Gripla - 20.12.2008, Side 101

99HEARING VOICES
literary reception in medieval Iceland, as elsewhere in Europe.8 Production
nonetheless continues to fascinate us, even though the effects of medial
interference at this point in the literary process are harder to map.9 That
literary production also fascinated medieval Icelanders is clear from the
numerous scenes of oral composition and verse performance in the sagas.
‘Voice’, therefore, not only marks a modality of saga reception, but is also
a key trope in the discourse of the sagas themselves, in the figure of the
performing skald. The much-discussed issue of whether these verses are
authentic witnesses to oral transmission, that is, the question of origins,
will not be entered into here.10 Rather, what is of interest is how saga stag-
ings of oral performance, like the narratives described by Dolar, play on
the ‘uncanny effects’ of the interference between a new medium, in this
case writing, and an old one, here the voice.
Although the theme of voice has received some attention in recent
work in medieval and cultural studies (see e.g. Dolar 2006, Kolesch and
Krämer 2006, Straumann 2007, and the 2004 special issue of the journal
Exemplaria on ‘medieval noise’), it has until now been largely neglected in
the Old Norse field (see however Glauser and Sabel forthcoming). The
realia of poetic performance in the medieval North have, of course, long
been a focus of intense interest.11 But this discussion has concentrated
on the sagas’ descriptions of poetic performance as evidence for histori-
cal practices, rather than on voice as a literary topos. Tropes of voice are
also common in the secondary literature on skaldic and eddic poetry.
Guðrún Nordal writes in her fascinating study of verse in the late medi-
eval manuscript tradition of Njáls saga that saga-writers ‘attempt ... to
give their characters a unique voice through their poetic utterances’ (2005,
8 Cf. the studies listed in note 7; for Iceland, see Hermann Pálsson 1962 and Glauser 1985.
9 The following are especially relevant here: Christian Kiening’s book-length study (2003)
explores medieval textual culture zwischen Körper und Schrift (‘between the body and
writing’) in Continental Europe; Simon Gaunt’s article (2005) on ‘fictions of orality’ in
troubadour poetry dicusses ‘orality’ as an effect self-consciously staged in the text; finally,
Glauser 2007 analyses narrative episodes in Old Icelandic texts where reading, writing and
oral performance are explicitly contrasted.
10 Roberta Frank (1985, 172–77) gives a survey with references up until the early 1980s;
important studies published after this date include Poole 1991, O’Donoghue 1991 and 2005,
Finlay 1995, and the collection in Poole 2001.
11 Gade (1994) summarises debates about Old Norse poetic performance stretching back to
the eighteenth century; for recent discussions of skaldic and eddic performance respectively,
see Würth (2007) and Harris (2000c).