Kate Heslop

Viking Mediologies is a study of pre-modern multimedia rooted in the embodied poetic practice of Viking Age skalds. Prior study of the skaldic tradition has focused on authorship—distinctions of poetic style, historical contexts, and attention to the oeuvres of the skalds whose names are preserved in the written tradition. Kate Heslop reconsiders these not as texts but as pieces in a pre-modern media landscape, focusing on poetry’s medial capacity to embody memory, visuality, and sound. Mobile, hybrid, diasporic social formations—bands of raiders and traders, petty kingdoms, colonial expeditions—achieved new prominence in the Viking Age. Skalds offered the leaders of these groups something uniquely valuable. With their complicated poetry, they claimed to be able to capture shared contingent meanings and re-mediate them in named, memorable, reproducible works. The commemorative poetry in kviðuháttr remembers histories of ruin and loss. Skaldic ekphrasis discloses and reproduces the presence of the gods. Dróttkvætt encomium evokes for the leader’s retinue the soundscape of battle. As writing arrived in Scandinavia in the wake of Christianization, the media landscape shifted. In the poetry of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, skalds adjusted to the demands of a literate audience, while the historical and poetological texts of the Icelandic High Middle Ages opened a dialogue between Latin Christian ideas of mediation and local traditions. In the Second Grammatical Treatise, for example, the literate technology of the grid is used to analyze the complex resonances of dróttkvætt as the output of a syllable-spewing hurdy-gurdy—a poetry machine. Offering both new readings of both canonical works such as Ynglingatal, Ragnarsdrápa, and Háttatal, and examinations of lesser-known texts like Glymdrápa, Líknarbraut, and Sturla Þórðarson’s Hákonarkviða, Viking Mediologies explores the powers and limits of poetic mediation.

A New History of Skaldic Poetics

Viking Mediologies

Klaus Müller-Wille

Anna Katharina Richter

Lukas Rösli

"Skandinavische Schriftlandschaften" ist eine Festschrift für Jürg Glauser, von 1994 bis 2017 Professor für Nordische Philologie an den Universitäten Basel und Zürich. Zu seinen Forschungsgebieten gehören schwerpunktmäßig die Literaturen Skandinaviens im Mittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit, insbesondere Sagaliteratur und Edda, aber auch Memory Studies, Mythologie, Rhetorik und Transmissionsgeschichte sowie neuisländische Literatur, Literaturgeschichtsschreibung und Fachgeschichte. In rund 60 Beiträgen, die jeweils von Abbildungen begleitet sind, wird mit kurzen Analysen ausgewählter Beispieltexte aus der skandinavischen Literatur von der Runendichtung bis zur Gegenwart einerseits das breite Spektrum der nordischen Literaturen sichtbar. Andererseits werden hier auch Jürg Glausers vielseitige Forschungsinteressen und innovative Studien auf diesen Gebieten anschaulich präsentiert. Durch die größtenteils farbigen Bilder wird – auch für ein breiteres Lesepublikum – nicht zuletzt eine kleine Schriftgeschichte Skandinaviens lebendig.

Vänbok till Jürg Glauser

Skandinavische Schriftlandschaften

Judy Quinn

Tarrin Wills

This volume presents twenty essays by leading scholars of Old Norse which bring into focus the nature of learned traditions - both oral and written - in medieval Scandinavia and the interpretation and re-interpretation of them over time. Theoretical frameworks for understanding Old Norse literature is the initial topic of the collection, which then moves on to present recent work on Old Norse myth and society; current perspectives on oral traditions in performance and text; and reflections on medieval ideas about language, both vernacular and Latin. The collection is rounded off by a section on prolonged traditions - the transformation of local and imported traditions into new literary forms. Individual essays in the volume offer significant primary research as well as reconsiderations of key issues in scholarship, their subjects ranging widely, both conceptually and chronologically, around the twin themes of learning and understanding. Like the research of the volume's honorand, Margaret Clunies Ross, Learning and Understanding in the Old Norse World exemplifies the diversity and vigour of current research in the field of Old Norse and draws together philological, literary, historical and anthropological perspectives on the subject.

Essays in Honour of Margaret Clunies Ross

Learning and Understanding in the Old Norse World

Kate Heslop

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