Gripla - 20.12.2008, Side 98

GRIPLA96
the sagas are so because this is what magical verses in medieval Iceland
were really like. However, these verses are (also) unmistakably a literary
motif. The significance of sonority as a literary technique is that sound-
patterns achieve their effect by non-semantic, performative means. The
content of the repeated line Ingjaldr í skinnfeldi is relatively unimportant
compared to how the repeated line beats upon its hearers’ ears. Sonority in
such verses represents the similarly performative, rather than communica-
tive, character of magical and ritual speech (on which see Raudvere 2005),
the claim of spells to ‘do things with words’.
What is somewhat harder to account for is why this verse is spoken
by a ‘voice from outside’, or acousmatic voice. The adjective acousmatique,
according to the Grand Dictionnaire encyclopédique Larousse, refers to une
situation d’écoute où, pour l’auditeur, la source sonore est invisible (‘a listening
situation where the source of the sound is invisible to the hearer’) (GDEL).
Revived in the mid-twentieth century to describe the experience of listen-
ing to musique concrète (Schaeffer 1966, 91) this term originally denoted
the esoteric teachings of Pythagoras, the a ’kou’smata (‘things heard’).
According to Iamblichus, writing in the fourth century AD, Pythagoras’
junior students, the acusmatici, were only allowed to listen to the master
from behind a curtain.5 Mladen Dolar, following the film theorist Michel
Chion (1982 [1999]), describes the acousmatic voice as ‘a voice in search of
an origin, in search of a body’ (Dolar 2006, 60), and points out that such
voices tend to be authoritative and charismatic: not only Pythagoras, but
also God, frequently represented in the Old Testament as an acousmatic
voice, and the Wizard of Oz.
In Bárðar saga, the sonorous verse chanted by the acousmatic voice
discomforts its auditors (mönnum brá mjök við þetta). The second constitu-
tive element of this episode is then uncertainty as to who is speaking. The
uncomfortable moment of uncertainty is immediately succeeded here
by ‘disacousmatisation’, in which an origin is found and the voice from
nowhere normalised. Once Hetta has been identified as the speaker, a nar-
rative of intentions and results can be constructed (Hetta tröllkona muni
þetta kveðit hafa, því at hon ætlaði, sem hon vildi, at Ingjaldr skyldi aldri aptr
5 Iamblichus, On the Pythagorean Way of Life, ch. 17: ‘they shared his [Pythagoras’] dis-
courses through mere hearing, being outside the curtain and never seeing him’ (Dillon and
Hershbell 1991, 99).