Re: writing: Medial Perspectives on Textual Culture in the Icelandic Middle Ages ed. by Kate Heslop and Jürg Glauser (review)

This is a collection of articles, many of which are revised versions of contributions presented in 2009 at an international workshop that took place in Zurich, Switzerland, under the auspices of the long-running project "The Staging of Writing. Translation, Vocality, and the Consciousness of Writing in the Scandinavian Literatures of the Middle Ages" (2005–15), a part of the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research, "Mediality. Historical Perspectives." The remaining articles were solicited for the present volume. According to the editors, these "are the first publications in English to concern themselves to this degree with medial perspectives on textual culture in the Icelandic Middle Ages," which is an area "largely neglected in Scandinavian Studies" and "a field with much promise for future research" (p. 5).

The lengthy and detailed introduction (pp. 9–59), co-authored by the two editors, lays out the theoretical approach that serves as a backdrop for the thirteen articles contained in the volume. The editors address such concepts as "medium" (from Antiquity to the twentieth century), "medium and signs," "mediality," "staging, interference, and implosion," as well as the areas "the medieval of media studies" and "the media of medieval studies." The introduction also gives a succinct and useful overview of earlier scholarly approaches to Old Norse-Icelandic Studies (the Free-Prose vs. Book-Prose controversy—encompassing orality, literacy, vocality, and transmission; oral formulaic theory; new philology; etc.). The phrase "RE: writing" in the volume's title, the editors explain, "is intended . . . to indicate that the technology of writing brought into being a new dimension of preservation, archiving and transmission, and that writing is always a central element of a medial perspective" (p. 49). As far as the terms "medium" and "mediality" are concerned, the editors further state that

[t]he question "what is a medium?" is thus better rephrased as "what can function as a medium, and under what conditions?" Rather than proposing a reorientation towards a particular empirical collection of materials ("the media", in other words), the promise of the medium for medieval studies is that it enables questions to be asked on the basis of "reconceptualising understanding from the perspective of the media". Mediality, the newest and most unfamiliar member of the word family explored here, names this reconceptualisation at the most general level as an interest in the social/ processual (mediation) and material (medium) aspects of medieval meaning making.

(p. 21)

This lengthy quote has been included here to illustrate the complexity of this approach and to provide an approximate definition of terms which will most likely be unfamiliar and somewhat nebulous to many scholars of Old Norse-Icelandic Studies.

The thirteen articles that form the core of this volume are divided into three groups under the headings "Mediums," "Media," and "Mediality." The first group contains two articles. Kate Heslop's "Talking heads: the mediality of Mímir" (pp. 63–84) gives a detailed, interesting, and well documented discussion of the portrayal of the mythical figure of Mímir in eddic and skaldic poetry and in prose. She outlines the position of this re-animated head as a medium who mediates communication on a variety of levels, such as between the mundane and the divine world, the world of the living and the realm of the dead, oral and literate cultures, etc. Judy Quinn ("Looking ahead to what is long in the past: the mediality of Jóreiðr's dreaming in Sturlunga saga," pp. 85–105) discusses the portentous dreams of the girl Jóreiðr prior to the battle of Þverá, in which a woman who identifies herself as the legendary Guðrún Gjúkadóttir acts as a medium; the actions of people of the present are assessed and judged by a person from the pagan...