The Performance of Christian and Pagan Storyworlds: Non-Canonical Chapters of the History of Nordic Medieval Literature ed. by Lars Boje Mortensen and Tuomas M. S. Lehtonen (review)

This engaging collection explores continuities and discontinuities, relationships, influences, and cultural connections across a range of early medieval Nordic literature, spanning, geographically, from Iceland to east of the Baltic, from Finland to Byzantium, and classical influences from the sunny south. Along the way it considers the characteristics of, and transitions between, oral and literary cultures and the pre-Christian and Christian worlds.

This work explores the non-canonical in ‘Nordic medieval literature’, looking in most part (there being a couple of exceptions) at material that is not commonly studied in the standard academic curriculum. Moreover, this volume turns a ‘performative lens’ onto this material, focusing on the role and importance of the ‘performance’ of text – the circulation, reception, revision, and development of literary material – in ethno-cultural practices, and the role that performance and literary practices play in forming and maintaining social and cultural identity.

The exceptions involve discussions of the prose Edda and the Íslendingasǫgur, but even in the articles that deal with this material, the treatment is non-canonical. Here the authors discuss textual variability and instability, the importance of understanding the array of performative realisations, and the role of traditonal referentiality against a modern reader’s literary sensibilities and expectations.

The volume divides into four parts. The first is concerned with Latin literacy, and the impact of medieval liturgy on the vernacular. Åslaug Ommundsen traces the localisation of Latin liturgy and the role of Saint Olaf in establishing local liturgical relevance. Tuomas Heikkilä considers the expansion of medieval Finnish literacy (both Latin and vernacular) not just in terms of religion and sacred practices, but in strengthening civic order and secular administration. In the third chapter in this part, Tuomas M. S. Lehtonen looks at the text Ramus virens olivarum. It negotiates the divide between the vernacular and the Latinate, where the Latin original has moved into vernacular Finnish, establishing a ‘vernacular oral culture … vividly infused by Catholic Christianity … paradoxically recorded in script’ (p. 130), where ‘written, aural, chanted, and performed Christian traditions in Latin lived side by side with syncretistic oral traditions’ (p. 133).

The second section frames pagan stories within a literary Christian discourse. Both Jonas Wellendorf and Henrik Jansen review variance among the Edda manuscripts, and consider the apparatus that readers bring to their reading, with Wellendorf looking at the ‘cultural qualifications’ that a readership is understood to have possessed. Jansen argues that the divergence between orality and literacy is not just a simple pre-Christian/Christian dichotomy, as twelfth- and thirteenth-century Icelandic culture, both oral and literate, was clearly Christian. Jansen also challenges the common idea that Snorri’s work reflects a pre-Christian worldview. In the section’s third chapter, Lauri Harvilahti locates St Olaf’s hagiography in the context of folk religion, and emphasises the importance of understanding genre in religious and ideological practices, changing to accommodate social values. Harvilahti usefully configures genre as contingent on culture, and explores the interpretation and adaptation of genres within an oral/literate dynamic.

The third section deals with textual performance codifying social discipline, values, and behaviours. Aidan Conti considers the practical balance of liturgy against sermon and the multifocal nature of audience in early Scandinavian church performance. Slavica Ranković challenges the modern reader to make sense of the paradoxically different and yet same characters (such as Þorgerðr Egilssdóttir in both Laxdæla saga and Egils saga) and objects (such as Bergr the sword in both Vatnsdæla saga and Grettis saga) across different sagas, using for insight the iterative and socially embedded sense of saga as ‘performance’.

Also in the third section, Irma-Riitta Järvinen tracks the early...