Gripla - 20.12.2008, Page 99

97HEARING VOICES
hafa komit, sem hon hafdi ráð til sett). These two features, how it sounds and
who is speaking, are both features of verse as performed, as ‘live’ event rather
than text. But in this episode they pull in opposite directions, as the highly-
patterned sound of the verse evokes a speaking body, whose presence is
deferred by the narrative’s withholding of its identity. Dolar observes fur-
ther that ‘with the advent of the new media the acousmatic property of the
voice became universal and hence trivial ...[but] in the early days of their
introduction there was no shortage of stories about their uncanny effects’
(63). The media he is talking about here are, of course, ‘radio, gramophone,
tape-recorder, telephone’, but perhaps his insight can be taken further?
Medieval Iceland, of course, also experienced the advent of a new medi-
um, namely, the manuscript codex. The relative importance of oral and lit-
erate practices in the production, reception, and dissemination of medieval
Icelandic literature has long been debated. While the original emphasis on
the implications of orality for the production of texts and, above all, for
the origin of genres, exemplified in the Freiprosa/Buchprosa split, contin-
ues to be productive in Old Norse studies,6 it has been supplemented by
an interest in the reception, rather than production, of texts,7 which has
gone hand in hand with a ‘weak’ formulation (the term is Ruth Finnegan’s
(1988, 39)) of the relationship between orality and literacy. In the ‘weak’
formulation emphasis is placed on the ‘coexistence and interaction’ (Chinca
and Young 2005, 1) of oral and literate media rather than, as in the ‘strong’
formulation associated with the heroic period of orality/literacy studies
(Havelock 1963, Goody and Watt 1963), dichotomisation into oral and
literate mentalities and postulation of a cultural or cognitive revolution as
being brought about by the transition from the former to the latter. Judy
Quinn’s recent survey (2000), despite its title (‘From orality to literacy in
medieval Iceland’), is actually an example of this ‘weak’ approach, focusing
as it does on the evidence that oral forms such as genealogies, lists, laws,
and spells survived alongside the new medium of writing. Karl Johansson
(2005) considers manuscript evidence both for Verschriftlichung (‘literari-
zation’) of oral genres and for oral performance of written texts, and Jürg
Glauser (1996) traces the ‘re-oralising’ of saga narratives in early modern
6 See e.g. on the elegy Harris (1988, 2000a, 2000b); and on the Íslendingasaga Gísli
Sigurðsson (2004 [2002]).
7 Also noticeable in recent research in other medieval literatures, see e.g. Green 1994 on
medieval Germany and Coleman 1996 on England and France.