REFERENCE

Jürg Glauser, Pernille Hermann,

VOLUME 1
HANDBOOK OF PRE-MODERN NORDIC MEMORY STUDIES
Jürg Glauser, Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell (Eds.)
In recent years, the field of memory studies has emerged as a key approach Stephen A. Mitchell (Eds.)
HANDBOOK OF
in the humanities and social sciences, and has increasingly shown its ability
to open new windows on Nordic studies as well. The entries in this book
document the work-to-date of this approach on the pre-modern Nordic
world (mainly the Viking Age and the Middle Ages, but including as

PRE-MODERN
well both earlier and later periods). Given that memory studies is an ever
expanding critical strategy, the nearly eighty contributors in this volume also
discuss the potential for future research in this area. Topics covered range

NORDIC MEMORY
from texts to performance to visual and other aspects of material culture,
all approached from within an interdisciplinary framework. International
specialists, coming from such relevant fields as archaeology, mythology,

STUDIES
history of religion, folklore, history, law, art, literature, philology, language,
and mediality, offer assessments on the relevance of memory studies to
their disciplines and show it at work in case studies. Finally, this handbook
demonstrates the various levels of culture where memory had a critical
impact in the pre-modern North and how deeply embedded the role of
memory is in the material itself.
!!INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACHES
VOLUME 1
interdisciplinary volume on memory studies in Viking Age and medieval
Scandinavia
texts and images illustrating the awareness of memory in, and the role of
memory studies for, the Old Norse world
entries and case studies by nearly eighty specialists representing a wide
variety of fields

www.degruyter.com
ISBN 978-3-11-044020-1
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

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Cover image: The Hills of Old Uppsala in Sweden, Erik Dahlberg, Suecia Antiqua et Hodierna
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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
VI   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
 Table of Contents   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
VIII   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
 Table of Contents   IX

Volume 2
Part III: Texts and Images
Remembering the Past and Foreseeing the Future:
Mnemonic genres and classical Old Norse memory texts
III: 1 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
The Saga of Thidrek of Bern — 1002
III: 18 Remembering and the creation of
The Saga of Yngvar the Far-traveler — 1004
X   Table of Contents

Media of Memory and Forgetting:

Figures of remembering and forgetting
III: 19 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   XI

Runic Inscriptions
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
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
 I: 7 Orality and Oral Theory: Stephen A. Mitchell   121

man, is, after all, only a few decades old – the anthologies of e.g. A. Assmann,
J. Assmann, and Hardmeier (1983) and Le Goff (1986) may be taken to represent
convenient early milestones in these modern developments. Even the venerable
initial considerations by Maurice Halbwachs about collective memory (1925,
1950) have not yet been around for as much as a century.
By contrast, orality’s enagagement with memory – perhaps best visualised
emically in the anthropomorphisation of ‘the tradition’ in the form of legendary
performers e.g. Homer, Ossian, Ćor Huso, or, in the case of pre-modern Nordic
oral poetry, Bragi (cf. Foley 1998) – represents a form of abstraction that dates
back millennia. Moreover, it is telling that the compound ‘folk memory studies’ in
the various Nordic languages (e.g. folkminnesforskning, þjóðminjafræði) has been
used since at least the early nineteenth century as a primary means of expressing
what in English was in that same period re-named Folk-Lore as a substitute for the
earlier phrase, ‘popular antiquities’ – and in all of these cases there existed 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).
122   Part I: Culture and Communication

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 Naturpoe-
sie (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
 I: 7 Orality and Oral Theory: Stephen A. Mitchell   123

argue that the Icelandic literary enterprise of the thirteenth century was ‘really’
a displaced exercise in Norwegian creativity, and the greater the degree to which
this oral tradition could be argued to be a practice harking back to the mother
country, the greater the nationalist claim to these prized literary works – and the
more legitimate the Norwegian demand for complete independence (Andersson
1964, 65–81; Mitchell 1991, 1–6).
In this sense, discussions of orality were not only an academic debate, but
rather a substantive argument deeply embedded in a serious political dilemma.
And it was a debate with a lengthy hangover: Harald Beyer’s Norsk Litteraturhisto-
rie (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
124   Part I: Culture and Communication

medium was not itself responsible for creating them. What distinguishes Parry
from other Classicists who had posed the “Homeric Question” before him was
not only his view that the Iliad and the Odyssey were originally the products of an
oral tradition that was older than any written literature, but rather his 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
 I: 7 Orality and Oral Theory: Stephen A. Mitchell   125

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.
126   Part I: Culture and Communication

In addition to these direct findings about south Slavic traditional oral poets,
among the most important results of applying the Parry-Lord observations to
other tradition areas, has been the reevaluation of just what we should hope
to find – not merely duplications of Parry and Lord’s original methods for, e.g.,
testing the use of formulas or the mechanics of composition in performance,
but also tools for such important perspectives as recontextualising performance
practices (e.g. Nagy 2011; Mitchell 2013; cf. Harris and Reichl 2011). Further 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-
 I: 7 Orality and Oral Theory: Stephen A. Mitchell   127

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 Münd-
lichkeit; 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-
128   Part I: Culture and Communication

larly, the specific intersection of orality and memory studies is significant, and
one expects that so interdisciplinary and methodologically-agglutinating a field
as folkloristics will enthusiastically embrace the lessons to be learned from
memory studies. The interplay between Oral Theory/orality and modern 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.

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