Studies in the Transmission and Reception of Old Norse Literature: The Hyperborean Muse in European Culture ed. by Judy Quinn, Adele Cipolla (review)

Judy Quinn and Adele Cipolla declare that the figure of the 'hyperborean muse' represents a departure from 'current scholarly nomenclature', highlighting the 'creative interface between critical thought and artistic creation' (p. 2). Their 'muse' is the driving force for the influence, impact, and reception of a culturally distant north (both geographic and temporal) in more southern and recent cultures. The volume is divided into broadly chronological sections, and while it is not necessary to read these kinds of collections from start to finish, when read in this way, the fact that the volume coheres as a whole speaks to both the overall vision and conception as well as the quality of the editorial work.

The first section, 'The Transmission of Old Norse Literature before and between Manuscript Witnesses', deals with theoretical and methodological issues and problems in historical editorial approaches, the transmission of textual variability, and the evolving principles of textual scholarship. There are three chapters in this section: Adele Cipolla looks at the editorial history of SnorraEdda, Judy Quinn examines principles of textual criticism in relation to oral traditions, and Odd Einar Haugen assesses methodological issues for textual criticism. All of these essays are strong teachable texts for manuscript studies, taking to task recent and historical approaches to editorial scholarship and textual reconstruction that elides or denies the heterogeneity of the 'highly unstable text'(p. 37). Both Haugen and Quinn criticize methods that simplify the construction of textual stemmata, and Cipolla explores the inherent instabilities in the reception of Eddic material and the associated construction of an authorial 'Snorri' despite textual variability.

Part 2 of this volume, 'Adaptations of Old Norse Literature and their Influence', shifts focus onto early modern hyperborean interests, specifically the reception of the Hamlet archetype and the impact of 'the North' on romantic and modern literature and culture. Of the eight chapters here, two deal with the Scandinavian Hamlet narrative outside of its specific Shakespearean reflex: Ian Felce seeks the 'Icelandic Hamlet' in manuscript evidence for Amlóða saga and Marcello Rossi Corradini explores the transposition of Saxo Grammaticus's version into eighteenth-century Italian opera. Next come two chapters on reflexes of Old Norse in romantic literature, with Mats Malm tracing the stylistic evolution of the translation of Old Norse poetry in the ideologies of eighteenth-century European nationalism, and Tereza Lanzing taking a long view of Hrólfr Kraki's appearance in literatures from medieval Saxon and early modern Icelandic rímur, through Danish Romanticism, to the twentieth-century science fiction of Poul Anderson. Two chapters then focus on August Strindberg. Massimiliano Bampi maps out the importance of the character of Starkaðr, tracing critical contextual polarities that informed Strindberg's works and noting a sense of authorial identification with the character, while Maria Christina Lombardi examines the changes wrought by Strindberg to Áns saga bogsveigis, wherein the Norse original becomes a narrative shaped to the stylistics and culture of late nineteenth-century Expressionism. This section concludes with Alessandro Zironi delivering a tight forensic examination of William Morris's use of Norse sources, both in his original works and his translations, and Julia Zernack examining the use of Norse myths for political purposes, focusing in particular on the rise of twentieth-century European right-wing propaganda, although she also identifies similar, but by no means as extensive, appropriations by the left. A key thesis in Zernack's chapter is that myth is used for 'a veneer of eternal truth, to remove the arbitrariness from political decisions and replace it with an assertion of metaphysical necessity' (p. 241). She chooses a particular example in Hávamal to reveal the wilful revision of text in translation for cynical political purposes.

The third and final section, comprising four chapters, is...