- Along the Oral-Written Continuum: Types of Texts, Relations and their Implications
At the core of this book lies a set of papers presented at a conference at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Bergen in October 2007. The organizers were able to bring together an expert group of historians, runologists, literary scholars, and oral theorists whose work responds in various ways to Ruth Finnegan's concept of the relations between orality and literacy as a continuum rather than a divide. The collection of essays is arranged in three broadly-defined sections. The first, "Conceptualising the Continuum," offers three articles that look at ways in which the continuum can be mapped. John Miles Foley's opening piece proposes a heuristic for thinking about oral and literary systems. Foley argues for a homology between oral tradition and internet or electronic tradition, arenas (or "agoras" in his terminology) in which collective authorship, changes, reproduction, and reformulation are all at work, particularly in the wiki, which provides a contemporary analogy to the communal production of oral texts. Foley also notes the conversion of the journal Oral Tradition to an electronic format, and signals the arrival of the Pathways Project, an experimental dual-medium vehicle, both book and online wiki for the analysis of brief units of oral, textual, and electronic media. Slavica Rankovic's own contribution posits the continuum as rather a 3-D space, in which the poetics, the medium, and the social context of any one work can be pinpointed. Thus, using examples ranging from Balkan Muslim and Christian epics, skaldic verse and sagas of Icelanders, James Joyce's Ulysses, and Wikipedia, she usefully shows how each kind of text can be positioned differently in a space conceptualized along the three axes. Three-dimensional mapping allows, for example, the model to distinguish between the literary-style poetics of skaldic poetry, with its interest in named authors and textual fixity, and its oral-type dependence on mnemonic devices. Rankovic's model is subtle and persuasive for the examples she chooses. [End Page 264] Finally in this section, Leidulf Melve analyzes sets of documents associated with different public debates: the Investiture Contest, the Becket Controversy, and the Baronial Rebellion in England in 1258. Melve shows how each debate, occurring at roughly hundred-year intervals, moves between different types of vernacularity, literacy, textual hierarchy, and discourse in ways which cannot easily be aligned with a simple "path to modernity" model.
Part II consists of a series of case studies of oral texts and performances from different positions along the continuum. Here notions of Verschriftlichung become key: the development in texts of certain features associated with literate forms. Judith Jesch shows how Sigvatr's commemorative poetry for King Óláfr is able to absorb new impulses from Christianity, in particular an understanding that the king lives on not only in poetry and in memory but in the community of saints and the ritual commemoration of his sainthood. Joseph Harris takes issue with earlier writings of Jesch to argue that dróttkvætt is only one form among many for memorializing the dead; that oral poetry and runic literate forms share, largely through context, certain features, and he adds an analysis of the Karlevi stone, which has a dróttkvætt stanza that nevertheless refers to a particular place of memorialization. Kristel Zilmer continues the discussion about runic monuments and their place on the continuum. Setting "oral monumentality"—the way in which runestones speak of themselves and the dead person—next to "commemorative literacy," Zilmer highlights how runestones stand at the interface of the two concepts.
Else Mundal's essay ushers in a subsection on Old Norse written culture, examining how written Norse texts may often have been utilized as prompts for oral performance, and suggesting kinds of oral genre which did not survive the transition to writing. Jürg Glauser's valuable article, later in the book, expands interestingly on some of...