Along the Oral-Written Continuum: Types of Texts, Relations and their Implications

496 Pages·2010·11.87 MB·English

by  Slavica Rankovic

ALONG THE ORAL-WRITTEN CONTINUUM
UTRECHT STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL LITERACY
20
UTRECHT STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL LITERACY
General Editor
Marco Mostert (University of Utrecht)
Editorial Board
Gerd Althoff (Westfälische-Wilhelms-Universität Münster)
Michael Clanchy (University of London)
Peter Gumbert (University of Leiden)
Mayke de Jong (University of Utrecht)
Rosamond McKitterick (University of Cambridge)
Arpád Orbán (University of Utrecht)
Armando Petrucci (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa)
Richard H. Rouse (UCLA)
ALONG THE
ORAL-WRITTEN
CONTINUUM
TYPES OF TEXTS, RELATIONS AND THEIR
IMPLICATIONS
edited by
Slavica Rankoviæ,
with Leidulf Melve and Else Mundal
H
F
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Along the oral-written continuum : types of texts,
relations, and their implications. – (Utrecht studies in
medieval literacy ; v. 20)
1. Literacy – Europe – History – To 1500. 2. Written
communication – Europe – History – To 1500. 3. Oral
tradition – Europe – History – To 1500. 4. Rhetoric,
Medieval – Europe. 5. Old Norse literature – History and
criticism.
I. Series. II. Rankovic, Slavica. III. Melve, Leidulf.
IV. Mundal, Else.
302.2'244'094'0902-dc22
ISBN-13: 9782503534077
© 2010 – Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.
D/2010/0095/58
ISBN 978-2-503-53407-7
Printed in the E.U. on acid-free paper
Contents
Introduction
SLAVICA RANKOVIÆ 1
Part I: Conceptualising the Continuum
Verbal Marketplaces and the Oral-Literate Continuum
JOHN MILES FOLEY 17
The Oral-Literate Continuum as a Space
SLAVICA RANKOVIÆ 39
Mapping Public Debates along the Oral-Literate Continuum (1000-1300)
LEIDULF MELVE 73
Part II: Oral Texts and Textual Performances:
Verbal Art along the Continuum
The Once and Future King: History and Memory in Sigvatr’s Poetry
on Óláfr Haraldsson
JUDITH JESCH 103
Old Norse Memorial Discourse between Orality and Literacy
JOSEPH HARRIS 119
Viking Age Rune Stones in Scandinavia: The Interplay between
Oral Monumentality and Commemorative Literacy
KRISTEL ZILMER 135
How Did the Arrival of Writing Influence Old Norse Oral Culture?
ELSE MUNDAL 163
vi Contents
Liquid Knowledge: Traditional Conceptualisations of Learning
in Eddic Poetry
JUDY QUINN 183
The Poetic Edda: Literature or Folklore?
VÉSTEINN ÓLASON 227
The Poetic Curse and Its Relatives
BERNT ØYVIND THORVALDSEN 253
A Text in Flux: St. Hallvard’s Legend and Its Redactions
ÅSLAUG OMMUNDSEN 269
The Charm and Difficulty of a Fragment: Tracing Orality in
Cena Cypriani and Summarium Biblie
LUCIE DOLEŽALOVÁ 291
Staging the Text: On the Development of a Consciousness of Writing
in the Norwegian and Icelandic Literature of the Middle Ages
JÜRG GLAUSER 311
Part III: Of Kings and Peasants: The Orality-Literacy Continuum
and the Advent of Administrative Writing
“Audire, intelligere, memorie commendare”: Attitudes of the Rulers
of Medieval Central Europe towards Written Texts
ANNA ADAMSKA 337
A Carolingian Pun and Charlemagne’s Languages
THEODORE M. ANDERSSON 357
Administrative Literacy in Norway
SVERRE BAGGE 371
On Evaluating “the Growth of a Literate Mentality”
in Late Medieval Norway
JAN RAGNAR HAGLAND 397
The Role of the Swedish Lawman in the Spread of Lay Literacy
INGER LARSSON 411
Using the Written Word in a Late Medieval Rural Society:
The Case of Denmark
BJØRN POULSEN 429
The Early History of Written Culture in the Northern Netherlands
MARCO MOSTERT 449
Introduction
SLAVICA RANKOVIÆ
The papers collected in this book build on the contributions originally
presented at a conference organised by the Centre for Medieval Studies
at the University of Bergen in October 2007. Together, they represent a
selection of practices currently being employed in the effort to develop a better
understanding of the complex ways orality and literacy influence one another,
whether by tracing distinct cultural trends that mark the introduction of writing,
or by analysing traditional narratives and poetry with a heightened sensitivity
to the aesthetic integrity of the intermediate forms such as oral texts and textual
performances. This book thus reflects diverse perspectives, texts and genres
(literary, historical, administrative, ecclesiastical, legal, polemical, etc.) and
involves a range of European cultural contexts, with special emphasis on Scan-
dinavia and Northern Europe, but also reaching out to various other corners of
the continent: from France, the Netherlands and England in the West, over
Germany, Bohemia and Poland in the Centre, to Serbia and Bosnia in the
Southeast.
