Gripla - 20.12.2008, Page 108

GRIPLA106
It is here, it is here
Why shall we further?
(Complete Sagas of Icelanders, IV, 174, slightly modified).
Once again the auditors are inside a building and the voice comes
from outside, and the prose introducing the verse is vague, saying only
kom kviðlingr, ‘a verse came’. The verses, especially the latter two, are
once again repetitive and incantatory. The phenomenal quality of the
voice – as opposed to the semantic content of what it says – is also again
emphasised, as Karl inn rauði’s first response to the voice is to recognise
it as Klaufi’s. Recognising a voice is a matter of non-semantic, embodied
cues: it depends on the physical characteristics of a person’s lips, tongue,
and voicebox, rather than anything the voice says. As Mireille Schnyder
observes, the indexical quality of the voice as natural sign of the person is a
widespread motif in medieval literature (forthcoming, 30–31); an obvious
instance in Old Norse literature is Þorsteinn drómundr singing from his
cell in Spesar þáttr.
So far, then, the narrative schema is that of the acousmatic voice. But
Karl’s disacousmatising move does not make the voice from the roof any
less uncanny. As his cautious phrasing suggests (róm þeim, er Klaufi ... hafði,
þá er vér heyrðum til hans), Klaufi is dead and has been so for some time, and
when the men go outside, they see Klaufi carrying his head in his hand.
Seeing its origin does nothing here to rob the voice of its uncanny effec-
tiveness, rather, it heightens it. Paradoxically, given the chain of intimate
associations of voice with body and of the speaking body with the indi-
vidual person that the trope of ‘recognising someone’s voice’ evokes, the
body in question turns out to be deceased and dismembered, and anything
but natural: Klaufi uses his head as an instrument, first a door-knocker,
then later in ch. 19 as a weapon. The aural affect of the ‘live’ performing
body, evoked by the sonorous repetitiveness of the verses, is set into a
prose narrative of grotesque fictionality, which makes a joke of the com-
municative potential of the body by letting Klaufi use his own head as a
door-knocker.
For the sake of completeness it should be noted that two more talking
heads appear in the sagas: in chapter 43 of Eyrbyggja saga (ÍF 4, 116; Eb
2003, 194–5) a mannshǫfuð laust óhulit ‘human head, loose [from its body]