kenning in many ways was dismissed as a “barbarisch[e] Stilfigur” (Krause 1930, 10) [barbarian figure of style (author’s translation)]. The pre-Christian skalds finally got their spokesmen in modern times with scholars like Hallvard Lie (1982 [1952]; 1957), who pointed out that the oldest skalds in Scandinavia could not have known classical aesthetics, and should therefore not be judged by them. Although, as Rudolf Meissner rightly commented, the skalds of old, “die bizarresten Verbin­ dungen oft mit Absicht aufsuchen” (1921 12) [look for the most bizarre combina­ tions (author’s translation)], it has since been pointed out that this aspect of the kenning images could have something to do with mnemonic function: “Nettopp fordi dei er så merkelege, er dei lette å feste i minnet” (Mundal 2004, 257) [because they are so eccentric, they are easy to memorise (author’s translation)]. Two distinct traditions, memoria in Roman literature and modern cognitive psychology, specifically in studies addressing memory and mental imagery, shed light on this question. The methodological point of departure is cognitive metaphor theory, or Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; 1989), later developed in Conceptual Integration Theory, often referred to as ‘blending’ (Fauconnier and Turner 2002). Following this theory’s mode of thought, the Old Norse kenning could be pre­ sented as a double-faced cognitive figure: A conceptual metaphor and a novel metaphor in one. The kenning is always based on an abstract rule or a fixed way of paraphrasing, which could be referred to as kenning-models, and these ‘rules’ remind one very much of the conceptual metaphor, an essential term in cogni­ tive metaphor theory, pointing out that what makes language make sense, often has invisible, non-linguistic rules governing from behind, as it were. In modern English, the conceptual metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY can, for example, be detected in linguistic expressions of the sort, ‘you must keep on going’ and ‘do not let this stop you’. In the same way, the Old Norse paraphrasing rule for a SHIP in the kenning-system is ANIMAL OF THE SEA. The aforementioned kenningmodel can easily be detected in the kenning-variants of the skalds, the meta­ phorical or novel extension of the underlying model, such as “marblakkr” [‘horse of the sea’], “ǫldu fíll” [‘elephant of the waves’] or “fjarðar elgr” [‘moose of the fjord’], and so forth. Skaldic poetry is, of course, alien to us since we do not share the conceptual rules of the skalds.

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Memoria In the Roman memoria tradition, a distinction is made between memorising texts word-for-word (memoria verborum) and memorising the basic aspects of a text, for example, a central argument or the gist of a story (memoria rerum). Although both methods could imply images, the Roman tradition seems to favour the latter, reflected, for example, in Cicero’s statement that the memory of things was most appropriate for the speaker (Ciceronis Rhetorica, II, 87, 358). When it comes to Old Norse skaldic poetry, the distinction between verbum and res is somewhat inappropriate. The overall goal in the Scandinavian oral society must have been to remember the skaldic stanzas word-for-word, since this poetry is not suited to improvisation. But in the Old Norse case, the technique for the memory of things, memoria rerum, and the imagery attached to it, could have functioned synchroni­ cally in the process of memorizing and recollecting the more abstract words of stanzas. The image of the kenning cues the word, so to speak, and since every second word rhymes in a dróttkvætt stanza the image is a valuable starting point for remembering the words. In this regard, the kenning reminds one of the term nota or ‘sign’ that Quintillian argued could cue memory for the central things in a text, and as Mary Carruthers points out, those signs could take the form of associated images (1993, 74). It has even been argued, that the use of the terms kenning and at kenna among Norse medieval scholars such as Snorri Sturluson are translations of Latin nota and notare, as both are variants on the concept of characterizing by using a striking image (Malm 2016, 318–319). The Norse hea­ thens had, of course, come to the same concept on their own, as Malm points out, since the phenomenon itself, later termed as kenning, was developed unrelated to those traditions. What kind of images then, are the most suitable for memorisation? The Roman answer to this is best reflected in the oldest text on memoria – Rhetorica ad Herennium (from ca. 86–82 BC): We ought, then, to set up images of a kind that can adhere longest in memory. And we shall do so if we establish similitudes as striking as possible; if we set up images that are not many or vague but active [imagines agentes]; if we assign to them exceptional beauty or singular ugliness; if we ornament some of them, as with crowns or purple cloaks, so that the similitude may be more distinct to us; or if we somehow disfigure them, as by introducing one stained with blood or soiled with mud or smeared with red paint, so that its form is more striking, or by assigning certain comic effects to our images, for that, too, will ensure our remembering them more readily (Yates 2001 [1966], 25–26).

The translation of Caplan from 1954, used by Yates above, translates agentes as ‘active’ from ago. As argued elsewhere it could be maintained that this adjective



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rather stems from agens, agentis ‘effective, powerful’ (Bergsveinn Birgisson 2010, 204). In any case, it is of interest to see if and how the Old Norse kenning can be seen as fulfilling this old criteria of the effective or striking image.

Cognitive psychology The Roman rule of imagines agentes is thoroughly discussed in cognitive psy­ chology, resulting in the much debated ‘bizarreness effect’. Opinions range from those who see it as a “not very important factor” (Richardson 1999, 199) to others who are quite convinced of the mnemonic powers of bizarre imagery (Einstein and McDaniel 1987, 99); still others have argued that it is not bizarreness in itself but the interaction of images that proves most beneficial for memory (Kroll et. al 1986, 42–53). Some theoretical problems are notable. The conclusions of modern psycholo­ gists are drawn from modern human beings in a cultural circumstances quite dif­ ferent from those of people in oral society. Modern humans are confronted with a process described as ‘externalization of memory’, and live in a society which favours a linguistic-based way of thinking, which can be seen as a constraint on other modes of thinking, such as the visual one (Helstrup 2005, 157–158). More­ over, the notion of ‘bizarre’ seems to be a fleeting one, even among modern schol­ ars. Keeping these problems in mind, there is a general consensus in psychology about criteria for images most easily retrieved from memory: 1) Attention. Images that draw attention are easier to memorise. This is of course the alpha and omega of the advertising business. 2) Communication/Understanding. If the image ‘makes sense’ or is meaningful in some respect, it helps memory. 3) Distinction. That which is distinct from its surroundings is easier to remem­ ber. This law is generally termed as the ‘von-Restorff effect’ or the ‘isolationeffect’. 4) Interaction. It helps memory if images, two or more, interact in one way or another, whereas they do not advance memorization if they are isolated one from another (as paintings on walls).

Analyses When applying these considerations to kennings, one finds out that the different criteria are not easily isolated from one another, but could rather be seen as dynamic and simultaneous processes when we visualize with our ‘inner eye’. One

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Fig. 1: The fire-wolf

Fig. 2: House-thief in fire stockings

could, for example, maintain that the potential of kennings to draw our attention (1) mainly lies in the contrasting images (horse vs. sea or fish vs. valley) they systematically bring to interaction (4). Furthermore, these interactive images ‘make sense’ since they are based on a system of communication the skalds and their contemporaries shared (2). As noted elsewhere (Bergsveinn Birgisson 2012, 286), the skald could draw attention to himself and his poem with an unheard kenning-variant based on the model, and thus demonstrate his skills in making a catachresis of conventional images – a fresh visual blend, meeting the criteria of distinction quite well (3). This is easily done since both the source (horse) and target (ship) in kenning-metaphors are concrete or ‘high in imagery’. Elaboration, defined as an “unusual interaction or connective” between to nouns, is a keyword for mnemonic images in psychology (Wollen and Margres 1987, 118–119). Interestingly, the kennings can be said to manufacture such elaborated images in a systematic manner, counteracting the conventional processing or ‘automatisation’ of language (Mukařovský 1964 [1932], 19). While it is uncertain exactly how people visualized kennings, one can be sure that the bizarre imagery of the kenning itself must be visualized in some manner, and not only the target (ship), in order to release their mnemonic power. One method would be to make a visual blending image as referred to above. The kenning allows us to blend two contrastive elements into a single image, the ‘horse of the sea’ (i.e. ship) which can be elaborated into a kind of ship-horse, and



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similar blends can be detected in kennings like “sporðfjöðruð spáþerna nóta” [‘fishtail-feathered tern of nets’ or ‘herring-tern’], or in effective fire-metaphors like “glóða garmr” [‘fire-wolf’], “húsþjófr á hyrjar leistum” [‘house-thief in firestockings’] or “éla meitill” [‘hail-chizel’] (Skj 1912 (AI), 74, 8, 13, 54) (see fig. 1 and 2). The kenning metaphors are grounded in an Old Norse aesthetical concept of ‘contrast-tension’ (Bergsveinn Birgisson 2007, 77–105; 2012, 289–291). It should be noted that skaldic aesthetics differ dramatically from classical aesthetics of the Roman memoria, demonstrated, for example, in Ars poetica by Horace when writing about artistic failure: “Similarly, the writer who wants to give fantastic variety to his single theme paints a dolphin in his woods and a wild boar in his sea” (The Norton Anthology, 124). This presentation of ‘failure’ by Horace happens to be the artistic rule for a good kenning among the old Scandinavians who favoured the clashing of contrastive nature elements like ‘land’ vs. ‘sea’ and thus called a snake for “dalfiskr” [‘fish of the valley’] and ship for “unnsvín” [‘boar of the sea’] among other things (Meissner 1921, 219–220). The central point is that the principle of contrast-tension is very beneficial in creating bizarre imagery, and we hardly find anything similar until the Surrealists appeared in the twentieth century (Bergsveinn Birgisson 2012, 289–291), perhaps with the exception of such contrastive imagery in Baroque poetry. The blending images of the kennings could be regarded as distinctive images, since they demand elaboration or even distortion of the common images in longterm memory. In their article on bizarre imagery, Wollen and Margres write: “The fact that the elaboration results in an unusual image means that bizarre images are more distinctive from (that is, share fewer features with) schematic images in memory than is the case with common images” (1987, 118). The blending image of a kenning is both a highly elaborated and a distinctive image, since it has no equivalence in the natural order of things – it is unseen and a-naturalistic. And since it is a distinct image, we could argue that it is easier to retrieve from memory than conventional images, remembering the so-called isolation- or von-Restorffeffect in cognitive psychology, where it is claimed that a thing which is distinct from its surroundings is easier to remember (3). Additionally, the images of the kennings seem not only to fulfil the criteria of interaction (4), it seems that the contrasting nature of the kenning images also invite one to create the kind of specific and distinctive relationships between images to which scholars of cognitive psychology have attributed a high mne­ monic value (Rubin 1995).

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Conclusion The bizarre imagery of the kennings could be regarded as mnemonic in nature when analysed in terms of modern cognitive psychology. The unique aesthetics of contrast-tension and the system of kennings as such could be seen as a tool for mass-production of distinctive and interactive images, which again tells us that the Scandinavians of old not only had insight into the mnemonics of the bizarre and effective image, but even created a system based upon this insight. If skaldic poetry is as old as maintained by medieval writers and the majority of later scholars, its origins must be traced to an oral society where learning by heart was of outmost importance if collective memory was to endure. As pointed out by Hallvard Lie (1982 [1952]), this mode of expression has to be analysed on those very terms, and not by some different aesthetic dogma. What needs to be further investigated is if skaldic aesthetics, here termed as contrast-tension, could be seen as even better equipped than classical aesthetics to produce images that fulfil the criteria of bizarre or striking images, mentioned for their mnemonic power in the Latin tradition of memoria. At least it can be said that classical aes­ thetics seem to favour the ‘representation’ or ‘imitation’ (read: mimesis) of nature as the highest artistic ideal. The point made is that naturalistic imagery can never be said to share the same level of distinction as the a-naturalistic images of the Old Norse skalds. The term ‘mnemonic aesthetics’ might thus be proposed to describe the presumably oral nature of the poetic expression of the oldest skalds in the North. Hopefully, future studies will shed further light on this issue.

Works cited Primary sources Den Norsk-Islandske Skjaldediktning (Skj), vol. IA (Tekst efter håndskrifterne 800–1200). Ed. Finnur Jónsson. Copenhagen, 1912–1915. M. Tulli Ciceronis Rhetorica / recognovit brevique adnotatione critica instruxit. In Vol I: Libros de oratore tres continens. Ed. A. S. Wilkins. Oxford, 1902. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York and London, 2001.



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Secondary sources Bergsveinn Birgisson. 2007. “Inn i skaldens sinn – Kognitive, estetiske og historiske skatter i den norrøne skaldediktingen.” PhD Diss. Bergen. http://bora.uib.no/ handle/1956/2732?show=full (14 December 2017) Bergsveinn Birgisson. 2010. “The Old Norse Kenning as a Mnemonic Figure.” In The Making of Memory in the Middle Ages. Ed. Lucie Doležalová. Later Medieval Europe, 4. Leiden and Boston. 199–214. Bergsveinn Birgisson. 2012. “Skaldic Blends Out of Joint. Blending Theory and Aesthetic Conventions.” Metaphor and Symbol 27.4: 283–298. Carruthers, Mary. 1993. The Book of Memory. A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge. Einstein, Gilles O. and Mark A. McDaniel. 1987. “Distinctiveness and the Mnemonic Benefits of Bizarre Imagery.” In Imagery and Related Mnemonic Processes. Theories, Individual Differences, and Applications. Ed. Mark McDaniel and Michael Pressley. Berlin. 78–102. Fauconnier, Gilles and Mark Turner. 2002. The Way We Think. Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York. Fidjestøl, Bjarne. 1993. “Skaldekvad og Harald Hårfagre.” In Rikssamlingen og Harald Hårfagre. Ed. Bjørn Myhre. Karmøy. 7–31. Finnur Jónsson. 1920. Den oldnorske og oldislandske Litteraturs Historie. 2nd ed. Vol. 1. Copenhagen. Frank, Roberta. 1978. Old Norse Court Poetry. The Dróttkvætt Stanza. Ithaca, NY. Helstrup, Tore. 2005. Personlig kognisjon. Kan vi kontrollere våre tanker og handlinger? Bergen. Krause, Wolfgang. 1930. Die Kenning als typische Stilfigur der germanischen und keltischen Dichtersprache. Schriften der Königsberger Gelehrten Gesellschaft, 7.1. Halle. Kroll, N.E.A., E.M. Schepelern and K.T. Angin. 1986. “Bizarre Imagery. The Misremembered Mnemonic.” Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory and Cognition 12: 42–53. Kuhn, Hans. 1983. Das Dróttkvætt. Heidelberg. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago. Lakoff, George and Mark Turner. 1989. More than Cool Reason. A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago. Lie, Hallvard. 1982 [1952]. “Skaldestil-studier.” In Om Sagakunst og skaldskap. Utvalgte avhandlinger. Ed. Øvre Ervik. 109–201. [originally in Maal og Minne 1952: 1–92]. Lie, Hallvard. 1957. ‘Natur’ og ‘Unatur’ i skaldekunsten. Oslo. Lord, Albert B. 1991. Epic Singers and Oral Tradition. London. Malm, Mats. 2016. “Two Cultures of Visual(ized) Cognition.” In Intellectual Culture in Medieval Scandinavia c. 1100–1350. Ed. Stefka Eriksen. Disputatio, 28. Turnhout. 309–334. Meissner, Rudolf. 1921. Die Kenningar der Skalden. Ein Beitrag zur skaldischen Poetik. Bonn. Mukařovský, Jan 1964 [1932]. “Standard Language and Poetic Language.” In A Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure, and Style. Ed. P.L.Garvin. Washington DC. 17–30. Mundal, Else. 2004. “Edda- og skaldedikt.” In Handbok i norrøn filologi. Ed. Odd Einar Haugen. LNUs skriftserie nr., 157. Bergen. 215–266. Richardson, John T. E. 1999. Imagery. East Sussex.

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Rubin, David C. 1995. Memory in Oral Traditions – The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-out Rhymes. Oxford. Wollen, Keith A. and Matthew G. Margres. 1987. “Bizareness and the Imagery Multiprocess Model.” In Imagery and Related Mnemonic Processes. Theories, Individual Differences, and Applications. Ed. Mark A. McDaniel and Michael Pressley. Berlin. 103–127. Yates, Frances A. 2001 [1966]. The Art of Memory. London.

Stephen A. Mitchell

II: 35 Charm Workers 1 Introduction The role of memory in passing on knowledge of such crafts as metal working, building construction, and ship-, saddle-, sail- and garment-making in Viking Age and medieval Scandinavia was of obvious importance. Less skilled workers learned through practice the ‘trade secrets’ of a vocation from more skilled prac­ titioners. Over time, by regulating who had access to knowledge of these tradi­ tional technologies, the formal apprenticeship system of the guilds, often with royal privileges, developed in late medieval Scandinavia, as elsewhere. Outside of and anterior to the craft guilds, other specialists similarly needed to acquire knowledge of their arts – so, for example, the Icelandic law speakers (cf. Gísli Sigurðsson 2004), the legal institution of the minnunga mæn ‘memory men’ (cf. Brink 2014), and even the saga narrators, as in the case of the young Icelander who visits King Haraldr Sigurðarson and relates how his knowledge of a particular story is the result of his apprentice-like relationship with Halldór Snorrason (cf. Meulengracht Sørensen 1993, 107–108). Similar to tradition bearers of these types, ritual specialists of a different sort relied on memory in the Nordic Middle Ages, viz. – users of charm magic. Although magic is sometimes characterized metaphysically as, e.g., “An alternative form of rationality” (Jolly 2000, 250), at heart, as one anthropologist famously noted, “Both magic and science are technologies, capable of being summed up in formu­ lae and rules of procedure […]” (Benedict 1937 [1933], 40).

2 Case study: Magic and memory Learning magical practices through instruction without apparent reference to written charm texts is widely referred to in Old Norse texts. Literary sources, such as the oft-cited cases of Gunnhildr learning magic from the Sámi in Haralds saga Hárfagra [Saga of Harld Fairhair] (Ch. 32). Gunnlaugr’s passion for learn­ ing magic from Geirríðr in Eyrbyggia saga [Saga of the People of Eyri] Ch. 15), Gúðriðr reluctantly admitting in Eiríks saga rauða [Saga of Eirik the Red] (Ch. 4) that her foster-mother, Halldís, had taught her a special kind of song to be used in the ritual magic called seiðr, or Busli’s offer to teach Bósi magic in Bósa saga

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ok Herrauðs [Saga of Bosi and Herraud] (Ch. 2), suggest a strong traditional belief in such practice. The legal records of medieval Scandinavia appear to reflect a similar view: the law codex of the Icelandic commonwealth Grágás for example, in prohibit­ ing the use of spells, witchcraft and lesser forms of magic, specifically notes the injunction against teaching such practices: “Ef maþr ferr með galldra eþa gørnin­ gar. eþa fiolkýngi. þa ferr hann með fiolkyngi ef hann queðr þat eþa kennir. eþa lætr queða. at ser eþa at fe sinv” (Grágás 22) [“If someone uses spells or witchcraft or magic – he uses magic if he utters or teaches someone else or gets someone else to utter words of magic over himself or his property” (Laws of Early Iceland, I, 39)]. The most famous medieval Nordic legal example where a charm is involved, the early fourteenth-century case of Ragnhildr tregagás in Bergen, concludes with the accused woman admitting that the elaborate curse, involving both physical and verbal elements, that she has worked against her former lover was one she had learned in her youth from Solli Sukk (“Jtem interrogata respondit quod hujusmodi incantationes hereticas in juventute a Solla dicto Sukk didicit quas in hoc casu practicavit” [Diplomatarium Norvegicum n:o 93]). In a similar case from Sweden in 1471, a woman in Arboga, referred to as galna kadhrin ‘Crazy Katherine’, instructs Birgitta Andirssadotthir on how to prevent Birgitta’s lover from pursuing another woman (Arboga stads tänkeböcker, I, 360). A further late fifteenth-century Swedish case likewise describes how Margit halffstop says that she learned from another woman, Anna finszka, the spell by which she could bewitch a man from a distance (Stockholms stads tänkeböcker, II, 418). Although there are strong similarities in content and context among these three cases, there are important differences as well (see Mitchell 2003 and 2011, 57–58 et passim): all of them rely on recall but in the two Swedish cases, this seems to be a matter of short-term memory, whereas in the Norwegian example, Ragnhildr specifies that the charm is one she has learned much earlier, in her youth (in juventute). Yet in all of these cases, ‘memory’ refers only to the ability to use magical methods learned within an individual’s lifetime, to what Jan Assmann (e.g. 1995) considers ‘communicative memory’. In fact, the important relationship of memory to charms has over several decades excited considerable attention, especially as such usage might be explained by such institutionalized cultural phenomena as the revering of saints, although to date these practices have principally been studied outside the Nordic orbit (e.g. Olsan 2004; cf. Roper 1998). For the Nordic world, there exist highly suggestive data indicating that at least some charm complexes may have been held together by common associations and traits which continue across a number of centuries and across the change in



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official religions. Such appears to be the case with the pagan god Óðinn (Odin) and his purported connections to the production, preservation and discovery of wealth, signs of which can be seen periodically from, e.g., such early documents as Snorri’s thirteenth-century Ynglinga saga [Saga of the Ynglings] (Ch. 7) and continuing right into modern times (Mitchell 2009, forthcoming); these traits pre­ cipitate out as magical references and texts in evidence in trials, documents, lin­ guistics and ethnographic observations from the medieval and modern periods, part of Nordic charm magic passed from one cohort of practitioners to the next over many centuries, especially in Sweden (see Mitchell 2009). Grimoires and other textual collections of charm material become especially rich in Scandinavia beginning in the sixteenth century (Mitchell 2014b). As valu­ able as these charm texts are, they inherently differ from sources that point to the active participation of tradition bearers. That much of the medieval and early modern evidence for the Odinic charms comes to us from those who, as far as we can judge, in fact actualized or acted out the terms of the charms indicates that the enactment or realisation of such rituals held real meaning for those who prac­ ticed them, real enough to risk being executed for their practice. We must thus consider the many factors that give such behaviour meaning, what Olsan (2004) calls the semantic motifs from which such practices drew their strength. What such magic as that invoking Óðinn offered was its purported ability to provide a conduit to power and, in turn, to wealth. And although the motivation for such rituals may have been desperation, what gave their practice meaning was their very traditionalism. To use the memorable formulation of John Miles Foley, two key elements come together in such acts, what he terms “the enabling event of performance” and “the enabling referent of tradition” (Foley 1992, 294; Foley 1995, 208). “The enabling event of performance” might readily be envisioned in line with Ass­ mann’s views of the desire of a memory culture (“Erinnerungskultur”) to demon­ strate its continuity by the cyclical production of social acts that underscore this trait. The semiotic system for such acts, what Foley terms “the enabling referent of tradition,” is the reality of superorganic matter or mentifacts within Nordic tra­ dition (see Mitchell 2014a), specifically the idea of Óðinn as a source of power – whether or not fifteenth-century, or seventeenth-century, or nineteenth-century practitioners of this kind of magic were aware of his pagan past or not. The role of memory (in the sense of recollection) to all areas of learning is clearly of great significance. Stored and retrieved expertise in an area like charm magic appears to have had a special role in curating traditional knowledge: for example, the argument has been made (Mitchell 2013, 295–296) that one of the direct functions of performing exceptional types of magical rituals in the Old Norse world was that it provided users with a conduit to their heritage.

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Works cited Primary sources Arboga stads tänkeböcker. Ed. Erik Noreen and Torsten Wennström. SFSS, 53. Uppsala, 1935–. Bósa saga ok Herrauðs. In Fornaldar sögur Norðurlanda. 3. Ed. Guðni Jónsson. Reykjavík, 1954. Diplomatarium Norvegicum. Ed. C. R. Unger and H. J. Huitfeldt. Christiania, 1847–. Eiríks saga rauða. In Eyrbyggia saga. Brands þáttr ǫrva. Eiríks saga rauða. Grœnlendinga saga. Grœnlendinga þáttr. Ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson and Matthías Þórðarson. ÍF, 4. Reykjavík, 1957 [1935]. 193–237. Eyrbyggia saga. In Eyrbyggia saga. Brands þáttr ǫrva. Eiríks saga rauða. Grœnlendinga saga. Grœnlendinga þáttr. Ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson and Matthías Þórðarson. ÍF, 4. Reykjavík, 1957 [1935]. 1–191. Grágás, Konungsbók. Ed. Vilhjálmur Finsen. Odense, 1974. [Facsimile of 1852 edition] Haralds saga Hárfagra. In Snorri Sturluson. Heimskringla I. Ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson. ÍF, 26. Reykjavík, 1962 [1941]. I: 94–149. Laws of Early Iceland: Grágás, the Codex Regius of Grágás, with Material from other Manuscripts. Ed. and transl. Andrew Dennis, Peter Foote and Richard Perkins. University of Manitoba Icelandic Studies 3, 5. Winnipeg, 1980–2000. Stockholms stads tänkeböcker 1483–92. Ed. Carlsson Carlsson. Stockholms stadsböcker från äldre tid. II:a serien 2. Stockholm, 1921–1944. Ynglinga saga. In Snorri Sturluson. Heimskringla. Ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson. ÍF, 26. Reykjavík, 1962 [1941]. I: 9–83.

Secondary sources Assmann, Jan. 1995. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” New German Critique 65: 125–133. Benedict, Ruth. 1937 [1933]. “Magic.” In Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences. Ed. Edwin R. A. Seligman and Alvin Johnson. New York. Vol. X: 39–44. Brink, Stefan. 2014. “Minnunga mæn. The Usage of Old Knowledgeable Men in Legal Cases.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 197–210. Foley, John Miles. 1992. “Word-Power, Performance, and Tradition.” Journal of American Folklore 105: 275–301. Foley, John Miles. 1995. The Singer of Tales in Performance. Bloomington, IN. Gísli Sigurðsson. 2004. The Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition: A Discourse on Method. Transl. Nicholas Jones. Publications of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature, 2. Cambridge, MA. [Icelandic orig. 2002] Jolly, Karen Louise. 2000. “Magic.” In Medieval Folklore. An Encyclopedia of Myths, Legends, Tales, Beliefs, and Customs. Ed. Carl Lindahl, John McNamara and John Lindow. Santa Barbara, Denver and Oxford. 250–252. Meulengracht Sørensen, Preben. 1993. Saga and Society. An Introduction to Old Norse literature. Studia Borealia. Monograph Series, 1. Odense. [Danish orig. 1977]



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Mitchell, Stephen A. 2003. “Magic as Acquired Art and the Ethnographic Value of the Sagas.” In Old Norse Myths, Literature and Society. Ed. Margaret Clunies-Ross. The Viking Collection. Studies in Northern Civilization, 14. Viborg. 132–152. Mitchell, Stephen A. 2009. “Odin, Magic and a Swedish Trial from 1484.” Scandinavian Studies 81.3: 263–286. Mitchell, Stephen A. 2011. Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages. Philadelphia. Mitchell, Stephen A. 2013. “Memory, Mediality, and the ‘Performative Turn’. Recontextualizing Remembering in Medieval Scandinavia.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 282–305. Mitchell, Stephen A. 2014a. “Continuity. Folklore’s Problem Child?” In Folklore in Old Norse – Old Norse in Folklore. Ed. Daniel Sävborg and Karen Bek-Pedersen. Nordistica Tartuensis, 20. Tartu. 34–51. Mitchell, Stephen A. 2014b. “Leechbooks, Manuals, and Grimoires. On the early History of Magical Texts in Scandinavia.” Arv. Nordic Yearbook of Folklore 70: 57–74. Mitchell, Stephen A. Forthcoming. “Faith and Knowledge in Nordic Charm Magic.” In Faith and Knowledge in Late Medieval Scandinavia. Ed. Karoline Kjesrud and Mikael Males. Turnhout. Olsan, Lea T. 2004. “Charms in Medieval Memory.” In Charms and Charming in Europe. Ed. Jonathan Roper. London. 59–88. Roper, Jonathan. 1998. “Charms, Change and Memory. Some Principles Underlying Variation.” Folklore. Electronic Journal of Folklore 9. [http://www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol9/roper.htm]

Gísli Sigurðsson

II: 36 Mental Maps 1 Introduction The term ‘mental maps’ is borrowed from human geography through the works of Kevin Lynch (1960), and Peter Gould and Rodney White (1974), referring to the way individuals perceive their immediate area and the world around them – and how they reconstruct their perception in a map-like form. The idea of drawing maps from people’s notions about their environment can be applied to historical texts with roots in traditional cultures of storytelling in Iceland where the stories people were telling (and later writing) are often closely associated with the land­ scape and place names in their vicinity, the landscape around the routes they travel within the country, or the remote countries where their contemporaries and ancestors roamed. As a result, mental maps can be reconstructed from the textual evidence, reflecting what and how people were thinking about their collectively known geographical area. This is an example of landscape as a memory tool for storytelling (Schama 1995).

2 Case study The Íslendingasögur [sagas of Icelanders] are reflections of local knowledge about Iceland, as well as of the wider world. They are authentic sources for ideas that people had about the world in the past and present, and the ways they medi­ ated those ideas through storytelling. The area where the main characters live and travel is often described as if the audience is expected to know what the land is like – whereas more emphasis is laid on the utilisation of land further away and land routes to other regions. In that respect the Íslendingasögur are comparable to the songlines in Australia, well-known from Bruce Chatwin (1987), and stories among First Nations in the Americas (Astvaldur Astvaldsson 2006). Places gain significance through stories that are in a way written on the land – as long as there is a continuous culture to share them. Narratives in Landnámabók (Book of Set­ tlements) can be thought of in this way, full as it is of stories and memories about places, place names, routes, events, and named characters, all intertwined with practical information about land boundaries and genealogy. The place, place name, and the story are all intertwined in the minds of the people who know them. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-072



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At the time the sagas were written, people in Iceland had many sources of knowledge about the lands on the other side of the ocean – in which direction to go, how long it would take, what the people were like, and so on. Some would have travelled and could reflect on their own experiences, in addition to reading books and listening to others. Most would rely on second-hand information which they could obtain from oral informants or written works that were read out loud to them. In order to get closer to the traditional milieu of ordinary people, as opposed to the learned centres where the privileged could read works on geography known in Iceland as in the rest of learned Europe (Sverrir Jakobsson 2005), it is better to focus only on the Íslendingasögur which can be analysed in their entirety to draw up the mental map of the world that the sagas are mediating to their audience through the stories. This approach opens up a way to address questions about memory vs. contemporary knowledge, tradition vs. creative storytelling, the practical purposes of storytelling for the mediation of vital information, and also the possible use of written sources during the composition of individual written sagas. Many of the stories about faraway places are likely to have had a vital func­ tion for survival among seafarers, who often had to rely on oral information about how to navigate from A to B and what to expect there. This function can be observed in the two Vinland sagas, Eiríks saga rauða [Eirik the Red’s saga] and Grænlendinga saga [The saga of the Greenlanders]. These sagas cannot be explained except as being based on stories told and retold by generations of sea­ farers who, at the beginning of the storytelling line, had actually been to the lands west and south of Greenland – as confirmed by the archaeological site at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland. The combination of storytelling and archaeol­ ogy gives a unique starting point. The thirteenth-century written sagas and the descriptions of Vinland cannot now be explained except through the continuity of memory of actual events. This, however, says nothing about their truthfulness when it comes to individual events and characters. Stories can be made up and changed every time they are told and there are opportunities for many parallel versions of such tales to spread during the long time that passed between pos­ sible events and saga-writing. The interesting point in this context is that, when combined, the Vinland sagas draw up a coherent picture of the lands west and south of Greenland. Kjalarnes is mentioned in both texts and is located relative to other places with indications of sailing directions and other details. Thus, the sagas can be interpreted as two dif­ ferent reflections of stories in a common tradition which provided the audience in Iceland, many generations after the voyages were undertaken, with a reasonable idea of the scene in which they were set. It is an additional bonus that this coher­

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ent picture or mental map shows a great general resemblance to the geography and natural conditions on the east coast of North America, from Baffin Island in the arctic and south along the Labrador coast, Newfoundland, the Gulf of St Law­ rence, Prince Edward Island, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, the Bay of Fundy, and even beyond Cape Cod to some river mouth in New England. This resemblance is hard to explain unless there was not only continuity but also authenticity in the storytelling tradition through the generations, and it generates two conclusions that must be addressed: first, the tradition can be shown to have mediated a coher­ ent mental picture of the lands beyond; and second, this picture can be explained as a reflection of genuine memory of stories that have reached the writers of sagas after having been passed down, constructed and reconstructed by consecutive generations through the centuries from the time of actual voyages around the year 1000, rather than as a reflection of fiction or a constructed memory in the present of the saga writing (Gísli Sigurðsson 2004, 253–302). Greenland is more unclear than Vinland in the Íslendingasögur even though people must have had first-hand experience of it during the time of writing. It occurs in: Auðunar þáttur vestfirska [The tale of Audun from the West fjords], Eyrbyggja saga [The saga of the people of Eyri], Eiríks saga rauða and Fóstbræðra saga [The saga of the sworn brothers], all in manuscripts from the late 1200s or around 1300; Grænlendinga saga and Hallfreðar saga [The saga of Hallfred] in Flateyjarbók from the end of the 1300s; sagas in *Vatnshyrna from the fifteenth century: Bárðar saga [Bard’s saga], Gísla saga [Gisli’s saga], Flóamanna saga [The saga of the people of Floi] and Króka-Refs saga [The saga of Ref the Sly]; and finally Gunnars saga Keldugnúpsfífls [The saga of Gunnar, the fool of Keld­ ugnup] and Jökuls þáttur Búasonar [Jokul Buason’s tale] in seventeenth century manuscripts. These sagas do not give an overview of Greenland. In view of what emerges about the British Isles below, it may be relevant that people in Iceland had no traditional or collectively shared memory of Greenland. The notion of Greenland is, however, clearly more alive in the west of Iceland, as all the sagas that refer to Greenland are set in the western part of Iceland, closest to Greenland. Known and shared place names in Greenland are few and far between sagas and limited to Brattahlíð, Eiríksfjörður, Einarsfjörður, and the seat of the Bishop in Garðar. It is a common assumption that saga writers used Landnámabók for gene­ alogical and historical information for the creative writing of the fictive sagas. The evidence of Greenland undermines that assumption as Landnámabók has a wealth of place names and local information about Greenland, none of which is used in the sagas set in Greenland. This fact demonstrates that it is unlikely that saga writers were looking up information in Landnámabók – suggesting a tradi­ tion outside written texts as the main source of information for saga writing. The



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writers do not use earlier written sagas either. They are operating with local and traditional information that evolves and changes during the centuries when these texts were written. They go from describing Greenland as an inhabited country with hostile environment, to gradually becoming empty and ending with no human occupation but only trolls when it comes to saga-texts that originate in manuscripts from the seventeenth century – more or less reflecting the historical development through the ages of the Norse settlement in Greenland. Thus, there is no evidence that saga-writers used Landnámabók as a source for information, and different saga writers were operating with first-hand and recent experience of Greenland as a country. There is no evidence of any shared or social memory of Greenland that would provide an overall mental map of the land (Gísli Sigurðs­ son 2011). The British Isles and Ireland are portrayed differently. First, they were wellknown when the sagas were written, both through personal experience and written literature. Second, the people who settled in Iceland knew them from first-hand experience. It can be assumed that long before the sagas were written, many in Iceland could share their ideas about the British Isles and Ireland with new generations – which does not prove that there was a continuity in this shared or social memory in Iceland. Similar knowledge could be reintroduced into the culture through other channels. Some interplay is possible. Social memory could have been reinforced or kept alive through contacts in the British Isles and Ireland. This part of the world is referred to in sagas that focus on characters and events set in the South, West and North of Iceland, that is in areas where there are references to people in the settlement period who come to Iceland from the British Isles and Ireland. These lands are described from the point of view of people sailing back and forth from Norway and Iceland, rather than from the perspective of a learned book on geography. In addition, the topographical infor­ mation focuses on areas where we know of Norse settlements in the Viking age. This suggests that the emphasis is not on information that could be obtained through the learned channels of the Church, which would have communicated with centres of religion and learning in England. This general pattern indicates that the most likely explanatory model is of a continuous social memory in Iceland, which may have been reinforced with some continuity in contacts. The mental map that emerges is of sea-routes around the British Isles and Ireland, going north and west to Iceland, east to Norway and south to France. On land are forests, cities, and a castle – all features that the people of Iceland did not have in their homeland but knew existed in this part of the world. The northern part was a foggy area, with dangerous skerries, landings and hostile natives in places where monolingual speakers of Icelandic would run into language difficulties, except for a few safe-havens where Norse was under­

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stood, and where people were friendly. There was general unrest and ongoing warfare in many areas, and the texts show an awareness of historical change with references to different earls and kings. It is easy to demonstrate that the sagas contain little of what can be con­ firmed as historical sources about the British Isles and Ireland. But they show that people in Iceland had a general idea about this part of the world, its appear­ ance, what the people were like, and who were the best known leaders in dif­ ferent periods (not always very accurate). All of this suggests that saga-writers were not gathering historical information from written works to use in their saga writing but rather operating with traditional memory (Gísli Sigurðsson 2015). In their own way, the sagas explain why communication with the British Isles diminished as links with Norway were strengthened. The difficulties with the fog, foul weather, dangerous skerries, and hostile natives were hardly ever an issue when travellers went from Iceland to Norway. In Norway, the characters from Iceland usually landed their ships with ease and quickly established contact with local friends and family, if not the king himself, thus making Norway the obvious place to go – as it was at the time of writing the sagas. All in all, it can be established that one of the many functions of storytelling in Iceland was to pass on images of near and faraway lands, in order to mediate knowledge and memory that did not always have a literary function in the narra­ tive, but served a practical function for orientation and keeping important infor­ mation alive in the memory of the population. Future work in this field could focus on individual sagas in Iceland, as well as the mental map of Norway and the continent beyond.

Works cited Secondary sources Astvaldur Astvaldsson. 2006. “Reading without Words. Landscapes and Symbolic Objects as Repositories of Knowledge and Meaning.” In Kay Pacha: Cultivating Earth and Water in the Andes. Ed. Penelope Dransart. British Archaeology Report, 1478. Oxford. 107–114. Chatwin, Bruce. 1987. The Songlines. New York. Gísli Sigurðsson. 2004. The Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition: A Discourse on Method. Transl. Nicholas Jones. Publications of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature, 2. Cambridge, MA. [Icelandic orig. 2002] Gísli Sigurðsson. 2011. “Greenland in the Sagas of Icelanders.” In Stanzas of Friendship. Ed. Natalja Y. Gvozdetskaja et al. Moscow. 83–100. Gísli Sigurðsson. 2015. “The Saga Map of Ireland and the British Isles.” In Clerics, Kings and Vikings. Ed. Emer Purcell et al. Dublin. 477–489.



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Gould, Peter and Rodney White. 1974. Mental Maps. London. Sverrir Jakobsson. 2005. Við og veröldin. Reykjavík. Lynch, Kevin. 1960. The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA. Schama, Simon. 1995. Landscape and Memory. New York.

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Pernille Hermann

II: 37 Mnemonic Methods 1 Introduction Medieval Norse texts often refer to minnugir men, that is, men with good memory (cf. Brink 2014). References are found, for instance, in the twelfth-century Íslendingabók [The book of Icelanders], where the author talks about his informants to Icelandic history as men with good memory (Íslendingabók, Ch. 1). In Lárentíus saga biskups [Bishop Larentius’s saga] (from the fourteenth century) it says that the author had kept in memory (“í minni halda”) the knowledge that was now transferred to the written saga (Lárentíus saga biskups, Ch. 1). This latter example indicates that, at the time Lárentíus saga biskups was composed, memory was an important resource even among clerics using alphabetic literacy; this and other examples suggest that throughout the medieval period memory and liter­ acy co-existed as instruments of storage. But what competences did these minnugir men have? The texts do not give much direct or explicit information about mnemonic techniques, i.e., how memory was trained and which methods were used. But indirectly the texts offer several gateways through which methods of memory can be accessed. The techniques used by men of good memory, among whom we include story-tellers and saga-authors, influenced the narrative culture and its organisation, and left a mark on how things, knowledge, and ideas were expressed, making the texts which preserve the narrative culture a highly valuable source to mnemonic techniques and to mnemonic culture more generally. While the texts sometimes reveal what may be reminiscences of mnemonic places, at other times they reflect on or comment on memory, providing us with an idea of memory’s importance and its limitations. Among other things, it is characteristic for many Old Norse narratives that the stories they tell and the knowledge they reveal are firmly anchored spatially, and exactly this spatial concern links them with memory.

2 Case study Memory and place That places call up associations in memory is a generally recognised idea. In a rhetorical context classical writers dealt explicitly with ‘the method of loci’ which https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-073



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was a central component of ‘artificial memory’, a method in which places, prin­ cipally of any kind, but often in the form of architectonic spaces, were created in the mind as a structure to which things that were to be remembered could be attached. Remembering thus happened as a process of recollection, where – by mentally moving through a spacious location – the things remembered were picked up from various places in the created structure. The Roman rhetoricians Cicero and Quintilian saw the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos as the legendary founder of ‘the method of loci’ (De oratore, 465–473; Institutio oratoria, 221). When explaining the origin of the method they referred to the legend where poet Simo­ nides was participating in a banquet, but was called out of the building. While being outside the roof of the banquet hall collapsed and all those present were buried in the ruins. After this deadly catastrophe only Simonides, who based his recollection on the exact order of where the guests had been seated, could iden­ tify the damaged corpses. The Roman rhetoricians learned from this legendary narrative that memory was best supported by spatial means. More generally, the legend signals how memory calls back and mentally brings to life what is gone. Judged from different genres of Old Norse-Icelandic literature the mnemonic efforts of minnugir men might indeed have been inspired by a rich variety of places from the surroundings, such as landscape formations, travel routes, and buildings. Places in the landscape tend to have held a dominant function for memory (Brink 2001; Barraclough 2012), but architectonic spaces (houses, halls, and their interiors, room-divisions, and so on) are often foregrounded and have a marked presence in the texts as well (cf. Glauser 2007, 19). Moreover, as in the legend about Simonides, there is a concern with seating scenes in the texts. A situation in Njáls saga [Njal’s saga] indicates that mnemonic techniques similar to the universal principles described by Roman writers were integral to saga-com­ position (see Hermann 2014). In a scene depicting a wedding, seating in a house is described in great detail: Hann sat á miðjan bekk, en innar frá Þráinn Sigfússon, þá Úlfr aurgoði, þá Valgarðr inn grái, þá Mǫrðr ok Runólfr, þá Sigfússynir; Lambi sat innstr. It næsta Gunnari utar frá sat Njáll, þá Skarpheðinn, þá Helgi, þá Grímr, þá Hǫskuldr, þá Hafr inn spaki, þá Ingjaldr frá Keldum, þá synir Þóris austan ór Holti. Þórir vildi sitja yztr virðingamanna, því at þá þótti hverjum gott þar, sem sat. Hǫskuldr sat á miðjan bekk, en synir hans innar frá honum; Hrútr sat utar frá Hǫskuldi. En þá er eigi frá sagt, hversu öðrum var skipat. Brúðr sat á miðjum palli, en til annarrar handar henni sat Þorgerðr, dóttir hennar, en til annarrar handar Þórhalla, dóttir Ásgríms Elliða-Grímssonar. (Brennu-Njáls saga, Ch. 34) [He himself sat in the middle of the bench, and next to him, on the inside, sat Thrain Sigfus­ son, then Ulf Aur-Godi, Valgerd the Grey, Mord Valgardsson, Runolf, and the sons of Sigfus, with Lambi all the way in. On the other side of Gunnar, toward the door, sat Njal, then Skar­ phedin, then Helgi, then Grim, then Hoskuld, then Haf the wise, then Ingjald from Keldur,

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then the sons of Thorir of Holt over in the east. Thorir himself wanted to sit at the outer edge of the men of worth, for then everyone would think himself well seated. Hoskuld Dala-Kolls­ son sat in the middle of the opposite bench, with his sons to the inside of him. Hrut sat on the other side of Hoskuld, toward the door. There is no report of how the others were seated. The bride sat in the middle of the cross-bench. On one side of her sat her daughter Thorgerd, and on the other Thorhalla, the daughter of Asgrim Ellida-Grimsson. (Njal’s Saga, Ch. 34)]

We note that those present are tightly anchored to specific places, and the narra­ tor’s comment that there is “no report of how the others were seated” indicates an awareness that spatial organisation is key to remembrance and recollection: if somebody is not stamped onto the spatial background structure forgetting intertwines. Besides signalling social status – as has often been suggested (see e.g. Lönnroth 1976, 196–197) – seating scenes like this one might demonstrate glimpses of the mnemonic techniques shared by those in charge of the transmis­ sion of the narratives, the story-tellers and the saga-authors, and their audiences. In this particular scene from Njáls saga seating is tangled with the narrative, as the persons mentioned belong to the two sides of the conflict that is dealt with in this part of saga (cf. Allen 1971, 102). Thus, when recalled in the mind and visual­ ised mentally the seating-order in the house will assist not only the remembrance of key-persons, but also the narrative they are a part of. Egils saga Skallagrímssonar [Egil’s saga] too displays an awareness of seating and spatial anchoring in halls and houses. It consists of a pre-saga and a mainsaga; the first part takes place in Norway and is focussing on conflicts between Kveld-Úlfr and Þórólfr and their complicated relationship with the Norwegian king, Haraldr. Seating in the king’s hall captures the plot of this part of the saga: Af ǫllum hirðmǫnnum virði konungr mest skáld sín; þeir skipuðu annat ǫndvegi. Þeira sat innast Auðun illskælda; hann var elztr þeira, ok hann hafði verit skáld Hálfdanar svarta, fǫður Haralds konungs. Þar næst sat Þorbjǫrn hornklofi, en þar næst sat Ǫlvir hnúfa, en honum it næsta var skipat Bárði; hann var þar kallaðr Bárðr hvíti eða Bárðr sterki [...] Þórólfr var með konungi, ok vísaði konungr honum til sætis milli þeira Ǫlvis hnúfu ok Bárðar [...] (Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar, Ch. 8). [Of all his followers, the king held his poets in highest regard, and let them sit on the bench opposite his high seat. Farthest inside sat Audun the Uninspired, who was the oldest and had been poet to King Harald’s father, Halfdan the Black. Next to him sat Thorbjorn Raven, and then Olvir Hump. Bard was given the seat next to him and was nicknamed Bard the White or Bard the Strong. […] Thorolf stayed with the king, who gave him a seat between Olvir Hump and Bard […] (Egil’s Saga, Ch. 8)]

The seating calls to mind important persons and their relationships. It places Þórólfr opposite the king; Firstly, that makes him a part of the insider group, and, secondly, it shows him as an intruder. Both Ǫlvir and Bárðr are important in the



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narrative: Ǫlvir is the old friend of Þórólfr and now the messenger of the king, and Bárðr testaments his estate to Þórólfr, supporting that he can gain a status equal to a king. Again social status is signaled through seating-positions, while simultaneously being useful for someone recollecting from memory the details of the narrative. The story about Þórólfr is hung up on other house-scenes and hall-gatherings as well. Þórólfr’s high status is expressed when his otherwise magnificent house is not big enough to accommodate all his supporters and visi­ tors, and a huge construction with benches and shields (interior that normally is found inside of the hall) is set up in a large barn next to the house (Ch. 11). The conflict between Þórólfr and Haraldr is settled when the king burns down Þórólfr’s house (Ch. 22). Altogether the hall- and house-scenes (the initial seating in the king’s hall, the great size of the house, and the final burning of it) gives a story-teller, or an author, a sequential background-structure that, when recalled in the mind and visualised mentally, will help to recollect details of the narrative from memory. Mnemonic spaces can mirror, and be inspired by, real spaces or they can be highly imaginative. Memory has been described individually as an ‘an art’ (Yates 1974 [1966]), ‘a craft’ (Carruthers 1990), and as a reserve that requires imagina­ tive ability and thus “incorporates poetic imagination” (Lachmann 2008, 303). Memory requires not only tedious technical competences, but is a resource for creative productivity. This becomes evident not least in spatially-orientated texts presenting the mythological world, for instance, in the Prose Edda. In the frame story of the part called Skáldskaparmál [language of poetry], seating-positions of gods and goddesses in Ásgarðr are mentioned: Ok um kveldit er drekka skyldi, þá lét Óðinn bera inn í hǫllina sverð, ok váru svá bjǫrt at þar af lýsti, ok var ekki haft ljós annat meðan við drykkju var setit. Þá gengu Æsir at gildi sínu ok settusk í hásæti tólf Æsir, þeir er dómendr skyldu vera ok svá váru nefndir: Þórr, Njǫrðr, Freyr, Týr, Heimdallr, Bragi, Viðarr, Váli, Ullr, Hœnir, Forseti, Loki; slíkt sama Ásynjur: Frigg, Freyja, Gefjun, Iðunn, Gerðr, Sigyn, Fulla, Nanna […] Veggþili ǫll váru þar tjǫlduð með fǫgrum skjǫldum. Þar var ok áfenginn mjöðr ok mjǫk drukkit. Næsti maðr Ægi sat Bragi, ok áttusk þeir við drykkju ok orðaskipti. (Skáldskaparmál, 1) [And in the evening when they were about to start the drinking, Odin had swords brought into the hall and they were so bright that light shone from them, and no other light was used while they sat drinking. Then the Æsir instituted their banquet and twelve Æsir who were to be judges took their places in their thrones and their names are as follows: Thor, Niord, Freyr, Tyr, Heimdall, Bragi, Vidar, Vali, Ull, Hænir, Forseti, Loki, similarly the Asyniur, Frigg, Freyia, Gefiun, Idunn, Gerd, Sigyn, Fulla, Nanna. […] The wall-panels were all hung with splendid shields There was also strong mead there and great quantities were drunk. The person sitting next to Ægir was Bragi; (Edda. Snorri Sturluson, 59)]

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The gods and goddesses are placed orderly in thrones, that is, in separate and delineated compartments, and again the situation seems to presuppose a specific seating-situation. One of the functions of mnemonic spaces is to secure order of thought, they function best when things and phenomena remembered are orderly arranged: Thought needs to be able to run through the mnemonic compartments built in the mind without hindrance (Institutio Oratoria, 221). We note that the mythological hall is lit up. Mnemonic spaces ought not to lie in the dark, nor in blinding light, in which cases it becomes difficult to conjure up the space visually in front of the inner eye; Altogether mnemonic spaces must be visually manage­ able to function as organising templates for the one placing things in, and at a later stage recollecting things from, memory (Hermann 2017). The eddic poem Lokasenna [Loki’s Quarrel], one of the poems of the Codex Regius (c. 1270), not only expresses, or show signs of, techniques of memory, it is also commenting on memory, both on mnemonic techniques and on cultural memory. If we look not primarily at the content of Lokasenna, but on its form and its spatial concern, it appears that there is a marked emphasis on the hall and seating in the hall, signalling that the spatial location is more than a neutral stage for Loki’s shaming of the gods. The way Loki proceeds from god to god, approach­ ing them one by one with critique and opposition draws up a picture of the gods being seated and lined up in orderly fashion. As a matter of fact, and pointing to their relevance as an organising principle, it is seating-arrangements that create the structure of the poem. The impression of orderly seating, and consequently comprehensiveness of detail (e.g. the enumeration of everyone present and their actions), is supported by the poem’s prose frame in which the gods are mostly listed in pairs, and when relevant, as married couples. But in what way does this poem offer a comment to memory? Ægir’s hall, where the gods are gathered, has been understood as a symbol of orderly society and peace (see Meulengracht Sørensen 1988), but in addition to that it symbolises one of the most important mnemonic spaces, the hall of memory. We notice, however, that the upright hall, its interior and its seating arrangements, are threatened by destructive forces. Firstly, Loki, who is an intruder, forces his way to a seat in Ægir’s hall (thus, to be remembered as one among the gods). This seating of Loki in the midst of the gods creates disorder in an otherwise neatly organised situation. Secondly, the hall – like in the legend of Simonides – is in danger of collapse. This is indicated by Loki’s threat in the end of the poem and his utterance that the hall will burn: “Er hér inni er / Leikiyfir logi / Ok brenni þér á baki.” (Lokasenna, 421) [“all your possessions that are here inside / may flame play over them / and your back be burnt!” (Loki’s Quarrel, 91)]



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Loki’s words point to a situation where the hall and all it contains will vanish. The motif of disappearing halls is found also in the Prose Edda, in the frame-story of the part called Gylfaginning [the tricking of Gylfi] another example where hall architectures can be understood in combination with, or as representing, mne­ monic techniques (see Hermann 2017). Considering the fact that nearly all the Norse gods are present, the destruction of Ægir’s hall will be similar to the end of the mythological world. The reference to fire gains further meaning from the depiction of Ragnarǫk in Vǫluspá [The Seeress’s Prophecy], which tells that fire will burn up the whole world (Vǫluspá, St. 57). So Lokasenna deals with the vexed relationship between order/chaos, cultural continuation/cultural destruction, and memory/forgetting, and can be understood as a reflection on the uncertainty of memory and the ever-present threat of oblivion and erasure. If we understand the poem from its context in the thirteenth century, at the time when Codex Regius was composed, it may also suggest that the mythology – at that time – is on the edge of forgetting: If Ægir’s hall, its rafters and gables, fall apart, the ability to restore in the mind and to access this imaginative, mythological world through memory will succumb. Lokasenna does not only reflect on mnemonic techniques and their limitations. When attention is turned to its content it becomes clear that it offers a critique of the shared memory of the gods. Loki interrupts the hall-gath­ ering and mercilessly confronts those present with otherwise forgotten or secretly kept acts, alliances and relationships of the past. In bringing to the surface forgot­ ten or repressed relations Loki displaces and challenges the cultural memory of the god-group. The passages that are dealt with above may indicate that remote echoes of mnemonic spaces and images that were used to remember key persons, impor­ tant storylines and plots, as well as mythic narratives, can be found in the texts; and they may be indicative of the narratives’ background in memory. Despite the relevance of mnemonic places some of the texts illustrate that the contin­ ued existence of techniques of memory were challenged; like, for instance, when Lokasenna pinpoint how the great halls of memory rested on fragile ground. The complex process in which mnemonic spaces were detached from the mind and released from their bodily location instead to become a part of writing culture is outside the topic of this article, which limits itself to focussing on one of many points of intersections between medieval Norse texts and memory. The argument, however, recognises that the narratives at our disposal have been transferred to, and cultivated in, manuscripts, and during this process what might once have been incised into mnemonic places of the minds of storytellers and their audi­ ences has become embedded into texts as bits and pieces of narratives.

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Works cited Primary sources Brennu-Njáls saga. Ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson. ÍF, 12. Reykjavík, 1954. De oratore. In Cicero. III. Ed. and trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA, 1967. Edda. Snorri Sturluson. Trans. Anthony Faulkes. London, 1995. Egil’s saga. Trans. Bernard Scudder. In The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, I. Ed. Viðar Hreinsson. Reykjavík, 1997. 33–77. Egils saga Skallagrímssonar. Ed. Sigurður Nordal. ÍF, 2. Reykjavík, 1933. Institutio oratoria. In The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian. IV. Trans. H. E. Butler. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA, and London, 1961. Íslendingabók. In Íslendingabók. Landnámabók. Ed. Jakob Benediktsson. ÍF, 1. Reykjavík, 1986. 1–28. Lárentíus saga biskups. In Biskupa sögur. 3. Ed. Guðrún Ása Grímsdóttir. ÍF, 17. Reykjavík, 1998, 215–441. Lokasenna. In Eddukvæði. Ed. Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, ÍF. Reykjavík, 2014. I: 408–421. Loki’s Quarrel. Trans. Carolyne Larrington. In The Poetic Edda. Rev. ed. Oxford, 2014. 84–96. Njal’s Saga. Trans. Robert Cook. In The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. 3. Ed. Viðar Hreinsson. Reykjavík, 1997. 1–220. Skáldskaparmál. In Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Skáldskaparmál. 1–2. Ed. Anthony Faulkes. 1998.

Secondary sources Allen, Richard F. 1971. Fire and Iron. Critical Approaches to Njáls saga. Pittsburgh. Barraclough, E. R. 2012. “Naming the Landscape in the Landnám Narratives of the Íslendingasögur and Landnámabók”. Saga-Book 36: 79–101. Brink, Stefan. 2001. “Mythologizing Landscape. Place and Space of Cult and Myth.” In Kontinuitäten und Brüche in der Religionsgeschichte. Festschrift für Anders Hultgård zu seinem 65. Geburtstag am 23.12.2001. Ed. M. Stausberg et al. Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde, 31. Berlin and New York. 76–112. Brink, Stefan. 2014. “Minnunga mæn. The Usage of Old Knowledgeable Men.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 197–210. Carruthers, Mary J. 1990. The Book of Memory. A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 10. Cambridge. Glauser, Jürg. 2007. “The Speaking Bodies of Saga Texts.” In Learning and Understanding in the Old Norse World. Essays in Honour of Margaret Clunies Ross. Ed. Judy Quinn, Kate Heslop and Tarrin Wills. Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe, 18. Turnhout. 13–26. Hermann, Pernille. 2014. “Key Aspects of Memory and Remembering in Old Norse-Icelandic Literature.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille



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Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 13–39. Hermann, Pernille. 2017. “The Mind’s Eye: The Triad of Memory, Space and the Sense in Old Norse Literature.” European Journal of Scandinavian Studies 47.1: 203–217. Lachmann, Renate. 2008. “Mnemonic and Intertextual Aspects of Literature.” In Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Media and Cultural Memory, 8. Berlin and New York. 301–310. Lönnroth, Lars. 1976. Njáls saga. A Critical Introduction. Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles, CA, and London. Meulengracht Sørensen, Preben. 1988. “Loki’s Senna in Ægir’s Hall.” In Idee. Gestalt. Geschichte. Festschrift Klaus von See. Ed. Gerd Wolfgang Weber. Odense. 239–259. Yates, Frances. 1974 [1966]. The Art of Memory. Chicago, IL.

Action Performing commemoration

Terry Gunnell

II: 38 Ritual 1 Introduction Memory naturally forms an essential component of ritual (religious, secular, or festive) which involves acts (often closely associated with spoken words) that are repeated (in varying degrees) at regular intervals (commonly at particular times and in particular spaces), and have gained additional importance (and implied power, social, religious, superstitious or otherwise) for those involved, on the basis of the fact that those involved remember them having been performed before and (on the basis of previously remembered associations) feel the neces­ sity of performing them again (drawing on the knowledge preserved in the memo­ ries) (see, for example, Rappaport 1979, 176, 182, 192; and Bell 1997, 159–169). While rituals can be carried out privately (for personal superstitious or reli­ gious reasons, or perhaps as a form of magic), social rituals (conducted for reli­ gious or secular reasons) will have been forged into their present form in some form of shared space over the course of some time, and will naturally represent a form of shared cultural memory, shaped communally by those involved (some of whom will tend to be more active and respected tradition bearers than others). In action, they will draw not only on some form of physical muscle memory, but also invoke memories of past events, and past participants no longer present, as well as drawing on different forms of knowledge which can add potency to the moment by creating what Eliade refers to as a sense of ‘sacred time’ in which past (mythical and historical) and present blend to create a powerful performa­ tive moment (Eliade 1958, 388–408; Assmann 2006, 3; and Rappaport 1979, 194 and 200). There is also a sense that in people’s minds, the future is being made less uncertain, and that those involved (and those objects and places involved) have been permanently transformed in some way (see, for example, Schechner 2013, 72–74; and Turner 1969, 1982). Joint participation in rituals will also serve to underline the degree to which they represent a form of shared form of cul­ tural memory, commonly involving a sense of ‘flow’ and ‘communitas’ which will underline a sense of enduring cultural unity in the minds of those involved (Assmann 2006, 13; Turner 1969; and Schechner 2013, 66–72).

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-074

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2 Case study: Aspects of memory in sacrifice and ritual The following case studies examine the degree to which both festive ritual (involv­ ing sacrifice) and other seasonally-associated magical rites in the pre-Christian Old Norse world (initially passed down as oral narratives and later preserved in texts with a strong Christian bent) will have not only drawn on but also instilled experiential memory and belief of various kinds.

A vetrnætr sacrifice Þiðranda þáttr ok Þórhalls [The tale of Thidrandi and Thorhall] forms part of Ólafs saga Tryggvasonar [The saga of Óláfr Tryggvason] in Flateyjarbók. Although seasonal vetrnætr [lit. Winter Nights] sacrifices are referred to on several other occasions in the sagas, Þiðranda þáttr provides most detail about what such sac­ rifices might have entailed in pre-Christian times, and the degree to which they drew on (and created) memories of various kinds, revealing new levels concern­ ing the close connections between festival, ritual and memory that deserve more attention than they have received in the past. The shape and preservation of the þáttr in the late-fourteenth century manu­ script underlines that fact that it had already taken the form of at least two kinds of cultural memory (see further Kaplan 2000). Describing events that apparently took place on the farm of Hallr of Síða at Hof [lit. temple] in Eastern Iceland shortly before the formal acceptance of Christianity in Iceland in AD 999/1000 (at least a hundred years before the earliest extant manuscripts were written in the country), the account is placed in the context of the Christianisation process (Hallr being one of the primary instigators of this process). It is written in a par­ ticularly stiff liturgical style, and infused with a strong degree of Christian sym­ bolism, telling of the death of Hallr’s eighteen-year-old son Þiðrandi at the hands of a number of horse-riding supernatural female dísir on the evening of the pagan vetrnætr celebrations at Hof. In its present context in the manuscript, the account takes on the role of a prophetic event preceding and boding the arrival of the new religion, the pagan seer, Þórhallr, who is a guest at the event, directly adopting the role of a male sybil, later interpreting the two groups of supernatural women (one dressed in black, the other in white) as having been representatives of the two different religions. It is nonetheless highly questionable whether this account, which must have had some origin in communicative family memory, was preserved for so long as



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part of the cultural oral tradition of the area for purely Christian reasons: Indeed, oral accounts of Þiðrandi’s death at the hands of the dísir are also referred to as part of Brennu-Njáls saga (Ch. 96) [Njál’s saga], a saga believed to have been written c. 1300 (Einar Ólafur Sveinsson 1954, lxxvv). There can be little question that, as Brennu-Njáls saga suggests, the reason for preservation was Þiðrandi’s violent death which was attributed to the supernatural women. The fact that the supernatural figures in question were seen as being dísir (see further Gunnell 2000) underlines direct links not only to cultural memories of pre-Christian reli­ gion, but also to the vetrnætr, which were also referred to as the time of the dísablót sacrifice (an idea that might also lie behind the Christian idea of martyrdom in the extant account). Indeed, several other key aspects of the account would appear to be pre-Christian (and unlikely to have been imagined by Christians with no personal knowledge of past pagan tradition). It is thus likely that one further reason for passing on and preserving the account in pre-Christian times (and perhaps even afterwards) was that it served to underline the existence and the power of the dísir (which are even given Christian counterparts). There is thus good reason to consider the form and nature of the communicative memory that appears to lie behind the cultural, and the information it may preserve about the nature of the original ritual described in the account, and the types of memory that were probably involved in the vetrnætr festival. It is worth noting too that the account contains several key features concern­ ing pagan festivals that are supported elsewhere: First of all, the events take place at Hallr’s haustboð [autumn gathering)] to which Þórhallr spámaðr [the seer] along with all of Hallr’s menn [lit. people] is invited, and at which another spámaðr in the shape of a twelve-winter old bull is going to be slaughtered. The repetition of the idea of prophecy (demonstrated by Þórhallr’s forebodings and his later explanations), and the connection between this and the name of the bull to be sacrificed suggests that the two were somehow equated at some point, even though they have become separated in terms of narrative memory, remain­ ing only as individual motifs. While nothing more is stated about the sacrifice itself, one notes also that the main events of the story take place at night time, when everyone else has gone to sleep, accompanied by a warning from the clairvoyant Þórhallr that no one should leave the building (thereby stressing clear borderlines between the inside household/ family [see Murphy, forthcoming] and an outside threat). Following three knocks at the door, Þiðrandi goes outside armed, and: heyrde at ridit uar nordan a uollinn. hann sa at þar uoru konur. ix. ok voru allar j suǫrtum klædum ok hǫfdu brugdin suerd j hondum. hann hreyde ok at ridit uar sunnan a uollinn þar voru ok .ix. konur allar j ljosum klædum ok a hvitum hestum. þa uillde þidrande snua inn

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aftr ok segia monnum synina. þa bar þar at fyrr konurnar þær hinar suartklæddu ok sottu at honum en hann uardizst uel ok dreingiliga. (Flateyjarbók, 1, 420) [heard the sound of riding coming into the field from the north. He saw that there were nine women, all of them in black clothes and with drawn swords in their hands. He also heard the sound of riding into the field from the south. There were another nine women, all of them in light clothes, and on white horses. Then Þiðrandi wanted to go back in and tell people about the sight, but the women, those dressed in black, got to him first and they attacked him. He defended himself bravely. (author’s translation)]

While the motif of the group of women dressed in white coming riding from the south can almost certainly be discounted as a Christian addition, the other key features of the account make some sense, not least that of the dísir riding horses, a motif also reflected in Ynglingatal [list of the Ynglings] in Ynglinga saga [saga of the Ynglings] (Chs. 17, 29) and the idea of the riding valkyrjur (see Gunnell 2000; Murphy 2013). In short, the focus of the festival appears to be on the various turning points and borderlines, and a meeting between worlds (and those relat­ ing to them): unlike those Christian festivals relating to such encounters (Christ­ mas and Easter), this festival is firmly rooted in the pagan calendar, set in the liminal nights (always in plural) occurring between the end of summer (the old year) and the beginning of winter (the new year), a time at which (with the help of a sacrifice) those present can be granted insight into supernatural knowledge/ memory of the future (ǫrlǫg ‘fate’), something which is commonly said to be in the hands of female goddesses (see, for example, Lokasenna [Loki’s Quarrel], Sts 25, 29; Gylfaginning [the tricking of Gylfi], Ch. 20; Ynglinga saga, Ch. 4); the nornir (supernatural women who have knowledge of the future: see Vǫluspá [The Seeress’s Prophecy], especially Sts 1–2, 20–22, 28–31); and seeresses (who may well have taken on the roles of the former as part of their seiðr ritual: see also Bek-Pedersen 2011). The high point of the gathering is in the late evening (another turning point, although as with seiðr, one would expect events to be focused at twilight, the liminal time between night and day). Other apparently temporary chaotic elements of change (and alteration) are seen in the stress on women coming from the wild area outside the farm (like those in Vǫluspá, Sts 8, 20, 22) not only riding horses and wielding arms (a male activity), but also riding onto and across a cultivated field, which they appear to control even as far as the wood pile where Þiðrandi attempts to find shelter. Inside (in what is usually deemed to be a female space) are the men, one of whom seems to be expected to adopt the traditionally female role of seeing into the future (one notes that no women are mentioned as being part of the proceedings inside). As noted, few of these latter features would appear to originate in Christian­ ity. If, as assumed here, these features originated in pagan tradition, it is easy to



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understand not only how this particular story might have come to remain in the oral tradition, but also how it might have lent added power to those memories that the cult activity itself would have instilled and annually revived. One can see parallels in the ways in which Yuletide ritual guising traditions and narratives about the Norwegian oskoreia/juleskreia (a form of the Wild Ride) in nineteenthand early twentieth-century Norway would have actively served to support living beliefs in the existence and threat of this group of supernatural beings (see, for example, Eike 1980). Similar uses of oral narratives as a means of preserving beliefs are seen in the present day in Icelandic legends dealing with álagablettir [enchanted spots] and Irish legends dealing with raths [fairy forts], and in earlier Nordic legends dealing with grave mounds, all of which are/ were meant to be left untouched, granting them an effective traditional preservation order and an element of supernatural power (see further Gunnell 2014, forthcoming). Such narratives and cult activities would also have underlined the degree to which mythical time was closely interrelated with human time, something that would have been strengthened by the potential symbolism of the interior of the longhouse which in this case was literally named Hof [temple]). All Nordic houses at this time had the potential to be transformed into an image of the pagan cosmos (Gunnell 2001), just as the church could effectively be transformed into an image of the Christian cosmos as part of Christian ceremony (see further Laugerud 2010). All houses contained blocks of wood called dvergar [dwarfs] which held up the roof, their mythological name underlining the potential for the roof to ‘become’ the sky, for the carved pillars around the high seat to ‘become’ the world tree, and the cauldron over the fire Urðarbrunnr in the minds of those present, simul­ taneously bestowing a supernatural dimension to the person sitting in the high seat, not least if he or she was wearing a mask of some kind, like the Sutton Hoo helmet (only one eye of which would light up in firelight, see Price and Mortimer 2014). Such moments of symbolic awareness and mystic experience are not easily forgotten. As with most other seasonal festive activities, the gathering inside the house, and its shared activities (which, as noted above, would have involved the sharing of the sacrificial meal and the consumption of strong alcohol which would have added yet another dimension to the liminal experience) would have also effec­ tively served to underline a sense of communitas and unity within the household group. Of particular interest here, though, is the way in which the vetrnætr narra­ tive, beliefs and associated rituals would have also served to build and underline a sense of gender for those involved, underlining the role(s) played by women in society and not least their close connection to the supernatural, the natural world, the winter season and the night.

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A seiðr ritual As with the example from Þiðranda þáttr ok Þórhalls, the following instance from Eiríks saga rauða [Eirik the Red’s saga] places a strong emphasis on gender roles, and also seems to be closely associated with the vetrnætr and prophecy. Unlike the festive rituals practiced during the vetrnætr, it seems clear that seiðr as a specific form of magical ritual could be practised at different times, by differ­ ent genders and for different purposes (see further Strömbäck 2000; Price 2002; Dillmann 2006; Tolley 2009). The account in Eiríks saga rauða (Ch. 4) is preserved in slightly differing wording in both the early fourteenth-century Hauksbók (AM 544 4to), and the mid fifteenth-century Skálholtsbók (AM 557 4to) manuscripts. It tells in some detail of a prophetic seiðr ritual carried out by a woman called Þorbjǫrg lítilvǫlva in the Norse settlement of Greenland c. AD 1000. While the account in question features Guðríðr Þórbjarnardóttir, a Christian woman who was one of the earliest Norse settlers of North America and is said to have later travelled to Rome, this account has little of the Christian veneer of Þiðranda þáttr ok Þórhalls. If the scene is based on memories preserved within Guðríðr’s family (since it ends with Þorbjǫrg accu­ rately foretelling Guðríðr’s future), it must have lived in oral tradition, or com­ municative memory, for at least a century before being recorded (a somewhat shorter timespan than Þiðranda þáttr). Bearing this in mind, the details given of the seeress’s costume, her equipment and the nature of her ritual is somewhat surprising, not least considering the wariness of many Christian scribes with regard to accounts of pagan cult. Indeed, as Price has shown (2002, 108–210), archaeological evidence from women’s graves of similar staffs to that described in the account (with a brass knob on top) has given credence to the veracity of the account. One must assume that these details remained in memory because of the visual impression made by the woman in question, by the truthfulness of her prophecy and/or the power of the unique experience, not least for Guðríðr herself and her family (one of whom later built one of the earliest churches in Iceland). As noted above, the account in question has been discussed in some detail elsewhere (see also Mitchell 2001; Gunnell 1995, 335–338; and in a memory studies perspective, Mitchell 2013, 295–297), and thus less attention will be given here to the symbolic value of Þorbjǫrg’s clothes involving a strapped mantle decked with precious stones, a string of glass beads, a hood of black lambskin lined with catskin, a belt carrying (or made of) dried tree fungus (hnjóskr) and various charms in a pouch, fur-lined catskin gloves, and laced calfskin boots. Of most interest here are those features of the account which deal with the ritual itself, which also appears to have taken place at the start of winter (um vetrum) and (as with the ritual in Þiðranda þáttr) been designed to result in a prophecy for



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the coming year (árferð) and other aspects of fate (forlǫg). It clearly involved two parts. First of all came an early evening meal (um kveldit), in which the visiting seeress took the place of the head of the family in his high seat (hásæti), and was given porridge made of kid’s milk. She was then presented with a meal made of the hearts of “ǫllum kykvendum, þeim er þar váru til” (Eiríks saga rauða, Ch. 4) [all of the animals that were present there], something which implies the need for a large preparatory blood sacrifice (even though nothing is stated about this in the extant account, possibly because it was less fitting to be preserved in cultural memory). There may even be some vague idea that knowledge, or access to it, is contained in these hearts. The second stage is said to have taken place a day later (following a necessary night’s sleep), once again, it would seem, at twilight (at áliðnum degi [late in the day]), and now outside, since it involved a form of a staging centring on a raised platform (hjalli) where Þorbjǫrg sat surrounded by a ring of women. (The archaeological remains of halls or longhouses make it clear that it would have been difficult to construct such a stage within the building itself.) The stress on liminality (the start of winter; the start of the evening, and the fact that Þorbjǫrg needs to contact the nature spirits of the area [náttúrur]) would suggest a setting on the periphery of the farm, between the cultivated area and the wild, a setting in which grave mounds tended to be built (cf. the custom of útiseta, which also involved sitting up ‘high’, in this case on a grave in order to gain knowledge from the dead). Þorbjǫrg’s prophetic ritual itself obviously involves both words and action, and, once again, a strong element of gender division. There is first of all need for knowledge of “frœði þat, sem til seiðsins þarf ok Varðlokkur [Varðlokur in AM 557] hétu” (Eiríks saga rauða, Ch. 4) [that knowledge which is needed for seiðr rituals, which was called ‘protective-spirit-calling’ (or protective-spiritguarding) (author’s translation)] which is only known by some women, and here only known by Guðríðr. As has been discussed elsewhere (see especially Mitch­ ell 2001, 66–70; Strömbäck 2000, 124–140), the uncertainty in the spelling of the word not only underlines its origin in the oral tradition and later loss of meaning, but also the possibility that the song or chant could have had one of several pur­ poses: as a varðlokkur, it may have been designed to call nature spirits to Guðríðr, or alternately to call her soul back from a shamanic journey (something which is viewed as being more likely); on the other hand, as a varðlokur, it may have been designed to protect her from them by creating some kind of enclosure around her or alternately enclosing the spirits in the space around her in some way. Whatever the answer, the word fræði and the verb kynni [lit. ‘knew; was able to do’] used with it in both manuscripts naturally underline the element of knowledge and the fact that this knowledge (known only to women) was shared, and meant to be used in conjunction with the skills demonstrated by Þorbjǫrg on her stage (both

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learned and apparently innate – since Þorbjǫrg’s nine sisters also mentioned in the account seem to have also learnt or been gifted with the ability to carry out seiðr). Clearly in danger of being forgotten and brought from Iceland to Green­ land after being taught to Guðríðr by her foster-mother (thus preserved for some time), the song or chant (which is later described as having been kvæðit fagrt ok vel [chanted both well and beautifully], in a particularly fegri rǫdd [beauti­ ful voice]) would seem to have been accompanied by a ring dance of some kind, considering the fact that the women “slógu […] hring um hjallan sem Þorbjǫrg sat uppi” (Eiríks saga rauða, Ch. 4) [beat a ring around the platform that Þorbjǫrg sat up on (author’s translation)] the verb slá [beat/stamped?] being directly used in association with dance (að slá dans) in several other sources (see Gunnell 1995, 144, 336). There can be little question that such combined song and repetitive rhythmic circling dance movement would not only have helped to mark out a gender-related performance space, involving a female inside and a male outside, but simultaneously invoked while it lasted (most important for memory) a strong sense of trance-like liminality and communitas amongst the women involved, impressing the words and the event deeply into their minds (see further Schech­ ner 2013, 97–98, 192–203 on shamanic trance-performances and the sense of ‘flow’ attainable in some performances). Perhaps most powerful of all, even though it is not stressed in the account, is the fact that the performance might have involved a strong element of drama in the fact that all of those involved referred to Þorbjǫrg as a vǫlva [seeress], thereby not only placing her on a parallel to the seemingly ageless vǫlva who chants Vǫluspá to the god Óðinn (Odin) while sitting úti (St. 28); the dead vǫlva he encounters on another periphery (at the gates of Hel) in Baldrs draumar [Baldr’s Dreams]; and the nornir at Urðarbrunnr (see Bek-Pedersen 2011). In that sense, it could be argued that the performance, like that in Þiðranda þáttr, momentarily invokes and draws on a sense of ‘sacred time’ as the mythical becomes part of the day to day. It might also be argued that in the memories of those involved, this invocation and mythical doubling of identity would have not only given added power to Þorbjǫrg in daily life, but also helped to burn the moment into their minds even after the platform was dismantled and Þorbjǫrg had vanished back into the wild space between farms the next day. One can understand why it might have been remembered in such detail, and preserved for so long in oral family tradition.



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Works cited Primary sources Eiríks saga rauða. In Eyrbyggja saga, Brands þáttr ǫrva. Eiríks saga rauda. Grœnlendinga saga. Grœnlendinga þáttr. Ed. Einar Ólafur Sveinsson and Matthías Þorðarson. ÍF, 4. Reykjavík, 1935. 193–237. Þiðranda þáttr ok Þórhalls. In Flateyjarbók. En samling af norske konge-sagaer med indskudte mindre fortællinger om begivenheder i og udenfor Norge samt annaler. Ed. Guðbrandur Vigfússon and C. R. Unger. 1. Christiania, 1860. 418–421.

Secondary sources Assmann, Jan. 2006. “What is ‘Cultural Memory’?” In Religion and Cultural Memory. Ten Studies. Trans. Rodney Livingston. Stanford, CA. 1–30. Bek-Pedersen, Karen. 2011. The Norns in Old Norse Mythology. Edinburgh. Bell, Catherine. 1997. Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions. Oxford. Dillmann, François-Xavier. 2006. Les magiciens dans l’Islande ancienne: Ètudes sur la représentation de la magie islandaise et de ses agents dans les sources littéraires norroises. Acta Academiae Regiae Gustavi Adolphi, 92. Uppsala. Eike, Christine N. F. 1980. “Oskoreia og ekstaseriter”. Norveg 23: 227–309. Einar Ólafur Sveinsson. 1954. “Formáli”. In Brennu-Njáls saga. Ed. Einar Ólafur Sveinsson. ÍF, 12. Reykjavík. v–clxiii. Eliade, Mircea. 1958. Patterns in Comparative Religion. Trans. Rosemary Sheed. London. Gunnell, Terry. 1995. The Origins of Drama in Scandinavia. Cambridge. Gunnell, Terry. 2000 (pub. 2005). “The Season of the Dísir: The Winter Nights and the Dísarblót in Early Scandinavian Belief.” Cosmos 16: 117–149. Gunnell, Terry 2001 (pub. 2005). “Hof, Halls, Goðar and Dwarves: An Examination of the Ritual Space in the Pagan Icelandic Hall.” Cosmos 17: 3–36. Gunnell, Terry. 2014. “Nordic Folk Legends, Folk Traditions and Grave Mounds: The Value of Folkloristics for the Study of Old Nordic Religions.” In New Focus on Retrospective Methods: Resuming Methodological Discussions: Case Studies from Northern Europe. Ed. Eldar Heide and Karen Bek-Pedersen. FFC, 307. Helsinki. 17–41. Gunnell, Terry. Forthcoming. “The Power in the Place: Icelandic Álagablettir Legends in a Comparative Context.” In Storied and Supernatural Places: Studies in Spatial and Social Dimensions of Folklore and Sagas. Ed. Ülo Valk and Daniel Sävborg. Studia Fennica Folkloristica, 23. Helsinki. Kaplan, Merrill. 2000. “Prefiguration and the Writing of History in Þáttr Þiðranda ok Þórhalls.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 99: 379–394. Laugerud, Henning. 2010. “To See With the Eyes of the Soul: Memory and Visual Culture in Medieval Europe.” Arv: Nordic Yearbook of Folklore 66: 146–159. Mitchell, Stephen A. 2001 (pub. 2005). “Warlocks, Valkyries and Varlets: A Prolegomenon to the Study of North Sea Witchcraft Terminology.” Cosmos 17: 59–81.

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Mitchell, Stephen A. 2013. “Memory, Mediality, and the ‘Performative Turn’: Recontextualizing Remembering in Medieval Scandinavia.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 282–305. Murphy, Luke John. 2013. “Herjans Dísir: Valkyrjur, Supernatural Feminities, and Elite Warrior Culture in the Late Pre-Christian Iron Age.” Unpublished MA Thesis, University of Iceland. Murphy, Luke. Forthcoming. “Domestic and Household Religion in the Pre-Archaic North: Pre-Christian Private Praxis.” Price, Neil S. 2002. The Viking Way: Religion and War in Late Iron Age Scandinavia. Aun, 31. Uppsala. Price, Neil S., and Paul Mortimer. 2014. “An Eye for Odin? Divine Role-Playing in the Age of Sutton Hoo.” European Journal of Archaeology 17: 517–538. Rappaport, Roy A. 1979. “The Obvious Aspects of Ritual.” In Roy Rappaport, Ecology, Meaning and Religion. Berkeley, CA. 173–221. Schechner, Richard. 2013. Performance Studies: An Introduction. 3rd rev. ed. London. Strömbäck, Dag. 2000. Sejd och andra studier i nordisk själsuppfattning. Ed. Gertrud Gildund. Acta Academiae regiae Gustavi Adolphi, 72. Uppsala. Tolley, Clive. 2009. Shamanism in Norse Myth and Magic. FFC, 296–297. 2 Vols. Helsinki. Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago, IL. Turner, Victor. 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York.

Joseph Harris

II: 39 Ritual Lament 1 Introduction Our contemporary world, in both everyday life and in calendar customs, is full of very obvious performative commemorations in which enactment of a ritual com­ prises a ‘group memory’, as we might etymologise commemoration. This class of commemoration contrasts with objects, such as tombstones and war memorials, though of course object and ritual action come together at creation or dedication or simply when we do things like lay wreathes; sometimes the memorial object is consumed, even literally, by the ritual performance (e.g. alcoholic drink), and very frequently the performance and its repetition come to overshadow any real exercise of memory. Commemorative objects survive from the pre-modern North (e.g. many rune stones), but the relatively little commemorative ritual attested in manuscript sources is mainly associated with death and the ancestors, as in genealogies, which in the period before writing had to be performed to be remembered and sometimes specify modes of death and burial (e.g. Ynglingatal [List of the Ynglingar], Beowulf). Some rituals around death were the genera­ tive locus of poetry, verbal commemorative objects, functionally like rune stones but originally, before textualisation, dependent on performance. These rituals, like rituals in general, were “part of cultural memory because they are the form through which cultural meaning is both handed down and brought to present life” (Assmann 2011, 6). In the absence of direct anthropological observation, however, the surviving memorial poems necessarily become precious focal points for knowledge of early Nordic cultural memory.

2 Case study: Death and mourning The disposal of a corpse is the first phase of death rituals and normally falls to the family but can be incumbent upon anyone who discovers a corpse (Sigrdrífumál [The Lay of Sigrdrifa] 33–34; Gulathing Law par. 161). Archaeology, with some support from manuscript sources, yields rich descriptions both of cremations and of inhumations. One might suppose that there was little space for voiced grief or other forms of commemoration during this active phase, and yet contemporary archeology emphasises the drawn out, dramatic nature of disposal, at least for elites. The time required for the famous funeral on the Volga described by Ibn https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-075

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Fadlan has been estimated at at least ten days (Price 2010, 133–137); this happens to be the time required for the building of Beowulf’s barrow (Beowulf, 3159b), so that the whole of his obsequies requires much more, and the Old English epic repeatedly depicts thoughts or utterances of grief in the midst of funeral activ­ ity (Beowulf, 49b–50a; 1071–1080a; 3148b–3155a) or in the presence of the undis­ posed dead (Beowulf, 2444–2454). In Beowulf the moment of most formal remem­ brance and praise comes last of all rites (the old father’s “sorhleoð” [sorrow song] in 2460–2461a), though it is impossible to say how much imagined time passed before the final circumequitation of the hero’s twelve horsemen (3169– 3182). Later we hear of set periods before conclusion of ceremonies (three, seven, or nine days), with possible Christian roots; on the other hand, such periods, especially thirty (or forty), have much wider distribution in the world’s cultures (Ranke 1951); older Norse sources tend to the practical (the space of time dictated by weather or the necessity to gather provisions). Norse sources offer no close parallels to the last scene in Beowulf, even for kings. Instead, the Norse funeral period is closed with a feast (veizla, erfi, erfiøl), the taking of food and drink in the context of death being a very ancient and widespread custom (Beck 1989; Bø 1960; Briem 1956). Norse sources several times connect the funeral feast with the heir coming into his inheritance; and in two well-attested cases the veizla is explicitly the site of performance of elegiac poetry associated with the dead (Landnámabók [The Book of Settlements] S207, H174 and Egils saga, Ch. 78).

Ritual lament Lament poetry is a worldwide phenomenon of both high cultures and tradi­ tional ones, where it is usually functional within a ritual context. Collections of references to early Continental Germanic lament are found in scholars such as Ehrismann (1954 [1932], 41–44). Literary historians have traditionally used the different lexemes to elaborate classes of such utterances (Krause 2000). Some scholars reject a too general use of ‘elegy’ for any similar poetry of loss – “eine Lyrik des ewigen Abschieds” (a lyric of eternal farewall), as it is characterized by Honko (1991–1993, 1405) – but this usage has the advantage of linking to modern and world literature and of subsuming, for example, the tears of the elderly king Hrothgar for his youth (Beowulf, 2105–2115) or of his contemporary, the Vandal king Gelimer for his situation in 534, besieged on a mountain near Carthage (Pro­ copius IV.vi.27–34). A modern concept such as ‘self-elegy’ (cf. Ramazani 1990) should be no stranger to the medieval field. Folk laments, still functional in their societies, probably constituted the ultimate organic root of sophisticated elegy – an argument made by scholars as different as Schücking for OE (1908) and Holst-



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Warhaft for Greek (1992). Old Norse has references to lamentation but nothing resembling a folklorist’s transcription of an oral lament; but Mundal (2013) argues convincingly that traces within the eddic elegies preserve evidence of women’s oral laments. Eddic poetry (including the Eddica minora) is based, however, on legend rather than life – that is, it is literature in a strict sense. Its relation to ritual, audience, and commemoration and its never-mapped role in cultural memory would be more complex than for the non-fictional forms directly concerned with real life and death. These comprise: many runic inscriptions in prosimetrical language memorializing dead leaders or family members; a few single-stanza skaldic lausavísur generated in specific occasions; and, the major form, longer skaldic compositions in praise of the dead.

Erfidrápa and erfikvæði Within the older segment (to c. 1100) of the huge skaldic corpus, a generous handful of poems have survived of the presumably many more composed in memory of a deceased lord or friend (Fidjestøl 1982 concludes that some 16–35 surviving poems qualify). No comprehensive study of this thematically and func­ tionally defined group can be cited (for a start, Fidjestøl 1982, 193–198; Harris 2006, 2010), but a brilliant account of the subgroup that is labeled in the manu­ scripts with the genre designation erfidrápa can be a starting point (Fidjestøl 1989). The sources so label six poems that had the form drápa and were com­ posed for a funeral (erfi) or similarly to commemorate the dead. The drápa, a long poem normally in the metre dróttkvætt and equipped with a refrain, was the most esteemed courtly form; a lesser form without refrain was the flokkr, and erfiflokkar are also mentioned. Fidjestøl based his characterisation on a corpus of the six erfidrápur proper plus six more closely similar poems that lack only the genre label. The result is highly uniform: praise and enumeration of victories and journeys of the deceased patron constitute a content and style little different from eulogy of the living (Fidjestøl 1989, 485, agreeing with Heusler 1943, 130). The challenge to these poets would seem to have been how to report the defeat and death of their hero in an inherently triumphalist genre. Despite some limited personal expression of grief, these erfidrápur bear witness to a strictly male, early Christian court culture, almost entirely of the eleventh century. Like all early skaldic poetry, this group relied on memory for composition and transmission. Behind and beyond this corpus, lies a more eclectic hinterland of commemo­ rative poems known as erfikvæði, where kvæði is a more general qualifier than drápa – so simply ‘funeral poems’. In fact, the term appears only once but then clearly as a non-technical genre term that today is regarded as taking in Eiríksmál

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[The Lay of Eiríkr] (after 954), Hákonarmál [The Lay of Hákon] (c. 961), and Sonatorrek [Irreparable Loss of Sons] (c. 961), culturally rich poems of broader liter­ ary interest; many scholars use it broadly as a cover term. The word-family of erfi itself has been illuminated from a philological and cultural perspective by Grønvik (1982), and his study of the Tune Stone (Grønvik 1981), together with the saga sources, render a rich background for the erfikvæði outside the more strictly definable erfidrápa context. Moreover, thematic continuities – topoi like the asso­ ciation of eschatology with individual death – from the older erfikvæði group to the erfidrápur and on to the eddic groups create an ON elegiac complex of great cultural and literary significance.

Sonatorrek Sonatorrek is justly the most famous poem of this complex, a lament, an erfikvæði, an elegy equal to many in world literature and its author, Egill Skalla-Grímsson, the best-known ‘Viking’ in the literature. According to the biographical saga about him, Egill was a poet of dazzling abilities. The saga is usually dated about 1231, and the historical Egill lived a long life in the tenth century (about 910 to after 990). By 961, Egill had lost two sons, the more immediate, his favorite, Bǫðvarr (born about 943), drowned in a shipwreck. According to the colourful backstory of the poem, his resourceful daughter tricked Egill out of his suicidal grief and into composing an erfikvæði for Bǫðvarr. Egill’s mood improved with the com­ position of the poem, which he called “Sonatorrek”, needed for an honourable funeral feast in the ancient style. Comprising 25 whole or fragmentary stanzas in a rough form of the metre kviðuháttr (Marold 2001), the poem alludes to the deaths of Egill’s father and mother, his brother Þórólfr, and the two sons. Its almost-musical structure inter­ weaves motifs and metaphoric language: e.g. the sea has breached his family palisade, leaving an “open son-gap” (St. 6); the sea goddess Rán cut the bonds of Egill’s family, “a strong strand of me myself” (St. 7). The sea theme resolves into a fantasy of revenge against Rán and her husband Ægir (St. 8), collapsing into the ageing father’s sense of weakness (St. 9), with young Bǫðvarr now called “the shield of my family” (St. 10). Bǫðvarr was good, innocent (St. 11), support of his father against all critics (St. 12)– this last leading to Egill’s sense of embattle­ ment (Sts. 13–14: his frustrated search for an ally such as a brother as his enemies threaten) in a time of corrupt values (St. 15). Next, an ancient proverb quoted sarcastically introduces stanzas directly on the death of sons (St. 17: there is no compensation for a lost son except another son sired to replace the dead; St. 18: the father has no peace since his younger son, Gunnarr, was taken [to Valhalla?];



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St. 19: Egill cannot hold up his head, [St. 20] since Gunnarr, the clean of speech, was taken by a fever). Egill meditates on Odin’s having taken his sons (St. 21), how the former friend Odin turned on Egill (St. 22); though Egill never sacrificed will­ ingly to Odin (St. 23), yet he has been given recompense for harms (bǫlva bœtir), namely (St. 24) two gifts: a perfect poetic talent and the ability to expose hidden enmity. In a closing vision (St. 25), Egill sees the death goddess Hel but awaits her fearless and “in good heart”. The poem contains classic elements of the ‘elegy’: loss, grief/anger, and con­ solation. Unlike our paraphrase, its events are not presented as narrative (‘epic’) so much as filtered through the ‘I’ poet’s experience; hence, critics have praised the poem’s almost nineteenth-century lyric sensibility. Emotion is frequently cap­ tured in allusions to traditional topoi (cf. ‘objective correlative’) like the withered tree of St. 4. More elusive is the representation of internal events of the poet’s life in mythic images (e.g. Sts. 1–2: the difficulty of making poetry in the now of the poem is represented as Odin’s arduous theft long ago of the mead of poetry [cf. Clover 1978]). It has been argued that a similar ‘mythic method’ extends to the whole trajectory of the poem; Egill’s mind is saturated with myth, espe­ cially Odinic myth, and the earthly father’s loss, isolation, paranoia, and vision of Hel constitute a religious calque on Odin’s loss of his favorite son Baldr and the looming final battle of Ragnarök (Harris 1994, 2010). The religious basis is timelessly present for Egill, but as a retrospective elegy, the poem not only relies on memory for its oral-textual life but for its content (cf. Sts. 5, 21); a striking kenning shows conscious thought about memory, though hardly optimism about its grounding in mind (“Often the lack of a brother enters my favourable wind of the moon-bear”; “moon-bear” = giant, “wind of the giantess” = mind; see Quinn 2013).

Conclusion Memorial poems (again, like rune stones) were intended to last – the stones, ‘while the North is peopled’; the poems’ occasional ending on an apocalyptic note perhaps implying a longue durée of human praise. Stripped of their ritual contexts, however, they probably had relatively short endurance in collective memory but for the intervention of writing, which made some of them available to create memory long after their oral shelf-life. Memory studies in its modern conceptions (well surveyed in Assmann 2011) was in many respects anticipated by (Nordic) folkloristics as long as that discipline maintained its diachronic ori­ entation and connection with philology; but memory, individual or collective, does fade. And continuity is a problem most directly addressed within the folk­

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lore-cum-philology arena (Mitchell 2014; von See 1972). The early modern and modern rediscovery (first through Icelandic mediation) of such tokens of earlier times as Sonatorrek created a secondary cultural memory, based on ‘reception’ and spurred by national romanticism and later motivations for shaping a usable past. If contemporary memory studies can be viewed as having one root in the old folklore-philology nexus, they may be said now to have come happily back home in early Nordic studies (e.g. Heslop 2014 and Hermann et al. 2014 in general).

Works cited Primary sources Beowulf. Klaeber’s Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg. Ed. R. D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, John D. Niles. 4th ed. Toronto, 2008. Eddica minora. Dichtungen eddischer Art aus den Fornaldarsögur und anderen Prosawerken. Ed. Andreas Heusler and Wilhelm Ranisch. Dortmund, 1903. Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar. Ed. Sigurður Nordal. ÍF, 2. Reykjavík, 1933. Eiríksmál. Ed. R. D. Fulk. In Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas, I. Ed. Diana Whaley. SkP I, 2 Vols. Turnhout, 2012. Pt. 2: 1003–1013. Gulathing Law. The Earlier Norwegian Laws, being the Gulathing Law and the Frostathing Law. Trans. Laurence M. Larson. Records of Civilization, Sources and Studies, 20. New York, 1935. Hákonarmál. Ed. R. D. Fulk. In Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas, I. Ed. Diana Whaley. SkP I, 2 Vols. Turnhout, 2012. Pt. 1: 171–195. Landnámabók. In Íslendingabók, Landnámabók. Ed. Jakob Benediktsson. ÍF, 1. Reykjavík, 1968. Procopius. History of the Wars, Books III–IV (The Vandalic War). Trans. H. B. Dewing. London, 1916. Sigrdrífumál. In Eddukvæði. II: Hetjukvæði. Ed. Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason. ÍF. Reykjavík, 2014. 313–321. Sonatorrek. In Scaldic Poetry. Ed. and trans. E.O.G. Turville-Petre. Oxford, 1976. Ynglingatal. Ed. Edith Marold. In Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas, I. Ed. Diana Whaley. SkP I, 2 Vols. Turnhout, 2012. Pt. 1: 3–60.

Secondary sources Assmann, Jan. 2011. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. Cambridge. [German orig. 1992] Beck, Heinrich. 1989. “Erbmahl.” In Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde. Berlin. 7: 428–430. Bø, Olav. 1960. “Gravøl. Norge.” In KLNM V: Cols.: 450–452. Briem, Ólafur. 1956. “Arveøl.” In KLNM I: Cols.: 267–268. Clover, Carol. 1978. “Skaldic Sensibility.” ANF 93: 63–81.



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Ehrismann, Gustav. 1954 [1932]. Geschichte der deutschen Literatur bis zum Ausgang des Mittelalters. Erster Teil. 2nd ed. Munich. Fidjestøl, Bjarne. 1982. “Ervekvædeproblemet.” In Det norrøne fyrstediktet. Universitetet i Bergen, Nordisk institutts skriftserie, 11. Øvre Ervik. 193–198. Fidjestøl, Bjarne. 1989. “Erfidrápa (Erblied).” In Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde. Berlin. 7: 482–486. Grønvik, Ottar. 1981. Runene på Tunesteinen. Alfabet, språkform, budskap. Oslo. Grønvik, Ottar. 1982. “The words for ‘heir’, ‘inheritance’ and ‘funeral feast’ in early Germanic. An etymological study of ON arfr m, arfi m, erfi n, erfa vb and the corresponding words in the other Old Germanic dialects.” Det Norske Videnskaps-Akademi. II. Hist.-Filos. Klasse, Avhandlinger, n.s. 18. Oslo. Harris, Joseph. 1994. “Sacrifice and Guilt in Sonatorrek.” In Studien zum Altgermanischen: Festschrift für Heinrich Beck. Ed. Heiko Uecker. Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde, 11. Berlin. 173–196. Harris, Joseph. 2006. “Erfikvæði – myth, ritual, elegy.” In Old Norse Religion in Long-Term Perspectives. Origins, Changes and Interactions. An international conference in Lund, Sweden, June 3–7, 2004. Ed. Anders Andrén, Kristina Jennbert and Catharina Raudvere. Vägar till Midgård, 8. Lund. 267–271. Harris, Joseph. 2010. “‘Myth to Live By’ in Sonatorrek.” In Laments for the Lost. Ed. Jane Tolmie and Jane Toswell. Turnhout. 149–171. Hermann, Pernille, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórdóttir, eds. 2014. Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. Heslop, Kate. 2014. “Minni and the Rhetoric of Memory in Eddic, Skaldic, and Runic Texts.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 75–107. Heusler, Andreas. 1943. Die altgermanische Dichtung. 2nd rev. ed. Potsdam. Holst-Warhaft, Gail. 1992. Dangerous Voices: Women’s Laments and Greek Literature. London. Honko, Lauri. 1991–1993. “Klagen.” In Enzyklopädie des Märchens. Handwörterbuch zur historischen und vergleichenden Erzählforschung. Berlin. 7: 1400–1406. Jónas Kristjánsson. 2006. “Kveðskapur Egils Skallagrímssonar.” Gripla 17: 7–35. Krause, Arnulf. 2000. “Klagelied.” In Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde. Berlin. 16: 598–601. Marold, Edith. 2001. “Kviðuháttr.” In Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde. Berlin. 17: 515–518. Mitchell, Stephen A. 2014. “Continuity: Folklore’s Problem Child?” In Folklore in Old Norse – Old Norse in Folklore. Ed. Daniel Sävborg and Karen Bek-Pedersen. Nordistica Tartuensis, 20. Tartu. 34–51. Mundal, Else. 2013. “Female Mourning Songs and Other Lost Oral Poetry in Pre-Christian Nordic Culture.” In The Performance of Christian and Pagan Storyworlds. Non-Canonical Chapters of the History of Nordic Medieval Literature. Ed. Lars Boje Mortensen and Tuomas M. S. Lehtonen, with Alexandra Bergholm. Turnhout. 367–388. Price, Neil S. 2010. “Passing into Poetry: Viking-Age Mortuary Drama and the Origins of Norse Mythology.” Medieval Archaeology 54.1: 123–156. Quinn, Judy. 2013. “‘Wind of the Giantess’: Snorri Sturluson, Rudolf Meissner and the Taxonomic Interpretation of Kennings.” Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 8: 211–264. Ramazani, Jahan. 1990. Yeats and the Poetry of Death: Elegy, Self-Elegy, and the Sublime. New Haven, CT.

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Ranke, Kurt. 1951. Indogermanische Totenverehrung. Vol. 1: Der dreissigste und vierzigste Tag im Totenkult der Indogermanen. FFC, LIX, No. 140. Helsinki. Sävborg, Daniel. 2000. “Beowulf and Sonatorrek are genuine enough. An answer to Klaus von See.” Skandinavistik 30.1: 44–59. Schücking, L. L. 1908. “Das angelsächsische Totenklagelied.” Englische Studien 39: 1–13. See, Klaus von. 1972. Kontinuitätstheorie und Sakraltheorie in der Germanenforschung. Antwort an Otto Höfler. Frankfurt am Main.

Lars Lönnroth

II: 40 Memorial Toasts 1 Introduction Beer is associated with memory and remembrance in Old Norse texts, an associa­ tion that may be explained through the custom of drinking toasts in memory of deceased ancestors. The origin and age of this custom are uncertain, but may have been imported in Christian times from the European continent. Yet there are indications that memory and beer were somehow associated in Germanic tra­ dition long before the conversion of Iceland and Norway, or the introduction of memorial cups.

2 Case study: Minni, mead, memorial beer There are several reasons why memory and beer were associated in Old Norse culture, but one is that beer was served at funeral feasts where people gathered to remember their ancestors and drink toasts in honour of the dead. This custom is referred to in several Old Norse texts, and its importance can be inferred from the vocabulary used all over Scandinavia about funerals during the Middle Ages. Thus the funeral feast could be called erfi-øl or erfisdrykkja in Old Norse-Icelandic [ale or drink of a funeral feast], arveøl in Danish, or graföl in Swedish. To drink a toast in somebody’s honour was called at drekkia minni [to drink memory] , and the word minni [memory], could itself be used in the sense of toast or memorial cup (Harris 2006). In the Christian period, the memorial cups emptied at funeral feasts and other festive occasions arranged by families and trade guilds were dedicated not only to the memory of the deceased, but also to Christ and the saints. According to Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla [The circle of the world] heathen Norsemen drank toasts in honour of Óðinn (Odin), Þórr (Thor) and other pagan gods. In Hákonar saga góða [Hakon the Good’s saga] in Heimskringla (Ch. 14), Snorri gives a detailed and col­ ourful description of heathen sacrifices held at Hlaðir in the tenth century, where memorial cups are said to have been emptied in memory of deceased ancestors and in celebration of the pagan gods. This description is one of the reasons why the custom of drinking minni at funerals has, until recently, been considered by many Old Norse scholars as an ancient Germanic custom, originating long before the conversion of the Scandinavian countries (Cahen 1921; Ólafur Briem 1956). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-076

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In his book Das Opferfest von Lade, Klaus Düwel (1985) manages to show that there are no valid reasons for assuming that the custom of drinking minni or full [toast] goes back to the pre-Christian era. Toasts in honour of Christ and the saints were evidently introduced in Scandinavia from the European continent in the twelfth century, and there are no early sources suggesting that this custom had any heathen antecedents. Snorri’s vivid description of pagan Norwegians drinking toasts in honour of ancestors and the æsir [heathen gods] may, accord­ ing to Düwel, be modelled on the Christian customs of his own time and have no foundation whatsoever in historical facts. Düwel’s arguments are persuasive, at least as far as toasts in honour of the pagan gods are concerned. It should be noted that minni in the sense of celebra­ tory toast does not occur in any pre-Christian Old Norse poetry, but it plays an important role in the late medieval poem Allra postula minnisvísur [All apostles’ memorial stanzas] (McDougall 2007, 852–871). In this poem, each of the apost­ les is celebrated with a toast as if they all participated in a symposium together with their Christian worshippers. As McDougall points out, with a reference to Rudolf Meissner (1930), the word minni, which appears at the end of each stanza, is a semantic loan here from German Minne (feminine) [love], used in the phrase Minne trinken (McDougall 2007, 852). Yet there are good reasons to suppose that beer or mead was somehow asso­ ciated with funeral feasts and with memory at a fairly early stage in Old Norse tra­ dition. The phrase drekka erfi occurs in the eddic poem Guðrúnarhvǫt [Whetting of Gudrun], which is generally believed to be an old poem. The words minnis-øl [memory beer], and minnis-veig [memory drink], are also both found in The Poetic Edda. The two latter terms do not refer to memorial toasts but to magic beverages specifically intended to strengthen the memory. The goddess Freyja in Hyndluljóð [Song of Hyndla] wants to give minnis-øl to her stupid protégé, Óttar heimski, to make him remember his ancestors (St. 45). The valkyrie Sigrdrífa, in the prose following stanza 3 of Sigrdrífumál [The Lay of Sigrdrifa] gives Sigurðr Fafnisbani minnis-veig in the form of mead (mjǫðr) to make him remember her lessons and useful information. She also, in stanza 6, gives him beer (bjór) filled with magic runes and spells that are evidently also intended to increase his knowledge. On the other hand, beer-drinking is also seen as the cause of forgetfulness in one of the most famous stanzas in Hávamál [The Sayings of the High One]: Óminnishegri heitir sá er yfir ǫlðrum þrumir, hann stelr geði guma; þess fugls fjǫðrum ek fjǫtraðr vark í garði Gunnlaðar. (Hávamál, 324)



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[The forgetfulness-heron it’s called / who hovers over ale-drinking; / he steals a man’s mind; / with this bird’s feathers I was fettered / in the court of Gunnlod. (The Sayings of the High One, 13)]

The stanza is obviously referring to the story of Óðinn’s theft of the skaldic mead from Gunnlöð, the daughter of the giant Suttungr, but what the heron is doing in the story is unclear. Scholars have not been able to agree on the interpretation of this stanza (Johansson 1996). What is clear, however, is that beer (or mead), according to Old Norse belief, can stimulate memory but also make people mind­ less, probably depending on how much of it is consumed. In spite of Klaus Düwel’s conclusions about memorial toasts, it is obvious that the drinking of beer or mead at festive occasions is often celebrated in early Germanic poetry, and it is almost always associated with memories of the past. From Beowulf and other Anglo-Saxon texts, we learn that songs about the deeds of heroic ancestors are supposed to be performed, accompanied by a harp, in a royal hall called beor-sele or meodo-ærn, where warriors meet to drink, remember and learn from the examples of their forbears. When Old Norse skalds celebrate the past actions of their lords, they often claim to be inspired by the skaldic mead of Óðinn. In the eddic poem Lokasenna [Loki’s Quarrel], even the most shameful deeds of the past are remembered at a party in Ægir’s hall, where the gods have gathered to drink beer. Memories and the drinking of beer or mead thus belong together not only in Old Norse tradition but more generally in early Germanic culture. And since both beer and memories of ancestors are likely to have been present at funeral feasts as far back as anybody could remember, the introduction of drinking from formal memorial cups in honour of the saints – the Christian and continental custom referred to as drekkia minni (or minne trinken) – was probably not very difficult to accept in Old Norse society. In this case, the new custom is likely to have merged with old customs without any conflict. This does not mean, however, that formal memorial cups in honour of the pagan gods were ever part of Old Norse religion. Had that been the case, the custom would probably not have survived after the conversion of Norway and Iceland.

Works cited Primary sources Allra postula minnisvísur. In Poetry on Christian Subjects. 2. Ed. Margaret Clunies Ross. Turnhout, 2007. 852–871.

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Beowulf. Ed. Fr. Klaeber. 3rd ed. Boston, 1950. Hávamál. In Eddukvæði. I. Ed. Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason. ÍF. Reykjavík, 2014. 322–355. Heimskringla, I. Ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson. ÍF, 26. Reykjavík, 1941. The Sayings of the High One. Trans. Carolyne Larrington. In The Poetic Edda. Rev. ed. Oxford, 2014. 13–35.

Secondary sources Cahen, Maurice. 1921. Études sur le vocabulaire religieux du vieux.scandinave. La libation. Paris. Düwel, Klaus. 1985. Das Opferfest von Lade. Quellenkritische Untersuchungen zur germanischen Religionsgeschichte. Vienna. Harris, Joseph. 2006. “Erfikvæði – myth, ritual, elegy.” In Old Norse Religion in Long-Term Perspectives. Origins, Changes and Interactions. An international conference in Lund, Sweden, June 3–7, 2004. Ed. Anders Andrén, Kristina Jennbert and Catharina Raudvere. Vägar till Midgård, 8. Lund. 267–271. Johansson, Karl G. 1996. “Hávamál strof 13. Ett inlägg i diskussionen kring Óminnis hegri.” Arkiv för nordisk filologi 111: 45–56. McDougall, Ian. 2007. “Introduction to Allra postula minnisvísur.” In Poetry on Christian Subjects. Ed. Margaret Clunies Ross. Vol. 2. Turnhout. 852–853. Meissner, Rudolf. 1930. “Minnetrinken in Island und in der Auvergne.” In Deutsche Islandforschung I. Ed. W. H. Vogt. Breslau. 236. Ólafur Briem. 1956. “Arveøl.” In KLNM, I: Cols. 267–268.

Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir

II: 41 Women and Remembrance Practices 1 Introduction Research on memory and gender has become an increasingly important topic in the past decade within medieval studies, generally indicating that not only men but also women played an important role for commemoration and remem­ brance practice (van Bueren et al. 2011, 196, 203). Whereas the art of writing and learning was dominated by a scholarly tradition that favoured men, women have been seen as central in the oral transmission of memory, not only in the Christian commemoration of late medieval times, but especially in the context of the oral culture that existed before the introduction of Christianity. Not many Old Norse studies have addressed both the role of men and women in medieval memory culture. Based on Peter Burke’s understanding that collective memories as con­ structed by social groups determine what is ‘memorable’ to society, as well as how it will be remembered (Burke 1997, 45), the present entry investigates the role of gender for this transmission, both with respect to how the past was remem­ bered, as well as in which types of media. With the appearance of writing, existing collective memory was transformed into texts, allowing for such stored information to be communicated across time and space. Medieval collective memory came to be divided into liturgical memory and lay memory. The development of the memory of the dead, especially the dead saints, became a significant part of ecclesiastical culture, practiced through litur­ gical sermons for the dead on the day of their death. Such commemorations were based both on oral and written culture – the same can be said about the Scholas­ tic system of the universities, from the end of twelfth century on, founded even more in orality than in writing (Le Goff 1992, 58, 59, 68–76). The medieval memo­ rial culture was thus not only written culture, but also oral, as well as visual, and it was transmitted through different types of media, by different social groups, and by both men and women.

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2 Case study: Women remembering the past Oral tradition Elisabeth van Houts has emphasised that only by looking at the interaction between men and women will we be able to determine the gendered forces in past communities (van Houts 2001, 2). Her book, Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe 900–1200, from 1999 analyses the ways in which medieval people in northwestern Europe captured memories of the past. Trying to answer one of her main questions – who decides what is to be remembered and how – she explores memory from a wide range of sources, including historical, hagiographical and visual materials (van Houts 1999, viii). Not only does she challenge the view that it was only men in monasteries or clerical institutions who were responsible for shaping historical thought, but she is also able to provide evidence that women actively informed men and helped them in remembering the past (van Houts 1999, 1–2). This approach demands that instead of looking at polarised gender construction, the focus should be on how cooperation between the sexes is the basis for social organisation (Hermanson and Auður Magnúsdóttir 2016, 17), as well as for medieval memorial culture. Written Old Norse literature encompasses memories from ancient times and the earliest historical writing in the North was highly influenced by a legal politi­ cal interest, and a similar interest continued to be a part of the historical discourse in subsequent late-medieval as well as early modern centuries. This tradition was heavily based on learned masculine culture, and juridical, as well as historical, writings were part of the same sort of selected memorial culture. In the Middle Ages, the transmission of such writings in Iceland, for instance, took place pre­ dominantly at the two episcopal sees and at the richer monasteries, albeit under great influence from a strong and powerful secular elite (Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir 2013, 2014); however, the reputation of women for their knowledge of past events clearly survived the introduction of writing. The best known case is that of Þuríðr Snorradóttir, who was praised by Ari Þorgilssons in his Íslendingabók [Book of Icelanders] for being one of his informants, both “wise and truthful” (margspǫk ok óljúgfróð). And Snorri Sturluson repeats Ari’s words in the prologue to his. Heimskringla [Circle of the world] (Jochens 1995, 114; Íslendingabók,  4; Heims­ kringla, 7). The earliest written medieval literature was thus not only a product of the monastic learned tradition of men: through their participation in the oral tradition, women also influenced it to some degree. The role of women in remembering and telling stories orally seems to have been greater before the introduction of writing. The pioneers in the field of women’s literary studies in the Nordic context focused on the role of women as



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mediators of historical knowledge in oral culture (Mundal 1983), where it was argued that women could be bearers of special types of oral tradition that existed before written literature (Mundal 1994, 2009, 2010a, 2010b). The eddic poems, especially the heroic ones, were felt to be good examples of this phenomenon. These poems were often told from a female point of view, and could even express the experiences of women (Kress 1990). Moreover, there even exist a few named female poets. Overall, however, skaldic poetry was heavily based on a masculine tradition, as evidenced by the high proportion of men among the named Icelan­ dic skalds known to us, famous for praising kings at Scandinavian or English courts. One can thus argue that oral and written culture continued to exist side by side throughout the medieval period, and that some of Old Norse literature, such as some of the eddic poems, was about women or was told from their point of view. But in contrast to women, men created entire stories about kings’ lives, distant ancestors or mythical beings, and they performed them in public. These studies are interesting to read together with the tradition of understanding royal power based solely on the more traditional source of the konungasögur [kings’ sagas] (Ármann Jakobsson 2005, 2015), an issue related to the question of who acted as patrons of writing, as well as the matter of how literacy developed as a part of administrative or political units. Studies of patrons of other media for memorial culture, such as royal burials, however, have provided insights into more gendered aspects of funeral culture and of power at the royal level. Danish queens, and not just kings, played an important role in powerful commemora­ tions of royal authority during the late Middle Ages (Bøggild 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007). The role of queens as patrons of courtly literature has also been a topic in international, as well as Norwegian and Swedish, studies (Layher 2010, 91–130; Småberg 2011). Women’s ‘voice’ in patriarchal culture has been a subject of some studies (Layher 2010), but there is indeed need for further studies on different gendered uses of memory, also in a practical sense, as studies on the existing manuscripts of St Margaret’s legend in Icelandic translations have shown. These tiny books were believed to have a magical effect that could help women give birth, and were not only copied during medieval time, but also after the Reforma­ tion. Thus, the popularity of St Margaret seems to have depended on her role as patroness of women in labour (Ásdís Egilsdóttir 2002).

Monastic culture The production of manuscripts in Iceland was largely centred on monasteries, and the ownership of manuscripts was likely reserved for the institutions pro­ ducing them, as well as for a few influential aristocratic families. As a result of

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the Reformation, private ownership of manuscripts became even more common. Studies on the tradition of passing on manuscripts to women as a gift from groom to bride, that is, as a part of the women’s dowry at a wedding, show that this tradi­ tion continued until at least the middle of the seventeenth century (Arthur 2012, 202). This interest in old manuscripts during the sixteenth and seventeenth cen­ turies can also be seen in the copious existing copies by a number of writers who tried to keep the remembrance of the past alive. Many of them were lawmen, and they were often paid by the bishops, inspired as they were by the new humanistic movement of that period, and especially its strong interest in the ‘national’ past. They also gathered large numbers of ancient legal and historical texts, often fol­ lowing requests from Danish and Swedish Kings, but they also made important selections and omissions. The most conspicuous example of their selective way of recording the past is how they censored out many texts related to the medieval Catholic Church and its legal system, while they were eager to preserve ancient customs documented in historical texts (Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir 2014, 226–227). Studies of book and manuscript ownership from seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury Iceland, however, show that women’s part in literary culture was far greater than previously thought (Margrét Eggertsdóttir 1999; Guðrún Ingólfsdót­ tir 2011). During the last two decades, several studies have shown that, at least when dealing with the later medieval and the early modern time periods, women owned and kept books, for example, “books of hours”. In some cases, they also participated in the production of some of the great medieval manuscripts (Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir 2010, 438; Guðrún Ingólfsdóttir 2011; Arthur 2012; Hoel 2016, 83–85). By reading together the different media for memorial culture, we can thus see that even if the patrons behind medieval writing and book production were often powerful men, women were also owners of such books. What is even more important, is that remembrance did not only occur through oral tales or written literature, but also through the production of religious texts, as well as in the commemoration of the culture of saints in general. Here in particular there is reason to believe that the role of women should be seen as an integrated part of the written, literary, and masculine-dominated memorial culture of the period (Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir 2013). Relics and religious artefacts connected to saints had a meaning for the culture of remembrance, and they do not seem to have lost their value and importance after the Reformation, as did some of the Canon Law collections (Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir 2013; Bergesen 2015). This fact can be explained by the continuing popularity of the legendary popular culture of saintly miracles. It has been argued that the interest in saints and saintly life continued to be com­ paratively strong after the Reformation (Cormack 1994, 2009, 47–71). Studies on surviving visual evidence of saints and sainthood in early modern Iceland shows



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that the Protestant reformers did not manage to change everyday religious life among the local people all at once (Þóra Kristjánsdóttir 2004, 262). In the Middle Ages, the saints had helped against suffering and had given hope for salvation, thanks to their role as mediators between human beings and the divine world. Lit­ erature and rituals were the media for this religious memory, which often found a collective expression in the hymns or legends about, for instance, the holy Virgin Mary. International research has used exactly the cult of Mary as a representation for a decidedly emotional field of everyday life (Rubin 2009a, 2009b, 45–77). It has been argued that source material for medieval western Scandinavian culture is characterised by a geographical division between text and image. A large corpus of Marian miracles in Old Norse is preserved, mainly in Icelandic manuscripts, whereas most art historical objects are preserved from Norway. These sources give witness to a strong Marian cult in Old Norse medieval religious sources, whereas for common people Mary came more and more to be seen as a graceful mother figure (Carlquist 2015). This implies that people were becoming more personally concerned with their religion. In a general European context, the Cistercians are considered to have been devoted to Mary, and five Cistercians monasteries were established in medieval Norway. It has also been noted that the Dominicans in Bergen played an important role in translating miracles from Latin into Old Norse in the thirteenth century. A common assumption is that the mira­ cles were intended for lay consumption and hence their function was to arouse interest in Christianity (Kjesrud 2015, 89, 92–95, 102). There are good reasons also to look at the nunneries as one of the bearers of this tradition. Although we do not know any female scribes by name, at least two manuscripts can reliably be associated with the two nunnery convents in Iceland (Cormack 2007, 39). The so-called Reynistaðarbók [book from Reynistaður] (AM 764 4to), which contains a universal chronicle and a number of saints’ lives, could have been produced at the nunnery of Reynistaður, either written by the nuns themselves, or at least ordered by them to be written in some nearby scrip­ torium. The manuscript is written by more than ten different scribes, and much of the content is devoted to famous female characters from the Bible. We know that the nuns at Reynistaður owned many books, and these texts could have been used for reading aloud while the nuns were having their meals, a custom common in many nunneries of the Benedictine order (Svanhildur Óskarsdóttir 2006, 148– 150). A second manuscript, a collection of sagas and prayers devoted to female saints from c. 1500, is preserved (AM 429 12mo), and it has been connected to another female convent, that of Kirkjubær. This manuscript probably was written for the nuns at Kirkjubær, although not necessarily by them (Wolf 2011). In older research on monastic culture in the Middle Ages, nunneries are assumed to have been less important than the monasteries of the men, at least

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in an economic sense. By contrast, the approach used by Elisabeth van Houts can be brought to bear on the Icelandic materials. Her description of the culture of literacy as a field, in which both men and women played an active part in pro­ ducing and upholding remembrance, can open our eyes to the role of nuns – and other devoted women – as patrons behind special types of personal votive texts or other visual artefacts of a religious content. In this context, studies of the Bridgettine Abbey in Sweden are of great interest. They show that the produc­ tion of illuminated manuscripts was from the nuns’ section of the convent, while the manuscripts of the monks were less lavishly illustrated. Those illuminations can be situated within a wider culture of international exchange. In particular, there are similarities between the Vadstena illuminations and those in countries like Finland, Norway and England, which show contact and mobility between monastic communities from a wide range of countries. Moreover these studies illustrate that art and written texts often show the same motives of devotion for the passion of Christ, both in vernacular prayerbooks, as well as in sculpture and embroidery. Thus, material culture collaborates heavily with textual culture in Vadstena (Sandgren 2014, 2015).

Gender interaction The hitherto dominant point of view – that writing resulted from a male-based learned culture only – might be re-appraised if we focussed more on the use of the literature and the audience. Old Norse sources offer their audiences a broad spectrum of images of various social positions and origins. By mapping out the ways in which women and men acquire agency, it is possible to explore which roles were available for these literary figures. Considering this point in relation to memory and gender, Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir has argued that women in Scandinavian literature of the Middle Ages show great variation, and that the ste­ reotyped roles of powerful/powerless female characters ought to be challenged (Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir 2013, 1–2). Recent attention to the religious commemoration of saints (DuBois 2008; Sands 2010), and to the production of religious images, as well as to commemora­ tion within the culture of saints through book production, has provided an array of new insights. When a wider range of source material is included, we are able to see how the transmission of gendered memory was based on different kinds of media. Visual and material culture, as well as various texts and oral tales, worked together in the cult of late medieval devotion (Carlquist 2015). Beyond such revelations remains the need to go behind these media and study how the practice of remembrance was based on the shared experience of



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men and women. As Elisabeth van Houts emphasises, it is primarily by looking at the interaction between men and women that we will be able to determine the gendered forces operating in the memory practices of past communities. To understand the commemoration of the culture of the saints as a more integrated part of the memorial culture of the medieval period is also a desideratum (Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir 2013). This tradition continued into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, testified to by the continuing flowering of the old medieval way of singing – the so-called modes – in church music as well as in popular chant. This continuation in the popular worship of saints is documented both by preserved inventories of churches before and after the Reformation and by the large number of religious hymns which were read, spoken or even sung (Svanhildur Óskarsdót­ tir and Anna Guðmundsdóttir 2003; Jón Þorkelsson 1888). The need also exists to further studies in this field by gaining a better understanding of the way in which medieval memory continued to survive despite the upheaval of the Lutheran Ref­ ormation. Through popular worship, some elements of medieval religious culture continued to be remembered by women, as well as men.

Works cited Primary sources Heimskringla. I. Ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson. ÍF, 26. Reykjavík, 1941. Íslendingabók. In Íslendingabók, Landnámabók. Ed. Jakob Benediktsson. ÍF, 1. Reykjavík, 1968. 1–28. Wolf, Kirsten, ed. A Female Legendary from Iceland. “Kirkjubæjarbók” (AM 429 12mo) in The Arnamagnæan Collection, Copenhagen. Manuscripta Nordica. Early Nordic Manuscripts in Digital Facsimile, 3. Copenhagen, 2011.

Secondary sources Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. 2010. Property and Virginity. The Christianization of Marriage in Medieval Iceland 1200–1600. Aarhus. Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. 2013. “Cultural Memory and Gender in Iceland from Medieval to Early Modern Time.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 378–399. Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. 2014. “Legal Culture and Historical Memory in Medieval and Early Modern Iceland.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 211–230.

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Arthur, Susanne Miriam. 2012. “The Importance of Marital and Maternal Ties in the Distribution of Icelandic Manuscripts from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century.” Gripla 23: 201–233. Ármann Jakobsson. 2005. “Royal Biography.” In A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture. Ed. Rory McTurk. Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture, 31. Oxford. 388–402. Ármann Jakobsson. 2015. “King Sverrir of Norway and the Foundations of His Power: Kingship Ideology and Narrative in Sverris saga.” Medium Aevum 84: 109–135. Ásdís Egilsdóttir. 2002. “St Margaret, Patroness of Childbirth.” In Mythological Women. Studies in Memory of Lotte Motz (1922–1997). Ed. Rudolf Simek and Wilhelm Heizmann. Vienna. 319–330. Bergesen, Rognald Heisdal. 2015. “Den hellige Anna – sjømennenes og rikdommens beskytter.” Nordlit 36: 229–248. Burke, Peter. 1997. Varieties of Cultural History. Oxford. Bøggild Johannsen, Birgitte. 2004. “Kongebegravelsernes ideologi og kultur. Problemer og perspektiver.” In Döden som katharsis. Nordiska perspektiv på dödens kultur- och mentalitetshistoria. Ed. Yvonne Werner. Stockholm. 89–121. Bøggild Johannsen, Birgitte. 2005. “Genealogical Representation in Gendered Perspective: The Funeral Complex of Queen Christine at Odense.” In Care for the Here and the Hereafter. The Function of Art in the Medieval Commemoration of the Dead. Ed. Truus van Bueren. Utrecht. 79–105. Bøggild Johannsen, Birgitte. 2006. “Ritual and Representational Aspects of the Royal Funeral Ceremonial in Early Modern Denmark.” In Tod und Trauer. Todeswahrnehmung und Trauerriten in Nordeuropa. Ed. Thomas Riis and Torsten Fischer. Kiel. 56–76. Bøggild Johannsen, Birgitte. 2007. “Køn, magt og minde. Omkring den rituelle og monumentale iscenesættelse af senmiddelalderens dronningebegravelser.” In Konge, kirke og samfund. De to øvrighedsmagter i dansk senmiddelalder. Ed. Agnes S. Arnórsdottir, Per Ingesman and Bjørn Poulsen. Aarhus. 179–218. van Bueren, Truus, Kim Ragetli and Arnoud-Jan Bijsterveld. 2011. “Researching Medieval Memoria: Prospects and Possibilities. With an Introduction to Medieval Memoria Online (MeMO).” In Jaarboek voor Middeleeuwse Geschiedenis: 14: 183–234. Carlquist, Jonas and Virginia Langum, eds. 2015. Words and Matter. The Virgin Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern Parish Life. Sällskapet Runica et Mediævalia, 24. Stockholm. Carlquist, Jonas. 2015. “Words and Matter: The Virgin Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern Parish Life.” In Words and Matter. The Virgin Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern Parish Life. Ed. Jonas Carlquist and Virginia Langum, Sällskapet Runica et Mediævalia, 24. Stockholm. 8–15. Cormack, Margaret. 1994. The Saints in Iceland: Their Veneration from the Conversion to 1400. Subsidia hagiographica, 78. Brussels. Cormack, Margaret. 2007. “Christian Biography.” In A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture. Ed. Rory McTurk. Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture, 31. Oxford. 7–26. Cormack, Margaret. 2009. “Catholic Saints in Lutheran Legend. Post-Reformation Ecclesiastical Folklore in Iceland.” Scripta Islandica 59: 47–71. DuBois, Thomas A., ed. 2008. Sanctity in the North: Saints Lives, and Cults in Medieval Scandinavia. Toronto.



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Guðrún Ingólfsdóttir. 2011. ‘I hverri bók er mannsandi.’ Handritasyrpur – bókmenning, þekking og sjálfsmynd karla og kvenna á 18. öld. Studia Islandica, 62. Reykjavík. Helga Kress. 1990. “The Apocalypse of a Culture. Völuspá and the Myth of the Sources/ Sorceress in Old Icelandic Literature.” In Poetry in the Scandinavian Middle Ages. The Seventh International Saga Conference. Atti del 12o Congresso internazionale di studi sull’ Alto Medioevo, Spoleto 4–10 settembre 1988. Ed. Teresa Pároli. Spoleto. 279–302. Hermanson, Lars and Auður Magnúsdóttir. 2016. “Inledning. Medeltidens genus.” In Medeltidens genus. Kvinnors och mäns roller inom kultur, rätt och samhälle. Norden og Europa ca. 300–1500. Ed. Lars Hermanson and Auður Magnúsdóttir. Gothenburg. 11–28. Hoel, Henriette Mikkelsen. 2016. “Dronning Eufemia og Eufemiavisene.” In Medeltidens genus. Kvinnors och mäns roller inom kultur, rätt och samhälle. Norden og Europa ca. 300–1500. Ed. Lars Hermanson and Auður Magnúsdóttir. Gothenburg. 73–94. van Houts, Elisabeth 1999. Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe 900–1200. London. van Houts, Elisabeth. 2001. “Introduction.” In Medieval Memories. Men, Women and the Past 700–1300. Ed. Elizabeth van Houts. London. 1–16. Jochens, Jenny. 1995. Women in Old Norse Society. Ithaca, NY. Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir. 2013. Women in Old Norse Literature. Bodies, Word and Power. London and New York. Jón Þorkelsson. 1888. Om diktningen på Island i det 15. og 16. århundrede. Copenhagen. Kjesrud, Karoline. 2015. “Conceptions of the Virgin Mary in Medieval Western Scandinavia.” In Words and Matter. The Virgin Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern Parish Life. Ed. Jonas Carlquist and Virginia Langum, Sällskapet Runica et Mediævalia, 24. Stockholm. 87–183. Layher, William. 2010. Queenship and Voice in Medieval Northern Europe. Queenship and Power. New York. Le Goff, Jacques. 1992. History and Memory. Trans. Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman. New York. [Italian orig. 1977] Margrét Eggertsdóttir. 1999. “Um kveðskap kvenna og varðveislu hans.” Vefnir 2. http://vefnir. is/grein.php?id=711. Reykjavík. (2 December 2017) McTurk, Rory, ed. 2005. A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture. Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture, 31. Oxford. Mundal, Else. 1983. “Kvinner og digtning. Overgangen frå munnleg til skriftleg kultur – ei ulukke for kvinner?” In Förändringar i kvinnors villkor under medeltiden. Uppsatser framlagda vid ett kvinnohistoriskt symposium i Skálholt, Island, 22.–25. juni 1981. Ed. Silja Aðalsteinsdóttir and Helgi Þorláksson. Ritsafn Sagnfræðistofnunar, 9. Reykjavík. 11–25. Mundal, Else. 1994. “Women and Old Norse Narrative.” In Contexts of Pre-Novel Narrative: The European Tradition. Ed. Roy Eriksen. Berlin. 135–152. Mundal, Else. 2009. “Kva kan vi vite om munnleg tradisjon?” In Á austrvega. Saga and East Scandinavia. Reprint Papers of the 14th International Saga Conference. Ed. Agneta Ney, Henrik Williams and Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist. Gävle. 704–711. Mundal, Else. 2010a. “How Did the Arrival of Writing Influence Old Norse Oral Culture?” In Along the Oral-Written Continuum: Types of Texts, Relations, and Their Implications. Ed. Slavica Ranković, Leidulf Melve and Else Mundal. Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, 20. Turnhout. 63–181.

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Mundal, Else. 2010b. “Memory of the Past and Old Norse Identity”. In The Making of Memory in the Middle Ages. Ed. Lucie Doležalová. Later Medieval Europe, 4. Leiden and Boston. 463–472. Rubin, Miri. 2009a. Mother of God. A History of the Virgin Mary. London. Rubin, Miri. 2009b. Emotion and Devotion. The Meaning of Mary in Medieval Religious Cultures. New York. Sandgren, Eva Lq. 2014. In Mulieres Religiosae: Shaping Female Spiritual Authority in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods. Ed. Veerle Fraeters and Imke de Gier. Turnhout. 219–242. Sandgren, Eva Lq. 2015. “Hearts of Love and Pain: Images for Devotion in Vadstena Abbey.” In Words and Matter. The Virgin Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern Parish Life. Ed. Jonas Carlquist and Virginia Langum. Sällskapet Runica et Mediævalia, 24. Stockholm. 50–86. Sands, Tracy S. 2010. The Company She Keeps: The Medieval Swedish Cult of Saint Katherine of Alexandria and its Transformations. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 362. Turnhout. Småberg, Thomas. 2011. “Bland drottningar och hertigar: Utblickar kring riddarromaner och deres änvendning i svensk medeltidsforskning.” Historisk Tidskrift 131: 197–226. Svanhildur Óskarsdóttir. 2006. “Genbrug í Skagafjörður: Arbejdsmetoder hos skrivere i klostret på Reynistaður.” In Reykholt som makt og lærdomssenter i den islandske og nordiske kontekst. Ed. Else Mundal. Reykholt. 148–150. Svanhildur Óskarsdóttir and Anna Guðmundsdóttir, eds. 2003. Til heiðurs og hugbótar. Greinar um trúarkveðskap fyrri alda. Reykholt. Þóra Kristjánsdóttir. 2004. “Trébílæti og bíldhöggvaraverk. Búnaður kirkna og íslensk listsköpun eftir siðaskipti”. In Hlutavelta tímans. Menningararfur á þjóðminjasafninu. Ed. Árni Björnsson and Hrefna Róbertsdóttir. Reykjavík. 260–271.

Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir

II: 42 Donation Culture 1 Introduction The relationship between the veneration of saints and donation culture has been a growing field of study in the North in recent decades (Cormack 1994; Sands 2003, 2010; DuBois 2008; Skórzewska 2011), and studies of medieval wills have been especially prominent sources of new information about the practice of giving pious gifts and gifts to illegitimate heirs (Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir 2007). The background for such practices is found in the legal rules telling how much of someone’s property could be given to persons who were not legitimate heirs, rules that came to Norway in the middle of the twelfth century and were adopted into Icelandic law at the end of the thirteenth century (Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir 2010, 403–405). Wills and other types of documents are not only concerned with dona­ tions to the church, but also with gifts to relatives. Gifts were commonly given to the benefit of the soul and as property to illegitimate children. Celebrating masses for the souls of dead family members was an important act of piety in late medieval culture. Through the ritual of the mass, dead persons were considered to be members of society: they were remembered and honoured, and the dead souls were helped in the afterlife. Important mediators in this reli­ gious culture were the saints, who were the formal receivers of the donations. During the Middle Ages, gifts were dedicated to certain saints, and local saints could play an important role for the memorial practice of a parish. Often a local church could claim ownership to certain landed property, only because it had been given to the church in the name of one or more saints. The most impor­ tant parties involved in this type of medieval donation culture were God and the saints, the latter as the intercessors mediating between the sinful souls and the judging God. After the Reformation, however, saints were almost never men­ tioned in wills. Although the Protestant Reformation did not change the everyday life of worship at one stroke, the memorial culture showed a new focus on the earthly family, mainly as a result of the new Protestant understanding of mar­ riage. The saints did not disappear from religious belief – they were still remem­ bered, but in a different way, not through the celebration of the mass, or in hagi­ ographical texts, but through their customary connection to everyday work. They were remembered while people were working, but there was no celebration or veneration of them. In the same way, some of the paintings and sculptures of holy saints in the churches were replaced by epitaphs remembering the earthly lives of bishops, priests and their families (Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir 2017). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-078

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2 Case Study: Memory across generations at Skarð in Skarðsströnd Late medieval Icelandic sources provide telling information about changes in the donation culture before and after the Reformation, examples of which can be seen in the donations and testamentary wills of the family of Skarðsverjar: Ólöf Loptsdóttir (1410–1479); her daughter, Solveig Björnsdóttir (c. 1436–1495); and Solveig’s son, Þorleifur Pálsson (d. 1558). A late fifteenth-century alabaster altarpiece in the church at the Icelandic manor Skarð in Skarðsströnd plays a central role in this example (see colour plate 21). This object is generally sup­ posed to have been given to the medieval church that once stood at Skarð by Ólöf Loptsdóttir in memory of her late husband, Björn Þorleifsson (1408–1467). He was killed in 1467 by English merchants at a place called Rifi on the western coast of Iceland, but his widow – nicknamed Ólöf ríka [Ólöf the rich] – continued to live at their manor in Skarð after his death. The testamentary documents were often connected to a vulnerable situation in a person’s life, and the story of Ólöf’s donations can been seen in this context. After the loss of her husband, she tried to secure his remembrance through a votive mass in her church, probably in front of the altarpiece representing the holy family (Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir 2009, 2014; Ásgerður Júníusdóttir 2016). The figures on the altarpiece show stories from the life of Saint Mary, to whom the medieval church in Skarð was dedicated. In Iceland, the Holy Virgin was among the first saints to be venerated. A gradual increase during the medi­ eval period in the popular veneration of the Mother of God is testified to not only in prose texts and poetry, but also in records of vows and offerings and in the choice of Mary as patron or co-patron saint for churches and monastic houses (Cormack 1994, 126–129). More than 100 Icelandic churches were – like Skarð in Skarðsströnd – dedicated to Mary. This particular church should also have owned two liturgical manuscripts, Maríusekvensí [Mary sequence] and saltari [psalter], which included pictures of the Virgin Mary (Ásdís Egilsdóttir et al. 1998, xix–xx). In the center of the altarpiece stands a depiction of Mary and Joseph, where Mary once carried the child, Jesus, but that figure has now disappeared. On the right side of them is a woman with white linen around her head, and on the left side a smaller person. It has been assumed that the woman on the right could be the donor, Ólöf Loptsdóttir (Ásgerður Júníusdóttir 2016). This assumption was first put forward by the State Antiquarian, Matthías Þórðarson, in 1911, and later accepted by Þór Magnússon in 2010 (Matthías Þórðarson 1911; Þór Magnússon 2010); however, this interpretation may be wrong. The woman with the white linen was not meant to portray Ólöf Loptsdóttir, but Saint Anne, the mother of



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Mary, whereas the smaller person on the left side would be the donor, since this was the normal way for donors to be presented on late medieval paintings and sculptures given by them to religious institutions. Towards the end of the Middle Ages, a cult of Mary’s mother, Saint Anne, developed alongside – and often inter­ twined with – the cult of Mary herself. Sculptors and painters in Germany, Flan­ ders and the Netherlands began to depict Saint Anne holding Mary and Jesus with the realism that characterized late Gothic art in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Images of a similar type – in German called Anna Selbdritt [Virgin and Child with St Anne] – can be found in many other parts of Europe as well (Nixon 2004, 1). The motif was spread throughout Northern Europe, especially to places where the Hanseatic League was influential, among other things thanks to the famous workshop of Bernt Notke in Lübeck (Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir 2014). Among Notke’s works of art depicting Mary and Anne is a double-winged altarpiece pro­ duced for the high altar of the cathedral of Aarhus in Denmark (Bjørn and Got­ fredsen 1996, 93–95). It shows Anne with Mary and Jesus, the women dressed in a similar way as the female figures of the altarpiece in Skarð. A related piece of work, made in Lübeck around 1500 by an unknown artisan, found its way into the church at Holt in Önundarfjörður (Guðbjörg Kristjánsdóttir 2004). The woman on the left side of Mary and Joseph in Skarð is very similar to the image of Saint Anne in all of these works. There can, therefore, be no doubt at all, that she is not Ólöf ríka, and that it is the picture of the small woman to the left, the one hitherto assumed to be a youngster, that is meant to portray the donor, probably Ólöf – or perhaps her daughter, Solveig (Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir 2014). Her daughter’s dona­ tions have some similarities to Ólöf’s. The will of Solveig Björnsdóttir is from 1495 (Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir 2007, 430; Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir 2014, 43). It begins with a religious formula: Solveig puts her fate in the hands of the Lord, gives gifts to the church, as her mother had done before her, and prays for help for her soul, as well as for the souls of her husband and children. Her prayers are framed within the Holy Kinship of the Virgin Mary and Saint Anne. She prays to them, as well as to Saint Andrew, to Saint Peter, to the holy Bishop Þorlákur and to the saints Óláfr and Michael, begging them all to give her peace and forgiveness for her sins. Her tomb she chooses inside the church at the manor of Skarð, where she lived (DI VII, 242–247). She wants to be buried in front of the altar of Saint Anne “[…] en ef þat er ecki giort vm þat ec onduzt þa uil eg huila fram firir uorri fru” [[…] but if the altar is not finished when I die, I will rest in front of Our Lady (author’s translation)] (DI VII, 243). Solveig was the oldest daughter of the rich couple Björn Þorleifsson and Ólöf Loptsdóttir. The father of Solveig’s first six children was one of her household men, a certain Jón Þorláksson. The couple was not married, probably because Jón, coming from a family of lower social status and economic means, was not

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regarded as a suitable marriage match for a rich aristocratic woman like Solveig. In 1479 another man, Páll Jónsson, wanted to marry Solveig – despite the fact that they were related within the fourth degree. In a preserved letter Solveig’s widowed mother, Ólöf ríka, agreed to accept the match if the couple received a dispensation to marry from the holy Church. Ólöf died soon thereafter (Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir 2009). Through the inheritance from her mother, Solveig became even wealthier. Together with her new husband she now had two more sons, Jón and Þorleifur. Six of Solveig’s children were, of course, illegitimate, but because the local bishop in Iceland did not accept the papal marital dispensations, acquired by the couple before they married, the two youngest sons – those to whom Páll was the father – also risked being defined as illegitimate. Immediately before her death, Solveig decided to write her last will. The will specifies in detail what Solveig’s two children with her husband Páll Jónsson were to receive of her estates and belongings after her death. If it became problematic for them to get hold of their inheritance, it should be noted that they had received their legacy as legal gifts, which could also be given as donations to saints or other religious means. Solveig’s plan for her family’s life and afterlife thus included instructions, includ­ ing how her possessions and belongings should be given for both saving the fam­ ilies lives on earth as in heaven (DI VII, 242–247). Many more judgements and declarations of the inheritance rights to her enormous wealth were established by Solveig. The issue of immediate concern is not reconstructing the whole case, but rather to remind us that before the Reformation wills were used to give ille­ gitimate children inheritance, and that this gift giving was closely related to the religious donation culture, since bequests to the Church was also a way of secur­ ing forgiveness for the sexual sin committed. The Reformation did not change the everyday life of worship at once, as the will of Þorleifur Pálsson, the son of Solveig Björnsdóttir, from 1558, shows. The formula in his will is very similar to the one in his mother’s. Þorleifur gives his soul into the hands of the almighty God and Holy Mary. As said before the church at Skarð was dedicated to the Virgin, and probably the family at Skarð continued to venerate her after the Reformation. Þorleifur makes this will for his sinful soul, as well as for his wife, Steinunn, and their children, and for his parents and other close relatives. Arnór Sigurjónsson has pointed out that even if he was a very wealthy and highly honoured man, his marriage had not been very successful and he had many illegitimate children (Arnór Sigurjónsson 1975, 463). He chose to be buried in the church at Skarð, and gave the church furniture; and he donated gifts to another church, in Garpsdalur, as well. Landed property was not given to the ecclesiastical institutions, but as a part of his legal gifts to some of his children. The gifts mentioned were given as the gifts of testaments, the “salvgiof.



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tivndargjöf. og allar þær lavggiafer” (DI XIII, 287) [gift for the salvation of the soul, the gift of one-tenth and all those legal gifts (author’s translation)], that the new Christian law from 1275 had mentioned. To the priest who would take care of the funeral, Þorleifur paid one cow, and he gave various other items to named persons as well. His will contains interesting information about how he should be remembered after his death. Þorleifur declared that two women should sing the pater noster each day for the salvation of his soul, as well as the souls of his children, parents and close relatives. He also proclaimed that his heirs should give alms to the poor every year on the day of his death. Two of his daughters received some of his jewellery, whereas the manor at Skarð was given to one of the daughters, with the consent of the other (DI XIII, 285–288). This will from 1558, few years after the introduction of the Reformation in Iceland, is thought-provoking: Þorleifur’s salvation did not depend on assistance from saints, but rather from his closest family members. They were supposed to continue to pray for his soul, as well as for his family members. Furthermore, alms were not given directly to the church as it had been the case in the medie­ val period, but rather to the poor in the neighbourhood. This means of distri­ bution indicates changes in social practices, and there seems also to be, after the Reformation, some confusion about the legal status of the will. A judgement from c. 1565, stated that wills could still be made, but only if they were done with the consent of the closest kin (DI XIV, 452). At the same time, the wills seem to become more focused on the closest family members, especially wife and child­ ren. This change in the donation culture is also reflected in the growing popula­ rity of a new type of funeral monument, the so-called memorial epitaph showing, for instance, a priest with his wife and all his children. People could no longer donate landed property in the name of a saint. Instead, the donors gave gifts in the name of God and His son Jesus Christ, with no saintly mediator between the giver and the receiver (DI XIV, 172). The story of the altarpiece, and its survival through the upheaval of the Refor­ mation, is a result of the donation culture that flourished in the Middle Ages. Even if the altarpiece survived the Reformation, and is still to be found in Skarð in the current church, the saints were no longer able to help the soul of Þorlei­ fur Pálsson, who died in 1558. The remembrance of him, and his family and ancestors, was now exclusively dependent on the living members of his family. Existing Icelandic wills from the period just after the Reformation provide us with further information on this shift in focus. Saints are almost never mentioned in the wills, and the concentration is rather on the earthly family members, not the Holy family (see, for instance, a will from 1569 in DI XV, 325–326, and another from 1570 in DI XV, 382–383).

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Works cited Primary sources DI = Diplomatarium Islandicum. Íslenzkt fornbréfasafn, sem hefir inni að halda bréf og gjörninga, dóma og máldaga, og aðrar skrár, er snerta Ísland eða íslenzka menn. Ed. Jón Sigurðsson et al. Vols. I–XVI. Copenhagen and Reykjavík, 1857–1972.

Secondary literature Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. 2007. “Sjælegaver i islandsk senmiddelalder.” In Konge, kirke og samfund. De to øvrighedsmagter i dansk senmiddelalder. Ed. Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir, Per Ingesman and Bjørn Poulsen. Aarhus. 415–442. Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. 2009. “Eigi skal gráta Björn bónda heldur safna liði.” In Heimtur. Ritgerðir til heiðurs Gunnari Karlssyni sjötugum. Ed. Guðmundur Jónsson, Helgi Skúli Kjartansson and Vésteinn Ólason. Reykjavík. 19–34. Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. 2010. Property and Virginity. The Christianization of Marriage in Medieval Iceland 1200–1600. Aarhus. Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. 2014. “Motherhood as Emotion and Social Practice: Mary and Anne as Maternal Models in Medieval Iceland.” In Denmark and Europe in the Middle Ages, c. 1000–1525. Essays in Honour of Professor Michael H. Gelting. Ed. Kerstin Hundahl, Lars Kjær and Niels Lund. Surrey. 43–58. Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. 2017. “Ægtesengen skal være uden synd.” In Reformationen – 1500-tallets kulturrevolution. Ed. Ole Høiris and Per Ingesman. Aarhus. 301–323. Arnór Sigurjónsson. 1975. Vestfirðingasaga 1390–1540. Reykjavík. Ásdís Egilsdóttir, Gunnar Harðarson and Svanhildur Óskarsdóttir, eds. 1998. Maríukver. Sögur og kvæði af heilagri guðsmóður frá fyrri tíð. Reykjavík. Ásgerður Júníusdóttir. 2016. “Altaristafla Ólafar ríku á Skarði. Veraldlegt vald – vist á himnum.” BA Thesis, Háskóli Íslands. http://hdl.handle.net/1946/24423. (28 February 2018). Bjørn, Hans and Lise Gotfredsen. 1996. Århus domkirke Skt. Clemens. Aarhus. Cormack, Margaret. 1994. The Saints in Iceland. Their Veneration from the Conversion to 1400. Subsidia Hagiogaphica, 78. Brussels. DuBois, Thomas A., ed. 2008. Sanctity in the North: Saints, Lives, and Cults in Medieval Scandinavia. Toronto. Guðbjörg Kristjánsdóttir. 2004. “Messuföng og kirkjulist. Búnaður kirkna í kaþólskum sið.” In Hlutavelta tímans. Menningararfur á þjóðminjasafninu. Ed. Árni Björnsson and Hrefna Róbertsdóttir. Reykjavík. 246–259. Matthías Þórðarson. 1911. Lýsing á Skarðskirkju og munum þar. Reykjavík. Nixon, Virginia. 2004. Mary’s Mother. Saint Anne in the Late Medieval Europe. University Park, PA. Sands, Tracey R. 2003. “The Saint as Symbol: The Cult of Saint Katherine of Alexandria among Medieval Sweden’s High Aristocracy.” In St Katherine of Alexandria: Texts and Contexts in Medieval Europe. Ed. Jacqueline Jenkins and Katherine Lewis. Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts, 8. Turnhout. 87–107.



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Sands, Tracey R. 2010. The Company She Keeps: The Medieval Swedish Cult of St. Katherine of Alexandria and its Transformations. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 362. Turnhout. Skórzewska, Joanna. 2011. Constructing a Cult. The Life and Veneration of Guðmundr Arason (1161–1237) in the Icelandic Written Sources. The Northern World, 51. Leiden. Þór Magnússon. 2010. Kirkjur Íslands. Skarðskirkja. Reykjavík.

Tóta Árnadóttir

II: 43 Chain Dancing 1 Introduction This article describes the role of memory in the Faroese ballad tradition, of how the performance of ballads along with chain dance in the Faroe Islands has been presented through time, and how the tradition of ‘remembering together’, has become ‘something to remember together’ in itself. The chain dance has been used in the founding and grounding of a national identity and continues to be defined as a vital part of the national heritage today. Yet, the question posed by Jan Assmann of “which past becomes evident in that heritage and which values emerge in its identificatory appropriation” (1995, 133), in this instance through the performance of ballads, can still be a subject of discussion, since the meaning of remembering and performing the ballads in the modern Faroese community is far from unambiguous.

2 Case study Ballads and chain dancing as memory resource Glymur dansur í høll, Dans sláið ring! Glaðir ríða Noregs menn til hildarting (Ólavur Tryggvason, CCF 215) [Raucous dancing in the hall. / Dance, form a ring! / Joyfully Norwegian men / Ride to the battle (author’s translation)]

These lines are the refrain of one of the most popular ballads used in the Faroese chain dance today, Ólavur Tryggvason (CCF 215, Føroya kvæði, 1972, 405), or as it is commonly known Ormurin langi [The Long Serpent]. The ballad refers to events which, according to Heimskringla, took place in Norway in past times, recalling the sea battle around the year 1000 in which King Óláfr of Norway was defeated by Earl Eiríkr and lost control over his kingdom – lost too was the king’s impres­ sive longboat, The Long Serpent. The ballad imitates the style of medieval ballads in oral tradition, but is far younger. It was written by the farmer and poet Jens Christian Djurhuus (1773–1853) who wrote several ballads imitating the old style, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-079



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based on events recorded in older writings on the history of Norway and the Faroe Islands. This particular ballad appears as Oula Triggason in a manuscript dated February 1823 (Króki 1983, 318–319) and has been a commonly used ballad in the Faroese chain dance ever since. In recent years, the modern rock version from 2002 (the lyrics being 10 verses picked out of the original 86) by the Faroese metal band Týr has no doubt contributed to its popularity among the younger gener­ ation even to the point of making some of them more interested in the dance tradition in general (Green 2013, 140). The popularity of this ballad illustrates some key aspects the role of memory has when it comes to the ballad tradition in today’s Faroese society: 1. The oral tradition with connections to medieval chain dance has long been used as proof of cultural memory of pre-modern times and of international connections to a local practice. The remembrance of a Norwegian king can be seen as historical consciousness, recognition of the fact that Faroese history goes beyond the borders of the country, both by the author and by performers of the song. 2. Romantic fascination with the medieval past became part of Faroese nation building. The author of the poem has been listed as one of the earliest repre­ sentatives of Faroese romantic poetry (Marnersdóttir and Sigurðardóttir 2011), given both that the form imitates an older folklore tradition and that the subject of the ballad is an imagined and idealised version of the Nor­ wegian king – a monarch to whom specific ‘Nordic virtues’ such as great courage and strength are attributed. 3. This modern self-conscious and sometimes ambiguous use of tradition often stands as the representation of a specific national identity. It serves as a source of pride for many that some take the effort to remember this part of a ‘national culture’ and at the same time the tradition is used as part of a commercial branding of ‘Faroese culture’ in an international setting. Young Faroese people who are attracted to the rock version of the ballad may not even know what it is about, but still enjoy the ‘Faroeseness’ of the song and happily sing along with the refrain. A foreign audience may experience the song as ‘authentic’ because it is sung in the Faroese language to the original tune, whether it is performed to the chain dance or not. These layers of meaning of memory overlap and are not mutually exclusive. Making the effort to memorise the many verses of a ballad demands motivation from those who intend to take part in this tradition. The questions that can be asked in all of these instances are: What is remembered? And why is it remem­ bered? What motivates the individuals who take on this challenge today? In what way can the battle of a Norwegian king of the past be relevant to a young Faroese

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person today? The answers will vary depending on the situation and illustrate the point that the Faroese ballad tradition signifies many different things to different people at different times, even simultaneously. The Faroese ballad tradition is part of a wider European tradition with obscure roots. The content of many of the ballads is shared by several other coun­ tries, although parts of the repertoire are only found in the Faroe Islands. The descriptive catalogue The Types of the Scandinavian Medieval Ballads (Jonsson et al. 1978) gives a good impression of the connections and overlaps of Faroese ballads with other Scandinavian ballads. Some of the heroes represented in the Faroese songs are known from Icelandic saga material, both notable Icelandic heroes and heroes from European legend material. Important intertexts in one of the most prominent ballads, Sjúrðar kvæði [the Sigurd ballads], include e.g. the Icelandic Völsungasaga and the German Nibelungenlied. The characters of these ballads are sometimes based on historical persons, for instance, when the Faroese dancers chant about Artala kongur, the Faroese term for Attila the Hun (leader of the Hunnic empire, d. 453). Whereas the equally prominent and popular ballads about Charlemagne, the most popular one being Runsivalsstríð [the battle at Ron­ cevaux], have their historical origin in the story about the Basque ambush attack on Charlemagne’s rear-guard in Roncevaux in the year 778. The chain dance itself, still performed in the Faroes, has also been claimed to belong to a wider European tradition, but the nature of the connection between the Faroese dance and a European tradition remains unclear (Bakka 2008). The earliest record of the dance is from 1616 and describes people dancing in a ‘Faroese way’ amongst other entertainment, at a party on a prominent farmhouse in the village of Lamba (Jón Ólafsson 1908–1909). In 1669, Thomas Tarnovius describes both the ballads and the dancing and seems to have the impression that the ballads are created – at least in part – by the Faroese: “De Øffve dem oc udi lange rim oc vyser at dicte, om en eller anden ting som mand skulde sige at det dennem fast umueligt” (Tarnovius 1950, 76) [They practice long rhymes and create poems about various things that should seem impossible to them (author’s translation)]. Another description from around the same time is found in a report by the Danish scholar Lucas Debes in 1673 who emphasises the primitive nature of the dance and underlines that the ballads sung by the dancers are old (Debes 1963, 251–252). These early presentations of the Faroese dance have been repeated numerous times as part of the exoticist image of the Faroe Islands, and in order to prove the authenticity of the dance as part of the nation building endeavours by the nationalist cultural movement later on (see e.g. Simonsen 2012). Thus, both Tarnovius and Lucas Debes can be seen as memory creators who have influenced the notion of how the dance is supposed to be performed in the best way.



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The eighteenth-century Faroese scholar Jens Chr. Svabo was convinced that the old ballads were threatened by extinction. We know from other sources that Danish ballads, kæmpeviser, became increasingly popular over time and were used in the dance along with and instead of the Faroese songs (Patursson 1966). It is likely that this development was already visible at the time of Svabo, who imagined that if someone would like to investigate these Faroese ballads in the future, they would probably have vanished along with the Faroese language see (Jacobsen in Marnersdóttir and Sigurðardóttir 2011, 162). In 1773, Svabo was very pessimistic about the future of the Faroese language and saw the sole preserving reservoir for the remnants of a ‘corrupted’ Faroese in these fading ballads: “Man har ikke her noget Mindesmærke af det rette Gamle [Sprog], med mindre man skulde kunne henregne nogle Helte-Sange, Kvêâïr kaldede hertil, som i en Række af Aarhundrede ere igiennem Slægternes utroe Hukommelse noget radbrækkede nedkomne til vore Tider” (Svabo 1959, XIII) [One does not have here (that is, in this case) memorials to the rather old (language) unless one includes some heroic songs, called kvæði, which through a line of centuries are by generations of faulty memory preserved somewhat mangled up to our time (author’s translation)]. An interesting thing about Svabo’s observation is that he claims that the Faroese sing these old songs without fully understanding them; not only will the songs soon be forgotten, but even if they are remembered, people will, according to him, probably forget the language.

Remembering the ballads, the language – and inventing the nation The future took a different direction, though. An organised collection of heroic ballads took place during 1817–1822, initiated by Danish scholars primarily inter­ ested in the ballads about Sjúrður ‘the dragon slayer’ mentioned above. Faroese collectors wrote down a variety of these ballads, and they were published in 1822 as Færøiske Qvæder om Sigurd Fofnersbane og hans Æt [Faroese poems about Sigurd the dragon slayer and his kin], compiled by Hans Chr. Lyngbye (Lyngbye 1822). This collecting activity became the start of an accelerated effort to collect other ballads in the islands, and the concept of ‘Faroese ballads’ was established and used as the title in the publishing of the material as Corpus Carminum Faroensium (referred to as CCF). This collection of ballads – around 70.000 stanzas in all – became the cultural artefact that proved the long roots into central European and Old Norse literature of Faroese culture and created a memory resource for the future literature written in Faroese. The printed version of the Sigurd ballads became the first book to use the Faroese language in print, emphasising the inter­ twining of the language and the Faroese ballads once again. Since the vocabulary

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preserved in the ballads also came to serve as a source, and a source of inspira­ tion, to the later purist line in the development of a modern Faroese language, the narrative of the ballads ‘saving the language’ has been retold since and can, at least in part, explain the high esteem the ballads continue to hold in the Faroe Islands. An example of the ballads being praised along these lines can be seen in the poem Móðurmálið [The mother tongue] by Christian Matras (1900–1988). The first verse of three describing where the poet ‘finds the language’ begins with an emphasis on the ballad tradition, claiming its continuity through the ages. The poem can be seen as cultural memory creation with the aim of presenting the Faroese language personified as a vibrant ‘you’ that can be encountered, for instance, in the ballads: Eg fann teg í kvæðum, sum fólksins varrar lyftu úr øld í øld, eg fann teg í søgum og sagnatali, har fólksins brøgd vóru tøld, eg fann teg í mjúkum barnaljóði, sum sungið varð vetrarkvøld. (Matras 1940) [I found you in ballads, Carried on the lips of the people throughout the centuries, I found you in stories and legends, encountering deeds of the people, I found you in the soft songs of children, sung on winter nights. (author’s translation)]

Remembering the ballads included remembering the islands’ language, history and culture, and as such this memory served as a vital part of the foundation of future national identity which became a political force with the nationalistic move­ ment of the early twentieth century (see e.g. Simonsen 2011). To some, remember­ ing the ballads and performing the dance gradually became an honorable patriotic act rather than just plain entertainment. Others continued to see the dance mainly as part of social life (perhaps outdated and old fashioned), or in some cases as dangerous and harmful as it was connected with the use of alcohol and ‘partying’ more than anything else in some places, something which lead to the dance being completely rejected in parts of the islands by the turn of the century (1900). Gradually the status of the ballads became an issue and the official authori­ ties sought to preserve as much as possible of the tradition. The importance of tradition to a national identity was used as an argument when the dance and the ballads were incorporated into the official school curriculum in 1997 (“Lóg 125 Um Fólkaskúlan 1997”.) The intention with this step was also to clear the dance



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from earlier stigmas as ‘sinful’ or inappropriate, a view widely held by the reli­ gious part of the population, even in the 1980s. This official interest in the dance, apart from benefitting dance organisations and supporting efforts to maintain the tradition, most likely affects the attitude of the average Faroese person towards the tradition for better and for worse – when the dance was introduced as a school subject, some enthusiastic dancers and experts on folklore warned that it would make children loose interest because they would just see it as another duty, instead of entertainment (Andreassen 1996, 30). On the other hand, only a minority of the children learn the dance in a setting outside of the school today, whereas most are introduced to the dance at school (although some connoisseurs will argue that in many cases this is just a superficial introduction to the tradition). There is no doubt that the general awareness of the importance of the tradi­ tion has added a symbolic value to the dance and ballad tradition, something pointed out by anthropologists studying the islanders already in the 1970s: As Faroese society has modernized, and has in many respects come more and more to resemble others in western Europe, its members find tokens of their collective distinctiven­ ess in the traditional past. The ballads are one such token. They have thus become symbols of Faroese culture as well as expressions of it, self-conscious articulations of what makes Faroese culture distinctive and respectable, timeless and enduring, in still-changing times. (Wylie and Margolin 1981, 71)

Rembering together In the Faroese chain dance the dancers form a ring, which is twisted like a snake and moving along with the chain the participants get to face all the other partici­ pants several times, make eye contact and share different gestures as the ballads are sung. Despite the symbolic uses, the chain dance continues to be a social experience more than anything else. In the preface to The Ring of Dancer (Wylie and Margolin 1981), Einar Haugen emphasises the social character of the dance: “Unlike the modern couple dance, they are not sexual, but communal” (Wylie and Margolin 1981, xv). To an outsi­ der the dance may seem dull and even grotesque in its monotony and not always very gracious movements; others will notice the unique community of the dance. Raymond Pilet, a French visitor who wrote down the melodies to some ballads during his travels in the Faroe Islands in 1895, describes the community of the dance in glorifying terms, typical of his time:

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Il n’y a là aucune distinction de classes: les pêcheurs, les laboureurs, les domestiques donnent fraternellement la main au négociant, au fermier du roi, au sysselman et au pasteur; il n’y a même pas de distinction d’âge: les petits enfants sont admis dans la ronde avec les grandes personnes. En les regardant, on pense à l’ode de Schiller: “O joie, belle étincelle de Dieu, fille de l’Élysée! nous entrons tout brûlants du feu divin dans ton sanc­ tuaire; devant toi tous les hommes sont égaux.” (Pilet 1896: 45) [There are no class barriers there: fishermen, workers, servants reach their hands to the merchant, the farmer, the sheriff and the priest as brothers; neither do they discriminate against age: the small children are allowed to enter the ring along with the big ones. Looking at them I come to think of “Ode to Joy” by Schiller: “Oh Joy, beautiful spark of divinity, daughter of Elysium, we enter, drunk with fire into your sanctuary; before you all humans are equal.” (Trans. Turið Sigurðardóttir)]

The romantic description gives the impression that before it became a self-con­ scious way of performing a national identity, the dancers seemed to be remember­ ing other things together, things that made sense to them across age and social status. This presentation can, of course, be seen as a form of memory creation in itself, but nevertheless, one must conclude that dancers through the centuries have found in the ballads something of importance to them, long before a nation­ alistic discourse entered the arena. When asked about the qualities of ‘good dance’, experienced dancers will still point to the ability of the lead singer to bring the narrative to life, and the ability of the other dancers to get involved in the story. This involves living memory – in the case of the leader, he or she must remember all the stanzas of the song and even more importantly have the skills and energy to perform the story, through musical variation, body language and facial expressions. Although it is not impossible to enjoy a ballad as long as you are ready to listen to the leader and join in on the refrain, the other dancers will find it easier to experience the story if they know it beforehand. In interviews with leaders of the dance in the 1960s and 1970s, the Faroese folklorist Mortan Nolsøe found that many of the older dancers found the events retold in the ballads to be historically correct, and some even thought of them as having taken place in the Faroes (Nolsøe 1987). He refers to a story he was told when interviewing teacher and dancer Leifur Tróndarson who had been attend­ ing a dance in the village of Fámjin sometime in the late 1930s or early 1940s. The ballad Seyðaríman (CCF 87) was sung at the dance and when Leifur came back to the house where he was staying, an elderly lady offered to point out to him the specific places where the events of this fantastic ballad took place (events involv­ ing fantasy beings, such as trolls and witches). Even the famous battle of Ronce­ vaux was placed in the nearby neighbourhood by some singers (Nolsøe 1987, 21).



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Today singers are not likely to see the ballads as ‘true’ but still the conceived importance of remembering can be seen as some sort of loyalty towards the imag­ ined heroes. The dancing community shares this loyalty when they get together to dance and to remember what others have forgotten. The author William Heinesen describes this in one of his short stories, Her skal danses [Here there shall be a dance] from 1980: Det er kun forståeligt, kære venner, om I ryster på hovedet ad den seje trofasthed og hengi­ vendhed hvormed vi gamle dages dansere og kvadmænd i hærskarer af vers hang ved disse sagnkæmper fra længst forgangne tider. Men det drejer sig nu ikke om den rene enfold og forstokkelse, må I vide. Ejheller om ubegribelig opslugthed af frankernes historie i det ottende århundrede! Nej, Karlemagnus – han er ikke bare det gamle vandresagns Charlema­ gne, – han er en af vore egne, en danser og kvæder som vi, og den rasende Roland kan være både dig og mig. Det er i vores vores stærke sang hans vældige hornklange bor. (Heinesen 1980, 177) [It is only understandable, dear friends, if you are shaking your heads at the stubborn loyalty and devotion with which we, the dancers and chanters of old, stick to these legen­ dary heroes from times long gone. Nevertheless, do not think that it is all about simplemin­ ded stubbornness. Nor is it about some incomprehensible fascination of the history of the old French in the eight century. No, Karlamagnus, he is not just the Charlemagne of the old travelling legend, he is one of our own, a dancer and chanter like us, and the furious Roland can be either you or me. It is in our strong song that his formidable horn sounds today. (author’s translation)]

Apparently the task of keeping the heroes alive still seems relevant enough for those who continue to enter the ring and join in the song about them, maybe because they somehow identify with them. The same can probably be said about those who, like Týr, decide to rejuvenate the old stories in new forms. The Cana­ dian anthropologist Joshua John Green who did fieldwork and numerous inter­ views with young people around the islands in 2011–2012 in connection with his writing on the Faroese music environment states that “…it should be evident that for some Faroese people, the events of even the most distant era of Faroese history, and Týr’s compositions that evoke and make reference to that era, remain relevant and meaningful” (Green 2013, 150). Those who chant about the Norwe­ gian king today may not care for historical facts or Norwegian kings as such, but use this means at recognising the community of those who remember heroes of the past.

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Remembering today Remembering the ballads has been staged officially as a way to ‘remember who we are’ as part of some sort of fixed Faroese identity, rather than a more diffuse and fluid remembering the events told in the ballads. These various ways of remembering are not mutually exclusive as such, but the balance and emphasis may vary from one person to another and from context to context; and it makes it hard to describe any particular intention or meaning that applies to every­ one who engages in the tradition. It is not unusual for Faroese chain dancers to have a tongue in cheek attitude toward especially politically incorrect ballads, like the brúðarvísa [wedding song] which reminds the audience that the woman has to respect the superiority of the man, for instance. People tend to bear with outdated, sometimes sexist and even semi-racist content of some ballads out of respect for the tradition itself, and some will laugh at these parts instead of reject­ ing the ballad as a whole, in this way adding a new ironic meaning to the text they are keeping alive. This postmodern approach is not understood or appreciated by everyone, whether we are talking about dancers or spectators. Among the younger generations there has been a tendency to distance them­ selves from a practice that appears archaic and formalised beyond simple plea­ sure (Green 2013, 91–92) but as the same time the practice has been recognised as ‘intangible heritage’ to be preserved for the future, implying an ongoing effort to enrol new participants in the tradition to ensure its continuation (Unesconevndin 2015). The dilemma, well-known from other discussions on intangible heritage, arises – what exactly is it that has to be remembered and preserved? The lyrics, the performance, the feelings, the motifs of the participants? The fact that the very fixation of a living cultural practise can easily lead to the death of that prac­ tise one is trying to protect, very much applies to the Faroese chain dance, and it has presented anyone interested in the tradition with dilemmas since the first efforts of ‘official remembering’ took place, namely by collecting the lyrics of the ballads and transferring them from an unsteady oral form to a fixed written form. Today, ballad singers mostly learn their repertoire from books, and remembering is very much a reproduction of an already fixed memory, rather than individually stored songs which may generate new ballads spontaneously, as described by Rubin (Rubin 1995, 285–294). The politicisation of a cultural practice is like a two-edged sword; at the same time that it ensures grants and support, it also makes the practise vulnerable to changing attitudes and opinions – the step from being seen as patriotic and authentic, to being perceived as nationalistic or even chauvinistic is not always that big, as has been experienced by some of the Metal bands using their heritage as ‘Nordic material’ in their expression and ending up with accusations of Nazi



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sympathies (as it happened to Týr and Finnish band Moonsorrow in 2008 [see http://www.metalunderground.com/interviews/details.cfm?newsid=73479]). In his article “Cultural Rhapsody in Shift”, the Faroese anthropologist Firouz Gaini explains how romantic portrayals of Faroese culture often fail to escape exoticism and are flawed by naïve focus in the Faroes as representatives of an authentic way of life. The islands are often being presented as this very strange and special place, hidden away from time and modernity. Gaini goes on to describe how local scholars instead of distancing themselves from the romantic portrayal of Faroese culture, have “adopted a politicized cultural concept in their struggle to ‘save’ the ancient ‘authentic’ culture and language” (Gaini, 2011, 134). Realising this, the question remains if it is possible to talk about the role of chain dance, or any cultural tradition valued as national heritage, without contributing in one way or the other to their reification as important cultural artefacts or the opposite, disclosing their role as ideological efforts with a nationalistic agenda. Academic scholars easily become memory creators either way, serving different agendas, whilst still entangled in a politicised discourse. Perhaps it would be useful to emphasise the importance of viewing collective remembrance through the chain dance, not as a fixed feature, canonised from above, but rather as varied, local and temporary versions of performing tradition as a way of ‘remembering who we are and what we value’. This perspective may serve as a fruitful complementary angle, which includes but also reaches beyond the three categories of memory mentioned in the introduction of this article.

Works cited Primary sources Debes, Lucas Jacobsøn. Færoæ & Færoa Reserata 1673. Færøernes Beskrivelse i Facsimileudgave. Vol. 1. Ed. Jørgen Rischel. Copenhagen. 1963. Føroya Kvæði. Corpus Carminum Færoensium. 6. Ed. Napoleon Djurhuus. Copenhagen, 1972. Heinesen, William. Her skal danses. Copenhagen. 1980. Jón Ólafsson. Æfisaga Jóns Ólafssonar Indíafara, samin af honum sjálfum (1661). Ed. Sigfús Blöndal. Copenhagen. 1908–09. Lyngbye, Hans Christian. Færøiske Qvæder Om Sigurd Fafnersbane Og Hans Æt. Randers. 1822. Matras, Christian. Úr leikum og loyndum. Tórshavn. 1940. MMR. 1997. Lóg 125 Um Fólkaskúlan 1997. Føroyar: logir.fo. http://logir.fo/Logtingslog/125fra-20-06-1997-um-folkaskulan-sum-seinast-broytt-vid-logtingslog-nr-34-fra-28. (January 2018) Svabo, Jens Christian. Indberetninger fra en Reise i Færøe 1781 og 1782. Ed. Napoleon Djurhuus. Copenhagen, 1959.

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Unesconevndin (the Faroese Unesco comittee) 2015. “Áheitan Um Íverksetan Av Unesco Sáttmálanum.” MMR. Tórshavn.

Secondary sources Andreassen, Eyðun. 1996. Føroyskur dansur – Ein stutt lýsing. Tórshavn. Assmann, Jan. 1995. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” New German Critique 65: 125–133. Bakka, Egil. 2008. “Tradisjonelle songdansar. Eit oversyn.” In Balladdans i Norden. Symposium i Stockholm 8–9 november 2007. Meddelanden från Svenskt Visarkiv, 48. Stockholm. 15–27. Gaini, Firouz, ed. 2011. Among the Islanders of the North. An Anthropology of the Faroe Islands. Tórshavn. Green, Joshua. 2013. Music Making in the Faroes. The Experience of Music-making in the Faroes and Making Metal Faroese. Tórshavn. Jonsson, Bengt R., Svale Solheim, Eva Danielsen, eds. 1978. The Types of the Scandinavian Medieval Ballad: A Descriptive Catalogue. Stockholm. Króki, Jóannes í. 1982. Sandoyarbók II. Ed. Rikard Long. Tórshavn. Marnersdóttir, Malan and Turið Sigurðardóttir. 2011. Føroysk bókmentasøga. Vol. 1. Tórshavn. Nolsøe, Mortan. 1987. “‘Eg havi verið við havsins botn og stundum uppi við ský.’” Fróðskaparrit. 34–36: 5–22. Patursson, Jóannes. 1966. Tættir úr Kirkjubøar søgu. Tórshavn. Pilet, Raymond. 1896. Rapport sur une mission en Islande et aux Îles Féroé. Paris. Rubin, David C. 1995. Memory in Oral Traditions – The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-out Rhymes. Oxford. Simonsen, Kim. 2011. “Networks in the Making of Faroese Literature.” S.P.I.N. Study Platform of Interlocking Nationalisms. (see spinnet.humanities.uva.nl). (January 2018) Simonsen, Kim. 2012. “Literature, Imagining and Memory in the Formation of a Nation.” Ph.D. Diss. University of Roskilde. Tarnovius, Thomas. 1950. Ferøers Beskrifvelser 1669. Ed. Håkon Hamre. Færoensia, 2. Copenhagen. Wylie, Jonathan and David Margolin. 1981. The Ring of Dancers. Images of Faroese Culture. Philadelphia, PA.

Mathias Nordvig

II: 44 Neo-Paganism 1 Introduction: The Viking as a racial patriarch in identitarian Ásatrú How the Viking function as a so-called racial patriarch in contemporary memory is exemplified by two North American identitarian Ásatrú neo-pagan groups: the Ásatrú Folk Assembly (AFA), and the Wolves of Vinland (WOV). To these groups, the Viking is an emblem of an imagined past purity. It is a past that is racially, cul­ turally, and spiritually pure. Because the Viking is perceived as closer to nature, removed from contemporary levels of civilised comfort, the Viking is also con­ sidered to be closer to the natural state of northern, white Europeans. There is a cross-over between the Ásatrú view of this Viking archetype, and its configu­ rations in the heavy metal music scene (von Schnurbein 2016). Viking-themed heavy metal music, to some extent, celebrates the Viking as a white racial patri­ arch, much like Identitarian Ásatrú. For that reason, the concept of the racial patriarch, as coined by Karl Spracklen in context of Viking-themed heavy metal (Spracklen 2015) is appropriate.

2 Case study The Viking archetype: A symbol of past purity in identitarian Ásatrú Since the Danish antiquarian Thomas Bartholin published his thesis, Antiquitatum danicarum de causis contemptae a Danis adhuc gentilibus mortis [Antiquities con­ cerning the Reason for the Pagan Danes’ Disdain for Death], in 1689, the stereo­ type of the brave Viking hero who proudly laughs in the face of certain death has been a common popular idea (O’Donoghue 2007, 108–109). To this day, the Viking is an emblem of an imagined past, a fearless warrior, a wild pagan savage who stands in opposition to the tame modern world. The Viking can also therefore be considered closer to Nature. It is the lack of modern civilised varnish that makes the Viking wild – hence brave, and more spiritual too. From this perspective, the Viking archetype is a social Darwinist symbol that is produced and reproduced in the collective memory of the modern western world, from music to screen pro­ ductions – to spirituality. The Viking archetype has become a modern ideological

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history, or collective mythical identity, which can be used by individuals in the twenty-first century to connect with, and create meaning through. In that sense, the phrase ‘collective mythical identity’, used by Jacques Le Goff in History and Memory (1992), lends itself well to the uses of the Viking arche­ type in contemporary culture. According to Le Goff, collective memory takes an interest in collective mythical identity, often shaped as origin myths centered around the earliest era of social history (Le Goff 1992, 55–56). The Viking arche­ type functions as a racial patriarch for multiple groups in that regard. Since the 1980s, Viking-themed media have been growing in popularity on a global scale. A fringe phenomenon in the late 1980s, Nordic black metal and folk metal using images of Nordic mythology, Vikings, and folklore, became widely popular in Europe and North America in the early twenty-first century (von Helden 2009). The increasing popularity of this Nordic-flavoured form of heavy metal is under­ scored by the establishment of music festivals such as the Norwegian Midgards­ blot [Middle-Earth Sacrifice] in 2015 at the historic site of Borre in Vestfold (Mid­ gardsblot webpage). Although Viking-themed heavy metal and its fan base may not be homog­ enous, encompassing bands, groups, and individuals with diverse origins and political perspectives, the prevalence of what scholar of heavy metal Karl Sprack­ len has called the ‘national patriarch’ is still notable. The national patriarch as a symbol in Viking-themed heavy metal and folk metal reinforces the image of Vikings and their Anglo-Saxon cousins as a symbol of whiteness and masculin­ ity: “[…] folk metal remains central to the on-going construction of heavy metal as a form of commodified leisure that makes the power of Western, instrumental whiteness and hegemonic masculinity invisible, while ironically being in plain sight.” (Spracklen 2015, 1). This concept of the Viking as a symbol of whiteness and masculinity is widely reproduced among contemporary Nordic-themed neopagan revivalists, such as Odinists and the Ásatrú – the Identitarian Ásatrú. Identitarian Ásatrú describes the contemporary incarnation of Nordic-the­ med neo-paganism with nationalist interests. As a political faction in new nati­ onalist movements, identitarians are proponents of an activist strategy of cultural infiltration, called ‘metapolitics’, and adhere to non-hierarchical globalist sepa­ ratism. Such new nationalist movements reject older far-right associations with skinhead movements and ultraviolent expressions, instead propagating a notion of white ‘me-too-ism’ or white ‘minoritisation’: the idea that the white race in this multicultural world is being denied its distinctive ethnic identity (Teitelbaum 2017, 29–32). New nationalists in general, and identitarians in particular, perform ‘folk’ memory culture through music, annual folk gatherings, the study of Old Norse mythology, and making Viking-era crafts (Teitelbaum 2017, 24). This is a way of celebrating the racial patriarch by inserting it into collective memory, and



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it often takes place in association with neo-pagan groups identifying as Ásatrú. Ásatrú groups aligned with these activities may be called Identitarian Ásatrú.

Contemporary Nordic-themed paganism Popularisation of the Nordic Middle Ages and the Viking Era in the broader public sphere has generated a way in which individuals can identify with the Vikings as a primary expression of Nordic culture (cf. O’Donoghue 2007, 183–190). Studies on western neo-pagan sub-cultures based on the Nordic Viking Age have in different ways highlighted how the pursuit of the Viking is rooted in a modern search for primitivism and authenticity. The seminal study by Stefanie von Schnurbein, Religion als Kulturkritik (1992), focuses on northern European neo-pagans, and how they adopt the Nordic past as a way to criticise the modern age. Such sentiments are persistently channelled through the reverence of the Viking archetype among current neo-pagans, Odinists, and the Ásatrú in North America. They subscribe to an ethno-nationalist ideal of the Viking as a racial patriarch projected back into an imagined past. This is a trend that has continued since the 1990s, and become even more prevalent in the early twenty-first century (Snook 2015; Velkoborská 2015; von Schnurbein 2016). Even when there is no overt or intended ethnic, nationalist or exclusive racial component to neo-pagan expressions of Viking spiritual identity, the Viking archetype still seems to be included. Reconstruction as a religious pursuit in Viking-themed neo-paganism is a recurring phenomenon where practitioners look to the pre-Christian Nordic past for primary expression of religious modalities and authority (Amster 2015; Gregorius 2015). One of the groups subscribing to ethno-nationalism is the Ásatrú Folk Assem­ bly (Gardell 2003, 259–283). Recently, its former leader, Stephen McNallen, seems to have surfaced on YouTube and other social media as a proponent of what could be called Identitarian Ásatrú with his “Wotan Network”. In several videos, McNal­ len expounds on an ideology of race, spirituality, and the “Wolf Age”. The term “Wolf Age” has its origin in the Old Norse vargǫld, a term for Ragnarök (Vǫluspá, St. 44). McNallen directly translates this into a belief that the white race across the world, in Europe, North America, and elsewhere, will be extinct in the year 2100 (YouTube 2017, What Stephen McNallen Really Thinks About Race, 6:40–7:10). His response to this perceived predicament of the white race is to reach back into the racial soul, to the “Wotan archetype”. In the video “The Awakening of Wotan”, McNallen explains this idea: What do German gods and obscure psychological theories have to do with the present needs of our race? How does a topic seemingly so abstract impinge on the crisis that faces white

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people around the world? Wotan, god of the Germans, was known as Odin to the Norsemen and Woden to the Saxons. The old Germanic religion has made a significant come-back in the recent decades with the worship of Odin and Thor and the other deities of Asgard, now occurring through Europe, North America, and other locations across the globe. And I’m proud to have played a key role in that revival. But one doesn’t have to be a literal believer in the reality of Wotan to appreciate his importance as an empowering symbol for the reawake­ ning of the European peoples. (YouTube 2017, The Awakening of Wotan, 0:32–1:20)

McNallen proceeds to explain the workings of C. G. Jung’s theory of Wotan as “the driving psychic dominant of Europe” (2:13–2:16), and as an archetype that becomes active within a race, whenever the race is threatened or the archetype itself is repressed or denied. Earlier, it was manifested in the revival of national­ ism, Germanic mysticism, and völkisch culture (see e.g. Jung, Wotan [1989]). The spirit of Wotan “the wanderer”, McNallen explains, gave way to the marching of soldiers with the rise of National Socialism as the ultimate result (2:20–3:25). McNallen warns that this will happen again, and, in “What Stephen McNallen Really Thinks About Race”, he says that he will fight for his race (9:28–9:30), allud­ ing to the reawakening of the Viking archetype as a racial patriarch. To McNallen and, perhaps, the Ásatrú Folk Assembly, the Viking archetype is embodied in the Wotan archetype. This archetype is a form of remembering the Viking past as a symbol of white, masculine primitivism, which derives from the collective memory of the fearless Viking first coined by Bartholin. The archetype perhaps finds its most refined expression in the group “Wolves of Vinland”. Like McNallen’s “Wotan Network” (YouTube webpage “The Wotan Network”), the “Wolves of Vinland” use the slogan “Wotan mit uns” (Wotan with us; Peter Beste webpage, second image). The group has its home in Lynch­ burg, Virginia, USA, but also has a following in Oregon, Colorado, and Wyoming (Donovan 2017). As neo-pagans, they embody hyper-masculinity and a concept of tribalism that seems partially inspired by the Italian radical traditionalist Julius Evola (see e.g. von Schnurbein 2016 for Evola’s influence on Ásatrú). They also appear to be involved with white supremacist activism (Perry 2017). They reject contemporary lifestyles, and revere a form of tribalist primitivism instead: “Standing in opposition to these ideas are groups such as The Wolves of Vinland who are actively producing and perfecting a system of tribalism that rebels against consumerism because of its understanding of its own true culture.” (The Hex Factory webpage 2017)

The visual representations of the group are telling: bare-chested men with ashpainted faces; runes; blood sacrifices; weapons; and boxing or wrestling, as wit­ nessed in a photo-documentary by renowned heavy metal photographer Peter Beste (Peter Beste webpage 2017). Beste’s photo-documentary reveals a group of



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men and a few women, whose impression of the Viking archetype is that it rejects modern capitalist consumerism as a form of multi-culture-turned-mono-culture (The Hex Factory webpage 2017). Physical strength and ‘wildness’ are important aspects of the group’s theology: As Heathen men and women, we are willfull beings, and excercising of the will is the only way to make it stronger […] When we talk about ‘re-wilding’ it is the acknowledgement that the very act of becoming civilized is one of relinquishing freedom. Everything that is wild is free and everything that is free is wild especially by today’s standards. So as we become more wild, we become more free. The reason we say re-wild is because we have to retrain our senses to perceive our world without the use of the civilized filter, and to realize that most of the time the only thing that is keeping us from achieving this freedom is our preconceived notions about the world we live in (The Hex Factory webpage 2017 [spelling and grammar in the source]).

In many ways, the Wolves of Vinland perform the Odinic Viking archetype that Stephen McNallen describes. Heathenism represents a white masculinist form of wildness that appears as counterculture to the established multi-ethnic ‘monoculture’ of the modern, globalised world. The Viking is thus remembered as a racial patriarch who represents a core of purity in white men. The reverence of the Viking archetype as a racial patriarch in the imagined memory space of Scandi­ navia is prevalent in multiple movements with identity-ties to Northern Europe. As the Nordic past has been gaining in popularity in music and media in the first decades of the twenty-first century, the Viking archetype has become more common and available for identity construction in North America. Identitarian Ásatrú has developed not at the centre of this broad cultural development, but in its periphery. In this periphery, groups and individuals enact a reclaiming of ethnic identity based on white minoritisation. As proponents of this enactment, a web of signifiers connects Stephen McNallen, his associates in AFA, the “Wotan Network”, and the “Wolves of Vinland”. The Viking archetype as a racial patri­ arch is at the centre as the collective memory of the white Viking past. The basic premise for the spirituality of these groups is that things were better in ancient Scandinavia: the time before the modern world, before white Northern Europe­ ans lost ground to peoples of other cultures and other races.

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Works cited Primary sources Beste, Peter. 2017. Wolves of Vinland. Peter Beste webpage: http://www.peterbeste.com/#/ wov/. (28 November 2017) Donovan, Jack. 2017. Waldgang Journal. Jack Donovan webpage: http://www.jack-donovan. com/axis/tag/wolves-of-vinland/. (28 November 2017) The Hex Factory webpage. 2017. http://www.thehexfactory.com/matthiaswaggener.htm. (28 November 2017) McNallen, Stephen. 2017. The Awakening of Wotan. June 27, 2017, YouTube: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hyESpANKtQ&t=27s. (28 November 2017) McNallen, Stephen. 2017. What Stephen McNallen Really Thinks About Race! March 3, 2017, YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewUuNO636ag. (28 November 2017) Midgardsblot webpage. 2017. https://www.midgardsblot.no/. (28 November 2017) Völuspá. In Eddukvæði. I. Ed. Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason. ÍF. Reykjavik, 2014. 291–321.

Secondary sources Amster, Matthew H. 2015. “It’s Not Easy Being Apolitical. Reconstruction and Eclecticism in Danish Asatro.” In Contemporary Pagan and Native Faith Movements in Europe. Colonialist and Nationalist Impulses. Ed. Kathryn Roundtree. New York. 43–63. Gardell, Mattias. 2003. Gods of the Blood. The Pagan Revival and White Separatism. Durham. Gregorius, Fredrik. 2015. “Modern Heathenism in Sweden: A Case Study in the Creation of a Traditional Religion.” In Contemporary Pagan and Native Faith Movements in Europe. Colonialist and Nationalist Impulses. Ed. Kathryn Roundtree. New York. 64–85. von Helden, Imke. 2009. “Scandinavian Metal Attack! The Power of Northern Europe in Extreme Metal.” In Heavy Metal Fundamentalisms. Music, Metal, and Politics. Ed. Rosemary Hill and Karl Spracklen. Oxford. 33–38. Jung, Carl Gustav 1989. “Wotan.” In Essays on Contemporary Events. The Psychology of Nazism. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Princeton, NJ. Le Goff, Jacques. 1992. History and Memory. Trans. Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman. New York. [Italian orig. 1977] O’Donoghue, Heather. 2007. From Asgard to Valhalla. The Remarkable History of the Norse Myths. London. Perry, David. 2017. “White Supremacists Love Vikings. But They’ve Got History All Wrong.” Washington Post webpage March 31, 2017: https://www.washingtonpost.com/ posteverything/wp/2017/05/31/white-supremacists-love-vikings-but-theyve-got-historyall-wrong/?utm_term=.f9ccfca3a4fc. (28 November 2017) Rose City Antifa webpage. 2016. http://rosecityantifa.org/articles/the-wolves-of-vinland-afascist-countercultural-tribe-in-the-pacific-northwest/. (28 November 2017) von Schnurbein, Stefanie. 1992. Religion als Kulturkritik. Heidelberg.



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von Schnurbein, Stefanie. 2016. Norse Revival. Transformations of Germanic Neopaganism. Leiden. Snook, Jennifer. 2015. American Heathens. The Politics of Identity in a Pagan Religious Movement. Philadelphia. Spracklen, Karl. 2015. “‘To Holmgard… and Beyond’. Folk Metal Fantasies and Hegemonic White Masculinities.” Metal Music Studies 1.3: 359–377. Teitelbaum, Ben. 2017. Lions of the North. New York. Velkoborská, Kamila. 2015. “The Brotherhood of Wolves in the Czech Republic. From Ásatrú to Primitivism.” In Contemporary Pagan and Native Faith Movements in Europe. Colonialist and Nationalist Impulses. Ed. Kathryn Roundtree. New York. 86–109.

Power Designing beginnnings

Else Mundal

II: 45 Origins 1 Introduction In oral societies, the transmission of all kinds of knowledge was dependant on memory. Among the topics that were most important to remember were stories about origins or beginnings. After the arrival of writing, we can observe this inter­ est in origins in early written texts building on oral tradition. In Old Norse myths, which are found in their fullest form in Gylfaginning [the tricking of Gylfi] and Skáldskaparmál [the language of poetry] of Snorri’s Edda (c. 1220), creation myths are very central. Stories about the creation of the world, the first giants, gods, dwarfs and humans are among the myths that contain knowledge that was essential to the culture and therefore necessary to remember. The origins of phenomena, such as earthquakes, the ebb and flow of tides, the shift of night and day, why sea water became salty, were also explained in myths. The origins of special items, such as the mead of poetry, the chain with which the wolf, Fenrir, was bound, and characteristic attributes of gods and goddes­ ses, such as Óðinn’s (Odin’s) horse, Sleipnir, his spear, Gungnir, and his ring, Draupnir, Freyr’s ship, Skíðblaðnir, and Sif’s golden hair, are all accounted for in myths. Together, myths about origins constitute a large part of the mythology and demonstrate how important these memories were to people in Old Norse culture. The interest in origins in all likelihood grew to be especially strong in Iceland, since the origin of this nation was not – as opposed to the rest of Scandinavia – hidden in the mist of time, but was something people could remember and tell stories about.

2 Case study: Origin of families and nations In Old Norse culture, knowledge about the origin of one’s family seems to have been very important for personal or family identity, as well as for one’s stan­ ding in society, and was therefore important to remember and to transfer to the next generation. To be able to count one’s ancestors back to a forefather who was seen as the founder of the family was so important to a family’s identity that many noble families were named after this forefather, for example ynglingar (named after King Yngvi, another name of the god Freyr), vǫlsungar (named after Vǫlsungr, son of Óðinn), gjúkungar (named after King Gjúki), skjǫldungar https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-081

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(namned after Skjǫldr, son of Óðinn). These forefathers, from whom royal figures and heroes known from heroic literature are descended, lived in the mythic or half-mythic past, and the origins of noble families are connected to Old Norse mythology since the royal families were descended from the gods. The memories of the mythic origin of the Yngling family, as well as of the earls from Hlaðir, are preserved in two skaldic poems, Ynglingatal [list of the Ynglingar] (by Þjóðólfr ór Hvin, late ninth century) and Háleygjatal [list of the Háleygjar] (Eyvindr Finnsson skáldaspillir, late tenth century), respectively (on skaldic poetry as mnemonic aid. see Bergsveinn Birgisson 2010). Normally, the further back in time the origin of the family could be located, the higher the status conferred; however, in saga genres, such as íslendingasǫgur [sagas of Icelanders] and the contemporary sagas in the Sturlunga cycle, we can see that the forefather who counted as the founder of the family and after whom a family was named did not always live far back in time. In some cases, men who gave their family a new start by improving its social standing in society could also give their name to their descendants. Examples of this in Icelandic history are the sturlungar who were named after Sturla Þórðarson (1116–1183) and the ásbirning­ar, named after Ásbjǫrn Arnórsson, who lived in the second half of the eleventh century. In Norway, the arnmœðlingar were named after Arnmóðr jarl who lived late in the tenth century. He was the forefather of the famous family to which both Kálfr Árnason and his brothers Finnr, Árni, and Þorbergr (known from the sagas about Óláfr hinn helgi [St Olav]) belonged as well as Þóra Þorbergsdóttir, one of King Haraldr hárðráði’s wives. Iceland was a nation that remembered its own birth, so to speak. Stories about how the settlers left Norway and settled in Iceland and established a new community is the topic of the earliest preserved work in the Old Norse language, Íslendingabók [the book of Icelanders] written by Ari fróði around 1130. Inter­ estingly, the descriptions of the foundation of Icelandic society as described in Íslendingabók – the establishment of law, institutions and counting of time – has, in fact, much in common with the establishment of the gods’ society after the creation of the world as described in Vǫluspá [The Seeress’s Prophecy]. Count­ ing of time and establishment of institutions (Vǫluspá, Sts. 6–7) is the result of the gods’ first meeting. These parallels give reason to ask whether the origin of a nation was so important that it had to be seen in the light of Old Norse myths. Landnámabók [the book of settlements], only known from later versions but originally written not much later than Íslendingabók, and the genre of the íslendingasǫgur written from around 1200 onwards, inform about the origin of individual families of settlers in Iceland, but at the same time both Landnámabók and the íslendingasǫgur as a whole describe the birth of the nation. The origin of the family, as well as the origin of the nation, were important for the feeling



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of identity, both of individuals and of families, as well as for the creation of a common identity among the settlers, one that gradually developed into an Icelan­ dic identity (see Mundal 1997, 2010; Hastrup 1990, Ch. “Cultural Identification”; Wamhoff 2016, especially Ch. 4). The fact that both the early works Íslendingabók and Landnámabók, as well as the whole genre of the íslendingasǫgur, are concer­ ned with the origin of the nation and the origin of Icelandic families demonstrate how important it was to remember these stories. Why this was important is best expressed in a passage in the late Landnámabók version of Þórðarbók [the book of Þórðr] from the seventeenth century, but can most likely be traced back to the lost version Styrmisbók [the book of Styrmir] through Melabók [the book of Melar]. Þat er margra manna mál, at þat sé óskyldr fróðleikr at rita landnám. En vér þykjumsk heldr svara kunna útlendum mǫnnum, þá er þeir bregða oss því, at vér séim komnir af þrælum eða illmennum, ef vér vitum víst várar kynferðir sannar […] (Landnámabók, 336, note) [People often say that writing about the settlement is irrelevant learning, but we think we can better meet the criticism of foreigners when they accuse us of being descended from slaves or scoundrels, if we know for certain the truth about our ancestry […] (author’s translation)]

As this quotation shows, to remember one’s origin is a matter of honour for indi­ viduals, families, and nations. Immigration to Iceland and the reasons behind the emigration from Norway were dramatic events that were remembered and passed down as family tradition to later generations. Gradually, these traditions developed into what is spoken of as communal or collective memory of the whole society (for a discussion of these terms, see Ranković 2010). These oral traditions, mostly in prose, but often supported by skaldic stanzas, formed the bases for the authors who later put such memories about the settlement into writing. In the Scandinavian countries, the origins of the nations were hidden in the mists of time. Nevertheless, when the origin of a nation, or the king after whom a nation was named, could not be remembered, it was so important that it had to be constructed by help of fiction. According to Saxo’s Gesta Danorum from around 1200 (Book I, Ch. 1), the Danes descended from a King Dan in the far past after whom Denmark and the Danes were named. The Norwegian chronicle, Historia Norwegie (c. 1160–1175), claims in chapter 1 that the land draws its name from King Nórr who conquered the land from the North many generations before King Haraldr hárfagri unified Norway. The story about this king is also found in Orkneyinga saga [the saga of the Orkney Islanders] (end of the twelfth century), and in Fundinn Noregr [the foundation of Norway] and Hversu Noregr bygðist [How Norway was inhabited], both preserved in Flayeyjarbók [the book of Flatey] (written 1387–1394). Such constructions of the past used to promote certain inte­ rests are often labelled cultural memories (see Glauser 2000; Hermann 2009,

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2010, 2014). The authors could build upon what existed in collective memory, exclude what did not fit in, change old stories, and add new ones. Memories would always contain a fusion of history and fiction, but as the examples above show, the proportion of history to fiction could vary greatly. Stories about the origin of the Icelandic nation were certainly constructions meant to suit their present (see Gísli Sigurðsson 2014), but are based on historical events. The stories about the origin of Norway (King Nórr) and Denmark (King Dan) are pure fiction. Learned authors, as well as oral storytellers, could implant ‘false’ memories, but these would function in the same way as memory about real events after having been accepted by the community. Memories of the past and of the glorious ancestors and founders of nations could also be stored in place names. Naming of new land is frequently described in íslendingasǫgur and Landnámabók, and is in a way part of the origin of a society. By giving names, the strange and unknown landscape was turned into something familiar, and naming the landscape was in fact a condition for talking about it and remembering it. A possible mythic parallel to settlement and the naming of new land can be found in the story of how the goddess Gefjun had the land that she was given by King Gylfi ploughed away from Sweden, and gave it the name of Zealand (Gylfaginning, 7). The naming is a continuation of the island’s creation and is connected to Gefjun’s colonisation; by naming her new land, she takes ownership of it. The closest connection between the origin of a place name and memory of the past we find in the cases where a place is named after an event or after a person. There are plentiful examples of this in íslendingasǫgur, as well as in other Old Norse sources. In Heimskringla [The Circle of the World] (Haralds saga ins hárfagra [The Saga of Harald fair-hair], Ch. 37), Snorri recounts King Haraldr’s estates in Western Norway. Two of them, Ǫgvaldsnes and Álreksstaðir contain a man’s name as the first element. Ǫgvaldsnes is named after a King Ǫgvaldr who lived there a long time ago. His story, which exists in slightly different versions, relates that he was attacked by a rival, fell in battle and was buried in a grave mound at the place that was named after him. Álreksstaðir was, according to the fornaldarsaga [legendary saga] Hálfs saga ok Hálfsrekka [The Saga of Hálfr and his Champions] named after a king who lived at the place in the far past. The story connected to him says that he had two queens; they did not get along well, so he had to send one of them away. In order to decide, he had the two queens compete to determine who could brew the best beer. One turned to Freya for help, the other to Óðinn, and the latter won. In stories like these, it is impossible to say with certainty whether there was a kernel of truth in the tradition or not, but if there was, the place name, connected to the story from the origin, became a stabilising factor that kept the tradition alive in people’s memory through generations.



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In Icelandic sources we find a similar kind of stories about the origin of names, but the origin is much closer in time. In some cases, the settlers gave their name to their new farm or to a formation in the landscape in the surrounding of the farm, as in the following example from Landnámabók: Grímr hét maðr, er nam land et syðra upp frá Giljum til Grímsgils ok bjó við Grímsgil; hans synir váru þeir Þorgils auga á Augastǫðum ok Hrani á Hranastǫðum, faðir Gríms, er kallaðr var Stafngrímr. Hann bjó á Stafngrímsstǫðum […] (Landnámabok, S39, H27) [There was a man called Grim, who took possession of land south of Giljar up to Grimsgill, and lived at Grimsgill. His sons were Thorgils Auga of Augastead and Hrani of Hranastead, father of Grim, who was nicknamed Prow-Grim and farmed at Stafngrimsstead […] (The Book of Settlements, Ch. 39)

In other cases, dramatic events provide the origin of a name, as for example in Gísla saga [The Saga of Gisli] The saga tells that two Norwegians (austmenn) killed an Icelander. After that they ran away. They camped in a valley, had break­ fast (dǫgurðr) and went to sleep. They were, however, found by their pursuers and killed. The saga continues: “Þar heitir nú Dǫgurðardalr ok Austmannafall.” (Gísla saga, Ch 7) [The place is now called Dagverdardal (Breakfast Dale) and Austmann­afall (Eastman’s Fall.”) (Gisli Sursson’s Saga, Ch. 7)] By naming places after individuals and dramatic events, the landscape was turned into a store of memories that supported and stabilised oral tradition and was a continuous reminder of the settlement and events in the settlement period.

Works cited Primary sources The Book of Settlements. Landnámabók. Trans. Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards. University of Manitoba Icelandic Studies, 1. [Winnipeg], 1972. Flateyjarbók. [Ed. Guðbrandur Vigfússon and C. R. Unger]. 1–3. Christiania, 1860–1868. Gísla saga Surssonar. In Vestfirðinga sǫgur. Ed. Björn K. Þórólfsson og Guðni Jónsson. Reykjavík, 1943. 1–118. Gisli Sursson’s Saga. Trans. Martin S. Regal. In The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, inclduing 4 Tales. II. Ed. Viðar Hreinsson. Reykjavík, 1997. 1–49. Gesta Danorum. In Saxo Grammaticus. Gesta Danorum. Danmarkshistorien. I–II. Ed. Karsten Friis Jensen. Trans. Peter Zeeberg. Copenhagen, 2005. Gylfaginning. In Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Prologue and Gylfaginning. Ed. Anthony Faulkes. 2nd ed. London, 2005. 7–55. Háleygjatal. In Den norsk-islandske skjaldedigtning, BI. Ed. Finnur Jónsson, Copenhagen, 1912. 60–62.

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Hálfs saga ok Hálfsrekka. In Fornaldar sögur Norðurlanda. 2. Reykjavík, 1954. 93–134. Heimskringla. Ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson. Reykjavík, 1941–1951. Historia Norwegie. Ed. Inger Ekrem and Lars Boje Mortensen. Trans. Peter Fisher. Copenhagen, 2003. Íslendingabók. In Íslendingabók, Landnámabók. Ed. Jakob Benediktsson. ÍF, 1. Reykjavík, 1968. 1–28. Landnámabók. In Íslendingabók, Landnámabók. Ed. Jakob Benediktsson. ÍF, 1. Reykjavík, 1968. 29–397. Orkneyinga saga. In Orkneyinga saga, Legenda de Sancto Magno, Magnúss saga skemmri, Magnúss saga lengri, Helga þáttr ok Úlfs. Ed. Finnbogi Guðmundsson. ÍF, 34. Reykjavík, 1965. 1–300. Vǫluspá. In Eddukvæði. I. Ed. Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason. ÍF. Reykjavík, 2014. 291–321. Ynglingatal. In Den norsk-islandske skjaldedigtning, BI, Ed. Finnur Jónsson. København, 1912. 7–38.

Secondary sources Bergsveinn Birgisson. 2010. “The Old Norse Kenning as a Mnemonic Figure.” In The Making of Memory in the Middle Ages. Ed. Lucie Doležalová. Later Medieval Europe, 4. Leiden and Boston, MA. 199–213. Gísli Sigurðsson. 2014. “Constructing a Past to Suit the Present. Sturla Þórðarson on Conflicts and Alliances with King Haraldr hárfagri.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 175–196. Glauser, Jürg. 2000. “Sagas of Icelanders (Íslendinga sögur) and þættir as the literary representation of a new social space.” In Old Icelandic Literature and Society. Ed. Margaret Clunies Ross. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 42. Cambridge. 203–220. Hastrup, Kirsten. 1990. Island of Anthropology. Studies in Past and Present Iceland. The Viking Collection, 5. Odense. Hermann, Pernille. 2009. “Concepts of Memory and Approaches to the Past in Medieval Icelandic Literature.” Scandinavian Studies, 81.3: 287–308. Hermann, Pernille. 2010. “Founding Narratives and the Representation of Memory in Saga Literature.” Arv. Nordic Yearbook of Folklore. 66: 69–87. Hermann, Pernille. 2014. “Key Aspects of Memory and Remembering in Old Norse–Icelandic Literature.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 13–39. Mundal, Else. 1997. “Framveksten av den islandske identiteten, dei norske røtene og forholdet til Noreg.” Collegium Medievale,10: 7–29. Mundal, Else. 2010. “Memory of the past and Old Norse identity.” In The Making of Memory in the Middle Ages. Ed. Lucie Doležalová. Later Medieval Europe, 4. Leiden and Boston. 463–472. Ranković, Slavica. 2010. “Communal Memory of the Distributed Author. Applicability of the Connectionist Model of Memory to the Study of Traditional Narratives.” In The Making of



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Memory in the Middle Ages. Ed. Lucie Doležalová. Later Medieval Europe, 4. Leiden and Boston. 9–26. Wamhoff, Laura Sonja. 2016. Isländische Erinnerungskultur 1100–1300. Altnordische Historiographie und kulturelles Gedächtnis. Beiträge zur Nordischen Philologie, 57. Tübingen.

Úlfar Bragason

II: 46 Genealogies 1 Introduction Ætt [family, kindred, pedigree], kyn [kin, kindred], ættartal [pedigree], ættartala [genealogy, pedigree], kynslóð [kindred, pedigree], ættvísi [genealogies, knowl­ edge of genealogies], mannfræði [history, esp. genealogies], langfeðgakyn [agnate lineage], langfeðgatal [agnate pedigree], konungakyn [royal kin], konungatal [series of kings] are all words that were used in Old Norse-Icelandic in the medi­ eval times to refer to families, pedigrees and genealogy. Anthropology distin­ guishes principally between two forms of kinship systems: lineage and kindred. Lineage systems may be cognatic, including descendants of a specified forefather and foremother, but tend to become agnatic, tracing descent only in the male line. In the Middle Ages, the word ætt seems to signify both the patrilineal kin group and cognatic kindred (Sigurður Líndal 1976; Meulengracht Sørensen 1977, 30–36; Hastrup 1985, 70–104; Hastrup 1990, 44–58). Here the evidence that ættvísi and mannfræði were memorised will be discussed, and in what context and by whom, what may have helped them to do so, the social conditions that were conducive to this practice, and how genealogies related to their identity.

2 Case study: Memory and Genealogies Ættvísi and mannfræði are grounded in transgenerational memory. Paul Ricoeur (2004) terms this phenomenon “the Succession of Generations”, which he says is “among the procedures for inserting lived time within the vastness of cosmic time” (394). This is not yet a form of historical chronology: instead genealogical knowledge opens up an internal network of connections to a past with which older generations are familiar. Genealogies were also among the oldest material put into writing on vellum in Iceland. The author of the First Grammatical Treatise, believed to date from the mid twelfth-century, states that it is customary in Iceland to write and read both laws and genealogies, interpretations of sacred writings, and the wise learning recorded in books by Ari Þorgilsson (31–33). The reference is to Íslendingabók [the book of Icelanders] by Ari Þorgilsson the Learned (d. 1148), which was probably written about 1130; that book concludes with Ari’s own langfeðgatal [agnate pedigree], traced all the way from the legendary King Yngvi of the Turks https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-082



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(Íslendingabók, 27–28). Possibly also attributable to Ari the Learned is a fragment known as Ævi Snorra goða [the life of Snorri the chieftain] (Einar Ól. Sveinsson 1935, xi–xiii). This lists the children of Snorri goði (d. 1031) and gives a brief account of his life. This was probably followed by genealogical tables tracing his descendants. At the same time as the Íslendingabók was being composed, work is believed to have commenced on compiling Landnámabók [the book of settle­ ments], although the extant versions of that work are of considerably later date; genealogies of the first settlers, and of their descendants, are among the prin­ cipal themes of the book. Twelfth-century genealogical writings are also cited: Breiðfirðingakynslóð [pedigree of Breiðafjörður people] (Landnámabók, 137) and Ölfusingakyn [kin of Ölfus] (Landnamabók, 334), both of which probably dated from the early twelfth-century. These examples, and others like them, are an indication that Icelanders had knowledge of their descent and origins, and stored that knowledge in memory (Gísli Sigurðsson 2002, 192–202). A relative was called frændi [kinsman] or frændkona [kinswoman]. Relationships between kindred were referred to by such terms as frændsemi, skyldskapr and skuldleikar. Kinship relations were calculated from siblings, in degrees (knérunnar, sing. knérunnr), up to and including five genera­ tions, or to þriðju bræður [third-brothers], as provided in the Grágás [Grey-Goose] law code of the Old Commonwealth (Sigurður Líndal 1976). But it was not solely in order to honour the memory of the dead that people learned who their relatives were. A prohibited degree of consanguinity between a couple might prevent them from marrying; individuals had certain responsibilities for supporting relati­ ves; and legacies were passed down in families. Compensation for killings was claimed by kin. They could take legal actions against slander, and they had a duty vengeance. Potential conflict of interest arising from kinship might prevent a man from court service, or from testifying. And knowledge of one’s ancestors was sometimes required, in order to prove rights of ownership of land or a manor (Sig­ urður Líndal 1976, Cols. 591–594). This necessitated familiarity with one’s descent for five generations, i.e. from great-great-great-grandparents. The genealogies in Landnámabók are undoubtedly attributable in some part to this requirement. Some genealogies, in fact, look further back in time than legal requirements made necessary; they trace descent back to famous settlers, or ancient kings and heroes. This could indicate that both kindred and lineage systems applied in Iceland in early times. During the Sturlung Age (1183–1264) there were several dominant families which were identified with certain properties and known under a definite family name. Families such as the Ásbirningar, Svínfellingar, Seldælir, Vatnsfirðingar, Oddaverjar and Haukdælir had a long history, on which they based their claims to power.

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The Sturlungs could admittedly trace their lineage to Snorri goði, but the Snorrungar chieftaincy had only been in the family since about 1100, when Þórðr Gilsson, great-grandfather of Sturla Þórðarson the historian (d. 1284) took it over. The Sturlungs, then, were a new arrival on the scene of power, whose aggression was a cause of disorder. There are strong indications that their efforts, whether armed with the sword, or with the pen in their hands or their learned clerks, may be traced to their lack of a respectable lineage. These writings must have been based to a certain degree on their private memory or communal memory (see White 2000, 53). Genealogies did not only serve as a tool with regard to legal duties and rights. Victor Turner has pointed out that “politics, or better politicking, rather than kinship duties alone” played a major role in the vengeance system (Turner 1971, 165). Concomitantly, the genealogies were linked with family ambition and claims to political power, which became the domain of fewer and fewer indivi­ duals during the period of the Commonwealth. The sagas of Icelanders, which can be interpreted as a continuation of the genealogies of Landnámabók, are also undoubtedly to some extent the result of this family ambition (Meulengracht Sørensen 1993, 173–176). As a rule in Iceland, the same personal names were used generation after generation within a family; more rarely, a child might be named after a friend of the parents. An exception to this rule was the naming of children after saints, or simply choosing a random name (Einar Ól. Sveinsson 1936, 192). Names of men and women must have helped people remember them, while names that recurred in families would service to identify and place them. Common names, of course, may well have led to confusion. Names of landed properties may also have been linked to individuals, and served as a reminder of them, as in the biography of Snorri goði. Stories of related individuals would also distinguish between them and others, by implying that a family had certain qualities. For example, accor­ ding to Sturla Þórðarson in his Íslendinga saga: “Hefir þat lengi kynríkt verit með Haukdælum ok Oddaverjum, at þeir hafa inar beztu veizlur haldit.” (Íslendinga saga, Ch. 170) [“it had long been the hallmark of the men of Haukadal and of Oddi that they held splendid feasts” (The Saga of the Icelanders, Ch. 170)] He thus attributes to members of these families the quality of being generous hosts. After the written word reached Iceland around 1100, it gradually acquired a greater role in ensuring remembrance. But, as soon as this knowledge was put down in writing on vellum, no doubt men supplanted women as the leading cus­ todians of memory (Helga Kress 1993, 12–13; Geary 1994, 51–73). The author of Hungrvaka [the Hunger-stirrer], a history of the first bishops of Skálholt penned around 1200, states in his introduction that he has put his energies into writing what he had committed to memory: “Hefi ek af því þenna bœkling saman settan,



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at eigi falli mér með ǫllu ór minni þat er ek heyrða af þessu máli segja inn fróða mann Gizur Hallsson, ok enn nǫkkura menn aðra merkiliga hafa í frásǫgn fœrt.” (Hungrvaka, Ch. 1) [“Therefore I have set this little book together, so that it may not completely drop out of my memory; that which I heard the learned man Gizurr Hallsson to say on this subject and a number of other distinguished men besides have conveyed in narratives.” (Hungrvaka, Ch. 1)] He also wants to encourage young men to explore that which is written in the Old Norse-Icelandic language: “lǫg eða sǫgur eða mannfrœði” (Hungrvaka, Ch. 1) [“laws or stories or genealo­ gies” (Hungrvaka, Ch. 1)]. Genealogies occupy, as is well known, considerable space in the sagas. As a rule they are recounted at the beginning of the family saga, before the action proper begins, and at the end, thus framing the actual narrative (Andersson 1967, 6–11, 26–29; Hume 1973). The sagas are often criticised for “the weakness for genealogy and personal history” (Stefán Einarsson 1957, 134). Scholars rec­ ognise, nonetheless, that genealogies are a part, not simply of the exposition of characters, but also of the structure of the works. Margaret Clunies Ross (1993) developed the idea of genealogy as a principle of literary organisation in early Iceland (see also Spiegel 1997, 104). One may therefore conclude that the desig­ nations of ‘family saga’ and ‘ættesaga’ reflect the nature of these writings more accurately than Íslendingasögur [sagas of Icelanders], the term used by Icelandic scholars. Some of the sagas, admittedly, deal with a single generation, and some include more than one family, but the genealogical accounts are nonetheless an indication of the correlation of the status of the individual in saga-age society to relationships of family. The same applies to other categories of saga, as Margaret Clunies Ross points out. Just as genealogies and related narratives were intertwined in oral tradition, people recalled stories about their relatives in connection with written genealo­ gies (Coote 2008, 44). Undoutedly, Icelanders had come across written genealo­ gies on their journeys abroad. In the agnate pedigrees of the Kings of Norway and Denmark, it had become customary to trace genealogies to ancient gods, entailing an assumption of euhemerism, as early as the twelfth century. In the thirteenth-century introduction to Snorri’s Prose Edda, the origin of the Norse gods is discussed, and they are said to be descended from Troy (Halvorsen 1965, Cols. 311–313; Faulkes 1978–1979, 92–106). As Francis Ingledew (1994, 674) points out, a “symptom of genealogy as an appropriative instrument for princes and noble landowners, Troy was the conceptual product of a structure of power”. The interest in tracing the family origin to Asia suggests, therefore, an interest in power. Everything goes to indicate that developments were similar in Iceland to those in continental Europe, that in Iceland the “conceptual reflex of [...] aristo­ cratic appropriation of time, land, and name” was genealogy, as in Britain and on

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the Continent (Ingledew 1994, 675). We should bear in mind that the genealogi­ cal literature indicates that history writing was utilised for political ends in the Middle Ages.

Works Cited Primary Sources Eyrbyggja saga. Ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson. ÍF, 4. Reykjavík, 1935. First Grammatical Treatise: Introduction, Texts, Notes, Translation, Vocabulary and Facsimiles. Ed. Hreinn Benediktsson. Publications in Linguistics, 1. Reykjavík, 1972. Hungrvaka. Trans. Camilla Basset. MA-thesis. University of Iceland, 2013. Hungrvaka. In Biskupa sögur. 2. Ed. Ásdís Egilsdóttir. ÍF, 16. Reykjavík, 2002. 1–43. Íslendinga saga. In Sturlunga saga. 1. Ed. Jón Jóhannesson et al. Reykjavík, 1946. Íslendingabók. Ed. Jakob Benediktsson. ÍF, 1. Reykjavík, 1986. Landnámabók. Ed. Jakob Benediktsson. ÍF, 1. Reykjavík, 1986. The Saga of the Icelanders. Trans. Julia H. McGrew. In Sturlunga Saga. 1. The Library of Scandinavian Literature, 9. New York, 1970. 115–447.

Secondary Sources Andersson, Theodore M. 1967. The Icelandic Family Saga. An Analytic Reading. Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature, 28. Cambridge, MA. Coote, Lesley. 2008. “Prophecy, Genealogy, and History in Medieval English Political Discourse.” In Broken Lines. Genealogical Literature in Late-Medieval Britain and France. Ed. Raluca L. Radulescu and Edward Donald Kennedy. Medieval texts and cultures of Northern Europe, 16. Turnhout. 27–44. Einar Ól. Sveinsson. 1935. “Formáli”. In Eyrbyggja saga. Ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson. ÍF, 4 Reykjavík. 1935. v-lxvi. Einar Ól. Sveinnsson. 1936. “Nafngiftir Oddaverja.” In Bidrag till nordisk filologi tillägnade Emil Olson den 9. juni 1936. Lund. 190–196. Faulkes, Anthony. 1978–1979. “Descent from the gods.” Mediaeval Scandinavia 11: 92–125. Clunies Ross, Margaret. 1993. “The Development of Old Norse Textual Worlds. Genealogical Structure as a Principle of Literary Organisation in Early Iceland.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 92: 372–385. Geary, Patrick J. 1994. Phantoms of Remembrance. Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium. Princeton, NJ. Gísli Sigurðsson. 2002. Túlkun Íslendingasagna í ljósi munnlegrar hefðar. Tilgáta um aðferð. Rit Stofnunar Árna Magnússonar á Íslandi, 56. Reykjavík. [English transl. 2004] Halvorsen, Eyvind Fjeld. 1965. “Langfeðgatal.” In Kulturhistorisk leksikon fra vikingetid til reformationstid. Ed. Johannes Brøndsted. Copenhagen. 10: 311–313. Hastrup, Kirsten. 1985. Culture and History in Medieval Iceland. An Anthropological Analysis of Structure and Change. Oxford.



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Hastrup, Kirsten. 1990. Island of Anthropology. Studies in Past and Present Iceland. The Viking Collection, 5. Odense. Helga Kress. 1993. Máttugar meyjar. Íslensk fornbókmenntasaga. Reykjavík. Hume, Kathryn. 1973. “Beginnings and Endings in the Icelandic Family Sagas.” Modern Language Review 68: 593–606. Ingledew, Francis. 1994. “The Book of Troy and the Genealogical Construction of History. The Case of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae.” Speculum 69: 665–704. Meulengracht Sørensen, Preben. 1977. Saga og samfund. En indføring i oldislandsk litteratur. Copenhagen. Meulengracht Sørensen, Preben. 1993. Fortælling og ære. Studier i islændingesagaerne. Aarhus. Ricoeur, Paul. 2004. Memory, History, Forgetting. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago, IL. Sigurður Líndal. 1976. “Ætt.” In KLNM. X: Cols.: 591–594. Spiegel, Gabrielle M. 1997. The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography. Baltimore. Stefán Einarsson. 1957. A History of Icelandic Literature. New York. Turner, Victor. 1971. “An Anthropological Approach to the Icelandic saga.” In The Translation of Culture: Essays to E. E. Evans-Pritchard. Ed. T. O. Beidelman. London. 349–374. White, Hayden. 2000. “Catastrophe, Communal Memory and Mythic Discourse. The Uses of Myth in the Reconstruction of Society.” In Myth and Memory in the Construction of Community. Ed. Bo Stråth. Series Multiple Europes, 9. Brussels. 49–74.

Sofie Vanherpen

II: 47 Religion and Gender 1 Introduction In his seminal work, Moses the Egyptian, Jan Assmann (1997, 9) proposes and practices a new discipline that he calls ‘mnemohistory’, which he defines as being “concerned not with the past as such, but only with the past as remembered [… and as a study which] surveys the storylines of tradition, the webs of intertex­ tuality, the diachronic continuities and discontinuities of the reading of the past”. Assmann’s preferred case study focuses on the memory of Moses and how he has been portrayed and remembered in Western culture. He coined the term ‘figure of memory’ to describe “a person, historical or fictional, who lives in tradition, in myths, legends, pictures, works of history or fiction, whose sayings are quoted, whose tomb, if known, is visited, who may even receive a kind of cult” (Assmann 2014, 61). Unnr djúpúðga or Auðr djúpauðga Ketilsdóttir [Unn the Deep-Minded or Aud the Deeply Wealthy] can serve as an example of such a figure of memory for Icelanders. She is remembered in Old Norse literature generally in two ways: on the one hand, she is the ‘heathen’ founding mother of a dynasty that spreads its reach from the Orkney Islands to the Dalir region in West Iceland in Laxdæla saga; on the other hand, she is a devout Christian settler in Landnámabók. This case study aims at providing the cultural background of these two competing memories of Auðr and highlighting relevant examples of utilised mnemotech­ nics – such as the earliest historiographical and literary texts, popular literature like rímur [Icelandic narrative poems]; cultural performances including prayers, processions, religious rites and ceremonies; as well as nonlinguistic media like monuments and the Icelandic landscape itself.

2 Case study: The curious case of Auðr/ Unnr djúp(a)úðga The ‘heathen’ Unnr and the Christian Auðr Just as Assmann distinguished between Moses the Hebrew and Moses the Egyp­ tian (Assmann 1997, 12), so can one distinguish between the ‘heathen’ Unnr and the Christian Auðr. As in the case of Moses, in the Icelandic traditions on Unnr/ Auðr there is a strict hierarchy between center and periphery. Her story as told https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-083



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in the various redactions of Landnámabók [the book of settlements] (Ch. S95– S110, Ch. H82-H84) is canonical and authoritative, while Laxdæla saga [saga of the people of Laxardal] (Ch. 1–7) represents an alternative version of the memory of Auðr (called Unnr here), which is often considered false. The ‘heathen’ Unnr belongs to a sort of ‘counter-memory’, a term coined by Assmann to describe “a memory that puts elements to the fore that are, or tend to be, forgotten in the official memory” (Assmann 1997, 12). He continues, “If it becomes codified in the form of a traditional story or even in a work of written historiography, countermemory corresponds to […] ‘counterhistory’” (12). The ‘heathen’ Unnr of Laxdæla is a representative example of counterhistory. When Laxdæla and Landnámabók are read together, they explicitly contradict each other: the first states that Auðr was buried in a heathen-style burial (Laxdæla, Ch. 7) while the second says that she was laid to rest according to a seemingly Christian burial custom (Landnámabók, Ch. S110). As a figure of memory, Unnr/Auðr indicates the existence of coun­ tercurrents in Old Icelandic tradition. Of all the Íslendingasögur [sagas of Icelanders], Laxdæla is unique in its indepth portrayals and foregrounding of female characters (Kellogg 1973, 254; Helga Kress 1980a, 1980b; Henriksen 1981, 9). In particular, the anonymous author pre­ sents a multifaceted foremother figure in Auðr – called Unnr here – a matriarch who contrasts with the female protagonists in Laxdæla and with representations of herself in other written sources. Imitating the structure of the Prologue to the Prose Edda, Auðr’s journey to and settlement in Iceland (Laxdæla saga, Ch. 4–7) parallels that of Óðinn (Odin) (Edda – Prologue, Ch. 10–11). Auðr is compared to Norse mythological figures and is depicted as a matriarch ‘in heathen style’ (see also Baldur Hafstað 2007). The Laxdæla author represents and mediates the memory of Auðr in a way that rings with literary echoes and overlays from Snorri Sturluson’s mythological text, Prose Edda, while at the same time, it represents an alternative version of the memory of Auðr. A few decades later, Sturla Þórðarson, too, depicts Auðr in his redaction of Landnámabók. Like its corresponding passage in Laxdæla, it is composed around Auðr’s migration to and settlement in Iceland, but its depiction of her differs in some respects from the matriarch figure in Laxdæla’s representation. Landnámabók’s narrative differs in that Auðr is remembered as a woman practising Christian rituals. The text reads as follows: “Hon hafði bœnahald sitt á Krosshólum; þar lét hon reisa krossa, því at hon var skírð ok vel trúuð” (Landnámabók, Ch. S97, H84) [“She used to say prayers at Kross Hills; she had crosses erected there, for she’d been baptized and was a devout Christian” (The Book of Settlements, Ch.  97)]. Moreover, the description of Auðr’s funeral practice is a subject of curiosity. The text emphasizes that: “[Hon] var grafin í flœðarmáli, sem hon hafði fyrir sagt, því at hon vild eigi liggja í óvígðri moldu, er hon var skírð” (Landnámabók, Ch. S110)

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[“She was buried at the high water mark as she’d ordered, because having been baptized, she didn’t wish to lie in unconsecrated earth” (The Book of Settlements, Ch 110)]. As Stefán Karlsson (1976, 481–488) argued, while not a Christian burial practice, the concept of the water washing on the shore mentioned in the passage on Auðr’s burial seems to be drawn from and inspired by a sermon in the Homíliubók, which teaches us that all the water in the world is consecrated when John the Baptist baptised Jesus in the river Jordan. Thus Landnámabók ascribes to being “grafa í flæðarmáli” [bury at the flood-mark] a metaphoric function that prefig­ ures Christian baptism and purification. Landnámabók (with its implicit refer­ ence to the sermon Apparitio domini [the Epiphany]) supports the canonisation of the memory of Auðr, but also becomes a carrier of cultural memory, in the sense that it supports “the cultural memory of a European textual culture” (Hermann 2013, 338). As illustrated above, this version was not unchallenged. From the middle of the eighteenth century, authors – who are familiar with both representations – make a composite image of Unnr/Auðr, either through unifying characteristics of both figures or by supplanting the earliest known image with the next. In 1769, Eiríkur Bjarnason utilises the second option in his Laxdælarímur, presenting the burial “í flæðarmáli” [at the flood-mark] as superior to the pagan ship burial in Laxdæla saga. NB Annað segja fræði fróð, framar þessu trúanleg, þar sem mættust fjara og flóð, frúin býði að jarða sig. Einninn fá svo yrki tjáð, er oss birta sannleikinn, helga skírn hún hafði þáð, hér því girntist legstaðinn. (Laxdælarímur 1769, 28) [Wise tales tell another story, / more reliable than this [i.e. Laxdæla saga]; / [that] were the shore and the flood meet, / the lady asked to be buried. // Also the work [i.e. Landnámabók] tells, / that shows us the truth; /that she had received holy baptism, / therefore wished for a grave there. (author’s translation)]

This note indicates that the poet used the Landnáma-text as a controlling device for how to think about the past. The literary memory of the Christian Auðr is pre­ served and further honoured through Ein bæn Auðar diúpauðgu [A prayer of Auðr The Deeply Wealthy], a prayer copied down by Jón Jónsson langur in 1828, which he claimed was “að vitni Ara prest f[róða]” [as witnessed by the priest Ari the Wise] (1828, 10v; Ein bæn Auðar diúpauðgu, 355). The prayer was recited in a memorial ceremony in June 2010 at the cross monument, raised in 1965 at Krosshólaborg, to commemorate Auðr (Óskar Ingi Ingason 2010). Acts of commemoration, such



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as the previously mentioned example, also help to retain and transform collective memory. The memorial cross, unveiled in 1965 for the millenial of Auðr’s settle­ ment in Iceland and her conversion to Christianity (Jón Bjarnason 1965, 382–383 and 388; Janet Ingibergsson 1965, 388) is an example of such a site of memory, or what Pierre Nora called lieux de mémoire and defined as “vestiges, the ultimate embodiments of a commemorative consciousness” (1996, 6). The memorial has a quotation from Landnámabók that says, “Hon hafði bænahald sitt á Krosshólum. Þar let hon reisa krossa því at hon var skirð ok vel trúuð” (Óskar Ingi Ingason 2010) [She held her prayers at Krosshólar. There she had crosses erected because she was baptized and a true believer (author’s translation)]. Commemorative rites for the 1965 millenial anniversary of her settlement, like those “Auðarganga” and “helgiganga” [procession for Auðr and saint’s procession] held in honour of Auðr in June 2010 and 2013 – a procession starting from Krosshólaborg, over “Auðartóftir” [the ruins or homestead of Auðr] to the church of Hvammur (Þórdís Valsdóttir 2010, 26; Magnús Magnússon 2013, 13), are intentionally produced to serve the purpose of remembering Auðr as a Christian settler. These cultural per­ formances – prayers, rites and ceremonies, which can be classified under religion and ritual – support the authoritative version of the past. The collective memory stored in the Landnáma-text has come to suppress the counter-memory preserved in Laxdæla over time. The story of Unnr/Auðr provides a valuable case study for the way in which memories are formed and shaped from the thirteenth century onwards in Iceland. These medieval narratives provide new and different perspectives on the past and, in this way, form official collective memories and oppositional memories. The challenge posed by the counter-history, as recorded in Laxdæla, is met by an upsurge in religious commemorative activities. It is in this strug­ gle between these two competing representations of Auðr that one represen­ tation becomes the dominant memory while the other becomes the counter-­ memory.

Works cited Primary sources The Book of Settlements. Landnámabók. Transl. Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards. University of Manitoba Icelandic studies, 1. Winnipeg, 1972. Edda. Prologue. In Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Prologue and Gylfaginning. Ed. Anthony Faulkes. London, 2005 [1982]. 3–6. Ein bæn Auðar diúpauðgu. Jón Jónsson langur. JS 494 8vo. 1828. 10v.

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Ein bæn Auðar diúpauðgu. In Þjóðsögur og munnmæli. Nýtt safn. Ed. Jón Þorkelsson. Reykjavík, 1899. 355. Gylfaginning. In Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Prologue and Gylfaginning. Ed. Anthony Faulkes. London, 2005 [1982]. 7–55. Apparitio domini. In Homiliu-bók. Ed. Theodor Wisén. Lund, 1872. 56–60. Landnámabók. In Íslendingabók. Landnámabók. Ed. Jakob Benediktsson. ÍF, 1. Reykjavík, 1936. 31–397. Laxdæla saga. In Laxdœla saga. Halldórs þættir Snorrasonar. Stúfs þáttr. Ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson. ÍF, 5. Reykjavík, 1934. 3–248. Laxdælarímur. Eiríkur Bjarnason. JS 46 4to. 1767.

Secondary sources Assmann, Jan. 1997. Moses the Egyptian. The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism. Cambridge, MA. [German orig. 1998] Assmann, Jan. 2014. From Akhenaten to Moses. Ancient Egypt and Religious Change. Cairo and New York. Baldur Hafstað. 2007. “Um Auði djúpúðgu í ljósi Ynglinga sögu og Laxdælu.” In Annir hjá Önnu Þorbjörgu Ingólfsdóttur fimmtugri 3. apríl 2007. Reykjavík. 13–17. Haraldur Bessason. 1977. “Mythological overlays.” In Sjöti ritgerðir helgaðar jakobi Benediktssyni 20. Júlí 1977. Ed. Einar G. Pétursson and Jónas Kristjánsson. Reykjavík. I: 273–292. Helga Kress. 1980a. “‘Mjǫk mun þér samstaft þykkja’: um sagnahefð ok kvenlega reynslu í Laxdæla sögu.” In Konur skrifa til heiðurs Önnu Sigurðardóttur. Ed. Valborg Bentsdóttir, Guðrún Gísladóttir and Svanlaug Baldursdóttir. Reykjavík. 97–109. Helga Kress. 1980b. “‘Meget samstavet må det tykkes deg’: om kvinneopprör og genretvang i Sagaen om Laksdölene.” Historisk Tidskrift: 266–280. Henriksen, Vera. 1981. Sagaens kvinner. Om stolthet og trelldom, kjærlighet og hevn. Oslo. Hermann, Pernille. 2013. “Saga Literature, Cultural Memory, and Storage.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 332–354. Janet Ingibergsson.1965. “Þegar ég stend á Krosshólaborg.” Sunnudagur fylgirit Þjóðviljans 5.32: 388. Jón Bjarnason. 1965. “Minnisvarði Auðar djúpúðgu og írskar konur að Hvammi.” Sunnudagur fylgirit Þjóðviljans 5.32: 382–383 and 388. Kellogg, Robert. 1973. “Sex and the Vernacular in Medieval Iceland.” In Procceedings of the First International Saga Conference. Ed. Peter Foote, Hermann Palsson and Desmond Slay. London. 244–257. Magnús Magnússon. 2013. “Auðar- og helgiganga í Dölum í minningu Auðar djúpúðgu.” Skessuhorn 16.25: 13. Nora, Pierre. 1996. Conflicts and Divisions. Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past. Vol. 2. Trans. A. Goldhammer. New York. [French orig. 1992] Óskar Ingi Ingason. 2010. “Helgigangan á Krosshólaborg velheppnuð.” Dalaprestakall (blog). http://kirkjan.is/dalaprestakall/2010/06/helgigangan-a-krossholaborg/. (19 June 2010)



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Stefán Karlsson. 1976. “Greftrun Auðar djúpúðgu.” In Minjar og menntir. Afmælisrit helgað Kristjáni Eldjárn 6. desember 1976. Ed. Guðni Kolbeinsson. Reykjavík. 481–488. Þórdís Valsdóttir. 2010. “Í minningu Auðar djúpúðga: helgiganga í Dölunum á laugardag.” Fréttablaðið 10.140: 26.

Laura Sonja Wamhoff

II: 48 Strategies of Remembering 1 Introduction Old Norse Historiography, written almost completely in Iceland from the begin­ nings around 1100 until the great period of copying beginning approximately 1300, is obviously characterised by a variety of different themes: on the one hand, there are Icelandic-centered stories about the settlement of Iceland and the devel­ opment of the Icelandic society and, on the other hand, there are non-Icelandiccentered stories about the Scandinavian (especially Norwegian) history, mostly connected with the kings. It is remarkable that they were all written in Iceland and that they correlate with each other in form and content. There are already a few studies dealing with the construction of the past in single texts or versions, but no greater consideration of the coherencies between them (Hermann 2009, 2013, 2014; Mundal 2010; Glauser 2006, 2014, 2016). To find out the function and role of single texts within the memory culture, this article tries to figure out some impor­ tant aspects about Icelandic cultural memory with focus on discussing the terms and concepts established by the premodern memory studies of Jan Assmann. His central idea is to differentiate between ‘communicative memory’ and ‘cultural memory’ as two different modes of collective memory (following Jeffrey Olick’s definition of collective memory as generic term for all kind of media and areas of culture, bearing collective references to the past; Olick 1999, 336) – the first for everyday organisation (‘biographical memory’) and the second for constructing a past giving sense to a group/ culture (‘foundational memory’) (Assmann 2007, 20–21). As examples for these two modes, Íslendingabók [the book of Icelanders] and Landnámabók [the book of settlements] are prominent ones.

2 Case study: Íslendingabók and Landnámabók as indicators of ambivalent Icelandic cultural memories Landnámabók, recorded in five different manuscripts of the fourteenth and sev­ enteenth centuries (Sveinbjörn Rafnsson 1974), is a collection of the stories of approx. 480 settlers, taking land on Iceland in pre-Christian times. Landnámabók was most likely not a nationwide project at first but had rather a regional ambi­ https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-084



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tion. One of the oldest hints toward this background originates from the refer­ ence to a man called Kolskeggr Ásbjarnarson, who shall have told a well-defined number of stories about the settlement in a specific region (“Nú hefir Kolskeggr [Ásbjarnarson] fyrir sagt heðan frá um landnám.” Landnámabók, S287/H248) [“Now begins Kolskegg the Wise’s account of the settlements.” (The Book of Settlements, 287)] which had been most likely also part of the oldest known versions of Landnámabók, the Styrmisbók [Book of Styrmir] (Jakob Benediktsson 1986, CVI–CVII). The overarching structure of Kolskeggr’s stories (name of settler  – settled land – his descendants and their family or clan-name) is characteristic for Landnámabók, as well as for most of the Íslendingasögur [sagas of Icelanders] and seems to be a specific mnemonic technique creating a family-centred per­ sonal identity (meant as a person’s roles, characteristics and competences in specific social constellations; Assmann 2007, 131–132). So the memories of the settlement were first personalised out of an urgent need to create family identi­ ties rather than a collective Icelandic identity. These memories serve to legitimise entitlement to land, and the externalisation into a written source served as an archive supporting memory. The later versions of Landnámabók, written between 1250 and 1300, took up the first accumulation of personalised identity constructions and placed approx. 480 settlement-stories into the same event, the process of the settlement and the constitution of a society in Iceland, by ‘historicising’ the text (Sveinbjörn Rafns­ son 2001, 612). In this process, descriptions about collective-relevant events were added (a prologue, some prose text passages about the adoption of the law, the church and the Christianisation), an identity construction that has been iden­ tified as moving ‘from the personal to the collective’ (Wamhoff 2016, 142–143). Thus an Icelandic collective identity only existed because of the many personal identities, which may have been the reason it was possible to reconstruct both identity constructions in the texts at the same time. In every time and period, Landnámabók has attracted unabated attention, because every family or person could place itself in this timeless reconstruction of the past and could reconstruct personal identity – the Íslendingasögur in particular testify to this unbroken collective interest. On the whole Landnámabók (particularly in its bók-versions, compiled in the thirteenth century) is a good example for remembering the past by foundational memories in the mode of cultural memory. Íslendingabók, a text written by Ari Þorgilsson between 1122 and 1133, is, by contrast, a highly organised text that consciously focuses on the whole of Ice­ landic society (except the descriptions of the bishops, Gizurr and Ísleifr, that are of high collective relevance) and constructs the Icelandic identity ‘from the col­ lective to the personal’. The author addresses all Icelanders by emphasising that thingsteads are entitled, laws made and bishops appointed by “all men”: “En

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þat líkaði ǫllum vel, ok mælti því manngi í gegn.” (Íslendingabók, Ch. 10) [“And everybody was very pleased with this, and no one opposed it.” (The Book of the Icelanders, Ch. 10)], “hverr maðr” (Íslendingabók, Ch. 1) [“everyone” (The Book of the Icelanders, Ch. 1)], “allra landsmanna” (Íslendingabók, Ch. 3) [“everyone in the country” (The Book of the Icelanders, Ch. 3)] and constructs a cultural iden­ tity by placing them all in a detailed construction of (resp. this one version of) Icelandic history. Unlike Landnámabók, focusing on the time of the settlement, Íslendingabók begins with the settlement and ends in the present – these two different perspectives could be differentiated as a prospective linearisation of the past vs. a retrospective foundation of the past (Assmann 2007, 72), each stand­ ing for another motivation (called “Mythomotorik” by Assmann): Landnámabók intends to legitimise the present by reconstructing the past as far back as pos­ sible (usually back to the great grandfather of a settler), whereas Íslendingabók emphasises linear development by hiding non-contingent events (for example, by hiding some really important settlers in favour of four central settlers, by hiding the non-Norwegian origin of the settlers and by hiding their past before coming to Iceland in Ch. 2, 6, and by hiding treatises or relationships with the Norwegian kings; see Wamhoff 2016, 136–137, and passim) and establishing a meaningful past in which cultural breaks like the settlement or the Christiani­ sation make sense to the collective. Because of this linearisation, Ari refers not only to foundational memories (e.g. of the settlement, where the events are proved with non-personal sources, e.g.: “es sanniliga es sagt” (Íslendingabók, Ch. 1) [“It is said with accuracy” (The Book of the Icelanders, Ch. 1)], “svá es sagt” (Íslendingabók, Ch. 1 [“And it is said” (The Book of the Icelanders, Ch. 1)], but also to numerous biographical memories (up to 80 until 100 years ago, used with the beginning of the chapter of the Christianisation, approx. 100–130 years earlier than Íslendingabók was written). It is striking that the description of the Christianisation is the first to refer only to personal sources: Teitr, Ari’s foster father, seems to be the only person who had told the story to Ari (Ch. 7, 17). Within the family of the Haukdælir, where Ari was raised and then ordained as a priest, Ari obtained access to family-bound memo­ ries. For the Haukdælir and their (clerical) family’s identity, Christianisation was one of the key events in history because they derived from it their influence on the Icelandic church (Orri Vésteinsson 2000). Obviously, the Christianisation was only remembered by a small group of clerics in their communicative memory to support their daily organisation and was (not yet) memorised as a foundational memory with collective relevance. Instead of religious motivation and identifica­ tion, Ari used for his construction the established and overall accepted law as a collective identity. This threshold from communicative to cultural memory is called ‘floating gap’ by Assmann (following Jan Vansina). These observations



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indicate that Íslendingabók was more concerned with constructing history than reconstructing it – this differentiation seems to be necessary, although both would be called ‘reconstructed’ by Assmann to prevent a valuation of memories. As a direct consequence, the construction of a collective identity was also under­ taken without an actual collective need and probably responsible the relatively small reception of the text. Both Landnámabók and Íslendingabók deal with the beginning of Icelandic society and they are mostly discussed together by scholars who often claim that the texts treat the same construction of the past (e.g. Whaley 2000, 174; Walther 2013, 94). As shown above, this conclusion has to be reversed, because the texts memorise the past in two different modes (foundational vs. biographical) with different strategies (retrospective foundation vs. prospective foundation) and with different functions (legitimising personal needs vs. legitimising the needs of the clergy). In Iceland (especially in oral tradition) a personal-centered memory seems to have been a common strategy to memorise the past and initial literality offered new strategies of memorising and constructing identities, as shown in case of the collective-centered identity construction in Íslendingabók. Besides Íslendingabók and Landnámabók, a great number of historiographi­ cal texts about the kings and kingdoms in Scandinavia, especially about the Nor­ wegian kings, were also created. It is highly improbable to assume they all were commissioned works because most versions were developed continually, later copied often and archived together with Icelandic-centered texts. A consolidation of these texts has shown that the Icelanders tried to create a reliable version of the Norwegian past, because they were looking for their own collective history (it is well known that the Norwegian reign never was as broad as later maintained in texts). Icelanders tried to reconstruct that extensive history to use it for their own collective foundation, as, on the one hand, most settlers came from Norway and, on the other hand, such stories represented foundational memory to rely on. By reconstructing the Norwegian past, the Icelanders simultaneously recon­ structed their own collective identity, implying that in twelfth-century Iceland collective (cultural) identity did not exist. Ari was also confronted with this dis­ turbing vacancy and took up numerous regional memories and reconstructed them in a foundational mode to provide collective relevance. This strategy was later no longer sufficient, because regional and biographical memories did not imply any collective relevance to rely on. As a consequence of these circumstan­ ces, the Icelanders needed to change their previous way of reconstructing the past (known from early Icelandic-centred texts as shown above) and invent a new identity strategy: the members of the new interpretation community no longer tried to distinguish Icelandic society from the Norwegian past but rather looked

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to find a way to integrate their own history in Norway’s past (for further informa­ tion, see Wamhoff 2016). The conclusion about what Old Norse historiography can tell us about cul­ tural memory in twelfth- to fourteenth-century Iceland is, first of all, that there existed only a limited stock of collective memories. Most commonly used were memorial figures like the settlement, Norwegian descent and the development of the law. First they were used to reconstruct personal identities, and later they were placed in a collective past. In the thirteenth century, these memorial figures were reconstructed with a contra-presentic function to improve society, regarded as deficient from the Norwegian perspective especially, indicating a social deve­ lopment towards a suppressed society. But inwards Icelanders still had to dis­ tance themselves from other Icelanders, which can be seen in Landnámabók and the Icelandic family sagas. Here it is rulers who act, not oppressed persons. In large part, this typical ambivalence in Icelandic cultural memory explains their ongoing search for identity with the aid of highly diverse strategies.

Works cited Primary sources The Book of the Icelanders. In Íslendingabók. Kristni saga. The Book of the Icelanders. The Story of the Conversion. Trans. Siân Grønlie. Viking Society for Northern Research. Text Series, 18. London, 2006. The Book of Settlements. Landnámabók. Trans. Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards. University of Manitoba Icelandic Studies, 1. [Winnipeg], 1972. Íslendingabók. In Íslendingabók, Landnámabók. Ed. Jakob Benediktsson. ÍF, 1. Reykjavík, 1968. 1–28. Landnámabók. In Íslendingabók, Landnámabók. Ed. Jakob Benediktsson. ÍF, 1. Reykjavík, 1968. 29–397.

Secondary sources Assmann, Jan. 2007. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen. Munich. [English transl. 2011] Glauser, Jürg. 2000. “Sagas of the Icelanders (Íslendinga sögur) and þættir as the Literary Representation of a new social space.” In Old Icelandic Literature and Society. Ed. Margaret Clunies Ross. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 42. Cambridge. 203–220.



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Glauser, Jürg. 2014. “Foreword.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. vii–x. Glauser, Jürg, ed. 2016. Skandinavische Literaturgeschichte. 2nd ed. Stuttgart and Weimar. Hermann, Pernille. 2009. “Concepts of Memory and Approaches to the Past in Medieval Icelandic Literature.” Scandinavian Studies 81.3: 287–308. Hermann, Pernille. 2013. “Saga Literature, Cultural Memory and Storage.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 332–354. Hermann, Pernille. 2014. “Memory and Remembering in Old Norse-Icelandic Literature.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 13–39. Jakob Benediktsson. 1968. “Formáli.” In Íslendingabók, Landnámabók. Ed. Jakob Benediktsson. ÍF, I. Reykjavík. V-CLIV. Mundal, Else. 2010. “Memory of the Past and Old Norse Identity.” In The Making of Memory in the Middle Ages. Ed. Lucie Doležalová. Later Medieval Europe, 4. Leiden and Boston. 463–472. Olick, Jeffrey Keith. 1999. “Collective Memory. The Two Cultures.” Sociological Theory 17.1: 333–348. Orri Vésteinsson. 2000. The Christianization of Iceland. New York. Sveinbjörn Rafnsson. 1974. Studier i Landnámabók, kritiska bidrag till den isländska fristatstidens historia. Lund. Sveinbjörn Rafnsson. 2010. “Landnámabók.” Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde. 17. 611–617. Whaley, Diana. 2000. “A Useful Past: Historical Writing in Medieval Iceland.” In Old Icelandic Literature and Society. Ed. Margaret Clunies Ross. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 42. Cambridge. 161–202. Walther, Sabine H. 2013. “Ingólfr war der berühmteste aller Landnehmer – Gründungsmythen im hochmittelalterlichen Island.” In Gründungsmythen Europas im Mittelalter. Ed. Michael Bernsen, Matthias Becher and Elke Brüggen. Gründungsmythen Europas in Literatur, Musik und Kunst, 6. Bonn. 87–103. Wamhoff, Laura Sonja. 2016. Isländische Erinnerungskultur 1100–1300. Altnordische Historiographie und kulturelles Gedächtnis. Beiträge zur Nordischen Philologie, 57. Tübingen.

Verena Höfig

II: 49 Remembering Origins 1 Introduction The tensions between communicative and cultural memory stand at the centre of Jan Assmann’s theory on forms of collective memory. While recent time is reflected in communicative memory, traditions of origin comprise the cultural memory of a given group (Assmann 2011, 36–41). If communicative memory needs social interaction, cultural memory relies on what Assmann calls ‘insti­ tutionalised mnemotechnics’, which he defines as “fixed objectifications both linguistic and nonlinguistic, such as rituals, dances, myths, patterns, dress, jewelry, tattoos, paintings, landscapes […] all of which are kinds of sign systems” (Assmann 2011, 37). Cultural memory focuses on selected points in the past, but as it is not able to preserve the past, it instead condenses it into figures of a symbolic kind to which memory attaches itself. An example of such a memory figure is Exodus, Assmann’s preferred case study, or, as will be argued here, the Icelandic landnám  – the permanent settlement and colonisation of the island, often embodied by the first settler, Ingólfr Arnarson. The aim of this case study is to provide the cultural background for this memory figure, along with selected examples of the kinds of mnemotechnics utilised to keep the cultural memory of the landnám in place – among them the earliest historiographical works, folk tales, public ceremonies, visual art, and the Icelandic landscape, which serves as the most effective non-linguistic medium for Icelanders’ cultural memory, and as a topographical text or mnemotope.

2 Case study: “Ingólfur’s Saga-People, Grown from Ice and Fire” An entire branch of Iceland’s earliest literature, the Íslendingasögur [sagas of Icelanders], establishes the landnám as the seminal event in the history of the country, occurring from around 870 until 930. Most sagas that refer to the landnám were first put into writing in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centu­ ries, while two historical works in the vernacular, Íslendingabók [the book of the Icelanders] and Landnámabók [the book of settlements], are presumed to have been committed to vellum during the twelfth century. Íslendingabók provides a short survey of the history of the island until the year 1118, while Landnámabók https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-085



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exists in several versions and covers the colonisation of Iceland with a clockwise description of the settlements on the island. Two of the five preserved versions – Sturlubók [Sturla’s book] and Hauksbók [Haukr’s book] – interpolate a founda­ tional narrative at the beginning of the work and elaborate on the first permanent settler, Ingólfr Arnarson and his foster brother Hjörleifr Hróðmarsson. Ingólfr and Hjörleifr leave Norway by ship to search for an island they had heard about from a previous explorer, Hrafna-Flóki. They spend one winter on the island and return to Norway to prepare for a permanent relocation the following year (Landnámabók, S8). Once in Iceland, Ingólfr erects a preliminary hall until his slaves locate his high-seat pillars, which he cast overboard while on the journey, asking the gods to indicate where they wanted him to settle. Hjörleifr, who is reluctant to use any supernatural guidance, is soon killed, but Ingólfr’s slaves locate his pillars, and that is the location where he decides to settle: “[…] hann bjó í Reykjarvík; þar eru enn ǫndugissúlur þær í eldhúsi.” (Landnámabók, S9) [he lived at Reykjarvík; there the high-seat pillars can still be seen in the hall.” (The Book of Settlements, Ch. 9)]. The literary memory preserved in these two texts, along with several of the sagas building on the description of Ingólfr’s landnám, has established a firm tradition, inspiring generations of Icelanders to understand themselves as Ingólfs sögu-þjóð [Ingólfur’s saga-people] (Matthías Jochumsson, “Til konungs”, 171). This expression was chosen by Matthías Jochumsson in “Til konungs” [To the King], a poem dedicated to the Danish king on the occasion of the first visit of a monarch to Iceland in 1874, which had by then been a colony for over 600 years. The date was picked in celebration of the millennium of Ingólfr’s settlement in 874 (the date mentioned in Landnámabók). The event was crowned by King Chris­ tian IX’s visit to Iceland, during which he officially presented Icelanders with a constitution – an important step towards the country’s independence. If the 1874 event served as Iceland’s first major public celebration in modern times, it also instituted a tradition: the 1100-year anniversary of the settlement in 1974 was celebrated by more than a quarter of the island’s population at Þingvellir (Guð­ mundur Hálfdanarson 2000, 7). Just as in 1874, the 1974 event celebrated societal achievements and milestones for Icelanders: the decisions to build a continuous road around the island, and to establish a newly merged national and university library (Björn Þorsteinsson and Bergsteinn Jónsson 1991, 300). The settlement, as represented by Ingólfr Arnarson, is thus intimately tied to major events in modern Icelandic history. At the same time, Icelanders’ foundational myth, and the chronology established by it, has come under intense scrutiny, triggered by debates about Icelanders’ DNA (that suggests a much more diverse founding population than indicated in the texts) and the archaeology of the landnám (Agnar Helgason et al. 2001, 735). Archaeologists have thus far not

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been able to locate any of the farmsteads of first generation settlers mentioned in Landnámabók. An excavated Viking Age building in Reykjavík, discovered in 2001 and at first dubbed Ingólfur’s Farm, was later dated to the mid-tenth century and declared an unsuitable location for the first farm (Helgi Þorláksson and Orri Vésteinsson 2006, 97). Additional excavations in the neighbourhood of the find suggest that the area was much more densely inhabited than expected from the description of the single household farmstead noted in Landnámabók (Vala Björg Garðarsdóttir 2011, 43). In immediate proximity to the hall, archaeologists located a fragment of a wall predating the settlement, dateable by its situation under the so-called landnám tephra or volcanic ash layer that resulted from an eruption dated to the year 871±2 (Árni Einarsson and Orri Vésteinsson 2006, 94). Several scholars have recently challenged the dating of the landnám based on this and other pre-871±2 finds from elsewhere in the country, for instance, on the southwestern peninsula of Reykjanes, where archaeologist Bjarni Einarsson has excavated an eighth-century turf building and argued emphatically for a much earlier settlement of Iceland: “Fellir kreddur um landnámið” 1, 6 [Invalidating the landnám Dogma]. Given the much more diffuse and complicated picture of the settlement suggested by the archaeological record, the place names and the artefacts mentioned in Landnámabók and ascribed to the first two settlers can be seen as attempts to inscribe a specific memory of the landnám into the landscape, a narrative that must at first have competed with other versions. The text conden­ ses the complicated and presumably turbulent events of the Icelandic settlement into a figure of memory. This memory is represented by an exemplary founding father, a pious and noble heathen who sacrificed and used divine guidance to find his place of settlement, much in contrast to his blood brother who refused to sacrifice, and suffered ill fortune (Meulengracht Sørensen 1974, 25). Paying close attention to the description of the location of Ingólfr’s settle­ ment in Landámabók, the text emphasises that “Ingólfr tók þar land, er nú heitir Ingólfshǫfði.” (Landnámabók, Ch. 8) [“Nowadays the place where he landed is called Ingólfshofdi.” (The Book of Settlements, Ch. 8)] The adverb nú (nowadays) may indicate an awareness of this place name as a later addition, ascribed to the location after the tradition about Ingólfr had replaced different memories and established itself as Icelanders’ dominant foundational myth. It is interesting to note that Ingólfr’s temporary residence on his way to finding his final place of settlement, Ingólfsfjall (Ingólf’s-Mountain), also bears his name, while his final home, Reykjavík, is not named after its supposedly first inhabitant. In fact, all the place names in Reykjavík connected to the first settler are attested only from the modern period. In 1772, poet and explorer Eggert Ólafsson visited the area and noted that the first settler’s name was commemorated in a local well and the ruins of a boatshed (Ferðabók Eggerts Ólafssonar og Bjarna Pálssonar I, 42;



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Fig. 1: Einar Jónsson’s Ingólfur statue from 1924

II, 154–156, 258–259). Another tradition connected a large rock on Reykjavík’s shoreline, demolished before 1820, with Ingólfr (Þorkell Grímsson 1974, 62). Present day visitors to Iceland’s capital will find a pier adjacent to the Harpa

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Concert Hall (opened in 2011) and a busy downtown square named after the first settler, along with a street in the same neighbourhood that runs along Arnarhóll hill – in Sturlubók, it is the location of his final settlement, and now crowned by Einar Jónsson’s impressive Ingólfur statue from 1924 (Lerner 2010, 39–53) (see fig. 1). While representation in place names and visual art seems appropriate for the founder of the later capital, it is nonetheless surprising that Reykjavík itself is not named after Ingólfr. Furthermore, it is startling that Iceland’s rich medieval literary heritage has not preserved any text that provides a different version of the settlement (Adolf Friðriksson and Orri Vésteinsson 2003, 144). This situation indi­ cates that saga authors and compilers either used a version of Landnámabók as their source, or were familiar with the same oral traditions that early on became part of a cognitive map of Iceland’s landscape. This cognitive map or mnemotope was carried over to modern times by means of place names and external markers that served as mnemonic tools to represent the country’s history. As the case of Ingólfr Arnarson’s landnám and the following examples from the early modern period demonstrate, such toponyms and mnemonic markers have both inspired folk traditions, and given rise to tensions when local lore spun about them was recognised as deviating too far from canonised medieval memory. In 1641, encouraged by an ongoing correspondence with the Danish scholar Ole Worm, Brynjólfur Sveinsson, then bishop of Skálholt, set out to lead an excur­ sion to Ingólfsfjall [Ingólfur’s Mountain] in search of Ingólfr Arnarson’s grave. Tradition at the time had not only preserved the name Ingólfsfjall for a promi­ nent mountain near today’s Selfoss, but also ascribed the name Ing[ólfs]hóll [Ing(ólfrs)’s mound], to a smaller mound on the hill, where local tradition held that the famous forefather was buried. Excavating the mound in 1641, Brynjólfur found no traces of human remains or artefacts (Adolf Friðriksson 1998, 37, note 100). Despite Brynjólfur Sveinsson’s failed excavation attempt, the idea that the first settler’s grave was located here continued in popular folk belief, evidenced by Jón Árnason and Magnús Grímsson’s collection of folktales that preserves two shorter stories revolving around Ingólfr’s grave on the mountain (Íslenzkar þjóðsögur og æfintýri, 75–76). That the historical memory about Ingólfr’s settle­ ment in Landnámabók was considered by elites to be superior to oral folk tra­ ditions and had established itself as authoritative for Iceland’s earliest modern writers is best illustrated by Árni Magnússon’s Chorographica Islandica from 1712. According to observations made while traveling around Iceland, the inhabitants of Seltjarnarnes believed the name Reykjavík [Smoke-Bay] stemmed from Ingól­ fr’s high-seat pillars: Reykjavík segja Seltjarnarnesingar heiti þar af, að þá Ingólfur skaut öndvegissúlum sínum fyrir borð, hafi þær rekið í Effersey. Það hafi Ingólfi þótt ólíklegt, að þær vísuðu sér að svo



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litlu landnámi, hafi því súlurnar þar brennt, er nú heitir Reykjanes á Effersey, og viljað láta sér vera landnáms tilvísan þar reykinn lagði á. Reykinn hafi lagt á Víkur stæði og síðan heiti það Reykjavík. Nugæ, qvæ non conveniunt cum Landnámu. (Chorographica Islandica, 60) [The people of Seltjarnarnes believe that Reykjavík was named from when Ingólfur cast his high-seat pillars, and they landed on Effersey. It seemed unlikely to Ingólfur that they would indicate such a small area for his landnám, and he had the pillars burnt at what is now Reykjanes on Effersey, and resolved to accept the area the smoke drifted to as his landnám. The smoke drifted to a bay which since is called Reykjavík. Nonsense, which does not agree with Landnáma[bók]. (author’s translation)]

To Árni Magnússon, who as collector and conservator was familiar with Landnámabók, anything in contrast to the established memory of the settlement con­ stituted nugae [‘nonsense’], even if it remains curious that he deemed this alter­ native tradition worth recording. The passage demonstrates how effectively the cultural memory of the landnám was established and held in place by means of official mnemonic tools such as Landnámabók and the place names it imprinted on the Icelandic landscape.

Works cited Primary sources Árni Magnússon. Chorographica Islandica. Safn til sögu Íslands og íslenzkra bókmennta. Annar flokkur, I.2. Reykjavík, 1955. The Book of Settlements. Landnámabók. Trans. Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards. University of Manitoba Icelandic Studies, 1. [Winnipeg], 1972. Ferðabók Eggerts Ólafssonar og Bjarna Pálssonar um ferð þeirra á Íslandi árin 1752–1757. I–II. Ed. Jón Eiríksson and Gerhard Schöning. Transl. Steindór Steindórsson. Reykjavík, 1981. Íslenzkar Þjóðsögur og Æfintýri. Vol. 2. Jón Árnason. Leipzig, 1864. Landnámabók. In Íslendingabók, Landnámabók. Ed. Jakob Benediktsson. ÍF, 1. Reykjavík, 1986 [1968]. 29–397. Matthías Jochumsson. “Til konungs”. Þjóðólfr 4 August 1874: 171.

Secondary sources Adolf Friðriksson. 1998. Íslensk fornleifafræði fyrir 1880. I.–II. hluti. Reykjavík. Adolf Friðriksson and Orri Vésteinsson. 2003. “Creating a Past. A Historiography of the Settlement of Iceland.” In Contact, Continuity, and Collapse: The Norse Colonization of the North Atlantic. Ed. James H. Barrett. Turnhout. 139–162.

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Agnar Helgason et al. 2001. “mtDNA and the Islands of the North Atlantic. Estimating the Proportions of Norse and Gaelic Ancestry.” American Journal of Human Genetics 68: 723–737. Árni Einarsson and Orri Vésteinsson. 2006. “Living in Reykjavík in the 10th Century.” In Reykjavík 871±2. Landnámssýningin. The Settlement Exhibition. Ed. Orri Vésteinsson, Helgi Þorláksson and Árni Einarsson. Reykjavík. 88–107. Assmann, Jan. 2011. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. Cambridge, MA. [German orig. 1992] Björn Þorsteinsson and Bergsteinn Jónsson. 1991. Íslands saga til okkar daga. Reykjavík. “Fellir kreddur um landnámið.” Fréttablaðið (4 June 2011): 1 and 6. Guðmundur Hálfdanarson. 2000. “Þingvellir. An Icelandic ‘Lieu de Mémoire.’” History and Memory 12.1: 4–29. Helgi Þorláksson and Orri Vésteinsson. 2006. “Myth.” In Reykjavík 871±2. Landnámssýningin. The Settlement Exhibition. Ed. Orri Vésteinsson, Helgi Þorláksson and Árni Einarsson. Reykjavík. 68–85. Lerner, Marion. 2010. Landnahme-Mythos, kulturelles Gedächtnis und nationale Identität. Isländische Reisevereine im frühen 20. Jahrhundert. Nordeuropäische Studien, 22. Berlin. Meulengracht Sørensen, Preben. 1974. “Sagan um Ingólf og Hjörleif.” Skírnir 148: 20–40. Vala Björg Garðarsdóttir. 2011. “Alþingisreiturinn: Upphaf landnáms í Reykjavík.” Árbók hins íslenzka fornleifafélags: 5–43. Þorkell Grímsson. 1974. “Reykvískar fornleifar.” In Reykjavík í 1100 ár. Ed. Helgi Þorláksson. Reykjavík. 53–74.

Power National memories

Pernille Hermann

II: 50 Danish Perspectives 1 Introduction Northern antiquity, and the supposed ‘Viking Age’, represent an integral part of cultural memory in Denmark (cf. Jan Assmann 1995). The memory of this par­ ticular point of the past is maintained in monuments, history books, poetry and literature, and in more recent developments from popular culture, such as, films, comics, role playing games, computer games, and so on. The Viking Age, and objects and themes belonging to it, are embraced as symbols of identity that offer orientation and define ‘us’ (the Danes, or sub-groups at other levels than the national) as a particular group of people. That the Viking Age has a position within cultural memory is evident from rapper Pede B.’s lyrics from 2017: Yo! Vi er VIKINGER, råber fodboldfans til udekampe og gør du med det samme tænker mjød, sværd og fluesvampe. En flok gutter der sagtens kunne banke enhver de skulle rende ind i uden for vores grænse […] For udover at være nogle væmmelige lømler var de her folk også nogle af verdens bedste tømrer […] Men her er en hurtig tanke Næste gang de siger vikinger til udekampe Skal du ikke blive superbange Bare tænk på nørder med en kugleramme (Pede B.) [Yo! We are Vikings, soccer fans yell; immediately you think about mead, swords and toxic mushrooms. Guys that would easily smack anyone they ran into outside of our border. […] Besides being louts, they were the best carpenters […] Here’s a thought, next time they say Vikings at games, don’t be frightened, just think about nerds with an abacus (author’s translation)]

In referring to Danes as ‘Vikings’, and at the same time remembering Vikings not only as ravaging brutes, but as a civilised and intellectually advanced people, Pede B. repeats an image that goes back to the nineteenth century, when the Viking Age was remembered as a point in history when “de Danske” [“the Danes”] were world-rulers (Worsaae 1873, 4).

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-086

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2 Case study: Remembering northern antiquity in Danish contexts A past at the edge of forgetting Ann Rigney presents two models of memory that are relevant for coming to grips with the memory of Northern antiquity in Denmark. In the first model, memory is considered as “something that is fully formed in the past (it was once ‘all there’ in the plenitude of experience, as it were) and as something that is subsequently a matter of preserving and keeping alive” (Rigney 2005, 12). The other is a ‘socialconstructivist model’, which implies that “memories of a shared past are collec­ tively constructed and reconstructed in the present rather than resurrected from the past” (Rigney 2005, 14). Whereas the first model can describe activities in, say, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when attempts were made to recover a (nearly) lost past, the second model offers an adequate framework for under­ standing developments of the nineteenth century, when themes from Northern antiquity, such as runic monuments, barrows, monoliths, myths, Guder [gods], Kæmper [giants] and Vikinger [Vikings], were invested with meaning, that is, when such images were narrativised and provided Danes with a shared memory and a shared identity. The term the ‘Viking Age’ was practically an invention of the nineteenth century, when – as part of romanticism and nation-building – a self-awareness was strengthened in times of political crisis and instability. But the interest in Northern antiquity, and the seeds of what flourished and was cultivated in the nineteenth century, had already been sown in previous centuries, when a consciousness of Danish-ness evolved around affection for the fatherland and remembrance of its history. In the seventeenth century, antiquarians both literally and metaphori­ cally unearthed cultural symbols. A high point in this development, which was supported by a royal regulation of 1622 ordering all priests to report information about “antiquiteter och documenter” [antiquities and documents] (Jørgensen 1970, xi), was the achievements of professor Ole Worm (1588–1654), who collected verbal and material monuments of interest to Danish history. Among his impor­ tant publications were the influential work about runic monuments, Monumenta Danica (1643), and some of the earliest scattered examples of sagas and poetry, which had not otherwise been accessible in Denmark (see fig. 1 and 2). At a time when Latin was the language used by scholars, skills in interpret­ ing runes and Old Norse letters were rare. With a hint to the problems it took to understand the old language, Worm criticised the “moderne Stads” [modern stuff] that had erased the greatness of antiquity and caused the weakening of the



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Fig. 1: Illustration of the large Jelling stone from Ole Worm’s Monumenta Danica, 1643

old spiritual power (“gamle Aandskraft”) (Breve til og fra Ole Worm, 283). Worm was not only preoccupied with written and tangible objects, but also folklore and orally transmitted memories caught his attention, and his collecting efforts reached remote corners of the Danish realm. In a letter concerned with poems about the legendary Danish king Skjold, one of Worm’s Icelandic contacts made reference to an “gammel Kone” [“old woman”] living on the “fjerneste Kyster” [remote coasts] in Iceland whom was “ikke uvidende om den Slags Oldsager” [not ignorant of this kind of antiquities] (Breve til og fra Ole Worm, 268). Worm’s col­ league, professor at Sorø Academy Stephanus Stephanius (1599–1650) addressed Worm as “den svindende Oldtids sande Juppiter Stator og dit Fædrelands ypper­ lige Pryd” (Breve til og fra Ole Worm, 301) [the fading antiquity’s true Jupiter Stator and your fatherland’s excellent ornament], and thus acknowledged that Worm’s collecting efforts prevented forgetfulness and that the antiquities were crucial pillars of the fatherland.

