Old Norse Poetry in Performance

Brian McMahon, Annemari Ferreira, Brian McMahon, Annemari Ferreira

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000573367
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Arti performative

This book presents a range of approaches to the study of Old Norse poetry in performance.

The contributors examine both eddic and skaldic poems and consider the surviving evidence for how they were originally recited or otherwise performed in medieval Scandinavia, Iceland and at royal courts across Europe. This study also engages with the challenge of reconstructing medieval performance styles and examines ways of applying the modern discipline of Performance Studies to the fragmentary corpus of Old Norse verse. The performance of verse by characters who appear in the Old Icelandic saga tradition is also considered, as is the cultural value associated not only with the poems themselves but with their various means of transmission and reception.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in the fields of Old Norse studies, Performance and Theatre History.

Part I The Social Dynamics of Performance

1 Framing Old Norse Performance Contexts The Wedding at Reykjahólar (1119) Revisited

Stephen A. Mitchell ¹

DOI: 10.4324/9780367809324-3

Performance and Ethnographies of Communication: A Personal Journey

In retrospect, perhaps the most consequential half-dozen pages I was asked to read as an undergraduate – pages that in many ways remain central to how I now frame matters related to Old Norse poetry in performance – had nothing to do with Old Norse at all.² The text was Charles O. Frake’s ‘How to Ask for a Drink in Subanun’, part of the special issue of American Anthropologist edited by Dell Hymes and John Gumperz titled The Ethnography of Communication (1964). In this remarkable essay, Frake presents and analyses the rules for, and the use of verbal art within, structured drinking games at festive gatherings among the Subanun,³ and especially how one’s social standing ‘can be extended, defined, and manipulated through the use of speech’ (1964b, 131). In discussing the difference between, on the one hand, the grammatically correct equivalent in Subanun of an English request for a drink and, on the other, what a person needs to understand about making such a request in culturally appropriate ways, Frake comments, ‘Our stranger needs more than a grammar and a lexicon; he needs what Hymes (1962) has called an ethnography of speaking: a specification of what kinds of things to say in what message forms to what kinds of people in what kinds of situations’ (Frake 1964b, 127).

The notion that unwritten codes of behaviour govern speech acts may seem obvious to modern readers, but it was not so apparent in the late 1960s. After all, what are today sociolinguistic ‘classics’ (e.g., William Labov’s work on language and society) were at that time just beginning to gain currency – and, in any event, Frake’s perspective and central argument were certainly revelations to me as a college freshman.

I realise that to many Frake’s work on the extra-linguistic dimensions of speech acts in Subanum may seem curiously out of place in a volume on Old Norse poetry in performance, but unwinding that short essay’s significant ramifications for interpreting culture is in my opinion at the heart of everything that should matter to us as medievalists about theories of performance and about how we can best understand medieval narratives, both conventional ‘storytelling’ in prose and poetry and cultural accounts of other sorts. These extra-literary narratives are part of an all-embracing view I cherish of what we should mean by terms like ‘stories’ and ‘performances’, that is, as topics for study that include everything from overtly creative works of fiction to recondite narratives submerged into and hinted at by chronicles and other historical monuments; that is, the full range of what makes these bygone eras so interesting to us today.

That it is a desirable goal to understand the cultural codes that shape behaviour, including performance and other communicative acts, in medieval northern Europe is a given, but accomplishing a goal of such magnitude is obviously no simple task, as it implies reverse-engineering from the archival materials the various rules that govern conduct, ritualised behaviour, the presentation of self and the extra-linguistic dimensions of speech acts. Where does one begin? Such an analysis is in my view best – and most likely to be – accomplished when framed as an ‘ethnography of performance’ (e.g., Bauman and Braid 1998; Reynolds 2018).⁴

Since at least the mid-1960s, ‘linguistic competence’ has been a critical and much-debated topic within linguistics, but in dealing with the Old Norse materials, I believe we need instead to focus on establishing what has been called ‘cultural competence’, where ‘competence involves mastery of communication that extends beyond the utterance of sentences into the social and cultural rules that generate performance’ (Ben-Amos 1997, 632, citing the views of Dell Hymes and Charles Briggs).⁵

