Gripla - 20.12.2009, Side 272
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story-telling poems collected and reduced to writing – in Einhard’s famous
words: ‘[Karl] also had the old rude songs that celebrate the deeds and wars
of the ancient kings written out for transmission to posterity’ – barbara et
antiquissima carmina, quibus veterum regum actus et bella canebantur, scripsit
memoriaeque mandavit. In the context of such a collection perhaps refer
ences to memoria reminded him of his native minni with a somewhat simi
lar range of meanings centering on ‘memory, remembrance.’ einhard’s
memoriae mandare is debated by specialists; but in context its meaning can
not have been far from ‘preserve for posterity (in letters).’26 For the Swede
– whose stories were ‘memory’ and ‘memory’ story – the possibility of
writing stories or poems pro memoria was a new idea and one from an
authoritative source. But it did have a partial analogue at home where runic
writing was already associated with monumentalization, often to preserve
the memory of individuals in stones and runes that were to last until
Ragnarök. Ideas, like seeds, may fall on ready ground, or not. Did our
imaginary Swedish visitor carry his new idea back with him to
Östergötland, where, sometime after the death of young Vámóðr, Varinn
applied it to a memorial, resulting in a monument unique in literary his
tory but one with a familiar feeling for the Anglo-Saxonist?
So I disagree with Widmark about the conservative impulses to be read
out of the Rök monument. Yet she and Meulengracht Sørensen were
rightly – though only implicitly – groping toward a placement of Rök not
just in relation to society and culture, as Wessén and Lönnroth do, but in
relation to different cultures and their interactions. Concerning the anxious
varinn’s decision “att anförtro sina minnen åt det beständigaste av allt:
sten” (Widmark 1997, 172), Widmark asked: “Ristade kanske varin egentli
gen inte alls för någon läsare utan såg i stenen en sorts robot som på något
magiskt plan för all evighet fyller den uppgift som hade varit hans?” (173).
In other words, the motivation is resistance to cultural change and the
technology, though new, is home-grown. Meulengracht Sørensen was
closer to my understanding of the matter when he emphasized the utter
uniqueness of Rök, the implausibility of Varinn’s experiment with exten
sive writing on stone, and the lack of any evidence of reception: “und tat
sächlich fand das großangelegte Schriftexperiment von Rök auch nirgens,
26 on Vita Karoli, ch. 29, and the Heldenliederbuch, see Haubrichs 1989 and Harris 2009, 45
n. 85.