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Fig. 2: Illustration of the Jelling monuments from Ole Worm’s Monumenta Danica, 1643

The interest in antiquity had started even earlier. Already around 1200 the medieval historian Saxo Grammaticus relied on cultural symbols from the past. In Gesta Danorum [History of the Danes], he refers to objectivised culture, such as boulders and runic inscriptions on rocks, which he compares with Roman script in books; this way Saxo re-interpreted and imposed ideals existing at his own time on the antiquities. By selectively referring to what would in reality have been scattered runic information, Saxo, creates an image of a Danish past that – with regard to level of civilisation – was comparable to (literate) Roman culture. Cen­ turies later, Gesta Danorum was considered the gem of the Danish Middle Ages. In the last half of the sixteenth century, as a response to a politically tense relation­ ship between Denmark and Sweden, patriotic tendencies lead to a renaissance movement and a concern with the past and the “fædreland” [fatherland] (Ilsøe 1991, 30, 32, 40–41). In that context Gesta Danorum was for the first time trans­ lated into Danish (in the 1570s) by historian Anders Sørensen Vedel (1542–1616). He wished to continue and update the text and regretted that earlier generations had never secured in “minde oc hukommelse” [memory and remembrance] the deeds of the forefathers (Karker 1955, 8).



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The antiquarians recovered from the dark what previous centuries had neglected in processes of ‘passive cultural forgetting’, that is, actions where objects had fallen “out of the frames of attention, valuation, and use” (Aleida Assmann 2008, 98). But towards the end of the eigtheenth century what had been recovered from forgetting gradually entered “active cultural memory”, and antiquities were increasingly often prioritised, systematically treated, and even manipulated with an eye to present needs (Aleida Assmann 2008, 100).

Prioritising and enlarging Nordic antiquity In the early nineteenth century, one of the key-figures of Danish romanticism, Adam Oehlenschläger (1779–1850) reflected on the past, memory and forgetting, and anticipated what is now a central concern of memory studies: De svundne Dage tænke vi os – for det meste – altid interessantere, end det nærværende Øieblik, fordi vi glemme det Ubehagelige, som ogsaa de førte med sig, det Behagelige derimod erindre vi, og forstærke det tifold med vor Fantasie, som maa komme Hukommel­ sen til Hielp … Vi interessere os for at faae mere at vide om disse Tider, end der staaer i vor Magt, og Indbildningskraften, som altid er rede, skaber os med Fornøielse en nye Verden (Oehlenschläger “Forsøg”, 15) [The disappeared days we most often consider more interesting than the present moment, because we forget the unpleasantness that those days also brought with them, in contrast, the pleasantness we remember, and we strengthen it ten times with our fantasy, which helps our memory … We are interested in knowing more about those times than we are able to, and imagination, which is always ready, provides us with a new world. (author’s translation)]

Oehlenschläger did not, as did previous generations of scholars, complain about the difficulties in getting access to an eroding past. He expressed the conviction that exactly because the past was distant and elusive it opened to a world of possibilities. In presenting the idea that memories were supported and structured around imagi­ nation, that is, that imagination could serve as an aid to memory, he recognised that a remembered past is very much the product of the present, an assumption that ties in well with the social-constructivist model of memory mentioned above. Oehlenschläger was immensely preoccupied with “Fædrelandskierlighed” [Love of the fatherland] and “Nationalaand” [National spirit] (Oehlenschläger, “Forsøg”, 21). When defining the national spirit, among other things, he focussed on Old Norse mythology, which had otherwise (in comparison to classical mythology) been considered as “fattig og raae” [poor and raw] (Oehlenschläger, “Forsøg”, 7). Moreover, he drew attention to those regions where the Norse gods,

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who marked the oldest trait of history, had once lived, and developed the idea that the Nordic landscape itself was a crucial point of intersection between the ancient past and the present: […] den nordiske Mythologie, i saa Henseende maa være os interessantere end den græske, da den indeholder de ældste forvirrede Spor af vor Fædrelands-Historie, da Guderne i denne Mythologie have været Mennesker, som have levet i vore Egne, og hvis Indretninger have virket paa vore Stater igiennem Aarhundreder (Oehlenschläger, “Forsøg”, 20) [Old Norse mythology, so to speak, will be more interesting to us than Greek mythology, since it contains the oldest uncertain traces of our fatherland’s history, as the gods in this mythology has been human beings who lived in our regions, and whose orders have influ­ enced our states through centuries. (author’s translation)]

Oehlenschläger substituted distance with proximity, and emphasised how bodily presence and the accessibility of the Nordic landscape caused affects and created feelings that classical mythology and its distant spaces could not evoke in people (Oehlenschläger, “Forsøg”, 20). In what became one of Denmark’s national anthems, Der er et yndigt land [There is a Lovely Country] (1819), Oehlenschläger compared the country to Freias Sal [Freyja’s hall], made references to a land­ scape with Bautasteen [monoliths] and populated the world with harniskklædte Kæmper [armoured champions] (cf. Oehlenschläger, “Fædrelands-Sang”). Until today – through repeated use – the anthem secures antiquity a position in collec­ tive memory at the same time as it maintains elements from a national-romantic narrative deriving from the nineteenth century. The anthem thus functions as a culturally formed and socially binding image of memory which concentrates its focus on a specific point in the past (cf. Jan Assmann 1995, 129). Obviously, the transition of the ancient material to active cultural memory was launched by multiple people, and Oehlenschläger followed the lead of earlier writers. Peter Friderich Suhm (1728–1798) wrote one of the first systematic treatments that focused on Norse mythology, Om Odin og den hedniske Gudelære og Gudstieneste udi Norden [About Odin and the Pagan Theology and Practice in the North] (1771). Suhm acknowledged that his source materials, the “theologie” [theology], i.e. the heathen belief, of the forefathers, were “mørke og vanskelige” [dark and difficult] (Suhm 1771, 3). Rather than developing a comparative study involving other peoples’ traditions, he focused on and prioritised the theology of “vore egne Folk” [our own people] (Suhm 1771, 2). Suhm’s interest in the mythic and legendary material is evidenced also in Nordiske fortællinger (Nordic tales) (1772–1777), an early example of a literary appropriation of legendary and mythic tales. Johannes Ewald’s play Balders Død (Baldr’s death) (1773), which was mod­ elled over the version of the myth told in Gesta Danorum, but which also shows



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Fig. 3: An eighteenth century representation of Thor by Nicolai Abildgaard (from the 1770s). Abildgaard made drawings of the costumes for the 1779 performance of Johannes Ewald’s play Balders død (Baldr’s death).

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inspiration from the eddic materials, was another important milestone. Ewald (1743–1781) used and knew about Suhm’s works (Kryger 1991, 334), but was also inspired by tendencies in Germany and England, where poets striving for liter­ ary renewal had discovered ancient mythologies. For instance, the German poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724–1803), who lived in Copenhagen for nearly two decades during the 1750s and 1760s, was influential. Ewald’s play was performed several times between 1775–1778 in the Royal Theater in Copenhagen. Judged from its success, its replacement of classicism with a Norse story world spoke directly to “det nationalt vakte borgerskab” [the nationally aroused citizenship] (Feldbæk 1991, 223). A variety of paintings and drawings of the god Baldr and other Norse figures accompanied the play, and the remembrance of the Norse gods began to circulate in different media (see fig. 3). The visual and artificial representations of the Norse gods and their settings by artists such as Peter Cramer (1726–1782) and Johannes Wiedewelt (1731–1802) did not adhere solely to the classical ideal, but represented gods in an environment with Norse characteristics (Kryger 1991, 329–339). Oehlenschläger’s influence was crucial and in the middle of the nineteenth century historian and archaeologist J. J. A. Worsaae (1821–1885) praised the poet for having “manet oldtiden op af graven” (Worsaae 1848, 10) [conjured antiquity up from its grave]. Worsaae was the first to define the period AD 800–1000, as Vikingetid [the Viking Age] (Worsaae 1873, 4; Cederlund 2011). According to him, Danes of that period belonged to a culture of traders and sailors, they were fore­ fathers who could be looked upon with admiration (Scherfig 2016, 16–18). Such a perspective on the people of Northern antiquity tweaked the meaning of the term ‘Viking.’ Whereas in the medieval sources víkingr and víking meant respectively a “sea-warrior” and a “military expedition” (Brink 2012 [2006], 6), ‘Viking’ would now increasingly often rather designate a member of an ethnic group belonging to a particular geographical area (Scherfig 2016, 19–20).

Sites of memory One of the cultural symbols from the Viking Age that is currently a part of cul­ tural memory is the Jelling monument in east Jutland, which since 1994 has been a UNESCO World heritage site. The monument area covers two huge mounds, a Romanesque church built on earlier structures, and two rune stones, of which the most impressive is raised by king Haraldr blátǫnn (Bluetooth) (see colour plate 10). The runic inscription reveals that the stone was made in commemoration of Haraldr Bluetooth’s parents, king Gormr (Gorm) and queen Þyrvé (Thyra), and that Haraldr won all of Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian. Many questions



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about the intention of the monument when it was built in the tenth century remain to be answered. But since the rune stone (which is the centre of the monument area) was recovered from the soil in 1586 it has been a steady reference point, and “[u]nlike many other archaeological sites Jelling never completely lost its impor­ tance but has maintained a significant, not least ideological, role up through Danish history to the present day” (Pedersen 2014, 261). The Jelling monu­ ment qualifies as a lieu de mémoire, a symbolic site of national identity (Nora 1998 [1992], x). It is a place that triggers and stimulates images of the nation’s origin, and adds meaning to foundational narratives referring to the Viking Age, power, Christianisation and royal authority. It is crucial for its status as a lieu de mémoire that the runic inscription explicitly mentions Denmark and Danes and thus directly expresses its meaning as a symbol of a collective identity. As a site of memory it is embedded in cultural and political practises and it has been in­fluenced by changing reception and different uses. Despite its significance in Danish history, and its long-lived status as the so-called ‘birth certificate’ of Denmark, it is only recently that the site has been thoroughly archaeologically investigated and accompanied by a nearby museum ‘Kongernes Jelling. Home of The Viking Kings’. As emphasised by Nora, memory sites have three dimensions, a material, a functional, and a symbolic (Nora 1989). The Jelling monument fulfils all of these; materially it has grown into a monumentally and aesthetically impressive site; functionally, it is even more visible as a document of a shared past, memorising political and religious transformations, and underlining the significance of this particular, formative, time of the past. And, finally, at the sym­ bolic level the recreation of the site supports ideas of a Danish national identity. The Jelling stone, which is tellingly pictured in the Danish passport, repre­ sents an image of the past, or we could say, a hegemonic memory, in which the coming into being of the state of Denmark and Christianity are tightly interwoven. But no version of the past remains uncontested. In 2006 the neo-pagan religious community Forn Siðr presented a runic monument over pre-Christian heathen traditions (Nørgaard 2006). This monument, which was temporarily placed in Jelling, can be seen as a counter-memory, which problematises the identification between the state of Denmark and the Christian faith. Principally it reveals how this identification is a challenge to a multi-religious society. In the wake of the formative period of the nineteenth century, and during the last two centuries, the memory of the Viking Age, and ideas concerned with it, have been informed by educational, cultural, literary, religious, political and popular interests and influences. It has been, and still is, pending between ‘active’ and ‘passive cultural memory’; at times it is kept away in a storage, but occasi­ onally it is taken out from the archive (Aleida Assmann 2008, 100–104). Despite being remembered in disparate contexts, the Viking Age has acquired increa­

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singly generalised and stereotypical meanings, making it a storehouse of easily recognisable images (cf. Cederlund 2011). Because of its antiquity and its position in national remembrance, a cultural symbol like the Jelling stone can be classi­ fied as a phenomenon of high culture. But in contemporary society the formation and reconstruction of cultural memory to a high extent relies on products of mass media and on other communities than the national (Rigney 2005, 15). To embrace the full range of the cultural products that secure antiquity a position in cultural memory, popular, or so-called low culture, is highly relevant, and the comic Valhalla (1979–2009), the TV-show Jul i Valhal (2005), computer games, role playing games, and the like must be included (cf. Kukkonen 2008). The reflections in this essay have focussed on the Danish case, and on how (in broad lines) the memory of the Viking Age has developed within a national framework; however, this is only part of the story. In contemporary culture globalised mass media and digital media have a profound influence on the remembrance of the Viking Age, and on the negotiation of the Viking as a figure of the imagination, and these media are decisive for the formation of groups and identities that adhere to this past. This makes it increasingly important to investigate the Viking Age as a connecting phenomenon at sub- and trans-national levels as well.

Works cited Primary sources Breve til og fra Ole Worm I. 1607–1636. Trans. H. D. Schepelern. Copenhagen, 1965. Jørgensen, Frank. Præsteindberetninger til Ole Worm. I–II. Copenhagen, 1970–1974. Oehlenschläger, Adam. “Forsøg til Besvarelse af det ved Kiøbenhavns Universitet fremsatte Priisspørgsmaal.” In Æstetiske skrifter 1800–1812. Ed. F. J. Billeskov Jansen. Copenhagen, 1980 [1800]. 5–22. Oehlenschläger, Adam. “Fædrelands-Sang.” In Samlede Digte, II. Copenhagen, 1823. Pede B. Vikingetiden. 2017. https://www.dr.dk/historie/danmarkshistorien/pede-bs-skaevedanmarkshistorie-her-er-den-nyeste-rap. (29 December 2017). Suhm, Peter Friderich. Om Odin og den hedniske Gudelære og Gudstieneste udi Norden. Copenhagen, 1771. Worsaae, J.J.A. Den danske Nationalitet. Et par Ord i Anledning af Forfatningsspørgsmålet. Copenhagen, 1848. Worsaae, J.J.A. De danskes Kultur i Vikingetiden. Copenhagen, 1873.



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Secondary sources Assmann, Aleida. 2008. “Canon and Archive.” In Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (in collaboration with Sara B. Young). Media and Cultural Memory/Medien und kulturelle Erinnerung, 8. Berlin and New York. 97–107. Assmann, Jan. 1995. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” New German Critique 65: 125–133. Brink, Stefan. 2012 [2008]. “Who Were the Vikings?” In The Viking World. Ed. Stefan Brink and Neil Price. London and New York. 5–7. Cederlund, Carl Olof. 2011. “The Modern Myth of the Viking.” Journal of Maritime Archaeology 6: 5–35. Feldbæk, Ole. 1991. “Fædreland og Indfødsret. 1700-tallets danske identitet.” In Dansk identitetshistorie 1. Fædreland og modersmål 1536–1789. Ed. Ole Feldbæk. Copenhagen. 111–230. Ilsøe, Harald. 1991. “Danskerne og deres fædreland. Holdninger og opfattelser ca. 1550–1700.” In Dansk identitetshistorie 1. Fædreland og modersmål 1536–1789. Ed. Ole Feldbæk. Copenhagen. 27–88. Karker, Allan. 1955. Anders Sørensen Vedel og den danske krønike. Copenhagen. Kryger, Karin. 1991. “Dansk identitet i nyklassicistisk kunst. Nationale tendenser og nationalt særpræg 1750–1800.” In Dansk identitetshistorie 1. Fædreland og modersmål 1536–1789. Ed. Ole Feldbæk. Copenhagen. 231–418. Kukkonen, Karin. 2008. “Popular Cultural Memory. Comics, Communities and Context Knowledge.” Nordicom Review 29: 261–273. Nora, Pierre. 1989. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire.” Representations. Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory 26: 7–24. Nora, Pierre. 1998 [1992] “Introduction to Realms of Memory, Volume III.” In Realms of Memory. Vol. III. New York. ix–xii. Nørgaard, Linda. 2006. http://www.fornsidr.dk/index.php/om-forn-sidhr/17-runestenen-ijelling. (29 December 29 2017). Pedersen, Anne. 2014. “The Jelling Monuments – a National Icon between Legend and Fact.” In Quo Vadis? Status and Future Perspectives of Long-Term Excavations in Europe. Ed. Claus von Carnap-Bornheim. Neumünster. 249–263. Rigney, Ann. 2005. “Plenitude, Scarcity and the Circulation of Cultural Memory.” Journal of European Studies 35: 11–28. Scherfig, Albert. 2016. “Perspektiver på konstruktionen af Vikingetiden. En analyse af J.J.A. Worsaaes fortidsbrug under 1800-tallets national-kulturelle kampe.” BA-thesis. Copenhagen.

Power National memories Sophie Bønding

II: 51 Danish Perspectives – N.F.S. Grundtvig 1 Introduction: A need for cultural cohesion During the long nineteenth century, Denmark underwent a number of fundamen­ tal political and institutional changes, as the state was transformed from a united monarchy into a nation-state. With the Danish Constitution of 1849, the form of government was changed from absolute monarchy to limited monarchy with a democratic constitution. Through the democratisation process, of which these developments were a part, the Danish people emerged as a politically empowered and culturally united entity (cf. e.g. Korsgaard 2004). The Danish polymath, N.F.S. Grundtvig (1783–1872), played an active role in this process and ascribed central significance to Old Norse mythology for the founding of the Danish community. He is important in relation to Danish nation building because his ideas influ­ enced the formation of a Danish national identity in his own time, and because later generations look back to him as an icon of national identity, even today. During Grundtvig’s life-time, Denmark, like the rest of Europe, was marked by political unrest. The French Revolution was at the forefront of public debate and served as an intimidating lesson for political and social transformation gone wrong (Nevers 2011, 65–93). Grundtvig, like most intellectuals of his time, was initially sceptical towards democracy (cf. Lundgreen-Nielsen 1998; Nevers 2011); however, he soon came to accept that the political empowerment of the popula­ tion was an inevitable consequence of the ongoing political displacements of the time – a demand that needed to be acceded to in order to prevent the eruption of political disorder. He, together with other political and cultural figures, faced the challenge of ensuring that the heterogeneous Danish population, consisting primarily of rural farmers and urban-based bourgeoisie, would be able to admin­ ister its collective political influence and act as a united political subject. In other words, there was a need to secure unity and cohesion among the population. To Grundtvig, the key was to create a uniting frame of reference, something which he found to be lacking. In the wake of the Enlightenment, the legitimacy of the monarchy and the Church was no longer a matter of course. Thus, they could no longer constitute an unchallenged foundation of the community, provide a sense of belonging among its members, and connect them emotionally. This meant that an alternative was needed, and Grundtvig found his solution in Old Norse mytho­ logy.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-087



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2 Case study Grundtvig’s solution: Reactualising Old Norse Mythology Grundtvig was a polymath: politician, pastor and theologian, philologist, philoso­ pher, historian, and poet. He produced an enormous number of written works, many of which deal with the pre-Christian past – including translations of sources and texts where he interprets the material more freely. His view of Old Norse mythology changed and developed through his life. The second edition of Nordens Mythologi [Mythology of the North] from 1832 [First ed., 1808] marks a significant step, as this is the first time his ideas about the significance of Old Norse mythol­ ogy for the formation of the Danish community are formulated in prose form. Here, however, focus is on the text Brage-Snak [Bragi’s Speech] (1844), which presents his ideas in an especially interesting way due to its genre. Brage-Snak is a collec­ tion of manuscripts from a series of 25 public lectures on Old Norse and Greek mythology and legends, which have been edited into a book. Its aim is not to retell the material but to interpret and expound it. As a series of performative acts, these lectures were part of a practice whereby Grundtvig sought to create awareness in his audience about their common past, i.e. attempted to shape their cultural memory. A central concern in Brage-Snak is to create a sense of continuity between the past, the present, and the future of the Danish community. Grundtvig’s vision is formulated as an awakening of his countrymen from a sleep, through which they have forgotten their common, glorious past. […] sagtens maa jeg da vove at bede og besværge Nordboerne selv dog at oplade Øinene og see sig om i Hjemmet, hvor de Fleste af dem, desværre, endnu er vildfremmede, see sig rigtig om, saa de kan lære at skiønne paa hvad der er skedt, for at Folke-Livet kunde gienfødes i Norden, og lære at skatte Midlerne til Gienfødelsen, før de atter forsvinde! (Brage-Snak, 311; emphasis in original) [(…) I can then venture to ask and adjure the Northmen themselves to raise their eyes and look around in their home, where most of them are unfortunately still complete strangers, [to] look around properly, so they can learn to appreciate, what has happened in order that the life of the people could be reborn in the North and learn to treasure the means to this rebirth, before they vanish once more! (author’s translation)]

The means to the awakening are the myths. Although Grundtvig has a great love for the myths in themselves, he proclaims that his interest lies in their potential for actualisation, i.e. in how they can be useful in his own time.

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[…] da jeg ikke bryder mig det mindste om, hvad der staar hos “Classikerne” eller i store Mænds Bøger, naar jeg ikke kan bruge det til Noget, og hvad Myther angaar, naar de ikke kan træde i Menneske-Aandens Tjeneste som talende Billeder af noget Stort eller Skiønt og Sandt i Livet. Er dette derimod Tilfældet, er en gammel Mythe en Guld-Ramme til en Ædelsteens-Tanke, som hæves ved at sees giennem et Lag af Chrystal, da er den mig dyrebar […] (Brage-Snak, 38; emphasis in original) [(…) because I do not, in the least, like, what it says in the “classics” or in the books of great men, when I cannot put it to any use, and with regard to myths, when they cannot be of service to the human-spirit as talking images of something large or beautiful and true in life. Is this, on the contrary, the case, [then] an old myth is a gold-frame for a gemstone-thought, which is accentuated by being viewed through a layer of crystal, then it is precious to me (…) (author’s translation)]

Metaphorically speaking, a myth is a frame in the sense that it contains and high­ lights thoughts, which are rooted in the past but essential to the present. Grundt­ vig views the mythology in terms of poetic memories from the community’s col­ lective past, which can serve as a figurative, poetic language through which the present can be conceptualised. Poetic is a key term to Grundtvig in this context. Stemming from the Greek poiein, to create, the term refers to the mythology’s potential to create, i.e. to shape the present and the future. Conceived in terms of cultural memory (Assmann 2011), “[myth] is founda­ tional history that is narrated in order to illuminate the present from the stand­ point of its origins” (Assmann 2011, 38). Myths as instantiations of cultural memory shared by a group provide orientation and exert normative and formative power over that group’s present, serving two possible functions. By lending legit­ imacy and authority to the present, making it appear unchangeable, it can create a sense of continuity and stability across time, thereby, serving a foundational function. Alternatively, it can serve a contra-present function, by presenting the present as deficient in comparison to an idealised, glorious past, stressing discon­ tinuity between past and present (Assmann 2011, 62–66). The goal then becomes to reconstitute stability by overlaying the past with meaning and actuality. Thus, in both functions, myths have the capacity to mobilise collective emotions and (re)constitute the identity of the group. Especially the contra-present function is pivotal to Grundtvig’s ideas about the formation of the Danish community. To him, the myths are evidence of a dis­ continuity between the past and the present, which he strives to rectify, encour­ aging his audience to look to the past in order to act in the present and create a glorious future – so that the myths will once again provide orientation for the Danish people. As such, Old Norse mythology can provide what Assmann terms “connective memory” (2006, 11), connecting the people across social class and geography, making them aware that they constitute a community. It is a source



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of a shared semantic universe which is saturated with meaning and relevant to the entire population. According to Grundtvig, it contains an authentic Danish outlook on life (Auken 2005, 494–495), a frame of mind, which he tries to awaken in, and propagate among, the population. His vision aligns with that of other nation builders, which “is not to return to the past, but to recover its pristine ethos and reconstruct a modern nation in the image of the past ethnie” (Smith 1999, 12; emphasis in original). Grundtvig strives to unite the heterogeneous pop­ ulation by reconstituting the present community in the image of its predecessor.

Folk-enlightenment: Reconstituting continuity In order to fix this cultural deficiency, Grundtvig envisions an enlightenment of the people, a folk-enlightenment (folkeoplysning), to bridge the cultural gap between the golden past and the glorious future. In Grundtvig’s assessment, this gap had emerged due to the collective “unaturlige Glemsel af vore egne naturlige Anlæg og historiske Forhold […]” (Brage-Snak, 331; emphasis in original) [unnatural forgetfulness of our own natural dispositions and historical conditions […]] (author’s translation) – natural being that which is authentic to the people. This forgetfulness had allowed a false, inauthentic enlightenment, Latin learning, to spread and invade the minds of the people. This “konstige Barbari” (Brage-Snak, 331; emphasis in original) [artificial barbarism] (author’s translation) practiced in schools and universities had deceived the people into believing that all things Danish were not good enough. He emphasises that “[…] Latinerne […] er fremmede Erobrere, […] saa hele deres Magt og Anseelse beror paa den Overtro hos Folket, at de er alle Barbarer, som ei kan Latin, og at en menneskelig Dannelse paa vort eget Moders-Maal er umulig […]” (Brage-Snak, 334; emphasis in original) [[…] the Latinists […] are foreign conquerors, […] so all their power and esteem hinge on the superstition among the people that they are all barbarians who do not know Latin, and that human moral education in our own mother tongue is impossible […]] (author’s translation). Through this folk-enlightenment, the people needed to learn about and start appreciating their common past. This would help cultivate an emotional attach­ ment among them, and create a collective intentionality, a voice of the people (Korsgaard 2015, 200–201) to govern its affairs in the new political situation – thereby securing that the empowerment of the people was driven by the common good. This was a matter of staying on a middle course between a potential anticommunal attitude, which could arise from too much individual empowerment, and a potential uncontrollable revolution of the multitude, spurred by collective emotional over-heating (Baunvig 2014, 79). In suggesting an alternative enlight­

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enment rooted in the collective past, Grundtvig was not reactionary in the sense that he wanted to return to a pre-enlightenment past. His enlightenment project is a quarrel with the educational system. In order to create a sense of community among the population, primary attention had to be given to the collective history of the people, their common narratives, and language rather than to classical learning based on dead, foreign languages. As such, his endeavours were firmly rooted in Romantic ideas about people, language, and nation, reaching back to Herder. Understanding Grundtvig’s use of Old Norse mythology as an attempt to attain communal stability in the face of political upheaval offers fruitful perspec­ tives on his work. He treats mythology as a reservoir of lost meaning, a forgotten cultural memory about a common, distant past. To him, Old Norse mythology constitutes the essence of what is authentically Danish, and he believes that it can provide a common frame of reference for the people and work as a founda­ tion for their collective identity. He hopes that it can inspire his contemporary countrymen to create a glorious future for the community.

Works cited Primary sources Brage-Snak. N.F.S. Grundtvig. Copenhagen, 1844 (Grundtvigs Værker [2010], www.grundtvigsvaerker.dk, Version 1.12, April 2018). Nordens Mythologi. N.F.S. Grundtvig. Copenhagen, 1832.

Secondary sources Assmann, Jan. 2006. Religion and Cultural Memory. Ten Studies. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Stanford, CA. Assmann, Jan. 2011. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization. Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. Cambridge. [Geman orig. 1992] Auken, Sune. 2005. Sagas spejl: Mytologi, historie og kristendom hos N.F.S. Grundtvig. Copenhagen. Baunvig, Katrine Frøkjær. 2014. “Det folkelige foredrag”. In Ved lejlighed. Grundtvig og genrerne. Ed. Sune Auken and Christel Sunesen. Hellerup. 66–94. Korsgaard, Ove. 2004. Kampen om folket. Et dannelsesperspektiv på dansk historie gennem 500 år. Copenhagen. Korsgaard, Ove. 2015. “How Grundtvig Became a Nation Builder”. In Building the Nation. Ed. John A. Hall, Ove Korsgaard and Ove K. Pedersen. Copenhagen. 192–209.



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Lundgreen-Nielsen, Flemming. 1998. “Løven i buret. Grundtvig i 1848.” In 1848 – det mærkelige år. Ed. Claus Bjørn. Copenhagen. 127–152. Nevers, Jeppe. 2011. Fra skældsord til slagord. Demokratibegrebet i dansk politisk historie. Odense. Smith, Anthony D. 1999. Myths and Memories of the Nation. Oxford.

Malan Marnersdóttir

II: 52 Faroese Perspectives 1 Introduction The Icelandic Færeyinga saga [the saga of Faroe Islanders] is a ‘superstory’ (Honko 1996, 21) that forms a memory resource contributing to the construction and maintenance of Faroese national identity (Assmann 2011). This overview focuses on the eleven editions of Føroyinga saga as an important resource for variety of hypertextual relations between Færeyinga saga, ballads, and modern written literature in Faroese (for the terminology of hypertextuality, cf. Genette 1982).

2 Case study Icelandic storage memories turned into Faroese functional memories One of the most important resources for Faroese storage memories can be found in the Icelandic sagas. As there are no medieval Faroese documents, manuscripts, or legends about the first settlers in the country, an overwhelming importance has been attributed to Færeyinga saga. The saga derives from the Icelandic manuscript Flateyjarbók (Book from Flatey), written in Iceland between 1387 and 1394, and forms the repository for collective cultural memories (Assmann 2011, 124) about pre-modern Faroese history. From this reservoir, the Danish scholar Carl Christian Rafn extracted and published Færeyinga saga in 1832 in Old Norse with transla­ tions into Faroese and Danish. Rafn, the Faroese translator, Pastor J. H. Schrøter, and the county administrator, Jens Davidsen, formed the literary elite that recei­ ved, interpreted and transferred – together with the first map giving the place names in Faroese – the saga to the Faroese audience, where it had a great impact as the basis for a national epic (Honko 1996, 30). The content of Færeyinga saga was, however, known in the country already in the late seventeenth century through Lucas Debes’ book Færoæ & Færoa Reserata (1673), as well as through Thormodus Torfæus extensive correction to Debes’ account with Commentatio historica de rebus gestis Færeyensium seu Færöensium (1695), which became more accessible to the Faroese audience when it was pub­ lished in a Danish translation by Peter Thorstensen in 1770. Therefore, the Færeyinga saga of 1832 structured already-known, but unconnected, fragments into a https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-088



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whole “invested with perspective and relevance” for compositions of meaning (Assmann 2011, 127).

The saga as a resource for ballads and poems This history underlines the fact that even before the saga was published as an independent narrative, the content of the saga was known from other sources. The 1832 compilation and publication itself represents a moment when a specific part of memory was activated from storage. Such literary memory relies on trans­ textuality, the Føroyinga saga being the hypotext to a great variety of hypertexts (Genette 1982). The Sigmundur character has in particular inspired poets, as there are three dance ballads about Sigmundur, one oral tradition ballad, and two by known authors (Marnersdóttir and Sigurðardóttir 2011, 67, 175, 231). In particular the ballad Sigmundsríma, written by the farmer and poet Jens Chr. Djurhuus in the beginning of the nineteenth century, is very well remembered and is included in the basic repertoire of the child dance training of the dance association “Sláið ring” [form a ring]. The first to suggest Tróndur as the positive hero in the saga was the ballad poet and farmer Jens Hendrik Djurhuus, who in the poem Gøtu­ skeggjar [Men from Gøta] from the late nineteenth century pays special attention to Tróndur as the opponent to Sigmundur’s Christianising of the country (Marn­ ersdóttir and Sigurðardóttir 2011, 269). In the twentieth century, Sigmundur’s role as the Norwegian kings’ representative, who turned the Faroes into a Norwegian tributary country, has been interpreted as the foundation of Faroese dependence on another country. Tróndur’s resistance to Sigmundur’s mission has been read as a wish for independence (Thomsen 1993; Simonsen 2012, 83).

Saga as nation building The two nineteenth-century translations of the saga served as “vital recollec­ tions that emerge from a process of selection, connection and meaningful con­ figuration” (Assmann 2011, 127) when the need for a collective identity emerged as Faroese society developed away from the old agricultural and fishing society towards a fish-producing and -exporting society. In this context, Færeyinga saga was the perfect means for the creation of a Faroese culture based on Faroese lan­ guage and history rather than Danish. In 1380 the islands had become part of the dual monarchy Denmark-Norway. In the second decade of the twentieth century, this endeavour got the form of nation building when independence entered

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Fig. 1: Jógvan Waagstein (1879–1949): Sigmundur announces Christianity. Painting from 1922

the political discussions about the islands’ status within the Danish Kingdom (Sølvará 2016). This nation-building process through the twenty-first century has so far been accompanied by nine editions of the saga. In 1962, a publicly-funded schoolbook publishing house took over and in 2016, it produced a new annotated translation from Old Norse by Eivind Weihe, with an epilogue by Ólafur Haldórsson. Publishing Færeyinga saga exclusively with public funding represents a notable act of support for that text being the definitive history of the country’s early days. Even though no scholarly investigation on this subject is available and Færeyinga saga is not included on the official school curriculum, it has been custo­ mary to introduce pupils to the story in the fourth grade – children 10–11 years of age. Some teachers have the students read the whole story in the ninth or tenth grade – youngsters 16–17 years old (Didriksen 2016). A painting depicting Sigmundur as a missionary (Jógvan Waagstein, 1922) is displayed in YWCA’s house in Tórshavn (see fig. 1). The location attests to the painting’s pedagogical purpose, reminding the girl scouts of the importance of the Christening by a man in full Viking costume. The editions of Færeyinga saga



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have been a productive source for new accounts about the main characters and interpretations of the events. Dance ballads, poems and stories stress different characters creating models for the Faroese audience, maintaining and develo­ ping Faroese identity’s rootedness in Old Norse literature and history.

Patriotic hypertexts The first paragraph in Færeyinga saga is a hypotext in poems from the early national period as for instance “Norðmenn gista Føroya landið, / flýggja har­ raboð” [Norwegians visit Faroe Islands / flee their master’s rule (author’s transla­ tion)] by Christian Bærentsen in his poem Fram úr Norðurhavi stendur (1886) [In the North sea stands]. Also the national anthem Tú alfagra land mítt [My most beautiful country] by Símun av Skarði (1906) refers via Lucas Debes (1963, 176) to Grímur Kamban, the first settler as the one naming the country: “Gud signi tað navn, / sum menn tykkum góvu, / tá teir tykkum sóu” [God bless the name that men gave you when they saw you (author’s translation)]. In the popular song Hvørjum man tykja vakurt hjá sær [Everybody loves his own place (author’s translation)] by Fr. Petersen (1892), both main characters from Færeyinga saga are remembered as personifying a virtue each, both of which caring mothers ought to nurture in their children Tróndur’s good intelligence, and Sigmundur’s bright and kind heart: “Gev teimum Tróndar skarpa vit / men Sigmunds bjarta hjartalit.” In terms of hypertextuality, ballads and didactic patriotic poems such as these are serious about the transposition from the saga (Genette 1982, 45). Espe­ cially Tróndur and Sigmundur are widely described and commemorated in poems and put into positions as heroes or ideals. Sigmundur is for obvious reasons the hero of the Faroese church, whereas Tróndur has become an icon for supporters of independence (Thomsen 1993). Similarly, in Faroese adolescent literature from the beginning of the twen­ tieth century, several writers used the saga characters and events in the cultural campaign creating a Faroese identity through the acquisition of written Faroese. The ballad Sigmundur og Tórir by teacher, writer and poet Mikkjal á Ryggi (1915) describes the two cousins, underlining that Sigmundur is the cleverer of them, which points forward to his achievements in adulthood. Ryggi wrote twelve epic poems about the saga, and in 1922, his colleague Hans A. Djurhuus published fourteen poems relating selected incidents from Færeyinga saga in a volume of poetry, Søgumál [History cases], that tend to idealise Tróndur (Sigurðardóttir forth­coming). Hans Andrias Djurhuus’ geographic song Lítið yvir Føroya land (1921) [Have a close look at the Faroe Islands] refers to the saga when describing places where scenes in Færeyinga saga took place, and as such the saga forms the

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Fig. 2: Sigmundur Brestisson, Vesturkirkjan, Tórshavn. Artist Hans Pauli Olsen



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historic memory in the poem’s creation of the country. By the form and structure of its contents, Djurhuus’ poem is hypotextually connected to the Danish poet Chr. Richardt’s Vort Land [Our country], where Saxo Grammaticus consolidates Danish history. By substituting the Danish superstory from Saxo with Færeyinga saga, the song contributed to the nation-building efforts of replacing as much Danish with Faroese equivalents as possible (Marnersdóttir 2009, 155). A pathetic way of referring to Sigmundur is found in the poem Ódn (1902) [The Hurricane] by J. H. O. Djurhuus. The poetic voice of the poem stands on the shore feeling the sublime from a terrible storm that makes him identify himself with Sigmundur in Færeyinga saga, quoting Sigmundur’s answer to Earl Hákon (Ch. 23) about his faith: “Tá leit eg á mátt mín og megi, / sum áður Sigmundur frægi” [Then I relied on my own might and power / just as the valiant Sigmundur did before (author’s translation)]. The starting point of the poem Turið megin­ einkja kvøður (1906) [The widow Turid sings] is Turið’s question to Tróndur, “How long are you going to fight decapitated men” (Ch. 38). Tróndur is likewise commemorated by J. H. O. Djurhuus in Gandkvæði Tróndar (1908) [Tróndur’s incantation], a work, like many of the author’s other poems, characterised by heavy alliteration, when Tróndur says, “Ramar eg risti / rúnir, ið rinda / ravni ræ. / Sanna skal Sigmundur / Tróndar trøllsterkur kvað” [Redoubtable runes I wrote that remain to raven’s reward. Sigmundur shall assent to Tróndur’s trollstrength chant (author’s translation)], referring to Tróndur’s magical gifts that he uses against Sigmundur and other Norwegian tax-collecting envoys. In Djurhuus’ poem, the idealisation of Tróndur corresponds with the poem’s symbolist-roman­ tic attitude. A playful way of remembering Tróndur is found in Tróndur Olsen’s satirical song Í Gøtu ein dag (1915) [Once upon the time in Gøta (where Tróndur lived)] staging him as the unwilling subject. In the poem, Tróndur wakes up in the World War I present and raises his friend Geyti from the grave to tell him how people are doing in the country. What the tax-refusing Tróndur does not like to learn in particular is that everybody is paying their taxes and that the Løgting administers food supplies – implying that this task is done instead of judging fights between the chiefs. This reference further alludes to the powerlessness of the Løgting at the time.

Færeyinga saga in the public The urbanisation of the biggest town and capital of the Faroe Islands, Tórs­ havn, in the beginning of the twentieth century meant that the municipality built streets that were given names, and Færeyinga saga was the go-to historical

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Fig. 3: Tróndur í Gøtu. Artist Hans Pauli Olsen

source – as the Icelandic sagas were in Reykjavík (Jón Karl Helgason 1999, 137). Five streets are named after the main characters of the saga, Gríms Kambans gøta, Tróndargøta, Sigmundargøta, Tórsgøta, and Sjúrðargøta. When new neighbour­ hoods were constructed in the 1980s, streets were also named after saga women, as in Turiðargøta and Tórugøta. In Tróndur’s village, Gøta, there is a Tróndargøta. These Færeyinga saga names are also common personal names, a fact that con­ tributes to the maintaining of the presence of the saga in people’s mind.



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In the 1950s and 1960s, two ‘dairy ships’ that conveyed milk from the villa­ ges to the dairy in Tórshavn were named after Tróndur and Sigmundur. Additio­ nally, seasonal events, like Víkingardagar [Viking days] in the village of Hov on Suðuroy, commemorate the saga. The Faroese postal service has also contributed to the commemoration of the saga. For instance, it celebrated a thousand years of Christianity by publishing stamps drawn by Anker Eli Petersen stating that ‘According to the Saga about the Faroese, Sigmundur Brestisson christened the Faroe Islands’. Many other stamps – most of them are for philatelists – memorialise Faroese history on the basis of the saga. Local history is a popular genre in Faroese literature, and the book Gøtuskeggjar (2008) [Men from Gøta] by the former first officer Sigfríður Joensen is about his native village Norðagøta and centres around Tróndur’s deeds and whereabouts, listing place names and ships named after him and the like. The book takes local pride from the saga and was published at the same time as a monument created by Hans Pauli Olsen commemorating Tróndur – publicly funded – was erected in Gøta (see fig. 3). This occasion was celebrated during eight Tróndardagar [Trónd days], with a rock- and research festival in 2008 that sacralised the memory of Tróndur and the saga (Simonsen 2010). As Færeyinga saga motifs in literature seem to wane towards the end of the twentieth century, the saga itself seems instead to have crystallised and mani­ fested itself as stone and bronze monuments (Nora 1989, 7). In a time of wide­ spread secularism, the 1000 years of Christianity on the Faroes were celebrated with three statues by Hans Pauli Olsen representing Sigmundur from the saga, all three publicly funded: one in his native village, Skúgvoy; one in front of the Ves­ turkirkja [West church] in Tórshavn (see fig. 2); and one on the beach in Sandvík, where Sigmundur was killed. Finally, Færeyinga saga has moved into other genres. The heavy metal band Týr is currently popular all over Europe because of their Viking texts and perfor­ mances. The Viking-ness derives from the set up and from texts such as Tróndur í Gøtu based on the ballad Geyti Áslaksson (2009) and poems such as J. H. O. Djurhuus’ Gandkvæði Tróndar (2008).

Conclusion Færeyinga saga has become a tradition, a cultural resource (Honko 1996, 19) and it is still celebrated as the original history about the country’s inhabitants. In doing so, Faroese culture shows how a selection of characters and events in the saga have helped to steer a clear course through the radical changes (Assmann 2011, 119)

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since the first publication and helped to create a set construction of the historical past that continues to produce new ways of representation – cut in stone and heavy metal.

Works cited Primary sources Bærentsen, Christian. “Fram úr Norðurhavi stendur.” 1886. In Songbók Føroya fólks. Tórshavn, 2008. N:o 56. Debes, Lucas Jacobsøn. Færøernes beskrivelse. 1673. Facsimile ed. Ed. Jørgen Rischel. Copenhagen, 1963 [1673]. Djurhuus, Hans A. “Lítið yvir Føroya land.” Varðin 1. 1921: 49–56. Djurhuus, Hans A. Søgumál. Tórshavn, 1922. Djurhuus, Jens Christian. “Sigmunds ríma” (= “Sigmundar kvæði nýggja”). CCF 216. Føroya kvæði. Corpus Carminum Færoensium. 6. Copenhagen, 1972. 409–414. Djurhuus, Jens Hendrik. “Gøtuskeggjar”. CCF 235. Føroya kvæði. Corpus Carminum Færoensium. 6. Copenhagen, 1972. 486–489. Djurhuus, J. H. O. “Ódn.” 1902. In Yrkingar. Ed. Chr. Matras. Tórshavn, 1988. 26–27. Djurhuus, J. H. O. “Turið megineinkja kvøður.” 1906. In Yrkingar. Ed. Chr. Matras. Tórshavn, 1988. 54–55. Djurhuus, J. H. O. “Gandkvæði Tróndar.” 1908. Yrkingar. Ed. Chr. Matras. Tórshavn, 1988. 68–69. Færeyinga Saga eller Færøboernes Historie i den islandske Grundtext med færøisk og dansk Oversættelse. Ed. and transl. Carl Christian Rafn and J. Schrøter. Copenhagen, 1832. Føroyingasøga. Transl. V. U. Hammershaimb. Tórshavn, 1884. Føringasøga. Transl. Chr. Holm Isaksen. Tórshavn, 1904. Føroyingasøga. Transl. V. U. Hammershaimb. 2nd ed. Tórshavn, 1919. Föroyingasöga. Transl. V. U. Hammershaimb. 3rd ed. Tórshavn, 1951. Føroyingasøga. Transl. Heðin Brú and Rikard Long. Tórshavn, 1962. Føroyingasøga. Transl. Bjarni Niclasen. Copenhagen, 1981. Føroyingasøga. Transl. Bjarni Niclasen. 2nd ed. Tórshavn, 1981. Føroyingasøga. Transl. Bjarni Niclasen. Vestmanna, 2013. Føroyingasøga. Transl. Eivind Weyhe. Tórshavn, 2016. Olsen, Tróndur. “Í gøtu ein dag.” 1915. In Songbók Føroya fólks. Tórshavn, 2008. N:o 123. Petersen, Fr. “Hvørjum man tykja vakurt hjá sær.” 1892. Songbók Føroya fólks. Tórshavn, 2008. N:o 18. Richardt, Chr. “Vort Land.” 1889. https://kalliope.org/da/text/richardt2002022301 (26 June 2018) Ryggi, Mikkjal Dánjalsson á. “Úr Føroyingasøgu.” 1915. In Mikkjalsbók. Ed. H. F. Pedersen and J. R. Hansen. Tórshavn, 1994. 351–377. Skarði, Símun av. “Tú alfagra land mítt”. 1906. Songbók Føroya fólks. Tórshavn, 2008. N:o 1.



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Secondary sources Assmann, Aleida. 2011. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization. Functions, Media, Archives. Cambridge. [German orig. 1999] Didriksen, Lydia. 2016. Personal communication. Genette, Gérard. 1982. Palimpsestes. Paris. Honko, Lauri. 1996. “Epic and Identity: National, Regional, Communal Individual.” Oral Tradition 11/1: 18–36. Joensen, Sigfríður. 2008. Gøtuskeggjar. Argir. Jón Karl Helgason. 1999. The Rewriting of Njáls Saga. Translation, Ideology and Icelandic Sagas. Topics in Translation, 16. Clevedon. Marnersdóttir, Malan. 2009: “Genskrivning, efterligning og modstand i færøsk historie og litteratur.” Tijdschrift voor Skandinavistiek 30.2: 137–164. Marnersdóttir, Malan and Turið Sigurðardóttir. 2011. Føroysk bókmentasøga. Vol. 1. Tórshavn. Nora, Pierre. 1989. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire.” Representations. Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory 26: 7–24. Post Stamps: Sigmundur Brestisson Christening: http://www.stamps.fo/ShopItem/2000/0/ PPA996063/SETT (21 November 2016) Sigurðardóttir, Turið. Forthcoming. “Hans Andrias Djurhuus.” In Føroysk bókmentasøga. 2. Tórshavn. Simonsen, Kim. 2012. “Literature, Imagining and Memory in the Formation of a Nation. Travel Writing, Canonisation and the Formation of a National Self-Image on the Faroe Islands.” PhD Diss. Roskilde University. Simonsen, Kim. 2010. “Færøske erindringssteder og erindringspolitik – Mellem trauma og sakralisering. Nationalisme og kristendom i færøsk erindringskultur, set gennem brugen af Færø Saga i nyere mindehøjtideligheder.” Den jyske historiker, 124: 75–97. Sølvará, Hans Andrias. 2016. The Rise of Faroese Separatism. Danish-Faroese Relations 1906–1925 and the Radicalization of the Nation- and Home Rule Question. Tórshavn. Thomsen, Rógvi. 1993. “Høvdingar hittast: Tróndur í Gøtu og Sigmundur Brestisson í føroyskum bókmentum og samleika.” In Frændafundur. Ed. Magnus Snædal and Turið Sigurðardóttir. Reykjavík. 99–122. Torfæus, Thormodus. 1695. Commentatio historica de rebus gestis Færeyensium seu Faröensium. Copenhagen. Týr: Joensen, Heri. 2009. “Tróndur í Gøtu”. By the Light of the Northern Star. Napalm Records. Austria. Týr: Joensen, Heri. 2008. “Gandkvæði Tróndar”. Land. Napalm Records. Austria. Vikings: http://en.stamps.fo/ShopItem/2005/0/PPS990205/ARK (21 November 2016)

Other sources The dance association Sláið ring – Child Dance: http://sr.fo/barnadansur+i+nordurlandah usinum_ndey.html (2 December 2016) Personal names. http://www.hagstova.fo/fo/hagtalsgrunnur/ibugvar-og-val/novn (2 December 2016)

Kirsten Thisted

II: 53 Greenlandic Perspectives 1 Introduction: Inuit and Norsemen Not much research on memory and how memory works has been carried out as concerns Greenland. This is paradoxical, because memories play a very big role in Greenlandic culture. Hardly a day goes to the end without a program based on memories having been broadcasted on the Greenlandic radio or on Greenlandic television. Storytelling, not least about spooky and remarkable occurrences, play a big role when people meet and socialise. In the more traditional communities remote from the urban centers, there are still people who can tell the ancient myths and legends as they have heard them told by their parents and grandpar­ ents (Thisted 2002). Within history writing and archeology there has been a ten­ dency to take Greenlandic oral traditions at face value as sources of actual events in pre-modern Greenland (as criticised by Arneborg 1993, 1997). A few research projects have tried through archeological studies to support the evidence that oral tradition may in fact be a reliable source to actual events (e.g. Gulløv and Kapel 1979–1980). In some cases, oral tradition has been used as ethno-historical sources, such as Einar Lund Jensen’s studies of South-East Greenlandic immigra­ tion to West Greenland around 1900 (Jensen 2009; Jensen et al. 2011). As regards the modern era, memory plays a central role in ethnography and anthropology, where people’s living conditions, often in smaller and more ‘tradi­ tional’ societies, is the focus. In particular, there has been interest in Greenland­ ers’ perception of the relationship between man and land (Nuttall 1992; Sejersen 2002), but people’s experience of modern urban life has also caught the interest of anthropologists (see e.g. Sørensen 2008). As part of local knowledge, projects focusing on historical uses of the landscape memories have also played a central role (e.g. Petersen 2010). More recently, the use of active recollection and the work of memories linked to industrialisation have been analysed (Jørgensen 2017).

2 Case study ‘Handed down’ or ‘planted’ As far as pre-modern periods are concerned, the question of cultural encounters between Inuit and Norsemen has been a research topic of particular interest. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-089



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When the Scandinavians arrived in Greenland in the eighteenth century, they immediately began questioning the Inuit about what had happened to the Norse­ men, who had inhabited the country during the Middle Ages. The Europeans became acquainted with the oral traditions of the Inuit, but only very rudimen­ tary information and short resumes were passed on. The first person to carry out a large scale, systematic collection of Greenlandic oral traditions was the leading administrator of South Greenland, Hinrich Rink (1819–1893). In an ‘invitation’ dated 22nd April, 1858, Rink issued a call for Greenlandic legends or poetic works that might still be retained by the inhabitants as either oral narration or song. The collection was intended to strengthen the Greenlanders’ feeling of a shared past and instill in them a sense of pride in their own heritage, a pride Rink saw sadly being turned into a stigmatised identity under the rule of the Danish colonial administration. Rink hoped that the Danes – confronted with the Greenlandic tales and traditions – would realise that the Greenlanders were not mere ‘prim­ itives’, but were rather a nation. As he wrote in his introduction to Eskimoiske Eventyr og Sagn, 1866 Den foreliggende Samling af Sagn blev af Forfatteren paabegyndt for 7 Aar siden. Den var mig dengang ganske ubekjendt, hvad Slags mundtlige Overleveringer Eskimoerne besidde, saa lidet som hvad de nuværende kristne Grønlændere have bevaret deraf, eftersom dette kun meget flygtigt berøres af Forfatterne, som have skrevet om dem, og af hvilke enkelte paastaa, at de saa godt som ingen Sagn have, og ligesaa lidet kunde jeg dengang faae nogen Oplysning derom hos Folk, som færdedes meget blandt Grønlænderne og forstode deres Sprog. Paa den Anden Side kunde jeg dog ikke tænke mig, at dette Folk, der er begavet med de samme Evner som vi, men for hvilke dog hele den øvrige Verden kan siges at være en lukket Bog, skulde være blottet for alt, hvad der kunde svare til Historie og Digtekunst hos andre Nationer. (Rink 1866, 1) [The present collection of legends was initiated by me seven years ago. At that time it was completely unknown to me what kind of oral tradition the Eskimos might possess, as well as how much of this tradition the current Christian Greenlanders had preserved, since the subject has been treated only very superficially by the authors who have written about them. Some even argue that they scarcely possess any legends at all. Equally insufficient informa­ tion was available from people who moved among them and knew their language. On the other hand, I could not imagine that this people, endowed with exactly the same talents as we but for whom all the rest of the world is like a closed book, should be completely devoid of what among other nations is known as history and poetry. (author’s translation)]

Contrary to the widely held view in Europe, literacy was relatively widespread in Greenland as early as the middle of the nineteenth century, and many people responded to Rink’s call for narratives. Before translating the stories, Rink pub­ lished a smaller collection of the manuscripts, as he had received them, in Green­ landic. Among the manuscripts were several versions of the different stories about the encounter between the Inuit and the Norse.

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There has been considerable debate about whether these stories are actually memories handed down through generations, and thus can count as sources to medieval history, or if they were rather ‘planted’ by the Europeans themselves. The latter point of view has been expressed and convincingly argued by medieval archaeologist Jette Arneborg (Arneborg 1991, 1993). Arneborg points out that in the missionary Hans Egede’s first reports, he claims that the Greenlanders knew nothing that could shed light on the fate of the vanished Norsemen. In a later version, however, Egede maintains that the Greenlanders confirmed the Old Norse stories about the Norsemen having been killed by the Inuit. On reading the diaries of both Hans Egede and his son, Poul Egede, Arneborg believes that they always turned their conversations with the Greenlanders towards the idea that their forefathers killed the Norsemen. It is therefore Arneborg’s conclusion that the Inuit stories represent a seventeenth-century European rather than a genuine medieval Inuit tradition. Arneborg also suggests that the sudden concern for the fate of the Norsemen may have served as part of the argument mounted to con­ vince the Danish king that it was necessary to resume the navigation in Greenlan­ dic waters in order to exercise sovereignty over the northern seas. This reading, however, raises another question: How do we account, not only for the willingness of the Inuit to accept the idea of their own ancestors as the exterminators of the present rulers’ ancestors, but also for the creative fantasy with which they added flesh and blood to the plot, and the eagerness with which they maintained these stories and handed them down from generation to gen­ eration through the eightheenth and nineteenth centuries? It is obvious that the stories about the Norsemen recycle material known from the Inuit stories about encounters with other foreigners (Holtved 1943; Kleivan 1982). Rink was aware of this, as he had received one version written down in the Uummannaq district in North Greenland, where the enemies were not Norsemen but tornit, inland dwell­ ers, and another from Labrador, where the enemies were Indians. The narratives as sources of Greenlandic history are examined by Thisted (2001), who argues that the story should not be dismissed as mere recycling of old material, but that it should be seen instead as a story in its own right, even if it is composed of ele­ ments known from other stories. That was how oral composition worked anyway, with the storyteller composing a storyline from available elements in his or her repertoire (Lord 1960; Foley 1995; Thisted 1994; 2001, 276; 2011). Whether or not the stories originated in the Middle Ages is difficult to determine; more import­ antly, they are certainly important sources to the Greenlandic interpretation of the cultural encounter as this was experienced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.



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Qallunaat and Qallunaatsiaat A central person in Rink’s collections was Aron from Kangeq (1822–1869). Aron is now internationally known for his drawings and woodcuts, most of which were carried out as illustrations for the many stories that he and other people wrote and submitted to Rink. Aron also wrote a story with the title ‘The Story of the Greenlanders’ First Meeting with the Ancient Norsemen’ (Oqaluttuaq itsaq kalaallit qallunaatsianik takoqqaarnerenik). The word Aron uses for the Norse is qallunaatsiaat, a derivation of the word qallunaat, which was used about contem­ porary Europeans. Aron uses the word qallunaatsiaat in the beginning of the text, but soon he switches over to use qallunaat. In a letter home to Denmark, Rink writes that he had to point out to Aron that depictions of the Norsemen needed to give them a different attire from that worn by contemporary Europeans – a strong indication that Aron was actually thinking about modern Europeans, when he wrote and illustrated the stories about the Inuit and the Norsemen. Another of the many features that link the stories of the Norsemen to stories about the modern qallunaat is the use of the word naalagaq [someone superior, the one in command, literally: the one who must be obeyed] to refer to the superi­ ors among the Norsemen. When the stories tell of strong men, the term pissarsuaq [a strong man, a man of power] or pingaartoq/pingaartorsuaq [an important man, a man of influence] is used. In Aron’s time, the word naalagaq was closely linked to the colonisation and denote the colonial administrative hierarchy, within which someone was legally entitled to be the commander of others, while others were duty-bound to listen and obey [intransitive: naalarnivoq ‘listens, pays atten­ tion’]. Accordingly, naalagaq was used with reference to the inspector, Rink’s offi­ cial title. It is the term used in the Bible for God, and the intensified plural form naalagarsuit meant “the high and mighty” or, in other words, the authorities. The relationship between the Greenlanders and the colonial powers was fundamen­ tally based on an asymmetrical distribution of power where the foreigners occu­ pied the position of those who must be obeyed, while the Greenlanders occupied the position of those who must obey. This distribution of power emerges as a central conflict in all Inuit stories concerning cultural encounters, such as stories about conflicts between hunters and missionaries, whalers and traders. There are obvious similarities between these stories and the stories about the Norse, as analysed in Thisted (2001). The narratives clearly intend to process the subordinate relationship and the conse­ quent submissiveness that the Greenlanders lived daily. In the narratives where the stage was set in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the conflicts are resolved such that the Greenlanders get the moral victory, but the Danes remain in power. In the stories about the old Norsemen, the Norse always end up losing

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both the power and the right to the country. The story about the Inuit annihilating the Norsemen gives the Inuit a lead part in history rather than the role of victims. There is, however, nothing proud or boastful about the Inuit’s victory. On the contrary, the basic premise in all the stories about the Norsemen is that the two peoples lived in peace for a long time, but eventually the good relationship was ruined by misunderstandings. As the conflicts escalate, both parties are guilty of wrongdoings, and as Aron relates the events, it is impossible to feel more sym­ pathetic toward either side. The Greenlanders did not necessarily perceive them­ selves as enemies of Europeans but wanted to share not only the material goods that Europeans possessed but also their culture, which brought writing, the art of drawing and new genres like the biblical narratives and songs and poems to the country. Perhaps this goes some way toward explaining the distinctly tragic mood that permeates the stories of the Norsemen.

The stories in modern interpretation The story about the annihilation of the Norsemen provides a setting in Greenlan­ dic history for exactly the type of mythic event upon which many nations build the myth of their birth. The hypothesis has been put forward that the annihila­ tion of the Norsemen represents such an inescapable, mythological incident in which the Greenlanders stood together for the first time and came into being as a people (Thisted 2001, 293). It is in this sense that the motif has lived on in modern Greenlandic fiction. The stories about the Inuit and the Norsemen made their way into the earliest Greenlandic school textbooks and later into Greenlandic written literature. In the 1900s, new theories about the disappearance of the Norsemen were developed. Research pointed out that the climate became considerably colder during the Middle Ages, which removed the basis for the farming culture of the Scandinavians (Nørlund 1971 [1936]). From a Greenlandic perspective, this was a very good story, which proved the Inuit, who, through travel descriptions and ethnography, had achieved fame precisely for their ability to survive the harsh arctic nature, to be the true owners of the country. This is how the story is told in Frederik Nielsen’s (1905–1991) great novel about the history of the Greenlanders, Ilissi tassa nunassarsi [This land shall be yours] (1970). Other writers, like Villads Villadsen (1916–2006) have focused on the Inuit hero Qasapi, who took revenge on the Norsemen who slaughtered his family. Qasapi became a symbol in the 1970s anti-colonial rebellion, leading to the law on Greenland home rule (implemented in 1979) and the law on Green­ land self-government (implemented in 2009). In this way, the stories about the Inuit’s encounters with the Norsemen (as well as all the many other stories inher­



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ited from the pre-modern Inuit hunting culture) act as a living memory archive (cf. Assmann 2008), from which narratives can be retrieved and given new turns, depending on the current context. This far, the stories about the Inuit and the Norsemen – by defining a collective Greenlandic identity as distinct from the Scandinavians, staged as foreigners in the Arctic – have served the Greenlandic nation-building process.

Works cited Secondary sources Arneborg, Jette. 1991. “Kulturmødet mellem nordboer og eskimoer. En kritisk analyse af kilderne til kulturmødet mellem nordboere og eskimoer. Vurderet i norrønt perspektiv.” Ph.D. Diss. University of Copenhagen. Arneborg, Jette. 1993. “Contacts between Eskimos and Norsemen in Greenland – A Review of the Evidence”. In Beretning fra det tolvte tværfaglige Vikingesymposium. Ed. Else Roesdahl and Preben Meulengracht Sørensen. Højbjerg. 23–35. Arneborg, Jette. 1997. “Cultural Borders. Reflections on Norse-Eskimo interaction.”  In Fifty Years of Arctic Research. Anthropological Studies From Greenland to Siberia. Ed. R. Gilberg and H. C. Gulløv. Publications of the National Museum, Ethnographical Series, 18. Copenhagen. 41–46. Assmann, Aleida. 2008. “Canon and Archive.” In Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Media and Cultural Memory, 8. Berlin and New York. 97–107. Foley, John Miles. 1995. The Singer of Tales in Performance. Bloomington, IN. Gulløv, H. C. and H. Kapel. 1979–1980. “Legend, History, and Archaeology – A Study of the Art of Eskimo Narratives.” Folk 21–22: 347–380. Holtved, Erik. 1943. The Eskimo Legends of Navaranâq. An Analytical Study. Acta Arctica, 1. Copenhagen. Jensen, Einar Lind. 2009. “Stories of the Past: Collective Memory and Historical Consciousness in The Cape Farewell District.” In On the Tracks of the Thule Culture from Bering Strait to East Greenland. Essays in Honour of Christian Gulløv. Ed. Bjarne Grønnow. Publications from the National Museum. Studies in Archaeology & History, 15. Copenhagen. 235–244. Jensen, Einar Lund, Hans Christian Gulløv and Kristine Raahauge. 2011. “Cultural Encounters at Cape Farewell. The East Greenlandic Immigrants and the German Moravian Mission in the 19th Century.” Monographs on Greenland 348/Meddelelser om Grønland 38: 1–340. Jørgensen, Anne Mette. 2017. “Moving Archives. Agency, Emotions and Visual Memories of Industrialization in Greenland.” Ph.D. Diss., University of Copenhagen. Kleivan, Inge. 1982. “Grønlandske sagn om nordboerne.” Tidsskriftet Grønland 8–9: 314–330. Lord, Albert B. 1960. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, MA. Nørlund, Poul. 1971 [1936]. Viking Settlers in Greenland and their Descendants during Five Hundred Years. New York. [Danish orig., De Gamle Nordbobygder ved Verdens Ende, 1936] Nuttall, Mark. 1993. Arctic Homeland. Kinship, Community and Development in Northwest Greenland. Toronto.

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Petersen, H. C. 2010. Local Knowledge. Living Resources and Natural Assets in Greenland. Hanover, NH. Rink, Hinrik. 1866. Eskimoiske Eventyr og Sagn. Copenhagen. [partial English translation by Rink, Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo, Edinburgh and London, 1875] Sejersen, Frank. 2002. Local Knowledge, Sustainability and Visionscapes in Greenland. Copenhagen. Sørensen, Bo Wagner. 2008. “Perceiving Landscapes in Greenland.” In Nordic Landscapes: Region and Belonging on the Northern Edge of Europe. Ed. Michael Jones and Kenneth R. Olwig. Minneapolis, MN, and London. 106–138. Thisted, Kirsten. 1994. “Som perler på en snor. Fortællestrukturer i grønlandsk fortælletradition – med særligt henblik på forskellen mellem de originale og de udgivne versioner.” Ph.D. Diss., University of Copenhagen. Thisted, Kirsten. 2001. “On Narrative Expectations. Greenlandic Oral Tradition about the Cultural Encounter between Inuit and Norsemen.” Scandinavian Studies 73.3: 253–296. Thisted, Kirsten. 2002. Grønlandske fortællere. Nulevende fortællekunst i Grønland. Copenhagen. Thisted, Kirsten. 2011. “Greenlandic Oral Traditions. Collection, Reframing and Reinvention.” In From Oral Tradition to Rap: Literatures of the Polar North. Ed. Karen Langgård and Kirsten Thisted. Nuuk. 63–118.

Simon Halink

II: 54 Icelandic Perspectives 1 Introduction On his quest for oral Icelandic folktales, the German legal historian Konrad Maurer (1823–1902) observed that Icelanders have a very special bond with their “glänzende und vielgefeierte Vorzeit, von den beengten und beschränkten Zuständen der Gegenwart grell abstechend” (Maurer 1860, v) [shining and muchcelebrated antiquity which stands in sharp contrast with the restricted and cur­ tailed conditions of the present (author’s translation)]. Maurer was certainly not the first outsider to notice the centrality of memory in Icelandic culture. Already in the early modern period, other Scandinavians considered the remote island a historical ‘deep freezer’, in which the spirit of the ancient north had been pre­ served. Theoreticians of nationalism have suggested explaining modern thought through the metaphor of the double-faced Roman deity Janus. Janus gazes back­ wards and forwards at the same time, and thus forms the perfect embodiment of the – often problematic – coexistence of a glorified past and modernistic aspi­ rations embedded in national discourses (Nairn 1997; Cusack 2000). These two sides are inextricably linked. While modern ideals of political autonomy and cul­ tural greatness are projected backwards onto a nationalised past, visions of a better future are often couched in historical references, revolving around becom­ ing again what we once were (Berger 2005). During the first half of the nineteenth century, Iceland’s national identity came to be centred around something that has been referred to as uchronia [literally ‘no-time’]. This term signifies the his­ torical fiction that to this very day constitutes the spine of Iceland’s collective cultural memory (Hastrup 1992).

2 Case study It has been argued that in the nineteenth century, when the national aspirations of countries like Belgium and Portugal were ridiculed because of their small pop­ ulations (in both cases hovering around four million), Iceland with its mere sixty thousand souls obviously needed to play its trump cards in order to compensate for its demographical disadvantage. These trumps came in the shape of medieval manuscripts, highly acclaimed in all the Nordic lands and the rest of the world (Karlsson 1995, 38). Cultural and political glorifications of the nation’s ‘childhood https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-090

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days’, the memory of which could – in the words of poet Matthías Jochumsson (1835–1920) – “kveikir vorsins yndi, ljós og frið, / og getur vakið hjörtun öld af öld, / sem áður voru dauð og jökulköld!” (Jochumsson 1980, 105) [wake up hearts century after century / which were previously dead and glacier cold! (author’s translation)] loomed large in the island’s national discourse. The first centuries of Iceland’s history – roughly between the landnám [settlement] in the late ninth century and the loss of independence to Norway in the 1260s – came to epitomise a golden age fuelled by nineteenth-century Romanticism and the political strug­ gle for autonomy from Denmark. The need to compensate for the nation’s small size through the cultivation of a prestigious national heritage may explain why virtually all protagonists of Iceland’s national movement combined their political activities with philologi­ cal research, and the publication of new editions of their nation’s medieval lit­ erature. In the words of Sigurður Nordal, Icelandic nationalists were “að gefa sífelldar ávísanir á sjö hundruð ára gömul afrek” (1942, 19) [constantly cashing cheques on deeds committed seven hundred years ago (author’s translation)]. Icelandic nationalism was not born in Iceland, nor was it strictly an Icelandic initiative from the beginning. Although Icelanders may have had a distinct ethnic identity for centuries (Karlsson 1999), cultural and political aspirations associ­ ated with modern nationalism did not enter the Icelandic mind until the early nineteenth century, after the Napoleonic Wars, “when the echoes of Fichte’s and Hegel’s writings reached the Icelandic student community in Copenhagen” (Guð­ mundur Hálfdanarson 2000, 20). Around 1800, Danish poets like Adam Oehlen­ schläger (1779–1850) had embraced Romanticism, and began glorifying their nation’s golden Viking Age, “da det straalte i Norden / da Himlen var paa Jorden” (Oehlenschläger, Guldhornene, 75) [when it shone from the North / When heaven was on earth (Greenway 1977, 1)], and the medieval manuscripts from Iceland, antiquity’s “hellige Ø!” (Oehlenschläger, Island, 105 [‘holy island’]), were con­ sidered the most venerable surviving testimonies to this age of splendour. Most of these manuscripts had been shipped to Copenhagen in earlier centuries, and were being studied in the Royal Library. Many of the city’s Icelandic residents benefited from this Danish interest in Old Norse-Icelandic literature, since it was believed that they still spoke the language of the manuscripts. It could be argued that without the linguistic and cultural activism of the Danish linguist Rasmus Kristian Rask (1787–1832), Icelandic nationalism may have looked very different. Rask considered modern Icelandic the closest surviv­ ing relative of this mother of all Nordic languages. But he combined his admira­ tion with a strong warning. He maintained that unless the Icelanders took matters in their own hands, their language would slowly fade away, and be supplanted by Danish, the language of the ‘oppressor’. He argued that if this process of Dani­



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fication continued, the language would have completely died out within a few centuries. The grim diagnosis of ‘cultural amnesia’ (Rigney 2008, 345) already at a shockingly advanced stage created a sense of urgency among learned Ice­ landers in Copenhagen, and required their vigourous and immediate linguistic activism. Rask himself laid the foundations of this movement by establishing the first Icelandic literary society (Hið íslenzka bókmenntafjelag, 1816) and by urging native Icelanders to cherish and cultivate their indigenous, ancient language of Scandinavia. Icelandic cultural nationalism took its cue from these foreign ideas, and the cultural memory that evolved from it can be considered an internalisation of this outsider’s perspective. Icelandic philologists found national pride in the special status ‘their’ national heritage enjoyed in the Nordic world, and the academic study of the manuscripts soon dovetailed with calls for national regeneration. In 1823, the distinguished runologist and royal archivist Finnur Magnússon (1781– 1847) called upon his fellow Icelanders to live up to the literary reputation of their ancestors, and to start writing great national literature again, to show the world that the spirit of their Nordic forefathers had not left them (Finnur Magnússon 1823, 56; cf. Halink 2015). One of the first Icelandic poets to cultivate Old Norse themes in the form of Romantic, national poetry was Bjarni Thorarensen (1786–1841). In his treatment of Nordic antiquity, the influence of Oehlenschläger – as well as Schiller and Novalis – is clearly discernible. His choice of themes largely corresponds to the literary fashion of the time, and one of Bjarni’s most profoundly mythological works, Sigrúnarljóð [Sigrún’s Song, 1820], based on the heroic poem Helgakviða Hundingsbana önnur [A Second Poem of Helgi Hundingsbani] from the Poetic Edda, stands as an Icelandic testimony to the aesthetic ideals of high Romanticism and its rather macabre, ‘gothic’ preoccupation with love and death. But Bjarni did more than simply imitate his Danish contemporaries. In a process of what could be labelled hostile imitation, he adopted the poetic language of Danish Roman­ ticism to celebrate Icelandic nature and culture, and to turn it against the very culture he adopted it from, by emphasising his homeland’s otherness from, and even superiority to, Denmark. Bjarni achieves this in, for instance, his landscape poetry, in which he contrasts the sublime and ‘living’ mountains of Iceland with the dull flatlands of Danish Zealand (Sjáland og Ísland, 1809). In Bjarni’s pro­ foundly dualistic worldview, Old Norse culture is interpreted as first and foremost Icelandic, and as an expression of everything that is noble and heroic, vis-à-vis a morally debased and inferior South. The national poetry of Bjarni and his contemporaries set the tone for the further nationalisation of cultural memory in Iceland. The Old Norse past and the literary heritage that sprang from it were presented as proof of Iceland’s unique

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character. But the Icelanders had more than just texts: they inhabited a land­ scape enlivened by the old stories, and lived on farms often still carrying the same names as in the Saga Age (Halink 2014). A striking example of this can be found in the poem Gunnarshólmi (Gunnar’s Holm, 1838), by poet Jónas Hallgrímsson (1807–1845). It describes the natural setting of one of Njáls saga’s most dramatic scenes, in which the outlawed hero Gunnar of Hlíðarendi, while looking at his homestead and its surrounding fields, changes his mind about fleeing the country with the words: “‘Fǫgr er hlíðin, svá at mér hefir hon aldri jafnfǫgr sýnzk, bleikir akrar ok slegin tún, ok mun ek ríða heim aptr ok fara hvergi.’” (Brennu-Njáls saga, Ch. 75) [“So lovely is the hillside that is has never before seemed to me so lovely as now, with its pale fields and mown meadows; and I will ride back home, and not go anywhere else.” (Njals’s Saga, Ch. 75)]. The exact motivation behind this fateful decision – which led to Gunnar’s violent death – does not become clear in the saga itself, but in the interpretation of Jónas, this event is transformed into an act of unwavering love for the fatherland. For that reason, the poet claims, the memory place of Gunnarshólmi is still of significance to Icelanders today: “Hugljúfa samt eg sögu Gunnars tel, / þar sem eg undrast enn á köldum söndum / lágan að sigra ógna bilgju ólma / algrænu skrauti príddan Gunnars hólma.” (Jónas Hallgrímsson, Gunnarshólmi, 33–34) [His story still can make the heart beat high, / and here imagination still can find him, / where Gunnar’s Holm, all green with vegetation, / glistens amid these wastes of devastation.” (Ringler 2002, 138)] (see also Glauser 2011)

These “wastes of devastation” surrounding Gunnarshólmi, caused by fluvial erosion, symbolises the decline of Iceland’s greatness since the Middle Ages, attributed to the loss of independence to foreign rulers. A common theme in Jónas’s poetry, this view reaches its zenith in his description of Þingvellir (the Plains of Parliament), which had been the location of Iceland’s national assembly since the tenth century, and which still functions as the ‘place of the heart’ (Her­ mannsson 2011) in the Icelandic imagination. After the national assembly was abol­ ished around the year 1800, Þingvellir lost its political function and became a place of national melancholia, where the memory of how things once were contrasted painfully with the emptiness and desolation of the present. It was here that Jónas, imagining what it must have been like when the whole nation gathered here for the assembly, felt bitterly imprisoned in the present, and asked himself – and his slumbering nation – “Hvað er þá orðið okkart starf í sexhundruð sumur? / Höfum við gengið til góðs götuna frammettir veg?” (Jónas Hallgrímsson, Ísland,  22) [“How have we treated our treasure during these six hundred summers? / Have we walked promising paths, progress and virtue our goal?” (Ringler 2002, 101)]. This lament was intended as a wake-up call for the nation, and for Jónas and his



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like-minded Romantics, there was no other place worthy of becoming the meeting place of the resurrected national parliament in the future. Theirs was not the only voice of Icelandic nationalism, however; the forwardlooking face of Iceland’s Janus was represented by the pragmatic lawyer, Jón Sig­ urðsson (1811–1879), who intended to turn Iceland into a modern nation, mod­ elled on the nation-states of Europe, with its seat of parliament in the capital city of Reykjavík, rather than out on the muddy plains of Þingvellir. The debate that unfolded between these two camps serves as a vivid illustration of the different ways in which cultural memory can be activated in a political sense; whereas Jónas and his camp considered a return to the glorious past the only road to a glorious future, the modernists did not believe that pride in one’s national history should lead to impractical decisions which might hinder the nation’s develop­ ment on the road to modern statehood. In the end, this last view prevailed, and in 1845 the parliament was re-established in Reykjavík. But Þingvellir remains Iceland’s most important memory place and the preferred location of national mass celebrations, such as the establishment of the Republic of Iceland in 1944, and the festivities marking the one-thousandth anniversary of the island’s con­ version to Christianity in the year 2000. To return to the metaphor of Janus’s two faces: one might argue that, in Iceland’s case, the two are entirely out of balance, with the disproportionately large backward-looking face outsizing its future-facing counterpart to the point where it completely overshadows it. Historical reality is more dynamic than that, however, and, as the case of Jón Sigurðsson clearly exemplifies, the nationali­ sation of Iceland’s cultural memory has always amounted to much more than merely a collective infatuation with the past.

Works cited Primary sources Bjarni Thorarensen. Kvæði. 2 Vols. Copenhagen. 1935. Brennu-Njáls saga. Ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson. ÍF, 12. Reykjavík, 1954. Jónas Hallgrímsson. Ísland. Fjölnir 1. 1835. 21–22. Jónas Hallgrímsson. Gunnarshólmi. Fjölnir 4. 1838. 31–34. Matthías Jochumsson. Ljóð. Úrval. Reykjavík. 1980. Njál’s Saga. Trans. Robert Cook. In The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, including 49 Tales. Ed. Viðar Hreinsson. Vol. 3. Reykjavík, 1997. 1–220. Oehlenschläger, Adam. Guldhornene. Digte. Copenhagen. 1803. 75–82. Oehlenschläger, Adam. Island. In Oehlenschlägers Poetiske Skrifter. 19. Oehlenschlägers Digte. 1. Ed. F. L. Liebenberg. Copenhagen. 1860 [1805]. 105–106.

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Secondary sources Berger, Stefan. 2005. “A Return to the National Paradigm? National History Writing in Germany, Italy, France, and Britain from 1945 to the Present”. The Journal of Modern History 77: 629–678. Cusack, Tricia. 2000. “Janus and Gender: Women and the Nation’s Backward Look”. Nations and Nationalism 6: 541–561. Birgir Hermannsson. 2011. “Hjartastaðurinn: Þingvellir og íslensk þjóðernishyggja”. Bifröst Journal of Social Science 5: 21–45. Finnur Magnússon. 1823. Untitled news supplement to Íslenzk sagnablöð 7: 1–60. Glauser, Jürg. 2011. “Gunnarshólmi – die Entstehung eines literarischen Gedenkortes”. In Island – Eine Literaturgeschichte. Stuttgart and Weimar. 54–62. Greenway, John L. 1977. The Golden Horns. Mythic Imagination and the Nordic Past. Athens. Guðmundur Hálfdanarson. 2000. “Iceland: A Peaceful Secession”. Scandinavian Journal of History 25: 87–100. Gunnar Karlsson. 1995. “The Emergence of Nationalism in Iceland”. In Ethnicity and Nation Building in the Nordic World. Ed. Sven Tägil. London. 33–62. Gunnar Karlsson. 1999. “Íslensk þjóðernisvitund á óþjóðlegum öldum”. Skírnir 173: 141–178. Halink, Simon. 2014. “The Icelandic Mythscape: Sagas, Landscapes and National Identity”. National Identities 16: 209–223. Halink, Simon. 2015. “A Tainted Legacy. Finnur Magnússon’s Mythological Studies and Iceland’s National Identity”. Scandinavian Journal of History 40: 239–270. Hastrup, Kirsten. 1992. “Uchronia and the Two Histories of Iceland, 1400–1800”. In Other Histories. Ed. Kirsten Hastrup. London and New York. 102–120. Maurer, Konrad. 1860. Isländische Volkssagen der Gegenwart, vorwiegend nach mündlicher Überlieferung gesammelt, und verdeutscht von Dr. Konrad Maurer. Leipzig. Nairn, Tom. 1997. Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited. London and New York. Rigney, Ann. 2008. “The Dynamics of Remembrance: Texts Between Monumentality and Morphing”. In Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin and New York. 345–353. Ringler, Dick. 2002. Bard of Iceland. Jónas Hallgrímsson. Poet and Scientist. Madison, WI. Sigurður Nordal. 1942. Íslenzk menning. 2 Vols. Reykjavík.

Terje Gansum

II: 55 Norwegian Perspectives 1 Introduction In periods of nation-building, the past and memories of the past are manipulated in various ways. Those holding the power to shape definitions are able to deter­ mine the meaning and significance that is to be assigned to things and places. The diversity of ways in which history can be used is aptly illustrated by the Viking Age, the presentation of which has varied according to ideological and political standpoints. For instance, a statement about the Borre burial mounds and their significance made during the Whitsun Rally of Norwegian Nazis in 1943 would be received in a different way than a similar statement made by the authorities five years later at the re-opening of the Oseberg Mound (Østigård 2001, 78–82; Gansum 2016, 123). What should or should not be remembered as part of a national narra­ tive is determined by those holding the power to mold such decisions. For those wishing to assert their authority and power, winning the battle of how the past is defined can be highly advantageous. An analysis of the workings of power reveals how closely history, memory, and the allocation of identity are connected to the concept of the nation as something permanent and inviolable; as an entity that is meant to be – or is in the process of being – fully realised (Nora 1989, 11).

2 Case study: The need for a proud past For over 400 years, from the Kalmar Union until 1905, Norway was the inferior partner in its unions with Denmark and Sweden. The notion of a separate national identity began to gain strength in the early nineteenth century. In this process, translations of the stories told in Icelandic sagas of the deeds of Norwegian kings in the Viking Age and Middle Ages were of particular significance. According to these narratives, Norsemen played important roles on the international politi­ cal stage. At the same time as the saga translations were gaining in popularity, Viking ships were being excavated by archaeologists. The ship burials unearthed at Borre (1852), Tune (1867), Gokstad (1880) and Oseberg (1904) became symbols of a past age associated with exploration and independence. As early as 1893, a copy of the Gokstad Ship was constructed and sailed to the World Fair in Chicago, arousing huge popular interest. A decade later, a really momentous Viking ship discovery was made at Slagendalen outside Tønsberg in Vestfold. On the farm https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-091

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known as Oseberg Øde, a large burial mound was opened in August 1903 by the landowner, Oscar Rom, who discovered that it concealed a ship. The Oseberg ship was the largest of many objects in the Oseberg find. The excavation was led by Gabriel Gustafson in 1904, and the discovery of two female skeletons no doubt came as a surprise to those working in the field of historical research, male-dom­ inated as it was. The Viking ship discoveries came to represent the greatness to which both national romantics and politicians fighting for independence aspired. Although the ships were not mentioned specifically as an argument, the Heritage Act was passed into law by the Storting on 7 July 1905. In Norwegian archaeology in the first half of the last century, the strongest advocate for letting Norway’s Viking heritage influence the process of nationbuilding was Anton Wilhelm Brøgger. From 1915, he was Professor of Archaeol­ ogy at the University of Oslo and, as a politician in the liberal Venstre party, was also a committed liberalist and nationalist. From 1916 onwards, Brøgger wrote academic and popular books and articles expanding on the notion of Norway’s proud national past (Brøgger 1916). He was convinced that nationalism could be harnessed as a powerful political force. The rhetoric of identity at the time was often peppered with metaphors relating to health and well-being: Avstanden mellem historisk interesse og følelse og den historiske sannhet er ikke sjelden uoverstigelig stor. Det er sikkert et av vår tids største dannelsesproblemer å utjevne denne avstand for bl. a. å erstatte usund nasjonalisme med nasjonal sundhet og klarhet. Det er ikke arkeologiens eller historiens skyld når deres resultater blir misbrukt i nasjonale for­ dommers tjeneste, for historien kan leses på så mange måter som der finnes lesere til (Brøgger 1929, 15–16).  [The gulf between an interest in and a feeling for history and what constitutes historical truth is often too wide to bridge. In the process of social improvement, one of our largest challenges is undoubtedly to narrow this gulf, not least by replacing an unhealthy nationa­ lism with a national health and clarity. It is not the fault of archaeologists, nor of history, when their results are misrepresented in order to bolster the cause of national prejudices, for history can be read in as many ways as there are readers. (author’s translation)]

One of the principal concerns of the day was the need for national unity, in the spirit of which Brøgger proposed that a national park should be established around the Borre burial mounds. This site already constituted a lieu de mémoire, a place of memory, to use the phrase coined by Pierre Nora (Nora 1989). Brøgger was instrumental in reaching agreements between the landowner and the state for use of the area and in 1932 took part in the opening ceremony of the Borre National Park. During the thirties, the National Socialist party increased the use of symbols connected to Viking Age. They became interested in the National Park and from 1935 to 1944, the fascist party, Nasjonal Samling, held its annual



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Whitsun Rally there. Historical sites such as Borre and Stiklestad were used in Nazi propaganda, casting a shadow over them for many years after the war. The appropriation of Viking symbols by the Nazis led to the whole Viking Age being tainted as an academic field in Norway. While little academic research was undertaken in that period, the historical sites were still used as places of ritual significance. One such symbolic act took place in 1948 at the Oseberg Mound (see fig. 1). The excavated skeletal remains of the two women were reinterred in the restored mound, with Crown Prince Olav, the County Governor and several thousand visitors in attendance. During the post-war period when the political focus was on national rebuilding, why did it seem imperative to perform such a symbolic act? One argument put forward at the time was that a precedent had been created when the remains of the Gokstad Man had been reinterred in his mound in 1928. Seen in a wider political context, this explanation is not com­ pelling. Since Gustavson’s partial excavation in 1904, the Oseberg Mound had lain exposed to the elements. Its naked crater had not invited ritual actions, and had escaped the attentions of the Nazis. It could, however, be reactivated as a national lieu de mémoire. Rubbish and detritus that had been discarded in the excavation shaft was removed, the mound was rebuilt, and, with a member of the royal family in attendance, the skeletal remains were ritually reinterred. It was a popular celebration, a national memory event. People could stand together and mark an occasion which pointed back to a proud past that was indicative of the bright future that lay ahead for the nation. The rhetoric was much the same as that used in Nazi propaganda but the political and historical context had changed. The discussion and speeches leading up to the reinternment, and the act itself, not only consolidated the scientific knowledge of the time, but also transferred the power of definition to democratically elected national authorities. At the same time, the skeletons were no longer available for research – an act that can be interpreted as a deliberate way of putting them beyond the reach of phre­ nology and racial hygiene. The heritage site had been recaptured and restored.

The status of historical knowledge – new national confidence in the symbolic value of the Viking Age One other factor that affected how Norwegians regarded the Viking Age in the post-war years, was the attitude of the West towards the Soviet Union. A change in political climate had already taken place after the Russian Revolution in 1917, but it came into effect fully after 1945, when communists became the enemies of the West. Norway’s neutrality had been violated by Germany in 1940 and the country received help in the North from Soviet troops. Nevertheless, the post-war regime

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Fig. 1: On this 1934 map, the Oseberg Mound is described as Gropen (the Trench). Various plans had been suggested for a commemorative building on the site, but in the end, the authorities opted for restoration of the mound and reinterment of the skeletal remains in an aluminium casket, placed in a sarcophagus. The skeletons were removed again in 2007.



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kept up a witch-hunt on communists. The national narrative, the memory of the Viking Age, the time of greatness, dominated contemporary self-image and Nor­ wegian politicians and historians turned their attentions westwards – towards England, Scotland, Ireland, Iceland and the New World. The so-called ‘Viking Age of the Cold War’ became a factor in historical analyses and the teachings of historians. Sweden, however, had remained neutral during the war and had not coupled its national prestige to notions of the Viking Age. It had nothing to lose in being a connecting point between Scandinavia and the old Viking regions of the East – such as Novgorod, Kiev, Holmgarðr, Miklagarðr, and other areas where the influence of the Kievan Rus’ was clearly felt. Seen from a Soviet point of view, however, the written history of the Kievan Rus’ – Nestor’s Chronicle, or the Primary Chronicle – had a focus on warriors of Scandinavian origin, and therefore had limited relevance to a global power that had fashioned its own ideological programme and turned its back on history. From 1945 and well into the 1980s, the history of the Viking Age was presen­ ted in Norway in a markedly apolitical way. When Kaupang in southern Vestfold was excavated, the emphasis was on its significance as a trading centre and how it might be compared to places like Birka, Ribe and Hedeby (Blindheim 1969). Academics repeated the interpretations of earlier generations without engaging scientifically with them. Critical research into historical source material gained a strong foothold after the First World War, and in the Norwegian context this was directed towards studies of the saga literature – with one exception: Ynglinga saga [The saga of the Ynglings] including the poem Ynglingatal [list of the Yng­ lings] since these were sources that laid the foundation for the accepted narra­ tive, and memory, of how the nation came into being (Nora 1989). In 1991, Claus Krag published his source-critical study of Ynglinga saga and Ynglingatal, concluding that the skaldic poem was based on a saga and could therefore be dated to the Middle Ages (Krag 1991, 244). With this argument, he reduced the academic hegemony of historians regarding the unification and Chris­ tianisation of the country. Krag did meet some opposition from fellow academics, but he nevertheless sparked an important debate (Myhre 1992; Norr 1998; Skre 2007; Bergsveinn Birgisson 2007). With this somewhat freer approach to the inter­ pretation of historical sources and unification processes, the way was open for anthropological and ethnographic considerations to be introduced into the field. New information emerged about the various centres of Viking power, from Borg in Lofoten to Borre in Eastern Norway. This gave the impetus for new research and debate about the early formation of states in Europe to which Norwegian archaeo­ logists could now contribute. Purely national concerns seemed to have less rele­ vance in these matters in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Instead, the history of these regions prior to, during, and after the formation of states was information

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Fig. 2: Coinage and confidence: The value of currency depends on the confidence associated with the country, of which its currency is a symbolic representation. For its currency, Norway has chosen national icons such as the prow of the Oseberg Ship (the 20 kroner coin from 1994) and the Gokstad Ship (obverse of the 100 kroner banknote, version VIII, was released in the summer of 2017). The motifs chosen for the national currency are intimately associated with national identity, and are intended to promote a sense of unity around the Norwegian state.

that seemed more applicable to inter-regional analysis (Titlestad 1996; Gansum 1997; Bergsveinn Birgisson 2013; Myhre 2015). Approached from an inter-regional angle, the discourse was less likely to become teleologically off-kilter, with the unification or formation of states regarded as an inevitable goal that had finally come to pass. The historical visitor centres at Jelling (Denmark), Gamla Uppsala (Sweden) and Borre (Norway) all opened in the year 2000, demonstrating just how synchronised these significant and politically symbolic investments were. The Norwegian state also elects to use images from the Viking Age on its most powerful symbolic representation – its currency (see fig. 2). It is not only academics who have looked at the Viking Age and what it sig­ nifies for identity with fresh eyes . The fascination for Viking themes in popular media has been striking in recent years. Groups specialising in historical reenactment are widespread, as is a recent flowering of interest in old crafts and



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storytelling traditions. These groupings often have close ties to academic institu­ tions, encouraging new approaches in research. In 2015, an annual black metal festival, Midgardsblot, was established at Borre in Vestfold. The combination of Viking and metal has the potential of becoming a hotbed for neo-fascism, but the festival has shown great intellectual and social responsibility in preventing these political forces’ exploitation of the theme. Neo-fascist sympathisers do use several of the Viking Age sites, but it is impossible to prevent their unannounced short ritual use of the monuments, as this is regarded as part of freedom of speech.

Works cited Secondary sources Bergsveinn Birgisson. 2007. “Inn i skaldens sinn – Kognitive, estetiske og historiske skatter i den norrøne skaldediktingen.” PhD Diss. Bergen. http://bora.uib.no/ handle/1956/2732?show=full (14 December 2017) Bergsveinn Birgisson. 2013. Den svarte vikingen. Oslo. Blindheim, Charlotte. 1969. “Kaupangundersøkelsen avsluttet.” Viking XXXIII: 5–40. Brøgger, Anton Wilhelm. 1916. “Borrefundet og Vestfoldkongenes graver.” Videnskapsselskapets Skrifter. Hist. Filos. Klasse. 1: 1–67. Brøgger, Anton Wilhelm. 1929. “Nasjonen og fortiden.” Universitetets Oldsaksamlings Skrifter BD. II: 5–16. Gansum, Terje. 1997. “Jernaldermonumenter og maktstrukturer – Vestfold som konfliktarena.” In Konflikt i forhistorien. Ed. Ingrid Fuglestvedt and Bjørn Myhre. AmS-Varia, 30. Stavanger. 27–40. Gansum, Terje. 2016. “The reopening of the Oseberg mound and the Gokstad mound.” In We called them Vikings. Ed. Gunnar Andersson. Stockholm. 120–127. Krag, Claus. 1991. Ynglingatal og Ynglingasaga. En studie i historiske kilder. Studia humaniora, 2. Oslo. Myhre, Bjørn. 1992. “Borre – et merovingertidssenter i Norge.” Universitetets Oldsaksamlings Skrifter 13: 155–180. Myhre, Bjørn. 2015. Før Viken ble Norge. Borregravfeltet som religiøs og politisk arena. Norske Oldfunn, XXXI. Tønsberg. Nora, Pierre. 1989. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire.” Representations. Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory 26: 7–24. Norr, Svante. 1998. To Rede and to Rown. Expressions of Early Scandinavian Kingship in Written Sources. Occasional Papers in Archaeology, 17. Uppsala. Skre, Dagfinn. ed. 2007. Kaupang in Skiringssal. Norske Oldfunn, XXII. Oslo. Titlestad, Torgrim. 1996. Kampen om Nordvegen. Nytt lys over vikingtiden. Bergen. Østigård, Terje. 2001. Norge uten nordmenn. En antinasjonalistisk arkeologi. Oslo.

Jon Gunnar Jørgensen

II: 56 Norwegian Perspectives – Heimskringla 1 Introduction Norway emerged as a modern nation state in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nation-building was criti­ cal, with the aim of instilling a national identity in a people with practically no memory of an historical situation other than being subordinate to Denmark. A particularly important strategy was to document Norway’s medieval history and to use it to educate people towards developing a national consciousness. Thus, the documentation of Norway’s past as an independent kingdom had the purpose of making a national state of Norway seem a natural historical reality and bridged the 400-year gap represented by the union with Denmark. The single work that has had the greatest significance as a tool for nation-building was Heimskringla, a collection of kings’ sagas from the earliest times to 1177. As well as being a mainstay of Norwegian historiography since the sixteenth century, the work also became popular reading in the nineteenth century. Heimskringla’s significance as a national symbol has been long-lasting and can be traced through three his­ torical events: the establishment of the Norwegian state with its constitution in 1814; its separation from Sweden in 1905; and finally the German occupation of 1940–1945, with the result that this text became a cornerstone in the construction of Norwegian national consciousness and has provided the nation with moral strength to handle crises of various kinds.

2 Case study Democracy Norwegian nation-building in the nineteenth century had both a political and an ideological aspect. The aim was to establish an autonomous, democratic state and, at the same time, develop a national identity. In many countries, demo­ cratic change and national independence came as a result of intense pressure over a long period. In Norway, the establishment of a national state occurred as a result of international developments over which Norwegians themselves had no control. In the Treaty of Kiel (January 1814), after Napoleon’s capitulation, it was https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-092



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decided that Denmark should cede Norway to Sweden. During the spring of 1814 an elected assembly drew up a democratic constitution, which they adopted on the 17th of May. The Swedish king chose to respect the new constitution, so the union became a personal union where Norway and Sweden were constitutionally autonomous realms with a common king and foreign policy. Some nationalist undercurrents among Norwegians can be traced to before 1814, but they are not prominent, and separatism is almost entirely absent (see Jørgensen 2013). The establishment of a democratic Norway thus occurred quickly, without any ideological maturation. The nation-building project arose from an historical situation, rather than the other way around. The great chal­ lenge was to educate the Norwegian people, to render them capable of supporting a democracy. This ideological refurbishment took inspiration partly from French rationalism and the ideas of popular sovereignty, and partly from the growing Romantic Movement with its Herderian notions of Volksgeist. It took some years after 1814 before the nation-building project gained momentum. This happened in the 1830s, when Romantic nationalism inspi­ red the uncovering and documentation of folk tales and legends, folk songs and music, and agrarian folk culture. In 1827, Rudolf Keyser started teaching at the University of Oslo after two years of study in Iceland. His subject was ‘The History of the Fatherland’, with particular emphasis on teaching ‘the old Norwe­ gian language’, reflecting the need to be able to read and interpret the Old Norse sources. Saga literature was especially suitable for popular education. Due to its rea­ listic style and narrative qualities, Heimskringla was selected as the Norwegian people’s history book. Both scholars and average readers had great confidence in the kings’ sagas as historical sources. This presupposed trust in oral tradition, since there were sometimes several centuries between the events of the sagas and the time they were written. For Rudolf Keyser and his circle, known as the ‘the Norwegian historical school’, confidence that written sagas built on oral narra­ tive traditions was fundamental, and is a view still widely shared by the reading public in Norway. Until the introduction of landsmål (later called nynorsk) in the mid-1800s, Danish was the only written language in Norway. Heimskringla was translated into Danish several times before 1830. It was available in two editions of Peder Claussøn’s translation (1633 and 1757), in the great ‘Copenhagen edition’ (Schøn­ ning, Torlacius 1777–1783), and in a popular translation by N.S.F. Grundtvig from 1818–1822, unabridged. In the 1830s, even with the relatively new Grundtvig translation in the bookshops, there were three different Norwegian initiatives for translating and publishing Heimskringla. Printer Thorkild Borg from Trond­ heim wanted to republish Peder Claussøn’s translation and issued subscription

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lists (Raabe 1941, 17–20). At the same time, Keyser’s student, P.A. Munch, started work on his own translation. A text sample was completed and subscription lists issued in 1832. A third project was launched by Jacob Aall, one of the most pro­ minent nation-builders. As a wealthy industrialist, he financed the translation published in 1838–1839 himself. Borg’s project was shelved, while Munch put his on hold, the view being that there was no market for two competing translations. In the 1830s, it was widely claimed that ‘Snorri’ in Peder Claussøn’s trans­ lation was among the favourite reading matter of Norwegian farmers. Aall says so in the introduction to his translation (1838, X). Henrik Wergeland echoes the view (1958 [1842], 120), and in Adam Oehlenschläger’s poem cycle “Norges­reisen” (1834, 70), one finds the following: “Her mindes Bonden gamle Nord; / Og, kommen hiem igien,/ Han læser, ved sit Fyrrebord, / Sin Snorro Sturlesen” [The farmer then recalls the old North and, at home sitting at his pine table, he reads his Snorri Sturluson (author’s translation)]. Halvdan Koht argues persuasively that this is a myth (Koht 1924, 102–113), a view confirmed by Jostein Fet’s study “Lesande bønder” (1995, 263–264). Fet examines 16,000 administrations of estate from the period 1690–1839, and among 14,000 books, he found only two copies of ‘Snorri’ (one 1633 edition and one 1757). This fits in with the sparse use of his­ torical rhetoric before 1830. But the myth is a powerful expression of national romantic wishful thinking – which would come true in future. Jacob Aall was a seminal figure in Norwegian nation building. He had played a pivotal role in the constitutional convention of 1814 and was an active partici­ pant in society, politically, economically and ideologically. In the introduction to his saga edition, Aall clearly situates the project as a contribution to nation building. He refers to the criticism of Grundtvig’s edition – that it is unsuitable for ‘the common man in Norway’ (Aall, 1838, IX). Peder Claussøn’s translation he notes with respect, but also as being both no longer available and further from the original than the new translation. He also states explicitly that the sagas can contribute to a better understanding of democracy among the people. In this vein, he emphasises the importance of the work being available at a reasona­ ble price, so that it could reach the common man (Aall, 1838, X). Despite this claim, the work was published in a grand, lavishly illustrated edition, equipped with topographical notes. With this edition, Heimskringla became a national symbol. Twenty years after Aall’s edition, the market was ripe for a new one. In 1859, P.A. Munch’s edition was published. By this time, Aall’s book was said to be dif­ ficult to obtain. In his introduction, Munch too emphasises that this should be a ‘people’s book’ and therefore should be sold at an inexpensive price (Munch 1859, VI). Thus, this edition was much less lavish, with denser print and without illustrations, and sold well, as in 1881, it was republished.



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In the same period, Heimskringla was published for the first time in landsmål, translated by Steinar Schjødt (see Jørgensen 2000, 70), and in 1868, Richard Unger provided a good new source edition.

Separation from Sweden Norway had a high degree of autonomy within its union with Sweden, but foreign policy was governed from Stockholm. The last half of the century saw increasing Norwegian pressure to change this arrangement. At the same time, the Norwe­ gian parliament had imposed parliamentarianism by means of an impeachment bill against the government in 1884. Polarisation between the king and the gov­ ernment, on one side, and the Norwegian parliament, on the other, helped feed national consolidation. History – and Heimskringla – once again becoming an important tool. In 1877–1879, Det norske Samlaget re-published Steinar Schjødt’s complete landsmål translation. But it was in the 1890s that the truly significant Heimskringla project came about, right in the middle of the process of secession. The young publisher, Johan M. Stenersen, was preparing a new illustrated translation where nothing was to be spared. The country’s foremost expert on kings’ sagas, Professor Gustav Storm, was responsible for the text. He was granted access to the manuscript of his Icelandic colleague Finnur Jónsson, who was working on his great critical edition of Heimskringla (1893–1900), which, many would argue, Storm surpassed with his. The project was inspired by the popular edition of Asbjørnsen and Moe’s Norwegian folk tales, illustrated by leading Norwegian artists like the young Erik Werenskiold. He was engaged for the new Heimskringla project and brought a select group of young artists with him. The entire design, from cover to page layout, initials and illustrations, was integrated down to the smallest detail. Recent archaeological finds, particularly the ship burial at Gokstad, were repro­ duced with scholarly thoroughness. For the first time, readers got historically verified drawings of Viking ships. The artists travelled to historical sites and drew in situ, as well as taking photographs. Economically, the project was extremely risky for a small publisher. Costs finally amounted to kr. 130,000 (Stortingsfor­ handlinger 1900/1901, 405–406), which it would be well-nigh impossible to cover. Even 10,000 sold copies could not balance the books, and the publisher was bankrupted. The result, however, stood as a glorious monument in Norwe­ gian publishing history. Stenersen managed to refinance his publishing firm and laid a plan to make Heimskringla truly popular reading. He applied to Parliament for funding for a

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cheaper edition. He used the same riksmål text, but also offered a twin edition in landsmål with a revised version of Schjødt’s text. The illustrations were scaled down photographically, and the text was set in Roman types, which took less room than the old Gothic script. The result was Nationaludgaven [the national edition], a fully-fledged popular edition in octavo format. Parliament contributed kr. 20,000 and set specific requirements for the retail price. The print run was for 70,000 copies of the riksmål version (1900) and 30,000 for the landsmål version (1901), which sounds optimistic in a population of only 2 million people. The print run must have sold out relatively quickly. In 1914, the jubilee year of the Norwegian constitution, a lavish new edition in four volumes was published which included the subsequent sagas up to Magnus the Lawmender’s saga. The National Edition was published again in 1934 (with a new translation by Anne Holtsmark and Didrik A. Seip), and in several new editions in the decades that followed. With the National Edition, Heimskringla had become a substantial piece of the constructed memory of the Norwegian nation.

The Occupation As we have seen, the core ideas of Norwegian nation building were basically demo­cratic, with independence gradually gaining emphasis. It was these values that were at stake when Norway was occupied by Germany in 1940. Heimskringla had become a significant symbol in the process of nation building. Now this symbol was challenged. National symbols were also important for Norwegian Nazis. The party Nasjonal Samling, founded on the National Day, the 17th of May, in 1933, sought inspiration and symbols from history and Old Norse literature. A semimilitary party organisation called hirden (from Old Norse hirð) held their conven­ tions at historical sites like Borre, Hafrsfjord and Stiklestad. It is no surprise, in the context of the nationalist values of Norwegian and European Nazism, that Norwegian Nazis wished to appropriate national symbols. But it proved difficult. The Nazis were keen to appropriate Snorri. In 1941, the 700-year anniversary of Snorri’s death was marked with a granite monument raised in the palace park in Oslo. In the same year, Heimskringla was published again in the same form as the National Edition, but with Holtsmark and Seip’s translation. Ironically, Seip was arrested by the Germans that same year. When peace came in 1945, the bauta was immediately removed (Østberg 2012, 57) – there was to be no Nazi taint on Snorri. Such was the power of Heimskringla as a democratic national symbol that it withstood the pressure from Nazism. In 1941, a children’s book was also published that miraculously escaped the censors, at least at first. Fridtjov Sælen wrote an illustrated story about a seal



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called Snorri. It was an allegorical story featuring a brave seal pup, representing patriotic resistance, and bloodthirsty monsters, representing Germans and Nazis. The book was stopped when the censors grasped the allegory, but it became an important inspiration for the resistance. Clearly, the hero would not have been called Snorri if any Nazi taint had clung to the name. In the nineteenth century, Heimskringla became a most important tool in the Norwegian nation-building process. This process of establishing a self-con­ scious national identity was shaped by the construction of certain images of the national past. Such references to images of the past, expressed in writings like Heimskringla, provided material from which to construct a common memory. 

Works cited Primary sources Munch, Peter A. Norges Konge-Sagaer. 1. Christiania, 1859. Oehlenschläger, Adam. Norgesreisen. Copenhagen, 1834. Stortingsforhandlinger 1899/1900, 6. del A. Wergeland, Henrik. Norges Constitutions Historie. Andet Hefte. In Henrik Wergelands skrifter. 6. Oslo, 1958 [1842].

Secondary sources Aall, Jacob, ed. 1838–1839. Snorre Sturlesons norske Kongers Sagaer 1–3. Christiania. Fet, Jostein, 1995. Lesande bønder. Oslo. Jørgensen, Jon Gunnar. 2000. “Reisningsmagten i vort Folk. Om norske Heimskringlaoversettelser på 1800-tallet”. In Artikler. Udgivet i anledning af Preben Meulengracht Sørensens 60 års fødselsdag 1. marts 2000. Ed. Trine Buhl et al. Århus. 64–77. Jørgensen, Jon Gunnar. 2013. “Norrøn inspirasjon på Eidsvoll.” In Frihetens forskole. Professor Schlegel og eidsvoldsmennenes læretid i København. Ed. Ola Mestad. Oslo. 108–123. Koht, Halvdan. 1924. “Peder Claussøns Snorre som norsk bondelesning.” Historisk tidsskrift 5.26: 102–113. Østberg, Jan Sigurd, ed. 2012. “Snorre-bautaen.” St. Hallvard 1: 57. Raabe, Gustav E. 1941. Det første norske Snorre-Trykk. Oslo.

Stephen A. Mitchell

II: 57 Swedish Perspectives 1 Introduction Concerned about the treatment of Swedish history by foreign chroniclers using loose rumours (“lööss ryckte”) – and implying awareness of the distinction between individual perspectives and what today, following Assmann (1995), would be called collective memory and cultural identity – the early sixteenthcentury Swedish chronicler, Olaus Petri, argues that he will instead form his work around what resides “i manna minne” (Svenska Krönika, 7) [in men’s memory (author’s translations)]. In fact, Swedish cultural memory had been carefully groomed by native chronicle writers throughout the Middle Ages (cf. Connerton 1989). Given modern perceptions of pre-Christian Sweden, it is striking that none of the historical works that constitute the pillars of medieval Swedish literature dwell at any length on the country’s former heathen status or the exploits of its Viking ancestors. Indeed, between, at one end, the era of “rune Swedish”, where one might see an occasional inscription such as “Sa varð dauðr […] i vikingu” (Vg 61) [He died […] on a Viking raid (author’s translation)] (see fig. 1), and, at the other, the publication in 1664 in Uppsala of the bilingual edition of Gautreks saga, neither Ordbok öfver svenska medeltids-språket nor SAOB cite a single Swedishlanguage instance of the word viking. It is true that Old Swedish texts often refer with regret to the pre-Christian past by noting that the names of the weekdays – Wednesday and Thursday in particular – are a legacy of their former paganism e.g. “manghe andre daghar som æn haua nampn af heþnom afguþum ok þo cristna dyrkt som oþens daghar ok þors daghar” (Sagan om Vår herre, 61) [many other days which still have the names of heathen gods, despite Christian worship, like Odin’s day and Thor’s day (author’s translation)], yet they purposefully, it seems, avoid discussing embar­ rassing truths about the nation’s pagan and Viking pasts, mostly preferring to begin their histories with or after the Conversion to Christianity (cf. Hermann 2009, 292–295; Burke 2000). So when Olaus Petri depends on what is ‘in men’s memory’, such memories, at least in the vernacular, are more likely than not to have been channeled in ways suggesting cultural censure, even erasure, of what was embarrassing and un-useful to and among ecclesiastical elites (cf. Haki Antonsson 2010, 28–29). For while Latin liturgical works from medieval Sweden celebrate the lives of key figures in the conversion of the Swedes (e.g. the officia of Ansgar, Botvid, Sigfrid, Eskil, and Helena of Skövde), original vernacular literature in medieval Sweden https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-093



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Fig. 1: The Härlingstorp rune stone (Vg 61)

(at least before the mid-fifteenth century), most notably the quintessentially historical genre of the rimkrönika (rhymed chronicle), simply do not take up the country’s shift in faith, nor do they show much interest in the adventures of their forefathers, especially when compared to Icelandic saga tradition (cf. Lönnroth 1996; Sävborg 2015).

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2 Case study: Sweden, cultural memory and nation-building Amid the religious turmoil and incipient Nordic nationalism of the sixteenth century, historical Swedish narratives such as the reworked materials that make up the so-called Yngsta rimkrönikan (also known as Cronica Swecie, 1523–1525; [The Youngest Rhymed Chronicle]) and Johannes Magnus’s Historia de omnibus gothorum sveonumque regibus (1554; [History of all the Gothic and Swedish Kings]) provide forceful expressions of an emergent nationalist, or proto-nation­ alist, fervor. The subsequent seventeenth-century fortunes of this Swedo-centric view of history have been well-investigated, particularly as it forms part of the propaganda explaining and justifying Stormatktstiden. But this muscular sense of nationhood and privilege was not exclusively a post-medieval phenomenon, and the foundations of a national narrative or myth are already to be seen in such pre-Reformation texts as Prosaiska krönikan [The Prose Chronicle], Lilla RimKrönikan [The Little Rhymed Chronicle] and the Chronica regni Gothorum [The Chronicle of the Gothic Kingdom] of Ericus Olai of 1470, as well as the oft-cited ‘invention’ of late medieval göticism by Bishop Nicolaus Ragvaldi at the Council of Basel in November of 1434. On the cusp of its entry into the Thirty Years War, Sweden, like Denmark before it, issued a royal decree (through the influence of Johannes Bureus) calling for a canvassing of the country for ‘antiquities’, oral as well as physical. Typical of the decree is the beginning of item 4 specifying the collection of: “Sammaled­ hes allehanda krönikor och historier, vhrminnes sagur och dickter om drakar, lindormar, dwergar och resar. Item sagur om nampnkunnighe personer, gamble klöster, borger, konungasäter och städher […]” (Almgren 1931, 36) [Likewise all manner of chronicles and histories, ancient tales and poems about dragons, lind­ worms, dwarves and giants. Item tales about renowned persons, old monasteries, castles, royal seats and cities […] (author’s translation)]. With the realisation that these ‘popular antiquities’, together with such medieval materials as the Icelan­ dic legendary and kings sagas, could push the boundaries of the nation’s past into hitherto officially uncharted territory, the hunt for a reliable re-created past, a newly manicured collective memory, around which to form ideas of the nation was on (cf. Armstrong 1982; Smith 1987, 2009). By the late seventeenth century, serious interest was underway in procuring, editing, and publishing manuscripts that could help substantiate such a view (e.g. Gautreks saga [the saga of Gautrek]; Gutalag & Gutasaga [the law of the Gotlanders and the saga of the Gotlanders]; Ketils saga hængs [the saga of Ketil Trout]), culminating in 1737 with Erik Björn­ er’s massive trilingual Nordiska kämpa dater (Nordic Heroic Exploits) (cf. Mitchell



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Fig. 2: The title page from Björner’s Nordiska kämpa dater (1737)

1991) (see fig. 2). These materials seriously engaged the nation’s intellectual elite, prominent public figures like Olaf von Dalin, Sven Lagerbring, and Johan Ihre, who looked to variously critique, evaluate and incorporate the historical world of the texts into the nation’s sense of self (see Wallette 2009). In the early nineteenth-century era of Romantic Nationalism, such extraor­ dinary attempts to restore and embrace this cultural identity rose to the fore in Sweden. Nothing could be more symptomatic of this change than the estab­ lishment in 1811 of Götiska förbundet, a group “egnadt åt upplifwandet af de

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Fig. 3: The title page from the 2nd edition of Tegnér’s Frithiofs saga (1876)

gamle  göters  frihetsanda, mannamod och redliga sinne” (Starbäck and Bäck­ ström 1880, 763) [devoted to the revival of the ancient Goths’ spirit of freedom, manly courage and irreproachable disposition (author’s translation)]. The soci­ ety’s rituals included such ‘revived’ traditions as each member taking the name of a known personality from the medieval period and, as part of his inaugural address, offering comments to that person’s memory. Among the members was Esaias Tegnér – nicknamed “Bodwar Bjarke” – from whose pen would spring the



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most successful literary effort of the age, Fritiofs saga (1825) [The saga of Fritiof], a poetic recasting in Swedish of an Icelandic saga (see fig. 3). The allure of the medieval Nordic past remained strong throughout the nineteenth century, wellattested in so famous a cultural figure as August Strindberg (Törnqvist 1996). So import­ant has this trend been that the reception of the Nordic past in eighteenthand nineteenth-century Swedish historiography and elite culture has been the subject of several indepth studies, one appropriately entitled ‘the dream of the saga age’ (Mjöberg 1967–1968; Hall 1998; Wallette 2004). Importantly, the constructed vision of the past was not only the stuff of elite society; it percolated out into the population more widely, especially with the publication of books aimed at young readers like Rydberg’s Fädernas gudasaga. Berättad för ungdomen (1887) [Our Forefathers Myths. Told for Young People], which had appeared in five editions by 1926, and in Verner von Heidenstam’s Svenskarna och deras hövdingar. Berättelser för unga och gamla (1911) [Swedes and their Chieftains. Narratives for Young and Old], echoing Jane Porter’s famous Scottish Chiefs (cf. Ollén 1992; Skott 2008; Wickström 2008). Poems like Rydberg’s valourisation of the ‘guardian’ or ‘ancestral’ tree, “Vårdträdet” (1888), an alliterative poem composed in conscious imitation of Old Norse poetry, further cemented the connection between the ancient past and con­ temporary events. In it, responding to rumour panics about the possible invasion of the country, Rydberg combines the image of Yggdrasill, the world-tree of Scan­ dinavian mythology, with that of a downed familial tree, which the family’s patri­ arch calls to be turned into weapons for the defence of the motherland, of law, and of freedom, traits associated with the imagined democratic yeomen-society of the Swedish Middle Ages: Ditt virke skall slöjdas till värnande sköldar att lyftas framför lag och frihet; med järnet spetsas till spjutstänger att föras i fejd för fosterjorden av mina söners modige söner i Svealandens kämpars led.

[Your timber shall be carved into protective shields to be lifted before law and freedom; with iron are sharpened the spear-shafts to be carried into the fray for the native soil by my sons’ bold sons in the ranks of Sweden’s warriors. (author’s translation)]

In similarly nationalist tones, Verner von Heidenstam, the author of numerous historical novels celebrating the nation’s seventeenth-century military prowess, published in Svenska Dagbladet (1899) a poem cycle entitled “Ett Folk” (A People).

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The text, following an ancient formula in Scandinavian historiography, envisions the emergence of a Swedish people, beginning with the prophet Nahum speak­ ing to the Assyrian king, and it suggests that the Swedes have emigrated from the ancient Mideast. At Óðinn’s (Odin’s) command, bards sing of their forgotten urhem; Viking exploits are valorised; and around a blood-stained altar, Óðinn sets up idols: Då stiger ur de äldstes krets, med isgrått skägg och lurvig mantel, trolsk, enögd, med en korp på skuldran och svärdet draget, undermannen. Han vinkar barderna – och sorgset de sjunga om förgätet urhem, när midnatt stirrar över tälten. Han talar – och kring offerstenen, som blodbestruken står vid eken, han ställer nya gudsbeläten och stannar själv som gud ibland dem. Då växer lövbeskuggat Birka, där roddarskepp med sång vid åran glatt skära vassen […]. [There rises from the throng of elders, With ice-gray beard and shaggy mantle, One-eyed, a raven on his shoulder. And sword unsheathed, a wonder-man. He motions to the bards – and sadly They sing of their forgotten birthplace, When midnight stareth on the tents. He speaks – around the altar-stone That, blood-smeared, stands beneath the oak-tree He sets new images of gods And stands himself as god among them. Then groweth leaf-o’ershadowed Birka, Where amid oar-song viking vessels Cut glad the waves […]. (Transl. C.W. Stork 1919, 136)]

When, some years after WWI, von Heidenstam addresses the Nordic student meeting in Oslo, he calls on Norwegians, Danes, Finns, and Swedes to respond to their shared cultural and linguistic heritage, and to “den nordiska urreligion, som har en vrå kvar djupt i vårt bröst” [the ancient Scandinavian religion which still has a corner deep in our breasts (author’s translation)], and to imagine how they might collectively form “en hög, ja, en ny civilization” [a high, yes, a new civilisa­ tion (author’s translation)] (Uppsatser och tal, 152–153 [Essays and Speeches]; on these texts, see Mitchell and Tergel 1994). Something of that same enthusiasm



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for Sweden’s ancient heritage can be seen in the monumental painting by Carl Larsson, Midvinter blot (Midwinter Sacrifice [1915]) (see colour plate 22), a massive work portraying a scene drawn from Ynglinga saga in which a Swedish king is sacrificed at Old Uppsala in order to save his people (see Lönnroth 1986). Lars­ son’s exacting yet often anachronistic historical reconstruction became highly controversial, and it was not until 1997 that the painting was finally installed at the National Museum. It is indicative of the degree to which this heathen Viking image of Sweden had been fostered that when a 70-minute travelogue on the country was released in 1934, it was given the title, “Sweden, Land of the Vikings” (prod. John Boyle), a national sobriquet found occasionally even today on tourist trade items. Embrac­ ing this image shortly thereafter were Frans G. Bengtsson’s Röde Orm [Eng. transl. as Red Orm and The Long Ships] volumes (1941, 1945), historical narratives encom­ passing the whole of Viking activities in the east and west, the basis for a musical, a comic book, films, and radio theatre, and books which have been translated into dozens of languages. In 1998, demonstrating the story’s staying power as an icon of cultural memory, Röde Orm was named the century’s third most signifi­ cant Swedish book by popular vote on a Swedish television show. The strength and durability of this historical image continued for some decades, yet, in the context of Sweden’s decision to join the European Union (1995), the national self-portrait appears to have been adjusted to a Swedish role in the medieval crusades with Jan Guillou’s Arn novels (1998, 1999, 2000), later to be made into international film sensations, stories that emphasise Sweden’s histori­ cal integration into larger multinational frameworks. Indeed, the entry into the European Union seems to have awakened familiar concerns about what it means to be a nation, giving birth to Göran Hägg’s sweeping review of the evolution of ‘Swedishness’ (2003) with the important aphorism about such an enterprise: “Ett folk är en grupp människor som förenas av gemensamma vanföreställningar om sitt förflutna” (Hägg 2003, 12, 240) [A nation is a group of people united by shared delusions about their past (author’s translation)]. One wonders whether Olaus Petri might just accept that expression as a gloss on what he meant when he referred to “manna minne” [men’s memory] (Svenska Krönika, 7)?

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Works cited Primary sources Bengtsson, Frans G. Röde Orm, hemma och i österled.  Stockholm, 1945. Bengtsson, Frans G. Röde Orm, sjöfarare i västerled. En berättelse från okristen tid. Stockholm, 1941. Guillou, Jan. Vägen till Jerusalem. Stockholm, 1998. Guillou, Jan. Tempelriddaren. Stockholm, 1999. Guillou, Jan. Riket vid vägens slut. n.p., 2000. Gautreks saga = Gothrici & Rolfi Westrogothiae regum historia lingua antiqua gothica conscripta. Ed. Olof Verelius and Johannes Scheffer. Uppsala, 1664. Gutalag & Gutasaga = Gothlandz-laghen på gammal göthiska, med en historisk berättelse wid ändan, huruledes Gothland först är vpfunnit och besatt. Ed. Johan Hadorph. Stockholm, 1687. Heidenstam, Verner von. “Ett folk.” Svenska Dagbladet, 22nd September 1899. Heidenstam, Verner von. Svenskarna och deras hövdingar. Berättelser för unga och gamla. Läseböcker för Sveriges barndomsskolor. Stockholm, 1911. Heidenstam, Verner von. Sweden’s Laureate. Selected Poems of Verner von Heidenstam. Trans. Charles Wharton Stork. New Haven, CT, and London, 1919. Heidenstam, Verner von. Uppsatser och tal. Ed. Kate Bang and Fredrik Böök. Verner von Heidenstams samlade verk, 23. Stockholm, 1943. Ketils saga hængs = Ketilli Haengii et Grimonis Hirsutingenae patris et filii historia seu res gestae. Ed. Olof Rudbeck, Jacob Reenhielm and Ísleifur Thorleifsson. Uppsala, 1697. Lilla Rim-Krönikan. In Svenska Medeltidens Rim-Krönikor. Ed. Gustaf E. Klemming. SFSS, 17.1. Stockholm, 1865. 215–231. Nordiska kämpa dater, i en sagoflock samlade om forna kongar och hjältar. Ed. Erik Julius Björner. Stockholm, 1737. Prosaiska krönikan. In Småstycken på fornsvenska. Ed. Gustaf E. Klemming. Stockholm, 1868–1881. I: 217–257. Rydberg, Viktor. Fädernas gudasaga. Berättad för ungdomen. Stockholm, 1887. Rydberg, Viktor. “Vårdträdet.” In Runa. Minnesblad från Nordiska museet (1888): 65–69. Sagan om Vår herre. In Ett Forn-Svenskt Legendarium. Ed. George Stephens and F. A. Dahlgren. SFSS, 7. Stockholm, 1847–1874. 61–96. Svenska Medeltidens Rim-Krönikor. Ed. Gustaf E. Klemming. SFSS, 17.1. Stockholm, 1865. Tegnér, Esaias. Frithiofs saga. Stockholm, 1825. Vg 61 = Samnordisk Runtextdatabas. Ed. Lennart Elmevik, Lena Peterson and Henrik Williams. http://www.runforum.nordiska.uu.se/samnord/. Uppsala, 1993-. (17 July 2017).

Secondary sources Almgren, Oscar. 1931. “Om tillkomsten av 1630 års antikvarie-institution.” Fornvännen 26: 28–47. Armstrong, John A. 1982. Nations before Nationalism. Chapel Hill, NC.



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Assmann, Jan. 1995. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” New German Critique 65: 125–133. Burke, Peter. 2000. “Foundation Myths and Collective Identities in Early Modern Europe.” In Europe and the Other and Europe as the Other. Ed. Bo Stråth. Collection Multicultural Europe, 10. New York. 113–122. Connerton, Paul. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge. Hägg, Göran. 2003. Svenskhetens historia. Stockholm. Haki Antonsson. 2010. “Traditions of Conversion in Medieval Scandinavian. A Synthesis.” Saga-Book 34: 25–74. Hall, Patrik. 1998. The Social Construction of Nationalism. Sweden as an Example. Lund Political Studies, 106. Lund. Hermann, Pernille. 2009. “Concepts of Memory and Approaches to the Past in Medieval Icelandic Literature.” Scandinavian Studies 81.3: 287–308. Lönnroth, Lars. 1986. “Dómaldi’s Death and the Myth of Sacral Kingship.” In Structure and Meaning in Old Norse Literature: New Approaches to Textual Analysis and Literary Criticism. Ed. John Lindow, Lars Lönnroth and Gerd Wolfgang Weber. The Viking Collection, 3. Odense. 73–93. Lönnroth, Lars. 1996. “En fjärran spegel. Västnordiska berättande källor om svensk hedendom och om kristningsprocessen på svenskt område.” In Kristnandet i Sverige: Gamla källor och nya perspektiv. Ed. Bertil Nilsson. Projektet Sveriges kristnande. Publikationer, 5. Uppsala. 141–158. Mitchell, Stephen A. 1991. Heroic Sagas and Ballads. Ithaca, NY. Mitchell, Stephen A. and Alf Tergel. 1994. “Choseness, Nationalism, and the Young Church Movement. Sweden 1880–1920.” Harvard Theological Studies 38: 231–249. Mjöberg, Jöran. 1967–1968. Drömmen om sagatiden. 2 vols. Stockholm. Ollén, Bo. 1992. Heidenstam som barnboksförfattare. Om Svenskarna och deras hövdingar. Hedemora. Ordbok öfver svenska medeltids-språket. Ed. Knut F. Söderwall and Karl Gustav Ljunggren. SFSS, 27. Lund, 1884–1973. Sävborg, Daniel. 2015. “Kungalängder och historieskrivning: fornsvenska och fornisländska källor om Sveriges historia.” Historisk tidskrift 135.2: 201–235. SAOB. Svenska akademiens ordbok öfver svenska språket. Lund, 1893-. Skott, Fredrik. 2008. Folkets minnen. Traditionsinsamling i idé och praktik 1919–1964. Avhandlingar från Historiska institutionen i Göteborg, 53. Gothenburg. Smith, Anthony D. 1987. The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford. Smith, Anthony D. 2009. Ethno-symbolism and Nationalism. A Cultural Approach. London. Starbäck, C. Georg and P.O. Bäckström, eds. 1880. Berättelser ur Swenska Historien. XXII. Carl XIII. Carl XIV Johan. Stockholm. Törnqvist, Egil. 1996. “Strindberg som fornisländare.” TijdSchrift voor Skandinavistiek 17.2: 7–19. Wallette, Anna. 2004. Sagans svenskar. Synen på vikingatiden och de isländska sagorna under 300 år. Malmö. Wallette, Anna. 2009. “National Histories. Sven Lagerbring and his Channels of Communication.” In Negotiating Pasts in the Nordic Countries. Interdisciplinary Studies in History and Memory. Ed. Anne Eriksen and Jón Viðar Sigurðsson. Lund. 99–120. Wickström, Johan. 2008. Våra förfäder var hedningar. Nordisk forntid som myt i den svenska folkskolans pedagogiska texter fram till år 1919. Religionshistoriska forskningsrapporter från Uppsala, 19. Uppsala.

Anna Wallette

II: 58 Swedish Perspectives – Rudbeck 1 Introduction: The renowned Atlantica Different times have emphasised different attitudes concerning why history writing is important. If an identity is a reflection of someone being similar, history in itself will not give that identity. But the past is one of the things con­ necting one individual to others. Since the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs intro­ duced his ideas on mémoire collective, the theories on collective memory have been defined and redefined with input from cultural theory (cf. Erll et al. 2008). A commonly used perspective deriving from Jan Assmann states that a cultural memory is all the material used by a society to transmit or communicate that soci­ ety’s self-image (Assmann 1995, 132). But in dealing with cultural memory, history and historiography can be defined as something else. A professional hand­ling of sources and a presentation of the past in a narrative that stands the test of critical examination is conceived as something different from said memory. What memory is, and how it functions on a collective level, should include history of knowledge. As Astrid Erll proposes: “history and/or/as memory’ is simply not a very fruitful approach to cultural representation of the past” (Erll 2008, 7). In line with this reasoning, Marek Tamm also suggests that history can be seen as one of many channels of cultural memory, and “history writing is simply a very specific medium of cultural memory with its own rules and traditions” (Tamm 2013, 463). If we are to understand memory as a shared experience, we cannot differentiate between memory and history writing, even when it is an intellectual elite choos­ ing what is relevant to preserve and narrate. The search for a common ancestry in the Early Modern Era will here be dem­ onstrated by highlighting one specific book and one source material. Scholars were interested in Old Norse material long before the end of the seventeenth century, but it was not until a book called Atland eller Manheim [Atlantis, or Home of Man], or the Atlantica according to its Latin title, was published in 1679 that the Icelandic sagas were introduced into Sweden in earnest. One author will illus­ trate how a collective memory can be transformed through historical scholarship, when writing history in a wider project of nation building.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-094



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2 Case study: Introducing new material into the nation’s past Hunting for antiquities Swedes joined the hunt for antiquities early on. From the mid-sixteenth century onwards, it was seen as a necessity to upgrade ‘Gothic’ civilisation. The Goths were not just the barbarians that contributed to the destruction of the Roman Empire. Apart from the traditions of the Goths emigrating from Scandinavia, the ancient Swedes had not been of regular interest before, but quarrels between Danish scholars and the Swedes on the origin of the runes in the early 1600s would strike the note for Gothicism firmly advancing onto a political platform. The antiquarians’ private collections of coins and carpets, books and statues should now be part of the kings’ collections. The seventeenth century was a formative period. It was a warlike period in Europe as a whole. War costs money and demands organisation. The need for new civil servants in the state changed both the universities and research insti­ tutes. Alongside a political transition, we see cultural identity-building within a state formation. Perhaps more so in Sweden due to its great power status on the European scene. Sweden took over as the leading power in the 1630s until the Great Northern War (1700–1720). The history writing of that period upheld the idea that contemporary Swedes had inherited virtues from their forefathers: that was the reason why they could and should conquer other countries.

Old Norse sagas in the Atlantica Written by the professor of medicine at Uppsala University, Olaus Rudbeck (1630–1702), the Atlantica was published in three complete (and one unfinished) volumes between the years 1679 and 1702. Besides medicine, he also worked within several other disciplines: as a founder of a botanical garden, builder of an anatomical theatre and other buildings, an astronomer, archaeologist, and even as an accomplished musician. But it was his writing of history that achieved European fame. The Atlantica is by no means unknown today. It has always been quite notori­ ous, causing “both astonishment and a degree of horrified admiration” (Malm 1994, 2). The arguments within it have been seen as “ridiculous and [the] whole book tainted with an obsession verging on madness” (Eriksson 1994, vii). The above quotations were made by the two authorities on the Atlantica, Gunnar

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Eriksson and Mats Malm. They are not interested in promoting this book as some­ thing exotic. They are instead rather keen to present the scholar behind the book (see Malm 1996; Eriksson 2002 for a thorough analysis). Olaus Rudbeck used different methods to prove that Hyperboreans, Scythi­ ans, Goths and others were of Swedish origin. The point of departure was a biblical foundation, and Greek and Latin authors were used to find relevant references to Sweden in Classical myths. Philological methods were mixed with archaeological excavations. A catalogue of natural history combined with statistical calculations explained the mythology and provided a table of events. The Old Norse material came to be of considerable importance in the fulfilment of his purpose. The Ice­ landic sagas had been known before. Translation from the so-called Gothic, or Old Swedish, began in the 1660s as a scholarly task. Rudbeck, perceiving a gap in the history between the Flood and the Goths of the Great Migration, argued that the sagas could help fill that gap. In his quest to describe why the survivors of the Flood decided to make Sweden their home, Rudbeck used the Old Norse mate­ rial to point out misinterpretations. The Greeks had not understood their own mythology. The Old Norse material could offer a more original narrative. Rudbeck used the whole spectrum of known sagas. He showed a strong inter­ est in the fearless heroes of the fornaldarsögur [legendary sagas], and put the newly printed translations of Gautreks saga [Gautrek’s saga], Bósa saga ok Herrauðs [the saga of Bósi and Herraud] and Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks konungs [the saga of Hervör and king Heiðrekr] to good use. Konungasögur [kings’ sagas] are also a common reference to describe people or places. He used all the printed pub­ lications together with several unpublished manuscripts and paper copies, and found that the Íslendingasögur [sagas of Icelanders] provided tales of old customs and virtues. He even read samtíðarsögur [contemporary sagas]. He acknowledged that the sagas described events later in time, while he focused more on the time of the Flood – in his chronology about the year 2400 BC. The most exciting mate­ rial was the mythology and the poetry. The mythology should be interpreted alle­ gorically (Malm 1994, 6). The sources were subjected to critique. The very first chapter addresses how to handle the sources. If several sources were identical, they would be direct copies and of little use, but since the story of the Deluge in the Old Testament differs from how Ymir’s blood saturated the earth in the Edda, the main theme must be truthful (Atlantica I, Ch. 1). It is not difficult to see the foolishness in many of Rudbeck’s claims, and the Atlantica is confusing. Over 100 observations on Sweden being the lost island of Atlantis are explained in excess. Some are more straightforward than others. The king Atlas is obviously the same person as Atli from Atlakviða [the lay of Atli] in the Poetic Edda (Atlantica, I, Ch. 7; II, Ch. 5). Using Disa’s clothing is something else. Disa, a Swedish heroine, was the same person as both the Old Norse goddess



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Freyja and the Egyptian Isis. She was neither dressed nor undressed by use of a net. Readjusting for leap years, Rudbeck was convinced the squares were a cal­ endar indicating the first assembly ever, located in Sweden (Atlantica, II, Ch. 5). What was probable for Rudbeck must be seen from the seventeenth century’s world-view. We do not rely on the Bible to speak the truth today. For Rudbeck, Noah was more than 900 years old, so why not the ancient Swedes? He wanted to legitimise the politics, without falsifying the evidence. The work should be in honour of the fatherland, but be guided by finding the right truth in the old texts. The primary duty was a better understanding.