The single overarching idea that binds all the contributions is that of the
oral-written continuum. One of the recurring topics in recent studies of orality
and literacy has been the need to transcend the dichotomous understanding of
the ‘oral’ and the ‘written’, the need born out of recognition that, through its
richness and variety, verbal art resists segregation into two mutually exclusive
camps. In turn, one of the most effective means used to counter and dispel the
metaphor of the ‘Great Divide’ has been Ruth Finnegan’s idea of the oral-writ-
ten, or the oral-literate continuum. However, while often casually invoked in
analyses of particular works, the concept has never been a focus of study in its
2 SLAVICA RANKOVIÆ
own right. The present volume is an attempt to place the oral-written contin-
uum at the heart of discussion, as an object of a head-on theoretical investiga-
tion, and as a tool for navigating the rugged landscape of verbal forms, explor-
ing the diversity and complexity of oral-literary interrelationships that they
manifest.
The book is organised in three parts. Part I opens with three articles, each
representing an attempt at “Conceptualising the Continuum”. JOHN MILES
FOLEY proposes a view of the oral-literate continuum as a complex interplay of
what he terms the “three verbal marketplaces”, or agoras, representing the
three principal media of human communication to date: oral, textual and elec-
tronic. While the dominant currency of each agora is a particular medium,
none of them should be understood as a pure or closed economy. Thus the
oAgora ranges from the straightforward oral compositions and performances,
over texts written with the intent of being orally performed, as well as texts
that draw on both oral and literary traditions and compositional techniques, to
texts composed in writing and intended for print and silent reading by an audi-
ence familiar with the specialised register of a particular oral tradition. Simi-
larly, the tAgora ranges from the fluid, malleable hand-written texts of the
Middle Ages, over the ‘brick-and-mortar’, post-Gutenbergian creations, to
static files of pixel-pages. The latter also constitutes an overlap with one end
of the eAgora spectrum. The other end is inhabited by the non-linear, interac-
tive, option-driven texts, the networked dynamics of which have affinities with
the oAgora. Foley places a special emphasis on the “OT-IT homology” and
provides examples of how the latter technology can be used most fruitfully to
represent the former.
SLAVICA RANKOVIÆ traces a brief history of, and reviews some common
assumptions about the oral-written continuum as a concept, arriving at the
question of whether it is still viable to conceive of the continuum as a one-
dimensional stretch of progressive development, a timeline. Building on Ruth
Finnegan’s work, Rankoviæ proposes a model of the continuum as a space of
at least three dimensions reflecting, respectively, the dependency (or other-
wise) of composition on the recording media, the poetic principles at play
indicative (or otherwise) of the anxiety of interpretation and influence, and
finally the evidence (or otherwise) of heteroglossia ‘in’ and ‘around’ the works
examined. Although already implicit in the common usage of the term, the
three dimensions of the continuum seem to inevitably collapse into an inter-
locked, linear set of causally dependant attitudes, leading to a cultural equation
Introduction 3
that for a particular type of society predicts a particular kind of literature,
which in turn exhibits a narrow set of poetic and aesthetic characteristics. The
orthogonality of the three dimensions in the proposed model liberates what
should always have been a set of distinct cultural and aesthetic qualities from
mutual causal dependency, ensuring that the placement of a verbal artwork (or
a literary trend, or a tradition) on one scale does not predetermine its position
on the other two. Such space then allows, in principle, for any kind of interac-
tion and any degree of permeability between the oral and the written. The
model is illustrated by plotting oral and orally derived traditional literatures as
diverse as Serbian Christian and Bosnian Muslim epics, skaldic verse and the
sagas of Icelanders, as well as the non-traditional verbal species, such as the
modernist novel (Ulysses) and Wikipedia.
