Gripla - 20.12.2008, Blaðsíða 117

115HEARING VOICES
Ynglinga saga, on the other hand, mediation is an occasion for trickery,
not teaching. Hœnir’s beautiful body turns out to be an empty shell,
reverberating with words which are not his own: he is merely a medium
for the wisdom of Mímir. The Vanir seek to deprive the author of the
trick, Mímir, of his ability to communicate by cutting off his head (cf.
Hamðismál 28: Af væri nú haufuð, ef Erpr lifði), thus returning the voice-
body-subject relation to normality. Hœnir then has (only) his own voice,
and Mímir none, as he is silenced by death. Only temporarily so, however,
as Óðinn’s magic reanimation restores voice to Míms hǫfuð, albeit a voice
without a body, an inversion of Hœnir’s body without a voice.
Klaufi and Míms hǫfuð both trouble the relationship between voice,
body and subject (the talking head Freysteinn finds on Geirvǫrskriða in
Eyrbyggja saga ch. 43 serves different narrative ends, a reminder that not all
severed heads say the same thing). In Svarfdæla saga and Ynglinga saga, the
question who is speaking? is thematised in the narrative itself, in the former
by Karl’s hesitant recognition of Klaufi’s voice, and in the latter by the
Vanir’s growing suspicion that they are the victims of a trick. When the
physically imposing Hœnir turns out to be incapable of correspondingly
authoritative speech acts, managing only the comically inadequate ráði
aðrar, his legitimacy is destroyed. And in both cases the ‘disacousmatising’
move of ascribing a source to the voice (‘It’s Klaufi!’ ‘It’s Mímir!’), which
should put everything back in its proper place and guarantee that utter-
ances have their origins in a particular subject, is disturbed by the literal
severing of the link between voice and body. It is the very unnaturalness
of Míms hǫfuð as a speaking being which suits it for the role of ‘speaker of
true letters’ in Sigrdrífumál. The magical effectiveness which is repeatedly
granted to acousmatic voices, and modelled within the saga text by the
excessive aural effects in their stanzas – the noise of the verse beating on
the listeners’ ears – is in Sigrdrífumál ascribed to the intersection between
writing and the body, as the runes issue from the mouth of Míms hǫfuð, are
inscribed, shaved off, mixed with mead, and ingested.