The Atlantica used in nation-building Today, scholars tend to concentrate on political culture and the incentives behind the institutions involved in collecting and studying the antiquities. Johanna Wid­ enberg (2006) is quite clear that both The National Heritage Board from 1630 and the Antiquities College from 1666 were established to safeguard the interests of the Swedish state. The interest in collecting historical texts and objects led to an act of ancient monuments protection in the first Antiquities Decree of 1666 (Kongl: Mayst:tz Placat och Påbudh om Gamble Monumenter och Antiquiteter), a proclamation that was read and heard from every pulpit in the realm. The impor­ tance of these inventories cannot be exaggerated. National historiography was – as elsewhere in Europe – a political concern. Scholars challenged each other, and this rivalry actually inspired scholarship in this period (see Skovgaard-Petersen 2012 for Denmark and Sweden). We can see how a society communicates a col­ lective identity through usage of the past, but the early modern researchers were not merely propaganda machines. Rudbeck’s book was well-read and well-liked. The critique concerned identifying Plato’s legendary island of Atlantis with his particular country, not on the methods or the grounds for his argumentation. We have to realise that this research was conducted in a different intellectual context than ours (Eriksson 1994, 87; Eriksson 2002, 341–346). Historical research was a biblical field of study. The British historian Colin Kidd has argued that in order to understand national identities prior to modern nationalism, one needs to understand that men of learning did not distinguish between different nationalities or ethnic communities. Instead, they saw dif­ ferentiation within a common stock. The goal for linguistic scholars was to find a common language, not to distinguish between languages (Kidd 1999, 30). The most natural identification would have been the nearby neighbourhood, but in a pre-modern society a sense for the kingdom and country, and for the privileges of the land, was important. Kidd connects these pre-modern identi­

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ties to ethnic theology and talks about different levels of us-ness rather than otherness. Promoting the Swedes at any cost was not the main focus, but Kidd’s argu­ ment would explain how Rudbeck could claim that they stood out from the rest. The Swedes maintained their history better than others since Sweden was never subdued by a foreign ruler. Everyone is related; it was just that some of us are a little bit better than the rest, depending on climate and experience. The sagas demonstrate that the forefathers had been strong and wise: Wåra Fäder, som räknas för det aldraäldsta Folcket, intet derföre att de woro äldre än andra, emedan dhe alla äro Adams och Noachs afkomne, uthan derföre att dheras Regemente hafwer warit af de älsta på Jorden, och för deras Wijsshet, Rättrådighet och Manlighet för bekante än andra, hafwa och i detta måhl, hafft mehra kunskap genom Segner än de senare Folcken. (Atlantica, III, Ch. 4) [Our fathers are seen as the oldest of all people, not by being older – all are descendants of Adam and Noah – but by having the oldest government in the world, since the knowledge of their wisdom, righteousness, and virility were told in tales. (author’s translation)]

So, the Swedes are not the first among nations by being the oldest people, but the ones who have preserved the virtues of their ancestors the best and therefore kept the best government. The Swedes kept their virtues since they kept their memories alive.

The legacy of the Atlantica Sweden lost its great power status, but the sagas’ now dominant position remained. A new European interest rose, for example, through Paul-Henri Mal­ let’s widespread writings on Scandinavian and Celtic mythology from 1755 and onwards. This was much more manageable for a wider audience than Rud­ beck’s promotion of Sweden. The discussion of Old Norse material as a source for Swedish history continued, and the ancestors were idealised as having been original democrats, as well as noble heathens. The past was seen as a magistra vitae – a collection of instructive examples to learn from. During the nineteenth century, the sagas acquired new readers. Romanticism promoted the idea that the people’s soul was to be found within the poetry, and citizens of the Swedish nation should be able to recognise themselves in this literature. The fact that the sagas had gained a new audience is shown by the translation style. Parallel trans­ lations, and comments in Latin, were gone (Wallette 2004). But even with special­ ised branches of science developing, the national setting was still of the utmost importance for folklorists, archaeologists, linguists and historians. Only in the



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twentieth century did reconstructions of historical societies based on religious or nationalistic conviction cease. The critical discussion among Swedish historians became so harsh that it restricted the study of the sagas as sources for a long time, even if the material itself continued to be of importance for others. Today, we have different goals for studying the past than did our predeces­ sors. Scholars still treat conceptual questions: What sources should we use and how should they use them? The perspective chosen will affect the questions asked, and the material chosen. Historians hold different views, and why these views change are interesting for historiographical reasons. The study of how the Old Norse material can promote memory today must be found within other frame­ works than that of a seventeenth-century scholar. Olaus Rudbeck did not set out to write a textbook on the history of Sweden from the beginning to the end. He wanted to understand new material and by working with a more modern method­ ology he could re-write universal history (Eriksson 1994, 98). By the standards of scholarly history writing, were seventeenth-century scholars un-critical? They were not. Instead they were quite innovative. Rudbeck should not be remembered as a strange muddle-head, but rather a methodologi­ cally sane person within his own context. Even if the sagas were used differently in the years to come, he did introduce them into the collective memory of the Swedes. By including history writing in the discussion on cultural memory, it is even clearer that history is not waiting for us to be discovered. It is not only what is remembered, but also how things are remembered that gives the past meaning (Erll 2008, 7).

Works cited Primary sources Kongl: Mayst:tz Placat och Påbudh om Gamble Monumenter och Antiquiteter. Stockholm, 1666. Atlantica. In Olaus Rudbecks Atlantica. Ed. Axel Nelson. Stockholm, 1937–1950. [Uppsala, 1679–1702]

Secondary sources Assmann, Jan. 1995. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” New German Critique 65: 125–133. Erll, Astrid and Ansgar Nünning. 2008. Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Media and Cultural Memory, 8. Berlin and New York.

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Erll, Astrid. 2008. “Cultural Memory Studies. An Introduction.” In Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Media and Cultural Memory, 8. Berlin and New York. 1–15. Eriksson, Gunnar. 1994. The Atlantic Vision. Olaus Rudbeck and Baroque Science. Canton, MA. Eriksson, Gunnar. 2002. Rudbeck 1630–1702. Liv, lärdom, dröm i barockens Sverige. Stockholm. Kidd, Colin. 1999. British Identities before Nationalism. Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800. Cambridge. Malm, Mats. 1994. “Olaus Rudbeck’s Atlantica and Old Norse Poetics.” In Northern Antiquity. The Post-Medieval Reception of Edda and Saga. Ed. Andrew Wawn. Middlesex. 1–25. Malm, Mats. 1996. Minervas äpple. Om diktsyn, tolkning och bildspråk inom nordisk göticism. Eslöv. Skovgaard-Petersen, Karen. 2012. “Historical Writing in Scandinavia.” In The Oxford History of Historical Writing. Vol. 3, 1400–1800. Ed. José Rabasa et al. Oxford. 449–472. Tamm, Marek. 2013. “Beyond History and Memory: New Perspectives in Memory Studies.” History Compass 11.6: 458–473. Wallette, Anna. 2004. Sagans svenskar. Synen på vikingatiden och de isländska sagorna under 300 år. Malmö. Widenberg, Johanna. 2006. Fäderneslandets antikviteter. Etnoterritoriella historiebruk och integrationssträvanden i den svenska statsmaktens antikvariska verksamhet ca. 1600–1720. Uppsala.

Thomas A. DuBois

II: 59 Balto-Finnic Perspectives 1 Introduction The intersection of the topics of memory and nation-building suggests a pro­ ductive synergy between culturally determined and enacted modes of memory and the purposeful, creative imagining of a political unity, a nation. Where the first of these overlapping areas implies generalised cultural practices and norms shared by all or at least some within a cultural community, the latter implies a specific cultural elite who embraces the task of asserting a nation and harnesses expressive cultural traditions toward that end. In the case of peoples speaking Balto-Finnic languages, the polity of self-conscious ‘nation builders’ has been few in number and relatively recent in origin. The Balto-Finnic languages, a sub­ group of Finno-Ugric languages consisting today of Estonian, Finnish, Ingrian, Karelian, Kven, Livonian, Livvi-Karelian, Ludic, Meänkieli, Vepsian, and Votic, have existed on the eastern and northern shores of the Baltic Sea for millennia. In the medieval past, many of these languages – e.g. Livonian and Karelian – were spoken by prodigious and powerful communities and no doubt possessed ambitious cultural leaders capable of promoting national identity and notions of cohesion, such as the historical but also legendary Livonian Kaupo of Turaida (d. 1217). Processes of colonisation, however, initiated by Germans and Balts in the area of the southeast Baltic, Swedes and Danes in the area around the Gulf of Finland, and Russians in the areas east of the Gulf of Finland and northward to the White Sea stunted this national development. Today, of the various BaltoFinnic languages, only Finnish and Estonian are spoken by numbers in excess of 50,000 and most of the Balto-Finnic peoples have dwindled to small, or precari­ ously small numbers. Even while politically disenfranchised, however, Balto-Fin­ nic peoples have possessed unique and characteristic traditions of memory and often have enunciated these in poetic products that, in the right circumstances, could become the basis of nation-building (DuBois 2013). Such was decidedly the case with Finnish culture in the nineteenth century, and to some extent also with north Estonian culture during the same period. Balto-Finnic peoples expressed and found in their alliterative song traditions powerful frameworks of cultu­ ral memory and ideal materials for the formation of national identities. When nineteenth-century romantic nationalism provided Finns and Estonians with conceptual frameworks for seeing their cultural groups as nations, energetic and visionary collectors and scholars arose to explore and assert national identities (Wilson 1976; DuBois 1995; Fewster 2011; Lyytikäinen 2011; Anttonen 2012). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-095

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Because of their geographic situation and longstanding commerce with neighboring peoples, Balto-Finnic cultures display a rich amalgamation of influ­ ences from both West and East, combined with ancient features that tie the BaltoFinnic peoples to other cultures across North Eurasia. Ancient aspects of memory and recalling are especially notable in the song traditions of these peoples, col­ lected primarily in the nineteenth century. Given the differing political histories of the various Balto-Finnic peoples and the degree to which the roles of these song traditions as cultural memory and in nation-building have been explored for the largest such community, Finland, this entry focuses on the pre-modern Balto-Finnic ways of remembering reflected in these traditions in particular.

2 Case study In describing acts of remembering, in addition to the active verb muistaa [he/ she/it remembers] and its passive voice form muistetaan [‘he/she/it is remem­ bered’], Finnish offers its speakers an intervening mediopassive, middle voice, or fourth-person impersonal verb muistua, translatable into English as: ‘to become remembered, to go down in people’s memory, to linger in popular conscious­ ness’. Similarly, a speaker can differentiate between unohtaa [‘he/she/it forgets’], unohdetaan [‘he/she/it is forgotten’] and unohtuu [‘he/she/it falls out of people’s memory, fades into oblivion’]. Similarly, in Estonian, one finds the forms meenutab/meenutatakse/meenub to express the act of recalling and unustab/unustatakse/ununeb to express the act of forgetting. In so doing, these languages offer their speakers a semantic space for a collective act of remembering or forgetting, conceptualised as an attribute of the person or thing remembered or forgotten. One can be remembered or forgotten by others, but one can also be memorable or forgettable in and of oneself. In contrast, as we shall see, when it comes to the Finnish verb tietää [‘to know’], there is no mediopassive alternative: one either knows ‘tietää’ or is known ‘tiedetään’, but knowing requires concrete (human) agency. Because none of the Balto-Finnic peoples developed a written literary culture before the Reformation, most of the evidence concerning their livelihoods and traditions in the medieval era are drawn from rather cursory and often highly negative accounts of their ways, contained in sagas and chronicles written by colonisers. The first extended documents written in Balto-Finnic languages date only from the time of the Reformation and often consist of Christian religious tracts. In order to recover some notion of pre-modern Balto-Finnic cultures, then, scholars have turned to collections of folklore, largely amassed in the nineteenth



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and twentieth centuries. Particularly distinctive in this folklore, and common to nearly all the Balto-Finnic languages in some way or another, are songs employ­ ing alliteration and some form of trochaic tetrameter. These distinctive songs, and the often archaic mythic and heroic narrative elements they contain, became the basis of nationalist essays and literary epics during the nineteenth century. These songs also provide valuable insights into pre-modern Balto-Finnic ways of remembering (below). The assiduous work of Balto-Finnic song collectors in the nineteenth century is impressive, even daunting: the authoritative anthology of collected songs and incantations in trochaic tetrameter in Finnish and Karelian, Suomen Kansan Vanhat Runot [Ancient Songs of the Finnish People; SKVR] numbers some 35  densely packed volumes (1908–1948), now also available digitally. Most of these songs were collected by hand by collectors who visited farmsteads and vil­ lages on foot and notated song texts and sometimes melodies from willing per­ formers. Often early collectors, like Zacharias Topelius the elder (1781–1831) or Elias Lönnrot (1802–1884), were doctors, whose close contact with villagers made them aware of local song traditions. A similarly prodigious collection of Estonian songs initiated by Jacob Hurt (1839–1907), and furthered by Ülo Tedre (1928–2015) and hundreds of other collectors is also available now in digital form: Eesti regilaulude andmebaas [database of Estonian traditional songs]. Some of the variety and interest of these songs can be glimpsed in English through Kuusi, Bosley and Branch’s Finnish Folk Poetry: Epic (1977). A broader pan-Finno-Ugric anthology that includes Balto-Finnic lyric and ritual songs in English translation is entitled The Great Bear (Honko et al. 1993). The research tradition concerning songs of this kind is long and illustrious. In addition to the nation-building collecting work, in which cultural enthusiasts, students, and sometimes intrigued outsiders sought out and laboriously notated song repertoires and variations, scholarly approaches to these materials became dominated by the work of Julius and Kaarle Krohn (1835–1888 and 1863–1933, respectively) who used data on the geographic distribution and variation of the songs to develop a method of folklore research which came to dominate interna­ tional folklore research for much of the twentieth century. Kaarle Krohn (1915) described the songs as mirrors of ancient beliefs and windows into past cultural contacts and relations, and Martti Haavio (1952; 1967) continued this research tradition, seeking to link Finnish and Karelian materials to parallels or sources from throughout Eurasia or the wider world. Matti Kuusi (1963) worked through­ out his career to differentiate the ages and themes of various songs composed in the trochaic tetrameter in Finnish, Karelian and Ingrian traditions, and Ülo Tedre (1969–1974) provided similar characterisations for songs in languages spoken in Estonia. Using archival materials as sources, Finnish scholars have continued

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to examine the meanings of songs in Finnish, Ingrian, and Karelian (e.g. Har­ vilahti 1990; Siikala 2002, 2016; Timonen 2004; Tarkka 2013) and scholars like Felix Oinas (1985) and Ülo Valk (2000) have provided similar analyses for Esto­ nian song traditions. Scholars in general argue for notions of intertextuality and generic expectations that helped singers and their audiences relate any given song to other counterparts in the tradition and to dominant themes. In a particularly widespread Karelian and Ingrian song, known by scholars as Kilpalaulanta (The Singing Contest), an aged and powerful sage Väinämöinen and a young and impetuous Joukamoinen (called in other versions Joukahainen) collide while riding on an open road. When neither man is willing to let the other have the right of way, Väinämöinen proposes a test of wisdom. In a version of the song collected in 1883 by Volmari Porkka from a woman named Olgoi in the village of Hevaa, parish of Kaprio, Ingria (SKVR IV/2, 1855), Väinämöinen makes his challenge in this way: Läkkää kiissoin laulamaan ja kiissoin sanelommaa: kumpi muistaa enemmän sen seissä tien selällä, kumpi muistaa vähemmän sen tieltä pois paetak. (Kuusi et al. 1977, 108) [Let us compete in singing and compete in reciting: whoever remembers more will stay put in the middle of the road whoever remembers less must get off the road. (author’s translation)]

Joukamoinen consents, and the contest takes place. Väinämöinen taunts the younger man with reminiscences of great mythic events of the past, including the first ploughing of the seas and piling up of rock cairns – acts which, Väinämöinen asserts, were of his own doing. When Joukamoinen can counter with no mem­ ories of equal magnitude, Väinämöinen disperses all of his rival’s possessions through magic until the latter promises to give Väinämöinen his sister in mar­ riage in exchange for his freedom. Where Olgoi’s song describes the battle of wits as involving memories, many other versions describe it as a battle of knowledge, related to the verb tietää, which can mean in the folk song dialect both ‘to know’ and ‘to make or shape’. Such knowledge must be recalled and recited in order to demonstrate power. Reminiscent of images of knowledge and memory in Eddaic poems like Völuspá and Vafþrúðnismál, Kilpalaulanta equates remembering with doing,



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and suggests that knowledge of ancient events comes from having witnessed or accomplished them personally. As Pernille Hermann (2014) has noted for the Old Norse tradition, memory, age, and wisdom are depicted as powerfully linked, and in other versions of Kilpalaulanta, Väinämöinen deprecates his younger rival’s knowledge as “lapsen […] mieli, vaimon tunti, ei […] partasuun urohon (SKVR I/1, 185; Kuusi et al. 1977, 102) [a child’s thoughts, a woman’s feelings, not that of a bearded man (author’s translation)]. Where knowledge in this song is associated with both age and masculinity, other songs suggest that one can gain knowledge at other ages and stations in life. Arhippa Perttunen of the village of Latvajärvi, Vuokkiniemi parish, Arch­ angel Karelia, sang lines for Lönnrot in 1834 (SKVR I/3, 1278) that suggest the proper way a diligent person gains and stores up knowledge to be remembered and recited later when needed: Olin piennä paimenessa lassa karjan katsonnassa, menin sillon mättähälle kiven kirjavan sivulle paean paksun lappehille. Niin saoin sanoa saatu pantu aitan parven päähän kukkaroh kultaseh vaskiseh vakkaseh. Kuin aika tosin tulee aukoan sanasen arkun kirjokannen kiimahutan poikkipuolin polvilleni. (Kuusi et al. 1977, 82) [When I was little and herding, a child watching over cattle, I went to a hummock to the side of a mottled stone to the edge of a thick boulder. Thus having gained hundreds of words and having placed them in the loft of a barn, in a golden satchel, a copper case, when the right time comes I will open this chest of words, break open the mottled lid that I’ll hold in my lap. (author’s translation)]

Knowledge awaits hidden in natural places, and once discovered, must be stored up in more ordinary human vessels and buildings for strategic use at apt moments.

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In the Finnish version of shamanism, the shaman is a tietäj [‘knower’], who has gained words through doing or finding, and has carefully committed these words to memory. Tietäjät were consulted especially for help with healing or in the management of luck. Court records of 1643 recount the trial of Antti Lieroinen of Ruovesi, who was accused of witchcraft. Lieroinen was known for his loitsut [incantations] pertaining to fertility and marriage luck. He was found guilty of sorcery and put to death (Siikala 2016, 90). In northern Savo, Gabriel Maxenius describes a tietäjä’s ritual in 1733 as involving wild gestures and movements, and similar details are supplied by Christian Lenqvist in 1782 (Siikala 2016, 91), accounts that suggest that the performance of incantations were part of wider ritual practices performed by the tietäjä. Nearly a century later, in 1860, Heikki Joppi, a carpenter from Peräseinäjoki, reported having obtained words to an incantation for blood stanching which he recorded in a book so as not to forget it: such spell books were common in Western Finland, as in parts of Scandinavia, and reflect an embrace of writing as a powerful supplement to a process of memo­ risation that had formerly been wholly oral (Siikala 2016, 91–92). Tietäjät worked to heal patients and restore missing luck, but they could also be accused of using their incantations and associated supernatural powers to harm the property or good fortune of others. Tietäjä Antti Tokoi was tried in the Lohtaja court twice for malevolent sorcery, in 1663 and 1681 (Siikala 2016, 91). Tietäjät were both revered and feared. Finnish and Karelian epic songs recount the heroic travels of figures like Väinämöinen in quest of such words of power. In a song describing a charac­ ter called Antero Vipunen, Väinämöinen is said to enter the grave of a deceased tietäjä in order to gain words he can use for completing a boat he is building. In a version of the song sung by Arhippa Perttunen for Elias Lönnrot in the village of Latvajärvi, Vuokkiniemi parish, Archangel Karelia in 1834 (SKVR I/1, 399), Väinämöinen builds a fire inside the dead man until he consents to divulge his words: Niin sanoopi Väinämöinen: “Lähenkonna kulkustasi maan valio maksostasi kun sanot sata sanoo tuhat virren tutkalmuo.” Sillon Antervo Vipunen ku on viikon maassa maannut kauan mannuusa levännyt niin sano sata sanoo tuhat virren tutkalmuo. Sillon vanha Väinämöinen sai venosen valmeheksi. (Kuusi et al. 1977, 185)



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[Thus said Väinämöinen: “Wretch, I will leave your throat earth being, [I will leave] your liver if you say a hundred words the tops of a thousand songs.” Then Antervo Vipunen who long had lain in the earth, rested long in the ground, says a hundred words the tops of a thousand songs. Then old Väinämöinen Was able to complete his boat. (author’s translation)]

The recitation of incantations is depicted as essential for accomplishing impor­ tant tasks, and these words of power must be sought out and then memorised. Such wisdom resides not only in the living tietäjä, but in the dead, and must be sought out and acquired, sometimes at the site of a grave. An important term mentioned in many epic songs and incantations, and also significant in the lament tradition (Stepanova 2012) is synty [birth]. In epic accounts, remembering and recounting a being’s origins through a poetic rendi­ tion gave one control over the being and allowed one to banish or control it. An unidentified singer performed an incantation for M. A. Castrén in the village of Akonlahti, Kontokki parish, Archangel Karelia in 1839. The 85-line text recounts the synty of fire. In the incantation’s account we find an elaborate history of the origin of fire. Struck originally in the sky by Ilmarinen and Väinämöinen, the flame or spark drops through various layers of the heavens down onto earth, where it burns a mother’s bosom. The woman whisks the flame into the lake Aluejärvi, where it is in turn consumed by a whitefish, which is in turn swallowed by a pike, which in turn is swallowed by a lake trout, which is finally swallowed by a red salmon. The salmon, beset by the flame burning in its gullet, calls for the hoeing and burning of a particular piece of land – a reference to the slash-andburn agriculture that nineteenth-century eastern Finns and Karelians continued to practice, a process that involved the use of fire centrally. Out of the ashes of a maggot burned in the field rise fine flax plants in a single night, which are har­ vested, soaked, and then woven into a net. Väinämöinen then uses the net to capture the salmon, and, while wearing a mitten of iron, is able to split open the salmon, releasing the lake trout, pike, whitefish, and at last the spark. The text closes with an image of the flame successfully domesticated and peaceful, tended like a baby rocking in a cradle: Siin on tulta tuuviteltu valkiaista vaaputeltu

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nenässä utusen niemen, siin on tulta tuuviteltu hihnoissa hopiaisissa: kätyt kultanen kulisi vaippa vaskinen vapisi tulta tuuvitessa. (Kuusi et al. 1977, 101) [There the fire was tended the flame coddled at the tip of a foggy headland there the fire was tended in a silver sling: the golden cradle creaked, the copper bedclothes rustled, as the fire was tended. (author’s translation)]

In his notes to this incantation, Matti Kuusi notes that it was recited as a treatment for burns. But it was also, he notes, useful in various other key ritual moments, as when lighting the first fire in a new home, (an important moment in Karelian wed­ dings), or igniting a bonfire at the time of the winter or summer solstice, or begin­ ning the work of burn-beat cultivation (Kuusi 1963; see also Siikala 2016, 524). Knowing and reciting the history of a being was a powerful way to gain control over it. Incantations recounted exactly – i.e., leaving no lines out, no matter how long the account – allowed one to control, cajole, or command an entity even as powerful and as unruly as fire (Siikala 2016, 149). Nineteenth-century tietäjät, collectors found, often knew numerous such involved and lengthy incantations. Sometimes they were willing to perform them for collectors, but sometimes they refused, keeping their powers to themselves, or subtly altering lines when dictat­ ing to a collector so that the synty would be of no avail to anyone else. A final important genre of musical remembering in the Balto-Finnic song world are musical performances known in Finnish as itkuvirret [crying verses, i.e., laments] (Honko 1974; Pentikäinen 1978; Nenola-Kallio 1982; Virtanen and DuBois 2000; Nenola 2002; DuBois 2006; Arukask 2011; Stepanova 2012). Per­ formed predominantly by women and often associated with particular ritual moments such as weddings or funerals, laments put into words highly stereo­ typed expressions of sorrow or frustration. Wedding laments with relatively fixed texts recount the sorrows of mother and bride, give counsel and warnings to the groom, praise and acknowledge new in-laws, and instruct the bride on her new role as the servant of her mother-in-law. They recall past singers’ experiences for the edification or reassurance of present listeners. Funerary laments employ stock images and turns of phrase in improvised performances that traditionally took place beside the deceased’s body or grave. Singers bemoan their vulnerability



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due to the loss of the deceased and express despair at continuing in life. Commu­ nicating across the border between the living and the dead in a medium that the dead can hear, such laments represented an important part of rituals intended to help the deceased move to a new status in the otherworld while retaining good relations with living relatives and community members. As Arukask (2011) and Stepanova (2012) show, lament traditions have persisted in some Balto-Finnic cultures down to the present day, and illustrate the striking conservatism and continuity of Balto-Finnic societies over time. The distinctive languages of Balto-Finnic communities seem to have acted as effective filters for slowing down the influx of new or competing ideas and styles from outside, ensuring that older patterns of behaviour and tried-and-true tradi­ tions remained viable from one generation to the next. These conservative forces were strongest particularly in the smallest Balto-Finnic languages, while larger languages like Finnish and Estonian – which today account for roughly 98 percent of all speakers of Balto-Finnic languages – provide less filtering of new ideas or trends. When comparing any of these communities with peoples speaking Scan­ dinavian languages, however, it may argued that all of the Balto-Finnic languages act as filters to one extent or another, creating different rates of diffusion of cul­ tural innovations into the eastern and western parts of the Nordic-Baltic region. When such linguistic barriers become combined with political and cultural disen­ franchisement, as was the case for most Balto-Finnic peoples in the medieval and pre-modern era, it is little wonder that ancient mythic and religious ideas survived better in these cultures than in more worldly and enfranchised neighbouring soci­ eties to the west of the Baltic Sea. For these reasons, the Balto-Finnic peoples offer rich data and insights for understandings of memory and remembering in the premodern Nordic-Baltic world. And while much research in Finnish and Esto­ nian has explored these traditions with care and perceptiveness, the work of com­ paring notions of remembering found in these traditions with counterparts from other cultures of the Nordic-Baltic region remains relatively unrealised. Much future research is needed to fully integrate these important sources of insight into an overarching understanding of pre-modern Nordic cultures of memory.

Works cited Primary sources Eesti regilaulude andmebaas. http://www.folklore.ee/regilaul/andmebaas/ (27 January 2017) Suomen Kansan Vanhat Runot. 1908–1948. 35 vols. http://www.skvr.fi/ (27 January 2017). Helsinki, 1999.

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Secondary sources Anttonen, Pertti. 2012. “Oral Traditions and the Making of the Finnish Nation.” In Folklore and Nationalism in Europe during the Long Nineteenth Century. Ed. Timothy Baycroft and David Hopkin. Leiden. 325–350.  Arukask, Madis. 2011. “Communicating across the Border: What Burial Laments Can Tell Us about Old Beliefs.” Estonian Journal of Archaeology 15.2: 130–150. DuBois, Thomas A. 1995. Finnish Folk Poetry and the Kalevala. New York. DuBois, Thomas A. 2006. Lyric, Meaning, and Audience in the Oral Tradition of Northern Europe. Notre Dame, IN. 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. Fewster, Derek. 2011. “‘Brave Step out of the Night of the Barrows’: Regenerating the Heritage of Early Medieval Finland.” In The Uses of the Middle Ages in Modern European States. History, Nationhood and the Search for Origins. Ed. R.J.W. Evans and Guy P. Marchal. Houndmills. 31–51. Haavio, Martti. 1952. Väinämöinen: Eternal Sage. FFC, 144. Porvoo. Haavio, Martti. 1967. Suomalainen mytologia. Porvoo. Harvilahti, Lauri. 1990. “The Production of Finnish Epic Poetry – Fixed Wholes or Creative Compositions?” Oral Tradition 7.1: 87–101. Hermann, Pernille. 2014. “Key Aspects of Memory and Remembering in Old Norse-Icelandic Literature.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 13–39. Honko, Lauri. 1974. “Balto-Finnic Lament Poetry.” Studia Fennica. Review of Finnish Linguistics and Ethnology 17: 9–61. Honko, Lauri, Senni Timonen and Michael Branch, eds.1993. The Great Bear: A Thematic Anthology of Oral Poetry in the Finno-Ugrian Languages. Helsinki. Krohn, Kaarle. 1915. Suomalaisten runojen uskonto. Helsinki. Kuusi, Matti. 1963. Suomen kirjallisuus I. Kirjoittamaton kirjallisuus. Helsinki. Kuusi, Matti, Keith Bosley and Michael Branch, eds. 1977. Finnish Folk Poetry: Epic. Helsinki. Nenola, Aili. 2002. Inkerin itkuvirret. Ingrian Laments. Helsinki. Nenola-Kallio, Aili. 1982. Studies in Ingrian Laments. FFC, 234. Helsinki. Lyytikäinen, Prijo. 2011. “The Kalevala: Inventing the National Cultural Memory.” In Ossian and National Epic. Ed. Gerald Bär and Howard Gaskill. Frankfurt am Main. 113–126. Oinas, Felix. 1985. Studies in Finnic Folklore: Homage to the Kalevala. Helsinki. Pentikäinen, Juha. 1978. Oral Repertoire and World-View. An Anthropological Study of Marina Takalo’s Life History. Helsinki. Siikala, Anna-Leena. 2002. Mythic Images and Shamanism: A Perspective on Kalevala Poetry. FFC, 280. Helsinki. Siikala, Anna-Leena. 2016. Itämerensuomalaisten mytologia. Helsinki. Stepanova, Eila. 2012. “Mythic Elements of Karelian Laments: The Case of Syndyzet and Spuassuzet.” In Mythic Discourses. Studies in Uralic Traditions. Ed. Frog, Anna-Leena Siikala and Eila Stepanova. Helsinki.



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Tarkka, Lotte. 2013. Songs of the Border People: Genre, Reflexivity, and Performance in Karelian Oral Poetry. FFC, 305. Helsinki. Tedre, Ülo. 1969–1974. Eesti rahvalaulud. Antologia I–IV. Tallinn. Timonen, Senni. 2004. Minä, tila, tunne. Näkökulmia kalevalamittaiseen kansanlyrikkaan. Helsinki. Valk, Ülo. 2000. “Ex ovo omnia. Where Does the Balto-Finnic Cosmogony Originate? The Etiology of an Etiology.” Oral Tradition 15.1: 145–158. Virtanen, Leea and Thomas A. DuBois. 2000. Finnish Folklore. Studia Fennica Folkloristica, 9. Helsinki. Wilson, William A. 1976. Folklore and Nationalism in Modern Finland.  Bloomington, IN.

Power Envisioning the northern past

Birgitta Wallace

II: 60 Canadian Perspectives 1 Introduction Discovery of the L’Anse aux Meadows site One day in September 1960, a tall Norwegian was set ashore on Max Anderson’s wharf in the small fishing village of L’Anse aux Meadows on the northernmost tip of Newfoundland’s Great Northern Peninsula (Max Anderson pers. comm.). The man was the Norwegian writer and explorer Helge Ingstad. He was looking for ruins of turf buildings left by Norse explorers about 960 years earlier in a land they named Vinland. It looked as if ancient memories of lands afar may have finally become transfixed into physical reality. At least Helge Ingstad thought that he had found Leifr Eiríksson’s settlement in Vinland. After seven summers of excavations led by his wife, Anne Stine Ingstad, between 1961 and 1968 (Ingstad and Ingstad 1986), he felt he could prove it. Others were not so certain. For more than a century others had made similar claims and none had been supported by evidence. In this case, however, continued work by Parks Canada 1973–1976 (Wallace 2009–2010, 2011, 2012, 2014) proved that the site was indeed Norse and dated from the early eleventh century. Helge Ingstad insisted that the major component that led him to L’Anse aux Meadows was his interpretation of the sagas. Other factors probably played a greater role. The area had already been proposed as the site of Vinland (Munn 1914; Tanner 1941). An archaeological excavation in 1956 by the Danish archa­ eologist Jorgen Meldgaard (Diary 1956; Madsen and Appelt 2010) was crucial. Meldgaard’s work, which included interviews with the locals about his desire to find turf-covered rectangular ‘mounds’ attracted attention, and stories of it travelled throughout the region. Thus, when Helge Ingstad appeared with the same questions, the locals were ready and led him to the remains of the buildings visible on the site (R. Elliott, Sam Decker pers. comm.).

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-096

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2 Case study L’Anse aux Meadows as an archaeological site Scrutinising L’Anse aux Meadows in light of memory studies, one is invariably shuttled into the Vinland sagas, Grænlendinga saga [the saga of the Green­landers] and Eiríks saga rauða [Erik the Red’s saga] in two versions, Hauksbók [Hauk’s book] and Skálholtbók [book of Skálholt] (Rafn 1837; Reeves 1890; Jansson 1945) and multiple questions as to their nature. The search for Vinland has generally been guided by efforts to match land marks and specific resources found in the sagas with geographical locations. The futility of this procedure is evident in the results: site locations pinpointed range from Chesapeake Bay in the south to Lab­ rador in the north. This study of the Vinland sagas has proceeded in the opposite direction, looking at them through the lens of archaeology. The first step was to look at the following aspects of the L’Anse aux Meadows site: –– The date of the events –– Purpose of the settlement –– Type of participants, their number, gender, and social status –– Buildings –– Activities –– Resources –– Geography –– Burials –– Length of settlement The conclusion has been that L’Anse aux Meadows was an early eleventhcentury base for extensive explorations and exploitation of resources located further south of there, probably in northeastern New Brunswick, a distance of about 1000 km from L’Anse aux Meadows. Among the resources brought back to L’Anse aux Meadows were hardwoods, such as linden and elm. Luxury foods (to the Norse) normally imported into northern Scandinavia, such as walnuts, were also brought back to the site in the form of butternuts, a type of walnut native to North America. The buildings were solid structures, built to withstand winter. The occupants were mostly men, with some women present for household main­ tenance. The buildings reflected the social status of the occupants, which in turn mirrored the mother colony. At the top were chieftains as shown by a truly large hall of the size and complexity reserved for chieftains presiding over a large work force. A second hall, smaller but unusually large, also reflected elite status when compared to Icelandic properties (Orri Vésteinsson 2004, 74–75). A third hall, somewhat smaller and simpler in layout, reflected a more middle-class resident.



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Flanking one of the halls was a small house of the kind used by subservient occu­ pants. Finally, a small, rather miserable hut clearly designed for humans, would have been the abode of people lowest on the social rung such as enslaved people (Wallace 2011, 457–458). Petrographic analysis of jasper firestrikers associated with the buildings showed that Greenland Norse lived in the largest hall and that at least some occupants from the other buildings were Icelanders (Smith 2000). Activities on the site revealed few signs of normal family life. Instead they were almost exclusively well-coordinated forms of work: carpentry, iron manu­ facture, smithing, and boat repair. Food sources had been predominantly sea mammals and cod. There was no evidence of livestock, the chief economic basis in Norse society, either in form of structures, food bone, or flora disturbances. Signs of a slightly warmer climate between c. AD 850 and 1200 could be observed in the pollen record (Davis et al. 1988), findings in line with those elsewhere in the North Atlantic during the Medieval Warming Period (Patterson 2010; Ogilvie et al. 2000, 39–40). Five native occupations spanning a period of about 4,800 years intermittently occupied the site before and after the Norse. There is no certain indication of their presence at the time of the Norse, but there were people living in nearby areas. The Norse occupation was short, no more than a decade. In spite of intensive searches, no burials were found, another indication of the short life of the post.

Vinland of the sagas Using the same analytical categories to dissect the Vinland sagas, one finds that the purpose of settlement was not colonisation but exploration of new areas and their resources. It was not a place to stay, but a base from which to bring back goods useful to the Greenland colony. The participants were men chosen “for their strength and height” (“ok valdi hann lið at afli ok vexti”, Grænlendinga saga, Ch. 6). They were accompanied by just a few women. Leaders were from the Greenland and Icelandic aristocracy, occasionally accompanied by their wives. The leaders also brought employees with special skills such as Þorhallr the Hunter (veiðimaðr) or domestic slaves such as Tyrkir the German (Suðrmaðr). The number of people coming would have been about 30 per ship. Buildings were at first temporary, then rebuilt into big halls. The chief activity was to harvest lumber while taking note of land marks, game and fish, and grapes. The most profitable resources were wild grapes and the trees on which they grew. All the expeditions took place shortly after AD 1000. The occupation was short, suc­ cessive expeditions lasting 2 to 3 years over a period of 10 to 15 years. The only burial mentioned is that of Þorvaldr. It may have been temporary as an expedition

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was launched (unsuccessfully) to recover his body and bring it back to Green­land. Eiríks saga rauða identifies two bases, the winter station in Straumfjörðr in northern Vinland and the summer camp Hóp in the south. Wild grapes are found near this camp. In Grænlendinga saga, the two locations have been conflated into one (Crozier 2003, 333; Wallace 2003, 211–212), an idea proposed originally by Þórhallur Vilmundarson (Jones 1986, 122). In Eiríks saga rauða, the role of Leifr Eiríksson has been diminished to one garbled paragraph and Þorfinnr Karlsefni has replaced him as the leader. The four successful expeditions chronicled in Grænlendinga saga have been combined into one mega-expedition led by him, with his wife Guðríðr at his side (for the political reasons behind the change see Ólafur Halldórsson 2001, 242).

Memory of L’Anse aux Meadows behind the Vinland sagas? Although L’Anse aux Meadows has some similarities to Viking winter camps in France and Ireland, it has just as many differences. The only parallel is to be found in the Vinland sagas, especially in the Hauksbók version of Eiríks saga rauða. The similarity to Straumfjörðr is too close not to be real. Even the geo­ graphical landmarks of Straumfjörðr fit L’Anse aux Meadows. There is a point extending into the sea with islands beyond it. The Strait of Belle Isle looks very much like a fjord since one cannot see that it is open at the other end. More strik­ ing yet, the mouth of the Strait has a particular set of ferocious multidirectional currents, swirling around an island, Belle Isle, in the middle. As the caretaker of L’Anse aux Meadows once said, “this is the only place you can see the same iceberg come around twice!” The archaeological evidence also shows us where to find Hóp. The closest habitat for linden trees and butternuts is northeastern New Brunswick, and both grow in the same areas as wild grapes, vitis riparia. This is also an area noted for its sandbars protecting the river estuaries, and abundance of tidal lagoons, hóp, many with rivers emptying into them. The memory recorded is not perfect, but all the major points are there. It forms an illustration of the process of memory transmission. Events are altered according to the interest of the audience and the narrator’s own needs (Helgi Þór­ laksson 2001); they are tweaked over time (Gísli Sigurðsson 2004, 29). Messages recorded “are fusions of several earlier messages” (Vansina 1985, 31) and “expan­ sion or contradictions, omission or addition of detail are common (Vansina 1985, 53). The very fact that the Grænlendinga saga and Eiríks saga rauða differ in details is a clear indication that the memory of them underwent changes over the 200–300 years before they were committed to writing. The “principle of selectiv­



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ity and reduction […] is integral to any transmission of memory (Hermann 2014, 32). Gísli Sigurðsson’s 2004 seminal The Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition. Discourse on Method points out that oral performances were directed to particular audiences and would therefore vary from time to time. A story can be shifted from one family to another (Gísli Sigurðsson 2004,194) and, like Sturla Þordarson in Landnámabók, the compiler of Eiríks saga rauða “uses his knowl­ edge of the past to reinforce the influence of his family and magnify himself and his family at the expense of contemporary competitors” (Gísli Sigurðsson 2015, 119; author’s translation). Vansina reminds us (1985, 20–21, 31) that group traditions can be created quite rapidly after the events […] After this […] such accounts undergo further change. After this they become shorter […] slowly reshaped and streamli­ ned […] Collective memory simplifies by fusing analogues, personalities or situations into one […] The process continues to the point that most accounts are lost or fused into each other beyond recognition…messages recorded are fusions of several earlier messages.

Simplification is a trait generally present in memory, and it is everywhere present in the Vinland sagas in the form of conflations. Momentous details such as native reactions to a Norse iron axe are plentiful, but more mundane situations doc­ umented at L’Anse aux Meadows such as iron manufacture and the repair of a small “afterboat” escape transmission. Memory techniques such as the creation of images of various locations and “mapping” of the landscape evident can be detected. The memory focuses on “selected points in the past, it […] condenses it into figures of a symbolic kind to which memory attached itself” (Assmann 2011, 36–41). Descriptive place names such as Straumfjörðr and Hóp are examples. Hóp itself is likely to be a conflation of several areas visited in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, more so than Straumfjörðr which was a more substantial and permanent base. Assmann (1995, 127) states that collective memory does not extend beyond 80–100 years, referring to the timespan discussed by Herodotus. This may be true of societies evolving as quickly as the Greek and Romans entering literacy, but not necessarily societies with relatively stable cultural patterns. Here we are dealing with a 200-year period. Memories can indeed be passed on for that time span and more. The Arctic explorer Charles Francis Hall encountered Inuit in Baffin Island in 1861 who told him of visits by the 1576–1578 Frobisher expeditions (Fitzhugh and Olin 1992, 17–21). When a Parks Canada underwater archaeological team was searching the Arctic for Franklin’s ships Erebus and Terror, which were aban­ doned in 1848, Inuit with traditional knowledge led them to the area in 2014 and 2016 (pc.gc.ca/en/culture/franklin/inuit). Sometimes the event is remembered, but the action is transferred to another time and a person of note, as was the case of the sinking of the Roskilde Viking ships in the eleventh century, which oral tradition had tied to the 1353–1412 reign of Queen Margrethe I (Olsen and

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Crumlin Pedersen 1969, 10–11). This may be especially true of rare, unexpected events such as travel and encounters with people of another ilk. “Travel brings one renown…” it “may also bring about changes in one’s previous identity in terms of helping one climb a social ladder, gain wealth, and achieve greater reco­ gnition” (Zilmer 2006, 5). Sverrir Jakobsson, in his “Vinland and Wishful Thing: Medieval and Modern Fiction” (2012), concludes that while the discoveries at L’Anse aux Meadows may be exciting, “their value for the study of the Winland narratives does not reach much further”. The crucial component of his argument is that the medieval world knew only of three continents and could not imagine a new one. But Columbus, too, knew of only three continents and was unaware of where he had landed. It is true that there is nothing in the sagas that infers that the Norse believed that they had arrived on a new continent. This does not nullify the reality of their discove­ ries any more than those of Columbus. In our eyes, Greenland is in the western hemisphere, but the Norse did not see it as such. Greenland was beyond Iceland, and Vinland, no less real, was simply a land one could reach from western Green­ land by way of Helluland and Markland. After three hundred years of colonies in Greenland, knowledge of lands to the west can be taken for granted. That the route to these lands led not only south but also west can be seen from continued travels to Markland such as the 1347 Icelandic Annals note of a Greenland ship that had been to Markland (Rafn 1837, 264–265). The fact that there is a physical site dated to the same time as the Vinland voyages and that it so closely corres­ ponds to the sagas’ Vinland seems too coincidental not to be taken seriously.

L’Anse aux Meadow’s place on Vinland maps The location of Vinland as well as the Norse colonies in Greenland became an issue in the sixteenth and seventeenth century for the Danish government. It was hoped that they could support Danish claims to these areas (Gad 1970, Chs. 6–7). Although medieval Greenland and Iceland did not use cartography in a modern meaning, there may well have been “mental maps” (Gísli Sigurðsson 2008, 61–63). Memories of L’Anse aux Meadows may have bearing on the Sigurður Stefánsson (Skálholt) map of 1570 (or 1590 – Storm 1887, 321) and Resen map of 1605 (Steenstrup 1889). The Sigurður Stefánsson map is only known via a 1669 copy by Bishop Þorður Þorláksson, who attributes it to Sigurður Stefánsson, a teacher at Skálholt (Storm 1887, 321). Storm dismisses it as a sixteenth-century uninformed interpretation of geographical locations spelled out in Eiríks saga rauða. He says (1887, 324) that the interpretation is impossible because it places Vinland in Newfoundland. We now know that Storm was wrong. The Resen map



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has been attributed to the Danish Bishop Hans Poulsen Resen. It was made in 1605 “after a map made a hundred years ago” (Seaver 2004, 250) superimposed on contemporary cartography in preparation for a Danish expedition searching for the Old Norse Eastern Settlement (Gad 1970, 220). Both maps clearly depict Newfoundland’s Northern Peninsula as Promontorium Winlandiæ, made even clearer on the Resen map by the position of the Gulf of St Lawrence south of what is Newfoundland. At that time, the existence of the L’Anse aux Meadows site was not known, yet these maps pinpoint the location.

L’Anse aux Meadows commemorated The authentication of L’Anse aux Meadows stirred both national and interna­ tional pride, quickly leading to protection and various forms of commemoration. The Government of Newfoundland planned almost immediately to make the site a provincial Historic Park and helped to sponsor the excavations. In 1966 the site was enclosed with a steel net fence and a caretaker was appointed. In 1968 the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada designated the site a National Historic Site of Canada; in 1978, UNESCO placed the site on their list of World Heritage Sites, the first site ever to be so distinguished. To some extent these com­ memorations reflected public fascination with Vikings and the mystery of legend­ ary Vinland, in spite of the fact that in the general opinion, the real Vinland was still to be found. There was also a certain appeal in that it represented the first Europeans to enter North America. Many individuals, especially those with Scan­ dinavian affiliation, cherished the thought that the site provided final proof that the Norse had preceded Christopher Columbus. For various reasons, the Vikings have been of even greater fascination in the United States than in Canada. The fact that the site is located in what is now Canada is sometimes deplored in the United States. During the Millennium celebration of Norse arrival in North America, a large exhibit Vikings – The North Atlantic Saga was prepared by the Smithsonian Institution in cooperation with Parks Canada and other institutions. The original text saying that L’Anse aux Meadows is located in Newfoundland, Canada, was changed to say “Northeastern North America”. Although the site has become a matter of national pride in Iceland, the country with the greatest interest in the commemoration of L’Anse aux Meadows is Norway, natural perhaps as the discoverer and first excavator of the site were Norwegian, and Helge Ingstad was already nationally famous as an explorer. Interest has, however, gone beyond that. In the opinion of many Norwegians (and to the consternation of many Icelanders), Leifr Eiríksson has been incorporated as a national hero, in spite of the fact that he was born in Iceland and raised in

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Greenland, with a mother probably of Irish descent (Gísli Sigurðsson 2008, 73). Be that as it may, L’Anse aux Meadows and Leifr Eiríksson have become great national symbols. In 2002, King Harald V and Queen Sonja of Norway gave, as a gift to the people of Canada, a bronze statue by the Norwegian sculptor Nils Sigurd Aas featuring the heads of Anne Stine and Helge Ingstad, elevated on a high plinth to be erected by the Parks Canada Visitor Centre. An inscription reads Anne Stine and Helge Ingstad De opdaget vikingernes Amerika (They discovered the America of the Vikings) Another copy of this monument is placed outside the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo. Thanks to the Leif Ericson Foundation of Seattle, Washington, a taller than life bronze statue of Leifr Eiríksson was also erected by the main wharf in the village of L’Anse aux Meadows in 2013 to greet visitors arriving from the sea. The statue is a replica of one on top of the hill behind Leifr Eiríksson’s Brattahlíð in Greenland.

Financial impact and millennial celebrations The site has had a great financial impact on Newfoundland, for employment, money spent on the site, and the 30,000 visitors who now arrive yearly. It has also spawned another local attraction, Norstead, a ‘Viking’ village imagined to be what L’Anse aux Meadows could have developed into if settlement had con­ tinued. Celebration of the millennium of the Viking entry into North America was wide-spread in the year 2000, leading to several exhibits, with L’Anse aux Meadows sharply in the focus. Most notable was Vikings – the North Atlantic Saga prepared by the Smithsonian Institution and Canadian and Scandinavian institu­ tions (Fitzhugh and Ward 2000). During the first meeting of the board of cura­ tors (of whom the author was one) for the Newfoundland Museum exhibit Full Circle: First Contact, Vikings and Skrælings in Newfoundland and Labrador, the question was: What was the surviving impact of the Norse settlement in New­ foundland? It left no traces among the native inhabitants, either physical or in stories of memory. In the Old World, all that remained were a few short written reminiscences. The only significance the board could think of was that for the first time since the evolution of humans, people had fully encircled the world, slowly moving out of Africa in many directions and finally coming face to face: Full Circle. In 2002, a bronze archway with human figures side by side created by Swedish sculptor Richard Brixel and Newfoundland’s Luben Boykov was erected on the L’Anse aux Meadows side to emphasise this message.



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Works cited Primary sources Antiquitates Americanæ sive scriptores septentrionalies rerum ante-columbianarum America. Samling af de i Nordens Oldskrifter indeholdte Efterretninger om de gamle Nordboers Opdagelsereiser til Amerika fra det 10e til det 14de Aarhundrede. Ed. Carl Christian Rafn. Copenhagen, 1837. Eiríks saga rauða. In Eyrbyggia saga. ÍF, 4. 193–237. Eyrbyggia saga. Brands þáttr ǫrva. Eiríks saga rauða. Grœnlendinga saga. Grœnlendinga þáttr. Ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson and Matthías Þórðarson. ÍF, 4. Reykjavík, 1957 [1935]. Grœnlendinga saga. In Eyrbyggia saga. ÍF, 4. 239–269. Jansson, Sven B. F. Sagorna om Vinland. Handskrifterna till Erik den rödes saga. Kungliga Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademiens handlingar, 60:1. Stockholm, 1945. Meldgaard, Jørgen. “Diary July 20-August 16, 1956 for travels in Labrador and Newfoundland.” Meldgaard-arkivet, Nationalmuseum. Copenhagen, 1956. Reeves, Arthur Middleton. Finding of Vinland the Good. The History of the Icelandic Discovery of America, edited and translated from the earliest records. London, 1890.

Secondary sources Assmann, Jan. 1995. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” New German Critique 65: 125–133. Assmann, Jan. 2011. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization. Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. Cambridge and New York. [German orig. 1992] Crozier, Alan. 2003. “Arguments against the Vinland Hypothesis.” In Vinland Revisited. The Norse World at the Turn of the First Millennium. Ed. Shannon Lewis Simpson. St. John’s, NL. 331–337. Davis, Anthony M., John H. McAndrews and Birgitta Wallace. 1988. “Paleoenvironment and the Archaeological Record at the L’Anse aux Meadows Site, Newfoundland.” Geoarchaeology: An International Journal 3.1: 53–64. Fitzhugh, William W. and Jacqueline S. Olin, eds. 1992. Archaeology of the Frobisher Voyages. Washington, DC. Fitzhugh, William W. and Elisabeth I. Ward, eds. 2000. Vikings. The North Atlantic Saga. Washington, DC. The Franklin Expedition. www.pc.gc.ca/en/culture/franklin/inuit. (September 2017) Gad, Finn. 1970. The History of Greenland. Vol. 1. Trans. Ernst Dupont. London. Gísli Sigurðsson. 2004. The Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition. A Discourse on Method. Publications of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature, 2. Trans. Nicholas Jones. Cambridge, MA. [Icelandic orig. 2002] Gísli Sigurðsson. 2008. The Vinland Sagas. The Icelandic Sagas about the First Documented Voyages across the North Atlantic. Trans. Keneva Kunz. Introd. and Notes Gísli Sigurðsson. London.

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Gísli Sigurðsson. 2015. “Vad är det för märkligt med islänningasagorna?” Thule. Kungl. Skytteanska Samfundets Årsbok 2015: 106–120. Helgi Þorláksson. 2001. “The Vinland Sagas in Contemporary Light.” In Approaches to Vinland. A Conference on the Written and Archaeological Sources for the Norse Settlements in the North-Atlantic Region and Exploration of America, held at the Nordic House, Reykjavik 9–11 August 1999. Ed. Þórunn Sigurðardóttir and Andrew Wawn. Sigurðar Nordal Studies, 4. Reykjavík. 63–77. Hermann, Pernille. 2014. “Key Aspects of Memory and Remembering in Old Norse-Icelandic Literature.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 13–39. Ingstad, Anne Stine and Helge Ingstad. 1986. The Norse Discovery of America. Vol. I: Excavations at L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland 1961–1968. Vol. II: The Historical Background and the Evidence of the Norse Settlement Discovered in Newfoundland. Oslo. Jones, Gwyn. 1986. The Norse Atlantic Saga. Being the Norse Voyages of Discovery and Settlement to Iceland, Greenland, and North America. New and enlarged edition, with contributions by Robert McGhee, Thomas H. McGovern and colleagues, and Birgitta Linderoth Wallace. Oxford and New York. Madsen, Christian Koch and Martin Appelt. 2010. Meldgaard’s Vinland Vision. Copenhagen. Munn, William. 1914. The Wineland Voyages. The Location of Helluland, Markland and Vinland from the Icelandic sagas. St. John’s, NL. Ogilvie, Astrid E.J., L.K. Barlows and A.E. Jennings. 2000. “North Atlantic Climate c. AD 1000. Millennial Reflections on the Viking Discoveries of Iceland, Greenland and North America.” Weather 55.2: 34–45. Olsen, Olaf and Ole Crumlin-Pedersen. 1969. Fem vikingeskibe fra Roskilde Fjord. Roskilde. Ólafur Halldórsson. 2001. “The Vinland Sagas.” In Approaches to Vinland. Ed. Andrew Wawn and Þórunn Sigurðardóttir. Reykjavik. 39–51. Orri Vésteinsson, 2004. “Icelandic farmhouse excavations. Field Methods.” Archaeologica Islandica 3: 71–100. Patterson, William et al. 2010. “Two Millennia of North Atlantic Seasonality and Implications for Norse Colonies.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107.12: 5306–5310. Seaver, Kirsten A. 2004. Maps, Myths, and Men – The Story of the Vínland Map. Stanford, CA. Smith, Kevin P. 2000. “Jasper Cores from L’Anse aux Meadows.” P.217 In Vikings. The North Atlantic Saga. Ed. William W. Fitzhugh and Elisabeth I. Ward. Washington, DC. 217. Steenstrup, K.J.V. 1889. “Om Østerbygden.” Meddelelser om Grønland 9: 1–51. Storm, Gustaf. 1887. “Studier over Vinlandsreiserne, Vinlands geografi og ethnografi.” Aarbøger for Nordisk Oldkyndighed og Historie. Copenhagen. 293–372. Sverrir Jakobsson. 2012. “Vinland and Wishful Thinking. Medieval and Modern Fantasies.” Canadian Journal of History 47.3: 493–514. Tanner, Väinö. 1941. “De gamla nordbornas Helluland, Markland och Vinland.” Budkavlen 1: 1–73. Vansina, Jan. 1985. Oral Tradition as History. Madison, WI. Wallace, Birgitta Linderoth. 2003. “L’Anse aux Meadows and Vinland, An Abandoned Experiment.” In Contact, Continuity and Collapse. The Norse Colonisation of the North Atlantic. Ed. James Barrett. Turnhout. 207–238. Wallace, Birgitta. 2009–2010. “L’Anse aus Meadows, Leif Eriksson’s Home in Vinland.” Journal of the North Atlantic 2, special issue: 118–129.



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Wallace, Birgitta. 2011. “L’Anse aux Meadows. Different Disciplines, Divergent Views.” In Viking Settlements and Viking Society. Ed. Svavar Sigmundsson. Reykjavík. 448–468. Wallace, Birgitta. 2012. Westward Vikings. The L’Anse aux Meadows Saga. Rev. ed. St. John’s, NL. Wallace, Birgitta. 2014. “Colonizers and Exploiters. The Norse in Vinland.” In From West to East. Current Approaches in Medieval Archaeology. Ed. Scott Stull. Newcastle upon Tyne. 40–54. Zilmer, Kristel. 2006. “Icelandic Sagas and the Narrative Tradition of Travelogue.” “In The Fantastic in Old Norse/Icelandic Literature and Sagas and the British Isles, especially Northumbria. Proceedings of the 13th International Saga Conference. Durham. http://www.dur.ac.uk/medieval.www/sagaconf/zilmer.htm. (February 2009)

Stephen A. Mitchell

II: 61 U.S. Perspectives 1 Introduction In several television appearances soon after writing the Preface to the Smithso­ nian Museum’s exhibit catalogue, Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga, former First Lady Hillary Clinton drew on the public’s re-imagination of history’s most infa­ mous raiders, traders, pillagers, and rapists as dashing adventurers when she noted that her first impression of ‘Bill’ Clinton, the former President of the United States, was that, “He looked like a Viking” she said. “He had this big, bushy, brownish-reddish beard, and longish hair, and he looked very imposing” (ABC News 2003). In making this association, Mrs. Clinton was far from creating a tra­ dition, but rather following one, for already long before, it had become a custom to underscore the purported tie – sometimes merely analogic and spiritual, some­ times more direct – between New World political leaders and ‘the Vikings’. Among such connections to the Viking experience is ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt’s oftnoted fondness for that world, especially as recast by such purveyors of Nordic culture in the Americas as the poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In his auto­ biography, Roosevelt recalls that he was “absorbed” by Longfellow’s “The Saga of King Olaf” (Roosevelt 1913, 16–17); moreover, his reputation on this topic was such that when in 1904, John Hay, his secretary of state, sent the twenty-sixth president of the U.S. “the manuscript of a Norse saga by William Morris,” Hay’s cover note begins, “Dear Theodore: In your quality of Viking this Norse saga should belong to you […]” (Roosevelt 1913, 385). No writer, however, develops this kind of association with the pre-modern North quite as far as does the genealogist Albert Welles, who, mimicking the practice of medieval kings, argues in 1879 that George Washington, “Planter, General and Commander-in-Chief of the American armies, and first President of the United States”, was a descendent of the Nordic god, Óðinn (Welles 1879; see Øverland 2000, 58, 207; Seale 2017). Appealing to the nation of immigrants that was his audience, Welles draws heavily on migration narratives, including Snorri Sturluson on Óðinn and the Æsir, as well as those of Óðinn’s descendants, the Scandinavians, possessing a history as brave as that of the Romans, as poetic as that of the Greeks – a nation that has controlled the world’s history in many things and at many times, and whose achie­ vements in war and in letters, are worthy the most heroic age of Rome and the most fini­ shed period of Greece; a nation whose philosophy outran their age and anticipated results

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that have been slowly occurring ever since. This reference can be true of but one people, the Norsemen, the dwellers in Scandinavia, who lived as heroes, lords and conquerors; who, sailing out of the ice and desolation in which they were born and nurtured, conque­ red England, Scotland and Ireland, ravaged Brittany and Normandy, discovered and colo­ nized Iceland and Greenland, and crossed the Atlantic in their crazy barks and discovered this very continent long before Columbus; anchored in Vineland Sound, and left a monu­ ment behind them; and wheresoever they went they were lords and rulers (Welles 1879, iv–v).

2 Case study: Vinland, Vikings and foundation myths How are we to understand this urge to find – or invent – means of connecting powerful New World political figures to the Vikings, and what sort of meaning do such efforts have for the nature of memory in the context of North America’s con­ struction of its purported past? In 2007, Hayden White remarked in his review of the English translation of Paul Ricœur’s Memory, History and Forgetting – chan­ nelling in important ways the thinking of Nordic scholars on the Nordic case (e.g. Meulengracht Sørensen 1993 [1977], 108) – that “In many respects, therefore, historical knowledge is disciplined memory, based on some extra historical cri­ terion of what can be legitimately remembered and, indeed, what ought to be remembered and what ought to be forgotten by members of the community.” It is not difficult to see that the same “disciplined memory” impulse can also lead to the creation, the fabulation even, of invented memories. How do New World residents and institutions remember events that happened mainly in their collec­ tive imaginations and how do these collective memories shape their perceptions of nationhood? Two key parallel streams of thinking contribute to this valorisation of the purported Viking past in North America: an early view from the established, elite ‘Yankee’ world, and a later one, a perspective formulated within the Nordic immi­ grant community. It is important to note that there is, of course, a genuine medi­ eval textual history well-covered in a variety of scholarly works (e.g. Seaver 1996; Barnes 2001; Gísli Sigurðsson 2004 [2002] ), as well as archaeological evidence of Scandinavian activity in the New World (e.g. Ingstad 1965, 1969), but there also exist a variety of more fanciful variations on these facts (e.g. Holand 1940), which together with such purported monuments as Dighton Rock and Newport Tower, offer what one authority has called “the wild side of North American prehistory” (Williams 1991).

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Fig. 1: Dighton Rock, identified by Carl Christian Rafn as bearing the inscription, “Thorfinn and his 151 companions took possession of this land.” Here in 1853, with Seth Eastman, an army officer then attached to the Office of Indian Affairs

Although accounts of the medieval Nordic materials were available already in eighteenth-century translations into Latin, French and English (e.g. Thormodus Torfæus 1705; Mallet 1756, 1770), among the earliest U.S. treatments is History of the Northmen (1831), by the American chargé d’affaires to Denmark (1827–1835), Henry Wheaton, a sober treatment of the topic and its source materials. The publication soon thereafter of Rafn’s Antiquitates Americanæ, with its various suggestive interpretations of possible ‘Viking’ sites, such as Dighton Rock (see fig. 1, on which, see Rafn 1837, 355–91), offered further possibilities: presumably encouraged by this volume, for example, the former chaplain of the New York State Senate, Asahel Davis, lectured widely, promoting the reality of pre-Colum­ bian Nordic contacts with the New World, lectures apparently so popular that the resulting printed versions appeared in no fewer than thirteen editions between 1839 and 1845 (e.g. Davis 1839).



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The key figure in both creating an appetite for Vikings and fixing their place in New World consciousness is undoubtedly the most popular American poet of his day, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who had made lengthy visits to Copen­ hagen and Stockholm in the 1830s, and was a great admirer of the Nordic world and its poetry, both ancient and modern (cf. Hilen 1947; Moyne 1963). He had, for example, studied Old Norse and may have offered courses in it on his return to Harvard. Inspired by his knowledge of that world, Longfellow reworked familiar saga matter into poems with titles like King Olaf’s Christmas, The Building of the Long Serpent, and King Svend of the Forked Beard. Perhaps his most profound effect on American thinking and self-perceptions came when he tied together his understanding of the Viking experience, several matters in local history, and his poetic imagination, writing in his journal in 1840: I have been hard at work – for the most part wrapped up in my own dreams […] prepared for the press another original ballad, which has been lying by me some time. It is called “The Skeleton in Armor,” and is connected with the old Round Tower at Newport. This skeleton in armor really exists. It was dug up near Fall River, where I saw it some two years ago (when returning from Newport). I suppose it to be the remains of one of the old Northern searovers, who came to this country in the tenth century. Of course I make the tradition myself; and I think I have succeeded in giving the whole a Northern air.

Throughout the 1800s, the idea of Viking presence in what had become the U.S. wove its way into national debates about such weighty topics as Abolition and Women’s Suffrage (Melton 2017). Toward the end of the century, the fanci­ ful deductions of the successful businessman, and Harvard chemistry profes­ sor, Eben Norton Horsford, in which he identified the legendary ‘Viking city’ of Norumbega as having been situated along the Charles River in the Boston-Cam­ bridge area, further cemented the association of the ‘ancient Northmen’ with high-status Yankee turf (e.g. Horsford and Clement 1890). Various monuments, statues and plaques in the area continue to celebrate this theory (e.g. fig. 2). And in the context of the growing American sense of a Viking history, it is no small thing that Horsford’s ideas became popular shortly before the successful sailing from Norway of the replica Gokstad ship to the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exhibi­ tion. With the significant increase in Nordic emigration to America from the midnineteenth-century on, a different set of issues arose, albeit also focusing on the Nordic past and the New World: if ‘Yankee’ interest in Vikings and Vinland largely derived from historical curiosity, specifically about the early role of northern Euro­ peans in the New World, the situation of the Scandinavian immigrant community was somewhat different, since rather than shaping the past to fit a present, their dilemma concentrated more on using the past as a relatively narrow means of

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Fig. 2: Statue of Leif Erikson on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, Massachusetts, erected in 1887



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situating their place within the American tapestry. It is thus telling that in his autobiography, the Norwegian-American educator and professor at the University of Wisconsin, Rasmus B. Anderson, recounts that in the 1860s he was accused of being too proud to be Norwegian and of wanting Norwegians to be “yankeef­ ied” (1915, 85–86). Responding by delving into Heimskringla and other Old Norse texts, he publishes America Not Discovered by Columbus, featuring adventurous ‘Norwegian’ sailors, in 1874. Given that 1888 marked the 250-year anniversary of the beginning of the Swedish colonial experiment in Delaware, the circumstances of the SwedishAmerican community were of a different sort. Indeed, already in 1876, in antici­ pation of the centennial celebrations of the U.S., Johan Alfred Enander, a leading Swedish-American, and in time the U.S. ambassador to Denmark, wrote the first of a series of Swedish-language histories on the States, notably published in Chicago (Enander 1874). The effect of Enander’s narrative chronograph of tenthcentury Viking explorers and seventeenth-century Swedish settlers was, as Ulf Beijbom (1980) notes, to give the impression that, like the Indians, the Scandi­ navians too were native Americans (cf. Blanck 1997; Øverland 2000; as well as Enander 1893). One effect of all this attention on ‘Vikings’ in the New World was that in the new century, novels and new media took up this relationship with alacrity. No such work was more famous than I de dage –. Fortælling om norske nykommere i Amerika by the Norwegian-American novelist Ole Rølvaag (1924) [In those days. A story of Norwegian newcomers in America], but better known in its 1927 Englishlanguage version, Giants in the Earth. A Saga of the Prairie. From its opening para­ graphs – in a section evocatively entitled “The Land-Taking” – where Norwegian settlers in a small caravan of wagons move silently through “waves” of prairie grass into the unexplored Dakota territory, this ‘saga’ makes clear that it wants to be understood as an immigrant experience cast in images drawn from Icelandic saga writing, especially stories of the Icelandic and Greenlandic landnám [settle­ ment, lit. land-take], as well as from Genesis, from whose verses (6:4) both the Norwegian and English titles of the novel take their names – especially the claim that from these giants descend “mighty men […] men of renown”. But the award-winning Giants in the Earth was hardly the first American work to engage in this kind of homage, although it was clearly the most successful. Earlier romantic recastings of the Vinland saga materials had been forged by the Swedish-American novelist O.A. Liljencrantz – The Thrall of Leif the Lucky. A Story of Viking Days (1902); The Vinland Champions (1904); Randvar the Songsmith. A Romance of Norumbega (1906) – texts that gave the public validating renditions of their ancient history. In her acknowledgements in the first of these books, Liljencrantz predictably thanks Rafn, Anderson and Horsford, among others, for

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helping her gain access to “the heroic Viking-age, – rough and brutal, if you will, yet […] with such purity and truth and power as befits the boyhood of the mighty Anglo-Saxon race”. The Thrall of Leif the Lucky. A Story of Viking Days, featuring its hero bringing Christianity to America, was to have a prominent role in fixing this foundation myth when it was recast in the new media environment of film in 1928, far from the last film to present Vikings in an early American matrix (see especially Hermann 2017). In considering a sixteenth-century silver vase depicting scenes of the Spanish Conquest, Carlo Ginzburg notes that, The New World was perceived and made familiar (as the Antwerp beaker shows) through an Old World idiom, based on visual formulas taken from classical antiquity and mediated by the Italian Renaissance. A visual language based on the superlative of violent expres­ sion worked, as we have seen, as a distancing device, projecting the gruesome reality of the Spanish conquest into a remote mythological world. Both at an individual and a social level, memory can make the past either closer or more distant: a paradoxical ambivalence which should not be forgotten. (Ginzburg 2004, 110)

New World elites, similarly, albeit from a different point of view, were industri­ ously applying this same principle to their own constructions of history – ‘real’ where available through the sagas; in an ‘improved’ state by the hand of a popular poet like Longfellow; or occasionally even ‘imagined’, as in the case of the Welles attempt to tie the genealogy of the Washington family to Óðinn. They too, as Ginz­ burg says of the Old World, perceived and made familiar the New World through what in their case was a very specific Old World idiom, the Vikings and their “rest­ less, adventurous spirit”, as Wheaton, that early U.S. advocate of Viking presence in the New World, wrote of Leifr Eiríksson (1831, 22). The momentous discover­ ies at L’Anse aux meadows in Newfoundland in the 1960s demonstrating Norse presence in the New World added zest to the possibility that “restless, adventur­ ous” Vikings had at some point set foot in what has become the United States, a perception that has led to ever greater interest in what such scenes would have looked and felt like (see fig. 3). Following Bjarni Herjólfsson’s accidental sighting of the New World in the tenth century and the reports of his find on his return to Greenland, Grœnlendinga saga (Ch. 3) famously remarks that “Var nú mikil umrœða um landaleitan” [there was now much talk about the discovery of new lands (author’s transla­ tion)] This phrase is often taken as a distinctly Nordic view in the context of the European Middle Ages, the ‘true’ Viking spirit present already in an early preMandeville medieval world where exploration and new knowledge were other­ wise generally frowned upon. That is, of course, the Viking cultural memory that Wheaton and many other Americans valorise in discussing the Northmen’s New



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Fig. 3: The Norwegian-built Draken Harald Hårfagre at Mystic Seaport: The Museum of America and the Sea, in Mystic, Connecticut in 2018. In the background, the nineteenth-century American whaling ship, the Charles W. Morgan

World adventure, a key piece of the New World foundation story. Is it then any wonder that when sending two space probes to explore the planet Mars in the mid-1970s, the U.S. space agency, NASA, channelling a long-standing American view of the Vikings and the nation, named this audacious and highly successful scheme – what else? – the Viking Program.

Works Cited Primary sources Grœnlendinga saga. In Eyrbyggia saga. Brands þáttr ǫrva. Eiríks saga rauða. Grœnlendinga saga. Grœnlendinga þáttr. Ed. Einar Ólafur Sveinsson and Matthías Þórðarson. ÍF, 4. Reykjavík, 1957 [1935]. 239–269.

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Secondary sources ABC News. 2003. “Hillary and Bill: ‘Immediate Attraction’.” (9 June 2003) http://abcnews. go.com/2020/story?id=123702. (24 April 2017) Anderson, Rasmus Björn. 1874. America Not Discovered by Columbus. An Historical Sketch of the Discovery of America by the Norsemen in the Tenth Century. Chicago, IL, and London. Anderson, Rasmus B. with Albert O. Barton. 1915. Life Story of Rasmus B. Anderson. Madison, WI. Barnes, Geraldine. 2001. Viking America. The First Millennium. Woodbridge and Rochester, NY. Beijbom, Ulf. 1980. “The Historiography of Swedish-America.” Swedish-American Historical Quarterly 31: 257–285. Blanck, Dag. 1997. Becoming Swedish-American. The Construction of an Ethnic Identity in the Augustana Synod, 1860–1917. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Studia historica Upsaliensia, 182. Uppsala. Davis, Asahel. 1839. A Lecture on the Discovery of America by the Northmen Five Hundred Years before Columbus, Delivered in New York, and in the other Cities of the State, also in some of the first Seminaries. 3rd ed. New York. Enander, Johan Alfred. 1874. Förenta staternas historia utarbetad för den svenska befolkningen i Amerika. Chicago,IL. Enander, Johan Alfred. 1893. Nordmännen i Amerika eller Amerikas upptäckt. Historisk afhandling med anledning af Columbifesterna i Chicago 1892–1893. Rock Island, IL. Fitzhugh, William W. and Elisabeth I. Ward, eds. 2000. Vikings. The North Atlantic Saga. Washington, DC. Ginzburg, Carlo. 2004. “Memory and Distance. Learning from a Gilded Silver Vase (Antwerp, c. 1530).” Diogenes 51: 99–112. Gísli Sigurðsson. 2004. The Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition: A Discourse on Method. Transl. Nicholas Jones. Publications of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature, 2. Cambridge, MA. [Icelandic orig. 2002] Hermann, Pernille. 2017. “The Vikings! Vikinger i populærkultur og kulturel erindring.” 16:9 filmtidskrift. http://www.16-9.dk/2017/04/the-vikings/. (25 April 2017) Hilen, Andrew R. 1947. Longfellow and Scandinavia. A Study of the Poet’s Relationship with the Northern Languages and Literature. Yale Studies in English, 107. New Haven, CT. Holand, Hjalmar Rued. 1940. Westward from Vinland. An Account of Norse Discoveries and Explorations in America, 982–1362. New York. Horsford, Eben Norton and E. H. Clement. 1890. The Discovery of the Ancient City of Norumbega. Boston, MA, and New York. Ingstad, Helge. 1965. Vesterveg til Vinland. Oppdagelsen av norrøne boplasser i Nord-Amerika. Oslo. Ingstad, Helge. 1969. Westward to Vinland. The Discovery of pre-Columbian Norse House-sites in North America. New York. Liljencrantz, Ottilia Adelina. 1902. The Thrall of Leif the Lucky. A Story of Viking Days. Chicago, IL. Liljencrantz, Ottilia Adelina. 1904. The Vinland Champions. New York. Liljencrantz, Ottilia Adelina. 1906. Randvar the Songsmith. A Romance of Norumbega. New York. Mallet, Paul Henri. 1756. Monuments de la mythologie et de la poesie des Celtes, et particulierement des anciens Scandinaves. [Trans. Northern antiquities: or, A description of the



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manners, customs, religion and laws of the ancient Danes, and other northern nations; including those of our own Saxon ancestors. With a translation of the Edda, or system of runic mythology, and other pieces, from the ancient Islandic tongue. London, 1770]. Melton, Zachary. 2017. “Nineteenth-Century American Reception of Old Norse Literature: The Search for American Identity.” MA Thesis, University of Iceland. Reykjavík. Meulengracht Sørensen, Preben. 1993. Saga and Society. An Introduction to Old Norse Literature. Studia Borealia, 1. Odense. [Danish orig. 1977] Moyne, Ernest J. 1963. Hiawatha and Kalevala. A Study of the Relationship between Longfellow’s “Indian Edda” and the Finnish Epic. FFC, 192. Helsinki. Øverland, Orm. 2000. Immigrant Minds, American Identities. Making the United States Home, 1870–1930. Urbana, IL. Rafn, Carl Christian. 1837. Antiquitates Americanæ sive Scriptores Septentrionales Rerum Ante-Columbianarum in America. Samling af De i Nordens Oldskrifter indeholdte Efterretninger om De gamle Nordboers Opdagelsesreiser til America fra det 10de til det 14de Aarhundrede. Copenhagen. Rølvaag, O. E. 1924. I de dage –. Fortælling om norske nykommere i Amerika. Kristiania. [Trans. Giants in the Earth: A Saga of the Prairie, 1927] Roosevelt, Theodore. 1913. Theodore Roosevelt. An Autobiography. New York. Seale, Yvonne. 2017. “George Washington: A Descendant of Odin?” The Public Domain Review. https://publicdomainreview.org/2017/02/08/george-washington-a-descendant-of-odin/. (20 April 2017) Seaver, Kirsten A. 1996. The Frozen Echo. Greenland and the Exploration of North America, ca. A.D. 1000–1500. Stanford, CA. Thormodus Torfæus. 1705. Historia Vinlandiæ antiquæ. Copenhagen. [Trans. The History of Ancient Vinland by Thormod Torfason, 1888] Welles, Albert. 1879. The Pedigree and History of the Washington Family Derived from Odin, the Founder of Scandinavia. B.C. 70, involving a Period of Eighteen Centuries, and including Fifty-Five Generations, down to General George Washington, First President of the United States. New York. Wheaton, Henry. 1831. History of the Northmen, or Danes and Normans, from the earliest Times to the Conquest of England by William of Normandy. Philadelphia, PA, and London. Williams, Stephen. 1991. Fantastic Archaeology. The Wild Side of North American Prehistory. Philadelphia, PA.

Henrik Williams

II: 62 North American Perspectives – Suggested Runic Monuments 1 Introduction The most renowned runestone in the world is not found in Denmark, Norway, or Sweden, the runic heartland with over 95% of all the inscriptions. The most famous (some would say infamous) runic monument is, in fact, the Kensing­ ton stone from western Minnesota (cf. Williams 2012) (see fig. 1). It was claimed to have been found in the roots of a tree by the Swedish-American farmer Olof Ohman (Swedish Öhman) in the fall of 1898. It soon made the news and became intensely discussed among scholars as well as laymen. Almost all of the former have consistently declared the inscription to be modern, whereas a substantial number of non-academics implicitly believe that the monument is medieval. The inscription on the Kensington stone is quite sensational. It reads in translation: Eight Götalanders and 22 Northmen on (this?) exploration/acquisition journey from Vinland westwards(?): We had a camp by two huts(?) one day’s journey north from this stone. We went fishing one day. After we came home (we) found 10 men red from blood and death. Ave Maria(?), may save from evil. There (are) 10 men by the sea to look after our ships, fourteen days’ journey from this island. Year 1362.

As can be seen, several words are translated with some uncertainty, but this does not affect the general message of the text. If authentic, it would prove the pres­ ence of Scandinavians in North America more than a century before Columbus.

2 Case study This is not the place to argue about the dating of the Kensington inscription; all runologists and scholars within Scandinavian linguistics unanimously conclude that it cannot be as old as its text claims. Most likely it was carved in the 1890s, and is of interest here because of its role in the memory-shaping of the Scandina­ vian immigrants to the United States, also true of several other American runic inscriptions. Not many people know that as many as one hundred objects in North America have been claimed to be inscribed with runes. A full description of these https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-098

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Fig. 1: Kensington stone (Alexandria, Minnesota)

is being prepared, but in this context only a concise overview, organised themati­ cally, is offered. The material may be presented in ten groups: 1. Seek and Ye Shall Find; 2. Never was; 3. Never heard of since; 4. Mere scratches; 5. Pictographs; 6. Writing yes, but is it runic?; 7. New; 8. Fakes?; 9. Copies; and 10. Possibility or probability?

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Seek and Ye Shall Find This group illustrates the fact that the initiative in finding runic inscriptions on American soil was not a native one, but one stemming from Scandinavians. The Danish professor Carl Christian Rafn, possibly the leading runologist of his time, and in any case a leading philologist, did his best to prove that Scandinavians were the first Europeans to colonise the New World. In his monumental and very influential work Antiqvitates Americana from 1837, soon partly made available in English, he published Old Norse texts testifying to the presence of the North­ men in America in Viking and early medieval times (see Kolodny 2012, 105–112). Among the evidence, Rafn counted the Dighton Rock in Massachusetts with its putative runes. Rafn’s theories became very popular as they served two purposes. Scandi­ navians were given a glorious past and domiciliary rights in the United States. Britons at the time were already enamoured with the thought that they, too, had Viking extractions (cf., e.g. Wawn 2000, 322–325), and Anglo-Americans were not slow to follow (Kolodny 2012, passim). The created memory of Viking exploits are still with us. A case in point is the Leif Erikson Day. In his proclamation, on the day before October 9, 2015, President Obama claimed to “honor [Leif Erikson] as an important piece of our shared past with the Norwegian people” (Obama 2015).

Never was Not everyone, however, was bitten by the Viking bug and in this group may be included the prank played in 1867 by Frank Cowan on the unsuspecting inhabit­ ants of Washington DC and the surrounding area (Tribble 2007). Cowan claimed to have unearthed the grave and runic funeral inscription of an Icelandic princess buried in 1051 near the Potomac River. The whole thing was invented and clearly meant as a lampoon directed at Professor Rafn and his followers.

Never heard of since Representative of this category is the Deapolis Rock in North Dakota, located at the bottom of the Missouri River. In 1894 and 1934, the water level of the river was so low that a large boulder became visible, “carved with peculiar markings” (quoted from Holand 1946, 230). Hjalmar Holand (Holand 1946, 231) claimed that a government survey mark or an Indian pictograph would have been recognised by the spectators and that “[the] possibility that this disappearing rock may

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contain a runic inscription is inviting” (Holand 1946, 232). Since the community of Deapolis was founded by a Scandinavian, Herman Danielson, who was pro­ bably Swedish-American, and populated at least partly by people of Norwegian extraction (Gavett 2009, 204–206), one would rather think that runes would be quite familiar to the people examining the bolder in the riverbed.

Mere scratches Here are to be found a number of stone objects bearing markings that have been identified as runes but are, in fact, not. Often we are dealing with natural grooves, at other times with scratches caused by damage to the stone surface by, for example, ploughing. Some markings are indeed man-made, but never meant to represent written characters, much less runes. Yet these objects and their puta­ tive runic inscriptions have played a major role in the created memory of a Viking presence, especially in New England. Olaf Strandwold (1948) was especially keen on seeing devout inscriptions on stones where no writing seems to be found (cf. Goudsward 2010, 22–23). Most of the objects found by people who think they may have acquired a runic object turn out to have natural grooves or scratches.

Pictographs Some would-be runic monuments really do bear inscriptions but consist of pic­ tures, not writing. An example is the Bourne stone in Massachusetts which is clearly carved by human hand. A university scholar has actually claimed that the message on the rock consists of an uninterpretable mixture of Roman and runic characters (Kirby 1993, 17–18). Another academic, however, convincingly identi­ fies the symbols as being Native American (Pieper 2007, 331–333).

Writing yes, but is it runic? We have at least one carving that fits this group, the Turley Hill cliff inscription near Tulsa, OK. It was considered runic and the seven symbols were thought to represent ten runes, making up a cryptogram for the date December 2, 1022 (Landsverk 1969, 58, 61). The method of runic cryptography has been debunked (cf. Haugen 1981, 155). Later, the inscription has been identified as “a South Semitic palindrome” (Farley 2007 [1994], 202), an equally improbable sugges­ tion. It is not known what the symbols mean or if they have any linguistic sense,

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although they probably do have some significance. Two out of the seven symbols could conceivably be runes, yet the rest of the sequence proves this not to be a runic inscription.

New In this group is found the largest number of genuine inscriptions, i.e. such that are carved with actual runes although in quite recent time. Many North Americans feel the urge to commemorate themselves or some event with a runic inscription. Thus, we have runestones erected at for example Gimli, Manitoba on the 125th Anniversary of Islendingadagurinn (Miljure 2014) and at L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland (Kalle Runristare [2016]). Private individuals are quite fond of this type of activity, too, as evidenced by a runestone erected in Escalon, CA, in memory of a living man who had his son carve the inscription (Pearson 2003).

Fakes It is difficult to suggest members of this category for the simple fact that we do not know if a certain monument was produced to be passed off as the genuine article. The Kensington stone may be an example, but we cannot prove that. It may have been carved for pleasure or as a joke, never meant to be taken seri­ ously. The Barrett Lake stone was indeed deemed a forgery almost immediately after discovery since it was carved with Kensington runes and thought to be dated in the same manner to 1776 or 1362. The finder of the stone readily admitted to carving it, once someone asked him about it, and also claimed that the date was supposed to be 1876 (Sprunger 2000, 146), which in fact is also what is found on the stone. The only definite fake is the ‘AVM stone’ found on an island near Kens­ ington, carved in 1985 by five doctoral students from the University of Minnesota (Williams 2002). However, even though the carvers admitted to having done it “‘for fun’ and to cast doubt on the validity of the nearby and famous Kensington Runestone”, they also preferred “to think it not as a hoax but as a scientific study, trying to determine whether people would think the inscription genuine” (Meier 2001). When the stone was discovered in 2001 and made the news, the carvers after all did come forward to acknowledge their handiwork.

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Fig. 2: San Antonio stone (San Antonio, Texas)

Copies Less self-centred are the carvings found in this group. Copies such as these are presumably made for pure enjoyment or to honour the original inscriptions. The Mahone Bay boulder in Nova Scotia is one fine example, a (partial) copy of the famous runic rock face carving at Ramsund in the Swedish province of Söderman­ land (Arnold 2014). A more intriguing inscription is found on a small stone slab from San Antonio, TX, with a column and a line of strange-looking but genuine runes (see fig. 2). It took years before Jonas Nordby (Oslo) and Buford Abeldt (McKinney, Texas) figured out that what we are dealing with is a partial copy of the famous runic cryptogram Jules Verne presents in his A Journey to the Centre of the Earth (French original published in 1864, English translation in 1871). The breakthroughs were made by Nordby and Abeldt independently of each other, and neither discoverer has yet published his findings.

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Fig. 3: Shawnee stone (Shawnee, Oklahoma) which may be connected with the Heavener stone mentioned below

Possibility or probability? This brings us to the tenth and final group, that consisting of inscriptions with genuine runes and where there is no evidence of recent manufacture. The ques­ tion here is one of possibility or probability. The best example is not the Kens­ ington runestone but the one in Heavener, OK (Farley 2007 [1994], 217–246) (cf. fig. 3). This is a giant sandstone slab, standing upright in an isolated ravine. It bears eight very large runes of which six definitely belong to the Older, PreViking Age futhark. The likeliest reading is gnomedal which looks like a word in Modern Norwegian meaning ‘valley of gnomes’. If authentic, the shape of the runes would date the inscription to before AD 700, a time when there were no ocean-going ships in Scandinavia and long before the known Viking presence on the east coast of North America. The authenticity of the Heavener inscription has most energetically been called in question by Tompsen (2011) who advances many convincing arguments but is effectively contradicted by Torbert (2011). The discussion proves just how difficult it is to prove the age of carving in stone and how even more difficult it is to convince non-academics using scientific argu­ ments. There will always remain a possibility that the object examined might be

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old. Admitting this while advocating that issues should be settled by probability, not possibility, might prove to be the most efficient course. A convincing case for how this inscription came about before 1923, when it was first officially reported, must also be put forward. At the time there were precious few Scandinavians in the area and no real reason for anyone to carve an inscription with common Ger­ manic runes. The origin of the Heavener stone remains a mystery, although sci­ entifically the conclusion must be that it was inscribed in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century.

Discussion All runic or claimed runestones serve their purpose through the function they are given in collective memory. The Kensington stone is an especially clear example of this and has been used in all kinds of ways (Krueger 2015). Runes are intimately perceived to be Scandinavian or at least Germanic. Whether ancient or modern, they are viewed as identity markers for an immigrant population. Monuments such as the Heavener stone are claimed to evidence pre-Viking Age presence of Europeans and thus legitimising their habitation in America. Recently carved runic markers with no intent to deceive still fill the function of ethnic indicators. By re-creating such identity symbols runes are used as material in the building of an American nation, founded on Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon presence.

Works cited Secondary sources Arnold, George. 2014. New Norse Runestone in Nova Scotia. Norumbega, Vinland has it Finally Been Located? https://norumbegavinland.wordpress.com/. (3 November 2017) Farley, Gloria. 2007 [1994]. In Plain Sight. Old World Records in Ancient America. Sixth printing. Golden, CO. Gavett, Joseph L. 2009. North Dakota. Counties – Towns & People. Part III. Tacoma, WA. Goudsward, David. 2010. The Westford Knight and Henry Sinclair. Evidence of a 14th Century Scottish Voyage to North America. Jefferson, NC. Haugen, Einar. 1981. “The Youngest Runes. From Oppdal to Waukegan.” Michigan Germanic Studies 7.1: 148–175. Holand, Hjalmar. 1946. America 1355−1364. A New Chapter in Pre-Columbian History. New York. Kalle Runristare. [2016]. Vinland Part 1 – The Leif Eriksson Runestone. http://www. runestonecarver.com/gallery/25_vinland/vinland1/00-vinland1.html. (3 November 2017) Kirby, Ian J. 1993. “La pierre de Bourne. Notes sur une recherche en cours.” Études de Lettres 3, Juillet–Septembre: 7–20.

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Kolodny, Annette. 2012. In Search of First Contact. The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery. Durham. Krueger, David M. 2015. Myths of the Rune Stone. Viking Martyrs and the Birthplace of America. Minneapolis, MN. Landsverk, O. G. 1969. Ancient Norse Messages on American Stones. Glendal, CA. Meier, Peg. 2001. “2nd Runestone a hoax, say two who claim to have carved it.” Star Tribune (Minneapolis – St. Paul) 6 November 2001. Miljure, Ben. 2014. (Incipit) ”Manitoba is home …” CTV News Winnepeg August 3. http:// winnipeg.ctvnews.ca/vikings-come-to-gimli-for-icelandic-festival-1.1944947/comments7.543639. (3 November 2017) Obama, Barack. 2015. Presidential Proclamation – Leif Erikson Day, 2015. https://www. whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/10/08/presidential-proclamation-leif-eriksonday-2015. (3 November 2017) Pearson, Birger A. 2003. “A California Runestone.” Viking Heritage Magazine 4.03: 24. Pieper, Peter. 2007. “‘Runen’ in Amerika.” In Zweiundvierzig. Festschrift für Michael Gebühr zum 65. Geburtstag. Ed. Stefan Burmeister and Jasper von Richthofen. Internationale Archäologie: Studia honoraria, 25. Rahden. 339–350. Sprunger, David A. 2000. “Mystery & Obsession. J. A. Holvik and the Kensington Runestone.” Minnesota History 57.3: 140–154. Strandwold, Olaf. 1948. Norse Inscriptions on American Stones. Weehauken, NJ. Tompsen, Lyle. 2011. “An Archaeologist Examines The Oklahoma Rune Stones.” ESOP. The Epigraphic Society Occasional Papers 29: 5–43. Torbert, Barton J. 2011. “Reply to an Archaeologist.” ESOP. The Epigraphic Society Occasional Papers 29: 44–58. Tribble, Scott. 2007. “Last of the Vikings. Frank Cowan, Pennsylvania’s Other Great Hoaxer and a Man Who Changed History.” Western Pennsylvania History, Fall: 48–57. Wawn, Andrew. 2000. The Vikings and the Victorians. Inventing the Old North in nineteenthcentury Britain. Cambridge and Rochester, NY. Williams, Henrik. 2002. “The ‘AVM’ Stone from Minnesota (Kensington II).” Nytt om runer 17 (2004): 40. Williams, Henrik. 2012. “The Kensington Runestone. Fact and Fiction”. The Swedish-American Historical Quarterly 63.1: 3–22.

Joseph Falaky Nagy

II: 63 Irish Perspectives 1 Introduction Collective memory of the Viking invasions of and settlements in Ireland that took place in the late first to the early second millennium AD plays a lively role in Gaelic-language folklore as collected over the last two hundred years. The raiders from Scandinavia (mostly Denmark), who in time became the founders of most of the major cities of medieval Ireland, play an important role in the orally transmit­ ted accounts of the past, shared among Irish people (particularly Gaelic speakers) even of modern times, and kept dynamically alive in performance by their tradi­ tion-bearers. This legendary history is based to some extent on the trickled-down record kept by the earlier literary and learned tradition, but it is also shaped by contemporary experiences, expectations, and concerns. Collective memory pro­ vided the Irish folk with a temporal background for understanding the present and for making the future more predictable. (For the study of memory in Irish tradition, see Nagy 2006; Poppe and Rekdal 2014.)

2 Case study Three characteristics of the traditional Irish historical outlook should be factored into any assessment of how the Vikings were remembered (or misremembered): 1. Invasion dèja vu. The coming of a new people, resulting in their violent confrontation with those already inhabiting the island, was not viewed as a unique event. In a shaping of the past already evident in writings that predate the impact of the Vikings, Ireland emerges as an ethnic and political palimpsest that has lived through many waves of invasion and settlement – an unending series of usually violent encounters that bring about a variety of outcomes, from the ban­ ishment of a people to the fusion of diverse groups, or the layering, one on top of the other, of successive populations. 2. Memory on the margins. Already in the earliest surviving stories about poets, sages, and other possessors of knowledge in Irish literature, it is clear that wisdom, including intimate familiarity with past events, is stored not just in safe spaces under the care of sanctioned functionaries who represent the values of the social realm, but also in dangerous hiding places beyond the boundaries of culture, in the care of a motley crew consisting of foreigners, exiles, madmen, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-099

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revenants, and supernatural beings. The last category is usually to be found in the síde (modern síthe), the ‘fairy mounds’ that even today are thought in popular imagination to mark the Irish landscape, especially in liminal zones. 3. The ‘Backward Look’. Coined by the twentieth-century Irish writer Frank O’Connor, alluding to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and memorialised in the title of his 1967 book on Irish literature, the phrase refers to the pre-modern Irish literary tradition’s tendency, shared perhaps with Irish traditional culture in general, to look to the past as in one sense lost, but in another sense as still pro­ foundly ‘present in the present’, even possibly to return as a surprisingly familiar future (O’Connor 1967).

Fact and fantasy The Viking raiders, invaders, and settlers of the Middle Ages, in addition to opening up the island to trade and more influences from abroad, left distinct traces in the Gaelic vocabulary and toponymy of Ireland (Ó Muirithe 2010–2013). Around 1000 they would have been called in Gaelic Danar [‘Danes’], Genti [‘hea­ thens’], Lochlannaig(h) [‘people from Lochlainn’], or simply Gaill [‘foreigners’], further divisible into Dubgaill [‘black foreigners’] and Fionngaill [‘white foreign­ ers’] (on these various names and their significance, see Etchingham 2014; on the origin of the names Lothlainn, later Lochlainn, see Ó Corráin 1998 and Ahlqvist 2005; on the ‘black’ versus ‘white’ distinction, see Etchingham 2010). The usual term in post-medieval Irish for ‘Viking’ is Lochlannach, which, while it can simply mean someone from Scandinavia, is also used in storytelling both literary and oral to refer to transmarine supernatural beings clearly akin to those living in the síthe. Thus we see that folklore moves the historical Vikings, in line with the theme of ‘memory on the margins’ (see above), close to or even into the category of the supernatural. As we shall see, in two very popular oral narratives in Gaeliclanguage lore concerning the Lochlannaigh, they are portrayed as possessors of ancient and valuable memories of compelling interest to more civilised, cultured folk (that is, the Irish). Significantly, this traditional attribution of supernatural provenance or special knowledge to the Vikings, while echoing the similar profil­ ing of earlier, primeval invaders, is only weakly replicated if at all in the Irish folk­ loric memory of later invaders, such as the Normans of the twelfth century, the opportunistic Hebridean mercenaries (so-called gallowglasses) of the following centuries, the repressive Tudor and Cromwellian armies, and the dispossessing settlers of Ulster in the early modern period. The Irish experience of the Vikings, it has been argued, had such a pro­ found impact on the popular imagination that they merged with the Fomoiri, the



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demonic enemies of the primeval inhabitants of Ireland (and possibly the rem­ nants of a pre-Christian Irish pantheon) known as the Túatha Dé Danann. Their confrontation is detailed in the traditional story (attested in both medieval liter­ ary and more recent oral sources) of the Second Battle of Mag Tuired, an epochal battle between the forces of order and chaos (Gray 1982, 16–17). In another strand of the Irish storytelling tradition that has to do with the Vikings, we see a fascinating demonstration of the ‘domino effect’ in folkloric memory. In this instance of ‘the backward look’, they abruptly dislodged the heroes belonging to the Fian(na), a Männerbund celebrated in the increasingly popular Fenian nar­ rative tradition, from their earlier, pre-Viking position as archetypally marginal characters, hovering ambiguously on the boundaries between human society and the otherworld. Tradition then shifted the Fianna into the social realm, where it became the standing army of the king of Ireland and a buffer against recur­ rent invasions, particularly of the Lochlannaigh, with whom the Fenian heroes maintained an acutely uneasy relationship (Mac Cana 2011, 241–50). These largerthan-life Vikings appear frequently in the extensive body of Fenian ballads of the medieval and modern periods, the Scottish Gaelic variants of which provided the eighteenth-century writer James Macpherson with some of the inspiration for his very popular and influential ‘Ossianic’ works (see Christiansen 1931).

The Vikings in Irish popular legend Assigned the number and title 726 “The Dream Visit” in the Ó Súilleabháin and Christiansen The Types of the Irish Folktale (1963), with at least two hundred and twenty-four variants collected (O’Sullivan 1966, 276), including one from the famous Kerry storyteller Peig Sayers in 1944 (followed here), this story of a poor Irishman’s visit to Lochlainn (which at least initially is a ‘real’ place to which one can go by ship) and his fortunate encounter with fantastically old but friendly Lochlannaigh plays on the widespread notion, to some extent confirmed by archaeology, that the Vikings buried and left behind many hoards in Ireland. The really important treasure that the Irishmen’s ancient hosts possess and that they share with their guest, though only so much as they think will benefit him, is their knowledge about the past – specifically, where our Irish hero can find gold buried in his own backyard, and how he can slay the monstrous cat guarding the treasure. The knowledge possessed by these long-lived and long-remembering Lochlannaigh, which they share with the visiting Irishman, benefits them as well. In that same underground space where the gold is to be found (in effect, a fairy mound), the Irishman will find shaving implements, his Viking hosts predict,

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which they instruct him to bring back to Lochlainn. Faithfully complying with this request, the returning Irishman, now a wealthy man, gives his hosts a shave and a haircut, after which, no longer encumbered by old age, they are returned to their glory days as young Vikings. And so, the story seems to be suggesting, memory, when acted upon carefully and conscientiously, can both enrich and rejuvenate those who remember, as well as bring back the past and open up a successful future. (The Sayers version is available in an English translation in O’Sullivan [1966, 192–204]; for some discussion of the other collected variants, see Ó Giolláin 1994/1995.) Another popular tale amply attested in the Gaelic-language oral tradition that has to do with Vikings and Viking knowledge (in this case withheld from, not shared with the Irish) has to do with a lost technique of brewing. (One hundred and eighty three variants of Type 2412E “The Heather Beer” are listed in Ó Súil­ leabháin and Christiansen [1963, 345–346; see also O’Sullivan 1966, 282–283].) In the latter, (O’Sullivan 1966, 234–235), there is an English translation of a version of the tale collected in 1947 from a Donegal storyteller, upon which the follow­ ing comments are based; for other variants, see O’Sullivan (1974, 129–132, and O’Sullivan 1977, 132–133). As is also true in regard to “The Dream Visit”, whether or not the story of the heather beer is distinctly Irish or an oikotype of an inter­ national tale, it serves to express a memory of the Vikings as end-of-the-line pos­ sessors of arcane knowledge, who are actually willing to cut themselves loose from their future in order to keep to themselves valuable lore that they have long passed down. The story features the two last Vikings left in Ireland, a father and son, who are captured by the Irish and commanded upon pain of death to reveal their secret technique for brewing beer from heather, an irresistible and highly desired drink. As if he were competing with his son to be the one spared, the father insists on his son being slain as the condition for his telling what he knows. Of course this is a trick, for the father, now the only surviving Viking in Ireland, after the elimination of his son, defiantly goes to his death in order to keep the recipe a secret forever. Remarkably, this story preserves a memory not only of the Vikings but also possibly of their own traditional story, very similar to the Irish tale, of how the Niflung hoard was lost, as well as a memory of the Norse provenance of a word in the modern Gaelic vocabulary. The word most frequently used in variants of Type 2412E to refer to the brew in question is not one of the native Gaelic terms for beer or ale, but the borrowing beoir (Almqvist 1991, 74–79).



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The Vikings in Ireland today In the twenty-first century, the Vikings have definitely returned to Ireland, both on the academic front, where the study of Irish-Scandinavian relations in the Middle Ages has become a voluminous scholarly industry, and on the popular front, where entrepreneurs have profitably responded to the eagerness of the modern Irish and the many tourists visiting Ireland to explore the country’s Viking heritage. One of the more ingenious exploitations of this interest has led to a collo­ cation that the ghosts of the Vikings of old, as well as the Lochlannaigh of tra­ ditional narrative, would no doubt find somewhat embarrassing: the amphibi­ ous tours of Dublin that the writers of The Lonely Planet guide have dubbed the “Dublin Viking Duck Tours”.

Works cited Primary sources O’Sullivan, Sean, ed. and trans. Folktales of Ireland. Chicago, IL, 1966. O’Sullivan, Sean, ed. and trans. The Folklore of Ireland. New York, 1974. O’Sullivan, Sean, ed. and trans. Legends from Ireland. London, 1977.

Secondary sources Ahlqvist, Anders. 2005. “Is acher in gaíth. . . úa Lothlind.” In Heroic Poets and Poetic Heroes in Celtic Tradition. Studies in Honor of Patrick K. Ford. Celtic Studies Association of North America Yearbook 3–4. Ed. Leslie Ellen Jones and J. F. Nagy. Dublin. 19–27. Almqvist, Bo. 1991. “The Viking Ale and the Rhine Gold. Some Notes on an Irish-Scottish Folk Legend and a Germanic Hero-Tale Motif.” In his Viking Ale. Studies on Folklore Contacts Between the Northern and the Western Worlds. Ed. Éilís Ní Dhuibhne-Almqvist and Séamas Ó Catháin. Aberystwyth. 63–81, 255–265. [Originally published in Arv 21 (1965): 115–135] Christiansen, Reidar. 1931. The Vikings and the Viking Wars in Irish and Gaelic Tradition. Skrifter utgitt av det Norske videnskapsakademi i Oslo. II. Hist.-filos. klasse 1930, no. l. Oslo. “Dublin Viking Duck Tours.” The Lonely Planet. https://www.lonelyplanet.com/ireland/dublin/ activities/dublin-viking-duck-tour/a/pa-act/v-6223VIKING/359796. (9 March 2018) Etchingham, Colmán. 2010. “Laithlinn, ‘Fair Foreigners’ and ‘Dark Foreigners’. The Identity and Provenance of Vikings in Ninth-Century Ireland.” The Viking Age: Ireland and the West. Ed. Donnchadh Ó Corráin and John Sheehan. Dublin. 80–88. Etchingham, Colmán. 2014. “Names for the Vikings in Irish Annals.” In Celtic-Norse Relationships in the Irish Sea in the Middle Ages 800–1200. Ed. Jón Viðar Sigurðsson and Timothy Bolton. Leiden. 23–38.

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Gray, Elizabeth A. 1982. “Cath Maige Tuired. Myth and Structure (24–120).” Éigse 19: 1–35. Mac Cana, Proinsias. 2011. The Cult of the Sacred Centre. Essays on Celtic Ideology. Dublin. Nagy, Joseph Falaky, ed. 2006. Memory and the Modern in Celtic Literatures. Celtic Studies Association of North America Yearbook, 6. Dublin. O’Connor, Frank. 1967. The Backward Look. A Survey of Irish Literature. London. Ó Corráin, Donnchadh. 1998. “The Vikings in Scotland and Ireland in the Ninth Century.” Peritia 12: 296–339. Ó Giolláin, Diarmuid. 1994/1995. “The Image of the Vikings in Irish Folk Legends.” Béaloideas 62/63: 163–170. Ó Muirithe, Diarmaid. 2010–2013. From the Viking Word-Hoard. A Dictionary of Scandinavian Words in the Languages of Britain and Ireland. 2 vols. Dublin. Ó Súilleabháin, Seán and Reidar Christiansen. 1963. The Types of the Irish Folktale. FFC, 78 (no. 188). Helsinki. Rekdal, Jan Erik and Erich Poppe, eds. 2014. Medieval Irish Perspectives on Cultural Memory. Studien und Texte zur Keltologie, 11. Münster.

Richard Cole

II: 64 British Perspectives 1 Introduction The memory of the Viking Age in Britain has chiefly been conditioned by two con­ flicting impulses. From the eighth until the eleventh centuries, large numbers of Scandinavians arrived in the British Isles. Sometimes they came as raiders, some­ times as settlers, sometimes as merchants, sometimes as would-be kings. In the years and centuries following this period, the first impulse of those who reflected upon it was to emphasise the conflict between the invaders and the invaded. From the Victorian period onwards, a second impulse emerged: to emphasise the legacy of cultural enrichment (and in the troubling parlance of the Victorians, particularly racial enrichment) afforded by the arrival of the Vikings in Britain.

2 Case Study: Memory of the Viking Age in Britain – from trauma to empire In the context of memory studies, Britain’s experience of remembering the Viking Age differs somewhat from that of other nations. For the Scandinavian coun­ tries, the process has essentially focussed on remembering “what we did”. For countries such as the United States, the process is one of memory appropriation: “perhaps they were here, perhaps we are them”. Both of these dynamics are at work in the British situation, but in the case of England, and to a degree Ireland, a third factor must be taken into account: the substantial body of Viking Age and Early Medieval literature detailing “what was done to us”. There is a traumatic sense of violation conveyed by these early sources. Indeed, the graphic accounts of Viking violence they provide are entirely consonant with the way that modern film and television often revels in the supposed barbarity of medieval Scandinavi­ ans: paganism, drunkenness, and sexual violence are recurrent themes (McDou­ gall 1993). To take just a few examples, nearly at random, images of pagan raiders mocking Christian ceremony can be found in the twelfth-century Cogadh gáedhel re Gallaibh. The War of the Gaedhil with the Gaill (13, cf. 226, on the Vikings in Ireland, often minimised by a focus on England, see Jones 1973, 204–208). The trope of Vikings raping defenceless English women can be found in Wulfstan’s Sermo Lupi ad Anglos [The Sermon of the Wolf to the English] (1010–1016): “[...] oft tyne oððe twelfe, ælc æfter oþrum, scendað to bysmore þæs þegenes cwenan https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-100

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hwilum his dohtor oððe nydmagan þær he on locað (The Homilies of Wulfstan, Sermo, 271) [often ten or twelve [Vikings], each after the other, shamefully dis­ grace a given man’s wife and even his daughter or kinswoman, while he looks on (author’s translation)]. As Ian Dougall has observed, the characterisation of the Vikings as particularly boozy recurred in medieval English letters (McDougall 1993, 210), and survived into Renaissance literature too (Seaton 1935, 5). On these lurid themes, the resemblance between Early Medieval British sources and trashy Anglo-American television is obviously not because of, say, a seamless oral tradition, passed down from generation to generation and told to the director while he/she was still child, dandled on his/her grandmother’s knee. Rather, it is the end result of a complex process of remembering, with anti­ quarians producing editions of medieval texts, popularisers representing them in other media, some folklore, a fair amount of freewheeling imagination, etc. This is demonstrative of what Pierre Nora called the “milieu de mémoire” (Nora 1989, 9), the thicket of agendas and media by which the past is remembered, uncoordi­ nated and often unconcerned with authenticity. It is symptomatic of the hegemony of the English-speaking world that the Viking Age has generally been defined according to the first and last recorded Viking attacks on English soil. The Viking Age is accordingly often reckoned to have begun with the attack on Lindisfarne monastery in 793, and to have ended with the death of the ultimate Viking, King Haraldr Harðráði, at Stamford Bridge in 1066. Although the aforementioned periodisation is somewhat problematic, not least because Vikings had been raiding elsewhere in Europe before 793, it does have the advantage that the year 1066 also saw a dramatic change in Eng­ land’s cultural and linguistic climate. With the Norman conquest, England began to shift away from the Germanic continuum which had connected the island to Scandinavia, towards a new focus on the Francophone inheritance brought by the nouveau régime. Authors in the Norman period continued to treat the trauma of the Viking Age, albeit in a less urgent manner than one finds in pre-Conquest poetry such as the Old English Battle of Maldon. Florence of Worcester (d. 1118), Symeon of Durham (d. 1130s), and William of Malmesbury (fl. 1120s) are all examples of Anglo-Norman Latin chroniclers who recalled the Danish and Norwegian attacks on England. Multiple factors might explain this continuity. Firstly, there is the reality that in the years following the Conquest it was by no means clear that Scandinavians would not trouble the House of Normandy just as they had the House of Wessex. The Danish King Sveinn Ástríðarson (r. 1047–1076) felt that he had inherited Haraldr’s claim on the English throne. Supposedly he sent men to support the Anglo-Saxon rebel and folk hero Hereward the Wake. One miracle tale by the second Norman Archbishop of Canterbury, Anselm (d. 1109), concerns



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a monk sent to arbitrate a non-aggression pact between William the Conqueror and Sveinn’s son, King Knútr (r. 1080–1086) (Anselm 319–324; cf. Maríu saga, 1030–1032). Anselm’s tale, which depicts the Danes actively making preparations to invade, indicates that the possibility of ongoing attacks from Scandinavia con­ cerned the Norman elite. The fact that it was a miracle tale embedded in a sermon also indicates that there was some attempt to communicate these fears to the general public. Indeed, it has been suggested that some close to the Danish crown were still vainly nurturing their claim to England as late as the thirteenth century (Heebøll-Holm 2015, 262–264; cf. Larson 1912). As the threat from Denmark waned, Anglo-Norman authors apparently felt at liberty to interpret the memory of the Viking Age less in the image of past traumas, and more in the image of contemporary concerns. Thus in medieval English romance and art the Vikings from the North became conflated with the Saracens from the East (Cawsey 2009) (see fig. 1). Although this development might seem far-fetched to a modern observer, it is quite straightforward when one considers the medieval propensity to think in terms of typology: what essential qualities or narrative roles are shared by two analogous characters? Both the Dane and the Muslim were understood as implacable, martially gifted, non-Christian ‘Others’, posing a direct threat to Christendom. The Anglo-Norman poet Wace described the Vikings who attacked his native Channel Islands as “la gent sarrazine” [the Saracen people] in the Roman de Rou (c. 1160s): Em plusors liex pert la ruine qui firent la gent sarrazine en Auremen et en Gernesi, en Serc, en Erin, en Guernerui […] (Wace 2002, 348)

In several places one can see the ruins which the Saracen people made in Alderney, and in Jersey, in Sark, in Herm, in Guernsey

The hybridised ‘Scandinavian Saracen’ notwithstanding, the high and late Middle Ages saw a widespread decline in literary interest in Britain’s Viking Age past, which would not be reversed until the Victorian era. One might have expected interest in Scandinavian matters to thrive during this period: The Normans were themselves of Scandinavian heritage, and during the early days follow­ ing the founding of their dynasty by Rollo (d. c. 930) there are some indications that they wished to preserve and emphasise this aspect of their history. Dudo of St. Quentin, writing in the early eleventh century, depicts a scene where William Longsword (d. 942) of Normandy has his son, Duke Richard I, sent to Bayeux to study Old Norse, “ut queat sermocinari profusius olim contra Dacigenas” (Dudo 1865, 222) [so that in the future he should be able to express himself more fluently to the Dacian-born (translation Christiansen 1998, 97)]. As seen, the increasing harmlessness of Scandinavia to England probably contributed to this disinterest.

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Fig. 1: BL Harley MS 2278, fol. 61 (England, 1430s) – Martyrdom of St Edmund in 869, with Vikings depicted as Saracens

However, arguably the crucial factor in the decline of Viking memories amongst Norman authors was the discovery of a competing source of inspiration: the Arthurian tradition. With their Celtic settings, Arthurian romances provided a sense of connection to Britain that recollections of ‘Dacian’ ancestry never could. The adoption of Arthurian material by the Normans was most likely therefore inevitable, and the role that Scandinavica might have played in global culture had Arthuriana not outstripped it can only be a matter of idle speculation. As shall be seen, there are compelling arguments to suggest that the trau­ matic memory of the Viking Age survived in England during the Tudor, Stuart, and Georgian periods (on the comparatively little Anglo-Scandinavian interest during these eras, see O’Donoghue 2014, 28–54). But the next ‘sea change’ in popular historiography would not arrive until the Victorian era. As Andrew Wawn has comprehensively surveyed (e.g. Wawn 2000), the Victorians saw themselves in the Vikings: manly adventurers who had carved a maritime empire. The Old Norse cultural inheritance was singularly well placed for appropriation. Britain (and particularly England) struggled to locate an appropriate empire in its own past on which to model itself, in the way that, say, Italy might look to Rome or France to Charlemagne. The Roman presence in Britain inspired some, but there were issues there that offended Victorian prejudices: 1) Rome was liable to being perceived as Mediterranean and effeminate, 2) it was an empire that had very obviously fallen, while Britain’s holdings were famously those on which ‘the sun



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would never set’. Thus the Scandinavian diaspora in Britain was imaginatively reconceived as a precursor to British imperialism. William and Mary Howitt’s The Literature and Romance of Northern Europe (1852) is so transparent on its ideo­ logical commitments that it merits quoting at length: Turn now from these old Scandinavians to the English. Though they have lived now for eight centuries under the influence of a religious faith totally opposed to that of Odin – under the religion of peace and love – it has not been able to quench the old Norse fire in their veins. The same love of martial daring and fame ; the same indomitable sea-faring spirit, the same passion for discovery of new seas and new lands, the same irresistible longing, when disco­ vered, to seize and colonize them, the same victorious strength in subduing the vastest, the most populous or the most savage nations to their yoke [...] America, Australia, the Indies East and West, South Africa, Gibraltar, Malta, the Ionia Isles, and the isles of many a distant sea bear testimony to the survival of the spirit of the Vikings in the bosoms of the British [...]. (Howitt 1852, 12–13)

The Victorian experience might be considered as an intermediary between con­ temporary processes in Scandinavia and America: like Scandinavians, there was some degree of truth to the genealogical claim that Britons were the descendants of the Vikings, but like many American enthusiasts much of what was claimed as cultural inheritance was spurious and nakedly ideological. As in German völkisch thought, there was a racial component in the Victorian memory of the Vikings, although for the Howitts the Vikings were the element in English blood which had mercifully saved us from ending up like our Teutonic cousins: But while we are compounded of British, Roman, Saxon and Scandinavian blood, had that of Germany predominated we should have been now as Germany is, a country without colonies, without conquests, without a fleet, and without political liberty. We might have displayed a good share of German intellectuality, but had we not possessed the crowning advantages of Scandinavian prowess, enterprise, and invincible fortitude and independence, we should indeed have been a Deutsche Insel, but not a Great Britain. (Howitt 1852, 13)

The Victorian reassessment of the Viking Age as a positive contribution to British history is easily characterised as conservative, and being closely bound up with the Empire. The feverish jingoism of the Empire has declined a great deal in the past century, though the oddly racial way the Vikings are discussed in Britain has survived. DNA testing kits, which fulfil fantasies of proving to a percentage how Scandinavian one supposedly is, are fairly popular items. A widely watched series of television programmes from 2001, entitled The Blood of the Vikings and accom­ panied by a popular book, rested its claims on this DNA technology. However, it ought to be noted that the same fundamental dynamic – of Viking blood compen­ sating for undesirable elements in ones own identity – has also been adopted by

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counter-hegemonic currents in British society. While the Howitts believed that slavish Saxon stock had been fortified by vital Viking vigour, the socialist and Ice­ landic enthusiast William Morris believed that Scandinavian heritage had given Britons a taste for consensus and liberty, opposite to the oppressive and bureau­ cratic ‘Norman Yoke’ (e.g. 1995 [1890], 90). Indeed, the occasional socialist inter­ est in Viking heritage is also attested by the evening that Morris apparently once spent with Friedrich Engels discussing the Poetic Edda (Engels 1959, 245–246). The use of heritage as a ‘counterbalance’ in identity construction is also found in some modern regionalist movements. Those who favour greater autonomy for Yorkshire, North-Eastern England, or Orkney and Shetland may well emphasise their Scandinavian roots, which they feel differentiate them from solidly Saxon or Norman South East England. The Victorian celebration of the Viking incursions was so energetic that one would be forgiven for thinking that it had erased the medieval tendency to reflect on the Viking Age with horror. However, there are some hints that the same sense of trauma felt by authors such as Wulfstan survived in vernacular memory. When one consults the volumes of orally collected British folklore, much of it published in the 1970s on a county-by-county basis, tales of Danish violence recur in certain regions. One finds motifs such as referring to red-headed children as “Danes’ bas­ tards” or “Daners” (Palmer 1973, 58; Whitlock 1976, 118). A mother may threaten her child that “I’ll set the Danes on to yer if yer doänt do as I tells yer!” (Simpson 2009 [1973], 28). There are ghost stories about spectral Danish invaders (Palmer 1973, 133–134; Simpson 2009 [1973], 45–46; Tongue 1965, 100) who continue to haunt England even in death. There are also etiological legends explaining that certain fruits or stones are red because of “Danes’ blood” (Boase 1976, 101–102, 114–115; Jones-Baker 1977, 133). As Simpson remarks in the case of Sussex (2009 [1973], 12) it is notable that a county which was largely spared from the Viking invasions should have such a wealth of folklore about them. Indeed, one finds this trend to extend further: counties which were once inside the Danelaw often have little or even no pre­ served folklore about Viking raids – perhaps there was no impetus to fear Scan­ dinavian raiders when they were in fact ones own grandparents. In Northum­ bria, Yorkshire, and the Scottish Isles, where one might expect to find the most folktales about Viking attacks, none are recorded in the canonical collections. It is the counties on the borders of the Danish controlled zone, or alternatively those deepest in the heartlands of Wessex, where the folkloric sources are the most vivid. In the case of those who lived at the border of the Danelaw, one can imagine that many tales were first generated out of actual conflict with their Scandinavian neighbours. In the case of places such as Sussex, these stories are arguably indicative that the absence of a hated ‘Other’ gives the imagination a



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peculiar degree of freedom to speculate over just how terrible they would be in reality. Of course, it would be an oversimplification to conclude this survey with the implication that folkloric sources are automatically more ‘authentic’ memories than the ideological fabrications of the Victorians. A folk tradition recorded in 1870 or 1970 may well not have existed at all in 1070 or 1570 – or it may have done, but the tradition’s bogeyman may not have become the Danes until the Victorian obsession took hold (indeed, particularly amongst spectral warriors there is often a great degree of flexibility: the same ghoul may variously be a knight, a Roman soldier, a Roundhead, or a Viking). Thus we return to the most useful message of memory studies: that authenticity is not always the arbiter of value. Where Nora (1989) spoke of les lieux de mémoire, we might think of a colourful famille de mémoire – one that embraces Wulfstan’s plunderers, Wace’s Saracen Scandinavi­ ans, the Howitt’s ‘Viking Redcoats’, and the moaning ghosts of Southern English folklore.

Works cited Primary sources Anselm. S. Anselmi ex Beccense abbate Cantuariensis archiepiscopi.Opera Omnia. Ed. J. P. Migne. Patrologia Latina, 4. Paris, 1854. Boase, Wendy. The Folklore of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. London, 1976. Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh. The War of the Gaedhil with the Gaill. Ed. J. H. Todd. Rerum Britannicum Medii Aevi Scriptores. London, 1867. Dudo of St. Quentin. De Moribus et Actis Primorum Normanniæ Ducum. Ed. Jules Lair. Caen, 1865. Dudo of St. Quentin. History of the Normans. Trans. Eric Christiansen. Woodbridge, 1998. Jones-Baker, Doris. The Folklore of Hertfordshire. London, 1977. Maríu saga. Legender om Jomfru Maria og hendes Jertegn. Ed. C. R. Unger. Christiania, 1871. Palmer, Kingsley. Oral Folktales of Wessex. Newton Abbot, 1973. Simpson, Jacqueline. Folklore of Sussex. Stroud, 2009 [1973]. Tongue, R. L. Somerset Folklore. Ed. K. M. Briggs. County Folklore, 8. London, 1965. Wace. The Roman de Rou. Trans. Glynn S. Burgess. Ed. Anthony J. Holden. St Helier, 2002. Whitlock, Ralph The Folklore of Wiltshire. London, 1976. The Homilies of Wulfstan. Ed. Dorothy Bethurum. Oxford, 1957.

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Secondary sources Cawsey, Kathy. 2009. “Disorientating Orientalism. Finding Saracens in Strange Places in Late Medieval English Manuscripts.” Exemplaria 21.4: 380–397. Engels, Frederick [Friedrich]. 1959. Frederick Engels, Paul and Laura Lafargue Correspondence. Trans. Yvonne Knapp. Moscow. Heebøll-Holm, Thomas. 2015. “A Franco-Danish Marriage and the Plot against England.” The Haskins Society Journal 26: 249–270. Howitt, William and Mary. 1852. The Literature and Romance of Northern Europe. A Complete History of the Literature of Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland. Vol. 1. London. Jones, Gwyn. 1973. A History of the Vikings. London. Larson, Laurence M. 1912. The Efforts of the Danish Kings to recover the English Crown after the Death of Harthacnut. Washington, DC. McDougall, Ian. 1993. “Serious Entertainments. An Examination of a Peculiar Type of Viking Atrocity.” Anglo-Saxon England 22: 201–225. Morris, William. 1995 [1890]. News from Nowhere. Ed. Krishnan Kumar. Cambridge. Nora, Pierre. 1989. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire.” Representations. Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory 26: 7–24. O’Donoghue, Heather. 2014. English Poetry and Old Norse Myth. Oxford. Seaton, Ethel. 1935. Literary Relations of England and Scandinavia in the Seventeenth Century. Oxford. Wawn, Andrew. 2000. The Vikings and the Victorians. Inventing the Old North in nineteenthcentury Britain. Cambridge and Rochester, NY.

Stephen A. Mitchell

II: 65 The Northern Isles 1 Introduction: Shetland and Orkney Many areas of the British Isles have had special relations to the Nordic past, but perhaps none more so than the archipelago stretching NNE from Scotland con­ sisting of the Orkney and Shetland islands. These island communities constituted a separate earldom within the medieval Nordic world, and the islands’ history to c. 1200, with a particular focus on St Magnús and Earl Ragnvaldr, is the subject of one of the earliest of the Icelandic sagas, Orkneyinga saga. These so-called Northern Isles remained part of the Scandinavian kingdoms (Norway at first and later, after the Union of Kalmar in 1397, Denmark) until the very late Middle Ages (Shetland until 1469, Orkney until 1472) when the islands were impignorated to the Scottish throne by Christian I of Denmark, whose daughter Margaret was to marry the Scottish prince, James III. Scottish influence naturally accelerated once the islands became part of the Scottish kingdom, but Norn, the form of Scandina­ vian language spoken throughout these islands and parts of Scotland, continued to be used to some extent into the seventeenth, and possibly even the eighteenth, century (Barnes 1998,  16). This unique language situation, discussed already early on (Laurenson 1860; Lyngby 1860), led the Faroese folklorist and linguist, Jakob Jakobsen, to undertake fieldwork in Shetland and to produce an etymologi­ cal dictionary of the Norn language (Jakobsen 1897, 1908–1921, 1985 [1928–1932]; cf. Barnes 1996, 1998).

2 Case study Norse romanticism was a powerful factor in nineteenth- and early twentieth-cen­ tury British intellectual and political life (cf. Wawn 2000), and a series of works (e.g. Barry 1805; Hibbert 1822; Edmonston 1856; Low 1879; Saxby 1880, 1932) ensured that the Northern Isles were included in this discussion (cf. Jesch 2015). How was this past shaped and what is its relationship to memory studies? In one of his analyses of how a culture develops its collective self-image, Jan Assmann suggests that researchers consider a series of important characteristics, among them: “the concretion of identity”; reconstruction; cultural institutionalisation of heritage; organisation (including institutionalising the communicative situa­ tion and the specialised bearers of this memory); and reflexivity (Assmann 1995, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-101

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130–132). Not all of these points are equally relevant or in crystal-clear evidence in the case of the Northern Isles, but all of them appear to have had their roles. A recent examination argues that it is with Hibbert (1822) that the Nordic cha­ racter of Shetland folk belief begins to be emphasised and distinguished from, even against, Irish and mainland British traditions, a perspective with serious consequences for modern tourist and artistic representations of the Northern Isles (Grydehøj 2009). In fact, whether the settlement of Shetland is to be asso­ ciated with Picts, Celts, Finns, or Scandinavian ‘Vikings’ was for the nineteenth century an important ‘foundation myth’ (see Burke 2000). That the unique cul­ tural situation of Shetland in that century and its memory situation are particu­ larly worthy of note may be understood with special clarity through the works of several individuals with distinctly different backgrounds: the prolific Shet­ land author, especially of so-called adolescent adventure books, Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby; the German writer and revolutionary-in-exile, Karl Blind; and the local antiquarian, and Nordic enthusiast, Arthur Laurenson (see ONDB and Spence 1901).

Shetland, cultural patrimony, authenticity, and authority Among the most prominent mid-nineteenth-century families in Shetland were the Edmonstons of Unst, Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby’s family, whose patri­ arch was a medical practitioner and author on natural history (ODNB). Saxby’s mother published on folklore (1856) and her brother authored Flora of Shetland (1845). Saxby herself was extraordinarily prolific; according to ODNB, “A draft bibliography in the Shetland Archives (D. 11/135/2) comprises nearly 150 items, forty-seven of them books.” Writing from Edinburgh, she reveals her sense of engagement with and perspective on the traditions of what she calls “my beloved Fatherland” (Saxby to Child, 7th Jan 1880) when she notes that where others fail to elicit folklore materials from informants whom they cross-examine, “I never fail to get them to speak when I proclaim myself one of themselves – a believer in Trows + witches, + a worshipper of our old Norse mythology + poetry!!” (Saxby to Child, 6th March 1880). Writing in an era in which adventure books featuring British boys set against historical and colonial backdrops were inordinately popular (e.g. George Alfred Henty; cf. Wawn 2000), Saxby tirelessly exploited her Shetland roots with books like The Lads of Lunda (1887). In a later book, Viking Boys (1892), one of her ado­ lescent characters muses about “the olden days, when his native Isles were the haunts of Vikinger, whose ships were for ever winging their way over those waters bearing the spoils of many a stormy fight”. When a sibling objects that they would



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have lacked such advantages as books, the boy responds, “Oh, tuts! They had Scalds to sing their history – much nicer than your musty books” (1892, 1). To the extent that Saxby’s own Shetland-themed books are credited with having contributed importantly to the islands’ self-image, a particularly telling, and surprising, discussion about bonds to the past and enduring legacies occurs in a section of Viking Boys entitled, “Of the Volsungs’ Kin is He” (Ch. 27): There are two races of men who have retained their peculiar characteristics through long ages and through many vicissitudes. They have wandered over the whole globe, and become part of almost every people now existing. They have conquered and been conquered. Their blood has mixed with that of all the other tribes of earth. As independent nations they no longer exist, and yet the personality of the Jew and the Norseman is as distinct to-day as it was when they were mighty ruling powers on the earth.

The same character continues by noting that ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Goths have in essence disappeared, whereas “in blending with those among whom they [the Jews and the Norsemen] dwelt they have yet never ceased to leave indelible traces, which have made them recognisable always.  They  have absorbed, but never been absorbed.” These telling words represent only a small sample of a much larger and lengthier project to shape Shetland’s memory of itself, one involving Saxby and others, and one that might reasonably be assessed in the terms Assmann (1995) uses, i.e. ‘the concretion of identity’ and heritage becoming ‘culturally institu­ tionalised’. Saxby’s influence in, as well as outside of, Shetland appears to have been considerable, leading one researcher to comment that, “The great innova­ tor of Shetland romanticism was Jessie Saxby, who already in the 1880s opposed Shetlanders to the Scots and the English and began presenting local folk belief in a unified manner” (Grydehøj 2009, 228). Although Saxby may have been the preeminent figure in this regard, and especially clever in her use of popular forms of print media – monthly journals, adolescent adventure books – she was by no means working in isolation in developing a memory of the Nordic past as part of Shetland’s present. By contrast, Karl Blind, domiciled in England from 1852, wrote most famously and prolifically about politics (e.g. Über Staat und Nationalität, 1859), but he was also a frequent contributor on folklore and history to various journals and news­ weeklies. When brought to his attention, he quickly embraced Shetland’s strong connections to its Nordic, even Germanic, past. In 1878, he published “Lieder­ trümmer aus der Edda in shetländer Volksmund” [song fragments from the Edda in Shetlandic vernacular] in Die Gegenwart, and the following year produced an English version, “Discovery of Odinic Songs in Shetland” in Nineteenth Century. Blind specifically connects this newly discovered verse with the Odinic narrative

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about the acquisition of runes in the eddaic poem Hávamál and provides the fol­ lowing transcription and translation: Nine days he hang pa da rütless tree; For ill wis da folk, in’ güd wis he. A blüdy maet wis in his side – Made wi’ a lance – ’at wid na hide. Nine lang nichts, i’ da nippin’ rime,  Hang he dare wi’ his naeked limb. Some, dey ieuch; Bit idders gret.

Nine days he hung on the Rootless Tree; For bad was the folk, and good was he. A bloody mark was on his side – Made with a lance – that would not hide (heal) Nine long nights, in the nipping rime, Hung he there with his naked limb. Some, they laughed; But others wept. (Blind’s translation)

Blind’s remarks on this item of Shetland folklore are wide-ranging to say the least, heavily informed by then-current thinking about mythology (e.g. Mannhardt, Grimm, Tylor) and eager to make wider associations with Aryan and Indian comparanda. Blind praises both the “vitality” and “weirdness” of i.a. the Shet­ land materials, and in conclusion writes, “in the smoldering ashes we still get glimpses of the hammer of Thor, of Odin’s glittering helmet and spear, of Freyja’s shining necklace” (Blind 1879, 1113). Given both Blind’s personal prominence and the international readership of his essays, he, as an outsider to Shetland, firmly fixed in place Shetland’s Nordic connections, providing etic interpretations of the islands’ place in the pre-modern North for the rest of the world, an important but very different kind of memory community. Well before either Saxby or Blind had published on Shetland, Arthur Laurenson had been active in developing knowledge of the islands’ cultural history and through it the value of the Nordic past as a point of reference for the islands. Perhaps more than any other Shetlander, Laurenson not only knew of and valorised the region’s Nordic connections but also worked diligently to prepare himself for the task. He had grown up and been educated in Shet­ land, and subsequently travelled through Norway and Sweden and appears to have possessed knowledge of the various Nordic languages. As a companion piece to Lyngby (1860), Laurenson publishes “Om Sproget paa Shetlandsö­ erne” [On the language of the Shetland Islands] in Annaler for Nordisk Oldkyndighed in 1860, a piece which with his many other shorter items (e.g. 1874) are in fact said to have influenced Jakobsen’s decision to explore Shetland Norn. On a trial basis in 1886, Laurenson publishes a slender test volume of Diplomatarium Hialtlandense containing a dozen medieval documents in Latin and Old Norse relating to the islands. Laurenson was also active in local cultural and political activities, being a co-founder of the Shetland Literary and Scien­ tific Society, a long-term member of the Lerwick Town Council, and the citizen entrusted with decorating the then-new (and still in use today) Lerwick Town



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Hall, with its stained glass windows, including one of a highly valorised Hákon Hákonarson, king of Norway (1217–1263), who had died on Orkney (see colour plate 23). Laurenson was also influential, if quietly so, in bringing the islands to the world’s notice through his correspondence with scholars in areas beyond the Northern Isles. It was, for example, Laurenson who drew Blind’s attention to the text of the “Odinic song”, writing, “I send you what I think will be found a rare and valuable specimen of a ‘survival’ […] I am afraid this fragment is all we can now recover of the Unst Lay. No doubt there was more, which, by time’s attrition, has been rubbed away” (quoted in Blind 1879, 1092). Laurenson had been to the United States and visited Henry Wadsworth Long­ fellow, the great champion of Nordic letters in nineteenth-century America, and he shortly thereafter became a correspondent with and ‘auxiliary’ to Francis James Child, who was then amassing materials for his monumental anthology of English and Scottish ballads (see Mitchell 2012). In precisely that context, we catch a glimpse of the candid Laurenson who shares with Child several of the opinions he did not otherwise air so openly. Writing to Child in response to the request that he advertise for ballad texts and contact local pastors and teachers for assistance, Laurenson responds, You will find that I have omitted your reference to the clergy and the schoolmasters, and also any reference to remuneration, as I do not think these will be of any use in furthering your views. The clergy here are almost all Scotchmen by birth + education and are entirely destitute of any sympathy with Old Norse matters or with the old traditions of the islands. They are all importations, are generally of the lower Scotch class by birth and training, and have as a rule no idea of linguistic studies – beyond the rudiments of Latin + Greek which fuss them through the Scotch Theological Halls. They as a class have done all they could for 200 years to destroy every relic of our antiquity in the shape of tradition or ballads and the schoolmasters are similar. (Laurenson to Child, 5 Jan 1880)

To which Laurenson adds at the end of his letter the following postscript: “Of course this letter so far as [it] relates to our clergy + schoolmasters is only for your private use.” As we now understand, however, his private comments are part of a much larger tug-of-war for the soul of the Northern Isles and their place in North Atlantic history (cf. Grydehøj 2009). One senses in Laurenson’s correspondence more than a small degree of pro­ fessional jealousy between himself and Saxby about the nature of the Shetlandic material, as well as who is in a position to comment on or record it. So, a further factor to consider regarding the concretion of identity, its reconstruction and so on, is that those specialised bearers of memory do not necessarily represent a chorus of harmony – they are perhaps just as likely to be discordant, feuding,

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and petty. Thus, commenting acidly on Saxby’s recent work on Shetland folklore, Laurenson reveals to Child, Since writing last I have seen Mrs Saxby’s articles in the Leisure Hour There is little there of any value. She has no real knowledge of or liking for the subject, but writes just for writing sake. In her short paper she makes an absurd blunder showing that she must be quite igno­ rant of the elements of the Old Northern Mythology – when she talks of Balder “conquering the Valkyrior” – or some nonsense to that effect. I do not have the paper to hand, so cannot quote the exact words. In the second paper she seems more concerned to trot out her father, brother +the family generally than to shed any light on the matter in hand. [!] And her father’s elucidation of [a difficult Norn phrase], causes one to feel no pang of sorrow (so far as the present subject is concerned) that he should have taken his conjectural ety­ mologies with him to the “Silent Land,” whereof Mrs Saxby speaks. (Laurenson to Child, 10 March 1880)

Updating Viking memories Lest there be any doubt about the direction Shetlandic cultural memory took, the custom of ‘Up-helly-aa’ provides something of a compass (see fig. 1). Celebrated in Lerwick and other locations on Shetland, it has become a famous ritual, even available online through live-streaming!, in which e.g. early in the darkness of the last Tuesday morning in January, in the words of a seminal writer on the topic, “A night-time army of a thousand men march in lavish costumes of masquerade with huge flaming torches, singing praise to medieval Norse heroes as they draw a Viking ship to its ceremonial funeral pyre” (Brown 1998). This festival has long roots, although by no means roots that stretch back to the Viking Age; neverthe­ less, a raucous annual tradition had developed in the centuries leading up to the nineteenth, during the latter parts of which (and, one assumes, under the influence of the specialised bearers or perhaps architects, of the islands’ cultural memory discussed above), it was re-purposed to fit the evolving connection to Shetland’s Nordic past. It is important in considering the ‘Up-helly-aa’ festivities that they not be judged with respect to a false understanding of so-called ‘authenticity’ according to which customs are viewed as unchanging atavisms from the past (cf. Bendix 1997; Mitchell 2014). This festival is a meaningful expression about the past by a particular folk group according to its curated sense of history. As Brown (1998, 196) notes, “What we find in living and vibrant community customs should not be treated as remnants of a preindustrial past, nor as signs of unchanging ele­ ments in society.” Neither the projected Nordic connections nor the festival itself can be dismissed as false, ‘fakelore’ or the like, but what ‘Up-helly-aa’ represents,



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Fig. 1: The Jarl of the 2016 ‘Up helly aa’ celebration, Mark Evans, leads fifty-five ‘Vikings’ and fourteen school-age junior ‘Vikings’ along the Esplanade by the waterfront in Lerwick.

despite all temptations from tourist boards and the like to make it more economi­ cally viable by changing the timing and so on, is how a community can employ its past to push back against grand national narratives and those who in Lauren­ son’s words “have done all they could for 200 years to destroy every relic of our antiquity”.