The result would, one expects, be a generative model of social conduct, including performance, according to which actions, speech acts, gestures, and deportment of every kind are seen as surface manifestations actualised, or transformed, by individuals, based on society’s deep ‘institutional’ codes.⁶ And here, I believe, we see a distinctive way in which some scholars, certainly many of today’s folklorists, conceive of ‘performance’ – that is, not as some precisely circumscribed toolkit centred on theatrical staging, but rather as perspectives, as Ben-Amos writes, that ‘point to a synthesis that encompasses cultural knowledge and experience – as they are available to members of the community in verbal, visual, musical, and mimetic symbolic forms – as the substance of performance’ (Ben-Amos 1997, 632, here referring directly to the work of Roger Abrahams and John Foley, as well Hymes and Briggs). Of course, we can expect ‘performances’ of any sort to involve a degree of theatricality, staging, and display, but understood as sketched here, ‘performance’ also accepts the importance and vitality of actions not only in highly marked situations (everything from community festivals, ceremonial speeches, ritual activities and slam poetry to Broadway and the West End), but also marked speech and behaviour – ‘performances’ – in much more quotidian contexts.⁷

Modern folkloristics is generally characterised now by being more behaviourally or contextually focussed than had been the case in folkloristics in the early twentieth century, a transformation in which performance plays a very prominent role. The path to this remodelled perspective of the field was filled with considerable tension within the field. It was a change in orientation that had both strong advocates (e.g., Abrahams 1968; Bauman 1975) and outspoken critics (e.g., Wilgus 1973; Jones 1979). The necessity of such a discussion about reorientation harks back to a time when those collecting traditional materials were only vaguely, if that, interested in the lives of the individuals from whom they were collecting. As a consequence, methods were developed specifically suited to focus on folklore texts (e.g., Krohn’s 1926 Die folkloristische Arbeitsmethode). In contrast to these text-centred practices, the application of ‘performance theory’ represented a movement within folkloristics away from an almost exclusive concern for folklore ‘products’ (i.e., texts of legends, ballads, and so on) and toward a vastly enhanced appreciation for both the individuals by whom, and the context in which, such materials were created and used.⁸ One means of expressing this change toward a contextually or behaviourally oriented folkloristics has been, as some wag or another put it, that one could now say that the focus has shifted from the ‘lore’ of ‘folk-lore’ to its ‘folk’.⁹

I recognise that my comments thus far have been mainly oriented toward the debates of the 1960s and 1970s within the North American scholarly communities, but I do not believe this change of perspective was by any means restricted to them. It was, after all, as a student in Lund in the early 1970s, for example, that I first heard reports of the negative assessments by D. K. Wilgus (as president of the American Folklore Society) about these trends toward a more context-oriented folkloristics.¹⁰ Similar concerns, although handled more sensitively, are to be seen in the comments by a leading Swedish folklorist and medievalist, Dag Strömbäck, after more than a quarter century at the helm of the prominent Nordic folklore journal ARV (1979a, 1979b). Addressing himself to the readers of ARV, Strömbäck notes that he sees this reorientation as a conflict between the study of folklore as he has known it, that is, as a field with intellectual roots in philology, archaeology, the history of religion, and the study of literature, and ‘firmly moored to the Scandinavian philological discipline and the critical-historical method’ (1979b, 10), against a movement that, as he writes, ‘sweeps folklore research in the direction of cultural anthropology and sociology and statistical method’ (1979a, cf. 1979b, 10).

As I have previously suggested (Mitchell 2014), although this change of perspective toward the contextual was to my mind intellectually robust and helped move the field in the correct direction, one can at the same time empathise with Strömbäck’s quandary as he continues, ‘I have tried to respond to the set of both these currents, though I willingly admit that my heart is captured more by the study of traditions from olden times, particularly from the Middle Ages, and by the approach which interweaves historical fact, philological interpretation and textual criticism. In Nordic folklore research my inspiring models have always been Moltke ...