Gripla - 20.12.2008, Blaðsíða 119

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usually taken as meaning ‘plagiarist’, and an anecdote is told in Skáldasaga
of Auðunn’s theft of a stef from another poet’s work, resulting in him being
given the nickname illskælda ‘bad poet’ and his poem the title Stolinstefja
‘Stolen Stef’ (Hb 445).24 Perhaps the blind spot of the sagas where rhapsod-
ic performance is concerned came about because the activities both of the
saga-writer, who like the rhapsode, ‘does not properly produce anything,
but only reforms, combines, gathers and presents’ (Bernstein 1998, 97),
and of the readers who took part in sagnaskemmtun, could also very well
be described in these not altogether favourable terms.
Uncertainty as to who is really responsible for the words the audi-
ence hears, coupled paradoxically with the authoritative presence of live
performance, is constitutive of the rhapsodic performance situation, and
these tensions are played upon in artistically self-conscious late medieval
texts – it should be noted that the instances of the acousmatic voice cluster
in so-called ‘post-classical’ sagas. But the theme also occurs elsewhere.
Ynglinga saga relocates the acousmatism trope into the mythic sphere and
lays bare the potential for deception in the split between text and originat-
ing body. And in Sigrdrífumál the cyclical process by which text and body
are separated and reunited is a reservoir of magical power, and the intoxi-
cating drink of knowledge gets a textual twist. The drink in Sigrdrífumál
is made not of ingested and regurgitated bodily fluids, as is the mead of
poetry, but of stafir which are spewed out, carved on wood, shaved off
and mixed with liquor, and drunk again, in a compelling metaphor for the
mediation of knowledge not through the embodied storage of memory, but
rather (like Mímir’s embalmed head) externally, through the new storage
technology of writing.
24 I am grateful to Margaret Clunies Ross for drawing the example in Skáldasaga to my atten-
tion.
HEARING VOICES