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Works cited Primary sources Letters from Arthur Laurenson to Francis James Child, dated 5 Jan 1880 and 10 Mar 1880. Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Am 2349 (3). Letters from Jessie M. (née Edmonston) Saxby to Francis James Child, dated 7 Jan 1880 and 6 Mar 1880. Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Am 2349 (21). Orkneyinga saga = Orkneyinga saga. Legenda de Sancto Magno. Magnúss saga skemmri. Magnúss saga lengri. Helga þáttr ok Úlfs. Ed. Finnbogi Guðmundsson. ÍF, 34. Reykjavík, 1980 [1965]. Saxby, J. M. E. Viking Boys. London, 1892.

Secondary sources Assmann, Jan. 1995. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” New German Critique 65: 125–133. Barnes, Michael P. 1996. “Jakob Jakobsen and the Norn Language of Shetland.” In Shetland’s Northern Links: Language and History. Ed. Doreen J. Waugh. Scottish Society for Northern Studies Publication, 8. Edinburgh. 1–15. Barnes, Michael P. 1998 The Norn Language of Orkney and Shetland. Lerwick. Barry, George. 1805. History of the Orkney Islands. In which is Comprehended an Account of Their Present as well as Their Ancient State; Together with the Advantages They Possess for Several Branches of Industry, and the Means by which They May be Improved. Edinburgh. Bendix, Regina. 1997. In Search of Authenticity. The Formation of Folklore Studies. Madison, WI. Blind, Karl. 1878. “Liedertrümmer aus der Edda in shetländer Volksmund.” Die Gegenwart. Wochenschrift für Literatur, Kunst und öffentlisches Leben, 13: 307–310 and 14: 101–104. Blind, Karl. 1879. “Discovery of Odinic Songs in Shetland.” Nineteenth Century: 1091–1113. Brown, Callum G. 1998. Up-helly-aa. Custom, Culture, and Community in Shetland. Manchester and New York. Burke, Peter. 2000. “Foundation Myths and Collective Identities in Early Modern Europe.” In Europe and the Other and Europe as the Other. Ed. Bo Strath. Collection Multicultural Europe, 10. New York. 113–122. Edmonston, Eliza. 1856. Sketches and Tales of the Shetland Islands. Edinburgh. Grydehøj, Adam. 2009. “Historiography of Picts, Vikings, Scots, and Fairies and Its Influence on Shetland’s Twenty-First Century Economic Development.” PhD Diss., University of Aberdeen. Hibbert, Samuel. 1822. A Description of the Shetland Islands, comprising an Account of their Geology, Scenery, Antiquities, and Superstitions. Edinburgh. Jakobsen, Jakob. 1897. Det norrøne Sprog på Shetland. Copenhagen. Jakobsen, Jakob. 1908–21. Etymologisk Ordbog over det norrøne Sprog på Shetland. 2 vols. Copenhagen. Jakobsen, Jakob. 1985 [1928–1932]. An Etymological Dictionary of the Norn Language in Shetland. 2 vols. Lerwick.



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Jesch, Judith. 2015. The Viking Diaspora. London. Laurenson, Arthur. 1860. “Om Sproget paa Shetlandsöerne.” Annaler for Nordisk Oldkyndighed: 190–201. Laurenson, Arthur. 1874. “On certain Beliefs and Phrases of Shetland Fishermen.” Proceedings, Society of Antiquaries of Scotland: 711–716. Laurenson, Arthur, ed. 1886. Diplomatarium Hialtlandense. Documents Relating to the Shetland Islands from the XIIIth Century. Lerwick. Low, George. 1879. A Tour through the Islands of Orkney and Shetland Containing Hints Relative to their Ancient, Modern, and Natural History, Collected in 1774. With an Introduction by Joseph Anderson. Kirkwall. Lyngby, K.J. 1860. “Om Sproget paa Hjaltalandsøerne.” Annaler for Nordisk Oldkyndighed: 201–216. Mitchell, Stephen A. 2012. “‘...very dark to me...very clear to you...’ Child, Grundtvig, Laurenson, and King Orfeo (Child 19).” In Child’s Children: Ballad Study and Its Legacies. Ed. Joseph Harris and Barbara Hillers. Ballads and Songs International Studies, 7. Trier. 114–126. Mitchell, Stephen A. 2014. “Continuity. Folklore’s Problem Child?” In Folklore in Old Norse – Old Norse in Folklore. Ed. Daniel Sävborg and Karen Bek-Pedersen. Nordistica Tartuensis, 20. Tartu. 34–51. ODNB = Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew et al. [online ed.] Saxby, Jessie Margaret Edmondston. 1880. “Folk-Lore from Unst, Shetland, Part II.” The Leisure Hour, No. 1468: 108–110. Saxby, Jessie Margaret Edmondston. 1932. Shetland Traditional Lore. Edinburgh. Spence, Catherine Stafford, ed. 1901. Arthur Laurenson. His Letters and Literary Remains: A Selection, with an Introductory Memoir. London. Wawn, Andrew. 2000. The Vikings and the Victorians. Inventing the Old North in NineteenthCentury Britain. Cambridge and Rochester, NY.

Pierre-Brice Stahl

II: 66 French Perspectives 1 Introduction The print discussed in this case study illustrates the dominant reception of Old Norse mythology in France at the beginning of the twentieth century which asso­ ciated the North as a Germanic space. The god Þórr (Thor) does not appear as a Nordic god, but he is rather conceived as a Germanic deity. Moreover, he is green and is described in the title as the essence of barbarism: Le Dieu Thor la plus barbare d’entre les barbares divinités de la Vieille Germanie [The god Thor, the most barbarous among the barbarian deities of Old Germany]. The stencilcoloured lithography dates from 1915 and measures 39.9 by 29.8 centimetres (see colour plate 24). With the use of Pierre Nora’s concept lieux de mémoire, the general social, political and cultural context of the print will be analysed in the following. Nora defines sites of memory as “any significant entity, whether material or nonmate­ rial in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a sym­ bolic element of the memorial heritage of any community” (Nora 1996, XVII; see also Nora 1997, 2226). They can take different forms, such as festivals, emblems, or monuments. The context of this print will help us understand the different types of discourse that lie behind this depiction of Þórr destroying important Gothic monuments.

2 Case study Epinal prints as a site of memory Epinal prints are colourful popular prints originating in Epinal, a commune in the Vosges department in north-eastern France. Different types of printed products were produced there, such as models, puppets, vignettes, or illustrations with captions. Through their (re)mediation and the meaning (re)invested in them, Epinal prints can be considered as sites of memory. In the nineteenth century, Epinal prints became their own genre with an international influence. The term ‘Epinal’ turned out to describe any prints using the same codes. The original company – that produced the Thor print – is Pellerin & Cie, a family-run business. Despite its success, the company had to cease its activity in 1914 due to the First https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-102



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World War. In 1915, Pol Payonne (1851–1921), one of the directors, reopened it and started a series of prints entitled “série de guerre” [war series] that was produced between 1915 and 1918 (Cablé 2014, 239–279). One of the reasons for the production of this series is tradition, a term often used by Payone to express the role of the company: to record the great moments of French history (Cablé 2014, 249). Anne Cablé notes that it is this ‘tradition’ that justifies the printing of this series: “[...] glorifier la France, bâtir une identité nationale, unir autour de ces valeurs, est un devoir, un sacerdoce sans lequel elle perdrait sa respectabilité, sa raison d’être.” (Cablé 2014, 249) [[...] to glorify France, to build a national identity, to unite around these values, is a duty, a priesthood without which it [i.e. the company] would lose its respectability, its raison d’être (author’s translation)]. Cablé describes this approach as an œuvre de mémoire (Cablé 2014, 279) [work of memory] , a tradition that started with the first series about Napoleon in 1829. Payonne was also aware of the possible lon­ gevity of the series as can be seen in a letter to Pierpik dated 29 September 1914 (Cablé 2014, 279). One of the intentions of this war series was to record the then present events and the destruction of the past as can be seen in the image of Þórr. This specific print, number 87 in the war series, was created by François Clasquin (1849–1917), a French architect. He only worked a few months for the company, from March to May 1915. Probably due to his friendship with Payonne and direct contacts with him, there is no extant written correspondence between the two men that could indicate the intentions behind this print. The detailed drawings of the monuments reflect his career as an architect. These buildings were never identified, but it is possible to determine that they correspond to several buildings that actually were destroyed in 1914, among them Ypres Cloth Hall, Arras Belfry and – presumably – Reims Cathedral. All these monuments share a common style: Gothic architecture.

Gothic architecture as a site of memory A key element to understanding this image is to comprehend the role played by Gothic architecture in France. At that time, Gothic architecture was perceived as French art par excellence. This perception of a historic architectural style was pro­ moted by several key actors, among them, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879), an architect and theorist, as well as Camille Enlart (1862–1927), an archaeologist, art historian, and museum director. Through their publications and museum exhibi­ tions, they participated in the construction of a national identity. Gothic architec­ ture and its monuments became sites of memory. Therefore, Clasquin’s print does

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not only depict the destruction of Gothic monuments: it is the French patrimony that is at stake. This Epinal print would also have reminded the audience of a specific event: the destruction of the Cathedral of Reims by German shellfire on 19 September 1914. This event became part of the collective memory of France at that time. The institutions, artists, and journalists widely used the event to strengthen the French community against the aggressor, Wilhelm II (1888–1918). The Cathedral of Reims became a symbol of French martyrdom. As the site for the coronation of the kings of France, it was a site of memory in its right. As Jacques le Goff pointed out, “[...] les atteintes portées au monument-mémoire sont une blessure de la mémoire elle-même” (Le Goff 1997, 651) [(...) the attacks on the memorymonument are a wound to the memory itself (author’s translation)]. The instrumentalisation of the destruction of these sites of memory played a central role in the anti-German propaganda, and art was requisitioned in this instrumentalisation (Bélier 2016, 11). In 1915, the Musée de Sculpture comparée highlighted the destruction of this French patrimony. A year later, an exhibition at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Paris displayed a selection of mutilated artwork (Exposition d’œuvres d’art mutilées, 1916). Various publications denounced these attacks on the monuments. The monuments even gained anthropomorphic char­ acteristics and were depicted as the incarnation of France or as a parallel to the victims from the battlefront. Illustrations of the destruction of the Cathedral of Reims can also be found on multiple postcards. They usually depict Wilhelm II with the burning Cathedral in the background. Clasquin’s work is part of this anti-German propaganda. Its peculiarity is that it represents Þórr as the main protagonist.

Þórr: barbarous and German Þórr is the destroyer of these Gothic monuments. This choice is linked to the quotation of the German romantic poet and essayist Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) by Clasquin: Le jour viendra, hélas  ! Les vieilles divinités germaniques se lèveront de leurs tombeaux fabuleux et essuyeront de leurs yeux la poussière séculaire ; THOR se dressera avec son marteau gigantesque et détruira les cathédrales gothiques. (Le Dieu Thor) [The day will come, alas! The old Germanic divinities will rise from their fabulous tombs and wipe away the secular dust from their eyes; THOR will rise with his gigantic hammer and destroy the Gothic cathedrals. (author’s translation)]



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This quote comes from “De l’Allemagne depuis Luther, deuxième partie” [About Germany since Luther, second part] published in 1834 in La Revue des Deux-Mondes (677). Written eighty years before 1914, the text echoed perfectly the situation of France and Belgium during the First World War. It was perceived as a prophetic announcement and used in various newspapers and books at that time (e.g. Petit Journal, 214). Clasquin notes at the bottom of the print that Heine had predicted “ce retour à la sauvagerie ancestrale” [this return to the ancestral savagery] (Le Dieu Thor) depicted by Þórr. The title introduces Þórr as “the most barbarous among the barbarian deities of Old Germany”. The term barbarous was already present in portrayals of the German Empire at the end of the nineteenth century (Beaupré 2015). It was com­ monly used during the propaganda to depict Germany and its Kaiser. At that time, the term referred to the enemy and was linked to notions of cruelty and inhuman­ ity. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Old Norse mythology was commonly associated with German culture in France through, for example, Wagner’s tetral­ ogy Der Ring des Nibelungen, the Grimm brothers’ work, popularising depictions, and propaganda during the Franco–Prussian War (1870–1871) (Mohnike 2015; Zernack 2016). Þórr could thus be portrayed as being barbarous, i.e. German. This aspect is not specific to this print; as underlined by Julia Zernack: “The nega­ tive Þórr allegory plays on older ways of denigrating the foreign as monstrous” (Zernack 2016, 269). Such monstrous and barbaric traits are reinforced by the people hanging at the top of the spear, as well as the drawing of skulls at the bottom of the image. It is also the reason why Þórr is represented in green, the colour of monsters and demonic entities during the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries (Mollard-Desfour 2012, XXVII). Since colours were an important part of the image d’Epinal, this choice reinforced the barbaric aspect of the god. In this representation, Þórr is not just the deity of Wilhelm II: he symbolises the whole of Germany. “En 1914–1915 le Kaiser commande et l’Allemagne applau­ dit !” [In 1914–1915, the Kaiser commands and Germany applauds!] (Le Dieu Thor). This last sentence of Clasquin echoes his drawing. Everyone participates in the destruction: the German people saluting at the bottom right; Wilhelm II in the form of an eagle on top of a weapon in the right corner; and the army gener­ als behind their emperor contemplating the scene. Þórr can be perceived here as an allegorical personification of the essence of German barbarism, while France is symbolised by its Gothic monuments. Clasquin’s work is part of a discourse opposing barbarism and civilisation that was common in the French anti-German propaganda. In this discourse, France is described as the emblem of civilisation. The Epinal print thus represents the opposition between the French patrimony

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with its Gothic architecture as sites of memory (representing civilisation) and Wilhelm II’s Germany with its old deity Þórr (representing barbarism).

Works cited Primary sources La Revue des Deux-Mondes. IV. Paris, 1834. Le Dieu Thor la plus barbare d’entre les barbares divinités de la Vieille Germanie. Claquin, François. Epinal. 1915. Le petit journal illustré du 5 septembre 1915. “Les prophéties sur la guerre”. 1915.

Secondary sources Beaupré, Nicolas. 2015. “Barbarie(s) en représentations. Le cas français (1914–1918).” Histoire@Politique 26. http://www.histoire-politique.fr/ (January 2018) Bélier, Corinne. 2016. “Des œuvres pour le dire.” In 1914–1918 le patrimoine s’en va-t-en guerre. Ed. Jean-Marc Hofman. Paris. Le Goff, Jacques. 1997 [1984]. “Reims, ville du sacre.” In Les Lieux de mémoire. Vol. 1. La nation. Ed. Pierre Nora. Paris. 649–733. Mohnike, Thomas. 2015. “‘Le Dieu Thor, la plus barbare d’entre les barbares divinités de la Vieille Germanie’. Quelques observations pour une théorie des formes narratives du savoir social en circulation culturelle.” Revue de littérature comparée 354: 151–164. Mollard–Desfour, Annie. 2012. Le Vert. Paris. Cablé, Anne. 2014. “L’Imagerie d’Epinal dans la tourmente, naissance d’une édition de guerre.” In 14/18, l’enfant découpait des images... Paola de Pietri, photographies. Ed. Musée de l’image. Epinal. 239–279. Nora, Pierre. 1996. “From lieux de mémoire to realms of memory.” In Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past. Ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman. Volume 3. New York. XV–XXIV. Nora, Pierre. 1997 [1992]. “Comment écrire l’histoire de France ?” In Les Lieux de mémoire, Vol. 2. Les France. Ed. Pierre Nora. Paris. 2219–2236. Zernack, Julia. 2016. “Old Norse Myths and the Poetic Edda as Tools of Political Propaganda.” In Studies in the Transmission and Reception of Old Norse Literature. Ed. Judy Quinn and Adele Cipolla. Acta Scandinavica, 6. Turnhout. 239–274.

Roland Scheel

II: 67 German Perspectives 1 Introduction Writing about memory and nation building in the German-speaking area, it is crucial to bear in mind which time frame should actually be associated with this nation building. Traditionally, Germany is seen as a ‘belated nation’. The late and forceful solution of the German Question in the war between Prussia and Austria in 1866 and the foundation of the Empire in 1871 under Otto von Bismarck’s lead­ ership, resting on the unifying war against France and Prussian dominance in the new state, is often thought to be connected to specific structural deficiencies of the new nation state. This late unification ‘from the top’ and the liberals’ failure to strive for a consequent democratisation have been argued to be responsible for a German Sonderweg in European history (for a critical view, see Blackbourn and Eley 1984, 144–155; Langewiesche 2008). It is tempting to view the often dis­ torting, Germano-manic, mostly anti-democratic, racist and anti-Semitic appro­ priation of the Old Norse tradition in Germany and in German-speaking parts of Austria in the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century as a phenomenon connected to the peculiarities of German nation building. After all, there is a strong völkisch continuity of thought, if not of institutions or groups, between the Wilhelminian Empire and the Third Reich (Zernack 1996; Puschner 2001). Viewing the phenomenon from the perspective of cultural memory, however, one should be able to point to a certain consensus at least among the influential classes in the respective societies to remember stories, motifs or figures from Old Norse literature as a part of the history of one’s ‘own’ culture or nation. A certain stability of contents, a high relevance with regard to identity, contained values and reflectivity of contemporary practices should be recognisable. As a precondi­ tion, the contents one comes across should be present in collective memory. This in turn presupposes a successful implantation of foreign witnesses to memory into ‘national’ myths.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-103

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2 Case study Preconditions: From a long incubation period to the Wilhelminian Empire This process of implantation has a long incubation period among scholars and authors, as is also the case with nation building in the German-speaking area. Both phenomena are remarkably parallel: Early forms of “patriotism for the Reich” (Reichspatriotismus), demanding a greater adherence to the laws and structures of the Old Empire in the middle of the eigtheenth century, coincide temporally with Johann Gottfried Herder’s ideas of a ‘culture-nation’ (Hien 2015, 178–186). It is defined first and foremost by a common language, and as Herder stressed national characteristics over Enlightenment universalism, the idea of a peculiar ‘national genius’ of a folk-community allowed him to call the mythologi­ cal tradition in Old Norse (and Celtic, for that matter) a “Rüstkammer eines neuen deutschen Genies” (Herder 1877, 74) [armory of a new German genius] as early as 1765 (Böldl 2000, 143–145; von See 1994, 73–75). This concept is a necessary pre­ condition for appropriating Norse material as a pure mirror of the Germans’ ‘own’ national characteristics. Although the accompanying definition of a ‘culture– nation’ is vaguer with regard to political structures – and therefore better fitted political reality than the Reichspatriotismus – the agents of both concepts per­ ceived themselves to be lone voices in the wilderness (Jansen 2011, 236–240; Hien 2015, 181–184). One might agree that they actually were. Even if Herder’s ideas appear like a conditio sine qua non for remembering Old Norse myths in the context of the national project in retrospect, his and the writings of many other authors belong to a long incubation period in nation build­ ing. The predominantly liberal demand for a German nation state grew between the victory over Napoleon and 1871, when Otto von Bismarck enforced the ‘lesser German solution’. Aggression outwards was accompanied by a growing partici­ pation of the liberals and thus the middle classes inside the new nation state. (Jansen 2011, 244–252; Weichlein 2011, 283–292). It is therefore reasonable to see the German nation-building period as ending on the eve of the Wilhelminian Era, which saw a stabilisation of political discourse within the frame of the new nation state.

Strategies of inclusion and exclusion: Roman – German – Germanic It is all the more surprising, at least at first glance, that the use of Old Norse mythology and saga literature as a part of German and Germano-Austrian cultural memory becomes a mass phenomenon first in the 1890s, when the aforemen­



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tioned völkisch movement also gains momentum and the Kaiser starts his yearly cruises to Norway (Zernack 1996). There is thus a huge temporal gap between the formulation of ideas, their application by numerous authors, and a real impact in every-day political discourse among the wider public. As we have seen, Herder already had established the idea of a ‘Nordic’ character of the Germans. This was not too uncommon in the European context, after Paul Henri Mallet had made parts of the two Eddas available in French in 1756: Many European communities, or rather their elites, who did not see their roots in the ancient Roman sphere, inscribed themselves into a ‘Nordic’ universe (Böldl 2000, 136–157; von See 1994, 73–82). A next decisive step in academia was taken by Jacob Grimm, when he, treat­ ing German grammar in 1819, declared Old Norse traditions to be ‘German’: Ich bediene mich, wie jeder sieht, des Ausdrucks deutsch allgemein, so daß er auch die nordischen Sprachen einbegreift. Viele würden das Wort germanisch vorgezogen und unter seine Allgemeinheit das Deutsche und Nordische als das Besondere gestellt haben. Da indessen nordische Gelehrte neuerdings förmliche Einsprache dawider thun, daß ihr Volks­ stamm ein germanischer sey, so soll ihnen die Theilnahme an diesem seit der Römerzeit ehrenvollen Namen so wenig aufgedrungen werden, […]. Deutsch bleibt dann die einzige allgemeine, kein einzelnes Volk bezeichnende Benennung. (Grimm 1819, XXXVIII) [I am using, as everyone can see, the term German [deutsch] broadly, so that it also comes to encompass the Nordic languages. Many would have preferred the word Germanic [germanisch] and would have subsumed under its generality the German and the Nordic as peculiarities. As, however, Nordic scholars of late have formally objected to the idea that their tribe was a Germanic one, their participation in this name, which has been honourable since the Roman Age, should not be forced upon them […]. German [deutsch] thus remains the only general term which does not designate only one people. (author’s translation, emphasis in the original)]

Grimm was not the first to formulate this equation, but his treatment of linguistic, legal and mythological aspects, rooted in Romanticism as it was, came to influ­ ence later reception to a remarkable degree, not least Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen and popular scholarship. Grimm alludes to the honour the ‘Germanic’ name has held since antiquity, whereby he addresses an aspect of the modern German foundation myth which was much more significant in cultural memory than Old Norse tradition, at least before the Wilhelminian Era. Tacitus’s Germania and especially his Annales, which describe Arminius’s victory over Varus in AD 9, had been put to propagandistic use already by Ulrich von Hutten in the context of the Reformation, where Arminius or Hermann became a forerunner of Protestant resistance against ‘Rome’ (von See 2003, 63–88). By the nineteenth century, Tacitus had become an integral part of humanist education. The broad effect is mirrored in the great public interest in the Hermannsdenkmal (Hermann

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Monument) in the Teutoburg Forest, which was built between 1838 and 1875. Car­ toonists both in Germany and abroad alluded to fictions of the ancient ‘German’ based upon the reception of Hermann, which underlines the dominance of ancient Roman sources. On the other side of the coin, this aspect of nationalistic memory was decidedly Protestant and northern German, i.e. of the bourgeois, liberal majority and the Conservatives in a Germany dominated by Prussia (von See 1994, 10–16). The marginalisation of Catholic voices in the process of German nation building as a consequence of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf [culture struggle, 1871–1878] should not obscure the fact that there had been options of inscribing the ‘German’ self into essentially two narratives: the ‘Nordic’ and the ‘Roman’ one, with regard to both the geographical and the confessional situation.

“Our old national myth”: Bismarck as a seismograph of bourgeois thought It seems remarkable that Otto von Bismarck in his speeches and publications pointedly did not choose to employ the myth of Hermann, but rather Norse mythology – although only in a few cases. The fact that the skilled rhetorician chose to employ a motif from Norse tradition is revealing with regard to the degree of internalisation he expected among his intended recipients, in this case the National Liberals. On 2nd March 1885, he answered questions from the parlia­ ment regarding expenses in the colonies, which resulted in a general defence of the new colonial politics and an explanation of their international consequences. Bismarck concluded thus: Bei den fremden Nationen machen die Vorgänge in Deutschland ja sehr leicht den Ein­ druck, daß bei uns zwar unter Umständen wie 1870, wie 1813, die geharnischten Männer aus der Erde wachsen wie aus der Saat der Drachenzähne in der griechischen Mythe in Kolchis, aber daß sich dann auch stets irgendein Zaubersteinchen der Medea findet, welches man zwischen sie werfen kann, worauf sie übereinander herfallen und sich so raufen, daß der fremde Jason ganz ruhig dabei stehen kann und zusehen, wie die deutschen gewappneten Recken sich untereinander bekämpfen. Es liegt eine eigentümliche prophetische Voraus­ sicht in unserem alten nationalen Mythos, daß sich, so oft es den Deutschen gut geht, wenn ein deutscher Völkerfrühling wieder, wie der verstorbene Köllege Völk sich ausdrückte, anbricht, daß dann auch stets der Loki nicht fehlt, der seinen Hödur findet, einen blöden, dämlichen Menschen, den er mit Geschick veranlaßt, den deutschen Völkerfrühling zu erschlagen respektive niederzustimmen. (Lebhaftes Bravo!) (Bismarck 1930, 8) [Among foreign nations, the events in Germany may easily give the impression that under certain circumstances in our country, as in 1870 and 1813, men in armour grow out of the earth like seed from the dragon’s teeth in the Greek myth in Colchis. Yet in these cases always some sort of Medea’s magic stone can be found, which one may throw among these men, after which they will attack each other and grapple with one another to such a degree



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that the foreign Jason may stand aside and calmly watch how the armoured German warri­ ors fight. There is a peculiar, prophetic foresight in our old national myth that, as soon as the Germans have it good, when a German peoples’ spring [Völkerfrühling] is dawning, as the late colleague Völk put it: that then the Loki is never lacking, who finds his Hödur/Höðr, a dumb, dim-witted man, whom he prompts craftily to slay, that is to defeat by vote, the German Peoples’ Spring. (Lively Bravo!) (author’s translation)]

This passage serves to illustrate how Bismarck in an ingenious manner integrated classical mythology, Norse mythology and liberal thought into a strong picture, thereby alluding to the self-image of his audience and its national thought. The allegories remind one of N.F.S. Grundtvig’s ‘symbolic language’, and they are clear enough with regard to the roles taken from the Eddas: Loki is the archparliamentarian, Hödur/Höðr the easily mislead German voter, and Baldr is the ‘peoples’ spring’ (Völkerfrühling) instigated by the government in recognition of the people’s true needs. It is interesting that Bismarck duplicates the picture through a parallel use of Greek mythology before he talks about ‘our old national myth’, obviously trying to reach a diverse bourgeois public. By mentioning the Völkerfrühling as the endangered objective of his policy, he invoked a keyword of liberal politics ultimately going back to Ludwig Börne, which originally expressed the strife for political freedom and participation as well as national unity. The late Joseph Völk had been a member of the Reichstag and of the National Liberal Party. Nevertheless, the use of the triangle Loki – Hödur/Höðr – peoples’ spring was more than just a pompous Bonapartist attempt to pocket the Liberals (OdenwaldVarga 2009, 195–197). As he felt that his Völkerfrühling was mistaken for enthusi­ asm for the colonies, Bismarck explained his ‘analogy to Old German mythology’ on 12th March 1885: Es war nur etwas, was […] mich in den letzten zwanzig Jahren ununterbrochen gequält und beunruhigt hat, diese Analogie unserer deutschen Geschichte und unserer deutschen Göt­ tersage. […] Ich habe unter dem Frühling, der uns Deutschen geblüht hat, die ganze Zeit verstanden, in der sich – ich kann wohl sagen – Gottes Segen über Deutschlands Politik seit 1866 ausgeschüttet hat, […]. (Bismarck 1930, 14) [It was just something that […] has haunted and discomforted me continuously for the last twenty years, this analogy of our German history with our German myth [Göttersage]. […] I understood the Spring, which dawned on us Germans, to be the whole period during which, if I may say so, God’s blessing lay on Germany’s policy since 1866, […]. (author’s transla­ tion)]

Bismarck identifies the Völkerfrühling with nation building, with the existence of the Reich in its current state, and nothing less than the existence of this state is what he sees threatened by the parliamentarian Loki. That opinion reveals some­

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thing about his concept of the German people, which in his view possesses great military potential as a result of its ‘virile’ Germanic heritage. At the same time, all peoples are of mixed descent, and the Germans are at the same time willing to put up with too much, are too naïve and would rather struggle among themselves than to fight external foes (Odenwald-Varga 2009, 148–150, 189–194; Goldberg 1998, 456–457). The German in Bismarck’s view is, like Hödur/Höðr, a potentially tragic figure, easily misled by politicians, called the “arch-voter” [Urwähler, that is, for the Progress Party] in a later speech on the same subject (12th March: Bis­ marck 1930, 14–15). That fits with his repeated use of Loki as the eloquent poli­ tician who will destroy with the feather what had been achieved by the sword (12th and 14th March: Bismarck 1930, 15–16). Bismarck’s rhetoric was driven by fear of loss of the achieved, which he expressed through repeated allegorical allusions to the Ragnarök. It is no coincidence that spring is in Baldr’s place in this narration. The idea of Baldr as a god of spring does not feature in Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie from 1835, but in a widely read popular scholarship book by the legal historian Felix Dahn and his wife Therese, first published in 1876. In their Walhall, we find all the information necessary to decode Bismarck’s alle­ gory and its morale: Baldr is the personification of the light of spring (Dahn 1888, 124–126), the bad and sly Loki is the ultimate traitor (Dahn 1888, 132–136), and the ‘Germanic consciousness’ is mirrored in the tragic character of its mythology (Dahn 1888, 41), which Bismarck addresses as ‘prophetic foresight’. It is quite clear that this view was also influenced by Richard Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen and his merging of German and Norse Nibelungen traditions with the Ragnarök (cf. Teichert 2008, 201–274). Nevertheless, it is still remarkable that we first encounter such an appar­ ently self-evident application of memory some twelve decades after Herder and five after Grimm. The degree of internalisation and coherent formation among a wider public obviously reached its critical mass first after some years of expo­ sure to Wagner and a greater resonance in popular science. Bismarck did not only manage to integrate the liberal idea of Völkerfrühling into his allegorical equa­ tion, but also acted as a sort of seismograph of ideological and aesthetic currents, which finally broke through the surface after ca. 1890. The use of Norse mythol­ ogy in the context of German imperialism and the Greater German movement in Austria (Zernack 2011, 166–167) makes him appear like a prophet. Thus, our example serves to illustrate the mechanisms of cultural memory, especially with regard to identity and reflexivity, at a critical juncture between politics, propaganda and the self-consciousness of the dominating classes: Not only did Bismarck and the peculiar structure of German industrialisation, which favoured the alliance between liberal and conservative groups due to the quick rise of the social democrats, come to influence German liberal culture and the



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balance between authoritarian and parliamentary elements. It also happened the other way round, and it was not least Bismarck who adopted and promoted memorialising Old Norse literature among the National Liberals as German nation building came to a close.

Works cited Primary Sources von Bismarck, Otto. Die gesammelten Werke. 13. Reden 1885 bis 1897. Ed. Wilhelm Schüßler. Berlin, 1930. Dahn, Felix and Therese Dahn. Walhall. Germanische Götter- und Heldensagen. 8th ed. Kreuznach, 1888. Grimm, Jacob. Deutsche Grammatik. Erster Theil. Göttingen, 1819. Herder, Johann Gottfried. Herders Sämmtliche Werke. I. Ed. Bernhard Suphan. Berlin, 1877.

Secondary Literature Blackbourn, David and Geoff Eley. 1984. The Peculiarities of German History. Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-century Germany. Oxford. Böldl, Klaus. 2000. Der Mythos der Edda. Nordische Mythologie zwischen europäischer Aufklärung und nationaler Romantik. Tübingen and Basel. Goldberg, Hans-Peter. 1998. Bismarck und seine Gegner. Die politische Rhetorik im kaiserlichen Reichstag. Beiträge zur Geschichte des Parlamentarismus und der politischen Parteien, 112. Düsseldorf. Hien, Markus. 2015. Altes Reich und neue Dichtung. Literarisch-politisches Reichsdenken zwischen 1740 und 1830. Quellen und Forschungen zur Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte, 82. Berlin and Boston, MA. Jansen, Christian. 2011. “The Formation of German Nationalism, 1740–1850.” In The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History. Ed. Helmut Walser Smith. Oxford. 234–259. Langewiesche, Dieter. 2008. “Staatsbildung und Nationsbildung in Deutschland – ein Sonderweg? Die deutsche Nation im europäischen Vergleich.” In Reich, Nation, Föderation. Deutschland und Europa. München. 145–160. Odenwald-Varga, Szilvia. 2009. ‘Volk’ bei Otto von Bismarck. Eine historisch-semantische Analyse von Bedeutungen, Konzepten und Topoi. Studia Linguistica Germanica, 98. Berlin and New York. Puschner, Uwe. 2001. Die völkische Bewegung im wilhelminischen Kaiserreich. Sprache – Rasse – Religion. Darmstadt. von See, Klaus. 1994. Barbar, Germane, Arier. Die Suche nach der Identität der Deutschen. Heidelberg.

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von See, Klaus. 2003. “‘Hermann der Cherusker’in der deutschen Germanenideologie.” In Texte und Thesen. Streitfragen der deutschen und skandinavischen Geschichte. Frankfurter Beiträge zur Germanistik, 38. Heidelberg. 63–100. Teichert, Matthias. 2008. Von der Heldensage zum Heroenmythos. Vergleichende Studien zur Mythisierung der nordischen Nibelungensage im 13. und 19./20. Jahrhundert. Skandina­ vistische Arbeiten, 24. Heidelberg. Weichlein, Siegfried. 2011. “Nation State, Conflict Resolution, and Culture War, 1850–1878.” In The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History. Ed. Helmut Walser Smith. Oxford. 281–306. Zernack, Julia. 1996. “Anschauungen vom Norden im deutschen Kaiserreich.” In Handbuch zur “Völkischen Bewegung” 1871–1918. Ed. Uwe Puschner, Walter Schmitz and Justus H. Ulbricht. Munich. 482–511. Zernack, Julia. 2011. “Nordische Mythen und Edda-Zitate im Dienst von Politik und Propaganda.” In Eddische Götter und Helden. Milieus und Medien ihrer Rezeption. Eddic Gods and Heroes. The Milieux and Media of Their Reception. Ed. Katja Schulz. Edda-Rezeption, 2. Heidelberg. 143–185.

Jakub Morawiec

II: 68 Polish Perspectives 1 Introduction The question of how memories of the beginnings of the Polish state and nation operated in the past may be answered through two perspectives. The first refers to the medieval period, when knowledge of the achievements of the first rulers and events they participated in shaped the foundations of the national conscious­ ness. The second involves the beginnings of modern Polish historiography that started to develop during successful attempts to regain Polish independence in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The latter perspective is crucial because it involved a tradition of Scandinavian impact on Polish lands during the Viking Age within a memory framework of the beginnings of Poland. Both perspectives feature elements discussed in memory studies. Sets of written accounts and historical studies sponsored by institutions like the royal court, the episcopate or academic milieus, were responsible for cultural memory in the way defined by Jan and Aleida Assmann (Aleida Assmann 2012; Jan Assmann 1995). The accounts in question, sometimes originating from oral tradi­ tion and presented as products of cultural memory, were to shape common visions of the past within a given community, defining its identity and self-awareness. This vision was also shaped by places of memory (lieux de mémoire), as defined by Pierre Nora (Nora 1989) including royal manors, cathedrals, battlefields and (mainly in the case of the second perspective) monuments (Węcowski 2014, 9–11).

2 Case study These theoretical considerations find direct application in studies on memory at the beginning of the Polish state and nation, seen from both perspectives men­ tioned above. Although the beginnings of Poland or, more precisely, the Piast monarchy, are still uncertain and involve many academic controversies, one can simply list elements that constitute a framework of state formation both in the pre-modern times and today, referring to the time of the first historical rulers, Mieszko I (d. 992) and his son, Bolesław the Brave (967–1025). The scope of memories of these events in medieval Poland can be traced today mainly through contemporary writings. The introduction of Christianity in the late tenth century resulted in the initiation of local historiographic traditions, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-104

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which recorded important events like Mieszko’s baptism (966) or the congress of Gniezno and foundation of the archdiocese in 1000 (Sikorski 2011, 38–49). First provided by annals, this information, due to its limited scope, required additions and comments in later narratives to contextualise its content, helping form the memory of the past for following generations. The chronicle written ca. 1113 by Gallus Anonymous preserves information about the oldest dynastic tradition functioning at the ducal court. His account of the beginnings of the dynasty and the monarchy consists of several main elements: the legend of Piast, the founder of the dynasty; the story of Mieszko, his marriage with Dobrava of Bohemia and his baptism; the missionary activity and martyrdom of St. Adalbert; the congress of Gniezno, which features Bolesław the Brave’s coronation by the emperor and his recognition as an imperial ally (Węcowski 2014, 34–41). Gallus was followed a century later by Master Vincentius, the bishop of Cracow (1161–1223), author of Chronicles of the Kings and Princes of Poland. His work is the result of both his very good education (e.g. in Paris and Bologna) and his position in the Church hierarchy. Although Vincentus based his account on Gallus, he not only develops, but also often contradicts, the account of his former colleague. For example, he provides a much more detailed report on the conflict between king Boleslaw the Generous (1054–1079) and the bishop Stanislaus (Dąbrówka and Wojtowicz 2009). The process of the development of cultural memory in medieval Poland was completed with the release of Annals or Chronicles of the Famous Kingdom of Poland by Jan Długosz in 1480. The twelve-volume opus describes the history of Poland from legendary times until the author’s own time. Various examples show the author’s tendency not only to record the most crucial events of the past, but also to shape them according to contemporary conditions and expectations (Węcowski 2014). Contacts between the Piast dynasty and Scandinavian rulers in late the tenth and early eleventh centuries were important and prestigious. They featured mar­ riages (Mieszko’s daughter was betrothed to the Swedish king, Eiríkr inn sigrsæli, ‘Erik the Victorious’), military encounters, and even missionary initiatives. Still, they were presumably found too accidental to deserve a firm place in Polish tra­ dition. Polish sources are completely silent on that matter. Consequently, these events did not become part of Polish cultural memory until early modern histori­ ans in Poland had access to Old Norse sources (Morawiec 2009, further references there). Studies on the beginnings of the Piast monarchy have been an important branch of medieval studies in Poland since it began in the early nineteenth century. Its development was accompanied by an increase in attempts to regain



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independence and rebuild the state. Political situations demanded quick and straightforward answers to questions concerning the history of Polish lands and the right to self-determination. Political and social demands grew even greater as the independence movement reached its final stage at the Versailles congress (1919), and these forces strongly opposed German unwillingness to recognise Polish claims and give back territories that had originally belonged to Poland. As the lands in question were where the Piast monarchy originated (so-called Greater Poland), Polish medievalists had an important task to carry out. Studies on particular issues created an excellent opportunity to shape contemporary memory with an appropriate vision of the past. The conversion of Mieszko I and the introduction of church hierarchy in Poland provide good examples. The view of the first chroniclers about the crucial role of Dobrava was used to argue that Mieszko decided to rely on Bohemian allies, so he could ignore the potential ambi­ tions of the see in Magdeburg (Labuda 1987). Both in 1918 and later, when Poland faced the Nazi threat in the Second World War, the idea of the Czech intermediary sounded much more friendly than the idea forcefully proposed by German schol­ ars, which described the Czechs as direct imperial inspiration. Another controversy referred to the status of the first Polish bishop, Jordan. To discredit the argument that he was dependent on the see in Magdeburg, histo­ rians argued that he was the direct suffragan of the Pope. That view was strength­ ened by another argument, namely, that Mieszko, when only recently baptised, was making efforts to acquire his own archdiocese, which was finally realized in AD 1000 by his son (Sikorski 2011, 182–195). Consequently, Mieszko and Boleslaw the Brave were remembered as struggling for independence from an aggressive empire, just as the early twentieth-century Poles were fighting to regain and keep their own independence. Polish historians at that time also gained access to Old Norse literature, mainly through German translations. Naturally, accounts of kings’ sagas caught their special attention. Stories of the Jómsvikings and Óláfr Tryggvason had twofold significance. Firstly, they provided Polish historians with, as many of them argued, additional, genuine, and trustworthy data on a so far almost unrec­ ognised aspect of Polish politics. Secondly, the sagas were considered proof that Poland in the late Viking Age was a powerful, independent and influential kingdom, ruled by prolific kings like Burisleifr, identified either with Mieszko I or Boleslaw the Brave (Morawiec 2015, 27–32, further references there). Although this approach was affected by very shallow knowledge of the spe­ cifics of Old Norse literature, there were reasonable and critical voices postulat­ ing careful treatment of particular accounts. Still, sagas were found too attractive to be rejected totally in pre-Second World War medieval studies in Poland. After the war, historians took the opposite extreme position. The total distrust and

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rejection of the sagas were signs of Polish participation in the anti-Normanism movement, which denied any Scandinavian/Viking impact on the rise of the early medieval Slavonic ‘states’ (Labuda 1953, 283–337; 1962, 300–323; Łowmiański 1957). Recent decades have brought new trends in research on early medieval Poland. Certainly, the primary role has been played by archaeologists, able to provide more and more interesting data on the material, economic, and cultural aspects of early Piast monarchy formation. At the same time, more and more historians focus on tradition and memory studies that result in new interpreta­ tions of well-known accounts, which are treated as both pieces of literature, and vehicles of local traditions within a wider European context (Wiszewski 2010; Węcowski 2014). The traditional necessity of deciding whether a given account is trustworthy or not has been challenged by a tendency to look for elements that fit a particular vision of the past provided by a given author. This is also true of the question of Scandinavian impact on Polish lands during the Viking Age. Both new interpretations of archaeological finds, for example, from Wolin (Stanisławski 2013a), and new discoveries like the cemetery in Bodzia (Buko 2014), shed new light on the problem. Wolin seems to be espe­ cially important. In fact, no one has ever doubted the constant and intense eco­ nomic and cultural contacts of the early town with the North, confirmed by both Scandinavian artefacts and other traces of presence of Norse traders and crafts­ men in the town. However, only very recent excavations revealed a rich set of artefacts sumptuously decorated in Borre, Ringerike and Mammen styles. There were objects of various kind (pendants, combs and many others), mainly made of wood and antler. It is very likely that they were produced in Wolin by Scandina­ vian craftsmen exclusively for Scandinavian customers. According to Władysław Duczko and Błażej Stanisławski, one can connect local production centres sty­ listically associated with points in the British Isles, and the presence of Scan­ dinavian elite warriors in Wolin, whose activity could be a contributing factor for the rise and development of the Jómsborg legend. Reinterpretations of finds coming from previous excavations in Wolin point to more numerous instances of Scandinavians in the early town complex (Duczko 2000; Stanisławski 2013a). Stanisławski points out the connection between a Scandinavian presence in Wolin and the transfer of Arabic silver from Pomerania into the Polish main­ land, an important process for the development of Piast monarchy (Stanisławski 2013b). This phenomenon could potentially explain the presence of Scandina­ vian noblemen, which is confirmed by burials located in various parts of early medieval Poland. It is no longer only a question of the physical presence of Viking Age Scandinavians, but also less direct influences that could have developed various aspects of everyday culture, funerary rites, and trade, to name only few.



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New research on written tradition concerning Haraldr Gormsson’s relations with the Slavs point to his interest in the Oder estuary region and a temporary ability to control Wolin and the surrounding area (Morawiec 2009). One cannot exclude the possibility that his son Sveinn, although with less success, tried to continue his father’s policy towards the Slavs and key centres like Wolin. Adam of Bremen had no doubts that the Eiríkr inn sigrsæli’s alliance with Mieszko I, confirmed by his marriage with Mieszko’s anonymous daughter, resulted in numerous PolishDanish military encounters (Morawiec 2009). Research on Scandinavian impact on the material culture of early medi­ eval Poland has been followed by a recent reignition of historical studies of Old Norse accounts. Memory studies has extensively affected the problem of the role and image of Slavs in saga accounts and Scandinavian-Slavonic relations in the Viking Age. It has resulted in a new approach to the legends of Jómsvikings and Oláfr Tryggvason in Vindland, which are also examples of twelfth-thirteenthcentury cultural memories of the fluid and turbulent relations in the Baltic zone both in the Viking Age and beyond. Moreover, saga accounts of Oláfr’s Slavonic connections (marriage and co-reign with Geira, his second visit to Jómsborg prior to the battle of Svoldr) can be interpreted as an intriguing reflection of complex and lively Pomeranian-Scandinavian political and military encounters in late tenth-early eleventh centuries. Wichman Billung, Saxon nobleman, relative of emperor Otto I, who ended his turbulent political career in 967 as military leader of Wolinians fighting against Mieszko I, is a good example. Wichman shows both that political elites in Wolin did not hesitate to take advantage of military leaders, and suggests that there could be a kernel of truth in the Oláfr legend. On the other hand, figures like Búrisleifr, mighty king of Slavs, and his daughters (Geira, Gunn­hildr and Ástriðr) could have resulted from the memory of real and active matrimonial relations between dynasties in the Baltic zone. Still, their liter­ ary profiles should be interpreted as signs of stylistic development of Old Norse narratives. This new approach embraces the image of Slavs as pagans and arch enemies of Christian Scandinavian rulers. The beginnings of this image can be traced back to the mid-eleventh century, when Magnús góði was forced to with­ stand attacks from the Obodrites on Denmark. Further turbulent relations on the Slavonic-Danish border, especially in the twelfth century, resulted in the creation of the hagiographic motif of prominent Scandinavian saintly monarchs like St Knútr, St Knútr Lavard, and St Óláfr (Morawiec 2009, 2013).

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Works cited Secondary sources Assmann, Aleida. 2011. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization. Functions, Media. Archives. Cambridge. [German orig. 1999] Assmann, Jan. 1995. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” New German Critique 65: 125–133. Buko, Andrzej. 2014. Bodzia. Late Viking-Age Elite Cemetary in Central Poland. Leiden and Boston, MA. Dąbrówka, Andrzej and Wojtowicz Wojciech, eds. 2009. Onus Athlanteum. Studia nad Kroniką biskupa Wincentego. Warsaw and Szczecin. Duczko, Władysław. 2000. “Obecność skandynawska na Pomorzu i słowiańska w Skandynawii we wczesnym średniowieczu.” In Salsa Cholbergiensis. Kołobrzeg w średniowieczu. Ed. L. Leciejewicz and M. Rębkowski. Kołobrzeg. 23–44 Labuda, Gerard. 1962. “Polska a Skandynawia w IX – X w.” Początki Państwa Polskiego. Księga Tysiąclecia. t.1: 300–323. Labuda, Gerard 1953. “Saga o Styrbjörnie, jarlu Jomsborga.” Slavia Antiqua 4: 283–337. Labuda, Gerard. 1987. Studia nad początkami państwa polskiego. v. 1. 2nd ed. Poznań. Łowmiański, Henryk. 1957. Zagadnienie roli Normanów w genezie państw słowiańskich. Warsaw. Morawiec, Jakub. 2009. Vikings among the Slavs. Jomsborg and Jomsvikings in Old Norse Tradition. Vienna. Morawiec, Jakub. 2013. “Slavs and their lands in Old Norse literature.” In Scandinavian Culture in Medieval Poland. Ed. Sławomir Moździoch, Błażej Stanisławski and Przemysław Wiszewski. Wrocław. 53–64. Morawiec, Jakub. 2015. “Old Norse Studies in Poland. History and Perspectives.” Fasciculi Archeologiae Historicae 28: 27–32. Nora, Pierre. 1989. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire.” Representations. Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory 26: 7–24. Sikorski, Dariusz. 2011. Kościół w Polsce za Mieszka I i Bolesława Chrobrego. Poznań.  Stanisławski, Błażej. 2013a. “Norse Culture in Wolin-Jomsborg.” In Scandinavian Culture in Medieval Poland. Ed. Sławomir Moździoch, Błażej Stanisławski and Przemysław Wiszewski. Wrocław. 193–246. Stanisławski, Błażej. 2013b. Jómswikingowie z Wolina-Jómsborga. Studium archeologiczne przenikania kultury skandynawskiej na ziemie polskie. Wrocław. Węcowski, Piotr. 2014. Początki Polski w pamięci historycznej późnego średniowiecza. Kraków. Wiszewski, Przemysław. 2010. Domus Bolezlai. Values and Social Identity in Dynastic Traditions of Medieval Poland (c. 966–1138). Leiden and Boston, MA.

Ulrich Schmid

II: 69 Russian Perspectives 1 Introduction The Kremlin stresses the political memory of a ‘unique Russian civilisation’ in its efforts to highlight an autochthonous beginning of Russian statehood. The central question is whether the first Russian state was of East Slavic origin, or an imposition of migrating Northmen (or Varangians as the old Russian chronicles would have it). The so-called Normanist debates that resulted from this dispute have challenged the Russian nation-building project since the eighteenth century, when the first historical interpretations arose (Rahbek Schmidt 1970). The debate resumed in the Soviet period, and even triggered discussions among the Russian diaspora. Normanist positions regained their relevance in the twenty-first century when Russia’s official state culture engaged with Ukraine in a memory war over the ethnic features of the Kievan Rus.

2 The Normanist debate in Russia and its contemporary repercussions A narrative of origin in the Nestor, or Primary, chronicle stands at the beginning of the Normanist debate: According to this foundation myth, the Slavs cross the Baltic Sea and ask the Varangian prince Riurik and his two brothers to rule over them. In the eighteenth century, the German historians Gerhard Friedrich Müller (1705–1783) and August Ludwing von Schlözer (1735–1809) developed their ‘Nor­ manist’ theory on the basis of this account. According to them, Nestor’s ethnonym ‘Varangians’ designates the inhabitants of Scandinavia, and the ‘Rus’ created by Riurik refers to a Scandinavian state structure. Both Müller and Schlözer were members of the Russian Academy of Sciences that was founded by Peter the Great in 1724. One of the first native Russian scientists, Mikhail Lomonosov (1711–1765), perceived the Normanist theory as a denigration of Russian cultural autonomy. His protest was based on the conviction that the Russian empire could not pos­ sibly find its roots in a foreign act of conquest. Lomonosov’s indignation must be interpreted against the contemporary historical backdrop. In the eighteenth century, Sweden acted as Russia’s archenemy, and was considered to be a perma­ nent threat, even though the Great Northern Wars of 1700–1721 rendered Russia the victorious power. The Normanist theory, which Lomonosov considered as https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-105

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concocted by ‘foreign’ scholars, contradicted the emerging national self-con­ sciousness of Russia. The historian Vasilii Tatishchev (1686–1750) sought to assume a conciliatory position when he developed his ‘Finnish’ theory. He considered the Varangians actually to be Finns. From this perspective, Riurik ruled over Finnish territories before he became a Russian prince. Consequently, Tatishchev derived the eth­ nonym ‘Russians’ from the hair color of the ‘blond’ (rusyi) Finns. Later on, the authoritative court historian Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826) accepted the original narrative from Nestor’s chronicle, and adopted a soft version of the Norman­ ist theory in his epic History of the Russian state (1803–1826): The Slavic tribes in Russia had already been ‘mildly’ governed by Varangians prior to Riurik’s appointment. The new ruler’s main objective was the unification of Finnish tribes with the ‘Slavic people in Russia’. On this basis, a common Slavic tradition of ‘customs, faith and language’ emerged (Karamzin 2002, 77). Karamzin solved the Normanist dilemma by inverting the original argument. Scandinavians did not found the Russian state, but Riurik turned out to be the first Russian head of state with a national cultural mission. In the nineteenth century, the debate touched mainly upon the research of toponyms. The Normanists were mainly German and Scandinavian linguists who worked in Russia. They derived toponyms in Russia from Nordic origins, while their opponents assumed purely Slavic sources (Kunik 1845; Thomsen 1877). A notable public dispute about the Normanist theory occurred in St Petersburg on March 19, 1860 between the prominent historians Mikhail Pogodin and Nikolai Kostomarov (Prymak 1996, 95–96). In the 1930s the Soviet Anti-Normanists were able to take advantage of the Marxist mainstream in most academic disciplines. Riurik’s vocation and the Scan­ dinavian foundation of the Russian state contradicted the Marxist philosophy of history. According to this ideology, state-building processes may not simply be imposed by a foreign power, but are determined by specific class structures of a given society. As a consequence, the Normanist theory was defamed as an elabo­ ration of ‘bourgeois science’. Moreover, the Soviet project acquired a distinctly Russian national dimension in the late Stalinist phase. The Soviet archeologist Boris Rybakov (1908–2001) even dated the foundation of Russia’s cultural history as far back as the early fifteenth century BC. The most prominent Anti-Nor­ manist, however, was the doyen of Medieval Russian studies Dmitrii Likhachev (1906–1999). In his Meditations about Russia, he highlighted the importance of the Byzantine Christian and imperial tradition for the Russian state. In his view, the impact of Scandinavian rulers in Rus was predominantly confined to mili­ tary improvements (Likhachev 1999, 37). He interpreted the narrative of Riurik’s vocation as a legend from the eleventh or twelfth century that served the politi­



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cal purpose of legitimizing the ruling dynasty (Likhachev 1987, 122–123). Rybakov and Likhachev not only assumed a patriotic stance in the Normanist debates. Both medievalists fervently refuted these allegations. Their dismay was paral­ leled by their rejection of allegations that the famous The Tale of Igor’s Campaign might be a forgery of the late eighteenth century. The doubts about the authen­ ticity of the Igor Tale were first brought forward by the French philologist André Mazon in 1940 and repeated by the Soviet historian Aleksandr Zimin in the 1960s (Keenan 2003). Other, less patriotic voices were rather the exception. In a public discussion in 1965, the historian Lev Klein criticised the anti-Normanist hyste­ ria in Soviet scholarship and pointed to the fact that the Vikings conquered not only Russian, but also English, French, German, Spanish, and Byzantine territo­ ries. Moreover, he showed that historiography never produced an anti-Normanist school in any of the above states. Klein ascribed the Soviet anti-Normanism to a Russian cultural complex of inferiority, and thereby provoked a scandal (Klein 2009, 109). Among conservative Russian émigré writers, anti-Normanist convictions were widespread. Normanist positions were considered to be the result of ruso­ phobic activities, such as the publication of the book The Origin of Russia in 1954 by the émigré Polish historian Henryk Paszkiewicz (1954). One year later, Nataliia Il’ina (1882–1963) published a response under the programmatic title The Expulsion of the Normans (Il’ina 1955). Il’ina was the wife of the political philosopher Ivan Il’in, a fervent pro-monarchist who hoped for the spiritual resurrection of imperial Russia. Also the eminent émigré historian Nicholas Riasanovsky raised his voice on behalf of the anti-Normanists. A new point of view was brought to the debate in 1981 by the Harvard historian Omeljan Pritsak. He considered the Kievan Rus to have a Khazar foundation and that they eventually adopted Norman ideas of political order. The crypto-patriotism of Soviet medieval scholarship came to the fore after the demise of the communist system. Anti-Normanism became an integral part of the nationalist historiography of the twenty-first century. In a strange twist of Jan Assmann’s concepts of collective and cultural memory, cultural memory about the autochthonous origin of the first Slavic state was forcibly turned into a politi­ cal discourse and entered the collective memory. In Assmann’s original under­ standing, collective memory is transformed by writing techniques into cultural memory. In 2005, the openly anti-Western historian Andrei Parshev published a textbook for the youth movement Nashi that was created by political engineers in the Kremlin. Parshev interpreted the Normanist theory as a part of a broader German historiosophic mythology. According to this narrative, the indigenous European population was Germanic. The Slavs invaded European territories from Asia and adopted Germanic culture. Parshev challenged the Normanist assump­

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tion about the Scandinavian invention of the Russian state. Instead, he high­ lighted the higher level of cultural development among the Slavs in the ninth century compared to that of the Varangians. He allowed for the possible appoint­ ment of one or another prince from ‘abroad’, although he rendered this appoint­ ment insignificant for the formation of a genuinely Russian civilization (Parshev 2005, 16–17). In a similar vein, Andrei Sakharov, the director of the institute of Russian history at the Academy of Sciences, criticised the Normanist approach sharply in an interview from 2008. He even spoke of an ‘aggressive group’ of German and Scandinavian scholars who were not able to read Russian chronicles (Sakharov 2008). In the official politics of memory, Riurik often appears as a genuinely Russian prince. In 2015, the Russian minister of culture Vladimir Medinskii inaugurated a monument in Staraia Ladoga to Riurik without mentioning his Scandinavian origins. Medinskii said, it was not important where Riurik came from, but impera­ tive to acknowledge that Riurik founded the Russian state, and that he united the Slavic tribes. Riurik initiated, Medinskii continued, a great tradition of political leaders who held the titles of Grand Princes, Tsars, Emperors, Secretary Generals, and Presidents. Since 2013, the ministry of education has been working on a single history textbook for Russian schools. As a basis for the new publication, a ‘historic-cul­ tural standard’ was produced. In this document, the leitmotif of Russian history is the continuity of statehood. According to the ‘historic-cultural standard’, the beginnings of Russian statehood are to be found in the ninth and tenth centu­ ries when Riurik united the East Slavic, Finnish, and Baltic tribes under his rule. Riurik’s Scandinavian roots are, meanwhile, mentioned explicitly. More impor­ tant are, however, the ‘politogenesis’ and the Christianisation during the Kievan period. This wording seems to reflect the current treatment of the Normanist problem: The Scandinavian roots of the first Russian ruler are not hidden, but neither are they highlighted. After the Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2014, the fight against Nor­ manist theories gained renewed traction. For the official politics of memory, it was crucial to prove that the Kievan Rus preceded all other realisations of Russian statehood. Even Wikipedia was turned into a battlefield. The Russian Wikipedia redirects queries for ‘Kievan Rus’ to ‘Old Russian state’, whereas the Ukrain­ ian Wikipedia returns an entry for ‘Kievan Rus’. In the official discourse of the Kremlin, Russian statehood looks back on a thousand year old history. Prominent Ukrainian scholars like Mykola Riabchuk challenged this view by pointing to the fact that the history of statehood was neither ‘Russian’ nor ‘a thousand years old’. In Vladimir Putin’s speech on the ‘re-unification’ of Crimea with Russia, Ukraine (or the territory of the Kievan Rus) turned out to be an invention of the Bolsheviks.



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For the arbitrary drawing of the Russian-Ukrainian border which produced two separate states after the break-up of the Soviet Union, Putin left Lenin and his comrades literally to the mercy of God. Soon, the film industry took up the topic. In 2006, a full length animated movie with the title Prince Vladimir stressed the Byzantine roots of the Russian state, and presented the pagan Pechenegs from Central Asia as possible allies. The Viking Olav Tryggvason (Óláfr Tryggvason) took the role of the villain. Such a general structure corresponded to the new cultural policies of the Kremlin, which featured a clear anti-Western and pro-Eurasian dimension. In 2016, an epic version of Prince Vladimir’s biography and the baptism of the Kievan Rus made it to the screens of Russian cinemas. Viking was one of the most expensive films in the history of Russian cinematography. More than half of the budget came from state institutions and from Gazprom Media, which sup­ ports the cultural policies of the Kremlin. The title, ironically, refers to the main hero Prince Vladimir. Vladimir is of course not a Viking, but – as one of his fellow Russian soldiers calls him in a dialogue – “as foreign as a Viking” because he is ready to accept Christianity. Vladimir’s own conversion is prepared by an elab­ oration of the hagiographic legend of St Theodor. In a key scene of the movie, St Theodor and his son die for their faith and become martyrs. Theodor is of Var­ angian origin, but converted to Christianity in Byzantium. This motif continues Likhachev’s conceptualisation of the Normanist problem: The first Russian state experienced both Northern and Southern influences. The Vikings brought mili­ tary skills, whereas the Byzantines offered Christianity and the imperial ideology. In contemporary Russia, the Normanist debates have reached a degree of sat­ uration in which the historical origins of the Russian state do not matter anymore. The current politics of memory insist on the continuity of Russian statehood which is based on a variety of cultural influences, including the Scandinavian one.

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Works cited Primary sources The Russian Primary Chronicle (Laurentian Text). Ed. Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor. Cambridge, MA, 1953.

Secondary sources Il’ina, Nataliia. 1955. Izgnanie normannov iz russkoi istorii. Ocherednaia zadacha russkoi istoricheskoi nauki. Paris. Karamzin, Nikolai. 2002. Istoriia Gosudarstva Rossiiskogo. Kniga 1. Vols I–IV. Moscow. Keenan, Edward. 2003. Josef Dobrovský and the Origins of the Igor’ Tale. Cambridge, MA. Klein, Lev. 2009. Spor o variagach. Istoriia protivostoiiania i argumenty storon. St Petersburg. Kunik, Ernst. 1845. Die Berufung der schwedischen Rodsen durch die Finnen und Slawen. St Petersburg. Likhachev, Dmitrii 1987. “Velikoe nasledie.” In Izbrannye raboty v trekh tomakh. Dmitrii Likhachev. Leningrad. II: 3–342. Likhachev, Dmitrii 1999. Razdum‘ja o Rossii. St Petersburg. Parshev, Andrei. 2005. Rossiiskii put’. Spetskurs po rossiiskoi istorii. Konspekt lektsii. Moscow. Paszkiewicz, Henryk. 1954. The Origin of Russia. London 1954. Pritsak, Omeljan. 1981. The Origins of Rus’. Cambridge, MA. Prymak, Thomas Michael. 1996. Mykola Kostomarov. A Biography. Toronto. Rahbek Schmidt, Knud. 1970. “The Varangian Problem. A Brief History of the Controversy.” In Varangian Problems. Ed. Knud Hannestad. Copenhagen. 7–20. Riasanovsky, Nicholas. 1947. “The Norman Theory of the Origin of the Russian State.” The Russian Review 7: 96–110. Sakharov, Andrei. 2008. “Istoriia – vsegda pole nepakhanoe.” Krasnaia zvezda. 16.1.2008. redstar.ru/2008/01/16_01/2_05.html. (8 April 2018) Thomsen, Vilhelm 1877. The Relations between Ancient Russia and Scandinavia and the Origin of the Russian State. Oxford and London.

Barbora Davidková

II: 70 Russian Perspectives – Viking 1 Introduction With an eye on current political constructions of memory in Russia, especially concerning the relation between Russian history and Western influence, the present case study explores the use of the ‘Viking’ past in contemporary Russian movie production, specifically in the 2016 movie, Viking (“Viking Fil’m [Official Website]” 2017), which portrays the conversion of the tenth-century king and Russian national saint, Vladimir. The choice of the film’s title is explored in par­ allel with the scarcity of Viking characters in the movie, and these themes are analysed, as is the choice of Crimea as the filming location, with regards to the relation between Russia and Ukraine. The focus here is with state-produced memory rather than with cultural memory as defined in Jan Assmann’s research, that is, as a collective and selec­ tive knowledge of the past which constitutes a basis for a group’s self-awareness, sense of belonging, and identity (J. Assmann 1995, 132). Certain characteristics ascribed to cultural memory (J. Assmann 1995, 130–132) are shared with state-pro­ duced, or political memory – they are both part of collective memory; they both select and interpret episodes of the past relatively to a contemporary context; both use official channels in order to be transmitted, usually in a formal, codi­ fied way; and finally, both are instrumental in the creation of self-awareness and sense of belonging of a given group. Yet, they differ on two important points: their respective ‘longevity’ and their ways of working. Whereas political memory is a top-down phenomenon, enacted by a political regime, and usually not existing beyond it, cultural memory is both top-down and bottom-up and it grows and evolves over centuries in the given society (J. Assmann 2010, 122). Additionally, political memory compels its members towards homogeneity and identification with the group, whereas cultural memory has a more individualistic trait, and pushes people towards a transgenerational and transcultural vision (A. Assmann 2006, 215–221). In the present study, the film Viking is considered as an example of political memory under construction.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-106

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2 Case study The movie, over two hours long, follows loosely the story of Saint Vladimir, as reported by the Russian Primary Chronicle. The plot tells the story of the youngest of the heirs to the Kievan throne, Vladimir, and of his arrival to the throne after fratricidal struggles. In these struggles, he is accompanied by a group of Swedish mercenaries, with whom he first attacks Polotsk, where he abducts the princess Rogneda. When he later arrives in Kiev, he takes hostage his brother Yaropolk’s wife, the Greek noblewoman, Irina. Once Yaropolk is killed and Vladimir is the sole ruler, Turkic Pechenegs attack the city, but the defence is successful, espe­ cially due to the Christian Fedor, whose son will subsequently be sacrificed to the pagan gods by the heathen crowd (see colour plate 25). Following this episode, Vladimir has a violent argument with the pagan priest, and is comforted by the discovery of the Christian faith, thanks to Irina. Afterwards, a ship arrives with a message from the Byzantine emperor who asks for Vladimir’s military help to counter the civil war he is facing. Vladimir besieges the city of Chersoneses, and after a difficult siege, manages to enter the city, thanks to Irina’s help. There, he enters the church, and during the discussion with the orthodox priest, Anastas, he expresses remorse for all his past violent deeds, and becomes Christian. In the final scene, sun shines over Kiev, where Anastas baptises the population in the Dniepr (see colour plate 26). The movie was released in 2016, after seven years of work. It was produced by Konstantin Ernst, director of the First Channel, and directed by Andrei Kravchuk. Described as the “Russian Game of Thrones”, it is one of the most expensive movies to have been produced in the country in recent years (Kamaletdinov 2017). Part of the movie was filmed in Crimea, where the first Russian movie-themed park was also later built (Dacjuk 2017) (see fig. 1). President Vladimir Putin was among the movie’s first spectators, and he declared to journalists of Rossijskaya Gazeta that Viking represents the most important part of Russian history, and that although some historians could spot inaccuracies, the main point was the artistic representation of the Russian past (Latuhina 2017). In order to understand why the Russian president himself had a private scree­ ning of a Viking-themed movie, it is necessary to contextualise the importance of history and official movie production in contemporary Russia. Since Putin’s first term in 2000, history has been seen as an essential part of national security policy. Laws have been promulgated to project a unified narrative in line with the Kremlin’s view that creating a unified past is necessary to the creation of a national identity (Persson 2013; Bertelsen 2016). The “continuous and thousandyear long history” is supposed to become the Russian citizens’ source to find



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Fig. 1: The entrance to the Viking park in Crimea

“the inner strength and meaning of national development” (Torbakov 2014, 157). Consequently, history schoolbooks have also been at the centre of the Russian government’s attention. Judging the historical narrative of the Yeltsin era to have been harmful to the image of Russia, these texts were revised to promote a unique historical narrative, free of “any contradictions or double interpretations” of history, the aim being to build pride for the “military victories and the greatness of Russia and its past” among the young generations (Persson 2013). The Russian film industry should be understood to be an official instrument in the Kremlin’s tool-box. Already in 1999, Nikita Mikhalkov, active on the Russian cultural scene and close to President Putin, expressed the view that depicting national heroes in movies was a “question of national security”, a way to make citizens feel proud of their country, and hence that cinema was an important weapon in the ideological war Russia was facing. In October 2008, Putin defined the film industry as an “instrument of education and for the promotion of civic values” and announced the creation of a governmental fund for the national film industry – Viking is the last of several patriotic movies to benefit from these sub­ sides aimed for glorifying the nation (Liñán 2010, 174).

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Although much could be said, especially regarding the significance of medie­ val Kiev in both Russian and Ukrainian cultural memory and national myth building, this short case study focusses first on the representation and possible subtext associated with the movie’s ‘Vikings’, and then briefly on the location of the movie’s shooting in Crimea. When the value of these Scandinavian warriors for the story’s plot is considered, the title of the movie appears rather difficult to explain, other, perhaps, than as advertisement; after all, the only Scandinavi­ ans present are Prince Vladimir’s mercenaries. They speak a kind of simplified Swedish, which is supposed to sound like Old Norse, and, like the other (nonChristian) characters, they are depicted as violent, with dark clothes and unclean faces. Apart from assisting the prince in his (violent) battles, the only other action they take is to pressure him into repaying their services, which forces the two women in Vladimir’s entourage, Rogneda and Irina, to give away their jewellery. Additionally, in the siege of Polotsk, Vladimir drinks the Vikings’ ‘berserker’s drink’, which intoxicates him and causes him to rape Rogneda in front of her parents, before killing them. In short, the Vikings are a group of violent mercena­ ries, interested only in the fights and the money it brings them – and they bring no good to the Kievan prince. To this depiction in the film can be added the ‘historical explanations’ availa­ ble on the movie’s official website. Vikings, we learn there, are violent plunde­ rers who terrorised Europe in the Middle Ages; what they did not take away, they mercilessly slaughtered and destroyed. Their unconquerability would have been due to their military tactics and to their religion, which encompassed contempt for death and respect for no other virtues than the martial ones. Except from a list of the important cities they plundered, the last information to be given is that they came into contact with Russian people only later on, and that Holm­ gard-Novgorod was known to them as the city of the mighty king (“Vikingi” 2017a). The lack of subtlety in the treatment of the Vikings, as well as their presence as mercenaries only, can reflect two subtexts. First, the old Normanist-contro­ versy, which in a nutshell opposed the Normanists, who favoured a Scandinavian origin for Russian statehood, and the Slavophiles, who argued that Vikings in Kievan Rus’ were not rulers but warriors hired by the Slavic princes. This hypo­ thesis was mostly popularised by the mid-eighteenth-century scholar Mikhail Lomonosov, who saw in Normanism a “key element in the plot against Russia” – and his theory is nowadays experiencing a revival in Russian popular literature (Sheiko and Brown 2014, 102–114). Hence, Viking’s Vikings are a clear representa­ tion of the Slavophile stance, in a big-budget movie targeted at a large audience, and shows well how “in the ideological war for public memories, […] historians and the media become an extension of politicians’ power” (Bertelsen 2016, 79).



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The second point the movie reflects is the trend in Russian politics to create an official historical narrative where Russia follows its own path with no need of help from the Western world. In the grand narrative jointly built in the past years by the Kremlin and the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), “Russian civilisation” is constructed against the West, as having its own traditio­ nal national “values and principles”, its “spirituality” and inner strength which were gathered during the country’s “thousand-year history” (Torbakov 2014, 152). Russian greatness and uniqueness is defined by the synthesis its culture repre­ sents between European “cultural and intellectual legacy”, harmoniously united with “Orthodox spirituality [and] Slavic ways and attitudes” (Torbakov 2014, 155). In the movie, this can be seen as well. The Vikings can be heroes of an occidental television programme, but in Viking, they are nothing more than pagan barbari­ ans in Russian history. The real civilisation and light literally comes from Byzan­ tium and its Orthodox faith. If one dives deep enough into the official website, another interesting detail comes out: on the map displaying the diverse realms mentioned in the movie, the “Viking realm” paragraph informs the reader about a misinterpretation of the Primary Chronicle’s mention of Vladimir’s “travel oversea” (“Vikingi” 2017b). To gather his mercenaries, he would have indeed travelled west, but not to hire “Varangians”. Rather, the mention must designate the Slavic Wagrian tribe, with whom the Prince had kinship ties. Consequently, the rejection of the Normanist hypothesis is quite clearly asserted, both in the movie and on its explanatory website. Not only did Scandinavians have nothing to do with the development of the Kievan Rus’ state, but even Vladimir’s mercenaries, useful for his ascension to the throne, were probably Slavs as well – and hence the Vikings have no role in this national narrative. Beyond the opposition to the Western world underlying the ‘Vikings’ of the movie, a trivial point needs to be addressed, namely, the location of the moviethemed park and of the fact that the movie was shot in Crimea. This decision is in itself political, as it contributes to the Kremlin’s discourse on Russian statehood, while attacking the Ukrainian national narrative on several levels. Crimea was annexed by Russia in 2015, and hence producing a movie there about the begin­ ning of the Russian state should be read as a statement about the Crimea being Russian property. Second, the shared idea that Kievan Rus’ is the cradle of the Eastern Slavs (i.e. Belarussians, Ukrainians, Russians), opposes the official Ukra­ inian and Russian historical narratives as to who is entitled to the legacy of this East-Slavic ‘super ancestor’ (see Kuzio 2006 for the presentation of the various historiographical schools). Since 1991, the foundation and legacy of Kievan Rus’ has been central to the discourses legitimating an independent Ukrainian state (see especially: Kuzio 2005, 38–40; Smoor 2017, 78–79), and consequently, the

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shooting of this movie, from the point of view of Ukrainian state-historiography, appears problematic. Kiev is pictured as a dirty pagan place, whose lustre comes only with its Christianisation by Prince Vladimir, Russia’s national saint, who gained this possibility thanks to his alliance with the Byzantine Empire. Hence, the emphasis is shifted from the origin of the political state to that of the reli­ gious one. Ukrainian historiography focusses on Vladimir as the state-founder, depicting him as the Saint who Christianised ‘Ancient Rus(sia)’, and this is a way to appropriate him for Russian historiography, which has other occurrences than this movie as discussed for instance by the Ukrainian journalist Vasil’ Yavir (2017). In this context, the shooting of the movie in Crimea appears as a statement of ownership of both the Kievan Rus’ past and Crimean territory, both considered by Ukraine as their own. When considered in this light, the creation of the moviethemed park occurs as a lasting reminder of this message on the landscape. Furthermore, the website of the park contains a wealth of material – regarding the themes treated above, the information provided by the ‘historical outline’ of the webpage seem the most relevant (“Istoricheskij Ocherk” 2017). There, Vikings are linked to the foundation of Kievan Rus’, as they would have been called to help against the Khazars’ raids. This, according to the website, is traditionally considered as the foundation of the Russian state. Following that, the outline focusses on Saint Vladimir’s battles to unify the neighbouring tribes into the Kievan Rus’ state, which he manages to do thanks to the Christian values he promoted, as well as to his alliance with Byzantium through marriage, which is underlined as well. The third paragraph treats at length the variety of ‘authentic cultures’ Prince Vladimir gathered in his powerful state, from which he selected and kept the best customs and culinary specialities – which, in addition to later exchanges due to military and trade activities – contributed to the variety and richness which still characterises Russia, the website says. When Bertelsen notes how the Putin government attempts to reduce “the multinational history of the Soviet Union […] to history of Russia and Moscow” only (Bertelsen 2016, 80), the similarity with both the ROC official discourse (Torbakov 2014) and the VikingCrimean website is noteworthy. To conclude, Viking reflects the instrumentalisation of both historical nar­ rative and film industry by contemporary Russian politics, and shows how they are used for the promotion of a specific, state-produced memory. In this way, the Kremlin promotes its patriotic message and unified national history through blockbuster movies, which allows the government to create an inclusive myth, by pointing at common origins far back in time, and creating the narrative of an independent state free of foreign, i.e. Western, impact (Liñán 2010, 174–176). At the same time, the choice of this movie’s title plays with Western influence; at first, potential spectators will think about the Western television programme



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Vikings and its Viking society where human sacrifices are controlled and where women can be war-leaders. Yet, in the Russian Viking, Vikings are nothing more than violent and greedy mercenaries, with no real impact on the Kievan Rus’ state – those to admire are the faithful Orthodox Christians and the Byzantine civilisation and empire, of which Russia considers itself to be the inheritor (Tor­ bakov 2014, 154). Additionally to the implicit message about Western culture, the location of the movie and its Viking-themed park in Crimea is also a politi­ cal statement from the Russian government regarding its perception of Crimea’s national allegiance, and through their denial of the Ukrainian claim on Kievan Rus’ history, a statement about Ukrainian independent statehood as well.

Works cited Primary sources “Istoricheskij Ocherk.” 2017. Viking Kinopark. http://viking-crimea.com/istoricheskiy-ocherk/. (9 March 2018) “Viking Fil’m (Official Website).” 2017. http://vikingfilm.ru/viking.html. (9 March 2018) “Vikingi.” 2017a. Viking Fil’m (Official Website). https://viking.1tv.ru/vikingi.html. (9 March 2018) “Vikingi.” 2017b. Viking Fil’m (Official Website). https://viking.1tv.ru/lands.html#vikingi. (9 March 2018)

Secondary sources Assmann, Aleida. 2006. “Memory, Individual and Collective.” In The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis. Vol. 5. Ed. Robert E. Goodin and Charles Tilly. New York. 210–224. Assmann, Jan. 1995. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” New German Critique 65: 125–133. Assmann, Jan. 2010. “Globalization, Universalism, and the Erosion of Cultural Memory.” In Memory in a Global Age. Discourses, Practices and Trajectories. Ed. Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad. New York. 121–137. Bertelsen, Olga. 2016. “A Trial in Absentia?: Purifying National Historical Narratives in Russia.” Kyiv-Mohyla Humanities Journal 3: 57–87. Dacjuk, Nadezhda. 2017. “Khodchenkova i Bezrukov Popali v Proshloe v Krymu: Zavershilis’ Semki ‘Vikinga.’” Ncrim.ru Nash Krym. Novosti. http://ncrim.ru/news/view/510. (9 March 2018) Kamaletdinov, Damir. 2017. “‘Viking’ Jernsta: Denezhnij Vopros Odnogo iz Samikh Dorogikh Rossiyskikh Fil’mov.” Tjournal.ru. https://tjournal.ru/39279-viking-ernsta-denezhnyyvopros-odnogo-iz-samyh-dorogih-rossiyskih-filmov. (9 March 2018)

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Kuzio, Taras. 2005. “Nation Building, History Writing and Competition over the Legacy of Kyiv Rus in Ukraine.” Nationalities Papers 33.1: 29–58. Kuzio, Taras. 2006. “National Identity and History Writing in Ukraine.” Nationalities Papers 34.4: 407–427. Latuhina, Kira. 2017. “Vladimir Putin Posmotrel Fil’m ‘Viking.’” Rossijskaja Gazeta. https:// rg.ru/2016/12/30/vladimir-putin-posmotrel-film-viking.html. (9 March 2018) Liñán, Miguel Vázquez. 2010. “History as a Propaganda Tool in Putin’s Russia.” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 43.2: 167–178. Persson, Gudrun. 2013. “Russian History – A Matter of National Security.” RUFS Briefing, no. 19. Sheiko, Konstantin and Stephen Brown. 2014. History as Therapy. Alternative History and Nationalist Imaginings in Russia, 1991–2014. Stuttgart. Smoor, Lodewijk. 2017. “Understanding the Narratives Explaining the Ukrainian Crisis: Identity Divisions and Complex Diversity in Ukraine.” Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, European and Regional Studies 11.1: 63–96. Torbakov, Igor. 2014. “The Russian Orthodox Church and Contestations over History in Contemporary Russia.” Demokratizatsiya 22.1: 145–170. Yavir, Vasil’. 2017. “«Viking». Recenzija na Fil’m pro Knjazja-Hrestitelja.” Spil’ne – Commons. http://commons.com.ua/uk/viking-recenziya-na-film/. (9 March 2018)

Part III: Texts and Images

Compiled, annotated, and introduced by Jürg Glauser, Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell The entries in the earlier sections of this handbook consider memory and modern memory studies perspectives situated in different disciplines and traditions (Part I), as well as how memory is, or, by extension, memory-related or memorydependent phenomena are, actualised in various circumstances (Part II). The entries in Part III, by contrast, offer inquisitive readers of all types – whether seasoned scholars in Old Norse, colleagues in neighbouring fields, beginning students, or interested users of whatever sort – the opportunity to consider how memory and memory-related issues are presented in the pre-modern Nordic materials themselves, that is, this section of the handbook looks to provide a direct experience with Old Norse concepts of minni as expressed in a highly diverse set of texts, only lightly contextualised in the headnotes and without retaining editorial emendations. Some of these choices, such as Vǫluspá [The Seeress’s Prophecy] may seem nearly canonical in such a context, whereas others, by contrast, such as the concept of the soul’s eternal relationship to memory in Själens kloster [The Cloister of the Soul], can strike readers as quite surprising and unexpected. In addition to these eclectic core texts, Part III also looks to integrate into its presentation the numerous colour plates noted in the entries in Parts I and II. The editors, authors and publishers are grateful to all the institutions and persons listed for permission to reproduce their material. An effort has been made to trace and contact the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any unintended omission.

Remembering the Past and Foreseeing the Future Mnemonic genres and classical Old Norse memory texts

III: 1 The Seeress’s Prophecy – an iconic Old Norse-Icelandic memory poem Vǫluspá [The Seeress’s Prophecy] is the emblematic first poem in the manuscript GkS 2365 4to (Codex Regius), c. 1270, the most important collection of eddic mythological and heroic poems from the Icelandic thirteenth century. The seeress (vǫlva) tells of the origin and the destiny of the universe and the inhabitants of the world. Because of her great age, she remembers everything that happened in the past, but she can also see into the future. Throughout the poem, the vǫlva functions as a distinctive memory figure. Vǫluspá [The Seeress’s Prophecy] text: source: Vǫluspá. In Eddukvæði. I. Ed. Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason. ÍF. Reykjavík, 2014. 291–307. translation: The Poetic Edda. Transl. Henry Adams Bellows. Scandinavian Classics, 21–22. New York, 1923 [with some amendments by the editors].

Original text 1 Hljóðs bið ek allar helgar kindir, meiri ok minni mǫgu Heimdalar; viltu at ek, Valfǫðr, vel fram telja forn spjǫll fira, þau er fremst um man. 2

Ek man jǫtna ár um borna, þá er forðum mik fœdda hǫfðu; níu man ek heima, níu íviðjur, mjǫtvið mæran fyr mold neðan.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-107

Translation 1 Hearing I ask from the holy races, from Heimdall’s sons, both high and low; Thou wilt, Valfather, that well I relate old tales I remember of men long ago. 2

I remember yet the giants of yore, who gave me bread in the days gone by; Nine worlds I remember the nine in the tree with mighty roots beneath the mold.

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16 Þat mun uppi, meðan ǫld lifir, langniðja tal Lofars hafat.

16 So for all time shall the tale be known, the list of all the forbears of Lofar.

21 Þat man hon fólkvíg fyrst í heimi, er Gullveigu geirum studdu ok í hǫll Hárs hana brenndu; þrysvar brenndu þrysvar borna, opt, ósjaldan, þó hon enn lifir.

21 The war she remembers, the first in the world, when the gods with spears had smitten Gullveig, and in the hall of Har had burned her; Three times burned, and three times born, oft and again, yet ever she lives.

31 Ek sá Baldri, blóðgum tívur, Óðins barni, ørlǫg fólgin; stóð um vaxinn vǫllum hæri mjór ok mjǫk fagr mistilteinn.

31 I saw for Baldr, the bleeding god, the son of Odin, his destiny set; Famous and fair in the lofty fields, full grown in strength the mistletoe stood.

37 Sal sá hon standa sólu fjarri Nástrǫndu á, norðr horfa dyrr; féllu eitrdropar inn um ljóra, sá er undinn salr orma hryggjum.

37 A hall she saw, far from the sun, on Nastrond it stands, and the doors face north; Venom drops through the smoke-vent down, for around the walls do serpents wind.

43 Geyr Garmr mjǫk fyr Gnípahelli, festr mun slitna, en freki renna. Fjǫld veit hon frœða, fram sé ek lengra,

43 Now Garm howls loud before Gnipahellir, the fetters will burst, and the wolf run free. Much does she know, and more can I see,



III: 1 The Seeress’s Prophecy – an iconic Old Norse-Icelandic memory poem 

um ragna røk rǫm sigtíva.

of the fate of the gods, the mighty in fight.

62 Sal sér hon standa sólu fegra, gulli þakðan, á Gimlé; þar skulu dyggvar dróttir byggja ok um aldrdaga ynðis njóta.

62 More fair than the sun, a hall she sees, roofed with gold, on Gimle it stands; There shall the righteous rulers dwell and happiness ever there shall they have.

63 Þar kømr inn dimmi dreki fljúgandi, naðr fránn, neðan frá Niðafjǫllum; berr sér í fjǫðrum – flýgr vǫll yfir – Niðhǫggr nái. Nú man hon sǫkkvask.

63 From below the dragon dark comes forth, Nithhogg flying from Nithafjoll; The bodies of men on his wings he bears, the serpent bright. But now must she sink.

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Fig. 1: The first page of manuscript GkS 2365 4to (Codex Regius of the Elder Edda) shows the beginning of The Seeress’s Prophecy.

III: 2 Memory and poetry in Egil’s Saga Sonatorrek [The Loss of My Sons] In Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar [Egil’s Saga], one of the longest and probably earliest sagas of Icelanders, there are numerous interesting memory scenes, both in the narrative frames that contextualise many of the eponymous hero’s poems and in the skaldic stanzas themselves. One of the so-called drápur [skaldic poems with refrain stanzas], Sonatorrek, belongs to the sub-genre of erfikvæði [funeral poems]; it is occasioned by the death of two of Egill’s sons. In the narrative surrounding it, the importance of a formally adequate pre-Christian funeral, including such funeral poems, is stressed, as is the habit of writing down an orally performed poem on wooden sticks. Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar [Egil’s Saga] text: source: Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar. Ed. Sigurður Nordal. ÍF, 2. Reykjavík, 1933. Ch. 78. translation: Egil’s Saga. Trans. Bernard Scudder. In The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, Including 49 Tales. I. Ed. Viðar Hreinsson. Reykjavík, 1997. Ch. 79.

Original text Þorgerðr segir hátt: “Engan hefi ek náttverð haft, ok engan mun ek, fyrr en at Freyju; kann ek mér eigi betri ráð en faðir minn; vil ek ekki lifa eptir fǫður minn ok bróður.” Hon gekk at lokhvílunni ok kallaði: “Faðir, lúk upp hurðinni, vil ek, at vit farim eina leið bæði.” Egill spretti frá lokunni; gekk Þorgerðr upp í hvílugólfit ok lét loku fyrir hurðina; lagðisk hon niðr í aðra rekkju, er þar var. Þá mælti Egill: “Vel gerðir þú, dóttir, er þú vill fylgja feðr þínum; mikla ást hefir þú sýnt við mik. Hver ván er, at ek muna lifa vilja við harm þenna?” Síðan þǫgðu þau um hríð. Þá mælti Egill: “Hvat er nú, dóttir, tyggr þú nú nǫkkut?” “Tygg ek sǫl,” segir hon, “því at ek ætla, at mér muni þá verra en áðr; ætla ek ella, at ek muna of lengi lifa.” “Er þat illt manni?” segir Egill. “Allillt,” segir hon, “villtu eta?” “Hvat man varða,” segir hann. En stundu síðar kallaði hon ok bað gefa sér drekka; síðan var henni gefit vatn at drekka. Þá mælti Egill: “Slíkt gerir at, er sǫlin etr, þyrstir æ þess meir.” “Villtu drekka, faðir?” segir hon. Hann tók við ok svalg stórum, ok var þat í dýrshorni. Þá mælti Þorgerðr: “Nú eru vit vélt; þetta er mjólk.” Þá beit Egill skarð ór horninu, allt þat er tennr tóku, ok kastaði horninu síðan. Þá mælti Þorgerðr: “Hvat skulu vit nú til ráðs taka? lokit er nú þessi ætlan. Nú vilda ek, faðir, at vit lengðim líf okkart, svá at þú mættir yrkja erfikvæði eptir Bǫðvar, en ek mun rísta á kefli, en síðan deyju vit, ef okkr sýnisk. Seint ætla ek Þorstein son þinn yrkja

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kvæðit eptir Bǫðvar, en þat hlýðir eigi, at hann sé eigi erfðr, því at eigi ætla ek okkr sitja at drykkjunni þeiri, at hann er erfðr.” Egill segir, at þat var þá óvænt, at hann myndi þá yrkja mega, þótt hann leitaði við, – “en freista má ek þess,” segir hann. Egill hafði þá átt son, er Gunnarr hét, ok hafði sá ok andazk litlu áðr. Ok er þetta upphaf kvæðis: 1 Mjǫk erum tregt tungu at hrœra eða loptvætt ljóðpundara; esa nú vænligt of Viðurs þýfi né hógdrœgt ór hugar fylgsni. […]

21 Þat mank enn, es upp of hóf í goðheim Gauta spjalli ættar ask, þanns óx af mér, ok kynvið kvánar minnar. […]

Egill tók at hressask, svá sem fram leið at yrkja kvæðit, ok er lokit var kvæðinu, þá fœrði hann þat Ásgerði ok Þorgerði ok hjónum sínum; reis hann þá upp ór rekkju ok settisk í ǫndvegi; kvæði þetta kallaði hann Sonatorrek. Síðan lét Egill erfa sonu sína eptir fornri siðvenju. En er Þorgerðr fór heim, þá leiddi Egill hana með gjǫfum í brott.

Translation Chapter 79 Thorgerd replied in a loud voice, “I have had no evening meal, nor shall I do so until I join Freyja. I know no better course of action than my father’s. I do not want to live after my father and brother are dead.” She went to the door to Egil’s bed-closet and called out, “Father, open the door, I want both of us to go the same way.” Egil unfastened the door. Thorgerd walked in to the bed-closet and closed the door again. Then she lay down in another bed that was there. Then Egil said, “You do well, my daughter, in wanting to follow your father. You have shown great love for me. How can I be expected to want to live with such great sorrow?” Then they were silent for a while. Then Egil said, “What are you doing, my daughter? Are you chewing something?”



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“I’m chewing dulse,” she replied, “because I think it will make me feel worse. Otherwise I expect I shall live too long.” “Is it bad for you?” asked Egil. “Very bad,” said Thorgerd. “Do you want some?” “What difference does it make?” he said. A little later she called out for something to drink, and she was brought some water. Then Egil said, “That happens if you eat dulse, it makes you even thirstier.” “Would you like a drink, father?” she asked. She passed him the animal horn and he took a great draught. Then Thorgerd said, “We’ve been tricked. This is milk.” Egil bit a lump from the horn, as much as he could get his teeth into, then threw the horn away. Then Thorgerd said, “What shall we do now? Our plan has failed. Now I want us to stay alive, father, long enough for you to compose a poem in Bodvar’s memory and I shall carve it into a rune-stick. Then we can die if we want to. I doubt whether your son Thorstein would ever compose a poem for Bodvar, and it is unseemly if his memory is not honoured, because I do not expect us to be sitting there at the feast when it is.” Egil said it was unlikely that he would be able to compose a poem even if he attempted to. “But I shall try,” he said. Another of Egil’s sons, called Gunnar, had died shortly before. Then Egil composed this poem: 1. My tongue is sluggish for me to move, my poem’s scales ponderous to raise. The god’s prize is beyond my grasp, tough to drag out from my mind’s haunts. […]

21. I remember still when the Gauts’ friend raised high to the gods’ world the ash that grew from my stock, the tree bearing my wife’s kin. […]

Egil began to recover his spirits as he proceeded to compose the poem, and when it was finished, he delivered it to Asgerd and Thorgerd and his farmhands, left his bed and sat down in the high seat. He called the poem The Loss of My Sons. After that, Egil held a funeral feast according to ancient custom. When Thorgerd went home, Egil presented her with parting gifts.

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Hǫfuðlausn [Head Ransom] In Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar, memory is employed as a rhetorical and oratorical device when Egill saves his own life by composing a praise poem for the Norwegian king, Eiríkr. The episode shows how, during one night’s solitude, Egill composes a 20-strophes long drápur, called Hǫfuðlausn [Head Ransom], which is memorised and performed in front of the king the next morning. The two last strophes of the poem underscore that Egill took the words from “the depths of his heart” and from “the seat of laughter” (the mind). The text cited below includes the narrative context of the poem, as well as a few memory-relevant strophes from the poem itself. Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar [Egil’s Saga] text: source: Egils saga Skall-Grímssonar. Ed. Sigurður Nordal. ÍF, 2. Reykjavík, 1933. Chs. 59–61. translation: Egil’s Saga. Trans. Bernard Scudder. In The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, Including 49 Tales. I. Ed. Viðar Hreinsson. Reykjavík, 1997. Chs. 60–62.

Original text Gunnhildr mælti: “Hví skal eigi þegar drepa Egil, eða mantu eigi nú, konungr, hvat Egill hefir gǫrt, drepit vini þína ok frændr ok þar á ofan son þinn, en nítt sjálfan þik; eða hvar viti menn slíku bellt við konungmann?” Arinbjǫrn segir: “Ef Egill hefir mælt illa til konungs, þá má hann þat bœta í lofsorðum þeim, er allan aldr megi uppi vera.”  Gunnhildr mælti: “Vér viljum ekki lof hans heyra; láttu, konungr, leiða Egil út ok hǫggva hann; vil ek eigi heyra orð hans ok eigi sjá hann.” Þá mælti Arinbjǫrn: “Eigi mun konungr láta at eggjast um ǫll níðingsverk þín; eigi mun hann láta Egil drepa í nótt, því at náttvíg eru morðvíg.” Konungr segir: “Svá skal vera, Arinbjǫrn, sem þú biðr, at Egill skal lifa í nótt; hafðu hann heim með þér ok fœr mér hann á morgin.” Arinbjǫrn þakkaði konungi orð sín, – “væntu vér, herra, at heðan af muni skipast mál Egils á betri leið; en þó at Egill hafi stórt til saka gǫrt við yðr, þá líti þér á þat, at hann hefir mikils misst fyrir yðrum frændum. Haraldr konungr, faðir þinn, tók af lífi ágætan mann, Þórólf, fǫðurbróður hans, af rógi vándra manna, en af engum sǫkum; en þér, konungr, brutuð lǫg á Agli fyrir sakar Berg-Ǫnundar; en þar á ofan vildu þér hafa Egil at dauðamanni ok drápuð menn af honum, en ræntuð hann fé ǫllu, ok þar á ofan gerðu þér hann útlaga ok rákuð hann af landi, en Egill er engi ertingamaðr. En hvert mál, er maðr skal dœma, verðr at líta á tilgørðir. Ek mun nú,” segir Arinbjǫrn, “hafa Egil með mér í nótt heim í garð minn.” Var nú svá; ok er þeir kómu í garðinn, þá ganga þeir tveir í lopt nǫkkurt lítit ok rœða um þetta mál. Segir



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Arinbjǫrn svá: “Allreiðr var konungr nú, en heldr þótti mér mýkjast skaplyndi hans nǫkkut, áðr létti, ok mun nú hamingja skipta, hvat upp kemr; veit ek, at Gunnhildr mun allan hug á leggja at spilla þínu máli. Nú vil ek þat ráð gefa, at þú vakir í nótt ok yrkir lofkvæði um Eirík konung; þœtti mér þá vel, ef þat yrði drápa tvítug ok mættir þú kveða á morgin, er vit komum fyrir konung. Svá gerði Bragi, frændi minn, þá er hann varð fyrir reiði Bjarnar Svíakonungs, at hann orti drápu tvítuga um hann eina nótt ok þá þar fyrir hǫfuð sitt; nú mætti vera, at vér bærim gæfu til við konung, svá at þér kœmi þat í frið við konung.” Egill segir: “Freista skal ek þessa ráðs, er þú vill, en ekki hefi ek við því búizt, at yrkja lof um Eirík konung.” Arinbjǫrn bað hann freista; síðan gekk hann brott til manna sinna; sátu þeir at drykkju til miðrar nætr. Þá gekk Arinbjǫrn til svefn­ húss ok sveit hans, ok áðr hann afklæddist, gekk hann upp í loptit til Egils ok spurði, hvat þá liði um kvæðit.  Egill segir, at ekki var ort, – “hefir hér setit svala ein við glugginn ok klakat í alla nótt, svá at ek hefi aldregi beðit ró fyrir.”  Síðan gekk Arinbjǫrn á brott ok út um dyrr þær, er ganga mátti upp á húsit, ok settist við glugg þann á loftinu, er fuglinn hafði áðr við setit; hann sá, hvar hamhleypa nǫkkur fór annan veg af húsinu. Arinbjǫrn sat þar við glugg­ inn alla nóttina, til þess er lýsti; en síðan er Arinbjǫrn hafði þar komit, þá orti Egill alla drápuna ok hafði fest svá, at hann mátti kveða um morgininn, þá er hann hitti Arinbjǫrn; þeir heldu vǫrð á, nær tími myndi vera at hitta konung. LX. KAPÍTULI Eiríkr konungr gekk til borða at vanða sínum, ok var þá fjǫlmenni mikit með honum; ok er Arinbjǫrn varð þess varr, þá gekk hann með alla sveit sína alvápnaða í konungsgarð, þá er konungr sat yfir borðum. Arinbjǫrn krafði sér inngǫngu í hǫllina; honum var þat ok heimult gǫrt; ganga þeir Egill inn með helming sveitarinnar; annarr helmingr stóð úti fyrir durum.  Arinbjǫrn kvaddi konung, en konungr fagnaði honum vel; Arinbjǫrn mælti: “Nú er hér kominn Egill; hefir hann ekki leitat til brotthlaups í nótt. Nú viljum vér vita, herra, hverr hans hluti skal verða; vænti ek góðs af yðr; hefi ek þat gǫrt, sem vert var, at ek hefi engan hlut til þess sparat, at gera ok mæla svá, at yðvarr vegr væri þá meiri en áðr. Hefi ek ok látit allar mínar eigur ok frændr ok vini, er ek átta í Nóregi, ok fylgt yðr, en allir lendir menn yðrir skilðusk við yðr, ok er þat makligt, því at þú hefir marga hluti til mín stórvel gǫrt.” Þá mælti Gunnhildr: “Hættu, Arinbjǫrn, ok tala ekki svá langt um þetta; mart hefir þú vel gǫrt við Eirík konung, ok hefir hann þat fullu launat; er þér miklu meiri vandi á við Eirík konung en Egil; er þér þess ekki biðjanda, at Egill fari refsingalaust heðan af fundi Eiríks konungs, slíkt sem hann hefir til saka gǫrt.”  Þá segir Arinbjǫrn: “Ef þú, konungr, ok þit Gunnhildr hafið þat einráðit, at Egill skal hér enga sætt fá, þá er þat drengs-

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kapr, at gefa honum frest ok fararleyfi um viku sakar, at hann forði sér, þó hefir hann at sjálfvilja sínum farit hingat á fund yðvarn ok vænti sér af því friðar; fara þá enn skipti yður sem verða má þaðan frá.”  Gunnhildr mælti: “Sjá kann ek á þessu, Arinbjǫrn, at þú ert hollari Agli en Eiríki konungi; ef Egill skal ríða heðan viku í brott í friði, þá mun hann kominn til Aðalsteins konungs á þessi stundu. En Eiríkr konungr þarf nú ekki at dyljask í því, at honum verða nú allir konungar ofreflismenn, en fyrir skǫmmu mundi þat þykkja ekki líkligt, at Eiríkr konungr myndi eigi hafa til þess vilja ok atferð, at hefna harma sinna á hverjum manni slíkum, sem Egill er.”  Arinbjǫrn segir: “Engi maðr mun Eirík kalla at meira mann, þó at hann drepi einn bóndason útlendan, þann er gengit hefir á vald hans. En ef hann vill miklask af þessu, þá skal ek þat veita honum, at þessi tíðendi skulu heldr þykkja frásagnarverð, því at vit Egill munum nú veitask at, svá at jafnsnimma skal okkr mœta báðum. Muntu, konungr, þá dýrt kaupa líf Egils, um þat er vér erum allir at velli lagðir, ek ok sveitungar mínir; myndi mik annars vara af yðr, en þú myndir mik vilja leggja heldr at jǫrðu en láta mik þiggja líf eins manns, er ek bið.” Þá segir konungr: “Allmikit kapp leggr þú á þetta Arinbjǫrn, at veita Agli lið; trauðr mun ek til vera at gera þér skaða, ef því er at skipta, ef þú vill heldr leggja fram líf þitt en hann sé drepinn; en œrnar eru sakar til við Egil, hvat sem ek læt gera við hann.” Ok er konungr hafði þetta mælt, þá gekk Egill fyrir hann ok hóf upp kvæðit ok kvað hátt ok fekk þegar hljóð: 19 Jǫfurr hyggi at, hvé ek yrkja fat,  gótt þykkjumk þat,  es ek þǫgn of gat;  hrœrðak munni  af munar grunni  Óðins ægi  of jǫru fægi. 

20 Bark þengils lof  á þagnar rof;  kannk mála mjǫt  of manna sjǫt;  ór hlátra ham  hróðr bark fyr gram;  svá fór þat fram,  at flestr of nam.

LXI. KAPÍTULI Eiríkr konungr sat uppréttr, meðan Egill kvað kvæðit, ok hvessti augun á hann; ok er lokit var drápunni, þá mælti konungr: “Bezta er kvæðit fram flutt, en nú hefi ek hugsat, Arinbjǫrn, um mál várt Egils, hvar koma skal. Þú hefir flutt mál Egils með ákafa miklum, er þú býðr at etja vandræðum við mik; nú skal þat gera fyrir þínar sakar, sem þú hefir beðit, at Egill skal fara frá mínum fundi heill ok ósakaðr. En þú, Egill, hátta svá ferðum þínum, at síðan, er þú kemr frá mínum fundi af þessi stofu, þá kom þú aldregi í augsýn mér ok sonum mínum ok verð aldri fyrir mér né mínu liði. En ek gef þér nú hǫfuð þitt at sinni; fyrir þá sǫk, er þú gekkt á



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mitt vald, þá vil ek eigi gera níðingsverk á þér, en vita skaltu þat til sanns, at þetta er engi sætt við mik né sonu mína ok enga frændr vára, þá sem réttar vilja reka.” 

Translation Gunnhild said, “Why not have Egil killed at once? Don’t you remember, king, what Egil has done: killed your friends and kinsmen and even your own son, and heaped scorn upon you yourself. Where would anyone dare to treat royalty in such a way?” “If Egil has spoken badly of the king,” Arinbjorn said, “he can make recompense with words of praise that will live forever.” Gunnhild said, “We do not want his praise. Have Egil taken outside and executed, king. I neither want to hear his words of nor see him.” Then Arinbjorn replied, “The king will not be urged to do all your scornful biddings. He will not have Egil killed by night, because killing at night is murder.” The king said, “Let it be as you ask, Arinbjorn: Egil shall live tonight. Take him home with you and bring him back to me in the morning.” Arinbjorn thanked the king for his words: “I hope that Egil’s affairs will take a turn for the better in future, my lord. But much as Egil may have wronged you, you should consider the losses he has suffered at the hands of your kinsmen. Your father King Harald had his uncle Thorolf, a fine man, put to death on the sole grounds of slander. You broke the law against Egil yourself, king, in favor of Berg-Onund, and moreover you wanted him put to death, and you killed his men and stole all his wealth. And moreover you declared him an outlaw and drove him out of the country. Egil is not the sort of man to stand being provoked. Every case should be judged in light of the circumstances,” Arinbjorn said. “I shall take Egil home to my house now.” This was done. When the two men reached the house they went up to one of the garrets to talk things over. Arinbjorn said, “The king was furious, but his temper seemed to calm down a little towards the end. Fortune alone will determine what comes of this. I know that Gunnhild will do her utmost to spoil things for you. My advice is for you to stay awake all night and make a poem in praise of King Eirik. I feel a drapa of twenty stanzas would be appropriate, and you could deliver it when we go to see the king tomorrow. My kinsmen Bragi did that when he incurred the wrath of King Bjorn of Sweden: he spent the whole night composing a drapa of twenty stanzas in his praise, and kept his head as a reward. We might be fortunate enough in our dealings with the king for this to make a reconciliation between you and him.” Egil said, “I shall follow the advice you offer, but I would never have imagined I would ever make a poem in praise of King Eirik.”

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Arinbjorn asked him to try, then went off to his men. They sat up drinking until the middle of the night. Arinbjorn and then the others went off to their sleeping quarters, and before he got undressed, he went up to the garret to Egil and asked how the poem was coming along. Egil said he hadn’t composed a thing: “A swallow has been sitting at the window twittering all night, and I haven’t had a moment’s peace.” Arinbjorn went out through the door that led to the roof. He sat down near the attic window where the bird had been sitting, and saw a shape-changer in the form of a bird leaving the other side of the house. Arinbjorn sat there all night, until daybreak. Once Arinbjorn was there, Egil composed the whole poem and memorized it, so that he could recite it to him when he met him the next morning. Then they kept watch until it was time to meet the king. Chapter 61 King Eirik went to table as usual with a lot of people. When Arinbjorn noticed this, he took all his men, fully armed, to the hall when the king was sitting down to dine. Arinbjorn asked to be let in to the hall and was allowed to enter. He and Egil went in, with half their men. The other half waited outside the door. Arinbjorn greeted the king, who welcomed him. “Egil is here, my lord,” he said. “He has not tried to escape during the night. We would like to know what his lot will be. I expect you to show us favour. I have acted as you deserve, sparing nothing in word and deed to enhance your renown. I have relinquished all the possessions and kinsmen and friends that I had in Norway to follow you, while all your other landholders turned their backs on you. I feel you deserve this from me, because you have treated me so outstandingly in many ways.” Then Gunnhild said, “Stop going on about that, Arinbjorn. You have treated King Eirik well in many ways and he has rewarded you in full. You owe much more to the king than to Egil. You cannot ask for Egil to be sent away from King Eirik unpunished, after all the wrongs he has done him.” Arinbjorn said, “If you and Gunnhild have decided for yourselves, king, that Egil shall not be granted any reconciliation here, the noble course of action is to allow him a week’s grace to get away, since he came here of his own accord and expected a peaceful reception. After that, may your dealings follow their own course.” Gunnhild replied, “I can tell from all this that you are more loyal to Egil than to King Eirik, Arinbjorn. If Egil is given a week to ride away from here in peace, he will have time to reach King Athelstan. And Eirik can’t ignore the fact that every king is more powerful than himself now, even though not long ago King Eirik would have seemed unlikely to lack the will and character to take vengeance for what he has suffered from the likes of Egil.”



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“No one will think Eirik any the greater for killing a foreign farmer’s son who has given himself into his hands,” said Arinbjorn. “If it is reputation that he is seeking, I can help him make this episode truly memorable, because Egil and I intend to stand by each other. Everyone will have to face the two of us together. The king will pay a dear price for Egil’s life by killing us all, me and my men as well. I would have expected more from you than to choose to see me dead rather than grant me the life of one man when I ask you for it.” Then the king said, “You are staking great deal to help Egil, Arinbjorn. I am reluctant to cause harm to you if it should come to this, if you prefer to lose your own life than to see him killed. But Egil has done me plenty of wrong, whatever I may decide to do with him.” When the kind had finished speaking, Egil went before him and delivered his poem, reciting it in a loud voice, and everyone fell silent at once. 19 King, bear in mind how my ode is wrought, I take delight in the hearing I gained. Through my lips stirred from the depths of my heart Odin’s sea of verse about the craftsman of war.

20 I bore the king’s praise into the silent void, my words I tailor to the company. From the seat of my laughter I lauded the warrior and it came to pass that most understood.

Chapter 62 King Eirik sat upright and glared at Egil while he was reciting the poem. When it was over, the king said, “The poem was well delivered. Arinbjorn, I have thought about the outcome of my dealings with Egil. You have presented Egil’s case so fervently that you were even prepared to enter into conflict with me. For your sake, I shall do as you have asked and let Egil leave, safe and unharmed. You, Egil, shall arrange things so that the moment you leave this room, neither I nor my sons shall ever set eyes upon you gain. Never cross my path nor my men’s. I am letting you keep your head for the time being. Since you put yourself into my hands, I do not want to commit a scornful deed against you. But you can be sure that this is not a reconciliation with me or my sons, nor any of my kinsmen who want to seek justice.”

III: 3 Dómaldi’s death – a memorable sacrifice in The Saga of the Ynglings Chapters fifteen and sixteen of Ynglinga saga, the first saga in Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla [circle of the world], describe the destinies of the Swedish king, Dómaldi, and his son, Dómarr. Although Dómaldi is sacrificed by his people because of bad harvests, Dómarr, whose reign is prosperous, dies from sickness and yet is awarded memorial stones. The saga quotes the poem Ynglingatal [list of the Ynglings] by Þjóðólfr ór Hvini and provides short narrative frames for each skaldic stanza. Saga and poem display a variety of mnemonic elements (genealogies, death places, structural and thematic repetitions and so on). See colour plate 22 Ynglinga saga [The Saga of the Ynglings] text: source: Ynglinga saga. In Snorri Sturluson. Heimskringla. I. Ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson. ÍF, 26. Reykjavík, 1941. Chs. 15–16. translation: Snorri Sturluson. Heimskringla. I. Trans. Alison Finlay and Anthony Faulkes. 2nd ed. London, 2016. Chs. 15–16.

Original text XV. kapítuli Dómaldi tók arf eptir fǫður sinn, Vísbur, ok réð lǫndum. Á hans dǫgum gerðisk í Svíþjóð sultr ok seyra. Þá efldu Svíar blót stór at Uppsǫlum. It fyrsta haust blótuðu þeir yxnum, ok batnaði ekki árferð at heldr. En annat haust hófu þeir mannblót, en árferð var sǫm eða verri. En it þriðja haust kómu Svíar fjǫlmennt til Uppsala, þá er blót skyldu vera. Þá áttu hǫfðingjar ráðagørð sína, ok kom þat ásamt með þeim, at hallærit myndi standa af Dómalda, konungi þeira, ok þat með, at þeir skyldi honum blóta til árs sér ok veita honum atgǫngu ok drepa hann ok rjóða stalla með blóði hans, ok svá gerðu þeir. Svá segir Þjóðólfr: Hitt vas fyrr, at fold ruðu sverðberendur sínum dróttni, ok landherr af lífs vǫnum

dreyrug vǫpn Dómalda bar, þás ágjǫrn Jóta dolgi Svía kind of sóa skyldi.



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XVI. kapítuli Dómarr hét sonr Dómalda, er þar næst réð ríki. Hann réð lengi fyrir lǫndum, ok var þá góð árferð ok friðr um hans daga. Frá honum er ekki sagt annat en hann varð sóttdauðr at Uppsǫlum ok var fœrðr á Fyrisvǫllu ok brenndr þar á árbakkan­um, ok eru þar bautasteinar hans. […]

Translation Chapter fifteen Dómaldi succeeded his father Vísburr, and ruled his lands. In his time there was famine and hunger in Svíþjóð. Then the Svíar held great sacrifices at Uppsalir. In the first autumn they sacrificed oxen, but even so there was no improvement in the season. The second autumn they held a human sacrifice, but the season was the same or worse. But the third autumn the Svíar came to Uppsalir in great numbers at the time when the sacrifices were to be held. Then the leaders held a council and came to an agreement among themselves that their king, Dómaldi, must be the cause of the famine, and moreover, that they should sacrifice him for their prosperity, and attack him and kill him and redden the altars with his blood, and that is what they did. So says Þjóðólfr: Once it was
 that weapon-bearers with their ruler reddened the ground, and the land’s people left Dómaldi


without life,
 their weapons bloody, when the Svíar seeking good harvests offered up
 the enemy of Jótar.

Chapter sixteen The son of Dómaldi, who ruled the kingdom next, was called Dómarr. He ruled the domains for a long time, and there were good seasons and peace in his day. Nothing is said of him other than that he died of sickness at Uppsalir and was taken to Fýrisvellir and burned on the river bank there, and his memorial stones are there. […]

III: 4 Ekphrasis and pictorial memory in the House-poem Two stanzas of the fragmentary ekphrastic poem Húsdrápa [House-poem] by Úlfr Uggason refer to minni [memory] in terms of images, mnemonic scenes from mythology and legend in the pictorial decoration of the hall in a noble farm house. The circumstances of the first public oral performance of this poem are described in Laxdœla saga [The Saga of the people of Laxardal], Ch. 29. Úlfr Uggason. Húsdrápa [House-poem] text: source: Úlfr Uggason. Húsdrápa. Ed. Edith Marold et al. In Poetry from Treatises on Poetics. 1. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages. 3. Turnhout, 2017. 415, 420. translation: Úlfr Uggason. Húsdrápa. Trans. John Foulks. In Poetry from Treatises on Poetics. 1. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages. 3. Turnhout, 2017. 415, 420.

Original text 6 Fullǫflugr lét fellir fjall-Gauts hnefa skjalla – ramt mein vas þat – reyni reyrar leggs við eyra. Víðgymnir laust Vimrar vaðs af frǫnum naðri hlusta grunn við hrǫnnum. Hlaut innan svá minnum. 10 Þar hykk sigrunni svinnum sylgs valkyrjur fylgja heilags tafns ok hrafna. Hlaut innan svá minnum.



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Translation 6 The most powerful killer of the mountain-Gautr ‹man of the Gautar› [GIANT = Þórr] let his fist slam against the ear of the tester of the bone of the reed [STONE = GIANT]; that was a mighty injury. The Víðgymnir ‹giant› of the ford of Vimur ‹river› [= Þórr] struck the ground of the ears [HEAD] off the gleaming serpent near the waves. Thus [the hall] received [decoration] inside with memorable pictures. 10 There I believe valkyries and ravens follow the wise victory-tree [WARRIOR = Óðinn] to the drink of the holy sacrifice. Thus [the hall] received [decoration] inside with memorable pictures.

Media of Memory and Forgetting Oral and written transmission of memories in prologues and colophones

III: 5 Personal memories and founding myths in The Book of the Icelanders Ari Þorgilsson’s Libellus Islandorum about the early history of Iceland was often considered one of the founding texts of Icelandic society, e.g. by Snorri Sturluson in the prologue to his Heimskringla. In his own prologue and in the first chapter, Ari reports inter alia about the origin of his work and the rootedness of his sources in oral family tradition. Ari Þorgilsson, Íslendingabók [The Book of the Icelanders] text: source: Íslendingabók. In Íslendingabók, Landnámabók. Ed. Jakob Bened­ ikts­son. ÍF, 1. Reykjavík, 1968. Prologus. translation: The Book of the Icelanders. In Íslendingabók. Kristni saga. The Book of the Icelanders. The Story of the Conversion. Trans. Siân Grønlie. Viking Society for Northern Research. Text Series, 18. London, 2006. Prologue.

Original text Prologus / Schedæ Ara prests fróða Íslendingabók gørða ek fyrst byskupum órum, Þorláki ok Katli, ok sýndak bæði þeim ok Sæmundi presti. En með því at þeim líkaði svá at hafa eða þar við auka, þá skrifaða ek þessa of et sama far, fyr útan áttartǫlu ok konunga ævi, ok jókk því es mér varð síðan kunnara ok nú es gerr sagt á þessi en á þeiri. En hvatki es missagt es í frœðum þessum, þá es skylt at hafa þat heldr, es sannara reynisk. Halfdan hvítbeinn Upplendingakonungr, sonr Óláfs trételgju Svíakonungs, var faðir Eysteins frets, fǫður Halfdanar ens milda ok ens matarilla, fǫður Goðrøðar veiðikonungs, fǫður Halfdanar ens svarta, fǫður Haralds ens hárfagra, es fyrstr varð þess kyns einn konungr at ǫllum Norvegi. In hoc codice continentur capitula: Frá Íslands byggð I. / Frá landnámsmǫnnum II ok lagasetning. / Frá alþingis­ setning III. / Frá misseristali IV./ Frá fjórðungadeild V. / Frá Grœnlands byggð VI. / Frá því, es kristni kom á Ísland VII. / Frá byskupum útlendum VIII. / Frá Ísleifi byskupi IX. / Frá Gizuri byskupi (x).

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Incipit libellus Islandorum I. kapítuli Ísland byggðisk fyrst ýr Norvegi á dǫgum Haralds ens hárfagra, Halfdanarsonar ens svarta, í þann tíð – at ætlun ok tǫlu þeira Teits fóstra míns, þess manns es ek kunna spakastan, sonar Ísleifs byskups, ok Þorkels fǫðurbróður míns Gellissonar, es langt munði fram, ok Þóríðar Snorradóttur goða, es bæði var margspǫk ok óljúgfróð, – es Ívarr Ragnarssonr loðbrókar lét drepa Eadmund enn helga Englakonung; en þat vas sjau tegum vetra ens níunda hundraðs eptir burð Krists, at því es ritit es í sǫgu hans. Ingolfr hét maðr nórrœnn, es sannliga es sagt at fœri fyrst þaðan til Íslands, þá es Haraldr enn hárfagri vas sextán vetra gamall, en í annat sinn fám vetrum síðarr; hann byggði suðr í Reykjarvík. Þar es Ingolfshǫfði kallaðr fyr austan Minþakseyri, sem hann kom fyrst á land, en þar Ingolfsfell fyr vestan Ǫlfossá, es hann lagði sína eigu á síðan. Í þann tíð vas Ísland viði vaxit á milli fjalls ok fjǫru. Þá váru hér menn kristnir, þeir es Norðmenn kalla papa, en þeir fóru síðan á braut, af því at þeir vildu eigi vesa hér við heiðna menn, ok létu eftir bœkr írskar ok bjǫllur ok bagla; af því mátti skilja, at þeir váru menn írskir. En þá varð fǫr manna mikil mjǫk út hingat ýr Norvegi, til þess unz konungrinn Haraldr bannaði, af því at hónum þótti landauðn nema. Þá sættusk þeir á þat, at hverr maðr skyldi gjalda konungi fimm aura, sá es eigi væri frá því skiliðr ok þaðan fœri hingat. En svá es sagt, at Haraldr væri sjau tegu vetra konungr ok yrði áttrœðr. Þau hafa upphǫf verit at gjaldi því es nú er kallat landaurar, en þar galzk stundum meira en stundum minna, unz Óláfr inn digri gørði skýrt, at hverr maðr skyldi gjalda konungi halfa mǫrk, sá er fœri á milli Norvegs ok Íslands, nema konur eða þeir menn es hann næmi frá. Svá sagði Þorkell oss Gellissonr.

Translation Prologue I first wrote the Book of the Icelanders for our bishops Þorlákr and Ketill, and I showed it both to them and to the priest Sæmundr. And in so far as it pleased them to keep it as it was or to add to it, I wrote this on the same subject, besides the genealogies and regnal years of kings, and I added what has since become better known to me and is now more fully reported in this book than in the other. But whatever is incorrectly stated in these records, it is one’s duty to prefer what proves to be more accurate. Hálfdan Whiteleg, king of the Upplanders, son of Óláfr Treefeller, king of the Swedes, was the father of Eysteinn Fart, father of Hálfdan the Bounteous but Stingy-with-Food, father of Goðrøðr the Hunter-King, father of Hálfdan the Black,



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father of Haraldr the Fine-Haired, who was the first of that family line to become sole king over the whole of Norway. These chapters are contained in this book. I. On the settlement of Iceland. / II. On the settlers and the establishment of laws. / III. On the establishment of the Althing. / IV. On the calendar. / V. On the division into Quarters. / VI. On the settlement of Greenland. / VII. On how Christianity came to Iceland. / VIII. On foreign bishops. / IX. On Bishop Ísleifr. / X. On Bishop Gizurr. 
 Here the Book of the Icelanders begins. CHAPTER I Iceland was first settled from Norway in the days of Haraldr the Fine-Haired, son of Hálfdan the Black, at the time (according to the estimate and reckoning of my foster-father Teitr, son of Bishop Ísleifr and the wisest man I have known, and of my paternal uncle Þorkell Gellisson, who remembered a long way back, and of Þóríðr daughter of Snorri goði, who was both wise in many things and reliably informed) when Ívarr, son of Ragnarr loðbrók, had St Edmund, king of the Angles, killed; and that was 870 years after the birth of Christ, according to what is written in his [Edmund’s] saga. It is said with accuracy that a Norwegian called Ingólfr travelled from there [Norway] to Iceland for the first time when Haraldr the Fine-Haired was sixteen years old, and a second time a few years later; he settled in the south in Reykj­ arvík. The place to the east of Minþakseyrr where he first came ashore is called Ingólfshǫfði, and the place to the west of Ǫlfossá which he later took possession of is called Ingólfsfell. At that time Iceland was covered with woods between the mountains and the seashore. There were then Christians here, whom the Northmen call papar, but they later went away, because they did not wish to stay here with heathens; and they left behind them Irish books and bells and staffs. From this it could be seen that they were Irishmen. And then a great many people began to move out here from Norway, until King Haraldr forbade it, because he thought it would lead to depopulation of the land. They then came to the agreement that everyone who was not exempt and travelled here from there should pay the king five ounces of silver. And it is said that Haraldr was king for seventy years and lived into his eighties. These were the origins of the tax which is now called land-dues, and sometimes more was paid for it and sometimes less, until Óláfr the Stout made it clear that everyone who travelled between Norway and Iceland should pay the king half a mark, except for women and those men whom he exempted. Þorkell Gellisson told us so.

III: 6 Writing as a means against oblivion in Hunger-stirrer The prologue to this anonymous history of the early Icelandic church, Hungrvaka [lit. Hunger-stirrer], presents the aim and the origin of the work, which is to record the oral tradition about the first bishops and prevent it from falling into oblivion. In a kind of colophone in the last chapter, the author finishes with the hope that the bishops Klængr and Þorlákr will be remembered forever. Hungrvaka [Hunger-stirrer] text: source: Hungrvaka. In Biskupa sögur. II. Ed. Ásdís Egilsdóttir. ÍF, 16. Reykjavík, 2002. Chs. 1, 11. “Hungrvaka.” Trans. Camilla Basset. MA-thesis. University of translation:  Iceland. 2013. Chs. 1, 11.

Original text I. kapítuli Bœkling þenna kalla ek Hungrvǫku, af því at svá mun mǫrgum mǫnnum ófróðum ok þó óvitrum gefit vera, þeim er hann hafa yfir farit, at miklu myndu gørr vilja vita upprás ok ævi þeira merkismanna er hér verðr fátt frá sagt á þessi skrá. En ek hefi þó náliga ǫllu við slegit, at rita þat sem ek hefi í minni fest. Hefi ek af því þenna bœkling saman settan, at eigi falli mér með ǫllu ór minni þat er ek heyrða af þessu máli segja inn fróða mann Gizur Hallsson, ok enn nǫkkura menn aðra merkiliga hafa í frásǫgn fœrt. Þat berr ok annat til þessa rits at teygja til þess unga menn at kynnisk várt mál at ráða, þat er á norrœnu er ritat, lǫg eða sǫgur eða mannfrœði. Set ek af því heldr þetta á skrá en annan fróðleik, þann er áðr er á skrá settr, at mér sýnisk mínum bǫrnum eða ǫðrum ungmennum vera í skyldasta lagi at vita þat eða forvitnask, hvernig eða með hverjum hætti at hér hefir magnazk kristnin ok byskupsstólar settir verit hér á Íslandi, ok vita síðan hverir merkismenn þeir hafa verit byskuparnir er hér hafa verit ok ek ætla nú frá at segja. En þat skyldar mik til at rita hversu staðrinn hefir eflzk ok magnazk í Skálaholti, eða um þeira manna ráð er hann hafa varðveittan, er ek hefi með Guðs miskunn alla gæfu af þeim hlotit þessa heims. En mik varir at vitrum mǫnnum mun þykkja bœklingr þessi jafn líkr sem hornspánar efni, af því at þat er ófimlig­ ast meðan vangǫrt er, þó at allfagrt sé þá er tilgǫrt er. En þeir menn er svá henda gaman at þessum bœklingi megu þat af nýta at skemmta sér við ok þeim ǫðrum er lítillátliga vilja til hlýða, heldr en at hætta til hvat annat leggsk fyrir, þá er



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áðr þykkir daufligt, því at margr hefir þess raun, ef hann leitar sér skammrar skemmtanar, at þar kemr eptir lǫng áhyggja. Sýnisk mér þar ráð at sá hafi af þessum fróðleik inum fátœka, er ritaðr er, þat er bezt gegnir ok hann hendir svá gaman at, ok varðveiti þat eptir á sjálfum mun í gerð falla, en felli það niðr er honum fellr eigi í skap. En þeim sýnisk mér þat bezt sóma er bœta vilja um þat er áðr þykkir hér ómerkiliga sagt vera ok þeir vitu annat sannara, heldr en þeir fœri þetta eða hafi at spotti, en vili eigi, eða hafi eigi fǫng á, um at bœta. En því hefi ek jafnat þessu til hornspánar at mér sýnisk forkunnar efni í vera, en ek veit at mjǫk þarf um at fegra, ok skal ek þaðan at um vera meðan ek em til fœrr um at bœta. Verð ek ok af því skyldugr til at þat mun af mínum vǫldum ok vanrœkð ef þat er nǫkkut í þessu máli sem rangt reynisk, þat er ritat er, en eigi þeira manna er ek þykkjumk þenna fróðleik eptir hafa. En þat er forn orðskviðr at hús skal hjóna fá. Segi ek af því fyrst hversu bœrinn hefir byggzk í Skálaholti, en síðan frá þeim er staðinn hafa varðveittan. XI. kapítuli […] Nú má oss sýnask sem eigi hafi slíkr skǫrungr verit á Íslandi fyrir margs sakir sem Klœngr byskup var. Viljum vér ok þat ætla at hans rausn muni uppi vera meðan Ísland er byggt. Nú er komit at frásǫgu þeiri er segja skal frá inum sæla Þorláki byskupi, ok er þessi saga hér samið til skemmtanar, góðum mǫnnum til frásagnar, sem aðrar þær er hér eru fyrir ritaðar. En svá vel sem frásǫgn ferr frá hverjum þeira þá eru þó engi dœmi fegri í alla staði en frá þessum inum dýrliga Guðs vin er at segja, Þorláki byskupi, er at réttu má segjask geisli eða gimsteinn heilagra, bæði á þessu landi ok svá annars staðar um heiminn. […] Translation Chapter I I call this little book Hungrvaka because many men, unlearned and unwise as well, will be so disposed towards that which it has checked that they would wish to know more fully of the origin and lifetime of those remarkable men who shall briefly be recounted here in this written work. And yet I may have expressed nearly everything in writing; that which I have fixed in my memory. Therefore I have set this little book together, so that it may not completely drop out of my memory; that which I heard the learned man Gizurr Hallsson to say on this subject and which a number of other distinguished men besides have conveyed in narratives. There is also another reason which applies to this literary work: to entice young men to acquaint themselves with our story, to possess and enjoy that which is written in Norse; law or stories or genealogies. Therefore I commit this to writing (rather than other knowledge, that which is already committed to writing) which

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seems to me to be most urgent for my children and other young men to know or enquire about: how or in what manner Christianity has increased in power here and Episcopal sees have been established here in Iceland, and then to know what noteworthy men they have been, the bishops who have been here, and I intend to relate that now. And that obliges me to write how the Episcopal see at Skálholt has grown strong and increased in power, and about the counsels of those men who have held it, since with God’s grace, I have received all the good luck of this world from them. But I have a foreboding that to wise men this little book must seem very like ‘horn spoon’ matter because it is most awkward while it is underworked, although it may then be very beautiful when it is fully worked. But those men who thus take a delight in this booklet may derive pleasure using it to entertain themselves with it and also those others who humbly wish to listen, rather than taking a risk on what else is available, that which heretofore seems dull, because many a man has experience of this, if he seeks brief amusement for himself, that there comes thereafter a long anxiety about it. It seems advisable to me that one may take from this poor information, which is written here, that which best suits one and he takes such a delight in, and afterwards preserve that which may be to one’s own liking, but may that with which he is not pleased fall from his memory. But to me, it seems to befit them best that they wish to improve upon that which previously seems to be unremarkably told here and know something else to be truer, rather than that they convey or turn this into ridicule, but will not, or have not the means to, improve it. And therefore I may have likened this to a horn spoon which I think to be a remarkable matter, but I know that much is needed to make it finer, and I shall thence endeavour to improve it while I am capable of it. It follows from that, that I will also be bound to it that it will be owing to my doing and negligence if there is something in this account which proves to be wrong, that which is written, and not to those men to whom I consider myself indebted for this knowledge. But there is an ancient proverb: ‘the house needs a household’. Therefore I say first how the farm has been built at Skálholt, and then of those who have kept the church establishment. […] Chapter XI […] Now it may seem to us, for many reasons, as though there may not have been such an outstanding man in Iceland as Bishop Klœngr was. We wish and intend that his magnificence shall live on in memory while Iceland is inhabited. Now it has come to that account which shall tell of the blessed Bishop Þorlákr, and this saga is here composed for entertainment, to tell to good men, like those other sagas which heretofore are written. But as well as the account may tell about each of them, there is nevertheless no example more beautiful in every



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respect then the one to tell about this glorious friend of God, Bishop Þorlákr, who may rightly be called ray or gemstone most holy, both in this land and likewise anywhere else in the world. […]

III: 7 Male and female voices in oral transmission and memory in The Saga of Óláf Tryggvason At the end of the vita by the Icelandic monk, Oddr Snorrason, of the Norwegian king, Óláfr Tryggvason [Olaf Tryggvason], one of the first ‘kings’ sagas’, the author enumerates his informants – among them three women – and tells that he improved a draft of the text he had shown to the bishop. text: Oddr munkr Snorrason, Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar [The Saga of Olaf Tryggvason] source: Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar eptir Odd munk Snorrason. In Færeyinga saga. Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar eptir Odd munk Snorrason. Ed. Ólafur Halldórsson. ÍF, 25. Reykjavík, 2006. Ch. A 83. translation: Oddr Snorrason. The Saga of Olaf Tryggvason. Trans. Theodore M. Andersson. Islandica, 52. Ithaca, NY, and London 2003. 2.

Original text Þessa sǫgu sagði mér Ásgrímr ábóti Vestliðason, Bjarni prestr Bergþórsson, Gellir Þorgilsson, Herdís Daðadóttir, Þorgerðr Þorsteinsdóttir, Inguðr Arnórsdóttir. Þessir menn kenndu mér svá sǫgu Óláfs konungs Tryggvasonar sem nú er sǫgð. Ek sýnda ok bókina Gizuri Hallssyni, ok rétta ek hana eptir hans ráði, ok hǫfum vér því haldit síðan.

