Oral Art Forms and Their Passage into Writing PDF
Preview Oral Art Forms and Their Passage into Writing
Oral Art Forms and their Passage into Writing Oral Art Forms and their Passage into Writing Edited by Else Mundal and Jonas Wellendorf Museum Tusculanum Press University of Copenhagen 2008 Else Mundal and Jonas Wellendorf (eds.): Oral Art Forms and their Passage into Writing © Museum Tusculanum Press and the authors, 2008 Consultant: Ivan Boserup Composition by Jonas Wellendorf Cover by Pernille Sys Hansen Set in Adobe Garamond Printed in Denmark by AKA Print ISBN 978 87 635 0504 8 Cover illustration: fol. 182v (Herr Bligger von Steinach) from the manuscript Codex Manesse (Cod. Pal. germ. 848) © Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg This book is published with the financial support from Bergen Universitetsfond Museum Tusculanum Press Njalsgade 126 DK-2300 Copenhagen S www.mtp.dk Contents Else Mundal Introduction 1 Theodore M. Andersson From Tradition to Literature in the Sagas 7 GÍSLI SlGURDSSON Orality Harnessed: How to Read Written Sagas from an Oral Culture? 19 Tommy Danielsson On the Possibility of an Oral Background for Gisla saga Súrssonar 29 Minna Skafte Jensen The Oral-Formulaic Theory Revisited 43 Lars Boje Mortensen From Vernacular Interviews to Latin Prose (ca. 600-1200) 53 Anna Adamska Orality and Literacy in Medieval East Central Europe: Final Prolegomena 69 Sonja Petrovic Oral and Written Art Forms in Serbian Medieval Literature 85 Graham D. Caie Ealdgesegena worm What the Old English Beowulf Tells Us about Oral Forms 109 Olav Solberg The Scandinavian Medieval Ballad: From Oral Tradition to Written Texts and Back Again 121 Jonas Wellendorf Apocalypse Now? The Draumkvade and Visionary Literature 135 Bernt Øyvind Thorvaldsen The Eddie Form and Its Contexts: An Oral Art Form Performed in Writing 151 vi • Oral Art Forms and their Passage into Writing Bergsveinn Birgisson What Have We Lost by Writing? Cognitive Archaisms in Skaldic Poetry 163 Guðrún Nordal The Dialogue between Audience and Text: The Variants in Verse Citations in Njdls sagas Manuscripts 185 LjubiSa Raji6 Mixing oratio recta and oratio obliqua: A Sign of Literacy or Orality? 203 Else Mundal Oral or Scribal Variation in Vqluspá\ A Case Study in Old Norse Poetry 209 Introduction Else Mundal The articles in this book deal with oral art forms and their passage into writing in different cultures. They build on papers presented at a conference organised by the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Bergen in June 2004. The oral art forms of the past can be studied only through later written records. It is in many cases difficult to know how representative a written form of a text is of the earlier oral form - or forms. There are also differences from one genre to another both regarding how much one oral performance could differ from another and how much the written form could differ from an oral performance. It is obvious that some oral genres had a form which did not allow much variation from one performance to the other. The most typical example of this is the Old Norse skaldic poetry. There is general agreement among scholars that skaldic poetry was memorised poetry, not improvised. The performer should - in principle - be able to recite the stanzas as he had learned them using the same words every time he or she performed; and when a skaldic stanza was written down, it would have been written down as it was recited word-for-word, or if the scribe knew the stanza himself, he would have written it down exactly as he would have recited it. In this case the oral text is extremely stable compared to other oral texts, and the written form would not add anything new to the oral form - what is new is that the written medium provided a safe-keeping for the text outside the human mind. The written skaldic stanzas give us in many ways direct access to the oral forms behind. There are, however, also important aspects of oral skaldic poetry which the written form does not give much information about, for instance aspects related to performance. At the other end of the scale we have written texts which have no equivalents or close parallels on the oral stage, but which at least to some extent build on an oral tradition and adopt some of its content as well as its compositional and stylistic features. In this case it is more difficult to draw conclusions about the oral art forms behind the written texts. However, the marks the oral tradition has left on the written text may provide us with some information about the previous oral forms which again may form a basis for theories about the oral forms behind the written texts and about their relation to each other. The sagas 2 • Oral Art Forms and their Passage into Writing of Icelanders are typical texts of this kind. In cases where Latin texts build on oral tradition in the vernacular, the relation between the oral tradition and the written form is even more complicated. Most oral art forms are to be found somewhere on a scale between the skaldic poetry where the written form in principle should reflect older oral forms rather closely, and medieval written prose texts which give vague and uncertain information about the oral tradition upon which the written texts build. Old Norse Eddie poetry, Old English poetry, Homeric epic, Serbian epic songs and medieval ballads, to mention some genres from different European cultures, are genres which were less stable in oral tradition than skaldic poetry and the relation between the first written form and the oral form(s) on which the written form was built was also less predictable than in skaldic poetry. There is, however, reason to believe that there are great differences among these genres regarding where they fit in between memorised literature, of which skaldic poetry is the most typical example, and improvised literature which was more or less reshaped in every oral performance. The Eddie poetry is - according to most scholars - to be seen as essentially memorised oral literature, although it must have been more open for improvisation and changes than skaldic poetry. Old English oral poetry on the other hand was probably even more open for changes in oral tradition than the Nordic Eddie type. VCe know from modern times that Serbian oral songs could change considerably from one performance to the other, and the differences between versions ot ballads written down in the nineteenth century and those recorded earlier were often great. The articles of this book focus on oral art forms of all the different types mentioned above, and investigate literature belonging to different genres and areas. The first three articles in the book all deal with saga literature, especially the sagas of Icelanders. Theodore M. Andersson tries to establish what is possible to deduce about the oral stories which the authors of saga literature had to build upon. He concludes that the style of the written sagas is likely to be largely oral, but the shape of any given saga must have been exclusively determined by the saga writer. The saga writer had, however, different types of narrative found in oral tradition to build upon, for instance biographical traditions, genealogical traditions, regional traditions about important events in a particular district, and traditions attached to landmarks, place names, and so on. Andersson suggests three types of overall organisation that the saga authors could choose from to create their stories: he could choose a biographical structure, he could write a sort of district chronicle, or he could be guided by the feud structure. As opposed to Theodore M. Andersson, Ciisli Sigurdsson finds the Old Norse texts unhelpful on their own when it comes to considering the nature of oral art forms in the Middle Ages. According to him, a more promising approach to envisaging the Old Norse oral background can be arrived at by drawing on the contemporary field studies from a variety of oral cultures. in the third article Tommy Daniclsson discusses the possibility of an oral background lor one particular saga of Icelanders, CisLi siiga Súrssonar. The beginning ot this saga exists in two rather different versions. The question
The list of books you might like
