Gripla - 20.12.2008, Side 109

107HEARING VOICES
and uncovered [i.e. presumably unburied]’ speaks a verse (staka); and the
verses heard before the battle of Örlygsstaðir in Sturlunga saga include one
performed by a headless man (the verse ‘Þornar heimr ok hrørnar’, Skj AII,
145; BII, 154). But as these episodes lack the markers of the acousmatic
voice trope (the barrier between speaker and listeners, distinctive vocal
quality, sonorous aural effects), and probably belong more in the category
of prophetic dream- or vision-verses, they will not be further discussed
here.
Vox animalia in grammatica and saga
Such liminal vocal phenomena as animal noises and wordless singing,
where meaningful utterance borders on meaningless sonority, presented
a challenge to the classificatory schemes of medieval grammars. Animal
noises feature in the discussions of vox ‘voice’ which conventionally open
medieval grammatical works, and the Second and Third Grammatical
Treatises are no exception (SGT 1982, 50–55, TGT 1884, 1–2). Vox ani-
malia is opposed to vox humana, the human voice, as animals’ voices
lack the human potential to become vox articulata, ‘articulate voice’ or
meaningful utterance (Schnyder forthcoming, 25); the question of what
distinguished human and animal voice when the former was inarticulata,
as in wordless singing, was accordingly much discussed in the grammati-
cal tradition. As the word articulata suggests, the grammarians conceived
of meaningful utterances as referring to a system of differentiated signs.
They also drew a distinction between vox literata and illiterata ‘writeable’
and ‘unwriteable’ voice.16 Although animal sounds such as the crow’s cra
or frog’s coax can be written down, and are so assigned by Priscian to
the category vox literata ‘writeable voice’, they do not belong to any such
system of signs and are inarticulata. Vox articulata illiterata, vocal sounds
which are meaningful but cannot be written down such as sibili ‘hisses’ and
gemitus ‘moans’, could potentially be made by animals (Allen 2004, 308–9;
see Wäckerlin 2006, 1007, on the meaningful roaring of Sigurðr þǫgli’s
companion lion), but Priscian specifies that only human hisses and groans
16 Schnyder argues (forthcoming, 23) that the use of articulata as the criterion of meaningful-
ness demonstrates that the grammarians’ conception of meaning is writing-dependent: the
categories of vox literata and vox articulata tend to fall together. This conception is taken
to an extreme by Remigius of Auxerre, who claims that vox articulata is named after ‘the
small joints, with which the quill or reed is held, when the voice is formed into writing’.