Gripla - 20.12.2007, Page 65

ANTIQUARIANISM, POETRY, AND WORD-OF-MOUTH FAME 63
by reaching further and further back in time for them, as works like Vƒlsunga
saga attest by their inclusion of obviously mythical material (Vƒlsunga
saga:40; Orkneyinga saga:1-7).28 The new thinking about fame and a new
way of transferring information (texts) are thus not only attacks upon the
traditional social practices that one may see in the sagas but also, as Óðinn’s
mentioning of his poetic powers indicates, upon language practice — upon an
oral society’s very method of communication. More particularly, since books
can replace memories, the tradition of witnesses (and thus Kári’s impression
of Skarpheðinn’s acrobatic slaying) is no longer necessary in order to preserve
such a deed and distribute it among a literately-inclined community. A link in
the chain of oral communication is broken. Consequently, the prospect of
literate thinking, as the saga-writers could see in the very act of composing
their works, would threaten to suspend reference from oral sign to oral sign
and to undercut (for the moment) the power of such signs; would threaten, like
certain more recent approaches to the study of literature, to destroy a
cherished belief concerning an entire communication system: that ‘the idea
that [an utterance or] literature is expressive’ (Vance 1973:2). The many
references to word-of-mouth fame in the sagas thus demonstrate that the Old
Icelandic prose writers were at least conscious that such destruction might
take place, and the frequency of such references suggests that these early
folklorists wished to preserve the expressive qualities traditional, oral, and per-
formative — of their past.
Kári’s verbal reaction to Skarpheðinn’s great leap in Njáls saga, then,
represents the description of a direct transfer of emotion from the mind of a
performer to that of a spectator; an empathetic moment, a transfer of a char-
acteristic moment from Skarpheðinn to him. This transfer begins a process of
poetic development in Kári that parallels his heroic development. The de-
velopment of Kári’s career is also an important indication of the ethics of his
society, and not merely in the sense of a traditional conception of the heroic
ideal. Through connecting Kári’s appreciation of Skarpheðinn’s great leap
with the former’s poetry and with ideas of oral communication, one may see
that Kári’s praise amounts to a highly sophisticated and revealing kind of
empathy that extends to nostalgia for oral communication as described by the
antiquarian saga-writers.
28 I grant that oral performers and perhaps the literate authors of these works would not neces-
sarily distinguish legends from chronicles and family narratives.