Translation I was told this story by Abbot Ásgrímr Vestliðason, the priest Bjarni Bergþórsson, Gellir Þorgilsson, Herdís Daðadóttir, Þorgerðr Þorsteinsdóttir, and Inguðr Arnórsdóttir. These people instructed me in the saga of King Olaf Tryggvason as it is now told. I showed the book to Gizurr Hallsson and corrected it with his counsel [and we have preserved it thus ever since].

III: 8 Medieval mnemonic theory and national history in Saxo Grammaticus’s preface to The History of the Danes Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum [History of the Danes] is famous not least for the immense impact his Præfatio had on medieval and early modern historiography. Much of what was known about Denmark in the pre-modern era was based on Saxo and his sources which were transmitted through the medieval and early modern periods. Among his contributions to aspects of memory in the learned Latin tradition, Saxo’s reference to oral story telling, in particular the role of the Icelanders as well-versed narrators, rune monuments in the Danish landscape, and ancient graves as mnemonic places with long histories, including, in the final section of the preface, his remarks about giants as the previous inhabitants of the country are especially significant. Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum [The History of the Danes] text: source: Saxo Grammaticus.  Gesta Danorum. Ed. J. Olrik and H. Ræder, Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, 1931. Online text from the Royal Library, Copenhagen. translation: First Nine Books of the Danish History of Saxo Grammaticus. Translated by Oliver Elton, with notes by Frederick York Powell. AngloSaxon classics (Norrœna Society). London: Norroena Society, 1905. Online text from The Medieval & Classical Literature Library.

Original text Præfatio 1.1. Cum ceterae nationes rerum suarum titulis gloriari voluptatemque ex maiorum recordatione percipere soleant, Danorum maximus pontifex Absalon patriam nostram, cuius illustrandae maxima semper cupiditate flagrabat, eo claritatis et monumenti genere fraudari non passus, mihi, comitum suorum extremo, ceteris operam abnuentibus, res Danicas in historiam conferendi negotium intorsit inopemque sensum maius viribus opus ingredi crebrae exhortationis imperio compulit. Quis enim res Daniae gestas litteris prosequeretur? quae nuper publicis initiata sacris, ut religionis, ita Latinae quoque vocis aliena torpebat. At ubi cum sacrorum ritu Latialis etiam facultas accessit, segnities par imperitiae fuit, nec desidiae minora quam antea penuriae vitia exstitere. […] 1.3.  Nec ignotum volo, Danorum antiquiores conspicuis fortitudinis operibus editis gloriae aemulatione suffusos Romani stili imitatione non solum rerum a

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se magnifice gestarum titulos exquisito contextus genere veluti poetico quodam opere perstrinxisse, verum etiam maiorum acta patrii sermonis carminibus vulgata linguae suae litteris saxis ac rupibus insculpenda curasse. Quorum vestigiis ceu quibusdam antiquitatis voluminibus inhaerens tenoremque veris translationis passibus aemulatus metra metris reddenda curavi, quibus scribendorum series subnixa non tam recenter conflata quam antiquitus edita cognoscatur, quia praesens opus non nugacem sermonis luculentiam, sed fidelem vetustatis notitiam pollicetur. Quantum porro ingenii illius homines historiarum edituros putemus, si scribendi sitim Latinitatis peritia pavissent, quibus tametsi Romanae vocis notitia abesset, tanta tradendae rerum suarum memoriae cupido incessit, ut voluminum loco vastas moles amplecterentur, codicum usum a cautibus mutuantes? 1.4. Nec Tylensium industria silentio oblitteranda: qui cum ob nativam soli sterilitatem luxuriae nutrimentis carentes officia continuae sobrietatis exerceant omniaque vitae momenta ad excolendam alienorum operum notitiam conferre soleant, inopiam ingenio pensant. Cunctarum quippe nationum res gestas cognosse memoriaeque mandare voluptatis loco reputant, non minoris gloriae iudicantes alienas virtutes disserere quam proprias exhibere. Quorum thesauros historicarum rerum pignoribus refertos curiosius consulens, haud parvam praesentis operis partem ex eorum relationis imitatione contexui, nec arbitros habere contempsi, quos tanta vetustatis peritia callere cognovi. 1.5. Nec minus Absalonis asserta sectando, quae vel ipse gessit vel ab aliis gesta perdidicit, docili animo stiloque complecti curae habui, venerandae eius narrationis documentum perinde ac divinum aliquod magisterium amplexatus. […] 3.0.  Danicam vero regionem giganteo quondam cultu exercitam eximiae magnitudinis saxa veterum bustis ac specubus affixa testantur. Quod si quis vi monstruosa patratum ambigat, quorundam montium excelsa suspiciat dicatque, si callet, quis eorum verticibus cautes tantae granditatis invexerit. Inopinabile namque quivis miraculi huius aestimator advertet, ut molem super plano minime vel difficile mobilem in tantum montanae sublimitatis apicem simplex mortalitatis labor aut usitatus humani roboris conatus extulerit. Utrum vero talium rerum auctores post diluvialis inundationis excursum gigantes exstiterint an viri corporis viribus ante alios praediti, parum notitiae traditum. Talibus, ut nostri autumant, subitam mirandamque nunc propinquitatis, nunc absentiae potestatem comparendique ac subterlabendi vicissitudinem versilis corporum status indulget, qui hodieque scrupeam inaccessamque solitudinem, cuius supra mentionem fecimus, incolere perhibentur. Eiusdem aditus horrendi generis periculis obsitus raro sui expertoribus incolumitatem regressumque concessit. Nunc stilum ad propositum transferam.



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Translation Preface 1.1. Forasmuch as all other nations are wont to vaunt the glory of their achievements, and reap joy from the remembrance of their forefathers: Absalon, Chief Pontiff of the Danes, whose zeal ever burned high for the glorification of our land, and who would not suffer it to be defrauded of like renown and record, cast upon me, the least of his followers – since all the rest refused the task – the work of compiling into a chronicle the history of Denmark, and by the authority of his constant admonition spurred my weak faculty to enter on a labour too heavy for its strength. For who could write a record of the deeds of Denmark? It had but lately been admitted to the common faith: it still languished as strange to Latin as to religion. But now that the holy ritual brought also the command of the Latin tongue, men were as slothful now as they were unskilled before, and their sluggishness proved as faultful as that former neediness. […] 1.3. And I would not have it forgotten that the more ancient of the Danes, when any notable deeds of mettle had been done, were filled with emulation of glory, and imitated the Roman style; not only by relating in a choice kind of composition, which might be called a poetical work, the roll of their lordly deeds; but also by having graven upon rocks and cliffs, in the characters of their own language, the works of their forefathers, which were commonly known in poems in the mother tongue. In the footsteps of these poems, being as it were classic books of antiquity, I have trod; and keeping true step with them as I translated, in the endeavour to preserve their drift, I have taken care to render verses by verses; so that the chronicle of what I shall have to write, being founded upon these, may thus be known, not for a modern fabrication, but for the utterance of antiquity; since this present work promises not a trumpery dazzle of language, but faithful information concerning times past. Moreover, how many histories must we suppose that men of such genius would have written, could they have had skill in Latin and so slaked their thirst for writing! Men who though they lacked acquaintance with, the speech of Rome, were yet seized with such a passion for bequeathing some record of their history, that they encompassed huge boulders instead of scrolls, borrowing rocks for the usage of books. […] 1.4. Nor may the pains of the men of Thule be blotted in oblivion; for though they lack all that can foster luxury (so naturally barren is the soil), yet they make up for their neediness by their wit, by keeping continually every observance of soberness, and devoting every instant of their lives to perfecting our knowledge of the deeds of foreigners. Indeed, they account it a delight to learn and to consign to remembrance the history of all nations, deeming it as great a glory to set forth the excellences of others as to display their own. Their stores, which are stocked with attestations of historical events, I have examined somewhat closely, and

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have woven together no small portion of the present work by following their narrative, not despising the judgment of men whom I know to be so well versed in the knowledge of antiquity. 1.5. And I have taken equal care to follow the statements of Absalon, and with obedient mind and pen to include both his own doings and other men’s doings of which he learnt; treasuring the witness of his August narrative as though it were some teaching from the skies. […] 3.0. That the country of Denmark was once cultivated and worked by giants, is attested by the enormous stones attached to the barrows and caves of the ancients. Should any man question that this is accomplished by superhuman force, let him look up at the tops of certain mountains and say, if he knows how, what man hath carried such immense boulders up to their crests. For anyone considering this marvel will mark that it is inconceivable how a mass, hardly at all or but with difficulty movable upon a level, could have been raised to so mighty a peak of so lofty a mountain by mere human effort, or by the ordinary exertion of human strength. But as to whether, after the Deluge went forth, there existed giants who could do such deeds, or men endowed beyond others with bodily force, there is scant tradition to tell us. But, as our countrymen aver, those who even to-day are said to dwell in that rugged and inaccessible desert aforesaid, are, by the mutable nature of their bodies, vouchsafed the power of being now near, now far, and of appearing and vanishing in turn. The approach to this desert is beset with perils of a fearful kind, and has seldom granted to those who attempted it an unscathed return. Now I will let my pen pass to my theme.

III: 9 Commemorating the achievements of the ancient kings in Sven Aggesen’s A Short History of the Kings of Denmark The Danish historiographer, Sven Aggesen, addresses in the preface to his Short History of the Kings of Denmark how necessary it is for a nation to commemorate the famous deeds of the kings and chiefs of earlier times in order to prevent them from falling into oblivion. text: Sven Aggesen. Brevis Histori Regvm Dacie [A Short History of the Kings of Denmark] source: Scriptores Minores Historicæ Danicæ Medii Ævi. I. Ed. M. Cl. Gertz. Copenhagen 1970 [1917–1918]. 94–97. translation: The Works of Sven Aggesen, Twelfth-Century Danish Historian. Trans. Eric Christiansen. Viking Society for Northern Research. Text Series, 11. London, 1992. 48–49.

Original text Proœmium Cum ueterum in codicibus contemplatione numerosa priscorum gesta stilo conscripta elegantissimo crebro perspicabar, diurnis suspiraui gemitibus, nostrorum regum seu principum immanissima gesta eterno deputari silentio. Quippe, cum et illi inferiores non extiterint meritis et uirtutum experiencia, pari preconio non extiterunt eorum commendate excellencie. Verum crebrescentibus malis huius in mundi senio, quantumlibet diligenti intentione commendabilia memorie quis conatur commendare, detractationis tamen neuticam declinabit dispendium. Diu itaque mens mihi fluebat in biuio, utrumnam, notam non declinans arrogantie, stilo licet illepido regum genealogias regnorumque successiones sub compendio memorie commendarem, aut sub silentio cuncta preterirem. Satius tamen autumabam posteris nostris, qui et uiuacis ingenii armabuntur acumine et doctrine floride copia fecundi erunt, preuius negligentie densitates penetrare, licet presumptionis dispendium non declinauerim, quam illustrium gesta principum negligentie obfuscentur caligine. Sed, ut ait Martianus, “ne incomperta falsitatem admiscere uideatur assertio”, et ne fabulose uidear historiam enarrare, quantum ab annosis et ueteribus certa ualui inquisitione percunctari, compendiose perstringam. Et quia non omnium regum par claruit uictoria, nec simili exultabant triumpho, cum et regni titulo a se non ambigue discreparent, quorum insignia gesta luce clarius sum perspicatus, eos ad memoriam conabor reuocare, illorum gestis modicam impen-

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dens operam, quos fama gloriosa circumuolans preterit. Nam, prout agrestum, ita et principum natura communis est omnium, ut hunc uirtutum stimulet titulus, illum desidie depigret cupiditas, hic generositatis titulos satagat propagare, ille gloriose laudis diminutionem floccipendat. Illum igitur nunc nostra retexat oratio, quem priscorum annositas iugi primum commendauit memorie.

Translation Preface Often, as I was studying the books of the ancients and discovering numerous deeds of early times recorded in the most elegant language, I sighed continually at the perpetual silence to which the mightiest achievements of our own kings and chiefs have been consigned. They were no less great in their merit and in their proven virtue, but their distinction has not been proclaimed aloud to the same extent. However, as this world grows old and evils gather apace, a man can strive to commemorate the things that ought to be remembered with all the care and industry he can muster, and he will still be wholly unable to deflect the shafts of defamation. And so for a long time I was in two minds: should I accept the charge of presumption and write down a short record of the pedigrees and successive reigns of our kings in my own style, unpolished as it is, or should I let them all pass away into silence? However, I thought it better not to avoid displaying my arrogance, and to penetrate the thickets of the neglected past, thus clearing the way for our successors, who will be armed with a sharp and lively intelligence and a fertile store of elegant learning, rather than that I should let the achievements of our famous princes be clouded over by the gloom of oblivion. However, Martianus tells us that ‘the statement of the unknown must not appear to be mixed with falsehood,’ and lest I should seem to be narrating fable as history, I shall give an abbreviated account of what I have been able to ascertain by questioning aged men and ancient authorities. Not all kings have been equally celebrated for their victories, nor have all triumphed alike, and they certainly differed from each other in their claims to the kingdom. Therefore I shall attempt to commemorate those whose famous deeds I found to be known with more certainty. To the deeds of those whom fleeting fame has passed by I shall attend less urgently. Peasants and princes share the common nature of all men, whereby reputation instigates this man to do well, while love of sloth tarnishes that one. This man endeavours to perpetuate his claims to nobility; little cares the other if glorious renown be dimmed. And so our tale will now restore to life the man whom our remotest forebears first commended to eternal remembrance.

III: 10 Remembering and transmitting for future generations in the prologue to A History of Norway The prologue to the anonymous Historia Norwegie [A History of Norway] from the twelfth century addresses itself to the generations to come which will be able to enjoy the results of the author’s endeavours. He has followed his sources closely but also included contemporary matters worthy of remembering, memorie dignum, in his work. Historia Norwegie [A History of Norway] text: source: Historia Norwegie. Ed. Inger Ekrem and Lars Boje Mortensen. Trans. Peter Fisher. Copenhagen, 2003. 50, 52. translation: A History of Norway and The Passion and Miracles of the Blessed Óláfr. Trans. Devra Kunin. Viking Society of Northern Research. Text Series, 13. London, 2001. 1–2.

Original text Prologus incipit Tullius in philosophie tractatu suo laudans amicitiam, cum de ceteris eius bonis ageret, inter caros amicos nichil fere difficile fore meminit. Huius igitur tanti philosophi satis probabili sentencie nequaquam contraire ausus, tametsi tali sagacitati me in omnibus imparem et ad tale et tam graue onus imbellicem noui, debite honstissimis adhortacionibus utpote uiri peroptimi satisfaciens, ne ingratus crebrorum munerum beneficio existam, ad quod poscor, uolens nolens aggredi temptabo. Est enim mihi imperito grauis sarcina situm latissime regionis circumquaque discribere eiusque rectorum genealogiam retexere et aduentum christianitatis simul et paganismi fugam ac utriusque statum exponere. Quod negotium nimio sudore plenum, florente mente excogitatum meeque imperitie immensum, sed hucusque Latino eloquio intemptatum, quam sit onerosum et ob inuidos quam sit periculosum, ipse optime nosti. Obsecuendo tamen nostris aminiculis fretus, illorum edacem liuorem postponendo (si quid nostra refert), quod uos posteri hec mei laboris emolumenta habebitis. Qua in re si quid indocta parentis forisfecit procacitas, clemens mandantis remittat caritas. Tu igitur, o Agnelle, iure didascalico mi prelate, utcumque alii ferant hec mea scripta legentes non rhetorico lepore polita, immo scrupulosis barbarismis implicata, gratanter, ut decet amicum, accipito. Neque enim laudis auidus ut cronographus existo, neque uituperii stimulos ut falsidicus exorreo, cum nichil a me de

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uetustatis serie nouum uel inauditum assumpserim, sed in omnibus seniorum asserciones secutus. Si quid uero nostris temporibus memorie dignum accidisse repperi, hoc ipse addidi, quoniam multorum magnificencias cum suis auctoribus ob scriptorum inopiam a memoria modernorum cotidie elabi perspexi.

Translation Here begins the Prologue ... tus, treating in his Philostratus of the other good things
 of life, says in praise of friendship that between true friends hardly any difficulties arise. Not by any means daring to oppose the well-founded axiom of such a philosopher, knowing myself incapable of matching in any way such sagacity and my powers too feeble for such an onerous task, yet bound
 in duty to respond to the highly honourable urging of the most excellent of men, lest I show myself ungrateful for the favour of his many generosities, I shall therefore attempt, willy-nilly, to undertake what is asked of me. For it is a heavy burden on my ignorant self to describe comprehensively the situation of a region so very vast, to disentangle the genealogy of its rulers, to relate the advent of Christianity side by side with the retreat of paganism and to expound the current state of both religions. You yourself know best what a labour this will be, full of inordinate toil, a subject, though hitherto unattempted in Latin discourse, devised by an eminent mind and imposed upon my callowness; and you know best how onerous the task and how great the risk to be run on account of envious men. I comply nevertheless, trusting in the sources we have and disregarding their devouring rancour if it touches us, because you generations to come will have the fruits of my labour, in which, if the author who obeys has done aught amiss in untaught presumption, may the patron who ordains pardon it in forbearing charity. Therefore, Agnellus, whatever other readers may say of these writings of mine, that they are not smoothed with rhetorical charm but gravelled with rough barbarisms, do you who are set above me with a teacher’s authority receive them with the kindness that befits
 a friend. For I am neither eager for praise as a historian nor fearful of the sting of censure as a liar, since concerning the course of early times I have added nothing new or unknown but in all things followed the assertions of my seniors. On the other hand, if I came upon something noteworthy [remembering] that occurred in our own day I have included it, for I have observed that the illustrious acts of many men, along with the men themselves, daily escape the memory of our contemporaries because there are no writers to record them.

Media of Memory and Forgetting

III: 11 Theodoricus Monachus filling up memory gaps in An Account of the Ancient History of the Norwegian Kings The Norwegian monk, Theodoricus, gives as one of the reasons why he wrote a history of ancient Norway the fact that a lack of writing about the early periods has effaced any remembrance (memoriam delevit) of the brave people who lived before Harald Fair-hair. text: Theodoricus Monachus, Historia de antiquitate regum Norwagensium [An Account of the Ancient History of the Norwegian Kings] source: Theodrici Monachi Historia de antiquitate regum Norwagensium. In Monumenta Norvegiæ. Latinske Kildeskrifter til Norges Historie i Middelalderen. Ed. Gustav Storm. Kristiania, 1973 [1880]. 3–4. translation: Theodoricus Monachus, Historia de antiquitate regum Norwagensium. An Account of the Ancient History of the Norwegian Kings. Trans. David and Ian McDougall. Viking Society for Northern Research. Text Series, 11. London, 1998. 1–2.

Original text Incipit prologus Theodrici monachi in historiam suam de antiquitate Norwagensium. Domino et patri suo, viro reverendissimo Augustino Nidrosiensi archiepiscopo Theodricus humilis peccator debitæ servitutis subjectionem et orationem suffragia. Operæ pretium duxi, vir illustrissime, pauca hæc de antiquitate regum Norwagensium breviter annotare, et prout sagaciter perquirere potuimus ab eis, penes quos horum memoria præcipue vigere creditur, quos nos Islendinga vocamus, qui hæc in suis antiquis carminibus percelebrata recolunt. Et quia pænæ nulla natio est tam rudis et inculta, quæ non aliqua monumenta suorum antecessorum ad posteros transmitterit, dignum putavi hæc, pauca licet, majorum nostrorum memoriæ posteritatis tradere. Sed quia constat nullam ratam regalis stemmatis successionem in hac terra extitisse ante Haraldi pulchre-comati tempora, ab ipso exordium fecimus: non quia dubitaverim etiam ante ejus ætatem fuisse in hac terra viros secundum præsens sæculum probitate conspicuos, quos nimirum, ut ait Boetius, clarissimos suis temporibus viros scriptorum inops delevit opinio. Ad

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quod probandum testes ciebo idoneos. Hugo bonæ memoriæ canonicus Sancti Victoris Parisiis, vir undecunque doctissimus, ita meminit gentis nostræ in chronica sua: Northmanni, inquit, de Scythia inferiori (illam procul dubio volens intellegi superiorem, quam nos Suethiam appelamus) egressi, classe advecti Gallias intrantesque per Sequanam fluvium omnia depopulati sunt ferro et flamma. Sigibertis quoque Gyemblacensis monachus in chronica sua ita scribit: Northmanni, inquit, aquilonaris gens atrocissima, advecti in Gallias longis navibus intraverunt Ligerim fluvium et Thurones usque pervenerunt omnia vastantes. Liquet itaque, virorum optime, ex his fuisse etiam ante tempora Haraldi in hac terra in bellicis rebus potentes viros, sed ut diximus illorum memoriam scriptorum inopia delevit. Veritatis vero sinceritas in hac narratione ad illos omnimodo referenda est, quorum relatione hæc annotavimus, quia nos non visa sed audita conscripsimus. Digressiones etiam more antiquorum chronographorum non inutiles, ut arbitramur, ad delectandum animum lectoris locis competentibus adjunximus. Vestræ igitur excellentiæ potissimum præsentem schedulam examinandam misimus, cujus peritiæ certissimæ scimus ned ad resecanda superflua quicquam afore nec benevolentiæ ad eda, quæ recte prolata sunt, comprobanda. Omnipotens deus custodiat sanctitatem vestram longo tempore incolumem ecclesiæ suæ sanctæ. Vale. Explicit Prologus.

Translation Here begins the prologue of the monk Theodoricus to his account of the ancient history
 of the Norwegian kings. To his lord and father, the most reverend Eysteinn, archbishop of Niðaróss, the humble sinner Theodoricus pledges the obedience owed by a subject, and the support of prayers. I have deemed it worthwhile, noble sir, to write down in brief these few details concerning the ancient history of the Norwegian kings, as I have been able to learn by assiduous inquiry from the people among whom in particular the remembrance of these matters is believed to thrive – namely those whom we call Icelanders, who preserve them as much celebrated themes in their ancient poems. And because almost no people is so rude and uncivilized that it has not passed on some monuments of its predecessors to later generations, I have thought it proper to record for posterity these relics of our forefathers, few though they are. Because
 it is clear that no established succession of the royal line existed in this land before the time of Haraldr Fair-hair, I have begun with him; and I have not done this because I doubted that before his day there were in this land men who, by the standards of the present age, were distinguished by their prowess, since



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certainly, as Boethius says, ‘reputation without authors has effaced those men who were very famous in their own times’. To prove this, I shall summon suitable witnesses. Hugh of blessed memory, canon 
of Saint Victor in Paris, a man most skilled in every branch of learning, made mention of our people in his chron­ icle 
as follows: ‘The Northmen,’ he says, ‘departed from Nether Scythia’(by which he doubtless means Upper Scythia, which we call Sweden), ‘and sailed in their fleet to Gaul, and entering the country by the river Seine, they laid everything waste with iron and flame.’ Sigebert the monk of Gembloux likewise writes as follows in his chronicle: ‘The Northmen,’ he says, ‘a most horrible Nordic people, sailed to Gaul in their longships, entered the river Loire and penetrated as far as Tours, devastating everything.’ It is therefore clear from these accounts, O best of men, that before the days of Haraldr there were in this land men mighty in war, but that, as I have said, a dearth of writers has effaced any remembrance of them. However, the degree of pure truth in my present narrative must be placed entirely at the door of those by whose report I have written these things down, because I have recorded things not seen but heard. Moreover, in the manner of ancient chroniclers, I have added digressions in appropriate places which, in my opinion, are not without value in serving to delight the mind of the reader. I have therefore submitted the little document before you to your excellency for examination, since I know that you lack neither the very sound understanding to cut away what is superfluous, nor the good will to approve of what has been set forth correctly.
 May almighty God long keep safe your holiness for His holy Church. Fare well.
 Here ends the prologue.

III: 12 Writing and memory in The King’s Mirror The young scholar in the King’s Mirror is advised by wise men who have overheard his conversations with his father that he should write everything down so that the “discussions should not perish as soon as we ceased speaking”. He searches his memory and follows the advice. Konungs skuggsjá [The King’s Mirror] text: source: Konungs skuggsiá. Ed. Ludvig Holm-Olsen. Norsk Kjeldeskriftinstitutt. Norrøne tekster, 1. 2nd rev. ed. Oslo, 1983. 1–2. translation: The King’s Mirror.  Trans. Laurence Marcellus Larson. New York, 1917. 73–74.

Original text Enn þá er eg hafdi feingit nog andsuor og viturlig af munne mijns fodurz vm alla þá hluti er eg spurda. þá voru nær staddir gofgir menn og spakir. þeir er heyrdu mijna spurningu og hans viturlig og sannlig andsuor. þá bádu þeir þess at eg skillda alla ockra rædu skrifa ok j bok setia at eigi yrdi su ræda suo skiott med tionum sem vier þognudum. helldur væri hun þá morgum sijdan nytsamligt gamann. er eigi mætti hallda skemtan af oss sialfum er nær yrdi þeiri rædu og heyrdu. Enn eg giorda bædi eptir bæn þeira ok rádum. og studderadi eg mijkit j þeim ollum rádum með athugasamligu minne og setta eg allar þær rædur j eina bok. eigi at eins til eyrna gamanns og skiotrar skemtanar þeim er heyrdi. helldur til margfalldrar nytsemdar ollum þeim er med riettum athuga nema þessa bok ok fylgja þui ollu vel er bydur j bokinni. Enn bokinn er suo gior. at þo mun frodleikur j þikia og skiemtan. ok þo mikit gagn at þat sie vel numit og giætt eptir. er ritat er j bokinni. Enn sá er hann hefur fullann skilning og riettan. þá verdur hann þess var at su er meiri bokinn er glosa þarf. en hin er ritud er.

Translation But when my father had given wise and sufficient replies to all the questions that I had asked, certain wise and worthy men, who, being present, had heard my questions and his wise and truthful answers, requested me to note down all our conversations and set them in a book, so that our discussions should not perish as soon as we ceased speaking, but prove useful and enjoyable to many who could derive no pastime from us who were present at these conversations.



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So I did as they advised and requested. I searched my memory and pondered deeply upon the speeches and set them all in a book, not only for the amusement or the fleeting pastime of those who may hear them, but for the help which the book will offer in many ways to all who read it with proper attention and observe carefully everything that it prescribes.

III: 13 The prologue to Heimskringla: Snorri Sturluson comments on his sources The famous prologue to Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla [Circle of the world] is an important source for medieval Icelandic story telling. It discusses the value and historicity of different sources such as skaldic poems by well-known Norwegian and Icelandic poets. Changing cultural habits, e.g. burial modes and memorials, are mentioned. To Snorri’s main informants belong Ari and Þuríðr, both of whom had extremely good memories. Because of their strict formal rules, the author considers skaldic poems the most stable category of sources. text: Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla [Circle of the world] source: Snorri Sturluson. Heimskringla. I. Ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson. ÍF, 26. Reykjavík, 1941. Prologus. translation: Snorri Sturluson. Heimskringla. I. Ed. Alison Finlay and Anthony Faulkes. 2nd ed. London, 2016. Prologue.

Original text Prologus Á bók þessi lét ek rita fornar frásagnir um hǫfðingja þá, er ríki hafa haft á Norðrlǫndum ok á danska tungu hafa mælt, svá sem ek hefi heyrt fróða menn segja, svá ok nǫkkurar kynslóðir þeira eptir því, sem mér hefir kennt verit, sumt þat, er finnsk í langfeðgatali, þar er konungar eða aðrir stórættaðir menn hafa rakit kyn sitt, en sumt er ritat eptir fornum kvæðum eða sǫguljóðum, er menn hafa haft til skemmtanar sér. En þótt vér vitim eigi sannendi á því, þá vitum vér dœmi til, at gamlir frœðimenn hafi slíkt fyrir satt haft. Þjóðólfr inn fróði ór Hvini var skáld Haralds konungs ins hárfagra. Hann orti kvæði um Rǫgnvald konung heiðumhæra, þat er kallat Ynglingatal. Rǫgnvaldr var sonr Óláfs Geirstaðaálfs, bróður Hálfdanar svarta. Í því kvæði eru nefndir þrír tigir langfeðga hans ok sagt frá dauða hvers þeira ok legstað. Fjǫlnir er sá nefndr, er var sonr Yngvifreys, þess er Svíar hafa blótat lengi síðan. Af hans nafni eru Ynglingar kallaðir. Eyvindr skáld­ aspillir talði ok langfeðga Hákonar jarls ins ríka í kvæði því, er Háleygjatal heitir, er ort var um Hákon. Sæmingr er þar nefndr sonr Yngvifreys. Sagt er þar ok frá dauða hvers þeira og haugstað. Eptir Þjóðólfs sǫgn er fyrst ritin ævi Ynglinga ok þar við aukit eptir sǫgn fróðra manna. In fyrsta ǫld er kǫlluð brunaǫld. Þá skyldi brenna alla dauða menn og reisa eptir bautasteina, en síðan er Freyr hafði heygðr verit at Uppsǫlum, þá gerðu margir hǫfðingjar eigi síðr hauga en bautasteina til minningar um frændr sína. En síðan er Danr inn mikilláti, Danakonungr, lét sér



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haug gera ok bauð at bera sik þannig dauðan með konungsskrúði ok herbúnaði ok hest hans við ǫllu sǫðulreiði og mikit fé annat ok hans ættmenn gerðu margir svá síðan, ok hófsk þar haugsǫld í Danmǫrku, en lengi síðan helzk brunaǫld með Svíum og Norðmǫnnum. En er Haraldr inn hárfagri var konungr í Nóregi, þá byggð­ isk Ísland. Með Haraldi konungi váru skáld, ok kunna menn enn kvæði þeira ok allra konunga kvæði, þeira er síðan hafa verit í Noregi, og tókum vér þar mest dœmi af, þat er sagt er í þeim kvæðum, er kveðin váru fyrir sjálfum hǫfðingjunum eða sonum þeira. Tǫkum vér þat allt fyrir satt, er í þeim kvæðum finnsk um ferðir þeira eða orrostur. En það er háttr skálda að lofa þann mest, er þá eru þeir fyrir, en engi myndi þat þora at segja sjálfum honum þau verk hans, er allir þeir, er heyrði, vissi, at hégómi væri ok skrǫk, ok svo sjálfr hann. Þat væri þá háð, en eigi lof. Ari prestr inn fróði Þorgilsson, Gellissonar, ritaði fyrstr manna hér á landi at norrœnu máli frœði, bæði forna ok nýja. Ritaði hann mest í upphafi sinnar bókar frá Íslands byggð ok lagasetning, síðan frá lǫgsǫgumǫnnum, hversu lengi hverr hafði sagt, ok hafði þat áratal fyrst til þess, er kristni kom á Ísland, en síðan allt til sinna daga. Hann tók þar ok við mǫrg ǫnnur dœmi, bæði konunga ævi í Nóregi ok Danmǫrku ok svá í Englandi eða enn stórtíðendi, er gǫrzk hǫfðu hér á landi, og þykkir mér hans sǫgn ǫll merkiligust. Var hann forvitri ok svá gamall, at hann var fœddr næsta vetr eptir fall Haralds konungs Sigurðarsonar. Hann ritaði, sem hann sjálfr segir, ævi Nóregskonunga eptir sǫgu Odds Kolssonar, Hallssonar af Síðu, en Oddr nam at Þorgeiri afráðskoll, þeim manni, er vitr var ok svá gamall, at hann bjó þá í Niðarnesi, er Hákon jarl inn ríki var drepinn. Í þeim sama stað lét Óláfr Tryggvason efna til kaupangs, þar sem nú er. Ari prestr kom sjau vetra gamall í Haukadal til Halls Þórarinssonar ok var þar fjórtán vetr. Hallr var maðr stórvitr og minnigr. Hann mundi þat, er Þangbrandr prestr skírði hann þrévetran. Þat var vetri fyrr en kristni væri í lǫg tekin á Íslandi. Ari var tólf vetra gamall, þá er Ísleifr biskup andaðisk. Hallr fór milli landa ok hafði félag Óláfs konungs ins helga ok fekk af því uppreist mikla. Var honum því kunnigt um konungríki hans. En þá er Ísleifr byskup andaðisk, var liðit frá falli Óláfs konungs Tryggvasonar nær átta tigum vetra. Hallr andaðisk níu vetrum síðar en Ísleifr byskup. Þá var Hallr að vetratali nírœður og fjǫgurra vetra. Hann hafði gǫrt bú í Haukadal þrítøgr ok bjó þar sex tigu vetra ok fjóra vetr. Svá ritaði Ari. Teitr, sonr Ísleifs byskups, var með Halli í Haukadal at fóstri ok bjó þar síðan. Hann lærði Ara prest, ok marga frœði sagði hann honum, þá er Ari ritaði síðan. Ari nam ok marga frœði at Þuríði, dóttur Snorra goða. Hon var spǫk at viti. Hon mundi Snorra, fǫður sinn, en hann var þá nær hálffertøgr, er kristni kom á Ísland, en andaðisk einum vetri eptir fall Óláfs konungs ins helga. Þat var eigi undarligt, at Ari væri sannfróðr at fornum tíðendum bæði hér ok útan lands, at hann hafði numit at gǫmlum mǫnnum ok vitrum, en var sjálfr námgjarn ok minnigr. En kvæðin þykkja mér sízt ór stað fœrð, ef þau eru rétt kveðin ok skynsamliga upp tekin.

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 Part III: Media of Memory and Forgetting

Translation Prologue In this book I have had written old stories about those rulers who have held power in the Northern lands and have spoken the Scandinavian language, as I have heard them told by learned men, and some of their genealogies according to what I have been taught, some of which is found in the records of paternal descent in which kings and other men of high rank have traced their ancestry, and some is written according to old poems or narrative songs which people used to use for their entertainment. And although we do not know how true they are, we know of cases where learned men of old have taken such things to be true. Þjóðólfr inn fróði (the Learned) from Hvinir was a poet of King Haraldr inn hárfagri (the Fine-Haired). He composed a poem in honour of King Rǫgnvaldr heiðumhæri (Nobly Grey), which is called Ynglingatal. Rǫgnvaldr was the son of Óláfr Geirstaðaálfr, brother of Hálfdan svarti (the Black). In that poem are named thirty of his paternal ancestors, and the death and burial place of each of them is related. The one called Fjǫlnir was son of Yngvi-Freyr, whom the Svíar worshipped for a long time afterwards. The Ynglingar are named after him. Eyvindr skáldaspillir (Poet-Spoiler) also enumerated the paternal ancestors of Jarl Hákon inn ríki (the Great) in the poem that is called Háleygjatal, which was composed in honour of Hákon. In that poem Sæmingr is named as a son of Yngvi-Freyr. There also the death and burial place of each of them is related. The history of the Ynglingar is written first according to Þjóðólfr’s account, and augmented according to the account of learned men. The first age is called the Age of Burning. At that time all dead people had to be burned and memorial stones raised for them, but after Freyr had been interred in a mound at Uppsalir, many rulers built mounds as well as memorial stones in memory of their kinsmen. But after Danr inn mikilláti (the Haughty), king of the Danes, had had a mound built for himself and commanded that he should be carried into it when he was dead with his royal robes and armour and his horse with all its saddle-gear and many other goods, and many people of his line had later done the same, then the Age of Mounds began there in Denmark, though the Age of Burning continued long after among the Svíar and Norwegians. And when Haraldr inn hárfagri was king in Norway, Iceland was settled. There were skalds (poets) with King Haraldr, and people still know their poems and poems about all the kings there have been in Norway since, and we have mostly used as evidence what is said in those poems that were recited before the rulers themselves or their sons. We regard as true everything that is found in those poems about their expeditions and battles. It is indeed the habit of poets to praise most highly the one in whose presence they are at the time, but no one would dare to tell him to his face about deeds of his which all who listened, as well as



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the man himself, knew were falsehoods and fictions. That would be mockery and not praise. The priest Ari inn fróði (the Learned), son of Þorgils, son of Gellir, was the first person in this country to write down history, both ancient and recent, in the Norse language. He wrote in the beginning of his book mostly about the settlement of Iceland and the establishment of the laws, then about the law-speakers, how long each had served, and he used that reckoning of years first to the point when Christianity came to Iceland, and then all the way down to his own time. He also included much other material, both the lives of kings in Norway and Denmark and also in England, and further the important events that had taken place in this country, and all his account seems to me most noteworthy. He was very wise, and so old that he was born in the year after the death of King Haraldr Sigurðarson. He wrote, as he himself says, lives of kings of Norway according to the account of Oddr son of Kolr, son of Hallr on Síða, and Oddr learned them from Þorgeirr afráðskollr (Payment-Chap), a wise man and so aged that he was living in Niðarnes when Jarl Hákon inn ríki was killed. In that same place Óláfr Tryggvason had a market town founded, where it still is now. At the age of seven, Ari the priest came to live with Hallr Þórarinsson in Haukadalr, and stayed there for fourteen years. Hallr was a very intelligent man with a good memory. He remembered being baptised by the priest Þangbrandr at the age of three. That was a year before Christianity was adopted into the law in Iceland. Ari was twelve years old when Bishop Ísleifr died. Hallr travelled from country to country and had business dealings with King Óláfr inn helgi (the Saint), from which he gained great advancement. So he was knowledgeable about his reign. But when Bishop Ísleifr died almost eighty years had passed since the death of King Óláfr Tryggvason. Hallr died nine years after Bishop Ísleifr. Hallr had then reached the age of ninety-four years. He had set up his farm in Haukadalr when he was thirty, and lived there for sixty-four years. So wrote Ari. Teitr, son of Bishop Ísleifr, was brought up by Hallr in Haukadalr and lived there afterwards. He taught Ari the priest and gave him much information which Ari afterwards wrote down. Ari also learned much information from Þuríðr, daughter of Snorri goði (the Priest/Chieftain). She had a highly intelligent mind. She remembered her father Snorri, and he was nearly thirty-five when Christianity came to Iceland and died one year after the death of King Óláfr inn helgi. So it was not surprising that Ari was accurately informed about past events both here and abroad, since he had learned from old and wise people, and was himself eager to learn and retentive. As to the poems, I consider them to be least corrupted if they are correctly composed and meaningfully interpreted.

III: 14 Stories fixed in memory in The Saga of King Sverrir The relation of the saga materials to manna minnum [the memory of men], what today might be termed communicative memory, is discussed. Sverris saga [The Saga of King Sverrir] text:  Sverris saga. Ed. Þorleifur Hauksson. ÍF, 30. Reykjavík, 2007. Prologus. source: translation: Karl Jónsson. Sverrissaga. The Saga of King Sverri of Norway. Trans. John Sephton. Northern Library, 4. London, 1899. 1.

Original text Prologus Hér hefr upp ok segir frá þeim tíðendum er nú hafa verit um hríð ok í þeira manna minnum er fyrir þessi bók hafa sagt. En þat er at segja frá Sverri konungi, syni Sigurðar konungs Haraldssonar, ok er þat upphaf bókarinnar er ritat er eftir þeiri bók er fyrst ritaði Karl ábóti Jónsson, en yfir sat sjálfr Sverrir konungr ok réð fyrir hvat rita skyldi; er sú frásǫgn eigi langt fram komin. Þar er sagt frá nǫkkurum hans orrostum. Ok svá sem á líðr bókina vex hans styrkr, ok segir sá inn sami styrkr fyrir ina meiri hluti. Kǫlluðu þeir þann hlut bókar fyrir því Grýlu. Inn síðarri hlutr bókar er ritaðr eftir þeira manna frásǫgn er minni hǫfðu til svá at þeir sjálfir hǫfðu sét ok heyrt þessi tíðendi, ok þeir menn sumir hǫfðu verit í orrostunum með Sverri konungi. Sum þessi tíðendi váru svá í minni fest at menn rituðu þegar eftir er nývorðin váru, ok hafa þau ekki breytzk síðan. En vera kann þat ef þeir menn sjá þessa bók er allkunnigt er um at þeim þykki skyndiliga yfir farit í mǫrgum stǫðum ok mart þat eftir liggja er frásagnar myndi vert þykkja, ok megu þeir þat enn vel láta rita ef þeir vilja. En þó at sumir hlutir sé hér annan veg sagðir en mest líkendi myndi á þykkja í orrostum fyrir fjǫlmennis sakir þá vitu þó allir sannendi til at þetta er ekki aukit. Ok þykkir oss þat líkara at þær sagnir muni vera við sannendum er á bókum eru sagðar frá ágætismǫnnum þeim er verit hafa í forneskju.

Translation Prologue Here we begin to speak of events which happened a while ago, within the memory of the men who related them for this book; to speak, that is, of King Sverri, son of King Sigurd Haraldsson. The beginning of the book is written according to the one that Abbot Karl Jonsson first wrote when King Sverri himself sat over him and



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settled what he should write. The story has not come far [from its source]. It tells of certain of his battles, and as the book advances, his strength grows, foreshadowing the greater events. They therefore called this part of the book Gryla, that is, bugbear. The latter part of the book is written according to the relation of those who remembered what happened, having actually seen or heard it, and some of them had been with King Sverri in battles. Some of these stories were fixed in memory, having been written down directly the events occurred, and they have not been altered since. Possibly, if this book is seen by those who have full knowledge of the events, they may think many matters passed over hastily, and many left untold which they regard as worthy of mention; they may well cause these to be written down if they wish. And though, in telling of battles against large numbers, some things are here said to have occurred otherwise than seems most probable, let all know of a certainty that nothing has been added. To us it seems probable that the stories are true which are told in books concerning famous men who lived in old times.

III: 15 The prologue to The Saga of the Sturlungs and the transmission of contemporary sagawriting In the much discussed so-called Sturlunga-prologue, i.e. the prologue to Sturl­ unga saga, or the compilation of contemporary sagas from the Icelandic thirteenth century, the anonymous author discusses various kinds of sources for saga writing, such as oral tradition, one’s own experience, and eye witnesses, as well as events that are told in written narratives. Sturlunga saga [The Saga of the Sturlungs] text: source: Sturlunga saga. I. Ed. Jón Jóhannesson, Magnús Finnbogason and Kristján Eldjárn. Reykjavík, 1946. 115. translation: Prologue. In Sturlunga Saga. 1. Trans. Julia H. McGrew. The Library of Scandinavian Literature, 9. New York, 1970. 53–55.

Original text Formáli Margar sögur verða hér samtíða, ok má þó eigi allar senn rita: […] Flestallar sögur, þær er hér hafa gerzt á Íslandi, áðr Brandr biskup Sæmundarson andaðist, váru ritaðar, en þær sögur, er síðan hafa gerzt, váru lítt ritaðar, áðr Sturla skáld Þórðarson sagði fyrir Íslendinga sögur, ok hafði hann þar til vísindi af fróðum mönnum, þeim er váru á öndverðum dögum hans, en sumt eftir bréfum þeim, er þeir rituðu, er þeim váru samtíða, er sögurnar eru frá. Marga hluti mátti hann sjálfr sjá ok heyra, þá er á hans dögum gerðust til stórtíðinda. Ok treystum vér honum bæði vel til vits ok einurðar at segja frá, því at hann vissa ek alvitrastan ok hófsam­ astan. Láti guð honum nú raun lofi betri.

Translation Prologue Many sagas here concern events which happen at the same time, but they cannot all be written at the same time: […] Almost all the sagas concerning events which took place here in Iceland before Bishop Brand Sæmundarson died were written; but those sagas which concern events which took place later were little written, before the skáld Sturla Þórðarson dictated the saga of the Icelanders. For this he drew on both the knowledge of wise men who lived during the early years and



III: 15 The prologue to The Saga of the Sturlungs 

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also on some materials written by those who lived at the same time as the events which the sagas relate. He himself saw and heard many of the most important events of his time. And we may trust well both to his understanding and his selection of what to tell, for I know him to be a very wise and a most temperate man. May God allow his experience to prove better for him than praise.

III: 16 Remembering old tales from foreign countries in Strengleikar Strengleikar [lit. stringed instruments] is a collection of translations of twenty-one Old French lais [short verse-stories] by Marie de France into Old Norwegian prose. The main manuscript is dated to the middle of the thirteenth century. Strengleikar [stringed instruments] text: source: Strengleikar. An Old Norse Translation of Twenty-one Old French Lais. Ed. Robert Cook and Mattias Tveitane. Norsk Historisk Kjeldeskriftinstitutt. Norrøne tekster, 3. Oslo 1979. 4, 6, 8; 150; 108; 66. translation: Strengleikar. An Old Norse Translation of Twenty-one Old French Lais. Ed. Robert Cook and Mattias Tveitane. Norsk Historisk Kjeldeskriftinstitutt. Norrøne tekster, 3. Oslo 1979. 5, 7, 9; 151; 109; 67.

Strengleikar – the two prologues The prologue to the entire collection consists of two parts, the first is the Norwegian translator’s own introduction, while the second is a slightly abridged translation of Marie de France’s prologue. In addition, some of the individual lais have their own shorter prologues and/or epilogues. All prologues stress the importance of preserving old stories by writing them down.

Original text FORRŒÐA AT hæve þæirra er i fyrnskunni varo likaðe oss at forvitna ok rannzaka þui at þæir varo listugir i velom sinom glœgsynir i skynsemdom. hygnir i raðagærðom vaskir i vapnom hœverskir i hirðsiðum millder i giofum ok at allzskonar drængscap. hinir frægiazsto. ok fyrir þui at i fyrnskunni gerðuzc marger undarleger lutir oc ohæyrðir atburðir a varom dogum. þa syndizc oss at frœða verande ok viðrkomande þæim sogum er margfroðer menn gærðo um athæve þæirra sem i fyrnskunni varo ok a bokom leto rita. til ævenlægrar aminningar til skæmtanar. ok margfrœðes viðr komande þioða at huerr bœte ok birte sitt lif. af kunnasto liðenna luta. Oc at æigi lœynizsk þat at hinum siðarstom dogum er gærðozk i andværðom. Sua ok at huerr ihugi með allre kunnasto ok koste með ollu afle freme ok fullgere með ollum fongum at bua ok bœta sialvan sec til rikis guðs með somasamlegum siðum ok goðom athævom ok hælgom lifsænda. þui at daðer ok



III: 16 Remembering in Strengleikar 

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drængskaper ok allzkonar goðlæikr er skryddi ok pryddi lif þæirra er guði likaðo. ok þæirra er i þæssa hæims atgærðom frægðost ok vinsælldozt i fyrnskonne huerfr þess giorsamlegre sem hæims þæssa dagar mæirr fram liða. EN bok þessor er hinn virðulege hacon konongr norrœna or volsko male ma hæita lioða bok. þui at af þæim sogum er þæssir bok birtir gærðo skolld i syðra brætlande er liggr i frannz lioðsonga. þa er gærazc i horpum gigiom. Simphanom. Organom. Timpanom. Sallterium. ok corom. ok allzkonar oðrum strænglæikum er menn gera ser ok oðrum til skemtanar þæssa lifs ok lykr her forrœðo þæssare. ok þesso nest er upphaf sanganna. Ollum þæim er guð hævir let vizsku ok kunnasto ok snilld at birta þa samer æigi at fela ne lœyna lan guðs i ser. hælldr fellr þæim at syna oðrom með goðvilia þat sem guði likaðe þæim at lia. Þa bera þæir sem hinn villdaste viðr lauf ok blóm. ok sem goðlæikr þæirra frægizst i annars umbotum þa fullgærezt allden þæirra ok nœrer aðra. Þa var siðr hygginna ok hœverskra manna i fyrnskonne at þæir mællto frœðe sin sua sem segi með myrkum orðum. ok diupom skilnengom. saker þæirra sem ukomner varo. at þæir skylldo lysa með liosom umrœðum þat sem hinir fyrro hofðo mællt. ok rannzaka af sinu viti þat sem til skyringar horfðe ok rettrar skilnengar. af þæim kænnengom er philosophi forner spekingar hofðu gort. Siðan sem alldren læið framm ok æve mannanna þa vox list ok athygli ok smasmygli mannkynsens. með margskonar hætte. sva at i ollom londum gærðuzc hinir margfroðasto menn mælande sinna landa tungum. En þæir sem lif sitt vilia lytalaust varðvæita. þa samer jamnan nokot þat at ihuga ok iðna. er þa gære sialfa vinsæla. ok af kunnasto sinne mege aðra frœða. Oc fyrir þui ihugaða ec at gæra nokora goða sogu. ok or volsku i bokmal snua at þat mætte flæsta hugga. er flæstir mego skilia. En lioð þau er ec hævi hœyrt er gor varo i syðra brætlande af þæim kynlegom atburðom er i þui lande gærðuzc þa likaðe mer at snua ok oðrum segia þui at ec hafða mioc morg hœyrt þau er ec vil at visu fram telia. ok engum glœyma af. þui er ec ma minni minu a koma. æinum kurtæisum konongi er guð leðe yvir oss vizku ok valld. gævo ok gnott margfallegs hins frægiazta goðlæiks. þui ihuga ec oftsamlega at samna lioðen oll ok i æina bok at fœra þer herra minn hinn hœverske konongr ef þer lika þa er mer fagnaðr at starf mitt þækkez ok hugnar sua hygnum hofðingia ok hans hirðar kurtæisom klærkom. ok hœværskom hirðmonnom. (4, 6, 8)

Translation Prologue It pleased us to inquire about and examine the deeds of those who lived in olden days, because they were skilled in their arts, discerning in their reason, clever in their counsels, valiant with weapons, well-mannered in the customs of the court,

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generous with gifts, and most famous for every kind of nobility. And because many marvelous things and events unheard of in our time took place in olden days, it occurred to us to teach men living and those to come these stories, which men of great learning made about the deeds of those who lived in olden days, and which they had written down in books as an everlasting reminder, as entertainment, and as a source of great learning for posterity, so that each man could amend and illumine his life with the knowledge of past events, and so that that will not be concealed in later times which happened in the remote past, and so that everyone might consider with full knowledge and strive with all his strenght, and accomplish and achieve with every opportunity to prepare and improve himself for the kingdom of God by means of fitting behavior and good deeds and a holy life’s end. For deeds and nobility and every kind of goodnees, which embellished and adorned the lives of those who pleased God and those who in olden days earned fame and favors by means of achievements in this world – these things are disappearing more and more as the days of this world march on. This book, which the esteemed King Hákon had translated into Norse from the French language, may be called “Book of Lais,” because from the stories which this book makes known, poets in Brittany – which is in France – composed lais, which are performed on harps, fiddles, hurdy-gurdies, lyres, dulcimers, psalteries, rotes, and other stringed instruments of all kinds which men make to amuse themselves and others in this world. Here ends this prologue, and next comes the beginning of the lais. It is not fitting that all those to whom God has given wisdom and knowledge and the eloquence to make these known should hide and conceal God’s gift within themselves; rather, it is proper that they reveal to others with good will that which it pleased God to grant them. Then they will bear leaves and blossoms like the most splendid tree, and as their goodness becomes known through the improvement of others, so will their fruit become fully ripe and nourish other people. It was the custom of wise and well-mannered men in olden days that they should set forth their learning, so to speak, in dark words and deep meanings for the sake of those who had not yet come, that these should explicate in lucid discourse that which their forbears had said and probe with their intelligence whatever pertained to the elucidation and correct understanding of the teachings which philosophers, sages of long ago, had made. As time and the lives of men wore on, man’s art and attentiveness and acumen increased in many kinds of ways, so that the most learned men in every country began expressing themselves in the language of their country. And it is quite fitting that those who want to preserve their lives faultless be always considering and working at that which may make themselves beloved and which may instruct others from their own knowledge. For this reason I thought of making some good story and of translating it from



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French into Latin [literally “from French into the book-language”; probably an error], that most might be comforted by that which most could understand. But the lais which I have heard, which were composed in Brittany about the strange adventures that took place in that land, I wanted to translate and tell to others, because I had heard very many things which I certainly want to tell. And I want to leave out nothing of what I can recall to my memory in honor of a courteous king whom God gave to us and endowed with wisdom and might, good fortune, and an abundance of manifold and renowned goodness. Thus I frequently think of gathering all the songs into one book to give to you, my lord and gracious king. If you like them, I am glad that my work pleases and satisfies such a wise chieftain and the courteous clerks of his court and his gracious retainers.

Strengleikar, Doun In the short prologue to this strengleikr the narrating “I” (ec) stresses that the tale is correctly remembered.

Original text doun heitir þessi strengleicr ÞEnna strengleic er doun heitir kunnv flestir allir er strengleiki hava nvmitt. en ec vil segia yðr af hverium atburð er þessi strengleicr er callaðr doun. Sva sem ec hevi sannfregit at retto minni þa bio i fyrnskonni ein mær norðr a skottlande þar sem heitir edenburg. hin friðazta ok hin kurteisazta.

Translation This lai is called “Doun”. This lai which is called “Doun” is know to most of those who have learned lais. I want to tell you the adventure from which this lai, which is called “Doun”, comes. As I have heard it truly told from correct memory, there lived long ago up north in Scotland, at the place called Edinburgh, an exceptionally beautiful and courteois maiden.

Strengleikar, Desiré The narrator says he wants to remember an event – atburðr, adventure – which gave rise to the tale that is remembered here.

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Original text þessi strengleicr heitir i volsku mali desire en i norrœnv tilfysilegr Hug vil ec a leggia ok gaumgæfa at minnazc æins atburðar af huæim þæir um þa daga varo. gærðu til minnængar fagran strænglæik. i allzkyns lioða talum. Gigium ok Simphonum. ok er þæsse strænglæikr kallaðr i volsku male desire. en i Norrœno til fyselegr. er sua var fagr ok sœtr at ængi um hans daga fanzc honom friðari. A skotlande er menn kalla kalatir. nér þar sem hæitir huitiskógr. hia havi hinu mykla. er uttan at gengr. Þar er ok su hin gula kapella. er aller þæir er set hava sægia hina friðasto.

Translation This lai is called “Desiré” in French and “Tilfysilegr” [Desired One] in Norse. I want to put my mind and attention to recalling an adventure from which men who lived at that time, in order to preserve its memory, made a beautiful lai for all kinds of musical instruments, fiddles and hurdy-gurdies. This lai is called “Desiré” in the French tongue, “The Desired One” in Norse. He was so handsome and charming that there was no one in those days more attractive than he. In Scotlan, which men call Kalatir, near a place called White Forest, next to where the great sea comes in, there lies also the Yellow Chappel. All who have seen it say that it is extremely beautiful.

Strengleikar, Equitan In the prologue to this tale, the narrator stresses that the lais is written down so that people do not forget it.

Original text Equitans strengleicr er her DYRleger menn ok daða fuller hygner menn ok hœverskir voru i fyrnskonne i brætlandi at riki ok at rœysti. at vizsko ok at vallde. at forsio ok kvrtæisi. er um atburði þa er jnnanlandz gærðuzt at kunnigir skylldo vera viðrkomandom ok æigi glœymazt okunnom þa leto þæir rita til aminningar. i strænglæika lioð ok af þæim gera til skemtanar ok varo mioc margir þæir atburðir er oss samer æigi at glœyma. er viðr læitom lioða bok at gera.



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Translation “The Lai of Equitan” begins here. Excellent and accomplished men, clever men and courteous, were in Brittany in olden days, with power and prowess, with wisdom and with might, prudence and politeness, who, concerning the events which took place in that country – in order that they be known to posterity and not be lost to strangers – had them written in lais for remembrance’s sake and made into entertainment. There were many of these adventures which we ought not to forget when we are trying to make a book of lais.

III: 17 Memorising between storytelling and writing in the prologue to The Saga of Thidrek of Bern The prologue to Þiðreks saga af Bern [Saga of Thidrek of Bern], one of the most extensive and most often discussed in Old Norse-Icelandic literature, starts by describing the advantage of using writing as a technique to prevent (oral) narratives from falling into oblivion. It goes on to discuss the origin of different versions in oral storytelling, as well as the stabilising effects of transmitting narratives in the form of poems. While the saga is usually dated to the thirteenth century, the prologue is extant only in manuscripts from the seventeenth century. text: source:

Þiðreks saga af Bern [The Saga of Thidrek of Bern] Þiðreks saga af Bern. I. Ed. Henrik Bertelsen. SUGNL, 34. Copenhagen, 1905–1911. Formáli. translation: The Saga of Thidrek of Bern. Trans. Edward R. Haymes. Garland Library of Medieval Literature. B, 56. New York and London, 1988. Preface.

Original text Formáli Ef menn vilia girnazt ath heyra þau stórtiþindi er verit hafa j fornum sid verdur huarteggia ath gera. ath spyrja þess er menn vitu ei aadur og suo festa j minne ef menn vilia kunna vkunnar søgur og lángar þa er betur, og geingur sídur or minne ath ritadar see. Þesse sagha er ein af þeim stærstum søghum er gerfuar hafa verit j þyverskri tunnghu er sagt er fraa Þidreki kongi og hans køppum Sigurdi Fabnis bana og Niflunghum Villtina monnum og morghum audrum kóngum og køppum er koma vid þessa søghu. Sagha þessi hefdzt wt aa Pul ok fer nordur wmm Lunbardi j Fenidi j Suaua j Vngaria j Pulina land j Ruzia j Windland j Danmork og Sviþjod wm allt Saxoniam og Frakland og westr wmm Walland og Hispaniam og wmm aull þesse rijke geingur þesse sagha þa er aull er saugd af þeim stórmerkium er þesser menn hafa gert er fra er saght j hveriu lannde þeirra er nefnd eru. og Daner og Sviar kunnu ath seigia hier af margar søgur enn sumt hafa þeir fært i kuæde sin er þeir skemmta ríkum monnum. morg eru þau kuæde kvedinn nu er fyrer longu voru ort epter þessare søghu. Norræner menn hafa samann fært nockurn part søghunnar, enn sumt med kvedskap. þath er fyrst fra Sigurdhi ath seigia Fabnisbana Volsunghum og Niflhungum og Welent smid og hans brodur Egli. fra Nidungi kongi og þo ath



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nockut bregdist athkuædi vmm manna heiti edur athburde þa er ei vndarligt suo margar søghur sem þesser hafa sagt enn þo rijs hun nær af einu efni. þesse sagha er samansett epter søgn þydskra manna, enn sumt af þeirra kuædum er skemta skal rikumm monnum og fornort voro þegar epter tiþindum sem seiger j þessare søghu og þo ath þu raker einn mann vr hverre borg vmm allt Saxland þa munu þessa søghu aller aa eina leid seigia enn þui vallda þeirra hin fornu kuæde, enn þeirra kuedskapur er settur epter þui sem vier meigumm vid kiennast ath kuæda hattur er j vorre tunngu. […]

Translation If men wish to hear of the great events that took place in ancient times, they must both find out what they had not previously known, and then keep it in their memory. If men want to learn long and unfamiliar stories, it is better that they be written down than that they pass out of memory. This saga, which is one of the longest stories that has been told in the German language, tells about King Thidrek and his warriors, about Sigurd Fafnisbana [Fafnir’s Bane] and the Niflungs, about the Vilkinamen and many other kings and warriors who come into this story. This story begins in Pul [Apulia] and moves north, through Lunbardi [Lombardy], Fenidi [Venice], Svava [Swabia], Ungaria [Hungary], Pulinaland [Poland], Ruzia [Russia], Vindland, Danmörk [Denmark], and Svithjod [Sweden], through all of Saxonia [Saxony] and Frakkland and to Valland in the West, and Hispania [Spain]. Throughout all these lands the saga is told, relating the glorious deeds these men accomplished in all of the lands here mentioned. The Danes and the Swedes can tell many stories of these matters, and the have put some of them into songs they sing to entertain powerful men. Many of the songs that are sung today were composed a long time ago. Norsemen have brought together many parts of the story, and some of them in verse. First of all they tell about Sigurd, the killer of Fafnir, the Volsungs and the Niflungs, and about Velent [Weland] the smith and his brother Egil, and about King Nidung. There are some variations in the names and deeds of men, but that is not surprising when so many stories have been told, even though they all arise from more or less the same origin. This saga is assembled from the stories of German men and some of it comes from their verses, which were composed to entertain great men, and which were composed long ago, soon after the events that are told here. Even if you were to take one man from each town in all of Saxony, they would all tell the story the same way, and this is because of their old songs. And this poetry is set down so that we can recognize that it is the usage of poetry in our language. […]

III: 18 Remembering and the creation of The Saga of Yngvar the Far-traveler A colophon discusses the supposed historicity of the saga and describes how the saga was assembled from various sources. Yngvars saga víðförla [The Saga of Yngvar the Far-traveler] text: source: Fornaldar sögur Norðurlanda. 2. Ed. Guðni Jónsson. Reykjavík, 1954. Ch. 14. translation: Vikings in Russia: Yngvar’s saga and Eymund’s saga. Trans. Hermann Pálsson and Paul Geoffrey Edwards. Edinburgh, 1989. Ch. 14.

Original text At þessum hlutum af liðnum býst Sveinn til burtferðar ok ferr sunnan, unz hann kemr í Svíþjóð. Landsmenn tóku við honum með fagnaði ok mikilli sæmd. Var honum landit boðit. En er hann heyrði þat, þá neitaði hann því skjótt ok kvaðst aflat hafa sér betra lands ok ársælla ok lézt enn mundu þess vitja. En er tveir vetr váru úti, siglir Sveinn ór Svíþjóðu, en Ketill dvaldist þar eftir, ok lézt hann svá heyra sagt, at Sveinn væri í Görðum um vetrinn ok bjóst um várit þaðan ok sigldi at sumarmagni ór Garðaríki, ok vissu menn þat síðast til hans, at hann sigldi í ána. En Ketill fór til Íslands á fund frænda sinna ok staðfestist þar ok sagði fyrstr frá þessu, en þat vitum vér, at nokkurir sagnamenn segja, at Yngvarr hafi verit sonr Eymundar Óláfssonar, því at þeim þykkir honum þat meiri sæmd at segja hann konungsson. En gjarna vildi Önundr gefa til allt sitt ríki, ef hann mætti Yngvars líf aftr kaupa, því at allir höfðingjar í Svíþjóðu vildu hann gjarna konung hafa yfir sér. En þess verðr enn nú af sumum mönnum spurt, fyrir hví at Yngvarr væri eigi sonr Eymundar Óláfssonar, en því viljum vér þá leið svara: Eymundr, sonr Óláfs, átti son, er Önundr hét. Sá var inn líkasti Yngvari í margri náttúru ok allra helzt í víðförli sinni, svá sem til vísar í bók þeiri, er heitir Gesta Saxonum ok er svá ritat: “Fertur, quod Emundus, rex Sveonum, misit filium suum, Onundum, per Mare balzonum, qui, postremo ad amazones veniens, ab eis interfectus est.” Svá segja sumir menn, at þeir Yngvarr færi tvær vikur, at þeir sáu ekki, nema þeir tendruðu kerti, því at saman luktust björgin yfir ánni, ok var sem þeir reri í helli þann hálfan mánuð. En vitrum mönnum þykkir þat ekki sannligt vera mega, nema áin felli svá þröngt, at gnúpar tæki saman eða væri skógar svá þröngir, at saman tæki þess á meðal, er gnípur stæðist á. En þó at þetta megi vera, þá er þó eigi sannligt.



III: 18 The creation of The Saga of Yngvar the Far-traveler 

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En þessa sögu höfum vér heyrt ok ritat eftir forsögn þeirar bækr, at Oddr munkr inn fróði hafði gera látit at forsögn fróðra manna, þeira er hann segir sjálfr í bréfi sínu, því er hann sendi Jóni Loptssyni ok Gizuri Hallssyni. En þeir, er vita þykkjast innvirðuligar, auki við, þar sem nú þykkir á skorta. Þessa sögu segist Oddr munkr heyrt hafa segja þann prest, er Ísleifr hét, ok annan Glúm Þorgeirsson, ok inn þriði hefir Þórir heitit. Af þeira frásögn hafði hann þat, er honum þótti merkiligast. En Ísleifr sagðist heyrt hafa Yngvars sögu af einum kaupmanni, en sá kveðst hafa numit hana í hirð Svíakonungs. Glúmr hafði numit at föður sínum, en Þórir hafði numit af Klökku Sámssyni, en Klakka hafði heyrt segja ina fyrri frændr sína. 
   Ok þar lyktum vér þessa sögu.

Translation When all this had been done, Svein prepared to leave, and travelled all the way north to Sweden where the people gave him a friendly and honourable welcome and invited him to rule the kingdom. He listened to their offer but would have none of it, saying that he had won for himself a better and richer kingdom to which he soon meant to return: and two years later, Svein sailed away from Sweden. Ketil stayed behind. He said he had heard that Svein spent the following winter in Russia, prepared to continue his journey in the spring. At the height of summer, Svein started out from Russia and nothing has been heard of him since he set sail up river. Ketil went back to Iceland, settling there amongst his kinsfolk, and he was the first to tell of these events. But we have heard that some saga-men claim that Yngvar was the son of Eymund Olafsson, thinking it to have been a greater honour for him to have been a king’s son. Onund would gladly have given his whole kingdom to buy back Yngvar’s life, for all the chieftains in Sweden wanted Yngvar as their king. Now, some people may ask what it is that shows Yngvar was not the son of Eymund Olafsson, and this is how we would wish to reply: Eymund, son of Olaf, had a son called Onund, and this Onund was very like Yngvar in character as well as in his travels far and wide, as is stated in a book called Gesta Saxonum. ‘It is said that Eymund, King of the Swedes, sent his son Onund across the Baltic Sea to the most vicious Amazones, and that he was killed by them.’ [NB: this quotation in Latin] Some people say that Yngvar travelled for two weeks, seeing no light apart from the candles they had with them because the overhanging cliffs closed over them above the river, and that for these two weeks it was as if they were rowing through a cave. However, learned people think this very unlikely, unless the river was flowing through a narrow gorge where the cliffs narrowed above the water,

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or the trees were growing so densely above the cliffs that they overlapped. But though that is possible, it is not very likely. We have heard this story told, but in writing it down we have followed a book composed by the learned monk Odd, which he based on the authority of well-informed people mentioned by him in his letter to Jon Loftsson and Gizur Hallson. Those who believe they know better must augment the account wherever they think it wanting. The monk Odd says he heard this story told by a priest called Isleif, and also by someone called Glum Thorgeirsson, and he had a third informant named Thorir. Odd took from each of these whatever he thought most interesting. Isleif told him that he had heared this story from a certain trader who claimed to have heard it at the royal court of Sweden. Glum had the story from his father, Thorir from Klakka Samsson, while Klakka learnt it from his older kinsmen. And so we end this saga.

Media of Memory and Forgetting Figures of remembering and forgetting

III: 19 Eddic mythological poetry: Birds of memory and birds of oblivion Among the significant mnemonic figures in classical and medieval literature and myth are birds. The eddic poems have two such types of birds: one for remembering, the other one for forgetting. source: Eddukvæði. 1. Ed. Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason. ÍF. Reykj­avík, 2014. translation: The Poetic Edda. Trans. Carolyne Larrington. Rev. ed. Oxford, 2014.

Huginn and Muninn in Grímnismál [Grimnir’s Sayings] In this well-known and often cited stanza from the eddic poem Grímnismál [Grimnir’s Sayings], Óðinn [Odin] speaks about his two ravens, Huginn and Muninn, whose names are usually taken to signify ‘intelligence, thought, mind’ (Huginn) and ‘memory’ (Muninn). Original text 20 Huginn ok Muninn fljúga hvern dag jǫrmungrund yfir; óumk ek of Hugin at hann aptr né komit, þó sjámk meirr um Munin.

Translation 20 Hugin and Munin fly every day over the vast-stretching world; I fear for Hugin that he will not come back, yet I tremble more for Munin.

See images in II: 10 ‘Óðinn’s Ravens’ by Stephen A. Mitchell and see colour plate 15.

Óminnishegri [heron of forgetfulness] in Hávamál [Sayings of the High One] One of the avian figures that is connected to forgetting is the otherwise unknown and rather enigmatic ‘heron of forgetfulness’, or óminnishegri, in Hávamál; the three stanzas are spoken by Óðinn [Odin].

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-109

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Original text 12 Era svá gott sem gott kveða ǫl alda sonum, þvíat færa veit er fleira drekkr síns til geðs gumi.

Translation 12 It isn’t as good as it’s said to be, ale, for the sons of men; for the more a man drinks, the less he knows about his own mind.

13 Óminnishegri heitir sá er yfir ǫlðrum þrumir, hann stelr geði guma; þess fugls fjǫðrum ek fjǫtraðr vark í garði Gunnlaðar.

13 The forgetfulness-heron it’s called who hovers over ale-drinking; he steals man’s mind; with this bird’s feathers I was fettered in the court of Gunnlod.

14 Ǫlr ek varð, varð ofrǫlvi at ins fróða Fjalars; því er ǫlðr bazt at aptr of heimtir hverr sitt geð gumi.

14 Drunk I was, I was more than drunk at wise Fialar’s; that’s the best about ale-drinking that afterwards every man gets his mind back again.

Fig. 1: The picture stone G 181 from Sanda kyrka, Gotland, dated to c. 1033–1066, has the runic inscription : roþuisl : aug : farborn : auk : kunborn : [Rodvisl (Rodils) and Farbjörn and Gun­björn]. It has been suggested that the bird on top left of the picture could be interpreted as a representation of the heron of forgetfulness (Hávamál, St. 13).

III: 20 Desire, love, and forgetting in eddic heroic poetry In quite a few eddic heroic poems of the Sigurðr-Brynhildr-Guðrún cycle and in the prosification of them in Vǫlsunga saga, remembering and forgetting are essential elements of the narratives. The elegies usually present a woman who looks back in anger and sorrow, and memories are mostly associated with pain. poetry source: Eddukvæði. 2. Ed. Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason. ÍF. Reykjavík, 2014. poetry translation: The Poetic Edda. Trans. Carolyne Larrington. Rev. ed. Oxford, 2014. prose source: Vǫlsunga saga ok Ragnars saga loðbrókar. Ed. Magnus Olsen. SUGNL, 36, Copenhagen 1906–1908. Ch. 28. The Saga of the Volsungs. The Norse Epic of Sigurd the Dragon prose translation:  Slayer. Trans. Jesse L. Byock. Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles, CA, London, 1990. Ch 28.

Vǫlsunga saga [The Saga of the Volsungs] – the fatal beer of forgetfulness In Chapter 28 of Vǫlsunga saga, Guðrún’s mother, Grimhildr, gives Sigurðr a drink which is called óminnisǫl [lit. ‘beer of forgetfulness’]. Sigurðr forgets Brynhildr and marries Guðrún.

Original text 28. Sigurdi var blandat uminnisaul. Sigurdr ridr nu i brott med þat mikla gull. […] Þat finnr Grimhildr, hve mikit Sigurdur ann Brynhilldi, ok hve oppt hann getr hennar. Hugsar fyrir ser, at þat væri meire gipta, at hann stadfestizt þar ok ætte dottur Giuka konungs […]. Eitt kvelld, er þeir satu vid dryck, ris drottningh upp ok geck fyrir Sigurd ok kvadde hann ok mællte: “Faugnudr er oss a þinne hervist, ok allt gott vilium ver til ydar leggia. Tak her vid horne ok dreck.” Hann tok vid ok drack af. Hun mællti: “Þinn fadir skal vera Giuki konungr, enn ek modir, brædr þinir Gunnar ok Haugne ok aller, er eida vinnid, ok munu þa eigi yþrir iafninghiar fazt.” Sigurdr tok þvi vel, ok vid þann dryck munde hann ecki til Brynhilldar. Hann dvaldizt þar um hrid. […] Þeir

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sveriazt nu i brædralagh, sem þeir se sambornir brædr. Nu er gior agætligh veizla, ok stod margha daga. Dræckr Sigurdr nu brudlaup til Gudrunar. (Ch. 28)

Translation 28 The Ale of Forgetfullness Is Blended for Sigurd Sigurd now rode away with that mass of gold […]. Grimhild perceived how much Sigurd loved Brynhild and how often he mentioned her. She thought it would be more fortunate if he settled there and married the daughter of King Gjuki. […] One evening when they sat together drinking, the queen rose, went to Sigurd, and said to him: “It is a great joy for us that you are here and we wish to set all good things before you. Take the horn and drink.” He accepted it and drank from it. She said: “King Gjuki shall be your father, and I your mother, while Gunnar and Hogni and all who swear the oath shall be your brothers. Then your equal will not be found.” Sigurd received this well and because of that drink he could not remember Brynhild. He stayed there for a while. […] They now swore a pact of brotherhood, as if they were brothers born of the same parents. A magnificent feast was prepared, lasting many days. Sigurd now wed Gudrun.” (Ch. 28)

Brot af Sigurðarkviðu [Fragment of a Poem about Sigurd] In this stanza of the fragmentary poem about Sigurðr, Brynhildr accuses her husband, Gunnarr, of not remembering the oaths which he and Sigurðr had taken. Original text 17 Mantattu, Gunnar, til gǫrva þat er þit blóði í spor báðir rennduð; nú hefir þú honum þat allt illa launat, er hann fremstan sik [þik] finna vildi.

Translation 17 You clearly did not remember, Gunnar, that you both let your blood run into a trench; now you have repaid him badly for that, when he wanted to make himself [you] the most pre-eminent of men.

III: 20 Desire, love, and forgetting in eddic heroic poetry 

III: 20 Desire, love, and forgetting in eddic heroic poetry 

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Sigurðarkviða in skamma [A Short Poem about Sigurd] The last section of Sigurðarkviða in skamma consists of a long monologue addressed to Gunnarr in which his wife, Brynhildr, looks back on her life (stanzas 52–71). In stanza 54, she predicts that Gunarr will be reconciled with his sister, Guðrún who, after having been married to king Atli, will still live with sad memories of Sigurðr. In stanza 57, Brynhildr mentions the many memories of how badly she was treated by her husband, Gunnarr, and his family. Memory is here connected with feelings of sorrow and pain. Original text 54 Sátt munuð it Guðrún snemr en þú hyggir, hefir kunn kona við konungi daprar minjar at dauðan ver.

Translation 54 You and Gudrun will be reconciled sooner than you think; the wise woman will have, along with the king [= Atli], sad memories of her dead husband [= Sigurd].

57 Margs á ek minnask, hvé við mik fóru, þá er mik sára svikna hǫfðuð; vaðin at vilja vark meðan ek lifðak.

57 Much I remember: how they acted against me, how you bitterly betrayed me, caused me pain; robbed of what I wished for I was, while I lived.

Dráp Niflunga [The Death of the Niflungs] – óminnisveig This short prose passage which precedes Guðrúnarkviða II provides a short abstract of the lay that follows and tells how Guðrún’s brothers gave her a drink of forgetfulness (óminnisveig) which caused her to agree to marry Atli, the brother of Brynhildr.

Original text Gunnarr ok Hǫgni tóku gullit allt, Fáfnis arf. Ófriðr var þá milli Gjúkunga ok Atla. Kenndi hann Gjúkungum vǫld um andlát Brynhildar. Þat var til sætta at þeir skyldu gipta honum Guðrúnu, ok gáfu henni óminnisveig at drekka áðr hon játti at giptask Atla. […]

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Translation Gunnar and Hogni took all the gold, Fafnir’s inheritance. There was a feud between the sons of Giuki and Atli. He blamed the Giukungs for the death of Brynhild [his sister]. In compensation, they were to marry Gudrun to him, and they had to give her a drink of forgetfulness before she agreed to marry Atli. […]

Guðrúnarkviða II [The Second Poem of Gudrun] – full at drekka In this lay, Guðrún looks back on how her own mother, Grímhildr, gives her a drink that makes her forget that her first husband, Sigurðr, was killed by her brothers. This ‘drink of forgetfulness’ is called óminnisveig in the short prose passage Dráp Niflunga [The Death of the Niflungs] that precedes Guðrúnarkviða II. Here the ingredients of the drink, bjórr (St, 231) [literally ‘beer’] are specified in stanzas 21–3. In the last stanza of the lay, Gudrun remembers her pain. Original text 21 Fœrði mér Grímhildr full at drekka, svalt ok sárligt, né ek sakar munðak; þat var um aukit jarðar magni, svalkǫldum sæ ok sonar dreyra.

Translation 21 Grimhild brought me a cup to drink from, cool and bitter, so I should not remember the strife; that drink was augmented with fateful power, with the cool sea, with sacrificial blood.

22 Váru í horni hvers kyns stafir ristnir ok roðnir – ráða ek né máttak – lyngfiskr langr, lands Haddingja ax óskorit, innleið dýra.

22 In the drinking-horn were all kinds of runes, cut and red-coloured – I could not interpret them – a long heather-fish, an uncut corn-ear of the Haddings’ land, the entrails of beasts.



III: 20 Desire, love, and forgetting in eddic heroic poetry 

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23 Váru þeim bjóri bǫl mǫrg saman, urt alls viðar ok akarn brunnin, umdǫgg arins iðrar blótnar, svíns lifr soðin, þvíat hon sakar deyfði.

23 Many bad things were mixed into that beer, the herbs of all the woodland, and burnt acorns, the dew of the hearth, the innards from sacrifice, boiled pig’s liver, since it blunted the strife.

24 En þá gleymðu er getit hǫfðu ǫll jǫfurs jórbjúg í sal; […]

24 And then they forgot, those who drank it, all the princes’ death in the hall, […]

44 Lægja ek síðan – né ek sofa vildak – þrágjarn í kǫr; þat man ek gǫrva.

44 I lay down then, I did not want to sleep, obstinate on the bed of pain; that I remember well.

Guðrúnarhvǫt [The Whetting of Gudrun] In this lay, Guðrún, towards the end of her life, remembers the many wrongs that she has suffered and looks back at her marriage with Sigurðr. Original text 18 “Fjǫlð man ek bǫlva! […]

Translation 18 ‘I remember many wrongs…

19 Minnstu, Sigurðr, hvat vit mæltum, þá er vit á beð bæði sátum; at þú myndir mín

[20] Do you recall, Sigurd, what we promised, when we two lay in bed together, that, brave warrior, you would visit me from hell, and I would come to you from the world?

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móðugr vitja, halr, ór helju en ek þín ór heimi.

Oddrúnargrátr [Oddrun’s Lament] This lay presents a number of memory scenes in an elegiac tone. It is spoken by Oddrún, the sister of Atli and Brynhildr. Original text 1 Heyrða ek segja í sǫgum fornum hvé mær um kom til Mornalands; engi mátti fyr jǫrð ofan Heiðreks dóttur hjálpir vinna.

Translation 1 I heard said in ancient tales, how a girl came to Mornaland; no one on the face of the earth was able to help Heidrek’s daughter.

11 Þá nam at setjask sorgmóð kona at telja bǫl af trega stórum.

[13] Then the sorrow-weary woman sat down, to recount the evil, from her great grief.

16 Man ek hvat þú mæltir enn um aptan, þá er ek Gunnari gerðak drekku; […]

[12] I remember what you said one evening, when I was preparing the drink for Gunnar […].

III: 21 Memory’s bodily location in The Prose Edda In Skáldskaparmál [The Language of Poetry], a section of the Prose Edda, we find a list of the poetic phrases that poets could use when describing the body; as is characteristic in classical and medieval traditions, memory is located in the breast. Skáldskaparmál [The Language of Poetry] text: source: Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Skáldskaparmál. 1. Ed. Anthony Faulkes. London, 1998. 108–109. translation: Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Trans. Anthony Faulkes. London and North Clarendon, VT, 1995. 154–155.

Original text Hjarta heitir negg. Þat skal svá kenna, kalla korn eða stein eða epli eða hnot eða mýl eða líkt ok kenna við brjóst eða hug. Kalla má ok hús eða jǫrð eða berg hugar­ ins. Brjóst skal svá kenna at kalla hús eða garð eða skip hjarta, anda eða lifrar, eljunar land, hugar ok minnis. [...] Vit heitir speki, ráð, skilning, minni, ætlun, hyggjandi, tǫlvísi, langsæi, bragvísi, orðspeki, skǫrungskapr.

Translation The heart is called bosom. It shall be referred to by calling it corn or stone or apple or nut or ball or the like, and referring to it in terms of breast or thought. It can also be called house or ground or mountain of the thought. The breast shall be referred to by calling it house or enclosure or ship of heart, spirit or liver, land of energy, thought and memory. [...] Wisdom is called sagacity, counsel, understanding, memory, deliberation, numeracy, far-sightedness, subtlety, eloquence, genius.

III: 22 Embodied and disembodied memory in The Saga of Saint Jón One of the sagas of bishops, Jóns saga ins helga [The Saga of Saint Jón], describes the teaching environment in the Cathedral school at Hólar in Northern Iceland. The bishop, Jón Ǫgmundarson (1052–1120), has hired a young priest from abroad, Gísli, as a teacher. The passage reveals how, when talking to his students, Gísli simultaneously refers to a book before him and to the knowledge that he kept in his breast (i.e. memory). The quotation reveals the co-existence of embodied and disembodied (i.e. internal and external) memory storage, and additionally points to the widespread idea that the breast was considered the abode of memory. Jóns saga ins helga [The Saga of Saint Jón] text: source: Biskupa sögur. I, 2. Ed. Sigurgeir Steingrímsson, Ólafur Halldórsson and Peter Foote. ÍF, 15, 2. Reykjavík, 2003. Ch. 8. translation: Origines Islandicae. I. Trans. Gudbrand Vigfusson and York F. Powell. Oxford, 1905. 552.

Original text Hann hét Gísli ok var Finnason. Hann reiddi honum mikit kaup til hvárs-tveggja, at kenna prestlingum ok at veita slíkt upphald heilagri kristni með sjálfum byskupi sem hann mátti sér við koma í kenningum sínum ok formælum. Ok ávallt er hann prédikaði fyrir fólkinu, þá lét hann liggja bók fyrir sér ok tók þar af slíkt er hann talaði fyrir fólkinu, ok gerði hann þetta mest af forsjá ok lítillæti, at þar hann var ungr at aldri þótti þeim meira um vert er til hlýddu at þeir sæi þat at hann tók sínar kenningar af helgum bókum en eigi af einu saman brjóstviti.

Translation He was called Gisle, and was the son of Finne. He [the bishop] paid him a great wage, both to teach the priestlings and to give such support to holy Christendom along with the bishop himself as he could manage in his teachings and addresses. And ever when he was preaching before the people, he had a book lying before him, and took therefrom what he spoke to the people, and he did this most out of prudence and humility, because as he was young in years those that listened might lay more store by it, when they saw that he took what he taught out of holy books and not out of his own natural knowledge or breastwit.

III: 23 The mind’s eye in The Old Norwegian Book of Homilies In the so-called Stave Church Homily (early thirteenth century) of the Old Norwegian Book of Homilies, references are made to “hugskots augumˮ (the mind’s eye). The context reveals that the church building and its interior functioned as a mnemonic structure. Not only would each architectonic element have a biblical symbolic-allegorical meaning, but the individual member of the congregation was also encouraged to see with the mind’s eye, that is, to memorise and thus internalise the structures of the church building. Gamal norsk homiliebok [Old Norwegian Book of Homilies] text: source: Gamal norsk homiliebok. Cod. AM 619 4o. Ed. Gustav Indrebø. Oslo, 1966 [1931]. 97. translation: The editors

Original text A þeſſo brioſt-þili  ero  mikil  dyrr  ſva at ſia ma oll tiðende í ſonghus (or) kirkiu.  þvi at hverr  er  fiðr miſcunnar  dyrr  hæilags  anda  má  líta  hugſcotz augum marga himneſca luti. Fiorer hornſtafar kirkio merkia fiogur guðſpioll. þvi at kenningaʀ þæira ero enar ſtærgſto ſtoðir allrar criſtni. Rǽfr kirkio merkir þa  menn er hugſcotz augo ſin hæfia upp fra ollumm iarðlegum lutum til himneſcrar dyrðar. […] En ſva ſem vér ſægium kirkio merkia allan criſtin lyð. ſva man hon merkia ſér hvern criſtin mann. þann er ſanlega gereſc myſtere hæilags anda í góðum ſiðum. Đvi at hvær maðr ſcal ſmiða andlega kirkio í ſér.

Translation On this front wall is a big door so one can see all happenings in the choir from the church, for all who find the Holy Ghost’s gate of grace see much divine with the eyes of the mind. The four corner pillars of the church mark the four gospels, since the knowledge they contain are the strongest posts of Christianity. The roof of the church signifies those men who lift the mind’s eye from the earthly to the heavenly glory. […] But in the same way as we say that the church signifies all Christendom, so can it signify each Christian, whom from a pure life becomes a true temple, thus will each man build a holy church within himself.

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Fig. 1: The Hopperstad Stave Church, Vik Municipality, Norway. The church was built ca. 1130, and stands at its original location.

Memory in Action Memory strategies and memory scenes in sagas, poetry, laws, and theological and historical texts

III: 24 Memorial toasts in The Saga of Hákon the Good People are said to drink toasts to their dead kinsmen at pagan sacrifices and feasts, calling such activities minni ‘memorial toasts’, the same word also commonly used for ‘memory’. Saga Hákonar góða [The Saga of Hákon the Good] text: source: Snorri Sturluson. Heimskringla. I. Ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson. ÍF, 26. Reykjavík, 1941. Ch. 14. translation: Snorri Sturluson. Heimskringla. I. The Beginnings to Óláfr Tryggvason. Trans. Alison Finlay and Anthony Faulkes. 2nd ed. London, 2016. Ch. 14.

Original text Sigurðr Hlaðajarl var inn mesti blótmaðr, ok svá var Hákon, faðir hans. Helt Sigurðr jarl upp blótveizlum ǫllum af hendi konungs þar í Þrœndalǫgum. Þat var forn siðr, þá er blót skyldi vera, at allir bœndr skyldu þar koma, sem hof var, ok flytja þannug fǫng sín, þau er þeir skyldu hafa, meðan veizlan stóð. At veizlu þeiri skyldu allir menn ǫl eiga. Þar var ok drepinn alls konar smali ok svá hross, en blóð þat allt, er þar kom af, þá var kallat hlaut, ok hlautbollar þat, er blóð þat stóð í, ok hlautteinar, þat var svá gǫrt sem stǫkklar, með því skyldi rjóða stallana ǫllu saman ok svá veggi hofsins útan ok innan ok svá støkkva á mennina, en slátr skyldi sjóða til mannfagnaðar. Eldar skyldu vera á miðju gólfi í hofinu ok þar katlar yfir. Skyldi full um eld bera, en sá, er gerði veizluna ok hǫfðingi var, þá skyldi hann signa fullit ok allan blótmatinn, skyldi fyrst Óðins full – skyldi þat drekka til sigrs ok ríkis konungi sínum – en síðan Njarðar full ok Freys full til árs ok friðar. Þá var mǫrgum mǫnnum títt at drekka þarnæst bragafull. Menn drukku ok full frænda sinna, þeira er heygðir hǫfðu verit, ok váru þat minni kǫlluð.

Translation Sigurðr Hlaðajarl was very keen on heathen worship, and so was his father Hákon. Jarl Sigurðr maintained all the ritual banquets on behalf of the king there in Þrœndalǫg. It was an ancient custom, when a ritual feast was to take place, that all the farmers should attend where the temple was and bring there their own supplies for them to use while the banquet lasted. At this banquet everyone had to take part in the ale-drinking. All kinds of domestic animals were slaughtered https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-110

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there, including horses, and all the blood that came from them was then called hlaut (‘lot’), and what the blood was contained in, hlaut­bowls, and hlaut-twigs, these were fashioned like holy water sprinklers; with these the altars were to be reddened all over, and also the walls of the temple outside and inside and the people also were sprinkled, while the meat was to be cooked for a feast. There would be fires down the middle of the floor in the temple with cauldrons over them. The toasts were handed across the fire, and the one who was holding the banquet and who was the chief person there, he had then to dedicate the toast and all the ritual food; first would be Óðinn’s toast – that was drunk to victory and to the power of the king – and then Njǫrðr’s toast and Freyr’s toast for prosperity and peace. Then after that it was common for many people to drink the bragafull (‘chieftain’s toast’). People also drank toasts to their kinsmen, those who had been buried in mounds, and these were called minni (‘memorial toasts’).

III: 25 Old poems and memorial stones in The Separate Saga of Óláfr the Saint This section of the prologue to the Separate Saga of Óláfr the Saint details how ‘old poems’ and other materials have been employed in the composition of the saga, information about royal lineages that occasionally specifies dozens of generations, going as far back as to ancestors descended from the gods and including the particulars of their deaths and burials. Also noted is an age of cremation, followed by an age of mounds for great men, with others being buried and having memorial stones erected. Óláfs saga ins helga in sérstaka [The Separate Saga of Óláfr the text:  Saint] source: Snorri Sturluson. Heimskringla. II. Ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson. ÍF, 27. Reykjavík. 1979 [1951]. 421. translation: Snorri Sturluson. Heimskringla. II. Óláfr Haraldsson (the Saint). Trans. Alison Finlay and Anthony Faulkes. London, 2016 [2014]. 280.

Original text Prologus […] Rita hefi ek látit frá upphafi ævi konunga þeira, er ríki hafa haft á Norðrlǫndum ok á danska túngu hafa mælt, svá ok nakkvarar kynslóðir þeira eptir því, sem vér hǫfum numit af fróðum mǫnnum ok enn er sagt í fornkvæðum eða í lángfeðgatǫlu finnsk, þar er konungar hafa rakit ættir sínar. Þjóðólfr inn fróði skáld, er sumir kalla inn hvinverska, orti kvæði um Rǫgnvald konung, son Óláfs konungs af Vestfold. Óláfr var bróðir Hálfdánar svarta, fǫður Haralds ins hárfagra. Í því kvæði eru upp talðir þrír tigir lángfeðga Rǫgnvalds, sǫgð nǫfn þeira ok svá frá dauða hvers þeira, ok er talit allt til Ingunar-Freys, er heiðnir menn kǫlluðu guð sinn. Annat kvæði orti Eyvindr skáldaspillir um Hákon jarl inn ríka Sigurðarson, ok talði hann lángfeðga til Sæmings, er sagt er, at væri Ingunar-Freysson, Njarðarsonar. Sagt er þar ok frá dauða hvers þeira ok legstað. In fyrsta ǫld var sú, er alla dauða menn skyldi brenna. En síðan hófsk haugsǫld. Váru þá allir ríkismenn í hauga lagðir, en ǫll alþýða grafin í jǫrð, þá er menn váru dauðir, ok settir eptir bautasteinar til minnis. 

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Translation Prologue I have had written from the beginning the lives of the kings that have held rule in the Northern lands and have spoken the Scandinavian language, and also some of their genealogies in accordance with what we have found out from learned men and is still told in old poems or in records of paternal descent where kings have traced their pedigrees. The poet Þjóðólfr inn fróði (the Learned), who some say was of Hvinir, composed a poem in honour of King Rǫgnvaldr, son of King Óláfr of Vestfold. Óláfr was the brother of Hálfdan svarti (the Black), father of Haraldr inn hárfagri (the Fine-Haired). In that poem are listed thirty of Rǫgnvaldr’s paternal ancestors, their names given and also details of each of their deaths, and the list goes right back to Ingunar-Freyr, whom heathen people reckoned was their god. There was another poem composed by Eyvindr skáldaspillir in honour of Jarl Hákon inn ríki Sigurðarson, and he listed paternal ancestors back to Sæmingr, who is said to have been son of Ingunar-Freyr, son of Njǫrðr. There also the death and burial place of each of them is told. The first age was that in which all dead men had to be burned. And afterwards began the Age of Mounds. Then all men of the ruling class were laid in mounds, but all ordinary people buried in the ground when they were dead, and memorial stones were set up in their memory.

III: 26 The remembered glory of Lejre in A Short History of the Kings of Denmark Writing in the twelfth century, Sven Aggesen recalls the former significance of the manorial estate at Lejre, which by Aggesen’s time was no more than among “the meanest of villages”. A so-called ‘central place’ in Viking Age Scandinavia, Lejre was overshadowed by the growth of nearby Roskilde, but retained in the Nordic Middle Ages a reputation for grandeur and importance in such works as the Icelandic Hrólfs saga kraka and the Gesta Danorum of Saxo Grammaticus. text: Sven Aggesen, Brevis Historia Regvm Dacie [A Short History of the Kings of Denmark] source: Scriptores Minores Historiæ Danicæ Medii Ævi. I. Ed. M. Cl. Gertz. Copenhagen, 1917–18. I: 97. translation: The Works of Sven Aggesen, Twelfth-century Danish Historian. Trans. Eric Christiansen. Viking Society for Northern Research. Text series, 9. London, 1992. 49.

Original text Huic in regno successit filius Rolf Kraki, patria uirtute pollens, occisus in Lethra; que tunc famosissima regis extitit curia, nunc autem Roskildensi uicina ciuitati inter abiectissima ferme uix colitur oppida.

Translation His successor as king was his son, Rolf Kraki, who became powerful through his inherited valour, and was killed at Lejre. This was then the king’s most famous residence, but now, near the city of Roskilde, it lies scarcely inhabited among quite the meanest of villages.

III: 27 Remembering and rhetoric in the Saga of Saint Óláfr In the Saga of Saint Óláfr, memory as a rhetorical and oratorical device is artfully employed by the lawman, Þorgnýr, as he invokes the memories held by three generations of lawmen about the reigns of various Swedish kings. Óláfs saga helga [The Saga of Saint Óláfr] text: source: Snorri Sturluson. Heimskringla. II. Ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson. ÍF 27. Reykjavík, 1979 [1945]. Ch. 78–80. translation: Snorri Sturluson. Heimskringla. II. Óláfr Haraldsson (the Saint). Trans. Alison Finlay and Anthony Faulkes. London, 2016 [2014]. Ch. 78–80.

Original text LXXVIII. KAPÍTULI Þá var á Tíundalandi sá lǫgmaðr, er Þorgnýr het. Faðir hans er nefndr Þorgnýr Þorgnýsson. Þeir langfeðgar hǫfðu verit lǫgmenn á Tíundalandi um margra konunga ævi. Þorgnýr var þá gamall. Hann hafði um sik mikla hirð. Hann var kallaðr vitrastr maðr í Svíaveldi. Hann var frændi Rǫgnvalds jarls ok fóstrfaðir hans. […] LXXIX. KAPÍTULI Rǫgnvaldr jarl kom einn dag at kveldi til bús Þorgnýs lǫgmanns. Þar var bœr mikill ok stórkostligr. Váru þar margir menn úti. Þeir fǫgnuðu vel jarli ok tóku við hestum þeira ok reiða. Jarl gekk inn í stofuna. Var þar inni fjǫlmenni mikit. Þar sat í ǫndugi maðr gamall. Engi mann hǫfðu þeir Bjǫrn sét jafnmikinn. Skeggit var svá sítt, at lá í knjám honum ok breiddisk um alla bringuna. Hann var vænn maðr ok gǫfugligr. Jarl gékk fyrir hann ok heilsaði honum. Þorgnýr fagnar honum vel ok bað hann ganga til sætis þess, er hann var vanr at sitja. Jarl settist ǫðrum megin gegnt Þorgný. […] Jarl þakkaði honum vel þessi heit, ok dvaldisk hann með Þorgný ok reið með honum til Uppsalaþings. Var þar allmikit fjǫlmenni. Þar var Óláfr konungr með hirð sinni.



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LXXX. KAPÍTULI Inn fyrsta dag er þing var sett, sat Óláfr konungr á stóli ok þar hirð hans um­hverfis. En annan veg á þingit sátu þeir á einum stóli Rǫgnvaldr jarl ok Þorgnýr, ok sat þar fyrir þeim hirð jarls ok húskarlasveit Þorgnýs, en á bak stólinum stóð bóndamúgrinn ok alt umhverfis í hring. Sumir fóru á hæðir ok hauga at heyra þaðan til. En er tǫluð váru ørendi konungs, þau sem siðr var til at mæla á þingum, ok er því var lokit, þá stóð upp Bjǫrn stallari hjá stóli jarls ok mælti hátt: “Ólafr konungr sendi mik hingat þess ørendis, at hann vill bjóða Svíakonungi sætt ok þat landaskipti, sem at fornu fari hefir verit milli Nóregs ok Svíþjóðar.” Hann mælti hátt, svá at Svíakonungr heyrði gǫrva. En fyrst, er Svíakonungr heyrði nefndan Ólaf konung, þá hugði hann, at sá myndi reka nǫkkut hans ørendi, en er hann heyrði rœtt um sætt ok landaskipti milli Svíþjóðar ok Noregs, þá skilði hann af hverjum rifjum rísa myndi. Þá hljóp hann upp ok kallaði hátt, at sá maðr skyldi þegja, ok kvað slíkt ekki tjóa mundu. Bjǫrn settisk þá niðr. En er hljóð fekkst, þá stóð jarl upp ok mælti. Hann sagði frá orðsendingu Óláfs digra ok sættarboðum við Óláf Svíakonung ok frá því, at Vestr-Gautar sendu Óláfi konungi ǫll orð til, at sætt skyldi gera við Nóregsmenn. Talði hann upp, hvert vandræði Vestr-Gautum var at því at missa þeirra hluta allra af Nóregi, er þeim var árbót í, en í annan stað at sitja fyrir áhlaupum þeira ok hernaði, ef Nóregskonungr samnaði her saman ok herjaði á þá. Jarl segir ok, at Óláfr Nóregskonungr hafði menn þangat sent þeira ørenda, at hann vill biðja Ingigerðar, dóttur hans. En er jarl hætti at tala, þá stóð upp Svíakonungr. Hann svarar þungliga um sættina, en veitti jarli átǫlur þungar ok stórar um dirfð þá, er hann hafði gǫrt grið ok frið við inn digra mann ok lagt við hann vináttu, talði hann sannan at landráðum við sik, kvað þat makligt, at Rǫgnvaldr væri rekinn ór ríkinu, ok segir, at allt slíkt hlaut hann af áeggjan Ingibjargar, konu sinnar, ok kvað þat verit hafa it ósnjallasta ráð, er hann skyldi fengit hafa at girndum slíkrar konu. Hann talaði langt ok hart, ok snøri þá enn tǫlunni á hendr Óláfi digra. En er hann settisk niðr, þá var fyrst hljótt. Þá stóð upp Þorgnýr. En er hann stóð upp, þá stóðu upp allir bœndr, þeir er áðr hǫfðu setit, ok þustu at allir þeir, er í ǫðrum stǫðum hǫfðu verit, ok vildu hlýða til, hvat Þorgnýr mælti. Var þá fyrst gnýr mikill af fjǫlmenni ok vápnnm. En er hljóð fékksk, þá mælti Þorgnýr: “Annan veg er nú skaplyndi Svíakonunga en fyrr hefir verit. Þorgnýr, fǫðurfaðir minn, munði Eirík Uppsalakonung Emundarson ok sagði þat frá honum, at meðan hann var á léttasta aldri, at hann hafði hvert sumar leiðangr úti ok fór til ýmissa landa ok lagði undir sik Finnland ok Kirjálaland, Eistland ok Kúrland, ok víða um Austrlǫnd. Ok mun enn sjá þær jarðborgir ok ǫnnur stórvirki, þau er hann gerði, ok var hann ekki svá mikillátr, at eigi hlýddi hann mǫnnum, ef skylt áttu við hann at rœða. Þorgnýr, faðir minn, var með Birni konungi langa ævi. Var honum hans siðr kunnigr. Stóð um ævi Bjarnar hans ríki með styrk miklum, en engum þurrð. Var hann dæll sínum vinum. Ek má muna

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Eirík konung hinn sigrsæla, ok var ek með honum í mǫrgum herfǫrum. Jók hann ríki Svía, en varði harðfengliga. Var oss gott við hann ráðum at koma. En konungr þessi, er nú er, lætr engi mann þora at mæla við sik nema þat einu, er hann vill vera láta, ok hefir hann þar við allt kapp, en lætr skattlǫnd sín undan sér ganga af eljanleysi ok þrekleysi. Hann girnisk þess at halda Nóregsveldi undir sik, er engi Svíakonungr hefir þat fyrr ágirnzk, ok gerir þat mǫrgum manni óró. Nú er þat vili várr bóandanna, at þú gerir sætt við Óláf digra Nóregskonung ok giptir honum dóttur þína, Ingigerði. En ef þú vilt vinna aptr undir þik ríki þau í Austrvegi, er frændr þínir ok forellri hafa þar átt, þá viljum vér allir fylgja þér þar til. Með því at þú vilt eigi hafa þat, er vér mælum, þá munum vér veita þér atgǫngu ok drepa þik ok þola þér eigi ófrið ok ólǫg. Hafa svá gǫrt hinir fyrri forellrar várir. Þeir steypðu fimm konungum í eina keldu á Múlaþingi, er áðr hǫfðu upp fyllzk ofmetn­aðar sem þú við oss. Seg nu skjótt, hvern kost þú vill upp taka.” Þá gerði lýðrinn þegar vápnabrak ok gný mikinn. Konungrinn stendr þá upp ok mælti, segir, at alt vill hann vera láta, sem bœndr vilja, segir, at svá hafi gǫrt allir Svíakonungar, at láta bœndr ráða með sér ǫllu því, er þeir vildu. Staðnaði þá kurr bóandanna. En þá tǫluðu hǫfðingjar, konungr ok jarl ok Þorgnýr, ok gera þá frið ok sátt af hendi Svíakonungs eptir því, sem Nóregskonungr hefir áðr orð til send. Var á því þingi þat ráðit, at Ingigerðr, dóttir Óláfs konungs, skyldi vera gipt Óláfi konungi Haraldssyni. Seldi konungr jarli í hendr festar hennar ok fekk honum í hendr allt sitt umboð um þann ráðahag, ok skilðusk þeir á þinginu at svá loknum málum.

Translation CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT In Tíundaland there was at that time the lawman who was called Þorgnýr. His father’s name was Þorgnýr Þorgnýsson. Their forefathers had been lawmen in Tíundaland throughout the lives of many kings. At this time Þorgnýr was old. He had a large following. He was said to be the wisest man in the realm of the Svíar. He was related to Jarl Rǫgnvaldr and was his foster-father […] CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE Jarl Rǫgnvaldr arrived one day in the evening at Lawman Þorgnýr’s home. There was a large and magnificent estate there. Many men were there outside. They welcomed the jarl warmly and took charge of their horses and gear. The jarl went into the living room. There was a large number of people in there. In the high seat there sat an old man. Bjǫrn and his party had not seen so big a man. His beard was so long that it lay on his knees and spread over his whole chest. He was a handsome and splendid-looking person. The jarl went before him and greeted



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him. Þorgnýr welcomes him warmly and bade him go to the seat he usually sat in. The jarl sat on the other side opposite Þorgnýr. […] The jarl thanked him warmly for this promise, and stayed with Þorgnýr and rode with him to the Uppsalir assembly. There were very large numbers there. King Óláfr was there with his following. CHAPTER EIGHTY The first day, when the assembly was inaugurated, King Óláfr was sitting on a throne and his following there round him. And on the other side at the assembly the two of them, Jarl Rǫgnvaldr and Þorgnýr, were sitting on a single seat, and there in front of them the jarl’s following and Þorgnýr’s body of retainers were sitting, and behind the seat and in a circle all round the crowd of farmers were standing. Some went up onto hillocks and mounds to listen from there. And when the king’s announcements, those which it was customary to make at assemblies, had been proclaimed, and when that was finished, then Bjǫrn stallari stood up by the Jarl’s seat and spoke in a loud voice: “King Óláfr has sent me here with this charge, that he wishes to offer the king of the Svíar settlement and the division of the lands that existed formerly between Norway and Svíþjóð.” He spoke in a loud voice so that the king of the Svíar heard clearly. But at first, when the king of the Svíar heard King Óláfr named, then he thought that the speaker was carrying out some business of his, but when he heard settlement and division of lands between Svíþjóð and Norway spoken of, then he realised from what roots it must have arisen. Then he leapt up and shouted in a loud voice that this man should be silent, and said that this would not do. Bjǫrn then sat down. But when a hearing could be got, then the jarl stood up and spoke. He told about Óláfr digri’s message and the offers of settlement to King Óláfr of the Svíar, and about this, that the vestr-Gautar had sent King Óláfr every kind of verbal support for peace being made with the Norwegians. He recounted what a problem it was for the vestr-Gautar to be without all the things from Norway which would supplement their own produce, and at the same time to be exposed to their attacks and raids whenever the king of Norway mustered an army and invaded them. The jarl also says that King Óláfr had sent men there with the message that he wishes to ask for the hand of his daughter Ingigerðr. And when the jarl stopped talking, then the king of the Svíar stood up. He replies bad-temperedly about the settlement, and reprimanded the jarl harshly and at length for his daring in having made a truce and peace with the fat man and having entered into friendship with him, declaring that he was guilty of treason against him, saying it would be proper for Rǫgnvaldr to be driven from the land, and says that he had got all this from the egging on of his wife Ingibjǫrg and declared that it had been the stupid-

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est idea that he should have married such a woman for the sake of lust. He spoke long and harshly and then directed his words against Óláfr digri. And when he sat down, then at first there was silence. Then Þorgnýr stood up. And when he stood up, then all the farmers stood up, those who had previously been sitting down, and all those rushed up who had been in other places and wanted to listen to what Þorgnýr said. Then to begin with there was a great din from the crowd of people and weapons. But when a hearing could be got, then Þorgnýr said: “Otherwise is now the temper of the kings of the Svíar than has been previously. My grandfather Þorgnýr remembered King Eiríkr Emundarson of Uppsalir, and said this of him, that while he was in his best years he took a levy out every summer and travelled to various countries and subjected to himself Lappland and Kirjálaland, Eistland and Kúrland and many places in the eastern lands. And there can still be seen the earthworks and other great strongholds that he built, and he was not so high and mighty that he did not listen to people if they had something important to speak to him about. My father Þorgnýr was with King Bjǫrn for a long period. His character was well known to him. Throughout Bjǫrn’s life his rule lasted with great power and no lessening of it. He was easy with his friends. I can remember King Eiríkr inn sigrsæli and I was with him on many warlike expeditions. He increased the power of the Svíar, and defended it fiercely. It was easy for us to give him advice. But this king that we have now lets no one dare to say anything to him except just what he wants to have done, and devotes all his enthusiasm to that, but lets his tributary lands slip from his grasp through lack of energy and lack of determination. He desires to keep the realm of Norway subject to him, when no king of the Svíar has previously coveted it, and this causes trouble for many a man. Now this is what we farmers want, that you make a settlement with King Óláfr digri of Norway and give him your daughter Ingigerðr in marriage. But if you want to win back into your power those realms in the eastern Baltic that your kinsmen and forefathers have had there, then we will all support you in that. Should you be unwilling to accept what we demand, then we shall mount an attack against you and kill you and not put up with hostility and lawlessness from you. This is what our forefathers before us have done. They threw five kings into a bog at Múlaþing who had become completely full of arrogance like you with us. Say now straight away which choice you wish to take.” Then the people immediately made a clashing of weapons and a great din. The king then stands up and spoke, saying that he will let everything be as the farmers wish, says that is what all kings of the Svíar have done, let the farmers have their way with them in everything they wanted. Then the grumbling of the farmers stopped. Then the rulers, the king and the jarl and Þorgnýr, talked together, and then made peace and settlement on the part of the king of the Svíar in accordance with what the king of Norway had previously sent his request for.



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It was at this assembly decided that King Óláfr’s daughter Ingigerðr should be married to King Óláfr Haraldsson. The king handed over to the jarl the betrothal arrangements and commissioned him to negotiate all the details of this wedding, and they parted at the assembly with the business concluded thus.

III: 28 Poets as eye witnesses and memory bearers in The Saga of Saint Óláfr Immediately before his last battle in Stiklarstaðir, the later saint Óláfr Haraldsson assembles his poets (skáld) around him in his shield wall (skjaldborg), so that they, as eye wittnesses, can base their poems directly on the events. Óláfs saga helga [The Saga of Saint Óláfr] text: source: Snorri Sturluson. Heimskringla. II. Ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson. ÍF, 27. Reykjavík, 1945. Ch. 206. translation: Snorri Sturluson. Heimskringla. II. Óláfr Haraldsson (the Saint). Trans. Alison Finlay and Anthony Faulkes. London, 2014. Ch. 206.

Original text Svá er sagt, at þá er Óláfr konungr fylkði liði sínu, þá skipaði hann mǫnnum í skjaldborg, er halda skyldi fyrir honum í bardaga, ok valði þar til þá menn, er sterkastir váru ok snarpastir. Þá kallaði hann til sín skáld sín ok bað þá ganga í skjaldborgina. “Skuluð þér,” segir hann, “hér vera ok sjá þau tíðendi, er hér gerask. Er yðr þá eigi segjandi saga til, því at þér skuluð frá segja ok yrkja um síðan.” Þar var þá Þormóðr Kolbrúnarskáld ok Gizurr gullbrá, fóstri HofgarðaRefs, ok inn þriði Þorfinnr munnr. […] Þá mæltu þeir sín á milli, sǫgðu, at þat væri vel fallit at yrkja áminningarvísur nǫkkurar um þau tíðendi, er þá mundu brátt at hǫndum berask. Þá kvað Gizurr: […]. Þá kvað Þorfinnr munnr aðra vísu: […]. Þá kvað Þormóðr: […].

Translation So it is said, that when King Óláfr drew up his troops, then he placed some men so as to make a shield wall that was to be kept in front of him in battle, and chose the men for it that were strongest and most agile. Then he called his poets to him and told them to go inside the shield wall. ‘You,’ he says, ‘shall be here and see the events that here take place. You will then not have to rely on verbal reports, for you will report them and compose about them later.’ There were now there Þormóðr Kolbrúnarskáld and Hofgarða-Refr’s foster-father Gizurr gullbrá (Golden Eyelash), and thirdly Þorfinnr munnr (Mouth). […]. Then they spoke among themselves, saying that it would be very fit to compose some memorial verses about the events that now would soon be upon them. Then spoke Gizurr: […]. Then Þorfinnr munnr spoke another verse: […]. Then spoke Þormóðr: […].

III: 29 Reciting and remembering disastrous poetry: Gísli Súrsson’s fatal stanza In Gísla saga Súrssonar [Gisli Sursson’s Saga], the eponymous hero recites in public a skaldic stanza in which he reveals himself as the murderer of his brotherin-law, the man married to his sister, Þórdís. She learns, i.e. memorises, the stanza immediately (she ‘takes’ it, as the text says) and goes home. By the time she has arrived there, Þórdís has been able to work out the meaning of the stanza. Later, she recites the stanza to her second husband. This act eventually leads to the killing of Gísli. Gísla saga Súrssonar [Gisli Sursson’s Saga] text: source: Gísla saga Súrssonar. In Vestfirðinga sǫgur. Ed. Björn K. Þórólfsson and Guðni Jónsson. ÍF, 6. Reykjavík, 1943. Chs. 18–19. translation: Gisli Sursson’s Saga. Trans. Martin S. Regal. In The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, Including 49 Tales. II. Ed. Viðar Hreinsson. Reykjavík, 1997. Chs. 18–19.

Original text Gísli sezk niðr ok gerir at trénu, horfir á hauginn Þorgríms; snær var á jǫrðu, en konur sátu upp í brekkuna, Þórdís systir hans ok margar aðrar. Gísli kvað þá vísu, er æva skyldi: […]. Þórdís nam þegar vísuna, gengr heim ok hefir ráðit vísuna. […] Þá stingr hon [Þórdís] við fótum ok kvezk eigi fara lengra; segir hon nú ok, hvat Gísli hafði kveðit, þá er hann leit hauginn Þorgríms, ok kveðr fyrir honum [Bǫrkr] vísuna. “Ok ætla ek,” segir hon, “at þú þurfir eigi annan veg eptir at leita um víg Þorgríms […].” Hann [Þorkell] snýr þá leið sinni út á Hól ok segir nú Gísla, hvat títt er, at Þórdís hefir nú upp rofit málit ok rannsakat vísuna, – “máttu nú ok svá við búask, at upp er komit málit.”

Translation […] then Gisli sat down and fixed the bat. He looked towards Thorgrim’s burial mound; there was snow on the ground and the women sat on the slope. His sister Thordis was there and many others. Gisli then spoke a verse which should not have been spoken: […] Thordis remembered the verse, went home and interpreted what it meant. […] Suddenly, Thordis stopped and said she would venture no farther. Then she recited the verse that Gisli had composed when he looked at Thorgrim’s burial place. “And I suspect,” she said, “that you need not look

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elsewhere concerning Thorgrim’s slaying […].” Then, he [Thorkel] changed direction and rode to Hol, where he told Gisli what had happened, how Thordis had discovered the truth and solved the meaning of the verse: “You’ll have to regard the matter as out in the open now.”

III: 30 Archaeology and oral tradition: The hero’s skull and bones in Egil’s Saga This passage towards the end of the saga illustrates the role of oral tradition in connection with ‘archaeological’ finds in the narration of the saga. Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar [Egil’s Saga] text: source: Egils saga Skall-Grímssonar. Ed. Sigurður Nordal. ÍF, 2. Reykjavík, 1933. Chs. 85–86. translation: Egil’s Saga. Trans. Bernard Scudder. In The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, Including 49 Tales. I. Ed. Viðar Hreinsson. Reykjavík, 1997. Chs. 88–89.

Original text 85. kapítuli […] Egill tók sótt eptir um haustit, þá er hann leiddi til bana. En er hann var andaðr, þá lét Grímr fœra Egil í klæði góð; síðan lét hann flytja hann ofan í Tjald­ anes ok gera þar haug, ok var Egill þar í lagðr ok vápn hans ok klæði. 86. kapítuli Grímr at Mosfelli var skírðr, þá er kristni var í lǫg leidd á Íslandi; hann lét þar kirkju gera. En þat er sǫgn manna, at Þórdís hafi látit flytja Egil til kirkju, ok er þat til jartegna, at síðan er kirkja var gǫr at Mosfelli, en ofan tekin at Hrísbrú sú kirkja, er Grímr hafði gera látit, þá var þar grafinn kirkjugarðr. En undir altarisstaðnum, þá fundusk mannabein; þau váru miklu meiri en annarra manna bein. Þykkjask menn þat vita af sǫgn gamalla manna, at mundi verit hafa bein Egils. Þar var þá Skapti prestr Þórarinsson, vitr maðr; hann tók upp hausinn Egils ok setti á kirkjugarðinn; var haussinn undarliga mikill, en hitt þótti þó meir frá líkendum, hvér þungr var; haussinn var allr báróttr útan svá sem hǫrpuskel. Þá vildi Skapti forvitnask um þykkleik haussins; tók hann þá handøxi vel mikla ok reiddi annarri hendi sem harðast ok laust hamrinum á hausinn ok vildi brjóta, en þar sem á kom, hvítnaði hann, en ekki dalaði né sprakk, ok má af slíku marka, at hauss sá mundi ekki auðskaddr fyrir hǫggum smámennis, meðan svǫrðr ok hold fylgði. Bein Egils váru lǫgð niðr í útanverðum kirkjugarði at Mosfelli.

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Translation Chapter 88 […] In the autumn Egil caught the illness that eventually led to his death. When he died, Grim had his body dressed in fine clothes and taken over to Tjaldanes, where a mound was made that Egil was buried in along with his weapons and clothes. Chapter 89 Grim from Mosfell was baptised when Christianity was made the law in Iceland and he had a church built at Mosfell. It is said that Thordis had Egil’s bones moved to the church. This is supported by the fact that when a cemetery was dug, after the church that Grim had had built at Hrisbru was taken down and set up at Mosfell, human bones were found under the site of the altar. They were much larger than normal human bones, and on the basis of old accounts people are certain they must have belonged to Egil. Skafti Thorarinsson the Priest, a wise man, was there at the time. He picked up Egil’s skull and put it on the wall of the churchyard. The skull was astonishingly large and even more incredible for its weight. It was all ridged on the outside, like a scallop shell. Curious to test its thickness, Skafti took a fair-sized hand-axe in one hand and struck the skull with it as hard as he could, to try to break it. A white mark was left where he struck the skull, but it neither dented nor cracked. This goes to prove that such a skull would not have been easy for weak men to damage when it was covered with hair and skin. Egil’s bones were buried by the edge of the churchyard at Mosfell.

III: 31 Memory, death and spatial anchoring in Njal’s Saga One of the best-known episodes in the thirteenth-century Brennu-Njáls saga [Njal’s saga], counted among the sagas of Icelanders, is the burning of Njáll’s farm. The burning, which leads to Njáll’s death, is the consequence of an ongoing conflict. The detailed description reveals how Njáll organised his death and planned how his body would later be found in the ruins, and thus made a (successful) attempt to shape his memory. Perhaps alluding to the legendary narrative about the founding father of the classical art of memory, Simonides of Ceos, the episode shows how memory and remembrance are supported through an anchoring to spatial locations. Brennu-Njáls saga [Njal’s saga] text: source: Brennu-Njáls saga. Ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson. ÍF, 12. Reykjavík, 1954. Chs. 129 and 132. translation: Njal’s saga. Trans. Robert Cook. In The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, Including 49 Tales. III. Ed. Viðar Hreinsson. Reykjavík, 1997. Chs. 129 and 132.

Original text Flosi mælti: “Útgǫngu vil ek þér bjóða, því at þú brennr ómakligr inni.” Njáll mælti: “Eigi vil ek út ganga, því at ek em maðr gamall ok lítt til búinn at hefna sona minna, en ek vil eigi lifa við skǫmm.” Flosi mælti til Bergþóru: “Gakk þú út, húsfreyja, því at ek vil þik fyrir engan mun inni brenna.” Bergþóra mælti: “Ek var ung gefin Njáli, ok hefi ek því heitit honum, at eitt skyldi ganga yfir okkr bæði.” Síðan gengu þau inn bæði. Bergþóra mælti: “Hvat skulu vit nú til ráða taka?” Njáll svarar: “Ganga munu vit til hvílu okkarrar ok leggjask niðr.” Síðan mælti hon við sveininn Þórð Kárason: “Þik skal bera út, ok skalt þú eigi inni brenna.” “Hinu hefir þú mér heitit, amma,” segir sveinninn, “at vit skyldim aldri skilja, ok skal svá vera, því at mér þykkir miklu betra at deyja með ykkr.” Síðan bar hon sveininn til hvílunnar. Njáll mælti við brytja sinn: “Nú skaltú sjá, hvar vit leggjumsk niðr ok hversu ek býg um okkr, því at ek ætla mér hvergi heðan at hrœrask, hvárt sem mér angrar reykr eða bruni; munt þú þá næst geta, hvar beina okkarra er at leita.” Hann sagði, at svá skyldi vera. Uxa einum hafði slátrat verit, ok lá þar húðin. Njáll mælti við brytjann, at hann skyldi breiða húðina yfir þau; hét hann því. Þau legj­ ask niðr bæði í rúmit ok lǫgðu sveininn í millum sín. Þá signdu þau sik bæði ok sveininn ok fálu ǫnd sína guði á hendi ok mæltu þat síðast, svá at menn heyrði.

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Þá tók brytinn húðina ok breiddi yfir þau ok gekk út síðan. Ketill ór Mǫrk tók í mót honum ok kippti honum út ok spurði vandliga at Njáli, mági sínum; hann sagði allt it sanna. [...] CXXXII. KAPÍTULI Kári bað Hjalta fara at leita beina Njáls, – “því at allir munu trúa því, er þú segir frá ok þér sýnisk.” Hjalti kvezk þat fúsliga mundu gera at flytja bein Njáls til kirkju. Síðan riðu þeir þaðan fimmtán menn. Þeir riðu austr yfir Þjórsá ok kvǫddu þar menn upp með sér, til þess er þeir hǫfðu hundrað manna með nábúum Njáls. Kómu þeir til Bergþórshváls at hádegi. Hjalti spurði Kára, hvar Njáll mundi undir liggja, en Kári vísaði þeim til, ok var þar mikilli ǫsku af mokat. Þar fundu þeir undir húðina, ok var sem hon væri skorpnuð við eld. Þeir tóku hana upp, ok váru þau bæði óbrunnin undir. Allir lofuðu guð fyrir þat ok þótti stór jartegn í vera. Síðan var tekinn sveinninn, er legit hafði í meðal þeira, ok var af honum brunninn fingrinn, er hann hafði rétt upp undan húðinni. Njáll var út borinn ok svá Bergþóra. Síðan gingu til allir menn at sjá líkami þeira. Hjalti mælti: “Hversu synask yðr líkamir þessir?” Þeir svǫruðu: “Þinna atkvæða vilju vér at bíða.” Hjalti mælti: “Ekki mun mér verða einarðarfátt um þetta. Líkami Bergþoru þykki mér at líkendum ok þó vel. En Njáls ásjána ok líkami synisk mér svá bjartr, at ek hefi engan dauðs manns líkama sét jafnbjart­an.” Allir sǫgðu, at svá væri. [...]

Translation Flosi spoke: “I want to offer you the chance to come out, for you do not deserve to be burned.” Njal spoke: “I will not leave, for I’m an old man and hardly fit to avenge my sons, and I do not want to live in shame.” Flosi spoke to Bergthora: “Then you come out, Bergthora, for by no means do I want to burn you in your house.” Bergthora spoke: “I was young when I was given to Njal, and I promised him that we should both share the same fate.” Then the two of them went back in. Bergthora said, “What are we to do now?” Njal answered, “We will go to our bed and lie down.” Then she said to the boy Thord, Kari’s son, “Someone will carry you out – you must not be burned here.” “You promised me, grandmother,” said the boy, “that we would never be parted, and so it must be, for it seems to me much better to die with you.” Then she carried the boy to the bed.



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Njal said to his foreman, “Now you must see where we lie down and how I lay us out, for I don’t intend to budge from this spot, no matter how much the smoke and the fire hurt me; then you will know where our remains can be found.” He said he would. An ox had been slaughtered, and its hide was lying there. Njal told the steward to spread the hide over them, and he promised to do so. They lay down in the bed and placed the boy between them. Then they crossed themselves and the boy and turned their souls over to God’s hands, and these were the last things people heard them say. The foreman took the hide and spread it over them and then went out of the house. Ketil of Mork met him and hurried him out and asked carefully about his father-in-law Njal, and the foreman told exactly what had happened. [...] Chapter 132 Kari asked Hjalti to go and look for Njal’s remains – “because everybody will believe what you say you have seen.” Hjalti said he would gladly do that, and also bring Njal’s remains to church. Fifteen of them rode off. They went east over the Thjorsa river and called others to join them, and eventually they had a hundred men, including Njal’s neighbours They reached Bergthorshvol at noon. Hjalti asked Kari where under the ruins Njal would be lying, and Kari pointed to the spot; there was a great deal of ash to clear away. At the bottom they found the ox-hide, shrivelled up from the fire. They lifted it off and underneath lay the two of them, unburned. They all praised God for this and thought it a great miracle. Then the boy who was lying between them was taken up, and one of his fingers, which he had stuck out from under the hide, was burned off. Njal was carried out, and then Bergthora. Everybody came to look at their bodies. Hjalti spoke: “How do these bodies seem to you?” They answered, “We’ll wait for what you have to say.” Hjalti said, “I’ll be frank about this. Bergthora’s body is as I would have expected, though well preserved. Njal’s countenance and body are radiant, and I’ve never seen such radiance in a dead man’s body.” They all agreed that this was so.

III: 32 Scenes of competitive memory in Morkinskinna Morkinskinna [lit. rotten vellum] (c. 1220), counted among the kings’ sagas, relates the biographies of the Norwegian kings from 1025–1157. The scenes presented here show various uses of skaldic poetry, all confirming the high rank of the poet at the kings’ courts. It reveals, through the self-conscious and playful performances of Einarr Skúlason, court poet of King Eysteinn Haraldsson (ruling between 1125–1157), how particular mnemonic abilities were needed to be able to compose poetry and how these competences could empower the poet. Morkinskinna text: source: Morkinskinna. II. Ed. Ármann Jakonsson and Þórður Ingi Guðjónsson. ÍF, 24. Reykjavík, 2011. Ch. 105. translation: Morkinskinna. The Earliest Icelandic Chronicle of the Norwegian Kings (1030–1157). Trans. Theodore M. Andersson and Kari Ellen Gade. Islandica, 51. Ithaca and London. 2000. Ch. 97.

Original text Einarr Skúlason var með þeim brœðrum, Sigurði ok Eysteini, ok var Eysteinn konungr mikill vin hans. Ok Eysteinn konungr bað hann til at yrkja Óláfsdrápu, ok hann orti ok fœrði norðr í Þrándheimi, í Kristskirkju sjálfri, ok varð þat með miklum jarteinum, ok kom dýrligr ilmr í kirkjuna. Ok þat segja menn at þær áminn­ingar urðu af konunginum sjálfum at honum virðisk vel kveðit. Eysteinn konungr virði Einar mikils. Ok eitt sinn er þat sagt at konungrinn Eysteinn var kominn í sæti, en Einarr var eigi kominn. Eysteinn konungr hafði þá gǫrt hann stallara sinn, en þetta var norðr í Þrándheimi. Hafði Einarr verit til nunn­usetrs á Bakka. Þá mælti konungr: “Víttr ertu nú, skáld, er þú kømr eigi undir borð ok ert þó konungs skáld. Nú munum vit eigi sáttir nema þú yrkir nú vísu áðr ek drekka af kerinu.’ Þá kvað Einarr vísu: 323. Oss lét abbadissa angri firrð um svangan, dygg þótt víf en vígðu víti fyr þat, gyrða.

Enn til áts með nunnum, ógnar rakks, á Bakka, drós gladdit vin vísa, vasat stallarinn kallaðr.



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Nú líkar konungi allvel. Þat er ok sagt þá er Sigurðr konungr var staddr í Bjǫrgyn varð sá atburðr at í bœnum váru leikarar, ok hét annarr Jarlmaðr. Ok hann Jarlmaðr tók kið eitt ok át frjádag, ok konungr vill þat refsa honum ok lét taka hann ok hýða. Ok er Einarr kømr at þá mælti hann: “Hart vili þér nú búa við Jarlmann, félaga várn.” Konungr mælti: “Þú munt nú ráda. Vísu skaltu yrkja, ok meðan þú yrkir skal hann hýða.” Einarr mælti: “Þat myndi hann vilja, Jarlmaðr, at mér yrði eigi alltorfynt,” – en fimm hǫgg lustu þeir hann. Þá mælti Einarr: “Nú er vísan ort.” 324. Austr tók illa kristinn Jarlmaðr frá búkarli – grǫ́ðr vas kjǫts á kauða – kiðling, hinns slær fiðlu. Vǫndr hrǫkk, vámr lá bundinn, velmáll, á skip þíslar; sǫng leikara lengi lími harðan príma. Þat barsk at eitt sumar at sú kona kom til Bjǫrgynjar er Ragnhildr hét, dýrlig kona. Hana átti Páll Skoptason. Hon helt einu langskipi; fór svá vegliga sem lendir menn. Dvalðisk þar í bœnum, ok er hon bjósk í brot þá sá konungr ferð hennar ok mælti: “Hvat er nú skálda með oss?” segir konungr. Þar var Snorri Bárðarson. Honum var ekki auðfynt, ok tók hann ekki svá skjótt til sem konungr vildi. Þá mælti konungr: “Eigi myndi svá fara ef Einarr væri hér með oss.” Hann var þá nakkvat svá fráskili orðinn konungi fyr ógá, ok spyrr konungr ef hann væri í bœnum ok mælti at fara skyldi eptir honum. Ok er hann kom á bryggjurnar mælti konungr: “Vel kominn, skáld. Sé nú hversu vegliga ferð konu þessar er búin. Yrk nú vísu ok haf lokit áðr skipit gengr út fyr Hólm.” Einarr svaraði: “Eigi mun þat kauplaust.” Konungr spurði: “Hverju skal kaupa?” Einarr svaraði: “Þú skalt skyldr til ok hirðmenn þínir sjau út í frá at sitt orð muni hverr yðar í vísunni, ok ef þat brestr gefið mér jafn marga aska hunangs sem þér munið eigi orðin.” Konungr játti því. Þá kvað Einarr vísu: 325. Hola bǫ́ru rístr hlýrum hreystisprund at sundi, blæss élreki of ási, Útsteins, vefi þrútna. Varla heldr und vildra víkmarr á jarðríki – breiðr viðr brimsgang súðum barmr – lyptingar farmi.

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Þá mælti konungr: “Þat ætla ek at ek muna: Hola báru ristr hlýrum. Já, veit Guð. Barmr lyptingar farmi.” Aldregi munðu þeir þat er í milli var. Einarr var þá í konungs sveit ok í ǫllu samlagi við konungs menn.

Translation Einarr Skúlason was in the company of the brothers Sigurðr and Eysteinn, and King Eysteinn was a great friend of his. Eysteinn asked […] him to compose a poem in honor of Saint Óláfr, and he did so. He presented it north in Þrándheimr in the very confines of Christ Church, and it was accompanied by great miracles. A sweet fragrance rose in the church, and people say that there were intimations from the king himself that he thought well of the poem. King Eysteinn honored Einarr greatly. We are told that once King Eysteinn had seated himself, but Einarr had not yet come to his seat. At that time King Eysteinn had made him his marshal. This happened north in Þrándheimr. Einarr had been at Nunnusetr at Bakki (Bakke). The King said: “You shall be fined, skald, since you have not taken your seat, even though you are the king’s poet. We will not be reconciled unless you compose a stanza before I empty my tankard.” Then Einarr recited this stanza: [...] The blameless abbess made me tighten the belt, yet men may reproach the faithful ordained women. For the marshal was not invited to eat with the nuns at Bakki [Bakke]; the woman did not gladden the friend of the battlebrave king. It pleased the king greatly. We are also told that when King Sigurðr was in Bjǫrgvin, it happened that there were minstrels in the town. One was named Jarlmaðr. Jarlmaðr ate goat meat on Friday. The king wanted to punish him and ordered him […] to be whipped. When Einarr arrived, he said: “You are treating our companion Jarlmaðr harshly.” The king said: “It is in your hands. Compose a stanza, and as long as it takes you to compose he will be whipped.” Einarr replied: “Jarlmaðr will wish me not to be overly tongue-tied.” They gave him five strokes, then Einarr said: “Now the stanza is done.”



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[...] Jarlmaðr, the poor Christian who plies the fiddle, took a goat kid from a farmer in the east; the greed for meat overcame the churl. The whip coiled; the loathsome fellow lay bound on the ship of the wagon shaft [wagon]; for a long time the eloquent lash sang a harsh service over the minstrel. It happened one summer that a prominent woman named Ragnhildr came to Bjǫrgvin. She was married to Páll Skoptason, commanded a longship, and traveled in the style of a distinct chieftain. She stayed in the town for a while, and when she made ready to leave, the king saw her preparations and said: “Is there a skald here?” Snorri Bárðarson was present. He was not quick on his feet, and he did not compose as rapidly as the king wished. […] The king said: “It would not be this way if Einarr was here.” At that time he was somewhat estranged from the king because of discord. The king asked whether he was in town and sent people to summon him. When he came to the quay, the king said: “Welcome, skald. Look at this woman’s splendid departure. Compose a stanza now and finish it before the ship gets out to Hólmr.” Einarr replied: “That won’t happen without negotiations.” The king asked: “What sort of negotiations?” Einarr answered: “You and seven of your retainers will be obligated to memorize one line each in the stanza, and failing that […], you must give me as many casks of honey as there are lines you do not remember.” The king agreed, and Einarr recited the stanza: [...] With the prow the capable woman carves the hollow wave toward the straits of Útsteinn [Utsteinen]; the storm chaser [wind] fills the swollen sails above the sail yard. There is hardly another bay horse [ship] on earth that sails beneath a more precious burden of the deck [cargo]; the broad breast gains good speed for the ship boards. Then the king said: “I think I remember ‘Hola báru rístr hlýrum.’” “That’s right.” “And then ‘barmr lyptingar farmi.’” But they could never remember what was in between. Einarr was subsequently in the king’s company and had the same privileges as the king’s men.

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Fig. 1: The Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim, Norway, built from 1070–1300. It stands at the location of the church mentioned in the passage above.

III: 33 The curse of forgetting in Gautrek’s Saga This legendary saga recounts how the warrior and poet, Starkaðr, is brought to an island to attend a council. At the council, the gods, Óðinn and Þórr, respectively bless and curse Starkaðr, one of the crucial issues being Starkaðr’s ability to compose poetry. Mentioning poetic ability in this context reveals its high status and importance, and the curse (that Starkaðr shall not be able to remember what he composes) points to the intricate relationship between poetic composition, memory and forgetting. Gautreks saga [Gautrek’s Saga] text: source: Gautreks saga. In Fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda. 4. Ed. Guðni Jónsson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson. Reykjavík, 1954. Ch. 7. translation: King Gautrek. In Seven Viking Romances. Trans. Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards. London, 1985. Ch. 7.

