Viking Mediologies: A New History of Skaldic Poetics

Abstract

Reading is fundamental. This phrase is the name of a respected nonprofit literacy organization in the United States but also a stock phrase in the popular TV series RuPaul's Drag Race (2009-), where reading has a somewhat different meaning as the “the real art form of insult,” as it is defined in Jenny Livingston's documentary film Paris is Burning (1990), and it is fundamental to “throwing shade,” an important drag queen skill that borrows the phrase from Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814).None of this would have been relevant to previous studies of skaldic poetics, but Kate Heslop's Viking Mediologies is a very different kind of book. The main reason the phrase came to my mind is that the reader does not get far into it before realizing that this is not only an ambitious and clever but a fundamental study that does not leave Skaldic Studies the same. But it is also relevant because reading is among the many issues taken up in the book, which is mainly concerned with remembering, seeing, and hearing, and also because an exploration of the complex semantic relationship between book reading and drag reading would probably benefit a great deal by the subtle theoretical framework used by Kate Heslop in Viking Mediologies.The book begins and ends with the saddest and most successful of skaldic poets, Egill Skallagrímsson and his complicated friendship with his Arinbjörn, the eventual recipient of one of Egill's greatest poems, now only extant in a single fragmentary text, which is probably one of many reasons Heslop uses it as a point of entrance. Heslop goes on to discuss the content of the poem: “Generosity is to miserliness as praise is to a slander, Egill insists” and page 1 thus already conveys to the reader what so many of us teachers of skaldic poetry fail to impress upon our sleepy students, that skaldic poetry, like other gifts, is also concerned with fundamental issues. She goes on to declare war on the “exclusionary dualism” of the holiest of cows in Old Norse Studies, the binary opposition of orality and literacy (p. 5), and this book is brilliantly successful in gently but firmly tearing down that statue, leaving us to explore what lies beneath the imagined dichotomy. The short but remarkably significant introduction also offers a brief but sufficient insight into the concepts of medium, media, mediality, and mediologies with which the study is concerned. This part, not least due to its succinctness, will make the book particularly useful to all Old Norse and medieval scholars wanting to understand this exciting new theoretical framework.Like Tolkien, Kate Heslop divides her book both into three and into six, with one coda. The three parts concern memories, seeing, and hearing, which she establishes as the core elements of skaldic poetry. The parts can be read independently to the reader's gain but also complement each other. Each and every one is replete with new analytical insights, with which the book is so plentiful that reading it three times will hardly suffice. Viking Mediologies is not only a study, but in its own modest way a handbook for future Skaldic Studies.The first third concerns the Rök stone and the poem Ynglingatal, which Heslop shrewdly juxtaposes with each other: memory in stone versus memory in text. In this part she discusses the complex relationship between poem and place, focused as the poem is on the deaths of its kings and their death-sites. As Heslop notes (p. 21), these kings are not active agents who bring death to others but meek victims of eerie natural and supernatural forces. Then she moves on to metaphors for genealogical relationships and argues that kviðuháttr poems such as Ynglingatal belong to an ancient Germanic genre of geneological poetry. The argument is convincing, although it will no doubt be controversial. This part of the study ends with a short but illuminating coda about the Rök stone which makes the point that both stone and poem are each in their own way an “early colossus” (p. 76). These are only some of the ideas presented in this part of the book that is unusually full of new insights.The memory part of the book is impressive and a hard act to follow, but this reviewer also found many engagingly novel observations in the second part where the point of entrance are the skaldic picture poems of Skáldskaparmál. While the poems are preserved, the shields are lost, their absence no less compelling than the existence of the poetry. Heslop goes on to discuss the concept of ekphrasis, recently popularized and introduced into Scandinavian Studies by Signe Horn Fuglesang, Margaret Clunies Ross, and others. Heslop examines the concept critically but it survives her examination (p. 105) and in the meantime she also has innovative things to say about the Old Norse concept of kenning, the verb kenna, and their sensory possibilities (p. 97). She goes on to discuss medieval sensory hierarchy (p. 115), including inner sense. Here the sources offer a rich store of words and phrases that Heslop navigates expertly, increasing the value of the book as a future handbook for all Old Norse scholars.The tripartite book progresses very naturally from memory to the eye to the noise, which of course is as fundamental to skaldic poetry as reading and shade are to drag queens. This turns out to be a third feast of intelligent and nuanced observations that are firmly grounded in previous scholarship but also on occasion offer a radical departure from it. In this part, Heslop adds a discussion of the hendingar to her kenning studies and goes on to discuss paranomasia or puns. Scholars such as Margaret Clunies Ross were not impressed by the poet Óláfr Þórðarson‘s attempt to link aðalhending and paronomasia, but Heslop demonstrates that he is far from the only scholar to associate the two and only on the surface do skaldic poetry and the pun seem ill-matched (p. 152). The voice part of the book culminates in a discussion of the Second Grammatical Treatise and the music of poetry.In the conclusion, Heslop not only summarizes her many interesting findings from the book but goes on to discuss that favorite medium of the bookish, reading and writing. Isidore claimed that writing was utterance without voice, whereas Sigmund Freud saw writing as the voice of the absent person (pp. 186–87). This paradoxical quality of voice harks back to etymology, but not merely. Heslop leaves us with this quandary, though not at loss but rather at the dawn of a new understanding.To sum up: Kate Heslop's Viking Mediologies is an ambitious and well-written book demonstrating on nigh every page a fiery intellect. It is bound to stimulate the curious reader and will surely rank as one of the most important and influential Old Norse studies from the first part of this century.