The Poetics of Commemoration: Skaldic Verse and Social Memory, c. 890–1070 by Erin Michelle Goeres (review)

Erin Michelle Goeres's book belongs to a growing body of scholarly work on Norse mnemonics, and her choice of source texts—poetry in commemoration of dead rulers—is particularly suited to such a perspective. Her book examines "the role poetic commemoration played in the courts of early medieval Scandinavia" (p. 2). This it does by analyzing much of the commemorative poetry from the end of the ninth to the second half of the eleventh century. It begins with a chapter on the genealogical poem Ynglingatal. The second chapter treats Eiríksmáland Hákonarmál, two poems where dead kings are welcomed into the pagan afterlife. The same chapter also discusses Erfidrápa Óláfs Tryggvasonar, which does not deal with the afterlife of the Christian king but rather with the various reports on his death. This poem is thus very different from the other two, and this serves to show that the way in which a ruler was commemorated varied considerably according to circumstances, something that is also borne out by the book at large. The third chapter treats the difficulties involved in shifting allegiance to a new ruler, in particular when that ruler had toppled one's former patron, as was the case for Eyvindr skáldaspillir. The fourth chapter analyzes the various ways in which Óláfr Haraldsson—Saint Olav—was commemorated and how his memory was instrumentalized for various purposes. In the poetry analyzed, we find expressions of what appears to be true sorrow as well as indications of an emerging hagiographic tradition and, perhaps most interestingly, exhortations to Óláfr's son to behave like his father did. The final chapter treats the delicate situation of Arnórr jarlaskáld, who commemorated two earls of Orkney of whom one had killed the other.

Geores's method is one of close reading, and she pays particular attention to the wide array of sentiments expressed in the poetry. She convincingly demonstrates that commemoration was something to be negotiated. The poet, who had been invested with the power not only to express but also to shape the collective memory of a dead ruler, often did so with a view to present, postmortem circumstances. In the eyes of this reader, the principal strength of Goeres's book is its presentation of a wide variety of responses of poets to the death of their patrons, ranging from descriptions of their welcome in the pagan afterlife to laments of the loss of the ruler's economic support, and finally to something we would recognize as grief. The genealogical poem Ynglingatalis not easily accommodated among the rest, since these all focus on individual rulers. Nonetheless, it serves as a good introduction to the issues at stake, since it features two distinctive modes of commemoration. When the poem shifts from legendary Swedish kings to historical Norwegian ones, this is accompanied by a shift of focus from bizarre deaths to tombs visible in the local landscape and from the poet's report of what he has heard to a collective and inclusive "as everyone knows" (pp. 51-52). All remaining poetry analyzed by Goeres treats historical and verifiable events and is thus more akin to the second part of Ynglingatalthan to the first, although in some cases, different poets defended different patrons and the consensus of Ynglingatalis then replaced by agonistic encounters over the proper mode of commemoration. The contrast between Ynglingataland the other poems thus enhances the overall impression of a wide array of functions of poetic commemoration at Scandinavian courts. This is what Goeres set out to investigate, and in many respects, her book successfully achieves that goal.

The book also has some weaknesses. Chief among these is that the connection between the theoretical backdrop and the sources under study remains unclear. The theories used are of such a...