Gripla - 20.12.2008, Qupperneq 113

111HEARING VOICES
which they fail to interpret correctly. Þórólfr’s commandeering of Glæsir’s
voice is in accordance with medieval ideas of demonic possession, in which
the devil replaces the voice of the possessed with his own (Schnyder forth-
coming, 28), though suspicions on this front were usually directed at the
seductive beauty of wordless song rather than the cries of animals. The
materiality of this mediation, in contrast to demonic possession, is stressed
to the point of overdetermination in the route by which Þórólfr’s body has
become part of Glæsir’s: shapeshifting followed by sexual reproduction,
or burning followed by ingestion, in both cases with the body of Glæsir’s
mother as intermediary.
The sequence of the cow licking up the ashes, transforming them in her
body into Glæsir, and Glæsir ‘speaking’ is reminiscent of the myth of the
mead of poetry, another cycle of ingestion, transmutation and regurgita-
tion. Like the drunken evening at Bárðr’s in chapter 44 of Egils saga (ÍF 2,
107–11), in which verses are interspersed with torrents of vomit, the Glæsir
episode restages a mythic pattern in an unsettlingly literal way, and insists
upon the material conditions of poetic (and, indeed, any) speech, namely
its origins in the depths of the body, and egress from the same orifice used
for eating, drinking, and vomiting. Glæsir’s bellowing conforms to the cat-
egory of vox illiterata: his utterances cannot be written down, but must be
described, whether as læti ‘sounds’ or skrækur ‘shrieks’, or by verbs such as
kveða, belja or gjalla. Despite not being writeable, his voice is nonetheless
articulata, meaningful, to his interpreter, Þóroddr’s foster-mother, who
performs a final unlikely transformation by translating Glæsir’s yells into
dróttkvætt verse.
Míms hǫfuð
Finally, in the figure of Míms hǫfuð the medial moment becomes the kernel
of a mythic narrative, with the relationship between voice, body and text
and the mechanics of textual production and dissemination as its theme.
Óðinn’s advisor Míms hǫfuð ‘Mímr’s head’ has been treated, albeit
usually briefly, in a number of studies (Simpson 1962; Turville-Petre
1964, 142–3; Clunies Ross 1994, 212–15; Dronke 1997, 136–7; Bragg
2004, 65–7). Vǫluspá and Sigrdrífumál, the poetic sources which depict
this being communicating with Óðinn, refer to it only as (the possessor
of) a head: mælir Óðinn við Míms hǫfuð ‘Óðinn speaks with Mímr’s head’