Eric Bryan challenges the views of two recent articles (Males 2023; Myrvoll 2023) that criticize material philological initiatives in Old Norse studies as over-concerned with scribal agency and the value of individual paleographic witnesses. Bryan responds by arguing that scribal agency must remain an essential component of philological efforts in Old Norse studies because it most accurately reflects not only the origins (via oral transmission) of saga and poetic narratives but also the re-oralization process (Quinn and Lethbridge 2010; Bryan 2021) that occurs in the post-medieval period in Iceland. This (re)oralized performativity makes Old Norse poetry and sagas what they were throughout their oral and textual production. Thus, while textuality and textual criticisms remain an essential component of Old Norse studies, material philology must continue to be corresponding method of inquiry.
Kate Heslop builds upon Bryan’s methodological discussion by exploring the uses of kennings (figurative poetic devices that refer to important objects or persons) for blood in Old Norse skaldic poetry—a form of poetry long associated with oral performance in medieval Scandinavia. Words and kennings for blood are component parts in larger metaphorical constructions for key referents such as ‘weapon’, ‘wolf or raven’, ‘warrior’. Blood is therefore central to skaldic poetic diction, meaning there is a rich material to draw on; but its apparently self-explanatory quality (Anidjar 2016, Schneider 1984) means it has been little investigated to date. This paper asks whether the particular metaphors the skalds use to talk about blood can lead us beyond the factual and descriptive (wounds do bleed) to elucidate premodern Scandinavian conceptual understandings and ideological uses of this ‘indispensable fluid’ (Foskolou 2022). As the god Óðinn’s theft of the mead of poetry underlies skaldic metaphors for poetic composition and performance, so may the primordial sacrifice of the god Ymir (Wellendorf 2021), whose blood forms the oceans, structure the skalds’ attempts to naturalize the violence of war.
Liam Waters concludes this discussion by taking up the twin strands of oral/aural performativity and ecocritical concerns. His paper draws on Martin Daughtry’s concept of “acoustic palimpsests” (2017), new materialism, and sound studies to examine three critical aspects of ice and flow as historical concerns in Iceland: 1) the way in which glaciers, ice, and water have been mythologized in the oral and written traditions of Old Norse poetic and textual culture; 2) their use as a source of environmental knowledge; 3) the ethics of poetry, sound recording, and music as palimpsests for glaciers in the wake of the climate disaster of AD 536 (Gräslund and Price 2017). This paper examines Old Norse mythological narratives of creation, which reveal a vibrant materiality that calls to mind recalled the Old Norse mythological metaphor of poetry as liquid mead. This unwritten flow of words—a poetic flow—challenges the traditional ocular-centric approach common to textual research, suggesting instead an aural technique for reading the unreadable. Particularly in Iceland, where all glaciers are projected to downwaste within the next 150 years, poetic flow becomes not just a convenient cognitive metaphor, but a means through which to examine, understand, and preserve the flow of water and ice in daily life.
This session brings together a diversity of voices primarily across academic rank and geography. Represented herein are a full professor, an associate professor, and an early career researcher. There is also some geographic differentiation, as one presenter currently resides and works in Iceland, another in California, and a third in the midwestern United States.