LEIDULF MELVE explores the concept of the continuum as it pertains to the
process of textualisation, and offers a model specifically tailored for consider-
ation of the medieval public debate. The key insights that inform his theoretical
scheme are the importance of the aural form of communication, the centrality
of the performance, or performativity in the communicative process, and the
need to take the practical use of text (i.e. reception) into account. The model
includes five variables, two of which (“vernacular dimension” and “oral proce-
dures”) relate to the oral end of the continuum, two (“textual hierarchy” and
“discourse”) to the literate end, and one (“interpretative societies”) pertaining
to both. Melve uses these variables to chart public debates that sprang up
around three major historical events – the Investiture Contest (c. 1030-1122),
the Becket controversy (1163-1170) and the Baronial Rebellion of 1258. Map-
ping treatises and other polemical writings according to the proposed variables
seems to reveal a trend from the closed, elitist debate conducted exclusively in
Latin (Investiture Contest) towards a more open and inclusive kind with either
an emerging (Becket controversy) or a very strong (Baronial Rebellion) vernac-
ular dimension and oral procedures, and a discourse that is moving away from
the critical and argumentative towards the demonstrative.
The articles in Part II of the volume, “Oral Texts and Textual Perfor-
mances: Verbal Art along the Continuum”, probe and exemplify possibilities
of the oral-written continuum through close analysis of specific texts, be they
orally composed pieces that anticipate (or already incorporate) aspects of liter-
acy, orally derived texts, texts written as cues for oral delivery, aurally received
written compositions, or texts composed in writing yet relying on the kind of
manuscript transmission that favours oral-like variability, or fluidity, rather
4 SLAVICA RANKOVIÆ
than textual stability. The material ranges from the Eddic and skaldic poetry to
the sagas, legends of saints, biblical marginalia and runic inscriptions.
Structured as an orality-literacy continuum itself, Part II opens with three
articles that all deal with Old Norse memorial discourse. JUDITH JESCH’s con-
tribution focuses on the poetic career and practices of Sigvatr Þórðarson, the
eleventh-century Icelandic skald, advisor and close friend of King Óláfr
Haraldsson of Norway. While composed and performed orally, Sigvatr’s poetry
nevertheless seems to demonstrate an awareness of different kinds of writing
and their uses. This is most apparent in the way the poet helps establish Óláfr’s
saintly role as the eternal king of Norway, appropriating new Christian memo-
rial practices and non-traditional perspectives on the past and future to the
highly traditional oral idiom and its existing commemorative framework. In
Sigvatr’s rendering courtly skaldic verse is both a medium of dignified public
remembrance as well as the vehicle for expressing very personal feelings (e.g.
on the passing of his lord and friend) and very personal views (e.g. those com-
municated in the advisory verses directed at his godson and King Óláfr’s heir,
Magnús). While Sigvatr’s poetry indexes a confident command of the tradi-
tional skaldic register and poetics, at the same time it shows a strong tendency
towards a versatile, innovative expression of the kind that gains ground more
firmly in written literature. Thus his opus itself represents something of an
oral-written continuum.
JOSEPH HARRIS’s article engages with two forms that both involve public
performance and preserving the memory of the departed – runic inscriptions
and the erfikvæði (funeral poetry) subgroup of skaldic poetry. While the roots
of the two forms’ similarities in content, poetics and function partially lie in
their mutual influence – through the Verschriftlichung of oral verse and
Vermündlichung of writing – Harris finds their common ritual background “a
more comprehensive explanation”. As worthy of note as the similarities are the
differences and contrasts between the two forms, especially those concerning
the attitudes to their own mediality. Thus, while inscriptions on rune stones
emphasise the durability of their medium, erfikvæði stress the perpetuity of the
deceased’s reputation, not the permanence of the verbal structure itself, even
if some skaldic verses (e.g. Egill Skallagrímsson’s Arinbjarnarkviða) do reflect
on the materiality of language, and even if, in comparison with other oral po-
etry, skaldic verse exhibits the kind of invariability that is more characteristic
of writing. The article concludes by asserting that, in terms of their ability to
affect audiences past and present, it is the shared commemorative aspect of