Original text Um nóttina nær miðri nótt vakti Hrosshárs-Grani Starkað, fóstra sinn, ok bað hann fara með sér. Þeir taka bát einn lítinn ok reru til eyjar einnar inn frá hólm­ inum. Þeir gengu upp til skógar ok fundu þar rjóðr eitt í skóginum. Í rjóðrinu var fjölmenni mikit, ok var þar þing sett. Þar sátu ellifu menn á stólum, en inn tólfti var auðr. Þeir gengu fram á þingit, ok settist Hrosshárs-Grani á stólinn inn tólfta. Þar heilsuðu allir Óðni. Hann mælti, at dómendr skyldi þá dæma örlög Starkaðs. Þá tók Þórr til orða ok mælti: “Álfhildr, móðir föður Starkaðs, kaus föður at syni sínum hundvísan jötun heldr en Ásaþór, ok skapa ek þat Starkaði, at hann skal hvárki eiga son né dóttur ok enda svá ætt sína.” Óðinn svaraði: “Þat skapa ek honum, at hann skal lifa þrjá mannsaldra.” Þórr mælti: “Hann skal vinna níðingsverk á hverjum mannsaldri.” Óðinn svaraði: “Þat skapa ek honum, at hann skal eiga in beztu vápn ok váðir.” Þórr mælti: “Þat skapa ek honum, at hann skal hvárki eiga land né láð.” Óðinn mælti: “Ek gef honum þat, at hann skal eiga of lausafjár.” Þórr mælti: “Þat legg ek á hann, at hann skal aldri þykkjast nóg eiga.” Óðinn svaraði: “Ek gef honum sigr ok snilld at hverju vígi.” Þórr svaraði: “Þat legg ek á hann, at hann fái í hverju vígi meiðslasár.” Óðinn mælti: “Ek gef honum skáldskap, svá at hann skal eigi seinna yrkja en mæla.” Þórr mælti: “Hann skal ekki muna eptir, þat er hann yrkir.” Óðinn mælti: “Þat skapa ek honum, at hann skal þykkja hæstr inum göfgustum mönnum ok inum beztum.” Þórr mælti: “Leiðr skal hann alþýðu allri.” Þá dæmdu dómendr allt þetta á hendr Starkaði, er þeir

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höfðu um mælt, ok sleit svá þinginu. Fóru þeir Hrosshárs-Grani ok Starkaðr til báts síns.

Translation Then just about midnight, Grani Horsehair woke up his foster-son Starkad and asked him to come along with him. They got a small boat, rowed over to another island, and walked through a wood until they came to a clearing where a large group of people was gathered for a meeting. There were eleven men sitting on chairs but a twelfth chair was empty. Starkad and his foster-father joined the assembly, and Grani Horsehair seated himself on the twelfth chair. Everyone present greeted him by the name Odin, and he declared that the judges would have to decide Starkad’s fate. Then Thor spoke up and said: “Since Starkad’s grandmother, Alfhild, preferred a clever giant to Thor himself as the father of her son, I ordain that Starkad himself shall have neither a son nor a daughter, and his family end with him.” Odin: “I ordain that he shall live three life spans.” Thor: “He shall commit a most foul deed in each one of them.” Odin: “I ordain that he shall have the best of weapons and clothing.” Thor: “I ordain that he shall have neither land nor estates.” Odin: “I give him this, that he shall have great riches.” Thor: “I lay this curse on him, that he shall never be satisfied with what he has.” Odin: “I give him victory and fame in every battle.” Thor: “I lay this curse on him, that in every battle he shall be sorely wounded.” Odin: “I give him the art of poetry, so that he shall compose verses as fast as he can speak.” Thor: “He shall never remember afterwards what he composes.” Odin: “I ordain that he shall be most highly thought of by all the noblest and best.” Thor: “The common people shall hate him every one.” Then the judges decreed that all that had been declared should come about. The assembly broke up, and Grani Horsehair and Starkad went back to their boat.

III: 34 How to remember the outcome of a law-suit in The Saga of the Confederates In one of the sagas of Icelanders, Bandamanna saga [The Saga of the Confederates] (from the middle of the thirteenth century), a complicated and cunning lawsuit is accompanied by a skaldic poem, which is composed to prevent forgetting. The example reveals how poetry, despite its non-tangible character, could function as a reminder and a witness, and that way would have served the same purpose as physical tokens or written documents. Bandamanna saga [The Saga of the Confederates] text: source: Bandamanna saga. In Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar. Bandamanna saga. Odds þáttr Ófeigssonar. Ed. Guðni Jónsson. ÍF, 7. Reykjavík, 1936. Ch. 10. translation: The Saga of the Confederates. Trans. Ruth C. Ellison. In The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, Including 49 Tales. V. Ed. Viðar Hreinsson. Reykjavík, 1997. Ch. 10.

Original text Þá mælti Þorgeirr: “Þat megu allir sjá, at gørð þessi er ómerkilig ok heimsklig, at gera þrettán aura silfrs ok eigi meira fyrir svá mikit mál”. “En ek hugða,” segir Egill, “at þér skyldi sjá gørð þykkja merkilig, ok svá mun vera, ef þú hyggr at fyrir þér, því at þat muntu muna á Rangárleið, at einn kotkarl markaði þrettán kúlur í hǫfði þér, ok tóktu þar fyrir þrettán lambær, ok ætlaða ek, at þér skyldi þessi minning allgóð þykkja”. Þorgeirr þagnaði, en þeir Skegg-Broddi ok Járnskeggi vildu engum orðum skipta við Egil. Þá mælti Ófeigr: “Nú vil ek kveða yðr vísu eina, ok hafa þá fleiri at minnum þing þetta ok málalok þessi, er hér eru orðin: 5. Flestr mun, Áms ok Austra ek vátta þat sǫ́ttum, malma runnr of minna, mik gœlir þat, hœlask; gatk hǫfðingjum hringa hattar land, en sandi œst í augu kastat, óríkr vafit flíkum.”

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Egill svarar: “Vel máttu hœlask um þat, at engi einn maðr mun meir hafa siglt á veðr jafnmǫrgum hǫfðingjum”. Nú eptir þetta ganga menn heim til búða sinna.

Translation Then Thorgeir said, “Everyone can see that this settlement is pointless and silly, awarding no more than thirteen ounces of silver in a case on this scale”. “But I thought”, said Egil, “that you at least would see the point of this settlement, and so you will if you think it over. Then you’ll remember how, at the Ranga Assembly, some poor smallholder raised thirteen lumps on your skull, and you accepted thirteen ewes with their lambs in compensation. I thought this would be a good reminder for you”. Thorgeir fell silent. Neither Beard-Broddi nor Jarnskeggi wanted to bandy words with Egil. Then Ofeig spoke up: “Now I want to recite you a verse, so that more people will remember this Althing and the outcome of this case: 5. Many a metal tree of much less has boasted: I record in the pledge that appeased dwarf and giant. In rings I’m not rich, but – I revel in telling it – I hoodwinked those heroes, hurling dust in their eyes.” Egil answered, “Well might you pat yourself on the back! No man can ever have taken the wind out of the sails of so many chieftains”. After this people went back to their booths.

III: 35 Men with good memory in the Laws of Hälsingland When property disputes arise, the law calls on the institution of the minnunga mæn [men with good memories] to resolve the competing claims. Jorþæ balkær [Book of Land] of the Laws of Hälsingland text: source: Codex iuris Helsingici. Ed. D.C.J. Schlyter. Samling af Sweriges Gamla Lagar. Corpus iuris Sueco-Gotorum antiqui, 6. Lund, 1844. translation: Brink, Stefan. 2014. “Minnunga mæn: The Usage of Old Knowledgeable Men in Legal Cases.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 202.

Original text Jorþæ balkær Delæ twe wm iorþ enæ. ok sighiæ baþir fæþernæ sit wæræ fornt ok gamalt. þær skulu baþir minningæ [mæn] till þingx föræ. ok hwar þeræ .VI. mæn næmpnæ. þe XII skulu scoþæ hwar þeræ minnung hawer eræ æller ældræ. ok wæri [þæt] gilt þe göræ. þæn þeræ at minung falder bötæ VI marker. til þræskiftis.

Translation Book of Land If two men have a dispute over the same land and both claim that it is their patrimony, old and ancient, then they both shall come to the thing assembly with men with good memory and each name six men. These twelve shall try which one of them has better or older evidence regarding old possession, and it shall be valid, whichever they do. The one of them who fails regarding evidence of old possession, he shall pay six marker in fine to be divided in three lots.

III: 36 Re-membering a lost deed in the Stockholm Land Registry When the city land records are destroyed in a fire, the oldest members of the council draw on their memories in order to reconstruct the history of a certain property. Stockholms stads jordebok [Stockholm Land Registry] text: source: Stockholms stads jordebok 1420–1474. Ed. Hans Hildebrand. Stockholms stadsböcker från äldre tid. Ser.1; 1–2. Stockholm, 1876. 3. translation: The editors Original text [1421] Anno eodem fore sama borghamæstarana ok radhit kom Magnus skomakare ok kungiordhe at hans gardh mædh hus oc jordh war inscrifuen i the førre bokinne som upbran, effter thy the ælzste i radhit thæt wæl drogho til minnes at hustru Cristin fordhom Jøns cannongiutares hustru haffdhe sik ingiffuit mædh Olaff kannongiutara mædh the øffre hælfftinne som nu fornempde Magnus ægher hustruna effter… Translation [1421] In the same year, Magnus the shoemaker came before the same burgermeisters and council and proclaimed that his property, with house and land, had been registered in the former books which had burned up; accordingly, the oldest [members] of the council recalled [lit., ‘drew to memory’] that goodwife Cristin, formerly the goodwife of Jøns canon-founder, had transferred to Olaff canonfounder with the other half [of the lot] which the just named Magnus inherited from his wife…

Memory in Action

III: 37 Establishing the remembrance of a king across the sea in The Greatest Saga of Óláfr Tryggvason According to this passage from the end of the late medieval Icelandic vita of the Norwegian king Óláfr Tryggvason, Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta, the English King Edward establishes a custom of telling the saga to his own men and he choses for this the first day of Easter each year. Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta [The Greatest Saga of Óláfr Tryggv­ text:  ason] source: Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta. II. Ed. Ólafur Halldórsson. Editiones Arnamagnæanæ. A, 2. Copenhagen, 1961. Ch. 286. translation: The Saga of King Olaf Tryggwason who reigned over Norway A.D. 995 to A.D. 1000. Trans. J. Sephton. London, 1895. Ch. 286.

Original text 286. Jathuarðr konungr tok þat ívanda sinn at segia hǫfþingium sinum ok hirð mǫnnum sǫgu Olafs Tryggva sonar aa paska dagh hinn fyrsta. En þvi sagði helldr sǫgu Olafs konungs aa pascha daginn en einnhuern annan dag at hann kvað Olaf Tryggva son sva hafa verit vm fram aðra konunga sem paska dagr er æðri en aðrir dagar aa .xij. manaðum. Maðr het Ormr ok var Þorliotz son. vítr maðr ok rett orðr. hann bio aa Dyr nesi i Orkn eyium. þa er Jathuarðr var konungr at Eng landi. Ormr sagði sva at hann heyrdi Jathvarð konung lesa sǫgu Olafs Tryggva sonar af þeiri sǫmu bok sem Olafr sialfr hafði sent Adalraði konungi fra Iorsǫlum. AA eínu aare las konungr fyrir hǫfþingium sinum ok allri hirð vm bardagann aa Orminum. ok sagði þar alt aa einn uegh sem aðr er rítat vm braut kvamu Olafs konungs ok vm ferðir hans vt yfir haf til Iorsala. ok hann hefði stað fest sik i klaustri nǫckuru i Syr landi. Ok þa sagði Jathuarðr konungr sinum mǫnnum andlat Olafs Tryggva sonar er þeir menn hǫfðu sagt konungi er þa voro ny komnir til Englandz af Sir landi.

Translation King Edward’s affection for the memory of King Olaf Tryggwason. 286. King Edward made it a custom to relate the Saga of Olaf Tryggwason to his great men and his body-guard on the first day of Easter; and he chose that day rather than any other for the telling of the Saga, saying that Olaf Tryggwason was superior to other kings as much as Easter-day is superior to the other days of

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the whole year. There was a man named Orm, Thorliot’s son, a wise and truthful man, who lived at Dyrness in the Orkneys when Edward was King of England. Orm declared that he heard King Edward read the Saga of Olaf Tryggwason out of the very book that Olaf himself had sent to King Ethelred from Jerusalem. One year when the King had read before his great men and all his body-guard the account of the battle on the Serpent, with the story of King Olaf’s escape, exactly as we have related it; and had told them of his journeys beyond sea to Jerusalem, and how he had fixed his abode at a cloister in Syrland – he added to the story, by announcing the death of Olaf Tryggwason, tidings of which had lately been brought to England by travellers from Syrland.

III: 38 Remembering and venerating – the death and funeral of Saint Þorlákr as staged memory scenes In this so-called ‘bishop’s saga’ a wealth of representative examples of medieval memory scenes and mnemonic practicies is staged: the death of bishop Þorlákr, described as an imitatio Christi; his relics – and the miracles that derive from them – and the shrine that still stands in the cathedral; the setting of the funeral and the eloquent speech at the grave, all contribute to keeping the rememberance of Saint Þorlákr alive. The saga as such also constitutes an important document of Icelandic ecclesiastical history. Þorláks saga byskups [The Saga of Bishop Thorlak] text: source: Þorláks saga byskups in elzta. In Biskupa sögur. II. Ed. Ásdís Egilsdóttir. ÍF, 16. Reykjavík, 2002. Chs. 18–19, 82–83. translation: The Saga of Bishop Thorlak. Þorláks saga byskups. Trans. Ármann Jakobsson and David Clark. Viking Society for Northern Research. Text series, 21. London, 2013. Chs. 18–19, 82–83.

Original text 18. kapítuli […] En er Þorlákr byskup var kominn at andláti beiddisk hann at drekka. Ok er at honum var borit, hné hann at hœgendum ok sofnaði sælliga til Guðs, ok veitti Guð honum þá dýrð at hann þyrsti við andlát sitt, sem sjálfan Guðs son, ok skyldi hvárrgi stǫðvask fyrr en í andligu lífi því er Guðs vinir eru jafnan þyrstir til. Birti Guð þat í andláti ins sæla Þorláks byskups er hann sagði fyrir munn Davíðs, at dýrligr myndi verða dauði heilagra manna, því at ǫllum þótti betra hjá honum ǫndudum en mǫrgum lifandi mǫnnum. […] Þá var búit um líkamann ok skorit hár hans. Hafa menn þennan helgan dóm víða ok fá mikla bót af. Þorlákr byskup andaðisk á Þórsdag, einni nátt fyrir jólaaptan, sex tiga vetra gamall ok hafði fimtán vetr byskup verit. Þá var liðit frá burð Krists ellifu hundruð vetra ok átta tigir ok sex vetr. 19. kapítuli Eptir andlát byskups var lík hans borit í kirkju ok var í sǫnghúsi þrjár nætr at bíða graptar. En annan dag jóla var hann í jǫrð lagðr, ok var þar við staddr Páll prestr, frændi hans, er byskup var eptir hann, ok margir aðrir lærðir menn. […] En áðr menn gengi frá grepti ins sæla Þorláks byskups þá mælti Gizurr Hallsson um þau

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stórtíðendi, er orðin váru, eptir því sem siðvenja var á yfir tiginna manna grepti. Hann tjáði fyrst hverr nytjamaðr Þorlákr byskup hafði verit, bæði staðnum ok ǫllu landsfólki. Þá veik hann nǫkkurum orðum til virðingar þeim byskupum er at stóli hǫfðu setit í Skálaholti áðr Þorlákr kœmi. Eptir það mælti hann svá: “Gott er á þat at minnask at váru vitni ok at sǫgn várra forellra um þá byskupa er fyrir várt minni hafa verit, at sá þykkir hverjum beztr er kunnastr er, ok svá dýrligir menn sem þeir hafa verit allit í sínum byskupsdómi þá er þat þó frábært hversu Þorlákr hefir búit sik til byskupstignar langt frá því sem allir aðrir. […]” Lauk hann sinni rœðu með snjǫllu máli. 82. kapítuli Þá er svá margar ok fáheyrðar jarteinir Þorláks byskups váru birtar ok upp lesnar samþykkðisk þat með ǫllum hǫfðingjum, lærðum ok leikum á landinu at taka líkama hans ór jǫrðu. Því kallaði Páll byskup saman lærða menn ok hǫfðingja í Skálaholt. […] Ok er þar váru allir saman komnir vǫkðu allir um náttina, Guði til lofs ok inum heilaga Þorláki. Um daginn eptir var heilagr dómr hans ór jǫrðu tekinn ok í kirkju borinn með ymnum ok lofsǫngum ok fagrligri processione ok allr þeiri sæmð ok virðing er í þessu landi mátti veittask. Var kistan sett niðr í sǫnghúsi, ok sungu lærðir menn þar Te Deum, en sjúkir menn krupu at kistunni, ok urðu margir menn heilir af. […] Síðan var kistan ok heilagr dómr Þorláks byskups borin í þann stað er hann var lengi dýrkaðr. […] Á því sama ári er heilagr dómr Þorláks byskups var ór jǫrðu tekinn urðu margar jarteinar, þær er ek mun inna með skǫmmu máli. 83. kapítuli […] Af þessum velgerningum ins heilaga Þorláks byskups sem nú hefi ek talt, gafsk mikit fé til staðarins í Skálaholti af ǫllum lǫndum er hans nafn var kunnigt, mest ór Nóregi, mikit af Englandi, Svíþjóð, Danmǫrk, Gautlandi, Gotlandi, Skotlandi, Orkneyjum, Færeyjum, Katanesi, Hjaltlandi, Grœnlandi, en mest innan lands. Ok má þar á marka hverja ást menn hǫfðu til hans, at fyrsta tíma er honum váru tíðir sungnar at staðnum brunnu þar þrír tigir vaxkerta annars hundraðs. Páll byskup lét gera skrín at helgum dómi Þorláks byskups þann gullsmið er Þorsteinn hét, þat sem nú er í dag, ok stendr þat skrín nú yfir háaltari í Skálaholti þar sem Guð gerir fyrir hans verðleika alls konar jarteinir. […] Biðjum nú at hann árni oss viðr allsvaldanda Guð friðar ok farsælu ok góðs endadags þessa lífs, en síðan laði hann oss til himinríkis vistar, frjálsaða af ǫllu djǫflavaldi fyrir sinn hǫfðingskap, at með honum lifum vér sælliga með Guði í himinríkis hirð at eilífu útan enda. Amen.

III: 38 The death and funeral of St Þorlákr as staged memor 

III: 38 The death and funeral of St Þorlákr as staged memory scenes 

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Translation Chapter 18 […] But when Bishop Þorlákr had come to the point of death, he asked for something to drink. And when it was carried to him, he sank onto the pillows and fell asleep blessedly unto God, and God granted him that glory that he thirsted for at his death, just like God’s Son Himself, nor could it be assuaged earlier than in the spiritual life, for which God’s friends are always thirsty. In the death of the blessed Bishop Þorlákr God elucidated what he said earlier from the mouth of David: that the death of holy men would be glorious, because it seemed to all to be better to be beside him in death than by many living men. […] Then the body was prepared and his hair cut. People now have that relic far and wide and derive much comfort from it. Bishop Þorlákr died on Thursday, one night before Christmas Eve, at sixty years old, and he had been bishop for fifteen years. There had then passed 1186 years since the birth of Christ. Chapter 19 After the bishop’s death his body was carried into the church and was kept in the choir for three nights to await burial. But he was laid in the earth on the second day of Christmas, and standing by were Priest Páll, his kinsman who became bishop after him, and many other learned men. […] But before men left the grave of the blessed Bishop Þorlákr, Gizurr Hallsson spoke about the events which had occurred, as was the custom at the burial of distinguished men. He told first of what a useful man Bishop Þorlákr had been both to the see and to all the people of the land. Then he spoke some words to the honour of those bishops who had had residence at the see of Skálaholt before Þorlákr had come. After that he spoke thus: “It is good to remember the witness and traditions of our ancestors about those bishops who lived before our memory, since the one whom they know best seems best to everyone, and as glorious men as they have all been in their episcopates, nevertheless it surpasses all how Þorlákr prepared himself for the dignity of bishop far beyond all others. […]” He closed his speech with eloquent words. […] Chapter 82 When so many unusual miracles of Bishop Þorlákr were revealed and read aloud, it was agreed among all the leading men in the land, clerical and lay, to take his body out of the earth. Therefore Bishop Páll called together clerics and chieftains to Skálaholt. […] And when they had all come together they all kept vigil during the night, to the praise of God and the holy Þorlákr.

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During the following day his holy relics were taken out of the earth and carried into the church with hymns and songs of praise and beautiful processions and with all the honour and veneration which could be achieved in this land. The coffin was set down in the choir and clerics then sang the Te Deum, and sick men knelt at the coffin and many men were healed thereby. […] Then the coffin and Bishop Þorlákr’s holy relics were carried into the place where he was venerated for a long time. […] In the same year that Bishop Þorlákr’s holy relics were taken out of the earth many miracles occurred, which I will mention in a short narrative. Chapter 83 […] Because of these benefits of the holy Bishop Þorlákr which I have now told, much money was given to the see at Skálaholt from all lands in which his name was known, most from Norway, a lot from England, Sweden, Denmark, Gautland, Gotland, Scotland, Orkney, the Faroes, Caithness, Shetland, Greenland, but most from within the country. And it can be observed what love people had for him from this: the first time that services were sung to him at the see, 130 wax candles were burned there. Bishop Páll had a goldsmith named Þorsteinn make a shrine for the holy relics of Bishop Þorlákr which is there to this day, and that shrine now stands over the high altar at Skálaholt where God grants all kinds of miracles according to his merits. […] We pray now that he intercede for us with Almighty God for peace and prosperity and a good end to this life, and afterwards may he lead us to the heavenly lodging, freed from all the devil’s power by his authority, that with him we may live blessedly with God in the court of heaven for ever and ever without end. Amen.

III: 39 Memorialising a king in The Saga of Hákon Hákonarson The short colophon of Hákonar saga Hákonarssonar, a so-called king’s saga about the life of the Norwegian king, Hákon Hákonarson, written by Sturla Þórðarson in the thirteenth century, is an example of how memory serves to virtually canonise the ruler after his death. text: Sturla Þórðarson, Hákonar saga Hákonarsonar [The Saga of Hákon Hákonarsson] source: Hákonar saga Hákonarssonar. In Hákonar saga Hákonarssonar. II. Magnúss saga lagabœtis. Ed. Sverrir Jakobsson, Þorleifur Hauksson and Tor Ulset. ÍF, 32. Reykjavík, 2013. Ch. 401. translation: The Saga of Hacon. Trans. G. W. Dasent. In Icelandic Sagas, and Other Historical Documents Relating to the Settlements and Descents of the Northmen on the British Isles. IV. London, 1894. Ch. 333.

Original text Jesús Kristr, faðir ok sonr ok heilagr andi, geymi ok gæti, signi ok sæmi slíks herra sá er svá marga nytsamlega hluti hefir eftir sik leifða. Per omnia secula. / Lýkr hér sögu Hákonar konungs.

Translation Jesus Christ, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, guard and keep, bless and honour such a lord’s soul, who has left behind him so many profitable things. Per omnia sæcula. Here ends the Saga.

III: 40 The knight and the lily-petal in An Old Swedish Legendary A knight never learns more Latin than the Ave Maria and obsessively recites it from memory. On his death, a lily with golden words on every petal grows from his grave. The translation assumes that it is not just the two-word phrase, but rather the devotional prayer, which had by c. 1200 taken on much of its canonical form, to which the narrative refers. Ett Forn-Svenskt Legendarium [An Old Swedish Legendary] text: source: Ett Forn-Svenskt Legendarium, innehållande Medeltids Kloster-Sagor om Helgon, Påfvar och Kejsare ifrån det 1:sta till det XIII:de Århundradet. Ed. George Stephens and F.A. Dahlgren. SFSS, 7. Stockholm, 1847–74. I: 7. translation: The editors

Original text Riddaren och Lilio-Bladet (Codex Bureanus, c. 1350) En riddar rik ok væl burin gafs . i . clostar : ænghte lærþar : læsa ælla siugga : han formate ok eigh mer nima : æn aue maria . þæt litla orþ han kunne ensamen læsa þaet gik hanom aldregh . w . minne : vtan las þæt baþе naat ok dagh : æ huar han var ælla i huat syslo han var Siþan han var dǫ́þar ok ii iorþ grauin : þa væxte vænast lilia up af hans graf : ok vp . a . huaroio lilio blaþum var aue maria scriuaþ mæþ gulstavum ¶ Mæn grouo tel rotenna ok funno at hon gik vt af hans tungo.

Translation The Knight and the Lily-Petal A rich and well-born knight entered a monastery, never learning to read or sing. He was never capable of understanding more than the Ave Maria. That little prayer alone he was able to recite. It never left his memory and [he] recited it night and day regardless of where he was or what he was doing. When he died and was buried, then the fairest lily grew up from his grave and on every lily petal the Ave Maria was written in gold letters. People dug down to the roots and found that the plant came from his tongue.

III: 41 The soul and memory in The Cloister of the Soul De Claustro Animae [on the cloister of the soul], an allegory on monastic spirituality, is today believed to have been written by the twelfth-century prior of St-Nicholas-de-Regny (1132) and St-Laurent-au-Bois (1152), Hugh of Fouilloy; however, in the Middle Ages, it was generally attributed to Hugh of St Victor. It was translated into Old Swedish by Jöns Budde (d. 1495), a monk from the Brigittine convent, Vallis Gratiae, in Nådendal, Finland. Själens kloster. Claustrum animæ [The Cloister of the Soul; Transtext:  lated from Latin into Old Swedish by Jöns Budde, d. 1495] source: Skrifter till Läsning för Kloster-folk. Ed. F.A. Dahlgren. SFSS, 22. Stockholm, 1875. 120. translation: The editors

Original text [...] för thy allom är nogh witherliket at siälen är odödeliken, oc oändeliken, oc at hon aldrig kan wara wtan mine, ällar aminnilse [...]

Translation [...] for as everyone understands the soul is immortal and eternal, and it can never be without memory or remembrance [...]

III: 42 Memory and revenge in The Chronicle of Duke Erik Political strife between the sons of the Swedish king, Magnus Ladulås – King Birger and dukes Erik and Valdemar – reached a climax in 1306 when at the royal estate at Håtuna, the dukes took their brother prisoner and held him captive for several years at Nyköping castle, an event known as Håtunaleken [the Håtuna game]. In 1317, the king reversed the roles and took Duke Valdemar and Duke Erik captive while attending a banquet at Nyköping castle (Nyköpings gästabud). In the most storied scene in all of medieval Swedish literature, the king then asks, “Mynnes jder nakot aff hatwna leek  / fulgörla mynnes han mik” [Do you the Håtuna game recall? / Full well I do remember it all!]. The dukes are subsequently tortured and said to die of starvation. Erikskrönikan [The Chronicle of Duke Erik] text: source: Erikskrönikan, enligt Cod. Holm. D2 jämte avvikande läsarter ur andra handskrifter. Ed. Rolf Pipping. SFSS, 68. Uppsala, 1963 [1921]. 148–151, 219–221. translation: The Chronicle of Duke Erik: A Verse Epic from Medieval Sweden. Trans. Erik Carlquist and Peter C. Hogg. Lund, 2012. 146–149, 202–203.

Original text

konungen war i hatuna  ok hertoghin kom rät i then luna  som konungin wille til bordz gaa  then tiid konungen them saa  han vntfik them mz mykin tokt  han wiiste ey huat the hado hokt  Thera kläder the wp baro  alle the hertogans men ther waro  gingo wt i thz hwss the skullo hawa lighat  then tid the komo alle tighat  Tha drogho the thera wapn vpa  swa at engen konungsins man thz saa  Then dagh war tha när forgangen  tha ward konung birger fangen  Ok drotning märita med honom sidhan ward örlögh yffrit i wonom  en smalensker swen heet Aruid  then tiid han saa then ofridh 

Translation

The king resided at Håtuna then, and there the dukes arrived just when the king was about to sit down to eat. The king them saw and went to greet and most politely them received, their purpose having not perceived. Their clothes they carried up on land. All the dukes’ men who were at hand went to where their quarters were. When all of them had assembled there, they donned their war-gear furtively, so that none of the king’s men did them see. The day had just begun to fade when they King Birger a prisoner made and with him Queen Margaret too. Now a fight seemed likely to ensue. A squire from Småland, Arvid by name. when he aware of the conflict became



III: 42 Memory and revenge in The Chronicle of Duke Erik 

 1063

ok han forstodh at jlla loot  tha loot han thädhan gaa til foot  Ok konungsins son vpa sin baak  han loop ok haffde mykit omak  han war en vnger man ok stark  ok barin thädhan ok til danmark  Ok fik han konungenom i sith skööt  tara nider a hans kinder flööt  Ok sagde honom thz han haffde seet  tha war thz konung Erik leet  taghar han fra hwat ther war tiit  the tidhande flugho tha yffrit wiit  liwer noghor man thz mon  thz barn war konungsins förste son  [O]m mikelsmesso tha war thzta the fengilse haffdo thz at sätta  at the willo thera harm swa hämpna  huat man wille for konungin nempna  thz giordhin han haffde ey annat til  the sagdo gör som thin broder wil  laat them wp badhe hwss ok land  ok antwardet hertogh erik i hand  Til stokholms the han tha fördho  tha the borgara thzta hördo  Tha sagdo wy viliom ey husit giwa  then stund the wisto konungin liwa  Til nyköpungs fördo the han thädhan  herra matius la fore stokholm mädhan  fore husit ok haffde stadhin  han giorde som hertoghin badhin  konungen satto the i nyköpung nidh  ok gaffwo honom hwat han torffte widh  til sith liiff bade öll ok maat  swa at fangit folk ey bäter gaat  farit än the foro bädhe badhe til mat dryk ok kläde 

and saw that it would badly end, on foot he thence his way did wend, while on his back the king’s son lay. Through many hardships he made his way – he was a young man and very strong – and bore him from there to Denmark along and in the king’s arms laid him at last – tears down his cheeks were flowing fast – and told him of what he a witness had been. King Erik in irate mood was seen when he learnt of what had happened there. The news of it spread everywhere. Does anyone living recall what was done? That child of the king was his eldest son. All this happened at Michaelmas. The aim of their arresting was to have their wrongs redressed that way. Whatever they to the king did say, he had no choice but to comply. They said: Do not your brother’s will defy! Hand over to them both castles and lands and place all those in Duke Erik’s hands. To Stockholm they him then transferred The burghers said, when they that heard, We wish to no one this castle to give! as soon as they knew that the king did live. From there to Nyköping they took him away. Lord Mats meanwhile outside Stockholm lay before the castle, and the town controlled. He did what he by the dukes was told. The king at Nyköping they left behind and gave him what he of every kind needed as sustenance, food and ale, so that no one could prisoners regale better than they those two did treat, with clothing, drink and food to eat.

[…]

[…]

[T]he toko tha liws ok gingo thädhan  hertogane soffwo bade mädhan  Ok lagho i thera sängh nakne  ther wider wordho the wakne  at dörren osakta wp gik  hertogh wallemar han fik  en kiortil ok kom ther i  tha waro the inne meer än tii 

They then took lights and went from there. Meanwhile the dukes both sleeping were and each lay naked on his bed What them to awaken abruptly led was that the door was open thrown. Then Duke Valdemar, on his own, a tunic found and put it on. Now more than ten in there had gone

1064 

 Part III: Memory in Action

Ok haffdo thera swerd dragith Summi willo han huggit ok summi slagith  Colrat isar war honom nest  i honom fik han handfäst  Ok hoff han nider wnder sik  Ok sagde broder hielp nw mik  Tha lupo the meer än tiwgho vpa han  summe willo stingan ok summe slan  Hertogh Erik sagde lat wara som er  war stridh dugher ekke nw här  The skullo sik ther fangna giwa  swa frampt the willo lenger liffua  Ther kom konungin gangande nidher  styrnade öghom hardla vreder  Mynnes jder nakot aff hatwna leek  fulgörla mynnes han mik  Thenne er ey bätre än hin j wardhin nw fölgia mik om sin  The bundo tha beggis thera hender  ok leddo them tha badha sender  jnnan tornit barfötta  en tyzsk heyt walram skytta  han lagde boyor at thera been  thz war konungenom inthet i geen

and all their swords had drawn alike. At some he thrust and at others did strike. Colrat Isar closest to him stood and with him he grapple could, pushed him beneath himself somehow and called out: ‘Brother, help me now!’ Then a score themselves at him did throw; some tried to pierce him or inflict a blow. Duke Erik said: Now hold your guard! For us to fight here is too hard. They were obliged if they to live any longer were. There the king came walking down, with staring eyes and a furious frown: ‘Do you the Håtuna game recall? Full well I do remember it all! This will no better than that one be! Now you will have to comply with me.’ Then the hands of them both they tied and together them led outside, and they barefoot into the tower came. A German, Walram Crossbowman by name, shackles around their legs did fit. The king no objection had to it.

Runic Inscriptions

III: 43 Commemorating the reign of King Haraldr on the Jelling stone The Jelling stone stands in eastern Jutland, Denmark, in the centre of the imposing Jelling monument. Apart from the inscription, the impressive three-sided stone is richly decorated, with animal and plant ornamentation and a Christ figure. This Viking Age stone is dated to AD 965, which was the year of the baptism of the Danish king Haraldr blátǫnn (Bluetooth). The word “after” (aft) shows that the stone is raised in memory of Haraldr’s parents, Gormr and Þyrvé. The stone also stands as a memorial for Haraldr himself and for the religious and political changes that he brought about; the inscription mentions that he made the Danes Christian and ruled over all of Denmark and Norway. text: Jelling inscription (sometimes called Jelling stone 2, the large Jelling stone or Harald’s stone) Danske runeindskrifter (http://runer.ku.dk/) source: translation: Danske runeindskrifter (http://runer.ku.dk/)

Original text Haraldr kunungR bað gørva kumbl þǿsi æft Gōrm, faður sinn, ok æft Þōrvī, mōður sīna, sā Haraldr es sēR vann Danmǫrk alla ok Norveg ok dani gærði krīstna

Translation King Haraldr ordered these kumbls made in memory of Gormr, his father, and in memory of Þyrvé, his mother; that Haraldr who won for himself all of Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-111

1068 

 Part III: Runic Inscriptions

Fig. 1: The Jelling stone, front side

III: 44 Memory’s role in the Rök stone The longest known runic inscription in stone – and given its complex and fascinating character at every level (i.a., structure, genre, use of older and younger futharks and even ‘secret’ runes) very likely the most thoroughly discussed runic text of all – the early ninth-century Rök stone (Ög 136) is dominated by its relation to memory. Beginning like so many other Nordic runestones with aft (lit., ‘after’, i.e., ‘in memory of’), the text additionally on four occasions uses the expression sagum mogminni, a phrase that has attracted much attention. Although an alternative transcription of the text would render the phrase simply sagum ungmænni ‘I [or we] say to the young men’, scholars generally understand it to indicate ‘I [or we] say the mogminni’, and link mogminni to a number of lexical choices building on minni. It in turn is a term which, as one well-regarded scholar notes, indicates in this context: (1) memory, remembrance; (2) old myths and legends preserved in memory; (3) a stimulus to memory of old myths and legends, such as pictures, toasts, or hinting questions. The first element mog has been connected to the common Nordic term almue (Swedish allmoge), indicating rustics or peasantry; thus, mogminni might be understood to refer to ‘common or shared memory’, here rendered in the translation ‘folktale’. The modern compound ‘folk memory’ (i.e. folkminne, folkeminne, folkeminde) has been used in Nordic scholarship for some two centuries as the native expressions for ‘folklore’. Remarkably, the Rök stone appears to anticipate the same line of reasoning a millennium earlier. source and translation: Samnordisk runtextdatabas (Scandinavian Runic-text Database) = www.nordiska.uu.se/ forskn/samnord.htm/

Original text Aft Vamoð standa runaR þaR. Æn Varinn faði, faðiR, aft faigian sunu. Sagum mogminni/ungmænni þat, hværiaR valraufaR vaRin tvaR þaR, svað tvalf sinnum vaRin numnaR at valraufu, baðaR saman a ymissum mannum. þat sagum annart, hvaR fur niu aldum an urði fiaru meðr Hraiðgutum, auk do meðr hann umb sakaR. Reð ÞioðrikR hinn þurmoði, stilliR flutna, strandu HraiðmaraR. SitiR nu garuR a guta sinum, skialdi umb fatlaðR, skati Mæringa. þat sagum tvalfta, hvar hæstR se GunnaR etu vettvangi a, kunungaR tvaiR tigiR svað a liggia. þat sagum þrettaunda, hvariR tvaiR tigiR kunungaR satin at Siolundi fiagura vintur at fiagurum nampnum, burniR fiagurum brøðrum. ValkaR fim, Raðulfs syniR, HraiðulfaR fim, Rugulfs syniR, HaislaR fim, Haruðs syniR, GunnmundaR/KynmundaR fim, BiarnaR syniR. Nu’k m[inni] m[eðr] allu [sa]gi. AinhvaRR ... [sva]ð ... [æ]ftiR fra.

1070 

 Part III: Runic Inscriptions

Sagum mogminni/ungmænni þat, hvaR Inguldinga vaRi guldinn [a]t kvanaR husli. Sagum mogminni/ungmænni, [h]vaim se burinn niðR drængi. Vilinn es þat. Knua/knyia knatti iatun. Vilinn es þat ... Sagum mogminni/ungmænni: Þorr. Sibbi viaværi ol nirøðR.

Translation In memory of Vámóðr stand these runes. And Varinn coloured them, the father, in memory of his dead son. I say the folktale / to the young men, which the two war-booties were, which twelve times were taken as war-booty, both together from various men. I say this second, who nine generations ago lost his life with the Hreidgoths; and died with them for his guilt. Þjóðríkr the bold, chief of seawarriors, ruled over the shores of the Hreiðsea. Now he sits armed on his Goth(ic horse), his shield strapped, the prince of the Mærings. I say this the twelfth, where the horse of Gunnr sees fodder on the battlefield, where twenty kings lie. This I say as thirteenth, which twenty kings sat on Sjólund for four winters, of four names, born of four brothers: five Valkis, sons of Hráðulfr, five Hreiðulfrs, sons of Rugulfr, five Háisl, sons of Hôrðr, five Gunnmundrs/Kynmundrs, sons of Bjôrn. Now I say the tales in full. Someone ... I say the folktale / to the young men, which of the line of Ingold was repaid by a wife’s sacrifice. I say the folktale / to the young men, to whom is born a relative, to a valiant man. It is Vélinn. He could crush a giant. It is Vélinn ... I say the folktale / to the young men: Þórr. Sibbi of Vé, nonagenarian, begot (a son).

Fig. 1: The runic phrase sagum mogminni ‘I [or we] say the mogminni [folk memory]’ (or alternatively, sagum ungmænni ‘I [or we] say to the young men’). See full images of the Rök stone in colour plates 6 and 7.

III: 45 A runic miscellany of memory, memorials and remembering There are some six thousand Nordic runic inscriptions from over a millennium, fully a third of which have to do with memorialization and commemoration. Yet although several thousand runic inscriptions in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark convey through various phrases the sense that they were specifically raised in memory of, or to commemorate, certain individuals (aft, eptir), this practice did not travel with the westward movement to the Faroes and Iceland. Nearly three-quarters of the known Icelandic runic inscriptions, for example, say that a certain person hvílir (rests) or liggr (lies) there; none are said to have been raised in memory of an individual. sources and translations for Norwegian and Swedish inscriptions: Samnordisk runtextdatabas (Scandinavian Runic-text Database) = www.nordiska.uu.se/forskn/samnord.htm/ sources and translations for Danish inscriptions (DR): Danish National Museum’s Danske Runeindskrifter = http://runer.ku.dk/

DR 359 (Istaby, Blekinge) This early seventh-century runestone is one of several related so-called Listerbystones from south Scandinavia. Written in the older futhark, the Istaby stone represents an early example of intergenerational commemoration of deceased family members.

Original text AfatR Hariwulafa HaþuwulafR HaeruwulafiR warait runaR þaiaR.

Translation In memory of HariwulfR (Herjólfr), HaþuwulafR (Höðulfr), descendant of HeruwulfR (Hjǫrólfr), wrote these runes.

1072 

 Part III: Runic Inscriptions

DR 110 (Virring, Jutland) A runestone from the Viking Age, now standing in the antechamber of Virring church in Jutland, Denmark, specifically employs the expression gerði minni ‘made these memorials’, but the translation also twice employs a term equivalent to ‘in memory of’, an expression appearing nearly 2,000 times in the Scandinavian Runic-text Database. The phrase ‘in memory of’ translates such formulaic expressions as ept, eptir, and aft, all terms indicating that the action was taken in honour of the individual being memorialized.

Original text Gei[r]mundr(?) ... [so]nr gerði minni [þa]u ept Sassur. Starr reisti stein ept dauðan. *Þórr vígi þessi kuml.

Translation Gei[r]mundr(?) ... [so]n made these memorials in memory of Sassurr. Starr raised the stone in memory of the deceased. May Þórr hallow this monument.

Öl 1 (Karlevi, Öland) The late tenth-century Karlevi stone, located on the Swedish island of Öland (Vickleby sokn, Altgultsrums härad), includes both prose and a stanza in dróttkvætt in praise of a Danish leader, yet is written in a West Norse dialect.

Original text S[t]e[inn] [þe]ss[i] er settr eptir Sibba Góða/Goða, son Foldars, en hans liði setti at ... ... Folginn liggr hinns fylgðu, flestr vissi þat, mestar dæðir dolga Þrúðar draugr í þessu haugi; munat Reið-Viðurr ráða rógstarkr í Danmôrku [E]ndils jôrmungrundar ørgrandari landi. {In nomin[e](?) Ie[su](?) ...}

Translation This stone is set up in memory of Sibbi Góði/Goði, son of Foldarr, and his retinue set on ... Hidden lies the one whom followed (most know that) the greatest deeds, Þrud’s warrior of battles, in this mound. Never will a more honest, hard-fighting



III: 45 A runic miscellany of memory, memorials and remembering 

 1073

‘wagon-Viðurr’ upon Endill’s expanses rule the land in Denmark. [This stone is placed in memory of Sibbi the good, Fuldarr’s son, and his retinue placed on ...

Fig. 1: The late tenth-century Karlevi runestone (Öl 1)

1074 

 Part III: Runic Inscriptions

... He lies concealed, he who was followed by the greatest deeds (most men knew that), a chieftain (battle-tree of [the Goddess] Þrúðr) in this howe; Never again shall such a battle-hardened sea-warrior (Viðurr-of-the-Carriage of [the Sea-king] Endill’s mighty dominion ( = God of the vessels of the the sea) ), rule unsurpassed over land in Denmark.] {In the name of Jesus(?) ...}

Sm 16 (Nöbbele, Småland) This runestone from the late tenth or early eleventh century provides one of the most complete records available of the relationship between runic writing, monument production, and commemoration, noting that as long as the stone and the rune staves live, so too will the father gætit verða ‘be commemorated’, that is, ’be mentioned, be spoken of’.

Original text Hróðsteinn ok Eilífr, Áki ok Hákon reistu þeir sveinar eptir sinn fôður kuml kennilikt eptir Kala/Kalla dauðan. Því mun gó[ðs manns u]m getit verða, meðan steinn lifir ok stafir rúna. 

Translation Hróðsteinn and Eilífr (and) Áki and Hákon, these lads raised the remarkable monument in memory of their father, in memory of Kali/Kalli the deceased. So the good man will be commemorated while the stone and the rune-staves live. 

Sö 173 (Tystberga, Södermanland) This eleventh-century runestone is one of nearly thirty memorials in the Lake Mälaren area connected to a famous voyage led by Ingvarr/Yngvarr, an historic event that later fed into Icelandic saga production in Yngvars saga víðfǫrla.

Original text Myskja ok Manni/Máni létu reisa kuml þessi at bróður sinn Hróðgeir ok fǫður sinn Holmstein. Hann hafði vestarla um verit lengi, dóu austarla með Ingvari.



III: 45 A runic miscellany of memory, memorials and remembering 

 1075

Translation Myskja and Manni/Máni had these monuments raised in memory of their brother Hróðgeirr and their father Holmsteinn. He had long been in the west; died in the east with Ingvarr.

N 247 (Skadeberg, Rogaland) This twelfth-century runestone provides insights into, as well as contemporary evidence of, the tradition of erfi-øl or erfisdrykkja in West Norse (ale or drink of a funeral feast), also known as at drekkia minni (to drink memory).

Original text [Ǫ]lhúsmenn reistu stein þenna eptir Skarða, en þeir drukku [e]rfi hans 

Translation The drinking-companions raised this stone in memory of Skarði when they drank his funeral-feast.

DR 413 (Gunnhildr Cross) Carved in the twelfth century, this walrus ivory crucifix bears a lengthy Latin inscription in Latin versals, with the name of the owner in runic characters. It is not know which Gunnhildr this is meant to be, although it is thought more likely that she was the daughter of Svend Grathe (1146–57), than of Svend Estridsøn (1047–74).

Original text (Iesus Nazarenus rex judeorum vita mors ecclesia sancta synagoga) (Videte [m]anus meas et pedes meos dicit Dominus venite benedicti patris mei dicedite a me maledicti in ignem pater Habraham miserere mei et mitte Lazarum ut [in]tinguat extremum digiti sui in aquam ut refrig fili recordare quia recepisti bona in vita tua) Gunhild (qui me cernit pro Helena magni Sueonis regis filia Christum oret que me ad memoriam Dominice passionis parari fecerat)

1076 

 Part III: Runic Inscriptions

(Qui in Christum crucifixum credunt Liutgeri memo[ri]am orando faciant qui me sculpserat roga tu Helene que et Gunhild vocat[ur].) 

Translation (Jesus of Nazareth, king of the Jews, Life, Death, the Holy Church, the Synagogue) (Regard my hands and my feet says the Lord. Come here, into my Father’s blessing, go away from me, you accursed, to (eternal) fire. Father Abraham, take pity on me and send Lazarus, that he may dip his finger in water and cool (my tongue). Son, remember that you have done good in your life) Gunnhildr (He who sees me shall pray to Christ for Helena, daughter of King Sueono Magnus, who has had me made in remembrance of the Lord’s suffering) (Those who in the crucified Christ, shall in their prayers remember Liutgerus who carved me at the behest of Helena, who is also called Gunnhildr.) 

N 446 (Tingvoll, Møre og Romsdal) A thirteenth-century inscription on marble from Tingvoll church, Norway, asks that the patron’s soul be remembered in prayer, while at the same time, reminds the reader that this same Gunnarr was responsible for the religious building in which the inscription stands.

Original text Ek bið fyrir Guðs sakar yðr lærða menn, er varðveita stað þenna, ok alla þá, er ráða kunnu boen mína: minnizk sálu minnar í helgum bœnum. En ek hét Gunnarr, ok gerða ek hús þetta. Valete! 

Translation I pray for God’s guilt to you learned men who are in charge of this place, and all of you, who can interpret my prayer: remember my soul in holy prayers. And I was called Gunnarr and I made this house. Farewell!



III: 45 A runic miscellany of memory, memorials and remembering 

 1077

G 183 (Sanda, Gotland) A fourteenth-century inscription on a fragment of a grave-slab from Sanda church, Gotland – currently in Statens Historiska Museum in Stockholm – asks that the couple’s souls be prayed for and ends with the final admonition, Minnizk (remember).

Original text Þi[ó]ð[m]u[ndr] ... [þ]eim sem bið[j]a fyrir vári sál, Nikulásar ok Geirvéar. Minnizk.

Translation Þjóðmundr ... those who pray for our souls, Nikulás and Geirvé. Remember.

G 290 (Hellvi, Gotland) A fourteenth-century inscription on a grave-slab in the floor of Hellvi church, Gotland, offers its reader/audience the stearnest of reminders about the brevity of life: ‘Remember that she was as you are now. You will be as she is now.’

Original text Bôðvé(?) hvílisk [h]ér, Ganna dóttir á Hambri/Hammars. Biðið fyrir ... Minnizk þet at hon var þat sem ér er[u] [n]ú [o]k ér verð[i]ð þet [se]m hon er [n]ú.

Translation Bótvé(?) rests here, daughter of Ganni of Hambrir/Hammars. Pray for ... Remember that she was as you are now and you will be as she is now.

Colour Plates



Colour Plates 

 1081

Colour plate 1: Several of the larger pre-Viking Age burial mounds at Old Uppsala, Sweden, a cultic centre and royal seat. See references in I: 6 ‘Performance Studies’ by Terry Gunnell; I: 8 ‘Archaeology’ by Anders Andrén; I: 10 ‘Medieval Architecture’ by Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen and Henning Laugerud; and II: 31 ‘Sites’ by Torun Zachrisson.

Colour plate 2: Þingvellir, Iceland, the assembly grounds of the early settlers, the venue where many of the family sagas play out, now a National Park, and, without a doubt, Iceland’s most iconic national site of memory. See references in I: 18 ‘Media Studies’ by Kate Heslop and II: 54 ‘Icelandic Perspectives’ by Simon Halink. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-112

1082 

 Colour Plates

Colour plate 3: The Gokstad ship exhibited in the Viking Ship Museum in Bygdøy, Oslo. See references in I: 11 ‘Museology’ by Silje Opdahl Mathisen.



Colour Plates 

 1083

Colour plate 4: Urnes Church relief. The Urnes style is named after the decoration on a stave church in western Norway. See references in II: 11 ‘Ornamentation’ by Anne-Sofie Gräslund.

Colour plate 5: Fourteenth-century drinking horn traditionally said to have belonged to Bishop Aslak Bolt. For a treatment of the tradition of drinking memory toasts, see II: 40 ‘Memorial toasts’ by Lars Lönnroth.

1084 

 Colour Plates

Colour plate 6: Rök stone (Ög 136), Östergötland, Sweden (east side). See references in I: 15 ‘Runology’ by Mats Malm.



Colour Plates 

Colour plate 7: Rök stone (Ög 136), Östergötland, Sweden (west side). See references in I: 15 ‘Runology’ by Mats Malm.

 1085

Colour plate 8: Ramsund carving (Sö 101), Eskilstuna, Sweden. See references in I: 15 ‘Runology’ by Mats Malm.

1086   Colour Plates



Colour Plates 

 1087

Colour plate 9: Rune stone (U 978), Old Uppsala, Sweden, now in the church wall, earlier placed as the tabletop of the altar. See references in II: 31 ‘Sites’ by Torun Zachrisson.

Colour plate 10: Jelling stone, Denmark (DR 42). See references in II: 50 ‘Danish Perspectives’ by Pernille Hermann.

1088   Colour Plates



Colour Plates 

 1089

Colour plate 11: The Glavendrup rune stone on Funen, Denmark (DR 209), accompanied by participants in the Viking moot 2016. See references in II: 32 ‘Memorial Landscapes’ by Pernille Hermann.

1090 

 Colour Plates

Colour plate 12: Page from the Icelandic manuscript GkS1812, which consists of three fragments originating from the period between 1200 and 1350 and bound together in the later Middle Ages. Contains among other learned material world maps. See references in II: 25 ‘Cartography’ by Rudolf Simek.



Colour Plates 

Colour plate 13: The Uppsala redaction of the Prose Edda, DG 11 4to (Iceland, ca. 1300), 1v–2r. Left: Drawing of a bishop below the words “Hier er vnder pryamvs konvngr”. Right: Incipit to the Prose Edda written as a rubrication and beginning of the prologue. See references in II: 3 ‘Manuscripts’ by Lukas Rösli.

 1091

1092 

 Colour Plates

Colour plate 14: Detail of the Icelandic manuscript Skálholtsbók yngri, AM 354 fol. f. 20r, c. 1400. Index fingers. Later additions and notes in the margins indicate that Skálholtsbók yngri, AM 354 fol., was used as reference book and primer over several centuries. Different types of hands with pointing or counting fingers are to be found in several legal manuscripts and can be interpreted as visual aids for memorisation and retrieval. See references in I: 14 ‘Material Philology’ by Lena Rohrbach.



Colour Plates 

Colour plate 15: Óðinn with Huginn and Muninn in an eighteenth-century Icelandic manuscript SÁM (Stofnun Árna Magnússonar á Íslandi) 66. See references in II: 10 ‘Óðinn’s Ravens’ by Stephen A. Mitchell.

 1093

1094 

 Colour Plates

Colour plate 16: St Olofsholm, formerly Akergarn, on Gotland has been a pilgrimage route since at least the thirteenth century. See references in II: 28 ‘Pilgrimage – Gotland’ by Tracey Sands.

Colour plate 17: Altar-frontal c. 1275, from the church of Kinsarvik, Hordaland in Norway. See references in I: 21 ‘Visual Culture’ by Henning Laugerud.



Colour Plates 

Colour plate 18: ‘The rich man’s prayer and the poor man’s prayer’, mural painting from around 1500 in the vault above the nave of Keldby Church on Møn, Denmark. See references in II: 9 ‘Images’ by Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen.

 1095

1096 

 Colour Plates

Colour plate 19: Life-size wooden sculpture of the seated Man of Sorrows from around 1500, possibly pertaining to a Corpus Christi altar (not extant) in the Bridgettine Mariager Cloister in Eastern Jutland, Denmark. See references in II: 12 ‘Animation’ by Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen.



Colour Plates 

Colour plate 20: Mary enthroned from Urnes church (MA 46). See references in II: 13 ‘Marian Representations’ by Karoline Kjesrud.

 1097

Colour plate 21: Alabaster altarpiece from the late fifteenth-century at Skarð church in Skarðsströnd, Iceland. See references in II: 42 ‘Donation Culture’ by Agnes Arnórsdóttir.

1098   Colour Plates

Colour Plates 

Colour plate 22: Carl Larsson’s Midvinterblot (1915). See references in II: 57 ‘Swedish Perspectives’ by Stephen A. Mitchell.

  1099

1100 

 Colour Plates

Colour plate 23: Hákon Hákonarson, king of Norway (1217–1263). Lerwick Town Hall, stained glass, c. 1883. See references in II: 65 ‘The Northern Isles’ by Stephen A. Mitchell.



Colour Plates 

Colour plate 24: Le Dieu Thor, la plus barbare d’entre les barbares divinités de la vieille Germanie 1915 [The god Thor, the most barbarous among the barbarian deities of Old Germany]. See references in II: 66 ‘French Perspectives’ by Pierre-Brice Stahl.

 1101

1102 

 Colour Plates

Colour plate 25: Image of the pagan crowd from the 2016 movie Viking. See references in II: 70 ‘Russian Perspectives – Viking’ by Barbora Davidková.

Colour plate 26: Image from the 2016 movie Viking of the baptism of Kiev. See references in II: 70 ‘Russian Perspectives – Viking’ by Barbora Davidková.

Select Bibliography of Pre-Modern Nordic Memory Studies This bibliography is not a general bibliography of international memory studies; it is a select bibliography based on the bibliographies of the present handbook. Addis, Donna R., Alana T. Wong and Daniel Schacter. 2007. “Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future: Common and distinct neural substrates during event construction and elaboration.” Neuropsychologia 45: 1363–1377. Adriansen, Inge. 2010. Erindringssteder i Danmark. Copenhagen. Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. 2000. “The Memory of Strong Women and the Shaping of Icelandic Identity.” In Women’s Politics and Women in Politics. In Honour of Ida Blom. Ed. Sölvi Sogner and Gro Hagemann. Bergen. 21–30. Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. 2007. “Erindring i afskrift. Om den islandske oldtidsinteresse i 1500- og 1600-tallet.” In Renæssancens Verden. Tænkning, kulturliv, dagligliv og efterliv. Ed. Ole Høiris and Jens Vellev. Aarhus. 283–299. Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. 2009. “Erindring og ejendomsret. Jordegendommens betydning for islandsk identitetsdannelse i middelalder og tidlig moderne tid.” In Tankar om ursprung. Forntiden och medeltiden i nordisk historieanvändning. Ed. Samuel Edquist, Lars Hermanson and Stefan Johansson. Stockholm. 81–94. Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. 2013. “Cultural Memory and Gender in Iceland from Medieval to Early Modern Times.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 378–399. Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. 2014. “Legal Culture and Historical Memory in Medieval and Early Modern Iceland.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 211–230. Amundsen, Arne Bugge. 2010. “Churches and the Culture of Memory. A Study of Lutheran Church Interiors in Østfold, 1537–1700.” ARV. Nordic Yearbook of Folklore 66: 115–137. Andrén, Anders. 2013. “Places, Monuments, and Objects: The Past in Ancient Scandinavia.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 267–281. Artelius, Tore. 2004. “Minnesmakarnas verkstad: om vikingatida bruk av äldre gravar och begravningsplatser.” In Minne och myt. Konsten att skapa det förflutna. Ed. Åsa Berggren, Stefan Arvidsson and Ann-Mari Hållans. Vägar till Midgård, 5. Lund. 99–120. Artelius, Tore and Mats Lindqvist. 2007. Döda minnen. Riksantikvarieämbetet, Arkeologiska undersökningar. Skrifter, 70. Stockholm. Arwill-Nordbladh, Elisabeth. 2007. “Memory and Material Culture – the Rune-stone at Rök.” In Cultural interaction between east and west. Archaeology, artefacts and human contacts in northern Europe. Ed. Ulf Fransson et al. Stockholm Studies in Archaeology, 44. Stockholm. 56–60. Arwill-Nordbladh, Elisabeth. 2008. “Aska och Rök – om minne och materiell kultur i nordisk vikingatid.” In Arkeologi och identitet. Ed. Bodil Petersson and Peter Skoglund. Acta Archaeologica Lundensia, Series altera in 8o, No. 53. Lund. 169–188.

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Ásdís Egilsdóttir. 2006. “From Orality to Literacy: Remembering the Past and the Present in Jóns saga helga.” In Reykholt som makt og lærdomssenter i den islandske og nordiske kontekst. Ed. Else Mundal. Reykholt. 215–228. Assmann, Aleida. 2008. “Canon and Archive.” In Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Media and Cultural Memory, 8. Berlin and New York. 97–107. Assmann, Aleida. 2011 [1999]. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization. Arts of Memory. Cambridge. Assmann, Jan. 1988. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” New German Critique 65: 125–133. Assmann, Jan. 1998. Moses the Egyptian. The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism. Cambridge, MA. Assmann, Jan. 2006 [2000]. Religion and Cultural Memory. Ten Studies. Stanford. Assmann, Jan. 2008. “Communicative and cultural memory.” In Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Media and Cultural Memory, 8. Berlin and New York. 109–118. Assmann, Jan. 2011. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization. Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. New York. Assmann, Jan. 2014. From Akhenaten to Moses: Ancient Egypt and Religious Change. Cairo, New York. Bandlien, Bjørn. 2013. “Hegemonic Memory, Counter-Memory, and Struggles for Royal Power: The Rhetoric of the Past in the Age of King Sverrir Sigurðsson of Norway.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 355–375. Bennett, Lisa L. 2007. “‘The Most Important of Events’: The ‘burning-in’ motif as a site of cultural memory in Icelandic sagas.” Journal of The Australian Early Medieval Association 3.1: 69–86. Bennett, Lisa L. 2008. “Conquering Viking Enemies in Icelandic Cultural Memory.” In Vikings and Their Enemies. Ed. Katrina Burge. Melbourne. 70–81. Bennett, L.L. 2014. “Burial Practices as Sites of Cultural Memory in the Íslendingasögur.” Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 10: 27–52. Bergsveinn Birgisson. 2010. “The Old Norse Kenning as a Mnemonic Figure.” In The Making of Memory in the Middle Ages. Ed. Lucie Doležalová. Later Medieval Europe, 4. Leiden. 199–214. Brenner, Elma, Meredith Cohen and Mary Franklin-Brown, eds. 2013. Memory and Commemoration in Medieval Culture. Farnham. Brink, Stefan. 2001. “Mythologizing Landscape. Place and Space of Cult and Myth.” In Kontinuitäten und Brüche in der Religionsgeschichte. Festschrift für Anders Hultgård zu seinem 65. Geburtstag am 23.12.2001. Ed. M. Stausberg et al. Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde, 31. Berlin and New York. 76–112. Brink, Stefan. 2014. “Minnunga mæn: The Usage of Old Knowledgeable Men in Legal Cases.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 197–210. Burke, Peter. 2000. “Foundation Myths and Collective Identities in Early Modern Europe.” In Europe and the Other and Europe as the Other. Ed. Bo Strath. Collection Multicultural Europe, 10. New York. 113–122.



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Burström, Mats, Björn Winberg and Torun Zachrisson. 1996. Fornlämningar och folkminnen. Stockholm. Byock, Jesse L. 2004. “Social Memory and the Sagas: The Case of Egils saga.” Scandinavian Studies 76.3: 299–331. Carruthers Mary and Jan Ziolkowski, eds. 2002. The Medieval Craft of Memory. An Anthology of Texts and Pictures. Pennsylvania, PA. Carruthers, Mary. 1990. The Book of Memory. A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge. Carruthers, Mary. 1993. “The Poet as Masterbuilder: Composition and Locational Memory in the Middle Ages.” New Literary History 24.4: 881–904. Carruthers, Mary. 1998. The Craft of Thought. Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200. Cambridge. Carruthers, Mary. 2010. “How to Make a Composition. Memory-Craft in Antiquity and in the Middle Ages.” In Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates. Ed. Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz. New York. 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. 59–74. Connerton, Paul. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge. Doležalová, Lucie, ed. 2010. The Making of Memory in the Middle Ages. Later Medieval Europe, 4. Leiden. Draaisma, Douwe. 2000 [1995]. Metaphors of Memory. A History of Ideas about the Mind. Cambridge. 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. Dudai, Yadin and Micah G. Edelson. 2016. “Personal memory: Is it personal, is it memory?” Memory Studies 9.3: 275–283. Eriksen, Anne. 1999. Historie, minne og myte. Oslo. Eriksen, Anne. 2010. “Memorial, Sentiment and Exemplarity.” ARV. Nordic Yearbook of Folklore 66: 351–370. Erll, Astrid and Ansgar Nünning, eds. 2008. Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Media and Cultural Memory, 8. Berlin and New York. Erll, Astrid. 2008. “Cultural Memory Studies: An Introduction.” In Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin. 1–15. Erll, Astrid. 2011 [2005]. Memory in Culture. New York. Fechner-Smarsly, Thomas. 1996. Krisenliteratur. Zur Rhetorizität und Ambivalenz in der isländischen Sagaliteratur. Frankfurt am Main, etc. Foley, John Miles. 1988. The Theory of Oral Composition: History and Methodology. Bloomington, IN, and Indianapolis, MN. Foley, John Miles. 1992. “Word-Power, Performance, and Tradition.” Journal of American Folklore 105: 275–301. Foley, John Miles. 1995. The Singer of Tales in Performance. Bloomington, IN. Foot, Sarah. 1999. “Remembering, Forgetting and Inventing: Attitudes to the Past in England after the First Viking Age.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 9: 185–200.

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Geary, Patrick J. 1994. Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium. Princeton, NJ. Gedi, Noa and Yigal Elam. 1996. “Collective Memory – What Is It?” History and Memory 8.2: 30–50. Ginzburg, Carlo. 2004. “Memory and Distance: Learning from a Gilded Silver Vase (Antwerp, c. 1530).” Diogenes 51: 99–112. Gísli Sigurðsson. 2004. The Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition: A Discourse on Method. Transl. Nicholas Jones. Publications of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature, 2. Cambridge, MA. [Icelandic orig. 2002] Gísli Sigurðsson. 2013. “Past Awareness in Christian Environments: Source-Critical Ideas about Memories of the Pagan Past.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 400–410. Gísli Sigurðsson. 2014. “To Construct a Past that Suits the Present: Sturla Þórðarson on Conflicts and Alliances with King Haraldr hárfagri.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 175–196. Glauser, Jürg. 2000. “Sagas of Icelanders (Íslendinga sögur) and þættir as the literary representation of a new social space.” In Old Icelandic Literature and Society. Ed. Margaret Clunies Ross. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 42. Cambridge. 203–220. Glauser, Jürg. 2007 “The Speaking Bodies of Saga Texts.” In Learning and Understanding in the Old Norse World. Essays in Honour of Margaret Clunies Ross. Ed. Judy Quinn, Kate Heslop and Tarrin Wills. Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe, 18. Turnhout. 13–26. Glauser, Jürg. 2009. “Sinnestäuschungen. Medialitätskonzepte in der Prosa-Edda.” In Greppaminni. Ritgerðir til heiðurs Vésteini Ólasyni sjötugum. Ed. Margrét Eggertsdóttir, Árni Sigurjónsson, Guðrun Ása Grímsdóttir, Guðrun Nordal and Guðvarður Már Gunnlaugsson. Reykjavík. 165–174. Glauser, Jürg. 2011. Island – Eine Literaturgeschichte. Stuttgart and Weimar. Glauser, Jürg. 2013. “Unheilige Bücher. Zur Implosion mythischen Erzählens in der ‘ProsaEdda’.” Das Mittelalter, 18.1: 106–121. Glauser, Jürg. 2014. “Foreword.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. vii–x. Glauser, Jürg. 2016. “Mittelalter (800–1500).” In Skandinavische Literaturgeschichte. Ed. Jürg Glauser. 2nd ed. Stuttgart. 1–51. Goeres, Erin Michelle. 2015. The Poetics of Commemoration: Skaldic Verse and Social Memory, c. 890–1070. Oxford. Granberg, Gunnar. 1935a. “Memorat und Sage: Einige methodische Gesichtspunkte.” Saga och sed 1935: 120–127. Gudehus C., A. Eichenberg and H. Welzer. 2010. Gedächtnis und Erinnerung: Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Stuttgart and Weimar. Guðmundur Hálfdanarson. 2000. “Þingvellir: An Icelandic ‘Lieu de Mémoire’.” History and Memory 12.1: 4–29. Guðrún Nordal. 2001. Tools of Literacy. The Role of Skaldic Verse in Icelandic Textual Culture of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. Toronto. Gunnell, Terry. 2017. “Blótgyðjur, Goðar, Mimi, Incest and Wagons: Oral Memories of the Religion(s) of the Vanir.” In Old Norse Mythology in Comparative Perspective. Ed. Pernille



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Hermann, Stephen Mitchell, and Jens Peter Schjødt. Publications of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature, 3. Cambridge, MA. 113–137. Hafström, Gerhard. 1981 [1956–1978]. “Minnunga män.” In KLNM. XI: Cols. 632–634. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1992. On Collective Memory. Trans., and with an introduction by Lewis A. Coser. Chicago, IL. Halink, Simon. 2014. “The Icelandic Mythscape: Sagas, Landscapes and National Identity”. National Identities 16: 209–223. Harris, Joseph. 2010. “Old Norse Memorial Discourse between Orality and Literacy.” In Along the Oral-Written Continuum: Types of Texts, Relations, and Their Implications. Ed. Slavica Ranković, Leidulf Melve and Else Mundal. Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, 20. Turnhout. 120–133. Hermann, Pernille. 2009. “Concepts of Memory and Approaches to the Past in Medieval Icelandic Literature.” Scandinavian Studies 81.3: 287–308. Hermann, Pernille. 2010. “Founding Narratives and the Representation of Memory in Saga Literature.” ARV: Nordic Yearbook of Folklore Studies, 66: 69–87. Hermann, Pernille. 2013. “Saga Literature, Cultural Memory and Storage.” In Memory and Remembering. Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 332–354. Hermann, Pernille. 2014. “Islændingesagaer og erindring.” Kultur og Klasse 43.118: 245–259. Hermann, Pernille. 2014. “Key Aspects of Memory and Remembering in Old Norse-Icelandic Literature.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 13–39. Hermann, Pernille. 2015. “Memory, Imagery and Visuality in Old Norse Literature.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 114.3: 317–340. Hermann, Pernille. 2017. “The Mind’s Eye: The Triad of Memory, Space and the Sense in Old Norse Literature.” European Journal of Scandinavian Studies 47.1: 203–217. Hermann, Pernille. 2017. “The Vikings! Vikinger i populærkultur og kulturel erindring.” 16:9 filmtidskrift. http://www.16-9.dk/2017/04/the-vikings/. (25 April 2017) Hermann, Pernille. 2017. “Cultural Memory and Old Norse Mythology in the High Middle Ages.” In Theorizing Old Norse Myth. Ed. Stefan Brink and Lisa Collinson. Turnhout. 151–174. Hermann, Pernille. Forthcoming. “Memory, Oral Tradition, and Sources.” In Pre-Christian Religions of the North. Histories and Structures. Ed. Anders Andrén, John Lindow and Jens Peter Schjødt. Turnhout. Hermann, Pernille and Stephen A. Mitchell, eds. 2013. Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Scandinavian Studies 85:3. Hermann, Pernille and Stephen A. Mitchell. 2013. “Constructing the Past: Introductory Remarks.” Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 261–266. Hermann, Pernille and Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir, eds. 2014. Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. Hermann, Pernille and Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. 2014. “Introduction: Minni and Muninn: Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 1–10. Heslop, Kate. 2014. “Minni and the Rhetoric of Memory in Eddic, Skaldic, and Runic Texts.” In Minni and Muninn: Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 75–107.

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Heslop, Kate and Jürg Glauser. 2018. “Introduction: Medial perspectives on textual culture in the Icelandic Middle Ages.” In RE:writing. Medial perspectives on textual culture in the Icelandic Middle Ages. Ed. Kate Heslop and Jürg Glauser. Zurich. 9–56. Hirst, William and Adam Brown. 2011. “On the Virtues of an Unreliable Memory: Its Role in Constructing Sociality.” In Grounding Sociality: Neurons, Mind and Culture. Ed. Gün R. Semin and Gerald Echterhoff. New York and London. 95–113. Honko, Lauri. 1964. “Memorates and the Study of Folk Belief.” Journal of the Folklore Institute 1: 5–19. Hållans Stenholm, Ann-Mari. 2006. “Past memories. Spatial returning as ritualized remembrance.” In Old Norse religion in long-term perspectives. Origins, changes, and interactions. Ed. Anders Andrén, Kristina Jennbert and Catharina Raudvere. Lund. 341–345. Hållans Stenholm, Ann-Mari. 2012. Fornminnen. Det förflutnas roll i det förflutna och kristna Mälardalen. Vägar till Midgård, 15. Lund. Jackson, Peter. 2005. “Retracing the Path: Gesture, Memory, and the Exegesis of Tradition.” History of Religions 45.1: 1–28. Jensen, Bernard Eric, Carsten Tage Nielsen and Torben Weinreich, eds. 1996. Erindringens og glemslens politik. Historieformidling, 1. Frederiksberg. Jensen, Einar Lind. 2009. “Stories of the Past: Collective memory and Historical Consciousness in The Cape Farewell District.” In On the tracks of the Thule Culture from Bering Strait to East Greenland. Essays in Honour of Christian Gulløv. Ed. Bjarne Grønnow. SILA Conference. National Museum of Denmark. Copenhagen. 235–244. Jesch, Judith. 2005. “Memorials in Speech and Writing.” In Runesten, magt og mindesmærker: Tværfagligt symposium på Askov Højskole 3.–5. oktober 2002. Ed. Gunhild Øeby Nielsen. Højbjerg. 95–104. Jesch, Judith. 2005. “Memories in speech and writing.” Hikuin 32: 95–104. Jesch, Judith. 2008. “Introduction: Myth and Cultural Memory in the Viking Diaspora.” Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 4: 221–226. Jesch, Judith. 2010. “The Once and Future King: History and Memory in Sigvatr’s Poetry on Óláfr Haraldsson.” In Along the Oral-Written Continuum: Types of Texts, Relations and their Implications. Ed. Slavica Rankovic, Leidulf Melve and Else Mundal. Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, 20. Turnhout. 103–117. Jesch, Judith. 2015. The Viking Diaspora. London. Jesch, Judith. 2016. “The concept of ‘homeland’ in the Viking diaspora.” In Shetland and the Viking World. Ed. Val E. Turner, Olwyn A. Owen and Doreen J. Waugh. Lerwick. 141–146. Johansson, Karl G. 1996. “Hávamál strof 13. Ett inlägg i diskussionen kring Óminnis hegri.” Arkiv för nordisk filologi 111: 45–56. Jón Bjarnason. 1965. “Minnisvarði Auðar djúpúðgu og írskar konur að Hvammi.” Sunnudagur. Fylgirit Þjóðviljans 5.32. Kansteiner, Wulf. 2002. “Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies.” History and Theory 41: 179–197. Kaplan, Merrill. 2011. Thou Fearful Guest: Addressing the Past in Four Tales in Flateyjarbók. Folklore Fellows Communications, 301. Helsinki. Kukkonen, Karin. 2008. “Popular Cultural Memory. Comics, Communities and Context knowledge.” Nordicom Review 29: 261–273. Lachmann, Renate. 2008. “Mnemonic and Intertextual Aspects of Literature.” In Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Media and Cultural Memory, 8. Berlin and New York. 301–310.



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Larsson, Mats G. 2005. Minnet av vikingatiden. De isländska kungasagorna och deras värld. Stockholm. Laugerud, Henning. 2010. “Memory Stored and Reactivated: Some Introductory Reflections.” ARV: Nordic Yearbook of Folklore Studies, 66: 7–20. Laugerud, Henning. 2010. “To See With the Eyes of the Soul. Memory and Visual Culture in Medieval Europe,” ARV. Nordic Yearbook of Folklore Studies, 66: 146–159. Laugerud, Henning. 2015. “Memory: The Sensory Materiality of Belief and Understanding in Late Medieval Europe.” In The Saturated Sensorium: Principles of Perception and Mediation in the Middle Ages. Ed. Hans Henrik L. Jørgensen, Henning Laugerud and Laura Kathrine Skinnebach. Aarhus. 246–272. Laugerud, Henning. 2016. “‘And how could I find Thee at all, if I do not remember Thee?’ Visions, images and memory in late medieval devotion.” In The Materiality of Devotion in Late Medieval Northern Europe. Images, objects and practices. Ed. Henning Laugerud, Salvador Ryan & Laura Kathrine Skinnebach: Dublin. 50–69. Le Goff, Jacques. 1992. History and Memory. New York. Lerner, Marion. 2010. Landnahme-Mythos, kulturelles Gedächtnis und nationale Identität. Isländische Reisevereine im frühen 20. Jahrhundert. Nordeuropäische Studien, 22. Berlin. Lietoff, Eija. 1999. Runestones: A colourful memory. Uppsala. Lindow, John. 2014. “Memory and Old Norse Mythology.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 41–57. Lord, Albert B. 1960. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, MA. Meissner, Rudolf. 1930. “Minnetrinken in Island und in der Auvergne.” Deutsche Islandforschung: 232–245. Meulengracht Sørensen, Preben. 2006. Kapitler af Nordens litteratur i oldtid og middelalder. Ed. Judith Jesch and Jørgen Højgaard Jørgensen. Aarhus. Mitchell, Stephen A. 1991. Heroic Sagas and Ballads. Ithaca, NY. Mitchell, Stephen A. 2007. “DgF 526 ‘Lokket med runer’, Memory, and Magic.” In Emily Lyle: The Persistent Scholar. Ed. Francis J. Fischer and Sigrid Rieuwerts. Ballads and Songs International Studies, 5. Trier. 206–211. Mitchell, Stephen A. 2009. “Odin, Magic and a Swedish Trial from 1484.” Scandinavian Studies 81.3: 263–286. Mitchell, Stephen A. 2011. Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages. Philadelphia, PA. Mitchell, Stephen A. 2013. “Memory, Mediality, and the ‘Performative Turn’: Recontextualizing Remembering in Medieval Scandinavia.” In Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North. Ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell. Scandinavian Studies 85.3: 282–305. Mitchell, Stephen A. 2014. “Continuity: Folklore’s Problem Child?” In Folklore in Old Norse – Old Norse in Folklore. Ed. Daniel Sävborg and Karen Bek-Pedersen. Nordistica Tartuensis, 20. Tartu. 34–51. Mitchell, Stephen A. 2014. “The Mythological Past: Memory in Medieval and Early Modern Gotland.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 155–174. Mitchell, Stephen A. 2018. “Óðinn’s Twin Ravens, Huginn and Muninn.” In Gemini and the Sacred: Twins and Twinship in Religion and Myth. Ed. Kimberley C. Patton. London. Mitchell, Stephen A. and Alf Tergel. 1994. “Choseness, Nationalism, and the Young Church Movement: Sweden 1880–1920.” Harvard Theological Studies 38: 231–249.

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Mundal, Else. 2010. “Memory of the Past and Old Norse Identity.” In The Making of Memory in the Middle Ages. Ed. Lucie Doležalová. Later Medieval Europe, 4. Leiden and Boston. 463–472. Nagy, Joseph Falaky. ed. 2006. Memory and the Modern in Celtic Literatures. Celtic Studies Association of North America Yearbook, 6. Dublin. Nilsson Stutz, Liv. 2004. “Minnet och glömskan av de döda i Skateholm.” In Minne och myt. Konsten att skapa det förflutna. Ed. Åsa Berggren, Stefan Arvidsson and Ann-Mari Hållans. Vägar till Midgård, 5. Lund. 81–98. Nora, Pierre. 1989. “Between Memory and History. Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations 26: 7–24. Nora, Pierre, ed. 1996–1998 [1984–1992]. Realms of Memory. New York. Nora, Pierre, ed. 1997 [1984–1992]. Les lieux de mémoire. Paris. Nordvig, A. Mathias Valentin. 2013. “Of Fire and Water. The Old Norse Mythical Worldview in an Eco-Mythological Perspective.” Ph.D. dissertation. Aarhus University. Nordvig, Mathias. 2017. “Creation from Fire in Snorri’s Edda. The Tenets of a Vernacular Theory of Geothermal Activity in Old Norse Myth.” In Old Norse Mythology in Comparative Perspective. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen Mitchell and Jens Peter Schjødt. Publications of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature, 3. Cambridge, MA. 269–288. Ó Giolláin, Diarmuid. 1994–1995. “The Image of the Vikings in Irish Folk Legends.” Béaloideas 62/63: 163–170. Oexle, Otto Gerhard. 1983. “Die Gegenwart der Toten.” In Death in the Middle Ages. Ed. Herman Braet and Werner Verbeke. Leuven. 19–77. Oexle, Otto Gerhard. 1994. “Die Memoria Heinrichs des Löwen.” In Memoria in der Gesellschaft des Mittelalters. Ed. Otto G. Oexle and Dieter Geuenich. Göttingen. 128–177. Oexle, Otto Gerhard. 1995. “Memoria als Kultur.” In Memoria als Kultur. Ed. Otto G. Oexle. Göttingen. 9–78. Oexle, Otto Gerhard. 2011. “Fama und Memoria der Wissenschaft in der Kunst der Frühen Neuzeit.” In Living Memoria: Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Memorial Culture in Honour of Truus van Bueren. Ed. Rolf de Weijert, Kim Ragetli, Arnoud-Jan Bijsterveld and Jeannette van Arenthals. Hilversum. 365–377. Olick, Jeffrey K., and Joyce Robbins. 1998. “Social Memory Studies: From ‘Collective Memory’ to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices.” Annual Review of Sociology 24: 105–140. Olick, Jeffrey Keith. 1999. “Collective Memory. The Two Cultures.” Sociological Theory 17.1: 333–348. Olsan, Lea T. 2004. “Charms in Medieval Memory.” In Charms and Charming in Europe. Ed. Jonathan Roper. London. 59–88. Parshall, Peter. 1999. “The Art of Memory and the Passion.” The Art Bulletin 81.3: 456–472. Pethes, Nicolas and Jens Ruchatz, eds. 2001. Gedächtnis und Erinnerung. Ein interdisziplinäres Lexikon. Reinbek bei Hamburg. Poole, Russell. 2014. “Autobiographical Memory in Medieval Scandinavia and amongst the Kievan Rus’.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 109–129. Prosser, Jay. 2001. “Skin Memories.” In Thinking Through the Skin. Ed. Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey. London. 52–68. Quinn, Judy. 2010. “Liquid Knowledge: Traditional Conceptualisations of Learning in Eddic Poetry.” In Along the Oral-Written Continuum: Types of Texts, Relations and their



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Implications. Ed. Slavica Ranković, Leidulf Melve and Else Mundal. Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, 20. Turnhout. 175–217. Radstone, Susannah, and Bill Schawarz, eds. 2010. Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates. New York. Ranković, Slavica. 2010. “Communal Memory of the Distributed Author: Applicability of the Connectionist Model of Memory to the Study of Traditional Narratives.” In The Making of Memory in the Middle Ages. Ed. Lucie Doležalová. Leiden and Boston. 9–26. Rekdal, Jan Erik and Erich Poppe, eds. 2014. Medieval Irish Perspectives on Cultural Memory. Studien und Texte zur Keltologie, 11. Münster. Ricoeur, Paul. 2004. Memory, History, Forgetting. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago, IL. Rigney, Ann. 2004. “Portable Monuments: Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans.” Poetics Today 25.2: 361–396. Rigney, Ann. 2005. “Plenitude, Scarcity and the Circulation of Cultural Memory.” Journal of European Studies 35: 11–28. Rigney, Ann. 2008. “The Dynamics of Remembrance: Texts Between Monumentality and Morphing”. In Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Media and Cultural Memory, 8. Berlin and New York. 345–353. Roediger, H. and J. V. Wertsch. 2008. “Creating a New Discipline of Memory.” Memory Studies 1: 9–22. Roper, Jonathan. 1998. “Charms, Change and Memory: Some Principles Underlying Variation.” Folklore. Electronic Journal of Folklore 9. (http://www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol9/roper.htm) Rowlands, Michael. 1993. “The Role of Memory in the Transmission of Culture.” World Archaeology 25. 2: 141–151. Sawyer, Birgit. 2000. The Viking-Age Rune-Stones. Custom and Commemoration in Early Medieval Scandinavia. Oxford. Schacter, Daniel L. 1996. Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past. New York. Schama, Simon. 1995. Landscape and Memory. New York. Schmitt, Jean-Claude. 2013. “Images and the Work of Memory, with Special Reference to the Sixth-Century Mosaics of Ravenna, Italy.” In Memory and Commemoration in Medieval Culture. Ed. Elma Brenner, Meredith Cohen and Mary Franklin-Brown. Farnham. 13–32. Schnall, Jens Eike. 2004. “Nahrung, Erinnerung, Dichtung oder Vom Zu-sich-Nehmen, Bei-sich-Behalten und Von-sich-Geben. Zum Raub des Skaldenmets und mittelalterlicher Körpermetaphorik.” In Poetik und Gedächtnis: Festschrift für Heiko Uecker zum 65. Geburtstag. Ed. Karin Hoff et al. Frankfurt am Main, etc. 249–277. Schulte, Michael. 2007. “Memory culture in the Viking Age. The runice evidence of formulaic patterns.” Scripta Islandica 57: 57–73. Simek, Rudolf. 2014. “Memoria Normannica.” In Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica, 4. Turnhout. 133–54. Skott, Fredrik. 2008. Folkets minnen: Traditionsinsamling i idé och praktik 1919–1964. Avhandlingar från Historiska institutionen i Göteborg, 53. Gothenburg. Tamm, Marek. 2013. “Beyond History and Memory: New Perspectives in Memory Studies.” History Compass: 458–473. Þórdís Valsdóttir. 2010. “Í minningu Auðar djúpúðga: helgiganga í Dölunum á laugardag.” Fréttablaðið 10.140: 26.

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Tirosh, Yoav. 2017. “Scolding the Skald: The Construction of Cultural Memory in Morkinskinna’s Sneglu–Halla þáttr.” European Journal of Scandinavian Studies 47.1: 1–23. Townend, Matthew. 2003. “Whatever Happened to York Viking Poetry? Memory, Tradition and the Transmission of Skaldic Verse.” Saga-Book 27: 48–90. Vanherpen, Sofie. 2013. “Remembering Auðr/Unnr djúp(a)uðga Ketilsdóttir. Construction of Cultural Memory and Female Religious Identity.” Mirator 14.2: 61–78. Viejo-Rose, Dacia. 2015. “Cultural Heritage and Memory: Untangling the Ties that Bind.” Culture and History Digital Journal 4.2. Vohra, Pragya. 2008. “The Eiríkssynir in Vínland: Family Exploration or Family Myth.” Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 4: 249–267. Wagoner, Brady. 2018, ed. Handbok of Culture and Memory. Oxford. Wamhoff, Laura Sonja. 2016. Isländische Erinnerungskultur 1100–1300. Altnordische Historiographie und kulturelles Gedächtnis. Beiträge zur Nordischen Philologie, 57. Tübingen. White, Hayden. 2000. “Catastrophe, Communal Memory and Mythic Discourse: The Uses of Myth in the Reconstruction of Society.” In Myth and Memory in the Construction of Community. Ed. Bo Stråth. Series Multiple Europes, 9. Brussels. 49–74. Yates, Frances. 1974. The Art of Memory. Chicago, IL. Zilmer, Kristel. 2008. “Scenes of Island Encounters in Icelandic Sagas: Reflections of Cultural Memory.” Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 4: 227–248. Zimmermann, Christiane. 2002. “Minne und Minnetrinken.” In Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde, 20. Berlin. 49–56.

Contributors Agnes Arnórsdóttir, Associate Professor, dr.phil., Aarhus University, School of Culture and Society, Department of History, Denmark Anders Andrén, Professor, PhD, Stockholm University, Department of Archaeology and Classical Studies, Sweden Tóta Árnadóttir, Assistant Professor, University of the Faroe Islands, Department of Faroese Language and Literature, The Faroe Islands Ásdís Egildóttir, Professor em., University of Iceland, Department of Icelandic and Comparative Cultural Studies, Iceland Massimiliano Bampi, Associate Professor, PhD, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies, Italy Bjørn Bandlien, Professor, Dr. philos., University of South-Eastern Norway, Department of Business, History and Social Sciences, Norway Lisa Bennett, Dr., PhD, Flinders University, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Languages, Literature and Culture Section, Australia Bergsveinn Birgisson, Independent Scholar and Writer, PhD, Laksevåg, Norway Sophie Bønding, PhD Fellow, Cand. mag., Aarhus University, School of Culture and Society, Department of the Study of Religion, Denmark Stefan Brink, Professor, Phil. Dr., University of Aberdeen, Centre for Scandinavian Studies, United Kingdom Lydia Carstens, Dr., Germany Margaret B. Clunies Ross, Professor em., University of Sydney, Department of English; Adjunct Professor, School of Humanities, University of Adelaide, Australia Richard Cole, Assistant Professor, PhD, Aarhus University, School of Culture and Society, History and Classical Studies, Denmark Aidan Conti, Professor, PhD, University of Bergen, Institue for Literary, Linguistic and Aesthetic Studies, Classics, Norway Barbora Davidková, MA, Independent Scholar, Switzerland Laurent Di Filippo, Dr., Ernestine, Strasbourg; Centre de recherche sur les médiations, Université de Lorraine, France Thomas A. DuBois, Professor, PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of German, Nordic and Slavic, USA Terje Gansum, Fil. dr., Mag. Art., Cultural Heritage Management, Vestfold County Council, Norway Gísli Sigurðsson, Research Professor, PhD, The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies, Iceland Jürg Glauser, Professor em., Dr., University of Basel, Scandinavian Department; University of Zurich, German Department, Scandinavian Section, Switzerland Anne-Sofie Gräslund, Professor em., Uppsala University, Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Sweden Guðrún Nordal, DPhil, The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies; Professor, University of Iceland, Faculty of Icelandic and Comparative Cultural Studies, Iceland Terry Gunnell, Professor, PhD, University of Iceland, Department of Folkloristics and Museum Studies, Iceland

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431360-114

1114 

 Contributors

Ann-Mari Hållans Stenholm, PhD, Lund University, Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Historical Archaeology, Sweden Simon Halink, Postdoctoral Researcher, Dr., University of Iceland, Faculty of Icelandic and Comparative Cultural Studies, Iceland Antonina Harbus, Professor, PhD, Macquarie University, Faculty of Arts, Department of English, Australia Joseph Harris, Professor em., PhD, Harvard University, English Department; Program in Folklore and Mythology, USA Reinhard Hennig, Associate Professor, PhD, University of Agder, Department of Nordic and Media Studies, Norway Pernille Hermann, Associate Professor, PhD, Aarhus University, School of Communication and Culture, Scandinavian Studies, Denmark Kate Heslop, Assistant Professor, PhD, University of California, Berkeley, Department of Scandinavian, USA Verena Jessica Höfig, Assistant Professor, PhD, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Scandinavian Program, USA Judith Jesch, Professor, PhD, University of Nottingham, School of English, United Kingdom Jon Gunnar Jørgensen, Professor, Dr. philos., University of Oslo, Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, Norway Karl G. Johansson, Professor, PhD, University of Oslo, Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, Norway Jón Karl Helgason, Professor, PhD, University of Iceland, Department of Icelandic and Comparative Cultural Studies, Iceland Karoline Kjesrud, Postdoc, PhD, University of Oslo, Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, Norway Christian Krötzl, Professor, Dr., University of Tampere, Faculty of Social Sciences, Tampere Centre for Classical, Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Finland Sarah Künzler, Dr., University of Glasgow, Celtic and Gaelic, United Kingdom Carolyne Larrington, Professor, DPhil, University of Oxford; St John’s College, Oxford, United Kingdom Henning Laugerud, Associate Professor, Dr., University of Bergen, Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies, Norway John Lindow, Professor em., PhD, University of California, Department of Scandinavian, Berkeley, USA Lars Lönnroth, Professor em., University of Gothenburg, Department of Literature, History of Ideas and Religion, Sweden Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen, Associate Professor, PhD, Aarhus University, School of Communication and Culture, Department of Art History, Aesthetics and Culture and Museology, Denmark Mats Malm, Professor, Dr., University of Gothenburg, Department of Literature, History of Ideas and Religion, Sweden Malan Marnersdóttir, Professor, Dr., Ph.d., University of the Faroe Islands, Department of Faroese Language and Literature, The Faroe Islands Bernadine McCreesh, Associate Professor (retired), PhD, University of Quebec at Chicoutimi, Department of Arts and Letters, Canada Stephen A. Mitchell, Professor, PhD, Harvard University, Program in Scandinavian, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures; Program in Folklore, USA



Contributors  

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Jakub Morawiec, Dr. hab., University of Silesia, Institute of History, Poland Else Mundal, Professor em., Cand. Philol., University of Bergen, Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies, Norway Joseph Falaky Nagy, Professor, PhD, Harvard University, Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures, USA Mathias Nordvig, Visiting Assistant Professor, University of Colorado, Boulder, Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, USA Simon Nygaard, PhD Fellow, MA, Aarhus University, School of Culture and Society, Department of the Study of Religion, Denmark Silje Opdahl Mathisen, Collection Manager, PhD, Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo, Norway Anders Piltz, Professor em., PhD, University of Lund, Department of Classics, Sweden Russell Poole, Professor em., PhD, Western University Canada, Department of English, Canada Slavica Ranković, PhD, Independent Scholar, Leeds, United Kingdom Lukas Rösli, Dr., University of Zurich, German Department, Scandinavian Section, Switzerland Lena Rohrbach, Professor, Dr., University of Basel, Scandinavian Department; University of Zurich, German Department, Scandinavian Section, Switzerland Tracey R. Sands, PhD, Independent Scholar, USA Roland Scheel, Juniorprofessor, Dr., University of Göttingen, Scandinavian Seminar, Germany Jens Peter Schjødt, Professor, Dr. Phil., Aarhus University, School of Culture and Society, Department of the Study of Religion, Denmark Ulrich Schmid, Professor, Dr., University of St. Gallen, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Russian Studies, Switzerland Sandra Schneeberger, Dr. des., University of Zurich, German Department, Scandinavian Section, Switzerland Michael Schulte, Professor, Dr. phil., University of Agder, Department of Nordic and Media Studies, Norway Rudolf Simek, Professor, Dr., University of Bonn, German Department, Scandinavian Section, Germany Pierre-Brice Stahl, Associate Professor, PhD, Sorbonne University, Department of Germanic and Nordic Studies, France Svanhildur Óskarsdóttir, Associate Research Professor, PhD, The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies, Iceland Kirsten Thisted, Associate Professor, PhD, University of Copenhagen, Department of CrossCultural and Regional Studies, Minority Studies Section, Denmark Yoav Tirosh, PhD Candidate, University of Iceland, Faculty of Icelandic and Comparative Cultural Studies, Iceland Torfi H. Tulinius, Professor, Dr., University of Iceland, Faculty of Icelandic and Comparative Cultural Studies, Iceland Úlfar Bragason, Research Professor, PhD, The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies, International Department, Iceland Sofie Vanherpen, Independent PhD Student, MA, Ghent University, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Department of Literary Studies, Belgium Vésteinn Ólason, Professor em., Dr., The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies; University of Iceland, Department of Icelandic Studies, Iceland Birgitta Wallace, Fil.mag., Uppsala University; LLD, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Senior Archaeologist em., Parks Canada, Canada

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 Contributors

Anna Wallette, Senior Lecturer, PhD, Lund University, Department of History, Sweden Laura Sonja Wamhoff, Dr., University of Kiel, Institute for Scandinavian Studies, Frisian Studies and General Linguistics, Germany Henrik Williams, Professor, Dr., Uppsala University, Department of Scandinavian Languages, Sweden Torun Zachrisson, Docent, PhD, Stockholm University, Department of Archaeology and Classical Studies; County Museum of Uppland, Sweden

Index The guiding principles of this fulsome, if still selective, index include the following: – Entries are generally grouped by categories under single headings (e.g. Bible verses, manuscripts, runestones), although not in the case of literary and historical works, which are listed individually under their original language titles (usually with cross-references from English). – The index concentrates on concepts and ideas, as well as the realia of premodern Scandinavia; on the other hand, the names of modern scholars are not indexed. – Icelandic authors are listed by given names, not patronymics. – Unmarked medieval Nordic titles are in Old Norse/Icelandic; Old Danish (ODa) and Old Swedish (OSw) titles are generally marked. – Original language versions of titles, whether books, plays, or poems, are italicized in the Index. – Page numbers in italics indicate images, tables, maps, and graphs. – Characters not used in English adhere to the following scheme: å = aa; æ / ä = ae; ǫ / ø / ö = oe; ü = ue; ð = dh; þ follows z. The editors take this opportunity to thank three student assistants, Lauren Fadiman, Alex Spiride, and Brooke Starn, for their help in producing the index. A People. See Ett Folk Abildgaard, Nicolai, 777 About Germany. See Germania About Odin and the Pagan Theology and Practice in the North. See Om Odin og den hedniske Gudelære og Gudstieneste udi Norden Acallam na Senórach [The Colloquy of the Ancients], 343 Account of the Ancient History of the Norwegian Kings. See Historia de antiquitate regum Norwagiensium Account of the Sámi. See Muitalus Sámiid birra Adam, first man, 62, 65, 410, 577 Adam of Bremen, 110, 925 Aðils (Adils), 571, 623 Ægir’s hall, 670–71, 697 Ärvinge, Uppland (Stockholms län), 607–612 –– map of, 608 –– table of mounds, 608, 609 Æsir, disguised as Hár (High), Jafnhár (Just-as-High), and Þriði (Third), 87–88, 422–425 ætt (family, kindred, pedigree), 744, 747

ættartala (genealogy, pedigree), 190, 410, 586–587, 744 Ættartala Sturlunga [genealogy of the Sturlungs], 410 ættvísi (genealogies, knowledge of genealogies), 84, 744 Ævi Snorra goða [The Life of Snorri the Chieftain], 745 ævikviða (dying man’s poem about his life and deeds), 510 Africa, 393, 575–578, 862, 895 aft (lit., ‘after’, i.e., ‘in memory of’). See ‘in memory of’ expressed as agape-meals, 59 Age of Burning (or Cremation), 306, 1025–1026 Age of Mounds, 1025–1026 Ágústínus saga [The Saga of St Augustine], 401 Akergarn, Gotland. See Saint Olofsholm akr (field) as memoria image, 441–442 Ála flekks saga [The Saga of Ali Flekk], 419 álagablettir (lit., enchanted spots), 681 Albertus Magnus, 45, 159 álfablót (sacrifice to the álfar), 100

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 Index

Alfræði íslenzk [Icelandic Encyclopedic Literature], 556, 559 Alfred of Essex, 16 All Apostles’ Memorial Stanzas. See Allra postula minnisvísur Allra postula minnisvísur [All Apostles’ Memorial Stanzas], 696 alphabetic literacy, 82, 666 Alreksstaðir, 740 altar, 56, 58–59, 162, 165, 261, 291, 293–296, 311, 450, 467, 602, 604, 625, 710–714, 830 –– altarpiece, 710–714, 1098 –– frontals, 291, 293–296, 1094 Altgermanisch, discussed as a concept, 15 Althing (general assembly), 212, 570, 641 áminning (premonition, warning; cp. præmonitio and minning), 17 Analecta hymnica, 65 anamneses of sacred history, 57, 261 anamnesis, 57, 58, 62, 162, 296, 449–451, 474 –– as culture of remembrance, 448 –– as meta-picture, 450 –– as performative memory, 448 –– as ritual remembrance ceremony, 58 –– recalling of Christ’s life, death and resurrection, 57 Ancient Songs of the Finnish People. See Suomen Kansan Vanhat Runot Andreas, 201, 400–401 Andreas Sunesen, archbishop of Lund, 52 Aun the Old, 571 Anglo-Irish influence, 291 Anglo-Latin, 335 Anglo-Norman authors, 892–893 –– Latin chroniclers, 311, 345, 892 –– poet Wace, 893, 897 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 335 Anglo-Saxons, 23, 169, 191, 335–338, 623, 697, 728, 872, 883, 892 animal ornamentation, of Migration Period, 463–466, 468 –– of Viking Age, 463–466, 468 –– influences from Scythian, Celtic, Oriental, and Roman art, 463 animation, 370, 376, 471–475, 1096

–– animated memento mori, 473 –– and memory, 471–475 animus, represented by hugr, 454 Anna Selbdritt [Virgin and Child with St Anne], 483, 711 annals, 211, 329, 335, 341, 345, 522, 543, 550, 860, 922 Andreas saga postola [The Saga of the Apostle Andreas], 400 Anselm, second Norman Archbishop of Canterbury, 892–893 Ansgar, 162, 824 Antikvitetskammer, 170 Antikvitetskollegium (Antiquities College), 837 Antiquitatum danicarum de causis contemptae a Danis adhuc gentilibus mortis [Antiquities concerning the Reason for the Pagan Danes’ Disdain for Death], 727 Antiquities concerning the Reason for the Pagan Danes’ Disdain for Death. See Antiquitatum danicarum de causis contemptae a Danis adhuc gentilibus mortis Antiquities Decree of 1666. See decrees, Kongl: Mayst:tz Placat och Påbudh om Gamble Monumenter och Antiquiteter Antiqvitates Americana, 878 Antóníus saga [The Saga of St. Anthony], 401 Anundshög, Västmanland, 570 Apologia of Justinus, 57 Apostle Paul with the allegorical Synagogue, 293 apostles, 55, 57, 293, 310, 313, 401–402, 522, 575, 696 apprenticeship, 121, 464, 655 Arboga, Västmanland, 656 archaeological overlays, 141–142, 628–629 –– association, 628–629 –– character of a palimpsest, 138, 214, 241, 259, 264, 414, 419, 629, 885 –– disassociation, 628–629 archaeological and paleo-ecological material, 329 archaeology, 14, 21, 23, 73, 109, 135–148, 151–155, 168, 237, 277, 279, 336,

Index 

341, 344, 607, 687, 763, 812, 856, 887, 1037 –– chronologies of, 136–138, 464 archetype, 428, 431, 727–731 –– as ‘a text that never was’, 428 architectonic space, structure, 41, 88, 159, 667 architecture, 41, 53, 151–155, 159–166, 176, 257, 267, 290, 909, 912 –– aristocratic forms of, 154–155 –– as container of specific memory, 159, 290 –– as instrumentalisation and materialisation of memory, 167 –– as memorial, 152–1154 –– as mnemotechnical device, 165 –– styles of, 161, 163 archive, 4, 8, 10, 65, 164, 169, 174–179, 190, 204, 210, 212–214, 244–245, 267, 286, 303, 307, 355–356, 407, 601, 757, 759, 779, 803, 900 Ari Þorgilsson, also called Ari inn fróði (the Learned), 188, 307, 329, 392, 396, 540, 584, 641, 700, 738, 744, 757, 967, 988 Aristotle, 38, 45, 52, 66, 232, 290 –– and Albertus Magnus, philosophical debate between, 45 Arminius or Hermann, 915 –– as forerunner of Protestant resistance against ‘Rome’, 915 –– victory over Varus in A.D. 9, 915 Arn novels, 831 Arngrímur Brandsson, 199, 402 Arngrímur Jónsson, 365 Árni Magnússon, 401, 403, 407, 766–767 Arnmœðlingar (named after Arnmóðr jarl), 738 Arnórr jarlaskáld Þórðarson, 314 Aron from Kangeq, 801–02 ars memoriae, 63, 185 ars moriendi (the art of dying), 449 ars poetica, 421, 651 ars vivendi (art of living), 449 ‘artificial memory’, 80, 159, 667 artistic traditions, 163 arveøl (ODa: funeral feast’s ale or drink), 695 Ásatrú Folk Assembly (AFA), 727, 730

 1119

Ásbirningar (named after Ásbjǫrn Arnórsson), 738, 745 Asbjørnsen and Moe’s Norwegian folk tales, 821 Asia, 383, 392, 455, 527, 576–577, 747, 842–843, 929, 931 Askr (Ash), 55, 86, 242, 542–44, 557–58, 730, 764, 847, 902 Ásmundar saga kappabana [The Saga of Ásmundr the Champion-Killer], 415–416 astronomy, 393, 576 at drekkia minni (to drink memory), 695 Athisli forte penates (Aðils’ strong hall), 623 Atlakviða [The Lay of Atli], 836 Atland eller Manheim, or Atlantica, 834–839 Atli, 200, 516, 532, 616, 836 áttvísi, 193 Auctoritates Aristotelis, 63 Auðunar þáttr vestfirska [The Tale of Audun from the West Fjords], 662 Augustine, 58–59, 61–63, 88, 265–266, 291, 454, 492 aural cues (alliteration, rhythm and rhyme), 199 Aurvandilstá (toe of Aurvandill), 557 Australia, 186, 392, 661, 895 –– aboriginal stories from, 186, 392, 661 Austrfararvísur [Eastern Journey Verses], 642 authenticity, 18, 171, 178–79, 364, 635, 662, 718, 729, 882, 892, 897, 900, 904 autobiographical memories. See memories, autobiographical, 527, 643 Autumn-Long i.e. poem whose composition took an entire autumn. See Haustlǫng Ave Maria, 264, 1060 Avenches (Aventicum), Switzerland, 597 AVM stone, 880 Backward Look, 886–887 Baldr’s Death. See Balder’s Død Balders Død [Baldr’s Death], 776–777 –– drawing for by Nicolai Abildgaard, 777 Baldrs draumar [Baldr’s Dreams], 684 Baldr’s Dreams. See Baldrs draumar Balkans, 646 Ballad about Sigmund. See Sigmundsríma

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 Index

ballads, 93, 95, 232, 716–725, 788–789, 791, 887, 903 Balto-Finnic, 348, 841–849 –– languages, 348, 841–849 –– song collectors, 843 Bandmanna saga [The Saga of the Confederates], 1049–1050 Banquet at Nyköping. See Nyköpings gästabud Banquet of the Ford of the Geese. See Fled Dúin na nGéd Bard’s Saga. See Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss [Bard’s Saga], 551, 615 Barrett Lake stone, 880 Bartholin, Thomas, 728, 730 Bartholomeus saga postola [The Saga of the Apostle Bartholomew], 400 Battle of Maldon, 893 Bayeux, Normandy, 893 Bayeux tapestry, 374, 376 Bede, 335, 337 beer, 76, 243, 499, 695–697, 740, 888 bees, beehives, 440 Benedictine order, 703 Bengtsson, Frans G., 831 Beowulf, 337, 571, 687–88, 697 Bergbúa þáttr [The Tale of the MountainDweller], 509–511, 539, 541–544 Bernard of Clairvaux, 63–65 Bernardino of Siena, 53 Bero Magni of Lödöse, 53 ‘berserker’s drink’, 936 Bethu Phátraic [The Life of Patrick], 343 Bible, references to, 17, 53, 57, 265, 310, 312, 394, 410, 440, 703, 801, 837 –– 1 Corinthians 11:24–25, 449 –– 1 Samuel 7:12, 56 –– 2 Timothy 1:3, 57 –– Deuteronomy 11:18, 57 –– Deuteronomy 5:3, 56 –– Exodus 20:24, 56 –– Exodus 39:7, 56 –– Genesis 9:13, 57 –– Genesis 35:14, 56 –– Isaiah 1:6, 475 –– Isaiah 62:6–7, 57

–– Jeremiah 11:19, 57 –– Job 2:7, 475 –– John 20:30–31, 57 –– Luke 1:72, 57 –– Luke 18:13, 450 –– Luke 22:19–20, 57, 448 –– Mark 14:10, 57 –– Numbers 19:10, 56 –– Proverbs 10:7, 57 –– Psalm 105:5, 57 –– Psalm 51:1, 451 –– Revelation of John 3:5, 59 –– Romans 1:9, 57 Bifröst, 556, 558 Bil, 557 birds, 81, 139, 200, 243, 265, 329, 418, 456–460, 466–467, 495, 543, 557, 611, 644, 697 –– of memory, 81, 243, 458, 466, 960 –– of oblivion, 200, 243, 960 Birger Magnusson, king of Sweden, 1062 Birka, 815, 830 bishop, 4, 52, 54, 59, 94, 212, 236, 264, 306, 309, 311, 319, 363, 396, 400–404, 408–411, 435, 440–441, 479, 481, 500, 523, 544, 550, 580, 596–99, 602, 662, 667, 702, 709, 711, 712, 747, 757, 766, 826, 860–861, 892, 922–923 –– of Hólar, 212, 264, 440–442, 449, 550 –– of Linköping, 53, 319, 602 –– of Skálholt, 212, 311, 395, 401, 404, 411, 523, 580, 746, 766, 860 Bishop Árni’s Church Law. See Kristinréttr Árna biskups Bishop Larentius’ Saga. See Lárentíus saga biskups Biskupa sögur (sagas of bishops), 329, 400, 1018, 1055 Biskupatal [List of Bishops], 402 Bismarck, Otto von, 913–914, 916–19 –– his Kulturkampf (culture struggle, 1871–1878), 916 Bjarni Jónsson frá Vogi, 19 Bjarni Thorarensen, 807 Björn Järnsidas hög, 570, 572 Björn Þorleifsson, 522, 710–711 Björn, king, 139, 569–70, 572

Index 

Björner, Erik, 826, 827 Blood of the Vikings, 895 blót (sacrifice), 110–112, 617, 679, 728, 817, 831 blótnaut (lit., bull sacrifice), 113 Blue Brain Project, 526 bo districts, 567 Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus, 320, 337 Boethius de Dacia, 53, 318 Bolesław the Brave (967–1025), 921–923 Boncompagno da Signa, 296 Book of Flatey. See Flateyjarbók Book of Land. See Jorþæ balkær Book of Leinster, 342 Book of Llandaf, 345 Book of Settlements. See Landnámabók book, as metaphor, 265–266 bookprose, 19, 94, 98, 123, 126, 257 bookprose-freeprose controversy, 19, 98, 123, 126, 257 Books of Hours (livres d’heures), 65, 702 Book of the Icelanders. See Íslendingabók, Libellus Islandorum Borgarfjörðr, Iceland, 434 –– miracles set in, 434–438 Borre, Norway, 171, 173, 728, 811–817, 822, 924 –– burial mounds, 171, 811–817, 924 –– National Park, 812 Bósa saga ok Herrauðs [The saga of Bósi and Herraud], 655–656 Botvid, 824 boundary, 189–191, 587 Bourne stone, Massachusetts, 879 Brage-Snak [Bragi’s Speech], 783–785 Bragi Boddason, 643 Bragi’s Speech. See Brage-Snak Brattahlíð, Greenland, 662, 862 breast, 1, 47, 200, 497, 830 –– as abode of memory, 1, 47, 200, 1017 –– as house or enclosure or ship of heart, spirit or liver, land of energy, thought and memory, 1, 47 bréfabækur (cartularies), 212 Breiðafjörður, 260, 509, 745

 1121

Breiðfirðingakynslóð (pedigree of Breiðafjörður people), 745 Brennu-Njáls saga [The Saga of Burnt Njal], 112, 188, 239, 253, 362, 373, 490–493, 520–522, 530, 551, 615, 617–618, 667–668, 679, 808, 1039–1041 Breta sögur [The Saga of the Britons], 286 breviaries, 65 Brevis Historia Regum Dacie [A Short History of the Kings of Denmark] by Sven Aggesen, 320–21, 979–980, 1027 British Isles, 327, 341, 587–88, 591, 641, 662–664, 891, 899, 924 Brot af Sigurðarkviðu [Fragment of a Poem about Sigurd], 1012–1013 Brynjólfur Sveinsson, bishop of Skálholt, 408, 411, 766 Bureus, Johannes, 94, 826 burial(s), 4, 57, 64, 111, 141, 143, 145, 152, 160–161, 171–172, 219–220, 240, 292, 305–306, 464, 466, 473, 566–572, 607–618, 620–621, 625, 629, 687, 701, 751–752, 811–812, 821, 856–857, 924 –– and gender, 607–12, 752 –– ceremonies, 143, 145, 152, 160–161, 171–172, 473, 607–618, 620–621, 625, 629, 687, 701, 811–812, 821 –– cremation and inhumation, 141, 306, 610–611, 687 –– mounds, 140, 141, 219–220, 240, 305–306, 567–572, 607–618, 620–621, 625, 629, 811–812, 1081 –– practices, 143, 145, 171–172, 240, 292, 607–618, 620–621, 625, 629, 687, 701, 751–52, 811–812, 821 Buridan, 66 bygd, 567, 570, 578 Bygdens navn, 565 cabinets of curiosities or Wunderkammer, 170–171 Cairn-dweller’s tale. See Kumlbúa þáttr canon, 37, 53, 57–60, 76, 169, 174–716, 179, 185–188, 194, 213–214, 245, 258, 267, 363, 371, 422–425, 428–430, 549–550, 702, 751–752, 766, 896 –– building, 258, 363, 422–425

1122 

 Index

–– law. See law(s), 185–188, 194, 213, 702 –– prayer, 53, 57–60, 76 canonisation, 57, 175–176, 550, 725, 752, 766 Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer, 601 Carbon–14 dating, 136–37 Carolingian Reform, 43 Cath Maige Tuired [Second Battle of Mag Tuired], 887 cathedral chapter of Lund, 59 cathedral schools, 54, 520 Ceciliu saga meyiar [Life of St Cecilia], 433–37 cella, as storeroom, 440 –– as compartments made by bees for honey, 440 –– as small rooms in monastic use, 440 Celtic languages, 341 –– extinct (Lepontic, Galatian, Celtiberian and Gaulish), 341 –– modern (Irish, Scots Gaelic, Welsh, Breton, Cornish and Manx), 341, 343 Celtic Studies, 23, 341–47 censorship, 214, 702, 822–23 ceorl, 567 chain dance in the Faroe Islands, 716–725 chancellery, royal, 189 chants, 53–54, 64, 75, 111–13, 189–190, 683–684, 705, 718, 723, 793 Charlemagne, 53, 286, 718, 723, 894 –– Charlemagne OSw. See Karl Magnus charms, 202, 655–657, 682 –– and performance, 656 –– and tradition, 202, 655–657 –– workers of, 655–657 charters, 101, 212–213, 305, 329, 335–336, 435 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 601 Chicago Columbian Exhibition, 869 Chorographica Islandica, 766–767 Christ’s Passion, 64–65, 263, 448–450, 473–475, 601, 704 Christian I, king of Denmark, 287, 899 Christianity, 4–5, 18, 53–59, 70, 107, 139, 143–138, 160–161, 164–166, 201–203, 217–221, 257, 263–266, 286, 291–293, 304–310, 318, 320, 322, 335, 343, 346, 349–350, 354, 382, 392, 394, 399, 402–403, 410, 433, 437–439, 447–449,

464, 467–468, 471–472, 478, 493, 519–520, 549–552, 559–560, 587–589, 594, 597–598, 603–610, 613–618, 623–625, 630, 678–680, 688–689, 695–697, 699, 703, 713, 750–753, 757–758, 778–779, 789–790, 795, 799, 809, 824, 842, 872, 891, 921, 925, 928, 930–931, 934, 938–939 –– conversion to, 4, 18, 70, 83, 139, 143–145, 147, 161, 253, 291–292, 308, 310, 318, 322, 335, 437–438, 454, 467–468, 516, 519–520, 551–552, 559, 587–589, 594, 603–605, 613–618, 695, 697, 753, 757–758, 778–779, 789–790, 809, 824, 872, 921, 923, 930–931, 933, 938 –– funeral rites of, 143–148, 160–161, 164, 220, 751 –– theology of, 54–59, 81, 83, 164–166, 201, 304–306, 448–449 –– topography of, 291 –– worldview of, 70, 81, 143–145, 160, 286, 433, 448–449, 493, 549, 560 Chronica regni Gothorum [The Chronicle of the Gothic Kingdom], 54–55, 826 Chronicle of Didrik. See Didrikskrönikan Chronicle of Duke Erik. See Erikskrönikan Chronicle of the Gothic Kingdom. See Chronica regni Gothorum chronicles, 93, 286, 303, 311, 335, 345, 363, 519, 577, 703, 739, 815, 824–826, 842, 922–923, 927–930, 934, 937 Chronicon of Hugh of St Victor, 294 Chronicon universale of Hartmann Schedel, 580 chronotope, 566 Church Dedication Homily. See Kirkjudagsprédikun church paintings, 53, 293, 295–297, 449, 709, 711, 790 church year, 402 Cicero, 498, 566, 648, 667 Ciceronis Rhetorica, 648 Circle of the World. See Heimskringla Cistercian order, 602, 703 –– monasteries of, 703 Civitas Hierusalem (The City of Jerusalem), 162

Index 

Claudius Clavus, Danish cartographer, 579–580 Claussøn, Peder, 819–821 Claustrum animæ. See Själens kloster Clemens saga [The Life of St. Clement of Rome], 400 clerical reforms, 310 climate and weather, 327–329, 549–552, 802, 838, 857 –– depictions of early settlers encountering bad weather, 551–552 Cloister of the Soul. See Själens kloster codex, 113, 115, 212, 241, 257, 265–266, 313, 365, 399, 401–404, 522, 539, 578, 656, 670–671 Cogadh gáedhel re Gallaibh [The War of the Gaedhil with the Gaill], 891 cogitatio, represented by hugr, 454 cognition, 205–06, 338, 447 cognitive approaches, 205, 335, 337–38, 510 –– linguistics, 198, 205 –– metaphor theory, or Conceptual Metaphor Theory, 647 –– perspective, 72 –– psychology, 95, 205–206, 647, 649–652 –– science, 71, 205, 336, 526 –– universals in cross-cultural studies, 200 Collection of Miracles of St Thorlak. See Jarteinabók Þorláks biskups collective memory. See memory, collective collective mythical identity, 728 Colloquy of the Ancients. See Acallam na Senórach colophone(s), 970 commemoration, 58–60, 86, 100, 110, 160, 199, 201, 205, 240, 257–258, 309, 311, 315, 336, 433, 448, 472–474, 516, 594–595, 613, 629, 678, 687–689, 699, 702, 704–705, 752, 778, 794, 861, 979 –– in Judaeo-Christian tradition (Hebrew zikkaron, Gr. anamnesis, Lat. memoria), 56 commemorative bautas, 240, 292, 467, 776, 822 –– objects, 240, 292, 776 –– practice, 240, 467

 1123

Commentatio historica de rebus gestis Færeyensium seu Fææroensium (1695), 788 commercialisation of culture and leisure, 380 communication, 7, 37–48, 70–74, 79, 82, 84, 95, 100, 107, 127, 243, 256, 266, 319, 322–323, 350, 451, 479, 567, 613, 621, 649–50, 664 communicative memory. See memory, communicative community, 52–53, 60, 65, 70, 84, 115, 155, 159–160, 217–223, 293, 296, 305–306, 309, 311–315, 322, 349, 352–353, 356, 367, 372, 380, 410, 472, 489–491, 510–511, 522–523, 545, 549, 588–590, 602, 613, 623, 627, 630, 716, 721, 723, 738, 740, 759, 779, 782–786, 806, 841–842, 849, 867, 869, 871, 879, 902, 904–905, 908, 910, 914, 922 –– and consumption of alcohol, 111, 116, 681, 720 –– and festivals and seasons, 110–111, 391 –– and identity negotiations, 84, 313, 526, 533 Compendiosa Regum Daniae Historia of Sven Aggesen, 320 competing memories. See memories, competing. compilation, 189, 210–213, 286, 307, 314, 365, 399–400, 402–403, 421, 588, 789 composition by formula and theme, 125 composition in performance, 125–126 Conceptual Integration Theory (also called blending), 647 Conceptual Metaphor Theory, 647 conceptualisations of the past, 12, 22, 37, 399, 404 –– Augustinian, 310–311, 313 –– Benedictine, 59, 311, 440, 595, 598, 703 Conciliorum œcumenicorum decretal, 54 Confessions of Augustine, 90 confirmation by clerics at the Alþingi, 397, 440, 617 congress of Gniezno, 922 connective memory. See memory, connective Consuetudines Lundenses, 60 continuity, conceptual, 70, 74, 83, 93, 95, 140, 163, 308, 349, 371, 392, 463–464,

1124 

 Index

484, 500, 508, 557, 565, 634, 644, 657, 661–663, 691, 720, 783–785, 849 –– linguistic, 93, 508 –– over time, 70 contra-present function, 760, 784 contrast-tension, aesthetical concept of, 651–652 conversion, See Christianity, conversion to Copenhagen Fire of 1728, 407 corpse, disposal of, 687 Corpus antiphonalium officii, 64 Corpus Carminum Faroensium (CCF), 719 Council of Basel, 826 counterhistory, 751 craft(s), 6, 86, 93, 124–125, 429, 430, 464, 465, 655, 669, 728, 816 craftsman, -men, 5, 60, 86, 464, 924, 959 –– craftmanship, 86 Crater Lake, 96 Creed, 55, 395 Crimean Viking park, 935 Cronica Guthilandorum of Hans Nielsen Strelow, 603 cross, –– memorial, Boge, Gotland, 146 –– stone, Leiasundet, Rogaland, Norway, 292 crucifix, walrus ivory, 64, 143, 165, 261, 293–295, 450, 474, 475 čuđit (marauders, bent on killing Sámi), 352, 355 cult, 55, 59, 72, 143, 161, 162, 304, 310, 311, 323, 433, 435–437, 447, 449, 466, 567, 569, 594, 601, 604, 681, 703, 704, 711 –– of saints, 310–11, 323, 433, 435–467, 471, 594, 601, 604, 703, 711 –– of saints and pilgrimages, 594 cultural memory. See memory, cultural culture, 3–5, 7, 9–15, 17, 18, 20–26, 38–40, 43, 45, 52, 54, 56, 58, 72, 73, 79, 80, 82, 84, 86, 88–90, 93, 97, 99, 100, 109, 116, 126, 137, 138, 148, 154, 160, 166, 168, 173, 174, 178, 186, 187, 198, 199, 202, 203, 214, 225, 231–235, 238, 242, 244, 245, 252, 256, 257, 259, 260, 263, 265, 266, 275, 276, 278, 279, 284, 285, 290–94, 297, 303, 304, 307, 309, 310, 312, 314, 315, 320, 322, 324, 328,

335, 336, 338, 341–343, 345, 346, 348, 355, 362, 363, 365, 370–374, 376–378, 380–382, 384, 385, 391–395, 397, 406, 410, 411, 418, 420, 423, 429, 431, 432, 439, 447, 448, 467, 514, 516, 517, 519, 520, 524, 527, 528, 539, 555, 556, 559, 575, 598, 614, 619, 620, 627, 631, 635, 657, 660, 663, 666, 671, 688, 689, 695, 697, 699–705, 709, 710, 712, 713, 717, 719–721, 725, 728–731, 737, 748–750, 752, 756, 771, 774, 778, 780, 789, 795, 798, 802, 803, 805, 807, 819, 829, 837, 841, 842, 849, 866, 885, 886, 894, 899, 911, 913, 918, 924, 925, 927, 929, 930, 937–939 –– and cohesion, 528, 782, 842 –– and records, 109, 161, 341, 362, 555 –– and self-perception, 244, 252, 276, 346, 869 currency, Norwegian, 816 custom, 9, 115, 143, 185–188, 190, 191, 193, 306, 312, 314, 354, 355, 391, 434, 435, 467, 615, 620, 621, 683, 687, 688, 695–697, 702, 703, 709, 744, 747, 751, 790, 836, 866, 875, 904, 924, 928, 938 customary right, 191 custos rhetoricae (guardian of rhetoric), 42 cyfarwyddiaid (men who preserve and present memory), 345 Dalasýsla, Iceland, 437 Dalin, Olaf von, 827 Dan, legendary founder, 322, 739 dance ballads, 789 Danish Constitution, 633, 782 Danish wall paintings, 297 Database of Estonian Traditional Songs. See Eesti regilaulude andmebaas Death of the Niflungs. See Dráp Niflunga De bono [On the Good] of Albertus Magnus, 45, 159 de Certeau, Michel, 318 De Claustro Animae [On the Cloister of the Soul]. See Själens kloster De memoria et reminiscentia commentarium of Thomas Aquinas, 447

Index 

De oratore of Cicero, 667 De sancta Cruce, 65 De Trinitate of St Augustine, 61, 454 Deapolis Rock, North Dakota, 878–79 death, 55, 57, 59, 60, 64, 86, 116, 124, 145–147, 152, 218, 220, 223, 238, 240, 252, 253, 260, 264, 267, 306, 309–311, 373, 400, 415, 433, 435, 458, 466, 491, 493, 514, 529, 531, 543, 557, 570, 576, 596, 615, 616, 634, 642, 678, 679, 687–691, 699, 710, 712, 713, 724, 727, 776, 777, 807, 808, 822, 846, 876, 888, 892, 896, 936 –– and mourning, 240, 337, 481, 514, 687 Death of the Niflungs. See Dráp Niflunga decrees, royal ordering report on antiquities and documents, 52, 94, 772, 826, 837 –– Kongl: Mayst:tz Placat och Påbudh om Gamble Monumenter och Antiquiteter [Antiquities Decree of 1666], 837 Decretum Gratiani, 63 Delaware, Swedish colonial experiment in celebrated 1888, 871 dendrochronology, 136, 137 denotatum, 566 Descriptive Translation Studies, 284 Devotio moderna, 65 dialogues with the past, 489–494 diaspora theory, 583–584, 589 diasporic networks, 584, 588–592 Didrikskrönikan. OSw [The Chronicle of Didrik], 286 diegesis, 277, 406, 410 Dighton Rock, Massachusetts, 867, 868, 878 Dimbo, Västergötland, 143 Dindshenchas (lore of places), 342, 344 Diplomatarium Hialtlandense, 902 directive function, 205 dísablót sacrifice, 110 –– at Hallr’s haustboð (autumn gathering), 679 Discovery of Odinic Songs in Shetland, 901 dísir, power of the, 678–80 Disthingstungel, 624 ‘distributed author’, 526, 589 Djúpafjörður, Iceland, 509–10 DNA testing kits, 895

 1125

Dobrava of Bohemia, 922–23 Dómaldi, 960–961 Dómarr, 960–961 Domesday Book, 186 Dominican order, 54, 703 donations, 145, 305, 596, 602–05, 709–13 Draken Harald Hårfagre at Mystic Seaport, Connecticut, 873 drama, 56, 107–109, 113–115, 159, 163, 178, 263, 373, 376, 380, 449, 500, 651, 684, 687, 739, 741, 808, 892 –– within rituals, 108, 113, 115 Dráp Niflunga [The Death of the Niflungs], 17, 1012–1013 drápa, drápur (skaldic poem[s] with refrain stanzas), 199, 263, 310, 402, 541, 642, 643, 689–690, 951, 954 Drápa af Máríugrát [Ode on the Tears of Mary], 263 drekkia minni (or minne trinken), 695, 697, 1075 drinking horn, 1083 drinking toasts, 16, 59, 73, 621, 695–697, 1083 –– in memory of ancestors, 695–696 Droplaugarsona saga [The Saga of the Sons of Droplaug], 591, 615, 617 dróttkvætt (court metre), 43, 199, 262, 267, 394, 496, 510, 643, 644, 646, 648, 689 –– runic inscription, 1072, 1073 druids, 342 Dublin, 174, 889 Dudo of St Quentin, 893 ‘ear of the mind’, 441 Eastern Journey Verses. See Austrfararvísur ecclesiastical geography, 596, 598 Edda, Eddas, 13, 93, 122, 199, 372, 378, 411–412, 561, 836, 915, 917. See also Poetic Edda and Snorra Edda Edda Islandorum, 365 Edmonstons of Unst, 900, 903 Eesti regilaulude andmebaas [Database of Estonian Traditional Songs], 843 Egede, Hans, 800 Egill Skallagrímsson, 111, 223, 241, 253, 591, 616, 618, 690–691, 951, 1037–1038

1126 

 Index

Egil’s Saga. See Egils saga Skallagrímssonar Egils saga Skallagrímssonar [Egil’s Saga], 111–112, 239, 241, 253, 258–260, 329–330, 551, 585, 590–591, 615, 617–618, 668, 688, 951–958, 1037–1038 Eilífr Goðrúnarson, 643 Einar Ólafur Sveinsson, 679 Einarr Skúlason, 310, 312, 1042 Einarsfjörður, Greenland, 662 Erik the Viking, 377 Eiríkr blóðøx (blood-ax), king of Norway and later of York, 309 Eiríkr inn sigrsæli (Erik the Victorious), 922, 925 Eiríks saga rauða [The Saga of Eirik the Red], 112, 114, 617, 655, 661–662, 682–684, 856, 858–860 Eiríks saga víðförla [The Saga of Eirik the Far-traveler], 403 Eiríksfjörður, Greenland, 662 Elder Edda. See Poetic Edda Enumeration of the Earls of Hálogaland. See Háleygjatal Enumeration of the Ynglingar. See Ynglingatal Erikskrönikan. OSw [The Chronicle of Duke Erik], 1062–1064 Eiríksmál [Words about Eirik], 114, 309, 689 ekphrasis (verbal account of an object of visual art), 82, 262, 643, 962 Eldgjá eruption in Icelandic memory, 539–541, 544, 546–48 elegy, 223, 253, 688, 690, 691 elite culture, 380, 423, 829 Elmelunde, Møn, 450 Enander, Johan Alfred, 871, 874 encyclopaedic tradition, 576 Enlightenment, 171, 914 ensemble forecasting, 529 ‘enskilment’, 124 environmental humanities, 327 environmental memory, 11, 327–331 ept, eptir (lit., ‘after’, i.e., ‘in memory of’). See ‘in memory of’ expressed as erfi-øl (ale or drink of a funeral feast), 695, 1075 erfidrápa (memorial ode), 689, 690

Erfidrápa Óláfs Tryggvasonar [Memorial Ode on Óláfr Tryggvason], 643 erfiflokkar, 689 erfikvæði (funeral poems), 218, 241, 689, 690, 951 erfisdrykkja (ale or drink of a funeral feast), 695, 1075 Ericus Olai, 54, 286, 287, 826 Erik, King of Sweden, 323 Erik Magnusson, duke, 1062 Erikskrönikan [The Chronicle of Duke Erik], 1062 Erling Skjalgsson, 292, 642 Eskil, 824 Eskimo Tales and Legends. See Eskimoiske Eventyr og Sagn Eskimoiske Eventyr og Sagn [Eskimo Tales and Legends], 799 Estonia, Estonian, 93, 841–844, 849 ethics of revenge, 252, 489–493, 498–500 ethno-nationalism 729 ethnography of communication (or speaking), 95, 127 ethnohistory, 95, 127 –– and sources, 95 ethnonym, 927–928 ethnopoetics, 95, 100, 126, 127 Ett Folk [A People], 829, 831 Etymologiae of Isidore, 576 etymology, etymologies, 15, 16, 79, 83, 198, 200, 204, 217, 344, 353, 455, 569, 571, 576, 647, 687, 899 –– creative, 344 eucharist, celebration of as continuing recollection, anamnesis, 56–58, 62, 162, 296, 448–451 Everlöv, Skåne, 450 Everlöv/Brarup-Elmelunde workshop, 450 Ewald, Johannes, 776–778, 777 exhibitions as active processes, 174 –– cp. archives as passive memory, 174 extended mind, 527 ‘eye of the mind’, 441 Eyjafjǫrður, Iceland, 313 Eyrbyggja saga [The Saga of the People of Eyri], 253, 260–261, 495–496, 521, 551–552, 584, 615–618, 662

Index 

Eysteinn, archbishop of Nidaros, 310 Eysteinn Haraldsson, king, 1042 Eyvindr Finnsson skáldaspillir (plunderer of skalds), 242, 642, 738 fabulate, 96 Fädernas gudasaga. Berättad för ungdomen [Our Forefathers Myths. Told for Young People], 829 Fædrelandskierlighed [Love of the fatherland], 775 Færeyinga saga [The Saga of the Faroe Islanders], 394–395, 585, 788–791, 793–795 Færoæ & Færoa Reserata, 788 Færøiske Qvæder om Sigurd Fofnersbane og hans Æt [Faroese Poems about Sigmund the Dragon Slayer and his Kin], 719 Fagrskinna, 112 family, 58, 60, 84, 116, 140, 145, 147, 192, 218–221, 223, 258, 305, 306–310, 312–314, 345, 350, 352, 356, 363, 370, 372, 391, 395, 396, 419, 435–438, 466, 483, 489, 490, 492, 493, 499, 503, 508, 519, 522–524, 584, 586, 587, 607, 612, 614, 620, 621, 623, 635, 664, 678, 679, 682–684, 687, 689, 690, 695, 701, 709–713, 737–739, 744–747, 757, 758, 760, 802, 813, 829, 857, 859, 872, 900, 904, 908, 967 –– time, 305–306 –– memory, construction of, 223, 258, 490, 635, 678, 682 Fanefjord, 450 Faroe Islands, 394–395, 585, 588, 716–725, 788–796, 1071 –– ballad tradition of, 716, 718, 719 –– images of Sigmundur Brestisson and the Conversion, 790, 792 –– statue of Tróndur í Gøtu, 794 Faroese Poems about Sigmund the Dragon Slayer and his Kin. See Færøiske Qvæder om Sigurd Fofnersbane og hans Æt ‘fattig og raae’ (poor and raw), 775 feast days, 402, 436 female inciters or whetters, 239, 519–521, 523, 524

 1127

Fenrisúlfr, 311, 559 Ferðabók Eggerts Ólafssonar og Bjarna Pálssonar [Travelogue of Eggert Ólafsson and Bjarni Pálsson], 764 festa í minni (to commit something to memory), 16 festival(s), 58, 107, 108, 110, 111, 113, 114, 116, 678–680, 728, 795, 817, 904, 908 –– rooted in pagan calendar, 108, 110, 114, 679–680, fictitionalized orality (Fingierte Mündlichkeit), 127 figure(s) –– of cultural memory, 502 –– of Ecclesia, 295 –– of memory, 8, 43, 323, 477, 750, 751, 764 filid and bards of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, 342–344 Finnboga saga ramma [The Saga of Finnbogi the Mighty], 614, 617 Finnish donor portraits, 291 Finnish Historical-Geographical School, 95 Finnish itkuvirret (crying verses, i.e., laments), 848 Finnish shamanism, 348, 350, 683–684, 846 –– shaman as tietäjä (knower), 846 ‘Finnish’ theory regarding the Varangians, 928 Finno-Ugric languages, 348–349, 841 Finnur Jónsson, 18, 39, 455, 456, 511, 547, 647, 821 Finnur Magnússon, 807 First Crusade, 578–79 First Grammatical Treatise, 744 First Lay of Gudrun. See Guðrúnarkviða I First World War, 815, 830, 908–909, 911 fixed text, 126, 395, 848 Fjäle myr, Gotland, 146 Flatey Annals, 522 Flateyjarbók [The Book of Flatey], 210–211, 313, 407, 409, 739 Fled Dúin na nGéd [The Banquet of the Ford of the Geese], 344 Flistad, Västergötland, 568 Fljótsdæla saga [The Saga of the People of Fljotsdal], 617

