Gripla - 20.12.2009, Blaðsíða 268
GRIPLA268
about its relevance to social hierarchies and about pedagogical function,
while Widmark constructs a Varinn who is a þulr – this ancient and not
fully understood office being constituted as a guardian of ethnically defined
knowledge, tribal tradition. Rök’s position among genres and media seems
a less speculative matter than its position in society, but the significant fact
about Rök in literary history is its uniqueness. Like Beowulf, the Canterbury
Tales, and a few other masterpieces, it can be seen as a kind of summa lit
terarum, but in parvo, bringing together elements of the literary past in a
form so new that it produces no significant heirs.24 Does that mean it is
insulated from cultural change?
One model of cultural change already applied to our field, but less well
known than it deserves to be, is embodied in a modest booklet by an
anthropologist of the sixties, Rosalie Wax, who wrote on “the changing
ethos of the vikings.” Wax derived the model from the anthropologist of
peasant cultures james Redfield and explains it briefly:
the Little tradition refers to the little community and to that
which is transmitted informally (predominantly orally) from
generation to generation; while the Great Tradition refers to the
corps of disciples within a civilized society and to special wisdom,
preserved in scriptures, which they guard and transmit (Wax 1969,
15).
This quotation leaves to the imagination the dynamic between Great and
Little, and the explanatory power of this simple model of big fish eating
little fish may have its limits. In the age of globalization, however, we do
not require much subtlety on this subject. Students of old Scandinavian
literature have long been accustomed to triumphalist presentations of the
Continental Great tradition and to demonstrations that apparent survivals
of Scandinavian Little traditions are in fact invented traditions. Instinctively
I would like to celebrate the local and instances of resistance to progress,
but the resistance – for example the thor’s hammers cast alongside crosses
– may be based on imitation and so be sad signs of the inexorable homog
enization, the cultural equivalent of loss of species. Long ago I tried to
advance an argument that it was later awareness of this kind of cultural
24 Argued for Beowulf in Harris 1991, for Rök in Harris 2009.