1128 

 Index

Flóamanna saga [The Saga of the People of Floi], 551–552, 614–617, 662 ‘floating gap’ between communicative and cultural memory, 213, 758 Flokkr about Erlingr Skjálgsson [Poem about Erlingr Skjálgsson], 642 Florence of Worcester, 892 florilegia, 439 fMRI scan, 528 folk belief, 508–10, 766, 900, 901 –– as set of shared conceptions over time, 508 folk groups, 95, 120, 904 folk-enlightenment (folkeoplysning), 785–86 Folk-Lore, as calque on German Volkskunde, 94 folklore, 14, 18, 21, 23, 26, 58, 93–101, 120, 126, 155, 231, 341, 355, 467, 511, 543, 556–557, 692, 717, 721, 728, 773, 842–843, 885–886, 892, 896–897, 900–902, 904 –– and memory studies, 18, 21, 92–94, 96–98, 100–01, 120, 126, 341, 355, 692 –– and sources, 18, 99, 843, 849, 892, 896–897 –– as building and craft traditions, 93 –– as calendric rituals, 93 –– as expressive practices and behaviours, expressions of value and heritage, 93 –– texts as emergent structures, 126 forgetting, induced, 527, 1011–1012 formulism at metrical level (sometimes termed ‘oral formulism’), 643–44 forn minni (deep mythological past), 2, 3, 198, 202 forn siðr (ancient customs), 620, 789 fornaldarsögur (legendary sagas), 99, 331, 364, 403, 415, 579, 740, 836 fornyrðislag metre, 74, 644 Forsby, Västergötland, 143 Fóstbræðra saga [The Saga of the Sworn Brothers], 529, 618, 662 fóstbræðrathǫfn (the bridge of turf under which participants blended blood), 111 Foundation of Norway. See Fundinn Noregr ‘foundational history’, 84 Four Gospels, 57 Fourth Lateran Council, 55

Fragment of a Poem about Sigurd. See Brot af Sigurðarkviðu Francophone inheritance by the nouveau régime, 892 fraternities and guilds, 59, 60, 595 freeprose, 18, 19, 94, 98, 123, 126, 234, 257 freeprose and bookprose, 19, 98, 123, 126, 257 French Revolution, 782 Freyja, 192, 375, 555, 558, 559, 567, 623, 669, 696, 776, 837, 902 Frihet (freedom), exhibition on the Norwegian constitution, 173, 828, 829 Frithiofs saga, 828–29 –– title page of 1876 edition, 828 Frø [Freyr], 567 Fróðá, Iceland, 495, 552 Frölunda, Västergötland, 567 Frösö, Jämtland, 143 Frösvi, Västergötland, 567 From the Separate Saga of Óláfr the Saint. See Ór Óláfs sǫgu in helga inni sérstǫku Fulcher of Chartres, 579 full at drekka, 1014 Fundinn Noregr [The Foundation of Norway], 739 funeral culture, gendered aspects of, 701 funerals and poetic commemoration, 40, 241, 257, 689–690, 848, 951. See also erfikvæði (funeral poems) funerary practices, 161, 336, 466, 924, 951 futhark. See runes, runic fyrd, 567 gætit verða (be commemorated, lit., be mentioned, be spoken of), 1074 *ga-menþja, common Germanic root of minni, minna(sk), muna, 15 Gallus Anonymous, 922 Gamal norsk homiliebok [Old Norwegian Book of Homilies]. See homilies Gamla Uppsala, Uppland [Old Uppsala], 110, 139 140, 143, 161, 570, 620–625, 816, 831, 816, 1081, 1087 –– as cultural memory site, 816 –– great hall building at, destroyed by fire, 621, 622, 671

Index 

–– map of in late eighth century, 622 Gamli sáttmáli [Old Covenant], 211 Gandvik (Magical Bay), 580 Garðar, Greenland, 662, 764 Gardens navn, 565 Garpsdalur, Iceland, 712 Gautrek’s saga. See Gautreks saga Gautreks saga [Gautrek’s saga], 824, 826, 836, 1047–1048 Gebetsbrüderschaft (communion of mutual intercession), 59 Geisli [Sun Ray], 310–311 Gelimer, 688 gender, 21, 24, 25, 115, 144, 147, 177, 372, 421, 519, 523, 524, 610, 613, 628, 681–684, 699–701, 704, 705, 856 –– and memory, 25, 144, 147, 519, 523, 699, 704, 974 –– and museology, 177 –– and vengeance, 25, 519–524 genealogies, 13, 75, 84, 93, 138, 141, 147, 160, 190, 193, 258, 306, 308–311, 322, 343, 345, 362, 391, 393, 394, 396, 410, 483, 511, 590, 607, 610–612, 621, 625, 641, 642, 660, 662, 687, 744–748, 866, 872, 895 Genealogy of the Sturlungs. See Ættartala Sturlunga geo-mythological language, 539 geological activities, 539, 540, 545, 547–548 gerði minni (made these memorials), 1072 ‘German Question’, 913 Germania [About Germany] by Tacitus, 516, 915 Germany, 25, 66, 596, 598, 631, 711, 778, 813, 822, 895, 908, 911–13, 916, 917 geschichtsmythische (historical-mythical), 84 Gesta Danorum [History of the Danes] by Saxo Grammaticus, 93, 320–321, 739, 774, 776, 975–978, 1027 Gesta Francorum Jerusalem expugnantium of Fulcher of Chartres, 579 Gestaltung, shaping and storage of perceived images, 447 Giants in the Earth: A Saga of the Prairie, 871, 875

 1129

gilda, brotherhood around the cult of a hero, 59 Gimli, Manitoba, 558, 880 Gísla saga Súrssonar [Gisli Sursson’s Saga] 112, 237, 492, 615, 617, 662, 741, 1035–1036 Gísli inn gauzki, teaches Latin and grammatica, 441 Gisli Sursson’s Saga. See Gísla saga Súrssonar Gjallarhorn (Screaming Horn), 85, 86, 558 Gjúkungar (named after King Gjúki), 737 Glavendrup rune stone. See DR 209 (Glavendrup, Funen) under runestone(s) Glavendrupdigtet [The Glavendrup Poem], 634 Glavendrup Poem. See Glavendrupdigtet Glavendrupstenen (Glavendrup Stone association), 632, 633 gleyma (oblivion), 2, 560 gleyma (to forget), 17 gleymska (oblivion), 17 Glossa ordinaria, 63 God Thor the most Barbarous among the Barbarian Deities of Old Germany. See Le Dieu Thor la plus barbare d’entre les barbares divinités de la Vieille Germanie Gododdin, 345 Göngu-Hrólfs saga [The Saga of Göngu-Hrolf], 17 *Gøti, 567 Götiska förbundet, 827 göticism, late medieval, 826 Götlunda, Västergötland, 567 Gøtuskeggjar [Men from Gøta], 789, 795 Gokstad, Vestfold –– man, 813 –– ship, 171, 172, 811, 813, 816, 816, 869, 1082 –– ship burial, 171, 172, 821 Golgotha, 261, 295, 474 Gormr (Gorm the Old), 161, 778, 1067 Gospels as ‘the memoirs (apomnemoneumata) of the apostles’, 57 Gothic architecture, as a site of memory, 909–10 Gothic cathedral, 143, 159, 910

1130 

 Index

Gotland, 84, 144–146, 200, 234, 261, 266, 464, 466, 601–605, 826 –– picture stones of 144–146, 200, 261, 266, 464–466, 602 Grænlendinga saga [Saga of the Greenlanders], 618, 661–662, 856–858, 872 graföl (funeral beer), 695 Grágas [Icelandic Law Code], 187–188, 521 Granavollen, Hedmark, 293 Granby assembly site (Grænbythyngstad), 610 grand history, 305 grave mounds and legitimacy of patrimony and odal (allodium), 140, 192, 621 graves, 4, 53, 55, 58, 111, 112, 136, 139–147, 152, 154, 160, 161, 171, 172, 220, 233, 258, 291, 305, 433, 464, 466, 473, 489, 509, 575, 594, 607–611, 614–618, 620–622, 624, 628, 681–683, 740, 752, 766, 778, 793, 846–848, 878 –– superimposition of 609, 610, 861 ‘Great Divide’ between orality versus literacy, 126, 204 Great Northern War (1700–1720), 835, 927 Greater Poland, 923 Greatest Saga of Óláfr Tryggvason. See Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta Greenland, 93, 327, 328, 331, 376, 402, 548, 551, 552, 579–581, 583, 588, 591, 617, 661–663, 682, 684, 798–803, 856–858, 860, 862, 867, 871, 872, 875 –– call for narratives from, 799 –– culture of, 328, 661–663, 682, 798–803 –– nature of sources on, 579–580, 661–662, 856–857, 872 –– settlements on abandoned by the Norse, 328, 588 greppaminni (poets’ reminder), 3, 223 Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar [The Saga of Grettir Ásmundarsson], 490, 510, 531–533, 551–552, 584–585, 615–618 Grímhildr, 515–16 –– her pharmacological repertoire, 515 Grimm, Jacob, 81, 85, 95, 454, 559, 902, 911, 915, 918 Grimm, Wilhelm, 95, 911

Grímnismál [Grímnir’s Sayings], 74–75, 81, 85, 113–114, 116, 260, 457, 543, 558, 1009 Grímnir’s Sayings. See Grímnismál grimoires and other textual collections of charms, 657 Grímsey, Iceland, 505 griþ, alt., gruþ (peace, asylum), 187 Grötlingbo, Gotland, 144 group identity, 70, 72 Grund, Battle of in Eyjafjǫrður, Iceland, 313 Grundtvig, N.F.S., 632, 782–786, 819, 820, 917 Guðmundar saga Arasonar [The Life of Gudmund the Good, Bishop of Holar], 549 Guðmundar saga biskups [The Saga of Bishop Guðmundr], 402, 403 Guðmundar saga dýra [The Saga of Guðmund dýri], 549 Guðmundar saga helga [The Saga of Saint Guðmund], 402–403 Guðmundardrápa [Ode on Bishop Gudmund], 199, 402 Guðrúnarhvǫt [The Whetting of Guðrún], 516, 696, 1015–1016 Guðrúnarkviða I [The First Lay of Gudrun], 516 Guðrúnarkviða II [The Second Lay of Gudrun], 259, 516, 1014–1015 guild(s) (Lat. convivium, sodalitas), 59, 60, 293, 594, 655, 695 –– as formal apprenticeship system 655 –– dedicated to saints, 594 Guillou, Jan, 831 Gunnars saga Keldugnúpsfífls [The Saga of Gunnar, the Fool of Keldugnup], 615, 662 Gunnars þáttr Þiðrandabana [The Tale of Gunnar, the Slayer of Thidrandi], 591 Gunnarshólmi (Gunnar’s Holm, 1838), 808 Gunnhildr Cross, 1075 Gunnlaugr Leifsson, 440 Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu [The Saga of Gunnlaugr Serpent-Tongue], 113, 618 Gunnlǫð, 200, 243 Gutalag OSw [The Law of the Gotlanders]. See Laws Gutasaga OSw [The Saga of the Gotlanders], 826

Index 

Gyðinga saga [The Saga of the Jews], 286 Gylfaginning [The Tricking of Gylfi], 2, 85–88, 243, 410, 421–425, 456, 457, 459, 555, 557–558, 671, 680, 737, 740 Gylfi (disguised as the wanderer Gangleri), 87, 88, 192, 243, 374, 410, 421–24, 456, 555, 558, 671, 680, 737, 740 Håtuna, Uppland, 1062 Håtunaleken (the Håtuna game), 1062 Hænir, 669 Hälsingelagen OSw (Laws of Hälsingland), 187, 190 Härjedalen, Sweden, 189, 191, 468 Hässelby, Uppland, 141, 142 hafa at minnum (to keep something in memory), 16 hafa uppi (to live on in memory, to be remembered), 16, 238 Hafrsfjord, Norway, 822 hagio-geographical memory, 598 hagiographic literature, 285, 286, 318, 323, 343, 344, 363, 403, 439, 440, 442, 481, 596, 700, 709, 925, 931 –– narratives, 318 hagiography, 307, 341, 439, 594 Hail Mary, 55 Hákon Aðalsteinsfóstri, king of Norway, also known as Hákon inn góði (the Good), 642 Hákon Hákonarson, king of Norway (1217–1263), 903 –– stained glass image of in town hall, Lerwick, Shetland, 1100 Hákonar saga góða. See Saga Hákonar góða Hákonar saga Hákonarsonar [The Saga of Hákon Hákonarson], 1059 Hákonarmál [Words on Hákon], 112, 309, 642, 690 Háleygjatal [Enumeration of the Earls of Hálogaland], 642, 738 Hálfdan svarti (the black), 362 Hallbjörn and Vilborg at Hvammr in Hvítársíða, miracle involving, 434, 435, 436 Hallmundarhraun, 510, 544 Hallmundarkviða [The Poem of Hallmund], 510

 1131

Hallstatt period (eighth to sixth century BC), 341 hamhleypa (shape-shifting), 419 hanefjät (rooster’s steps), 624 Haraldr blátǫnn (Bluetooth) Gormsson, king of Denmark, 160, 778, 1067, 1068 Haraldr gilli, king of Norway, 504 Haraldr harðráði Sigurðsson, king of Norway, 502 Haraldr hárfagri (Fairhair), king of Norway, 362, 584, 739, 983 Haralds saga hárfagra [The Saga of Harald Fairhair], 655, 740 Hárbarðsljóð [Harbard’s Song], 113–114, 116, 259 Harðar saga og Hólmverja [The Saga of Hord and the People of Holm], 615–617 harmr (grief), 515 Harvard University, 122, 124 hátíð (festival, feast), 107–108 Haukdælir family, 308, 745, 758 Haukr Erlendsson, 314 Hauksbók. See AM 544 4to under manuscripts Haustlǫng [Autumn-Long, i.e. poem whose composition took an entire autumn], 643 Hávamál [The Sayings of the High One], 85, 112–113, 200, 240, 243, 259, 642, 696, 902, 1009–1010, 1010 Hávarðar saga Ísfirðings [The Saga of Havard of Isafjord], 614–615 Hawaii, 96 Head-Ransom. See Hǫfuðlausn heart. See hjarta heathen, 306, 492, 493, 504, 560, 614, 617–618, 695–696, 731, 750–751, 764, 776, 779, 825, 831, 838, 934 –– funerals, 695–696, 751 –– religion, 306, 750–751 ‘Heather Beer’ (Type 2412E), 888 Heavener stone, Oklahoma, 882, 883 Hedeby, Slevsig 460, 815 Heiðarvíga saga [The Saga of the Slaying on the Heath], (copied from memory), 407, 615 Heidenstam, Verner von, 829, 830, Heilagra manna sögur (sagas of saints), 402–403

1132 

 Index

Heimdallr, 86, 669 –– special hearing ability of, 86 Heimskringla [Circle of the World], 42, 98, 306, 505, 520, 551, 570, 577, 695, 700, 716, 740, 818–823, 871, 960, 967, 988–991, 1023, 1025, 1028, 1034 Heine, Heinrich, 910–911 Hel, 423, 517, 541, 684, 691 Helena of Skövde, 824 Helgafell, Augustinian monastery of, 253, 313, 437, 576 Helgi Harðbeinsson, 514 Heliand, 201 Helluland, 580, 860 Hellvi church, Gotland, 1077 helmet plate, Vendel period, 456 Helreið Brynhildar [Brynhildr’s Ride to Hel], 517 hendingar (internal rhymes), 644 Henricus Martellus, 579–580 Henry of Finland, 323 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 122, 786, 819, 914–915, 918 –– and ideas of a ‘culture-nation’, 914 –– ‘Herderian notions’, 914–915, 918 Hereward the Wake, 892 Heritage Act of Norway (1905), 812 Hermannsdenkmal (Hermann Monument) in the Teutoburg Forest, 915–916 hermeneutic pendulum, 533 heroic restraint, 532–533 ‘heron of forgetfulness’. See óminnishegri Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks konungs [The Saga of Hervor and King Heidrek], 569, 836 Hexaemeron of Andreas Sunesen, 53 hierophany, 110 hieros gamos, 115 Hildigunnr Starkaðardóttir, 520, 530 Hilleshög, Färingsö, Sweden, 572 hirðstjóri (superior commissioner), 313, 521 Historia Brittonum, 345 Historia de antiquitate regum Norwagiensium [An Account of the Ancient History of the Norwegian Kings], 320–322, 983–985 Historia de omnibus gothorum sveonumque regibus [History of all the Gothic and Swedish Kings], 826

Historia Norwegie [A History of Norway], 311, 320, 322–323, 739, 981–982 Historia Sancti Olai, 286, 287 Historia scholastica of Peter Comestor, 439 Historical Museum, Oslo, 172, 175–176 historical studies, 153, 303, 305, 314, 323, 336, 921, 925 historiographical literature, 285–286, 586, 751, 763, 839, 937 –– historiographical reasons, 285, 286, 586, 751, 763, 839 –– historiographical schools, 937 history, 5, 9–10, 14, 21, 23, 25–26, 43, 52, 55, 57, 59, 65, 74, 83–84, 135, 137, 147, 151, 161, 166, 168–172, 174–175, 177–178, 185, 187, 190, 193, 198, 204–205, 231, 233–234, 236, 244, 252, 253, 261, 266, 274, 277, 279, 286–287, 295, 296, 303–315, 319–323, 335, 338, 341, 345–346, 353, 362, 363, 367, 370–371, 381–382, 385, 400, 402–404, 428, 439, 447, 489, 519, 552, 559, 566, 569, 575, 579, 594, 603, 613, 618, 632, 634, 635, 666, 717, 720, 728, 738, 740, 744, 745, 747–748, 750, 753, 756, 758–760, 762–763, 766, 771–772, 774, 776, 779, 784, 786, 789–791, 795, 798–800, 802, 809, 811–812, 815, 819, 821–822, 824, 826, 834–836, 839, 866–869, 871–872, 885, 893, 895, 899–904, 909, 913, 917, 922–923, 928, 930–931, 933–935, 937–939 –– Augustinian view of, 310–311 –– and historiography, 346, 834 –– and memory studies, 303–304 –– as a modern science, 303 –– as a study of the past, 303–304 –– cult of, 304 –– of mentalities, 10, 65, 95, 305 –– writing of, 307, 835 History of all the Gothic and Swedish Kings. See Historia de omnibus gothorum sveonumque regibus History of Norway. See Historia Norwegie History of the Danes. See Gesta Danorum by Saxo Grammaticus Hiúki, 557

Index 

hjarta (heart), 1, 47, 57, 64, 199, 263, 434, 436, 441–442, 454, 467, 475, 691, 791, 808, 954 –– as house or ground or mountain of the thought, 1, 47 –– as memoria image, 1, 47, 263, 441–442, 791 Hjortsberga, Blekinge, 143 Hlaðir, 73, 695, 738 –– earls of, 738 –– heathen sacrifices held at in the tenth century, 73, 695 Hliðskjálf (Óðinn’s high seat), 558–559 Hǫfuðlausn [Head-Ransom], 954–959 Högåsen, Gamla Uppsala, 140, 620, 622, 1081 Hǫgni, 516 Højgaard, Jutland, 141 Højrup, Jutland, 141 Hørning. Jutland, 143 Hófsstaðir, Iceland, 111 Hólar, Cathedral school at, 441–442 Holland, 66 Holmgarðr, 815 Holt, Önundarfjörður, 711 Holy Day of Obligation, 434 Holy Land, 261, 596 Holy Spirit, 53, 64, 165, 482 Homeric epics (Iliad and Odyssey), 122–124 ‘Homeric Question’, 124 homilies, 41, 65, 160, 164–165 291, 295, 439, 481, 752, 892 –– Gamal norsk homiliebok [Old Norwegian Book of Homilies], 41, 160, 164–165, 291, 295, 1019 –– Homiliæ of Bernard of Clairvaux, 65 –– Íslensk hómilíubók (also Homíliu-bók), 439, 752 –– Kirkjudagsprédikun [Church Dedication Homily], 439 Hóp, Vínland, 858–859 Hopperstad stave church, Vik, Norway, 1020 Horae de Domina [Hours of Our Lady], 65 Horace, 651 Horsford, Eben Norton, 869, 871 Hours of Our Lady. See Horae de Domina Hours of the Cross, 65

 1133

House-Poem. See Húsdrápa Hov, Torsö, Sweden, 568 Hrafna-Flóki, 763 Hrafnkels saga [The Saga of Hrafnkel Frey’s Godi], 98, 615, 617 Hreiðars þáttr heimska [The Story of Hreiðarr the Fool], 502 Hrólfs saga kraka [The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki], 1027 Hugh of Fouilloy, 1061 Hugh of St. Victor, 63, 294, 1061 Huginn and Muninn, 42, 81, 200, 259, 454–460, 1009, 1093 –– figures from Hedeby and Lolland, 460 –– ‘Odin from Lejre’ 459, 460 –– SÁM 66, 459, 1093 –– Vendel era helmet plate, 455–456, 456, 460 hugr, also hugi (thought, mind), 1, 81, 200, 259, 454, 455, 1009 hugscotz augum (the inner eye), 165, 295, 1019 human geography, 660 human interactions with the supernatural, 111–113, 266, 508–510, 531, 545, 681 human psyche, 253, 495, 497 Humanist thought, 363 hundari (OSw: hundred, section of a shire), 570 Hunger-stirrer. See Hungrvaka Hungrvaka [Hunger-stirrer], 236, 746–747, 970–973 husabyar (royal farms), 570 Húsafell, Iceland, 434–437 Husby, Munsö, Sweden, 570 Húsdrápa [House-Poem], 962–963 Hversu Noregr bygðist [How Norway was Inhabited], 739 hvílir (rests), 1071 hvöt (whetting, incitement), 238, 515–516, 696 Hyltén-Cavallius, Gunnar Olof, 97–98 Hyndla, 75, 192, 696 Hyndla’s Chant. See Hyndluljóð Hyndluljóð [Hyndla’s Chant] 75–76, 192–193, 259, 696 hypertextuality, hypotext, and hypertexts, 138, 788–789, 791, 793

1134 

 Index

ibn Fadlan, 687–688 Iceland, 4, 18–20, 25, 39, 70, 84, 94, 110–111, 123, 185, 188, 212–213, 244, 252–254, 261, 263, 265, 277–278, 286, 303, 305–308, 310–314, 318–319, 327–330, 362–367, 392, 407–409, 412, 434–435, 437, 495, 500, 503, 505, 510–511, 514–515, 519–524, 526, 530, 539–540, 543, 545, 549–552, 557, 559, 576–577, 579–580, 583–591, 596, 598, 641–642, 656, 660–664, 678, 682, 684, 695, 697, 700–703, 710, 712–713, 737–739, 744–747, 750–751, 753, 756–760, 763–764, 766, 773, 788, 805–807, 809, 815, 819, 860–861, 867, 947, 967, 970 –– as historical ‘deep freezer’, 805 –– nationalism in, political struggle of for autonomy from Denmark, 19, 94, 122, 805–807, 809, 819 –– settlement (landnám) of, 18, 20, 123, 279, 739, 757, 762–764, 766–767, 806, 871, 967 Icelandic Commonwealth, 312, 350, 656 Icelandic Encyclopedic Literature. See Alfræði íslenzk Icelandic Law Code. See Grágás and Jónsbók Icelandic Legends and Fairy-Tales. See Íslenzkar Þjóðsögur og Æfintýri iconography, as culturally symbolic expression, 3, 113, 295, 455, 467, 478 Identitarian Ásatrú, 727, 728, 729, 731 identity construction, 9, 83, 89, 211, 286, 324, 330, 363, 382, 414, 416, 627, 728, 731, 757–759, 788, 818, 896, 899, 903, 909 –– and functions of mythology, 83, 89, 382, 430, 728 –– collective, 9, 211, 330, 430, 627, 728, 731, 757–759, 788, 899 –– personal, 414, 416, 757–759 Iðavǫllr (Idavoll Plain), 423, 424 Ignatius of Loyola, 65 Igor Tale, 929 Ihre, Johan, 827 image(s), 16, 65, 218–220, 224, 239, 266, 287, 290–91, 293, 295–296, 355, 370, 374, 375, 430, 435, 440, 447–450, 452,

472–475, 479, 482–483, 497–498, 505, 528, 541–542, 575, 586, 616, 634, 646, 648–652, 703, 711, 718, 728, 730, 752, 771, 774, 776, 779, 785, 815, 829, 831, 834, 847, 893, 899, 901, 909, 911, 917, 925, 935 –– as culturally symbolic expressions, 3 –– as necessity for collective memory in oral societies, 463 –– imagines agentes (active images), 648–49 –– of anamnesis in action, 450, 474 –– of the past ethnie, 785 –– ON-Ice. mynd, connections to muna (remember) and minni (memory), 15–16, 646–47 imagined communities, 24 imaginatio, memory and imagination, 447, 452 imagination, 16, 43, 65, 97, 320, 322, 324, 337, 370, 373, 397, 431, 447, 528, 614, 632, 635, 669, 775, 780, 808, 866, 869, 886, 892, 896–97 imitatio Christi, 451, 1055 imitatio Mariae, 65 In dedicatione templi. Sermo [Sermon for the Dedication of Churches], 164 ‘in memory of’ expressed as ept, eptir, and aft, 188, 191–192, 203, 238, 411, 424, 441, 569, 595, 598, 627, 1067, 1069, 1071–1072, 1074–1075 ‘incorporating practice’ (e.g., cultural specific postural performances), 8 Indo-European language, 341 *Ingi, 571 Ingimundr inn gamli (the Old), 585 Ingjald Illråde, 571 Ingjaldshögen, Fogdö, Sweden, 571 Ingledew, Francis, 747, 748 Ingólfr Arnarson, 762–763, 766 –– pillars of, 763, 766 –– slaves of, 763 –– statue of by Einar Jónsson, 765 Ingólfsfjall (Ingólfr’s Mountain), 764, 766 Ing(ólfs)hóll (Ing(ólfrs)’s mound), 766 Ingólfs sögu-þjóð [Ingólfur’s Saga People], 763 Ingólfur’s Saga People. See Ingólfs sögu-þjóð

Index 

Ingrian, 841, 843–844 Ingstad, Anne Stine, 855, 862, 867 Ingstad, Helge, 855, 861–862, 867, 874 inheritance, 192, 193, 219, 307, 367, 394, 521, 612, 622, 688, 712, 892, 894–895 initiation rituals, 71, 75, 76 inscribing practice (e.g. actions which imply storage), 8 Institutio Oratori of Quintilian, 667, 670 institutionalised mnemotechnics, 762 inter-Nordic colonialism, 122 interactive retrieval, 555 interactivity, 391 intergenerational memory, 1071 ‘internal-external memory’, 82 International Council of Museums (ICOM), 170–171 International Saga Conferences, 22, 99 Interpretatio Scandinavica, 467 intertextuality, 19, 87, 89, 198, 231, 233, 237, 241–242, 259, 287, 307, 330, 422, 510, 844 –– mythological overlays, 87, 89, 198, 231, 242, 307, 844 Inuit, 328, 798–803, 859 –– and Norsemen, 798, 800–803 inventio crucis, 261 Inventory of Bishop Wilkin. See Vilchinsmáldagi Irish historical outlook (invasion), 885–889 –– dèja vu, 885 –– memory on the margins, 885 Ísafjarðardjúp, Iceland, 437 Isidore of Seville, 576–577 Islandske Annaler, 543, 550 Íslendinga saga [The Saga of the Icelanders], 113 Íslendingabók [The Book of the Icelanders], 83, 188, 259, 279, 329, 392, 396, 540, 584, 586–587, 641, 666, 700, 738–739, 744–745, 756–759, 762, 967–969 –– as work of ‘contemporised past’, 587 Íslendingasögur (sagas of Icelanders), 252, 277, 307–308, 313–314, 329–331, 394, 428, 489, 493, 516, 520, 522–523, 526, 529, 551, 584–586, 588–591, 613–614, 618, 646,

 1135

660–662, 738–740, 747, 751, 757, 762, 836 Íslensk hómilíubók. See homilies Íslenzkar Þjóðsögur og Æfintýri [Icelandic Legends and Fairy-Tales], 101, 766 It hundrede vduualde Danske Viser [One Hundred Selected Danish Poems], 17 Jaffa, false claims of conquest during the Crusades, 597 Jakobs saga postola [The Saga of the Apostle James], 400 Játvarðar saga [The Saga of Edward the Confessor], 402 James III of Scotland, king, 899 Janus, the double-faced Roman deity, 805, 809 Jarteinabók Þorláks biskups [Collection of Miracles of St Thorlak], 400–401 Jelling, Jutland, 143, 153, 160–161, 218, 257, 292, 466, 627, 773–774, 778–780, 816, 1068 –– as Denmark’s ‘birth certificate’, 779 –– illustrations of from Ole Worm’s Monumenta Danica, 773, 774 –– runestone (Harald’s stone). See DR 42 under runestone(s) Jesus’ Descent into Hell. See Niðrstigningar saga Jewish-Christian communities, 439 Jöns Budde, monk of Vallis Gratiae, Nådendal, Finland, 1061 Joensen, Sigfríður, 795 Jökuls þáttur Búasonar [Jokul Buason’s Tale], 662 jötnar (giants) in Norse mythology, 114–115, 556 Johannes Magnus, bishop, 580 John de Caulibus, 64 John of Sacrobosco, 66 joik as muitingoansta (a way of remembering), 349 Jokul Buason’s Tale. See Jökuls þáttur Búasonar Jómsvikings, 923, 925 Jón Árnason, 766 Jón Egilsson, 212–213

1136 

 Index

Jón Gereksson, bishop, 523 Jón Guðmundsson lærði, 94 Jón Ǫgmundarson, Bishop of Hólar, 550 Jón Ólafsson Indíafari, Icelandic traveller, 718 Jón Þorláksson, 711 Jónas Hallgrímsson, 808–809 Jóns saga helga [Saga of Saint Jón], 401–402, 440–442, 550–552, 1018 Jónsbók [Icelandic Law Code], 212, 307 Jordanes, 623 Jorþæ balkær [Book of Land], 1051 Jupiter, 410, 555, 559, 773 Justinus, 57 Karelian, 841, 843–844, 846–848 Karl Jónsson, abbot, 311 Karl Knutsson, 287 Karl Magnus OSw [Charlemagne], 286 Karlamagnús saga [The Saga of Charlemagne], 286 Karleby, Västergötland, 567 Karlevi stone. See Öl 1 (Karlevi, Öland) under runestone(s) Kaupang, Vestfold, 174, 815 Kaupo of Turaida, 842 Keldby, Møn 450 –– mural 1095 kenning(s), 2, 40, 42–44, 82, 87–88, 164, 199–200, 241–242, 311, 441, 497, 542, 560, 644, 646–652, 691 –– as concentrated mini-myths, 647 –– as double-faced cognitive figure, 42–43 –– kenning-models, 647, 650 Kensington stone, Minnesota, 876–877, 877, 880, 883 Ketils saga hængs [The Saga of Ketil Trout], 826 Khazar(s), 929, 938 Kiev, Ukraine, 578, 579, 815, 934, 936, 938 Kievan Rus’, 815, 927, 929, 931, 936–939 –– as the cradle of the Eastern Slavs (i.e. Belarussians, Ukrainians, Russians), 937 Killer-Glúm’s Saga. See Víga-Glúms saga Kilpalaulanta [The Singing Contest], 844–845 King’s Mirror, Norwegian. See Konungs skuggsjá King’s Mirror OSw. See Konunga styrelse

Kinsarvik, Hardanger, altar-frontal, 293–296, 1094 Kirkjubær, female convent of, 703 Kirkjudagsprédikun [Church Dedication Homily]. See homilies Kjalarnes, 661 Kjalnesinga saga [The Saga of the People of Kjalarnes], 615, 617 Kjartan Óláfsson, 514 Klængr Þorsteinsson, bishop, 435, 969 Knight and the Lily-Petal. See Riddaren och Lilio-Bladet knowledge, 4, 7, 8, 24, 43–44, 48, 62, 74–76, 82, 84–86, 88–89, 93, 95, 98, 101, 111–112, 114–116, 169, 178, 186–187, 189–190, 193, 199–200, 204–205, 210, 214, 217, 218, 225, 232, 239, 242–243, 256, 259, 262, 266, 291, 311–312, 319–320, 323, 327–328, 342–345, 353, 361–362, 365, 372, 384–385, 391–395, 397, 418, 425, 435–436, 440–441, 458, 477, 483, 489, 505, 510, 511, 526, 556, 560, 565, 572, 575–576, 578–579, 581, 585, 586, 589, 591, 597, 607, 613–614, 639, 655, 657, 660–661, 663–664, 666, 677, 679–680, 683, 687, 696, 700–701, 737, 744–746, 798, 813, 834, 838, 844–845, 859–860, 867, 869, 872, 885, 886–888, 902, 904, 921, 923, 933 –– externalization of, 214 Knútsdrápa [Ode to Cnut/Canute the Great], 642 Kola Peninsula, Murmansk Oblat, Russia, 349 –– substrate lexicon of first people in Nordic region, 349 Kolskeggr Ásbjarnarson, 757 kommunikatives Gedächtnis. See memory, communicative Kongl: Mayst:tz Placat och Påbudh om Gamble Monumenter och Antiquiteter [Antiquities Decree of 1666], 837 Konunga styrelse OSw [King’s Mirror], 46, 986–987 –– also known as En nyttigh Bok om Konnunga Styrilse och Höfdinga, 47 konungakyn (royal kin), 744

Index 

konungasögur (kings’ sagas), 579, 646, 701, 836 konungatal (series of kings), 112, 744 Konungs skuggsjá [The King’s Mirror, Norwegian], 312, 523, 543, 986–987 Kormak’s Saga. See Kormáks saga Kormáks saga [Kormak’s Saga], 112, 551, 615 Kremlin, the, Moscow, Russia, 927, 929–931, 934–935, 937–938 Kristinréttr Árna biskups [Bishop Árni’s Church Law], 212 Króka-Refs saga [The Saga of Ref the Sly], 662 kulturelles Gedächtnis. See memory, cultural Kumlbúa þáttr [The Tale of the Cairn-Dweller], 509 Kung Björns hög, Uppland, 569 Kung Inges hög, Ö. Torsås, Småland, 571 Kung Nordians hög, Åshusby, Uppland, 571 Kung Ranes hög, Västergötland, 568 Kunstpoesie (art or elite poetry), 122 Kvasir, 81, 86 Kveld-Úlfr, 668 Kven, 841 kviðuháttr, 690 kyn (kin, kindred), 744 kynslóð (kindred, pedigree), 744 L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, 661, 855–856, 858–862, 872, 880 lacunae, 406 Lärbro, Gotland, 603 lais (Old French short verse-stories), 41, 236–237, 312 Lambert of St Omer, 577 land, 1, 47, 57, 111, 140, 143, 187, 189–193, 203, 236, 260, 265, 278, 283, 292, 308, 322, 328–329, 344, 373, 393–394, 490, 542, 544, 550, 552, 567, 571, 577, 580, 584, 587–588, 590, 596, 598, 615, 651, 661, 663, 684, 739–741, 745, 747, 756–757, 764, 798, 802, 831, 837, 847, 855–858, 860, 868, 871, 881, 900, 902, 904, 924 –– disputes, 140, 189 –– use models, 329

 1137

landnám (Icelandic settlement period), 18, 20, 123, 279, 739, 757, 762, 763, 764, 766, 767, 806, 871 Landnámabók [Book of Settlements], 112, 116, 259, 329, 540, 544, 550–552, 585–588, 590, 660, 662, 663, 688, 738–740, 741, 745–746, 750, 753, 756–760, 762–764, 766–767, 859 landscape, 23, 41, 99, 110–111, 114–115, 152, 154, 220–221, 257–260, 267, 276–278, 291, 304, 320, 343–344, 350, 351, 353, 391–392, 503, 510, 540, 563, 565–567, 607, 609, 611–613, 615, 617, 625, 635, 660, 667, 740–741, 750, 762, 764, 766–767, 776, 798, 807, 859, 886, 938 –– and mounds, 111, 152, 220, 567–568, 570, 572, 607, 608, 609–618, 620, 622, 625, 628, 740, 766, 886 –– as a memory tool for storytelling, 660 landsmål (later called nynorsk), 819, 821–822 langfæðgar, 191 langfæðrgar, 191 langfeðgakyn (agnate lineage), 744 langfeðgar, 193 langfeðgatal (agnate pedigree), 84, 193, 744 Language of Poetry. See Skáldskaparmál Lárentíus saga biskups [Bishop Larentius’ Saga], 264, 666 Larsson, Carl, 140, 831, 1099 Last Supper, 448 Latin-based scribal memory, 641 Latinskt-Svenskt glossarium, 16 Laufás-Edda (an adaptation of Codex Wormianus), 365 Laurenson, Arthur, 899, 900, 902–904 lausavísur (free-standing verses), 364, 642–643, 689 law(s), 21, 23, 25, 56, 60, 62, 83, 99, 172, 185–194, 198–199, 201, 204, 212–214, 234, 266, 279, 293, 306–309, 311, 313–314, 329, 342–343, 392–396, 481, 489, 492, 504, 520–524, 555, 571, 579, 587, 601, 631, 641, 649, 655–656, 687, 702, 709, 713, 738, 744–745, 747, 757–758, 760, 802, 809, 812, 826, 829, 914, 934

1138 

 Index

–– and culture, 186–187, 199, 307, 314, 393–395, 524, 702, 709, 914 –– and written documents, 198–199, 201, 204, 212–214, 307, 342, 396, 521 –– canon, 185, 187–188, 193, 213–214, 702 –– comparative, 185 –– customary, 185, 188, 191, 193 –– Gulathing Law, 192, 687 –– Gutalag OSw [The Law of the Gotlanders], 826 –– Hälsinge Law OSw, 187, 190, 1051 –– lawspeaker, lawmen, lawyer, 99, 392, 555, 809 –– lawsuit memorialized in skaldic verse, 1049–1050 –– Magnus Lagabøters Bylov [Magnus Lagabøtes City Law], 293 –– Norges Gamle Love, 293 –– oral composition and, 193 –– oral legal culture and witnesses, 56 –– Roman, 185, 187 –– Svea 187 –– Uppland Law, 187–188 Law of the Gotlanders. See Laws, Gutalag Laxdœla saga [The Saga of the People of Laxardal], 238, 437, 514–515, 522, 530, 584, 615, 617, 750–753, 962 Laxdælarímur [Rímur about the People of Laxardal], 752 Lay of Atli. See Atlakviða Le Dieu Thor la plus barbare d’entre les barbares divinités de la Vieille Germanie [The God Thor, the most Barbarous among the Barbarian Deities of Old Germany], 908, 1101 learned culture, 21, 40, 45, 380, 520, 704 legal process, 308 legends, 82, 93–95, 100, 116, 224, 259, 277, 312, 318, 345, 348, 350, 352–355, 382, 436, 449, 450, 466–467, 508, 511, 568, 570–571, 576, 588, 641, 643, 667, 670, 681, 689, 701, 703, 718, 720, 723, 750, 783, 788, 798–799, 819, 887, 896, 922, 924–925, 928, 931 –– as short believable narratives, 508, 681 Leif Erikson, statue of in Boston, Massachusetts, 870

Lejre, Sjælland, manorial estate at, 459–462, 1027 ‘Lesser German Solution’, 914 lexical studies, 198, 200–201, 336 Libellus Islandorum [The Book of the Icelanders]. See Íslendingabók Liber daticus vetustior, 59 Liber floridus of Lambert of St Omer, 577–579 liber memorialis (memory book) of the monastery of Reichenau, 595 liber vitae (book of life), 265–266 libertas ecclesiae (freedom of the Church from lay authority), 252 Libri sententiarum of Lombardus, 63 Liedertheorie (song theory), 122 lieux de mémoire, famille de mémoire, 9, 11, 115, 259, 275, 304, 350, 428, 510, 566, 594, 598, 601, 613–614, 634, 753, 779, 897, 908, 921, 1081 –– Nora and sites of memory, 9, 219, 259, 275, 304, 350, 510, 566, 601, 613, 779, 908, Life of Gudmund the Good, Bishop of Holar. See Guðmundar saga Arasonar Life of Patrick. See Bethu Phátraic Life of St Cecilia. See Ceciliu saga meyiar Life of St Clement of Rome. See Clemens saga Life of St. Thomas Backet. See Thómas saga erkibiskups Life of the Archangel Michael. See Mikjáls saga liggr (lies), 491, 559 Lignum vitae of Bonaventure, 64 Liljencrantz, O.A., 376, 871 Lilla Rim-Krönikan [The Little Rhymed Chronicle], 826 Lindisfarne monastery, 892 linear time in archaeology, 137–138 linguistics, 14, 198, 204–205, 876 Linköping, bishop of, 53, 319, 602 List of Apostles. See Postulatal List of Bishops. See Biskupatal List of Norway’s Kings. See Noregs konunga tal Listerby-stones, 1071 literacy, 4–5, 82, 123, 127, 198–199, 204, 206, 212–214, 221, 224–225, 237,

Index 

256–257, 305, 342–343, 346, 364, 394, 406, 521, 666, 701, 704, 799, 859 –– and power of the clergy, 394 –– as a medium for bureaucratic memory, 305 –– widespread in Greenland, 799 literary studies, 5, 21, 23, 231, 233, 245, 277, 279, 335, 421, 428, 700 literature, social function, 83, 232, 343, 421, 885 Little Rhymed Chronicle. See Lilla Rim-Krönikan liturgy, 52–53, 55, 57, 164, 263–264, 295–296, 304, 318, 320, 324, 402, 436, 448, 479, 481–482, 484, 678, 699, 710, 824 –– local liturgical books, 320, 436 –– liturgical memory, 304, 699 –– liturgical texts, 164, 264, 710 –– re-actualises biblical history, 55, 296, 318, 481 Livonia, Livonian, 841 Livvi-Karelian, 841 ljóðaháttr (magical chant metre), 74, 113–114 loci memoriae, 566, 572 Loden from Ulvkälla, 189 Lǫgberg (law rock), as axis of memory-space of Þingvellir, 266 lǫgsǫgumaðr (law-speaker), 641 Lönnrot, Elias, 843, 845–846 Lofotr Viking Museum, 178 Lokasenna [Loki’s Quarrel], 112–114, 116, 670–671, 680, 697 Loki’s Quarrel. See Lokasenna Lomonosov, Mikhail, 927, 936 Long Serpent. See Ólavur Tryggvason Long Ships. See Röde Orm Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 866, 869, 872 –– The Building of the Long Serpent, 869 –– King Olaf’s Christmas, 869 –– King Svend of the Forked Beard, 869 –– The Skeleton in Armor, 869 Longinus, 293, 475 ‘lore against literature’, 124 Loss of My Sons. See Sonatorrek Love of the fatherland. See Fædrelandskierlighed

 1139

Ludic, 841 Ludolph of Saxony, 64 Lumbers hög, Norra Vånga, Västergötland, 571 Macpherson, James, 887 Macrobius, 578 maculation, 214 Mälar region, central Sweden, 139, 141, 607 magic and memory, 88, 111–113, 115, 217, 225, 307, 458, 555, 655–657, 677–678, 682, 696, 701, 844 Magnús góði Ólafsson, King, 502, 504–505, –– as the Russian king Jarizleifr’s fól (fool), 504 Magnús Grímsson, 766 Magnus Ladulås, 1062 Magnus Lagabøters Bylov [Magnus Lagabøtes City Law], 293 Magnus Lagabøtes City Law. See Magnus Lagabøters Bylov Magnús Ólafsson. See Magnús góði Ólafsson, 502, 504–505 Magnús VI lagabœtir, Norwegian king, 263 Máhlíðingavísur [Stanzas for Mávahlíð], 465 Mahone Bay boulder, Nova Scotia, 881 maiden kings, 307, 520, 523 máldagabækur (inventories), 212 Mallet, Paul-Henri, 868, 915 Málskrúðsfræði (rhetoric), 39 Malsta, Hälsingland, 192 Mammen style, 464, 924 Man of Sorrow, 450, 474, 1096 manna minne (men’s memory), 824, 831, 992 mannfræði (history, esp. genealogies), 84, 193, 744 mannvit (innate knowledge, that which we have not learned), 85, 436 manuscripts, 25, 44, 45, 46 , 59, 65–66, 94, 100, 109, 113, 115, 127, 164, 206, 210–214, 234, 241–245, 257, 259, 263, 267, 291, 297, 307, 313, 323, 342, 345, 363, 365, 374, 392, 397, 399–403, 406–408, 408, 409, 408–412, 414, 420, 425, 427–432, 434, 437–438, 459, 502, 505, 509, 522–523, 556, 559, 575–576, 578–580, 591, 662–663, 671, 678, 682–683, 687, 701–704, 710, 717, 756,

1140 

 Index

783, 788, 799, 805–807, 821, 826, 836, 866 –– AM 81a fol., 523 –– AM 106 fol. & 112 fol. (Melabók), 586–587, 739 –– AM 106 fol. (Þórðarbók), 739 –– AM 107 fol. (Sturlubók), 585–587, 763, 766 –– AM 122b fol, (Reykjarfjarðarbók), 403–404 –– AM 132 fol. (Möðruvallabók), 210–211, 313, 522 –– AM 208, 8vo, 580 –– AM 219 fol., 400 –– AM 234 fol., 400 –– AM 235 fol., 402, 437 –– AM 243a fol., 523 –– AM 252 4to, 576 –– AM 252 fol, 577 –– AM 350 fol. (Skarðsbók), 313 –– AM 354 fol. (Skálholtsbók yngri), 212–13, 1092 –– AM 429 12mo, 437, 703 –– AM 544 4to (Hauksbók), 210, 314, 539, 541, 579, 585–587, 763, 856, 858, 682 –– AM 557 4to (Skálholtsbók), 682 –– AM 564a 4to (Pseudo-Vatnshyrna), 509 –– AM 619 4to (Gamal norsk homiliebok), 164–165, 291, 295 –– AM 645 4to , 400 –– AM 657c 4to , 400 –– AM 732 b 4to, 578–579 –– AM 736 I, 4to, 580 –– AM 748 4to, 113–114 –– AM 764 4to (Reynistaðarbók), 703 –– BL Harley MS 2278, 894 –– DG 11 4to (Uppsala Edda), 410–412, 1091 –– Flateyjarbók. See GkS 1005 fol. –– Gamal norsk homiliebok, See AM 619, 4to –– GkS 1005 fol. (Flateyjarbók), 408, 409, 680 –– GkS 1009 fol. (Morkinskinna), 502–505, 1042–1045 –– GkS 1812, 4to, 576, 1090 –– GkS 2881, 4to, 580 –– GkS 2365 4to, (the Codex Regius), 113, 947, 950 –– Hauksbók. See AM 544 4to –– Holm perg. 5 fol., 400 –– Holm perg. 7 fol., 523

–– Laufás-Edda (an adaptation of Codex Wormianus), 365 –– Melabók, See AM 106 fol. & 112 fol. (Melabók) –– Möðruvallabók. See AM 132 fol. –– Morkinskinna (lit., rotten vellum). See Gks 1009 fol. –– NkS 359 4to, 578 –– *Ormsbók, 313 –– Reykjarfjarðarbók. See AM 122b fol. –– SÁM 1 fol. (Codex Scardensis), 313 –– SÁM 66, 459, 1093 –– Skálholtsbók. See AM 557 4to –– Skarðsbók. See AM 350 fol. 313 –– Sturlubók. See AM 107 fol. –– *Styrmisbók, 739, 757 –– UUB Ms C 599, 45 –– UUB Ms C 601, 46 –– UUB Ms C20, 16 –– Þórðarbók, See AM 106 fol. (Þórðarbók) manuscript signature, 407–408 manuscripts as spatial repository of memory, 407 mappae mundi, 575–578 Margrét Vigfúsdóttir, 523–524 Maria Regina, 478, 481 Mariager Cloister, Denmark, 473–474 –– sculpture of Man of Sorrows, 1096 Marian representations, 477–479, 480, 481, 1097 Marian Short Office. See Officium parvum Beatae Mariae Virginis Marie de France, 41, 237, 312, 996–1001 –– lais of 41, 237, 312, 996–1001 Maríu saga [The Saga of Mary], 401, 482, 893 Maríu saga egypsku [The Saga of Mary from Egypt], 403 Maríusekvensí [Mary Sequence], 710 marker of allodial rights (the odal), 607 Markland, 580, 860 Martinus saga biskups [The Saga of Bishop Martin], 400 Mary, Virgin, 60, 65, 435, 703, 710–711 –– as a Daughter, 482 –– as Mother of God, 478–479, 481 –– as the Ruling Mary, 478 –– as the Victorious Mary, 293, 479, 480, 481

Index 

–– cult of, 703, 711 –– sculptures of , 477–479, 481–482, 480, 484, 1097 –– meant to serve as manifestations of the Divine, 477 –– representational forms, so-called motifs, 478–479, 481 Mary Sequence. See Maríusekvensí mass production, 380, 652 masses, celebrated for the souls of dead family members, 60, 709 material culture, 13, 99, 133,137–138,148, 276, 315, 335–336, 338, 704, 925 Mattheus saga postola [The Saga of the Apostle Matthew], 400 Matthias of Linköping (c. 1300–1350), 319 Mávahlíð, Iceland, 495 Međedović, Avdo, 125 media of memory, 244, 257, 259, 399 media studies, 23, 198, 206, 233, 235, 256 –– determinism 381, 385 mediality, as fundamental category for theories of rhetoric and memory, 23, 40, 41, 100, 166, 198, 206, 220, 224–225, 235–236, 244–245, 256, 266, 389 Medientheorien, 257 medieval Catholicism, 53 –– as a memory community, 53 medieval education, 52 medieval Latin, 21, 39–40, 318–319, 323–324 medieval manuscripts as ‘books of skin’, 414 medieval maps, 575–576 Medieval Memoria Online-project (MeMO), 160 medieval warm period, 549, 550, 857 meditation-lectio divina, ruminatio, 63 Meditationes vitae Christi of John de Caulibus, 64–65 megaliths, 140–141 –– megalithic tombs, reused as graves, 141 Melkorka Mýrkjartansdóttir, 530 Memento for living and dead, 59 memento mori (remember [that you have] to die), 449 memento vivere (remember [how] to live), 449 mémoire collective, 834 memorate, 234, 309, 509

 1141

Memoratiua (a visual representation of the ventricles), 46 memoria, 6, 16, 37–38, 42, 48, 56, 61–63, 80–81, 122, 159–161, 165, 198–199, 233–234, 236–238, 258, 290–291, 294, 304, 320, 342, 430, 439–442, 447, 451–452, 454, 471–472, 624–625, 630, 646–648, 651–652 –– as mediator between thoughts and specific act of communication, 37 –– memoria artificialis (learned memory), 38, 439 –– memoria naturalis (natural memory), 38, 439 –– memoria rerum (creative recall), 80, 122 –– memoria verborum (rote memory), 80, 122 –– Christianisation of, 304 –– in Roman literature, 647 memorial books (libri memoriales), 59 –– as ‘Book of Life’ in the Revelation of John, 59 ‘memorial dynamics’, 384 memorial epitaph, 713 memorial landscape(s), 154, 258, 635 Memorial Ode on Óláfr Tryggvason. See Erfidrápa Óláfs Tryggvasonar memorial park(s), 632–635, 633 memorial storehouse, 440 –– as arca (box), 440 –– as cella (cell in a beehive), 440 –– as cellula (small cella), 440 –– as scrinium (bookcase), 440 –– as thesaurus (storehouse), 440 memorial toasts, 695–697, 1083 memoriale fratrum, 59 memorie dignum (worthy of remembering), 981 memories of the past manipulated, 107, 549, 552, 775, 811 Memory & the Pre-Modern North. An international Memory Studies network focusing on Viking Age and Medieval Scandinavia (MPMN), 22 Memory Studies (journal, 2008-), 6, 233 memory, memories –– adaptive advantage of, 529

1142 

 Index

–– aides and techniques for, 4, 7, 11, 40, 200, 236, 242, 256, 290–291, 391–392, 646 –– and diaspora, 21, 235, 315 –– and navigation, 498, 800 –– and oblivion, 2, 11, 17, 57–58, 84, 94, 200–201, 214, 238, 240, 243–244, 305, 320, 408, 452, 472, 515, 560, 627, 671, 842 –– and place, including landscape, 23, 41, 99, 110–11, 115, 152, 154, 220–221, 257–260, 267, 276–279, 291, 304, 343–344, 350–351, 353, 391–392, 510, 540, 565–568, 570, 572, 607–612, 613, 612, 617, 620–625, 627–635, 660–664, 667, 740–741, 750, 762, 764, 766–767, 776, 798, 807, 859, 886, 938 –– and revenge ethics, 489, 492–493 –– and skin, 414–20, 474–75 –– architectonic, 41, 88, 159, 667, 1019 –– as ‘contemporised past’, 8 –– as ‘use of the past,’ 22, 99, 147, 211, 219, 235, 306, 309, 523, 528 –– as animation, 370, 376, 471–475 –– as cognitive process, involved encoding, retrieval, source information and detail, 342, 514 –– as culturally constructed, 14, 22, 25, 84, 95, 99, 121, 135, 139, 259, 267, 276–277, 279, 309, 344, 381, 502 –– as generative technology, 80, 121 –– as mental faculty and access to God, 61–63 –– as modality and mediating psychotechnology, 122 –– as skill, 7, 37, 643 –– as stomach, 80, 442 –– as storage, 6–7, 9–10, 82, 164, 214, 307, 377, 406, 447, 528, 616, 666, 779, 788–789 –– as technical skill, 37 –– as thematic concern in mythology, 79 –– autobiographical, 204, 337, 492, 527, 643 –– collective, 4, 7–11, 20, 55–57, 73, 76, 120–21, 159–60, 174, 204–05, 211, 231, 259, 275, 290, 295–96, 305–06, 309, 348, 364, 369, 378, 380, 383, 408–10, 429–30, 442, 463, 490–91, 508–11, 526, 594–95, 631, 652, 699, 727–31, 739–40, 753, 756, 762, 824–26, 834, 839, 859, 883, 885, 910, 913, 929, 933

–– collective memory and identity, 8–9, 121, 159, 174, 211, 279, 290, 296, 306, 309, 371, 380, 430, 526, 605, 728, 731, 739, 803, 824, 834, 883, 913, 933 –– collective memory, transmission modes of, 13–14, 95, 231, 305 –– communal, 220, 324, 491, 529, 746, –– communicative, 7, 11, 96, 120, 166, 204, 218, 220, 267, 399, 468, 489, 508–09, 623, 656, 679, 756, 758, 762, 992 –– communicative family memory, 678, 967 –– communities, 24, 53, 58, 120, 210, 225, 304, 309–310, 314–315, 367, 372, 374, 439, 471, 524, 526, 545, 588, 700, 705, 750, 780, 798, 841, 849, 915 –– ‘communities’ and ‘folk groups’, 120 –– competing, 97, 643, 750, 753 –– connective, 11, 784 –– construction of, 211, 381–382, 427, 431 –– cultural, 7–9, 11, 14, 18–22, 70–76, 80, 82–84, 89, 96–99, 107, 115, 121, 135, 137, 151, 174, 175, 185, 201–4, 213, 214, 218–21, 223–25, 233–35, 245, 253, 257–59, 262, 267, 275–77, 285–87, 294, 308, 318–24, 327, 331, 335–37, 342–46, 350, 353, 363, 367, 370–77, 399, 406, 412, 415, 433, 436, 466–69, 477, 484, 489, 490, 492–94, 502, 505, 508, 510, 569, 584–87, 589, 592, 613, 614, 618, 620, 623, 641, 643, 644, 670, 671, 677, 678, 683, 687, 689, 692, 717, 720, 752, 756–58, 760, 762, 767, 771, 775, 776, 778–80, 805, 807, 809, 824, 826, 831, 834, 839, 841, 842, 872, 904, 913–15, 918, 921, 922, 929, 933, 936 –– – as social practice, 8, 83, 220–221, 224, 258, 276, 319, 324, 335, 371, 433, 489, 618, –– – transmission and preservation of, 14, 74 –– – turn, 5, 276–277 –– cultures (Erinnerungskulturen), 3–4, 10–12, 23–25, 307, 309, 312, 342, 410 –– embodied, bodily location of, 7, 72–73, 82, 108, 124, 205, 448–449, 451, 454, 471–472, 474, 671, 1017, 1018, 1019 –– episodic , 11, 71, 73 –– externalised, 649

Index 

–– group , 338, 687 –– hegemonic , 779 –– historical, 583–84, 589, 592 –– in popular culture products, 381 –– inscribed, 9, 109, 162, 213, 217–218, 222, 318, 343, 415–419, 633, 876, 883, 915 –– interactive , 205, 276, 391–392, 555, 557, 650, 652 –– malleability of, 527 –– ‘memory crisis’ , 121 –– memory depicted as a stomach (digestion-rumination metaphor), 442 –– memory pegs, 565–566 –– memory spaces, 87, 277, 278, 407, 410 –– memory specialists, 73, 190, 394 –– memory techniques of oral cultures, 123–126, 392, –– memory theatre, 261, 296 –– memory topoi in Celtic literatures, 341–42 –– memory-repression, 515 –– memory-tokens, 515 –– negotiations of memory of a text as intertextuality, 315 –– of lawspeakers, 394–396 –– of Viking invasions, 885, 896 –– semantic, 11, 71, 73 –– social alignment of, 527 –– social manipulation of, 527 –– social, 8, 11, 154, 185, 211, 257, 305, 309, 324, 468, 607, 611–612, 663 –– social-ecological, 327, 332 –– transgenerational , 744, 933 memoryscapes, 267 menningarminning (‘culture-memory’), 19 mens (power of reason and the intellect as a whole, represented by munr), 15, 455 mental defence mechanisms, 499 mental maps, 278, 579, 660–664, 860 mentalité, 613–614 mentalities, theorisations of oral and literate, 10, 95, 305 mentifact, 95, 657 Metal and sub-genres, Pagan Metal and Viking Metal, 382 metaphor, conceptual, 336, 647 Metaphysics of Aristotle, 52–53, 232 ‘method of loci’, 26, 666–667

 1143

Midgard Historical Centre, 178 Midgardsblot, annual black metal festival, 817 Midvinter blot, 831, 1099 Mieszko, 922–923, 925 Mieszko I (d. 992), 921, 923, 925 Migration Period, 141, 258, 463–464, 609, 611 Mikjáls saga [The Life of the Archangel Michael], 403 Mikkjal á Ryggi, 791 Miklagarðr, or Constantinople, 815 milieu de mémoire, 892 Mímir, 80–81, 84–86, 259, 458, 642 –– Mímameiðr (Mímir’s tree), 89, 468 –– MímisbrunnR (Mímir’s well, or spring), 80, 85–86 –– Míms hǫfuð (Mímir’s head), 80, 85 minna (ON/Ice., ‘to remind’; as impersonal construction, ‘to remember’, ‘to recollect’; used reflexively, ‘to recollect’, ‘to call to mind’), 15, 47, 190, 201, 203, 238, 240, 423–424, 493 minni (ON/Ice., memory), 1–3, 15–17, 100, 198–202, 222–224, 236, 240–241, 362, 436, 498, 621, 647, 666, 695–697, 747, 943, 962; used in the dative plural with hafa at to mean ‘to keep in memory, as something to remember’, 2, 16 minna/minni related compounds and derivatives in ON/Ice. – –– minngarverðr (worthy of remembrance), 16 –– minni (mead, memorial beer; memorial toasts), 621, 695–697, 1023 –– minning (premonition, warning) (cp. præmonitio), 16–17, 19 –– minningarbœn (memorial service/prayer), 16 –– minningarmaðr (a person who remembers ‘memorial’), 16 –– minnis garðr (‘memory’s yard’) for mind and heart, 199 –– minnis-øl (memory beer), 696 –– minnis-veig (memory drink), 243, 696 –– minnisǫl (memory beer), 76, 243 –– minnissjóðr (pouch containing something which ought not to be forgotten), 16, 441

1144 

 Index

–– minnisveig (curative drink of memory), 17, 696; cp. óminnisveig / óminnis veig (liquor of not-memory) minnung, f. (OSw: memory; old possession of land; proof of old possession), 190 minnunga [alt., minninga] mæn (OSw: men with good memories; lit., memory men), 190, 655, 1051 minnunge, n. (OSw: memory), 190 Minus fem (minus five) at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, 173 miracles, 57, 310, 400–401, 433–440, 481, 549, 702–703 Mithras cult, 59 Mnemosyne, Greek myths of, 43, 243 mnemotechniques/mnemonic(s), 1, 3, 7, 26, 40–43, 57, 63, 80, 82, 86–89, 151, 159–162, 164–166, 185, 187, 189–191, 198, 217, 231, 233–237, 240–245, 266, 275, 277, 290–294, 297, 304, 343–346, 411, 414–420, 430, 433, 439–440, 449–450, 473–474, 545, 613, 616, 624, 630, 644, 646–647, 649–650, 652, 666–671, 738, 960, 962, 975, 1009, 1019, 1042, 1055 –– mnemonic anchoring, 82 –– mnemonic assistance, 646 –– mnemonic figures, 41, 87–89, 151, 241–242, 449–450, 616, 646–652, 666–671, 962, 1009, 1019 –– mnemonic perspective, 231 –– mnemonic spaces, 88, 630, 666, 669–671 –– mnemonic theory, 243, 975 mnemotope(s) –– as cognitive map, 762, 766 –– Halbwachs’ theories of, 275 modern (or new) memory studies, 19–20, 94, 96, 100, 120–121, 219, 943 modes, 13, 71, 224, 231, 235, 239, 241, 244, 251, 262, 277, 305, 309, 445, 500, 517, 649, 687, 705, 756, 759, 841 –– of performance, 262, 500, 687 –– of religiosity, 71 mogminni (common or shared memory, i.e. folktale), 199, 223–224, 1069–1070 monastic culture, introduction of in the north, 310, 701, 703

Monica, the mother of Saint Augustine, 58 monologic form, 116, 113 Monumenta Danica, 772, 773–774 monuments as prosthetic recollection devices, 161 Morkinskinna (lit., rotten vellum). See Gks 1009 fol. under manuscripts Morris, William, 866, 896 Moses, 17, 552, 750 motifs, 73, 83, 95, 258, 286, 293–295, 297, 330, 442, 449, 463, 466–467, 478–484, 657, 679, 690, 724, 795, 816 mounds, 111, 139–141, 143, 152–153, 161, 171, 219–220, 238, 240, 241, 305–306, 567, 568–572, 607–614, 616–618, 620–621, 622, 625, 628, 629, 631, 681, 683, 740, 766, 778, 811–813, 814, 855, 886–887, 1081 –– re-used, graves placed on top of older graves, 607 –– mound-memories on the landscape, 609 –– mounds and halls in Old Uppsala used for expressing cultural memory, 620–622, 1081 Mount Taranaki, New Zealand, 96 Mousa Broch, Shetland, 590 mouvance, 125, 211, 214 Müller, Gerhard Friedrich, 927 muistaa (he/she/it remembers) in Finnish, 842, 844 Muitalus Sámiid birra [An Account of the Sámi], 349 muitit or mui’tet (to remember), North Sámi, 348 –– close relation to derivative verb muitalit (to narrate), 348 multiformity, 125 muna (to remember something, to commemorate), 15, 81, 201, 239–240, 242, 454, 455, 491, 498 Muninn (memory); see also Huginn and Muninnn, 42, 80, 81, 100, 199, 200, 259, 260, 362, 454–460, 1009 munr, as ‘discernment’ (Unterscheidungsvermögen), 454 Musée de Sculpture comparée, 910 Museology, or Museum Studies, 26, 168–169, 171, 175

Index 

Museum of Cultural History (Kulturhistorisk museum), Oslo, 168–169, 173, 175–177, 179 –– plans for new museum complex, 176–177 musicology, 24, 336 Muspells lýðir (people of Muspell), 543 Mýrdalsjökull, Iceland, 539 Mythology of the North. See Nordens Mythologi myths, 43–44, 54, 71, 73, 74, 79–90, 111–112, 114, 116, 137–141, 200, 202–204, 219, 223, 242–244, 262, 278–279, 306, 327, 345, 361–362, 366–367, 375, 382–385, 421, 425, 539, 543–545, 555–561, 567–569, 585–586, 641–643, 669–671, 681, 684, 691, 728, 737–740, 763–764, 775–776, 782–786, 802, 820, 826, 829, 836, 867, 872, 900, 913–918, 927, 936, 938 –– and cultural memory, 74, 79–90, 137, 200, 202–203, 219, 223, 262, 267, 318, 327, 345, 367, 370, 373, 375, 466, 569, 585–586, 613, 671, 763, 776, 783–784, 786, 913–915, 918, 936 –– and memories of environmental and climatic change, 327 –– and nation-building, 54, 89, 303, 361–362, 367, 613, 737, 782, 784, 802, 820, 826, 913–917, 936 –– foundation myth, 585–586, 872, 900, 915, 927 –– as ideological and ethical forms of communication, 79 –– myth-making, 362 –– Mythomotorik, 758 –– myths and mythology in embodied and disembodied memory, 82 Nådendal, Finland (Brigittine convent, Vallis Gratiae), 1061 naalagaq (someone superior, literally: the one who must be obeyed), 801 –– closely linked to the colonial administrative hierarchy, 801 naalarnivoq = listens, pays attention, 801 Närlunda, Västergötland, 567 Näs, Uppland, 58

 1145

name users, 565 namnbrukare (name users), 565 namnbrukarkrets (community of name users), 565 Napoleanic era, 122 Napoleonic Wars, 806, 818 Nashi youth movement, 929 Nasjonal Samling, 812, 822 nation-building, national memories, 10, 89, 94, 122, 172, 587, 717–718, 769, 772, 782, 789–790, 793, 803, 811–812, 818–819, 820, 822, 823, 826, 834, 837, 841–843, 913, 914, 916–917, 919, 927, 928 –– Balto-Finnic countries, 841–849 –– Britain, 891–897 –– Canada, 855–862 –– Denmark, 771–780, 782–786 –– Faroe Islands, 788–796 –– France, 908–912 –– German-speaking countries, 913–919 –– Greenland, 798–803 –– Iceland, 805–809 –– Ireland, 885–889 –– North America, 876–883 –– Northern Isles, 899–905 –– Norway, 811–823 –– Poland, 921–925 –– Russia, 927–931, 933–939 –– Sweden, 824–831, 834–839 –– United States of America, 866–873 national identity, 161, 171, 320, 363, 613, 627, 635, 716, 717, 720, 722, 779, 782, 788, 805, 811, 816, 818, 823, 841, 909, 934 –– construction of, 161, 171, 320, 363, 613, 909 –– ideas of, 782, 788 –– maintenance of, 788 –– perceptions of, 613 –– performing, 779 –– promoting, 816, 841, 908, 934, –– supportive of, 635, 716–717, 720, 722 national romantic ideas and manuscript studies, 429 National Socialism (Nazi, Nazis), 25, 173, 175, 274, 724, 811, 813, 822, 823, 923 –– propaganda, 173, 175, 813 Nationalaand (National spirit), 775

1146 

 Index

nationalism, 172, 304, 367, 729, 805–807, 809, 812, 819, 826–827, 837, 841 –– and the birth of history as a science, 304 –– proto-nationalist fervor, 826 –– sub- and trans-national perspectives, 780 natural memory (memoria naturalis), 38, 159, 290, 439, 442 Naturpoesie (natural or ‘folk’ poetry), 122 Necrologium Lundense (memoriale fratrum), 59 neo-paganism, 727–729 Neolithic, 137, 140, 141 Nestor’s Chronicle (also called The [Russian] Primary Chronicle), 815, 927–928, 934, 937 neuron populations, 526 neuron(al), 526, 529 neuropsychology, 250 New (cultural) memory studies, 18, 22 New Philology, 20, 127, 210, 431 New World stones, ten categories of, 877–883 Newport Tower, Rhode Island, 867, 869 *Niærþer, 567 Nicolaus Cusanus, 53 Nicolas Oresme, 66 Nicolaus Ragvaldi, Bishop, 826 Nidaros, 306, 310, 311, 479, 601–603, 1046 Nidaros Cathedral, Trondheim, Norway, 1046 níðingr (scoundrel), 520 Niðrstigningar saga [Jesus’ Descent into Hell], 400–401 níðstǫng (insult pole), 111 Nikulás, abbot, 595–598 –– pilgrimage description of, 596 –– references to Nordic cultural memory sites, 595–598 –– Nordic adaptations of existing names on route, 595–598 Nikolaus Germanus, 579 Njáls saga. See Brennu-Njáls saga Nørre Alslev, Falster, 450 Nor, legendary founder, 322 Nordens Mythologi [Mythology of the North], 783 Nordic Heroic Exploits. See Nordiska kämpa dater

Nordic immigrant community, 869 Nordiska kämpa dater [Nordic Heroic Exploits], 826, 827 Nordvegen History Centre and Viking Settlement, 178 Noregs konunga tal [List of Norway’s Kings], 112 Norges Gamle Love [Norway’s Old Laws]. See laws Norgesreisen [Travel through Norway], 820 Norman conquest, 345–346, 892 ‘Norman Yoke’, 896 Normanist-controversy, 927–931 Normanist and anti-Normanist debates, 927–931 Normans, 886, 893, 894, 929 Norn, form of Scandinavian language, 86, 899, 902, 904 Norna-Gests þáttr [The Tale of Gestr of the Norns], 516, 517 Norns (Urðr, Verðandi, and Skuld), 85, 558 Norra Sandsjö, Småland, 191 Norrsunda, Uppland, 571 Norsa, Uppland, 350, 571 Norse romanticism, 899 Norstead, Newfoundland, 862 North Germanic-speaking cultural area, 70 Northern Isles (Shetland and Orkney), 93, 314–315, 583, 585, 588–591, 643, 739, 751, 896, 899–905 Norumbega (‘Viking city’ in Massachusetts), 869 Norway, 25, 70, 94, 110, 122, 139–140, 169–173, 175, 178, 186–187, 189, 191–192, 261, 265–266, 286, 291–293, 306–310, 314, 318–320, 323, 327, 329–330, 349, 351, 355, 362, 364, 376, 412, 464, 478, 481, 483, 503, 505, 511, 515, 519, 521–522, 532, 551, 583–587, 590, 591, 596–597, 603, 605, 641, 663–664, 668, 681, 695, 697, 703–704, 709, 716–717, 738–740, 747, 759, 760, 763, 778, 789, 806, 811, 812, 813, 815–816, 818–822, 861–862, 869, 876, 899, 902–903, 915 Norwegian Folk Museum (Norsk Folkemuseum), 175

Index 

Norwegian Nazis, 811, 822 Norwich, 642 nostalgia, 337 Novgorod, 603–604, 815, 936 numerical system, or grid, 294 numismatics, 336 Nyköping castle, 1062 Nyköpings gästabud (banquet at Nyköping), 1062 oblivion (damnatio memoriæ), 57 Occam, 66 oðal, 192, 140, 607, 621 Oddaverjar, 745 Oddr munkr, 974, 1005 Oddr Snorrason, 237, 974 Oddrún, 1016 Oddrúnargrátr [Oddrun’s Lament], 202, 1016 Oddrun’s Lament. See Oddrúnargrátr Ode on Bishop Gudmund. See Guðmundardrápa Ode on Magnus Lagabœtir. See Sturla Þórðarson, Drápa about Magnus lagabœtir Ode on Óláfr (Tryggvason). See Óláfsdrápa Ode on St Peter. See Pétrsdrápa Ode on the Tears of Mary. See Drápa af Máríugrát Ode to Cnut/Canute the Great. See Knútsdrápa Ode to Ragnarr. See Ragnarsdrápa Ode to Þórr (Thor). See Þórsdrápa Odensåker, 567 Odenslunda, 567 Odinists, 728, 729 Óðinn (Odin), 42, 44, 74–75, 80–81, 84–86, 98, 110, 112, 200, 243, 259, 380, 410, 454–460, 555, 558–559, 567–568, 642, 657, 669, 684, 691, 695, 697, 728–731, 737–738, 740, 751, 776, 824, 830, 866, 872, 895, 901–903, 1047–1048 –– also called Blindi (Blind), 85 –– as ‘Lord of Ghouls or of the Hanged’, 458 –– as one-eyed god, 85, 830 –– and the mead of poetry, 42, 44, 80, 86, 200, 243, 691, 1697, 737

 1147

–– and the ravens Huginn and Muninn, 42, 81, 200, 259, 454–456, 457–458, 459–460, 1093 –– from Lejre (silver figurine), 459 Ǫgvaldsnes (named after a King Ǫgvaldr), 740 Oehlenschläger, Adam, 632, 775, 776, 778, 806–807, 820 Ölfusingakyn (kin of Ölfus), 745 Ǫlvir, 616, 668, 669 Ǫrvar-Odds saga [The Saga of Arrow-Odd], 112 Östra Vemmenhög, Skåne, 143 Överhogdal tapestry in Härjedalen, 468 Officium parvum Beatae Mariae Virginis [Marian Short Office], 65 Ohman (Swedish Öhman), Olof, 876 Olaf of Norway, 323 Óláfr Haraldsson, 286, 520, 624, 642, 1034 Óláfr Tryggvason, 238, 376, 516, 642–643, 678, 923, 925, 931, 1053 Óláfr Þórðarson hvítaskáld, 39 Óláfs saga helga [The Saga of Saint Óláfr], 110–111, 286, 520, 624, 1028–1033, 1034 Óláfs saga ins helga in sérstaka [The Separate Saga of Óláfr the Saint], 1025–1026 Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta [The Greatest Saga of Óláfr Tryggvason], 678, 1053–1054 Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar eptir Odd munk Snorrason [The Saga of Olaf Tryggvason], 237, 974 Óláfsdrápa [Ode on Óláfr (Tryggvason)], 642 Olaus Petri, 824, 831 Ólavur Tryggvason (CCF 215), also known as Ormurin langi [The Long Serpent], 716 Old Covenant. See Gamli sáttmáli Old Danish, 331, 572 Old English, 199, 201, 335–337, 512, 688, 892 –– verse, 201, 335, 337 Old Norse, 1, 15–17, 20, 39–40, 42–44, 48, 70, 191, 193, 198–199, 201, 210–211, 231, 234–237, 240–243, 245, 256–260, 262–263, 276–279, 284–285, 292–293, 319, 327, 329–330, 348, 350, 362–363, 367, 378, 383–385, 393, 400–401,

1148 

 Index

406–412, 414, 418, 433–434, 454, 457, 467, 479, 482, 505, 514–517, 529, 539, 543, 555, 569, 571, 578, 646–649, 651–652, 655, 657, 666–667, 678, 689, 695–697, 699–701, 703–704, 719, 728–729, 737–738, 740, 744, 747, 750, 756, 760, 772, 775, 776, 782–784, 786, 788, 790–791, 800, 806–807, 819, 822, 829, 834–836, 838–839, , 845, 861, 869, 871, 878, 893–895, 900, 902–903, 908, 911, 913–915, 919, 922–923, 925, 936 –– historiography, 70, 231, 244, 751, 756, 760 –– mythology and saga literature as a part of German cultural memory, 20–22, 35, 43–44, 697, 908, 911, 913–915 –– mythology’s use to attain communal stability, 530, 786 Old Norwegian Book of Homilies. See homilies Old Swedish, 16, 190, 286, 331, 570, 572, 623–624, 824, 836 Old Swedish equivalents to Latin lexemes containing mem- (e.g. memini, Memon, memor, meminisse), 15–16 Old Uppsala. See Gamla Uppsala oldtidsfolket (the people of antiquity), 643 Ólöf Loptsdóttir, known as Ólöf ríka (Ólöf the rich), 710–712 Ólöf ríka (Ólöf the rich). See Ólöf Loptsdóttir Olov Johansson (Olaus Johannis Gutho), 46 Olov Torstensson (Olaus Thorstani), 45 Om Odin og den hedniske Gudelære og Gudstieneste udi Norden [About Odin and the Pagan Theology and Practice in the North], 776 óminni ‘forgetting’ (negative prefix ó- lit., ‘un-memory’), 16–17, 201 óminnis veig, óminnisveig (liquor of not-memory), 17, 200, 240, 515, 1013–1014; cp. minnisveig óminnishegri (heron of forgetfulness), 200, 208, 696, 1010 óminnisǫl (ale of forgetfullness), 1011 On the Good. See De bono On the Cloister of the Soul. See De Claustro Animae

One Hundred Selected Danish Poems. See It hundrede vduualde Danske Viser onomasticon, 588 onomastics, 341, 565 onomatopoetic images, 43 Oqaluttuaq itsaq kalaallit qallunaatsianik takoqqaarnerenik [Story of the Greenlanders’ First Meeting with the Ancient Norsemen], 801 Ór Óláfs sǫgu in helga inni sérstǫku [From the Separate Saga of Óláfr the Saint], 1025 oral composition, 7, 38, 43–44, 56, 72–75, 79, 80, 82, 94, 98–99, 101, 109, 113–114, 116, 120–128, 185–188, 190–191, 193, 199, 201, 204, 213–214, 218, 220, 222, 224–225, 256–258, 261, 263, 307, 309, 319, 338, 392–395, 423, 519, 557, 559–560, 624, 646, 648–649, 652, 691, 799–800, 859 –– and enskilment, 124 –– and history, 338, 519, 559 –– and laws, 56, 185–188, 193, 201, 307, 393–395 –– and memory, 43–44, 74, 80, 98–99, 109, 121–122, 128, 213–214, 220, 224–225, 257, 309, 392, 394, 423, 557, 624 –– and performance, 38, 73–75, 94, 113, 116, 123, 127, 199, 258, 397, 859 –– and poetic language, 113, 125, 199, 394 –– and poets, 114, 121, 124–127, 263, 395 –– and society, 72–74, 186, 190–191, 218, 222, 225, 261, 393, 646, 648–649, 652 –– and text, 120, 125–126, 691 –– and traditions of the Inuit, oral-centred methodologies, 799–800 –– and training, 7, 38, 79, 124, 319, 394, 560 –– theory of, 101, 120, 123, 125–128, 204, 256, 393, 646 oral song, Serbo-Croatian, 257 oral-derived text, 127 oral theory, 101, 120–128, 256, 646 –– Lord’s generative model, 125 orality, 4–5, 15, 43, 94, 120–123, 125, 127–128, 198–199, 204, 218, 221, 224–225, 237, 256–257, 346, 393, 395, 397, 450, 524, 699

Index 

orally transmitted, performed, or produced texts, 18, 44, 72, 75, 79, 89, 99, 124, 185, 187–189, 201, 258, 336, 338, 394, 396, 439, 700, 773, 885, 896, 951, 954, 962, 974 orator, 42–43 Orkney, 93, 314–315, 583, 585, 588–589, 591, 605, 643, 739, 751, 896, 899, 903 Orkneyinga saga [The Saga of the Orkney Islanders], 315, 589–590, 739, 899 Ormr Snorrason, 313–314, 522–524 ornamentation, 151, 221, 463, 466, 468 –– motifs persist, based on memory and traditions, 463 Oseberg, Vestfold –– mound, 811, 813, 814 –– ship, 173, 816 Oseberg Øde, 812 Ossian, works of, 121, 887 Óttarr, 75, 77 Ottar (or Othere), 169 Ottar Vendelkråka, 571 Óttarr svarti (the black) 642 642 Ottarshögen, Uppland, 571–572 Our Forefathers Myths. Told for Young People. See Fädernas gudasaga. Berättad för ungdomen ownership, 111, 189, 191–193, 505, 566, 701–702, 709, 740, 745, 938 Paleolithic, 137 palimpsest, 138, 214, 241, 259, 264, 414, 419, 629, 885 Páll Jónsson, 712 Páls saga postola [The Saga of St. Paul the Apostle], 401 paratext, 409–412, 422, 425, 575–576 –– as ‘threshold’, 410 Paris, 53–54, 163, 318, 910, 922 Passio Olavi, 310 ‘past in the past’, 135, 137–139, 147, 152, 267 pater noster (Our Father), 55, 713 ‘patriotism for the Reich’ (Reichspatriotismus), 914 pellis (human and animal skin, parchment), 415 Pentecost, 64

 1149

performance ‘space’, 107, 116, 684 –– studies, 26, 107, 115–117, 126–127, 198, 205, 277 performative acts, 20, 783 performativity, 8–9, 40, 220, 224, 235, 245, 421–422, 425, 484 performed commemoration and ritual lament, 687–689 Peringskiöld, Johan, 570–571 periodisation (Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age), 135–137, 170–171 Peter Comestor, 439, Peter the Great of Russia, 927 Pétrsdrápa [Ode on St Peter], 263 Pétrs saga postola [The Saga of St. Peter the Apostle], 400 Petrus Astronomus, 66 philological approach, 428 philology, 93, 127, 198, 205, 210, 341, 393, 429–430, 691–692 –– artefactual, 210 –– material, 20, 210, 431 –– new, 20, 127, 210, 431 Philosophia mundi of Willliam of Conches, 578 Philostratus, 982 Piast monarchy, 921–924 pictorial catechisation, 295 pictorial memory, 447, 450–452, 962 pilgrim(s), pilgrimage(s), 160, 594–596, 601–605 –– accounts and descriptions of pilgrimage journeys, 596–598, 602–603 –– guidebooks, 596 –– memory of pilgrimages invoked in sermons, 594 –– participation of women, 594–595 –– routes, 66, 160, 594–596, 601–605, 1094 –– runic evidence of, 595 –– to Rome, Santiago de Compostela, Jerusalem, Trondheim, Vadstena, 66, 594–595 –– to Saint Olofsholm, Gotland, 601–605, 1094 pissarsuaq (a strong man, a man of power) or pingaartoq / pingaartorsuaq (an important man, a man of influence), 801 Pite Sámi vuolle of Seldotnjuona, 350

1150 

 Index

place, 9, 41, 88, 100, 124, 148, 153, 159, 161–162, 164–165, 169, 275, 278, 291, 327, 528, 566, 588, 605, 630–631, 661, 665–667, 808–809, 811–812, 921 –– and sensory perception for memory, 86, 447, 630 –– classical theories of (loci / topoi), 13, 26, 41, 88, 159, 236, 341, 343, 414, 419, 439, 566, 572, 666–667, 690–691 placenames as folk etymologies, 59, 189, 191, 329, 342, 344, 350, 352–353, 424, 544, 565–566, 568–569, 579, 598, 642, 660, 662, 740, 764, 766–767, 788, 795, 859 Plains Indians, stories of Mazama event in North America, 541 Poem about Erlingr Skjálgsson. See Flokkr about Erlingr Skjálgsson Poem of Hallmund. See Hallmundarkviða Poetic Edda (also called Elder Edda), 93, 122, 198, 200, 234, 241, 243, 245, 278, 373, 378, 454, 457, 555, 561, 642, 696, 807, 836, 844, 896, 901 poetry, 1, 6, 13, 25, 39–40, 48, 73, 76, 82, 86–87, 121–124, 144, 198–200, 218, 237, 241, 243, 250, 257, 259, 262–263, 307, 335–337, 341, 345, 363–365, 391–392, 421–422, 425, 466, 492, 495–500, 511, 514, 556, 560, 591, 621, 632, 643, 646–648, 651–652, 687–689, 691, 696–697, 701, 710, 717, 771–772, 807–808, 829, 836, 838, 892 poetry, use of, 144, 218, 307, 364 Poland, Polish, 921–925, –– cultural memory, 921–922 –– historiography, 921 political disorder, 782, political displacements, 782 polity of self-conscious ‘nation builders’, 841 polysystem theory, 284–285, 287 popular culture, contemporary, 14, 168, 304, 370–378, 380–385, 771 ‘post-museums’, 178 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 251 Postola sögur (sagas of apostles), 400–401, 522 Postulatal [List of Apostles], 402 poiein (to create foundational function), 784

praxeology, 211 prayer as factor in practice of memory culture, 55–57, 304, 439, 450, 750, prayerbooks, 65, 703–704 –– at female monastery of Vadstena, 65 pre-Christian Reihengräberfelder, 143 pre-modern, as a concept, 9, 12, 14, 121, 199, 214, 371, 440, 717, 798, 837 preaching as factor in practice of memory culture, 52, 55, 304, 441 Premonstratensian canons of Lund, 59 Priamos, King of Troy, 410 Primary Chronicle. See Nestor’s Chronicle primary religion, 72, 75–76 Prince Vladimir, 931, 936, 938 professional training, 394 prologues, 41, 236–237, 577 promontorium Vinlandiae (the headland of Vinland), 580 proprium, 569 Prosaiska krönikan OSw [The Prose Chronicle], 826 Prose Chronicle. See Prosaiska krönikan Prose Edda. See Snorra Edda prosification, 1011 prosimetrum, 363–364 Protestant Reformation, 66, 709 Protevangelium Jacobi (Gospel of James), 482 proverbs, 52, 93, 187, 204 Pseudo-Vatnshyrna. See AM 564a 4to under manuscripts Ptolemean tradition, 579 Purgatory, 55, 60, 293, 471, 601 Qallunaat and Qallunaatsiaat, 801 Qasapi, Inuit hero, who took revenge on the Norsemen, 802 Quintilian, 566 Rafn, Carl Christian, 788, 868, 871, 878 Ragnarǫk, 202–203, 541, 544, 558, 671, 691, 729, 918 ragnarøkkr (lit., the twilight of the gods), 423 Ragnarr Loðbrók, 380, 517, 570 Ragnarsdrápa [Ode to Ragnarr], 643 Ragnvaldr, earl, 899

Index 

Raimundus Lullus, 66 Ranstena, Västergötland, 567–568 Rask, Rasmus Kristian (1787–1832), 365, 631, 806–807 raven(s), 81, 200, 243, 259, 311, 454–457, 459 –– and Memoria ‘memory’ and Intelligentia ‘intelligence, understanding,’ together with Voluntas ‘will, purpose,’, 81, 454, 460 –– Muninn, as personification of Óðinn’s memory, 80, 259, 454 reception studies, 361–364, 367 Rechtsarchäologie, 193 Rechtsphilologie, 193 recollective transformation, 447 ‘recomposition in performance’ reconstruction of textual history, 125 recordatio Christi, 451 Red Orm. See Röde Orm reference memory, 175, 177, 214, 344 reflection, 99, 337, 479, 643, 660, 662 –– and ambiguity as a dialogue with cultural memory, 99, 492 Refrigerium (a meal to keep alive the memory of the deceased), 58 ‘remembered pasts’, 84 remembering the past, gendered aspects of, 700 remembering, 1, 3, 5, 14–17, 22, 38–40, 43, 56, 71, 73–74, 94–95, 138, 147–148, 160–161, 172, 231–232, 236–244, 256–257, 263, 276, 304, 307, 319, 335, 337–338, 342, 346, 348–350, 355–356, 394, 406, 415, 418–419, 433–434, 441, 490, 508, 514–517, 526–529, 598, 618, 631, 648, 651, 667, 700, 716, 720, 722–725, 730, 740, 753, 757, 842–844, 847–849, 891–892, 914 –– strategies of, 138 –– sufferings of martyrs, 433 remembrance not recovery of fixed past, 10 –– as interplay between past, present, and future, 10 reminiscence, 160, 337, 467, 667, 884, 862 Renaissance literature, 892 requiems, 145, 147 Resmo, Öland, 143

 1151

retrieval, 74, 472, 514, 555 Revelationes. See Sancta Birgitta rex perpetuus Norvegiae, 601 Reykdæla saga og Víga-Skútu [The Saga of the People of Reykjadal and of KillerSkuta], 61–617 5 Reynistaður, Iceland, nunnery at, 703 rhetoric and memory, relationship between, 37–38, 40–42, 44, 48 rhetoric, concepts of, 1, 7, 21, 37–40, 43–46, 48, 80, 235, 238, 244–245, 290, 295, 304, 311, 342, 474, 666, 916 –– dispositio (arrangement), 37 –– elocutio (style), 37 –– five canons of – actio (delivery), 37 –– inventio (invention), 37 –– memoria, last phase of preparing a speech, 37 Rhetorica ad Herennium, 42, 88, 648 Rhetorica novissima by Boncompagno da Signa, 296 rhetorical concentration, 294–295 rhetorical effect of differing styles of narration, 39 Ribe, Jutland, 162, 164, 202, 815 –– cathedral, 162, 163 –– healing charm, 202 rich and poor man’s prayers compared, 450, 1095 Richard I, 893 Richard of St Victor, 266 riddarasögur (sagas of knights), 236, 331, 416, 520, 522–523 Riddaren och Lilio-Bladet OSw [The Knight and the Lily-Petal], 1060 Riksantikvarieämbetet (Swedish National Heritage Board) (1630), 837 Rím I-III, 556 Rímbegla, 556 Rímur about the People of Laxardal. See Laxdælarímur rites de passage, 55 ritual(s), 8, 19, 22, 41, 53, 58, 60, 70–76, 82, 93, 107–113, 115–116, 140, 143, 147–148, 152–154, 160–162, 202, 220–222, 224–225, 235, 261–262, 266, 278, 304–306, 309, 311, 314–315, 319, 348,

1152 

 Index

350, 366, 372, 391, 414, 421, 430, 433, 447–450, 466–468, 472–473, 470, 479, 481–482, 484, 544, 605, 607, 609, 615, 618, 620, 623–624, 655, 657, 677–683, 687–689, 691, 703, 709, 751, 753, 762, 813, 817, 843, 846, 848–849, 904 –– as a form of shared cultural memory, 108, 112, 677 –– as sacred time, 684 –– building, 140 –– continuity, 140 –– lament, 60, 688–689 –– performance (‘incorporating practices’, ‘inscribed practices’), 109 –– repetition of uniform prayers and songs of the Roman liturgy, 53 Riurik (also: Rørik), 927–928, 930 Röddinge, Skåne, 450 Röde Orm (Eng. transl. as Red Orm and The Long Ships), 831 Rǫgnvaldr Kali, earl of Orkney, 643 Rǫgnvaldr Mœrajarl (Earl of More and Romsdal), 585 Rök-stone. See Ög 136 under runestones Rølvaag, Ole, 871 Rørik. See Riurik roles of ‘memory specialist’, poet, and rune carver encapsulated in Óðinn (Odin), 75, 80, 84–86, 200, 243, 642, 697 Roman de Rou, 893 Roman Iron Age, 98, 141 Roman virgin martyrs, 433 Romanesque art, 466 Romanesque churches, 88, 140, 144, 261 Romantic nationalism, 122, 172, 819, 827, 841 Romanticism, 171, 244, 367, 382, 428, 431, 692, 772, 775, 806–807, 838, 899, 901, 915 Rome, 54, 58, 261, 479, 594–596, 682, 866, 894, 915 Rómverja saga [The Saga of the Romans], 286 Roosevelt, Theodore, 866 royal lineages, 415, 570, 1025–1026 Royal Theater in Copenhagen, 778 Rudbeck, Olaus, 834–839 Rudbeck, Olof, 624

runes, runic, 111, 114, 204, 217–225, 264, 383, 392, 458, 579, 588, 595, 627–628, 642, 696, 730, 772, 793, 835, 882, 901–902, 1014, 1069, 1071 runestone(s), runic inscriptions, 58, 143–145, 147, 153, 191–192, 258, 267, 293, 467–468, 624, 631, 876–883, 1067, 1069–1070, 1071–1077 –– DR 42 (Jelling, Jutland), 218, 257, 466, 627, 773, 774, 778–779, 1067, 1068, 1088 –– DR 110 (Virring, Jutland), 222, 1071 –– DR 209 (Glavendrup, Funen), 627, 629, 632, 629–35, 1089 –– DR 290 (Sövestad, Skåne), 467 –– DR 359 (Istaby, Blekinge), 1071 –– DR 413 (Gunnhildr Cross), 1075–1076 –– G 181 (Sanda kyrka, Gotland), 1010 –– G 183 (Sanda, Gotland), 1077 –– G 290 (Hellvi, Gotland), 1077 –– Gs 18 (Hille, Gästrikland), 467 –– N 68 (Dynna, Hadeland), 467 –– N 247 (Skadeberg, Rogaland), 1075 –– N 446 (Tingvoll, Møre og Romsdal), 201, 1076 –– Ög 136 (Rök, Östergötland), 222, 258, 1069–1070, 1070, 1084, 1085 –– Öl 1 (Karlevi, Öland), 1072–1073, 1073 –– Sm 16 (Nöbbele, Småland), 222, 1074 –– Sö 101 (Ramsund, Södermanland), 219, 467, 1086 –– Sö 173 (Tystberga, Södermanland), 1074 –– U 114 (Runby, Uppland), 222, 267 –– U 489 (Morby, Uppland), 465 –– U 529 (Sika, Uppland), 467 –– U 631 (Kalmar, Uppland), 467 –– U 978 (Gamla Uppsala, Uppland), 1087 –– Vg 61 (Härlingstorp, Västergötland), 825 runhent, 314 Russian Academy of Sciences, 927 Russian Orthodox Church, 937 Russian Primary Chronicle. See Nestor’s Chronicle Russian statehood, beginning of, 927, 930–931, 936–937 Rydberg, Viktor, 829

Index 

Ryginaberg, Norway, 265 sacred history, 57, 261 Saga Hákonar góða [The Saga of Hákon the Good], 73, 695, 1023–1024 Saga of Ali Flekk. See Ála flekks saga Saga of Arrow-Odd. See Ǫrvar-Odds saga Saga of Ásmundr the Champion-Killer. See Ásmundar saga kappabana Saga of Bishop Guðmundr. See Guðmundar saga biskups Saga of Bishop Martin. See Martinus saga biskups Saga of Bósi and Herraud. See Bósa saga ok Herrauðs Saga of Burnt Njal. See Brennu-Njáls saga Saga of Charlemagne. See Karlamagnús saga Saga of Edward the Confessor. See Játvarðar saga Saga of Eirik the Far-traveler. See Eiríks saga víðförla Saga of Eirik the Red. See Eiríks saga rauða Saga of Finnbogi the Mighty. See Finnboga saga ramma Saga of Göngu-Hrolf. See Göngu-Hrólfs saga Saga of Grettir the Strong. See Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar Saga of Guðmund dýri. See Guðmundar saga dýra Saga of Gunnar, the fool of Keldugnup. See Gunnars saga Keldugnúpsfífls Saga of Gunnlaugr Serpent-Tongue. See Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu Saga of Hákon Hákonarson. See Hákonar saga Hákonarsonar Saga of Hákon the Good. See Saga Hákonar góða Saga of Harald Fairhair. See Haralds saga hárfagra Saga of Havard of Isafjord. See Hávarðar saga Ísfirðings Saga of Hervör and king Heiðrekr. See Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks konungs Saga of Hord and the People of Holm. See Harðar saga og Hólmverja Saga of Hrafnkel Frey’s Godi. See Hrafnkels saga

 1153

Saga of Icelanders. See Íslendinga saga Saga of Ketil Trout. See Ketils saga hængs Saga of King Hrolf Kraki. See Hrólfs saga kraka Saga of King Sverrir. See Sverris saga Saga of Mary. See Maríu saga Saga of Mary from Egypt. See Maríu saga egypsku Saga of Olaf Tryggvason of Oddr the munk. See Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar eptir Odd munk Snorrason Saga of Ref the Sly. See Króka-Refs saga Saga of Saint Anthony. See Antóníus saga Saga of Saint Augustine. See Ágústínus saga Saga of Saint Guðmund. See Guðmundar saga helga Saga of Saint Jón. See Jóns saga helga Saga of Saint Óláfr. See Óláfs saga helga Saga of Saint Paul the Apostle. See Páls saga postola Saga of Saint Peter the Apostle. See Pétrs saga postola Saga of Saint Þorlákr. See Þorláks saga helga Saga of Sigurd the Silent. See Sigurðar saga þǫgla Saga of the Apostle Andreas. See Andreas saga postola Saga of the Apostle Bartholomew. See Bartholomeus saga postola Saga of the Apostle James. See Jakobs saga postola Saga of the Apostle Matthew. See Mattheus saga postola Saga of the Britons. See Breta sögur Saga of the Confederates. See Bandmanna saga Saga of the Faroe Islanders. See Færeyinga saga Saga of the Gotlanders. See Gutasaga Saga of the Greenlanders. See Grænlendinga saga Saga of the Icelanders. See Íslendinga saga Saga of the Jews. See Gyðinga saga Saga of the People of Eyri. See Eyrbyggja saga Saga of the People of Fljotsdal. See Fljótsdæla saga Saga of the People of Floi. See Flóamanna saga

1154 

 Index

Saga of the People of Kjalarnes. See Kjalnesinga saga Saga of the People of Laxardal. See Laxdœla saga Saga of the Orkney Islanders. See Orkneyinga saga Saga of the People of Reykjadal and of KillerSkuta. See Reykdæla saga og Víga-Skútu Saga of the People of Svarfadardal. See Svarfdæla saga Saga of the People of Vatnsdal. See Vatnsdæla saga Saga of the People of Vopnafjord. See Vápnfirðinga saga Saga of the Romans. See Rómverja saga Saga of the Skjoldungs. See Skjǫldunga saga Saga of the Slaying on the Heath. See Heiðarvíga saga Saga of the Sons of Droplaug. See Droplaugarsona saga Saga of the Sturlungs. See Sturlunga saga Saga of the Sworn Brothers. See Fóstbræðra saga Saga of the Trojans. See Trójumanna saga Saga of the Völsungs. See Vǫlsunga saga Saga of the World. See Veraldar saga Saga of the Ynglings. See Ynglinga saga Saga of Thidrek of Bern. See Þiðreks saga af Bern Saga of Thord kakali. See Þórðar saga kakala Saga of Thord Menace. See Þórðar saga hreðu Saga of Thorstein the White. See Þorsteins saga hvíta Saga of Valla-Ljot. See Valla-Ljóts saga Saga of Yngvar the Far-traveler. See Yngvars saga víðfǫrla sagas, historicity and authenticity of, 18–19, 42, 236 Sagas of Apostles. See Postola sögur Sagas of Icelanders. See Íslendingasögur Sagas of Knights. See Riddarasögur Sagas of saints. See Heilagra manna sögur sagum mogminni (I [or we] say the mogminni), 199, 223, 1069, 1070 sagum ungmænni (I [or we] say to the young men), 1069, 1070

Särslöv, Skåne, 450 Saint Olofsholm (formerly Akergarn), Gotland, 601–605, 1094 saint(s), 53, 55–56, 58–60, 64–65, 160, 162, 202, 286, 295, 310–311, 318, 320, 323–324, 343, 363, 400–401, 433, 435–440, 448–449, 471, 473, 481, 523, 552, 594, 596, 598, 601–605, 655, 695, 697, 699, 702–703, 709–713, 746, 753, 925, 933–934, 938 –– Saint Adalbert, 922 –– Saint Andrew, 400, 434, 436, 711 –– Saint Anne, the mother of Mary, 482, 483, 710–711 –– Saint Anthony, 401 –– Saint Augustine of Hippo, 401 –– Saint Bartholomew, 400, –– Saint Birgitta, 53, 60, 318–319, 324, 473–475, 594, 601 –– Saint Bonaventure, 64 –– Saint Canute, 59 –– Saint Cecilia, 64, 433–437 –– Saint Clement, 400 –– Saint Edmund, 894 –– Saint Francis, 65 –– Saint James, 400, 594 –– Saint Magnús, 899 –– Saint Margaret, legend of, 701 –– Saint Matthew, 400 –– Saint Óláfr of Norway, sword of, 310, 711, 925 –– Saint Paul, 401 –– Saint Peter, 55, 293, 295, 400, 711 –– Saint Theodor, 931 –– Saint Thomas Aquinas, 294, 447 –– Saint Thomas Becket, 401 –– Saint Vladimir, 933–934, 938 saints, local, 320, 709 –– veneration of, 709 saints’ cults in Gotland, 604 saltara (psalter), 54, 60, 710 Sámi, 23, 169, 348–349, 352–354, 655 –– joik, 348–350, 355–356 –– legends, 350, 352–355 –– pre-Christian sieidi sites, 348, 350, 351, 354–355 –– shamanic drums, 350

Index 

–– studies, 23 samtíðarsögur (contemporary sagas), 329, 363, 836 San Antonio, Texas stone, 881, 881 Sancta Birgitta. Revelationes, 61, 473 Sanda, Uppland, 140 Sanda church, Gotland –– picture stone (G 181), 1010 Santiago de Compostela, 594, 596 Sara Maria Norsa of Árjepluovve (Arjeplog), 350 Saracens, 893, 894 Saxby, Jessie Margaret Edmondston, 900–904 Saxo Grammaticus, 143, 161, 320, 580, 641, 774, 793, 975, 1027 –– History of the Danes. See Gesta Danorum by Saxo Grammaticus Sayings of the High One. See Hávamál Schlözer, August Ludwing von, 927 Scotland, 66, 315, 342, 346, 540, 584, 588, 815, 867, 899 Scottish antipathy towards Shetland traditions, 903 Screaming Horn. See Gjallarhorn scroll, as metaphor, 265 sculpture, as culturally symbolic expression, 3 seafarers, 661 ‘seat of laughter’ (mind), 954 Second Battle of Mag Tuired. See Cath Maige Tuired Second Ecumenical Council of Nicaea, 53 Second Grammatical Treatise, 40 Second Lay of Gudrun. See Guðrúnarkviða II Second World War, 173, 187, 274, 633 secondary religion, 72, 75–76 secondary-oral environment, 343 seeress (vǫlva), 85–86, 192, 242–243, 262, 545, 680, 682–684, 738, 947, 950 Seeress’s Prophecy. See Vǫluspá seiðr, 112, 655, 680, 682–684 –– as a specific form of magical ritual, 682 seinfyrnd (lit., ‘hardly-decayed’), 262 Seldælir, Iceland, 745 sensory embodiment, 449, 451 –– features, 451 –– materiality, 449

 1155

Separate Saga of Óláfr the Saint. See Óláfs saga ins helga in sérstaka Sermo Lupi ad Anglos [Sermon of the Wolf to the English], 891 Sermon for the Dedication of Churches. See In dedicatione templi. Sermo Sermon of the Wolf to the English. See Sermo Lupi ad Anglos setja saman (put together), 412 Seyðaríman (CCF 87) [Sheep-ballad], 722 Shawnee stone, Oklahoma, 882 Sheep-ballad. See Seyðaríman ships, of Viking Age, 175–176, 376, 811–812, 821, 859, 904 Short History of the Kings of Denmark. See Brevis Historia Regum Dacie by Sven Aggesen Short Poem about Sigurd. See Sigurðarkviða in skamma sieiddit objects in the landscape, 350, 354–355 –– Lake Duortnos (Torneträsk), Sweden, 351 –– siedi stone, Deatnu (Tana) River, Norway, 351 Sigmundsríma [Ballad about Sigmund], 789 Sigrdrífumál [The Lay of Sigrdrifa], 111, 113–114, 116, 259, 687, 696 Sigrún’s Song. See Sigrúnarljóð Sigrúnarljóð [Sigrún’s Song, 1820], 807 Sigurd ballads. See Sjúrðar kvæði Sigurðar saga þǫgla [The Saga of Sigurd the Silent], 416–417 Sigurðarkviða in skamma [A Short Poem about Sigurd], 240 Sigurðr Fáfnisbani (slayer of Fáfnir), 515, 696 Sigurðr jórsalafari, 306, 310 Sigurðr sýr, ‘sow’, 504 Sigurdur Stefánsson, 580 Sigvatr Þórðarson, 310, 312, 642 Simonides of Ceos, 277, 667 Símun av Skarði, 791 singers and memorized texts, 125 Singing Contest. See Kilpalaulanta sites of memory. See lieux de mémoire Själens kloster OSw Claustrum animæ [The Cloister of the Soul], 943, 1061 Sjúrðar kvæði [The Sigurd ballads], 718

1156 

 Index

skaði kennir mér minni minn (my loss teaches me to remember), 498 Skaftáreldar eruption, 540 skáld ‘poet’, 199, 262, 267, 309–311, 364, 394, 425, 504, 516, 641–644, 647, 650, 697, 701, 1034 –– acquisition of memory skills by, 643 skaldic ekphrasis, 82, 262 skaldic poetry, 13, 73, 82, 87, 144, 198–199, 218, 231, 234, 240–241, 245, 263, 267, 307, 310–311, 392, 421–422, 425, 495–496, 498, 500, 511, 556, 591, 646–648, 652, 689, 701, 988, 1042–1045, 1049–1050 –– as panegyric, 310–311 –– composed to prevent forgetting lawsuit, 1049 –– links to the mythological and heroic past, 307 Skáldskaparmál [The Language of Poetry] of the Prose Edda, 1–2, 39, 42, 44, 47, 80, 87, 200, 243, 259, 262, 411–412, 557, 560, 623, 669, 737, 1017 Skálholt, Iceland, 212, 311, 395, 401, 404, 411, 523, 580, 682, 746, 766, 856, 860 Skarð, Iceland, 710, 1098 Skarðströnd, Iceland, 710 Skarðsverjar, donations and testamentary wills of the family of, 710 Skarpåker rune-stone, 203 Skellefteå, Västerbotten, 350 skills, 83, 88, 111–112, 117, 204–205, 396, 429, 458, 464, 492, 643, 650, 683, 722, 772, 857, 931 skilning (understanding), 1, 436 skin, 414–420, 474–475 –– and memory studies, 414 –– as dermographia, 416 –– as social or personal acts of remembering, 415, 417–419 –– as visual biographic record, 420 Skírnir’s Journey. See Skírnismál Skírnismál [Skírnir’s Journey], 111, 113–116 –– dramatic performance of, 115 skjaldborg (shield wall), 1034 Skjǫldunga saga [The Saga of the Skjoldungs], 623

Skjǫldungar (namned after Skjǫldr, son of Óðinn), 737 Skjold, legendary Danish king, 773 Skog wall-hanging from Hälsingland, 468 skogsrå (forest spirit), 509 Skolt Sámi Archive, 355 skrive i glemme-bog/bok (to relegate [something] to oblivion, to ignore), 17 Skúli Bárðarson, Duke, 311, 412 skyscape, 393, 555–561 Slagendalen outside Tønsberg, Vestfold, 811 Smithsonian Museum, 866 Snorra Edda (also called Snorri’s Edda; Prose Edda; Younger Edda), 1–3, 16, 39, 42, 44, 47, 80, 85–89, 93, 200, 243–245, 262, 267, 278, 365–366, 374, 410–412, 421–425, 456, 457, 459, 545, 552, 555, 557, 558, 560, 555–556, 576, 623, 669, 671, 737, 747, 751, 1017, 1091. See also Edda, Eddas –– as canon for the mastery of the skaldic poetry, 425 –– asserts Nordic independence, 3 –– preoccupation with memory, 223 Snorri Sturluson, 42, 47, 110, 143, 161, 306–308, 364–365, 393, 395–396, 410–412, 456, 458, 505, 543, 551, 555, 576, 623–624, 642, 644, 648, 695, 700, 751, 820, 866, 960, 967, 988, 1017, 1023, 1025, 1028, 1034 Snorri Þorgrímsson, 253 social belonging, 111 social contagion, 527 social memory, 8, 11, 154, 185, 211, 257–258, 304–305, 309, 324, 468, 607, 611–612, 663 –– creation of on burial-grounds, 607 social unity, 111, 527 Socrates, 260 –– the aviary as figure for memory, 260 Sœgr, 557 soil erosion, 328 Solberga, community of Cistercian nuns, 602 sólmörk, 556 Solveig Björnsdóttir (ca. 1436–1495), 710–712 sómi, sœmð (honour), 490

Index 

Sonatorrek [The Loss of My Sons], 223, 690, 692, 951–953 songlines in Australia, 660 sorhleoð (sorrow song), 688 Sorø Kloster, Zealand as royal mausoleum and lieu de mémoire, 160 Soti, rune-carver, 627–628, 634–635 soul, concept of and memory, 58, 165, 290, 450, 454, 472–473, 683 south Slavic oral poetry, 124, 126 Soviet Union, 356, 813, 931, 938 space, 9, 40, 55, 71, 83, 87–89, 107, 112–116, 151, 163, 175, 220, 225, 258, 261, 266, 274–278, 286–287, 305, 308, 337, 341, 349, 371, 383, 391, 399, 406–407, 409–410, 429, 505, 508, 529, 533–534, 539–540, 545, 566, 589, 614, 634, 667, 669–671, 677, 680, 683–684, 688, 699, 731, 747, 776, 842, 885, 908 space/architecture, 41, 154, 162, 170, 261, 623, 667, 669 spatial, 24, 82, 163, 261, 274–275, 278–279, 406, 668 –– anchoring, 24, 82, 261, 668, 1039 –– objects, 406 –– quality of written text as an artefact, 406 –– studies, 274–275, 279 –– turn, 274, 278–279 –– volumes, 163 special carriers of cultural knowledge, 323 Spiritual Exercises, 65 Staðarhóll in Saurbær in Dalasýsla, Iceland, 437 staging, 107, 422, 448, 473, 683, 793 stállu – large, dangerous, dim-witted cannibalistic ogre, 352, 355 Stamford Bridge, battle of, 892 Stanislau, Bishop, 922 Stanzas for Mávahlíð. See Máhlíðingavísur Starkaðr, cursed not be able to remember what he composes, 517, 1047–1048 state-produced memory, 933, 938 Stave Church Sermon. See Stavkirkeprekenen Stavkirkeprekenen [The Stave Church Sermon], 41, 160, 164 –– as mnemonisk teater (mnemonic theatre play), 41

 1157

stemma codicum, 431 Stephanus Stephanius (1599–1650), 773 Stephaton, 293 Stephens, George, 631, 632 Stiklarstaðir, Norway, battle of, 516, 520, 1034 Stjórn, 17, 264, 439 stjörnumörk, 556 Stockholm Land Registry. See Stockholms stads jordebok Stockholms stads jordebok OSw [Stockholm Land Registry], 1052 stone-settings, ship-formed, 139, 141, 611 stones and creation of memory, 4, 13, 56, 58, 111, 115, 139, 143–147, 153, 161, 191–192, 199, 203, 217–225, 240, 257–258, 260, 266–267, 293, 350, 351, 466, 595, 624, 627, 633, 635, 687, 880, 883 Stora Mellösa, Närke, 143 storage, 6–7, 9–10, 82, 87, 174, 211–214, 307, 406, 447, 528, 616, 666, 779, 788–789 –– storehouse, 72, 124, 187, 204, 259, 399, 404, 422, 425, 440, 780 Story of Hreiðarr the Fool. See Hreiðars þáttr heimska Story of the Greenlanders’ First Meeting with the Ancient Norsemen. See Oqaluttuaq itsaq kalaallit qallunaatsianik takoqqaarnerenik Story of the Volsi. See Vǫlsaþáttr Strata Florida abbey, 345 Straumfjörður, Vínland, 858–859 Strelow, Hans Nielsen, 603–604 Strengleikar [lit., stringed instruments], 41, 236–237, 257, 312, 996–1001 –– Desiré, 999–1000 –– Doun, 999 –– Equitan, 1000–1001 –– prologues, 996–999 stress hormones, 250 stressful experiences, 250, 1117 Strindberg, August, 829 Stringed instruments. See Strengleikar structures, deep and surface, 125 Sturla Þórðarson, 263, 308, 497–498, 642, 738, 746, 751, 1059

1158 

 Index

Sturla Þórðarson, Drápa about Magnús lagabœtir [Ode on Magnús lagabœtir], 263 Sturlunga saga [The Saga of the Sturlungs], 264, 314, 404, 505, 994–995 Sturlungaöld (Age of the Sturlungs), 410, 412, 497–500 sturlungar (named after Sturla Þórðarson), 738 styrkesaft (strength juice), 634 Suhm, Peter Friderich, 776, 778 Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas, 294 Sun Ray. See Geisli Suomen Kansan Vanhat Runot [Ancient Songs of the Finnish People], 843 supernatural, 79, 89, 96, 100, 108, 111–114, 116, 266, 350, 355, 508–511, 531, 543, 545, 552, 678–681, 763, 846, 886 –– women, 678–681 –– worlds, 79, 89, 108 superorganic, 95, 657 superstitions, 55, 93 Sussex, 896 Suttungr, 200, 697 Svabo, Jens Chr., 719 Svarfdæla saga [The Saga of the People of Svarfadardal], 238, 615, 617 Sveinn Ástríðarson. See Svend Estridsøn, 892 Sven Aggesen, 320–321, 323, 979, 1027 –– Short History of the Kings of Denmark. See Brevis Historia Regum Dacie Svenska Krönika [The Swedish Chronicle], 824, 831 Svenskarna och deras hövdingar: Berättelser för unga och gamla (1911) [Swedes and their Chieftains. Narratives for Young and Old], 829 Sverrir Sigurðsson, Norwegian king, 311 Sverris saga [The Saga of King Sverrir], 265–266, 311, 992–993 Svetjud (OSw Svethiudh), 623–624 Svínfellingar, 745 Svǫldr, battle of, 643, 925 Sweden, 25, 45, 53, 56, 58, 60, 65–66, 94, 97, 110, 112, 139–141, 153, 171–172, 186, 189–192, 218, 221, 258, 318, 349,

363, 429, 450, 567, 570, 585, 591, 607, 620–621, 624, 641, 656, 657, 704, 740, 774, 811, 815, 818, 821, 824, 826, 831, 834–839, 876, 902, 927 Sweden, Land of the Vikings (film prod. by John Boyle), 831 Swedes and their Chieftains. Narratives for Young and Old. See Svenskarna och deras hövdingar: Berättelser för unga och gamla Swedish Chronicle. See Svenska Krönika ‘Swedishness’, 831 Symeon of Durham, 892 T-O map scheme, 575–578 tablet, as metaphor, 265 Tacitus, 516, 915 –– on memory, 516 tælia, 190 Tatishchev, Vasilii, 928 Tale of Audun from the West Fjords. See Auðunar þáttr vestfirska Tale of Gestr of the Norns. See Norna-Gests þáttr Tale of Gunnar the Slayer of Thidrandi. See Gunnars þáttr Þiðrandabana Tale of Igor’s Campaign, 929 Tale of the Cairn-Dweller. See Kumlbúa þáttr Tale of the Mountain-Dweller. See Bergbúa þáttr Tale of Thidrandi and Thorhall. See Þiðranda þáttr ok Þórhalls Tale of Thorleif the Earl’s Poet. See Þorleifs þáttr jarlsskálds Tale of Thorstein Shiver. See Þorsteins þáttr skelks tales, 93, 97–99, 204, 307, 312, 344, 353, 385, 489–490, 661, 701, 704, 776, 799, 826, 836, 838, 888, 892–893, 896 –– about climate of bygone days, 551 talumæn, 190 Tarnovius, Thomas, 718 Tausen, Hans, 17 teaching as key factor in practice of a memory culture, 52 Tegnér, Esaias, 828, 828 Teitr, son of Bishop Ísleifr, 758

Index 

terms, Old Norse-Icelandic, for families, pedigrees and genealogy, 84, 190, 193, 744 –– ætt (family, kindred, pedigree), 744 –– ættartala (genealogy, pedigree), 190, 744 –– ættvísi (genealogies, knowledge of genealogies), 84, 744 –– konungakyn (royal kin), 744 –– konungatal (series of kings), 744 –– kyn (kin, kindred), 744 –– kynslóð (kindred, pedigree), 744 –– langfeðgakyn (agnate lineage), 744 –– langfeðgatal (agnate pedigree), 84, 193, 744 –– mannfræði (history, esp. genealogies), 84, 744 terms, Sámi (e.g. čohkka, čearru, duottar, oaivi, riidi, várdu and várri) for mountain. terra bacallaos, 580 texts and imagery, relations of, 40 ‘textual arenas’, 407 textual memory, 236, 240, 277, 285, 287, 407, 409–410 textual performativity, 421–422, 425 –– Rahmung (Framing), 422, 425 –– Sagen als Tun (Doing something as saying something), 422 –– Wiederholung/ Wiederholbarkeit (Repetition/Iterability), 422 textual studies, 198, 201, 204 Theaetetus of Socrates, 260 Theodor Thorlacius, 580 Theodoricus Monachus, 306, 311, 320–323, 641, 983–985 thesaurus inventorum (treasure-house of ideas), 42 thing assembly, 189, 570 Third Grammatical Treatise, 39, 457–458 Third Reich, 913 Thirty Years War, 826 Thomas Aquinas, 294, 447 Thómas saga erkibiskups [The Life of St. Thomas Becket], 401 Thormodus Thorfæus, 788, 868 Thoms, William, 94 Thorfinn’s Poem. See Þorfinnsdrápa

 1159

Thorvi, or Thyra, Queen of Denmark, 161, 778 Thrym’s Poem. See Þrymskviða Thule, 579 Tidan, 567–568 time, 79, 83, 85, 108, 111–112, 135, 137–138, 163, 169, 213, 242, 251, 259, 266–267, 277, 296, 304–306, 321, 349, 383, 391, 404, 407, 436, 463, 468, 508, 557, 566, 586, 589, 618, 624, 627, 634, 677, 680–681, 684, 699, 731, 738, 744, 747 Tingsted, 450 Tingvoll Church, Nordmøre, Norway, 201 tithe, 190 Tiundaland, Uppland, Sweden, 570 tjǫsnublót (lit., duelling-ring-peg sacrifice), 112 topographical or topological turn, 274 toponymy, 566, 886 Totenkult and Totenmemoria (the cultus and memoria of the dead), 471–472 tradition, 1–3, 5, 9, 13, 15, 17, 21, 23–24, 40–41, 43–45, 47–48, 52, 56, 59, 70–74, 93–101, 107–108, 111–116, 120–127, 138, 143, 145, 147–148, 155, 159, 161, 163, 166, 171, 185–187, 190–191, 199, 204, 210, 212, 219–220, 225, 234–237, 240 –– anthropomorphized in form of legendary performers, 121 traditional ecological knowledge, 327–329 traditional oral lore as genuine memory from the past, 396, 662 transformational grammar, 125 transgression of ecological boundaries, 327 transmission, cultural, 72, 478, 484 trauma, 9, 71, 163, 235, 241, 250–254, 495–500, 515–517, 891–894, 896 Travel through Norway. See Norgesreisen Travelogue of Eggert Ólafsson and Bjarni Pálsson. See Ferðabók Eggerts Ólafssonar og Bjarna Pálssonar Treaty of Kiel, 172, 818 Tri Chof (three memories): the deeds of heroes past, the Welsh language, and genealogy, 345 Tricking of Gylfi. See Gylfaginning Trójumanna saga [The Saga of the Trojans], 286

1160 

 Index

trolls, 98, 307, 380, 384, 508, 511, 555, 663, 722, 793 Trondheim, 531, 594, 819 Tróndur, 789, 791, 793, 794, 795 Troy, as foundation myth, 286, 308, 410, 747 trustworthiness, 94, 98, 262, 550 –– of Landnámabók memories, 550 trygð, 187 trygdamål, 187 Túatha Dé Danann, 887 Tudor, Stuart, and Georgian periods, 886, 894 Tuna, 567, 571 Tune ship burial, 171, 811 Tune Stone, 690 Turi, Johan, 348–349, 352–353, 355 Turley Hill cliff inscription near Tulsa, Oklahoma, 879 Twelve Tables, 185 typology, 893 Tyrkir, 857 Tystberga, Sörmland, 1074 Ukraine, 927, 930, 933, 938 Úlfr Uggason, 962 Ullarvi, 567 Ullervad, 567 Ullr, 567, 669 UNESCO Memory of the World international registry, 356 Union of Kalmar, 122, 899 universities, 45–46, 53, 54, 178, 699, 763, 785, 835 –– established, 53 –– in Copenhagen (1479), 53 –– in Uppsala (1477), 45, 53 Unnr the Deep-minded. See Auðr djúpúðga Ketilsdóttir Up-helly-aa, 904, 905 Uppåkra, Skåne, 140 Uppsala, Uppland, 45–46, 53–54, 65–66, 143, 161, 323, 410–411, 523, 569–570, 824 –– cathedral, 66 –– redaction of the Prose Edda. See DG 11 4to under manuscripts

Urnes style, 464 –– U 489 (Morby, Uppland), 465 –– Urnes church door, 1083 Urrecht, 187 us-ness rather than otherness, 838 útiseta (lit., sitting out [on graves]), 112, 683 Uummannaq district, North Greenland, 800 vaðmálsklæði (clothes of homespun), 503 Vårdträdet (1888), 829 Vadsbo, Västergötland, 567 –– map of, 568 Vadstena, Östergötland, 65, 66, 473, 594, 601, 704 –– monastery, 65, 66 Vämmenhög, Skåne, 572 Vänge, Gotland, 144 Västerås, Västmanland, 570 Väte, Gotland, 144 Vafthrudnir’s Sayings. See Vafþrúðnismál Vafþrúðnismál [Vafthrudnir’s Sayings], 113–114, 844 Vágar, Lofoten, 590 Valdemar Magnusson, duke, 1062 Valfǫðr (Val-father), 86 Valhǫll (Hall of the slain), 86, 153 valkyrjur (Valkyries), 75, 112, 680 Valla-Ljóts saga [The Saga of Valla-Ljot], 617 Vápnfirðinga saga [The Saga of the People of Vopnafjord], 615 varðlokkur, 683 variation, absence of fixed form, 10, 16, 136, 148, 236, 259, 263, 305, 344, 384, 397, 704, 722, 843 Vatnajökull, Iceland, 539 Vatnsdæla saga [The Saga of the People of Vatnsdal], 551–552, 585, 615–616 Vatnsfirðingar, 745 *Vatnshyrna, 313, 509, 662 Vedel, Anders Sørensen, 774 Veiens navn, 565 veizla, 688 –– as site of performance, 688 Vendel, Sweden, 460, 571 Vendsyssel, Jutland, 571 Vepsian, 841

Index 

vera uppi ‘to live on in memory, to be remembered’, 16 Veraldar saga [The Saga of the World], 286 verbatim memorization, 191 Verses on a Viking Expedition. See Víkingarvísur Vestrfararvísur [Western Journey Verses], 642 vetrnætr sacrifice, 110, 678–679, 681–682 –– Norwegian parallels, 681 Vico, Giambattista, 122 Victorians, 891, 894, 897 Víðidalstunga, Iceland, 408 Víga-Glúms saga [Killer-Glúm’s Saga], 502 Vígslupallar: Ordines, 402 Viking (film about Vladimir), 933–939 –– first Russian movie-themed park based on Viking(s), 934, 935, 937–939 –– pagans and conversion in, 1102 Viking(s), –– as Racial Patriarch, 727–731 –– as symbol of whiteness and masculinity, 728 –– and popular culture, 370–378, 382, 384, 771 –– diaspora, 21, 235, 315, 583–592, 641, 895 –– heritage tourism, 178, 635 –– in heavy metal, 727–728, 730, 795–796 –– in Irish popular legend, 887–888 –– moot, 635 Viking Age, 1, 12–14, 17–18, 20, 22–23, 43, 48, 70, 75, 139, 141, 143–145, 147, 152–153, 168–169, 171–179, 198, 203–204, 219, 221–222, 225, 231–232, 235, 244, 258, 290, 292, 327, 329, 364, 370, 374, 377–378, 454, 460, 464, 466–467, 570, 580, 583, 588, 590–592, 620–622, 624–625, 627, 629, 632, 634, 641, 665, 663, 729, 764, 771–772, 778–780, 806, 811–813, 815–817, 872, 891–896, 904, 921, 923–925 –– and ideological formation of Nordic nation states, 169 Viking Program of U.S. space agency, NASA, 873 Viking Ship Museum, Oslo (Vikingskipshuset), 168–169, 172, 173, 175–176, 178, 862, 1082

 1161

Viking Ships Museum, Roskilde (Vikingeskibsmuseet), 168 Víkingarvísur [Verses on a Viking Expedition], 642 Vilchinsmáldagi [Inventory of Bishop Wilkin], 435 Vilhjálmr, 403, 417–418 Vincent of Beauvais, 439 Vincentius, bishop of Cracow, 922 Vinland, 376, 580–581, 662, 727, 730–731, 855–856, 858, 860–861, 869, 871, 876 Vinland sagas, 99, 376, 579–580, 661, 856–859, 871 Viollet–le–Duc, Eugène, 909 virðing (esteem), 237, 490 Virgin Mary. See Mary, Virgin Virring, Jutland, 1072 Visby, Gotland, 146, 602, 604 visual anamnesis, 449 visual culture, 166, 290–291, 297, 447 Vita Jesu Christi of Ludolph of Saxony, 64 Vitae patrum [Lives of the Desert Fathers], 401 Völkisch, 730, 895, 913, 915 Vǫlsaþáttr [The Story of the Volsi], 111 Vǫlsunga saga [The Saga of the Völsungs], 515–516, 718, 1011–1012 vǫlsungar (named after Vǫlsungr, son of Óðinn), 737 Vǫluspá [The Seereess’ Prophecy], 16, 85–86, 112–114, 116, 201–204, 242–243, 263, 539–545, 671, 680, 684, 738, 844, 943, 947–949, 950 –– and the Eldgjá memory, 544 –– vǫlva in, 85–86, 242–243, 545, 684 vǫlva (seeress), 85–86, 192, 242–243, 262, 545, 684 ‘voices of the past’, 364 Volga River, 687 Votic, 841 votive gifts, 437 Wadden Sea, 162 Wanderer, 337 War of the Gaedhilwith the Gaill. See Cogadh gáedhelreGallaibh wax, 260, 264–266, 399, 604

1162 

 Index

–– tablets, as metaphor for memory and forgetting, 265 Wedding of Meho Son of Smail. See Ženidba Smailagić Meha Weltmodel (world model) of medieval Scandinavian people, 277 Wergeland, Henrik, 820 Wessobrunner Prayer, 201 Western Journey Verses. See Vestrfararvísur Wheaton, Henry, 868, 872 Whetting of Guðrún. See Guðrúnarhvǫt Whitsun Rally of Norwegian Nazis, 811, 813 Wife’s Lament, 337 Wilhelm II, Kaiser, 910–912 Wilhelminian Empire, 913–914 William Longsword of Normandy, 893 William of Æbelholt, 319 Willliam of Conches, 578 William of Malmesbury, 892 William of Sabina, papal legate, 602 wills, 709–710, 712–713 ‘Wolf Age’, 729 Wolf, Friedrich August, 122 Wolin, 924–925 –– evidence of Scandinavian presence, 924 Wolves of Vinland (WOV), 727, 730–731 women, 65, 101, 112, 144, 172, 190, 442, 482, 490–491, 495, 515–516, 519–524, 530, 559, 594–595, 598, 610–611, 628, 634, 678–684, 689, 693, 699–701, 702, 704–705, 711, 713, 731, 746, 794, 813, 848, 856–857, 891, 939 –– and incitement of men to take revenge, 521 –– and memory, 144, 442, 700–701, 704 –– as bearers of special types of oral tradition, 699–701 women’s, 56, 701–702 –– dowries, 56, 702 –– private ownership of manuscripts, 702 –– ‘voice’, 701 Words about Eirik. See Eiríksmál Words on Hákon. See Hákonarmál World Fair in Chicago, see Chicago Columbian Exhibition Worm, Ole, 94, 766, 772–773, 774 Worsaae, J. J. A., 171, 631–632, 778 Wotan Network, 729–731

writing, 3, 5, 7, 17–18, 25, 37, 41, 43, 73, 75, 82–83, 93, 97–98, 120, 123, 126–127, 205, 213, 217–218, 220–221, 223–225, 231, 234–235, 237, 257–259, 263–264, 279, 284, 287, 297, 303, 306–307, 318–320, 322, 324, 329, 336, 364, 392–397, 399, 406, 415, 427, 431, 441, 519, 560, 613–614, 660, 662, 671, 691, 699, 702, 748, 802, 834, 839, 846, 929 –– as a technique against oblivion, 2, 320, 406 –– as in-scribing of space in literature (topo-graphy), 406 Wulfstan, 891–892, 896–897 Wunderkammer-collections, 170–171 Yggdrasill, 86, 89, 458, 468, 541, 543, 545, 557–558, 829 –– as mythological interpretation of the Milky Way, 558 Ymir, 89, 411–412, 557, 836 Ymirs haus (Ymir’s skull), 88, 557 Ynglinga saga [The Saga of the Ynglings], 42, 85, 110, 259, 458, 577, 623–624, 657, 680, 815, 831, 960–961 Ynglingar (dynasty named after King Yngvi, another name of the god Freyr), 623, 737 Ynglingatal [Enumeration of the Ynglingar], 571, 642, 680, 687, 738, 815, 960 Yngsta rimkrönikan OSw [The Youngest Rhymed Chronicle], also known as Cronica Swecie, 826 Yngvarr, son of Eymundr Óláfsson, 1004, 1074 Yngvars saga víðfǫrla [The Saga of Yngvar the Far-traveler], 1004–1006, 1074 Yngvi, 571, 737, 744 Youngest Rhymed Chronicle. (also known as Cronica Swecie). See Yngsta rimkrönikan York, 174 Yorkshire, 896 yrkja (compose), 412 ystyr (lit., ‘meaning’ or ‘significance’), 345 Zeitenraum (temporal space), 55 Zeithorizonte, 259

Index 

Ženidba Smailagić Meha [The Wedding of Meho, Son of Smail], 125 þættir, 116, 187, 258, 277, 502 Þiðranda þáttr ok Þórhalls [The Tale of Thidrandi and Thorhall], 114, 678, 682, 684 –– two kinds of cultural memory, 678 Þiðreks saga af Bern [The Saga of Thidrek of Bern], 41, 237, 259, 286, 1002–1003 Þingeyrar, Iceland, 311, 408, 440 Þingvellir, Iceland, 266, 396, 763, 808, 809, 1081 Þjazi in Skáldskaparmál, 259, 557 Þjóðólfr inn fróði (the Learned) from Hvinir; also known as Þjóðólfr ór Hvini, 642–643, 961 Þóra, daughter of Sigmundr Brestission, 394–395 Þórðar saga hreðu [The Saga of Thord Menace], 615–617 Þórðar saga kakala [The Saga of Thord kakali], 113, 252–253, 549 Þórdís, memorises a stanza, 237 Þorfinnsdrápa [Thorfinn’s Poem], 541 Þorgils from Borgarfjörðr, miracle involving, 434–437 Þorgnýr the lawman (in Óláfs saga helga [The Saga of Saint Óláfr]), 1028–1033

 1163

Þorhallr veiðimaðr (Thorhall the Hunter), 857 Þorlákr Þorláksson, bishop, 400, 401, 404, 970, 1055 Þorláks saga helga [Saga of Saint Þorlákr], 400, 402, 440, 1055–1058 Þorleifs þáttr jarlsskálds [The Tale of Thorleif, the Earl’s Poet], 112 Þorleifur Pálsson, 710, 712–713 Þórólfr Mostrarskegg, 261 Þórr (Thor), 259, 261, 374–375, 380, 382, 423, 511, 555, 558–559, 568, 627–628, 630, 643, 669, 695, 730, 824, 902, 908–912, 1047–1048 –– Abildgaard’s drawing of for Ewald’s Balders død, 777 –– Le Dieu Thor lithograph, 1101 Þórsdrápa [Ode to Þórr (Thor)], 643 Þorsteins saga hvíta [The Saga of Thorstein the White], 591 Þorsteins þáttr skelks [The Tale of Thorstein Shiver], 509 Þrymskviða [Thrym’s Poem], 116, 375, 377 þulr (sage), 262, 641 þulur (singular þula) (metrical list of poetic synonyms), 542–543, 644 Þuríðr Snorradóttir, ‘wise and truthful’ (margspök ok óljúgfróð), 700, 988 Þyrvé, 778, 1067