Orality, Textuality and Performance

Summary

Among the many kinds of literary texts that have been preserved from medieval Iceland, only a very few could be said to bear a close relation to the texts of actual performances. Homilies might be one example, where the written text was transmitted with the clear objective of forming the basis of a performed sermon. Liturgical texts similarly played a role in the performance of the Christian ritual, within an institutional context where conformity with centralised conventions was intrinsic to both performance and transmission. Other kinds of works indubitably bear some kind of relation to performance but the relation is more oblique, especially in transmission contexts outside of a formal institutional environment like that of the Church. The practice of socially undermining someone while lauding oneself or one's allies through the composition of a memorable stanza or two seems to have been an abiding facet of political interaction in medieval Iceland, and such compositions were most probably transmitted by those party to the political interaction or in sympathy with those whose reputations the verse promoted. The more formal (and usually commissioned) praise-poem, as the modern generic term suggests, must have relied on public declamation for its cultural force in promoting reputations. These performances, or a simulacrum of them, are often captured in saga prosimetrum, where one genre – the saga – quotes other genres – the poetic quip, or a stanza excerpted from a praise-poem. The resultant prosimetric shifts in the narrative are a significant characteristic of the saga genre and repeatedly draw attention to the re-performance of oral compositions within a literary text.

The effects created by the insertion of poetic performances into prose narration are worth investigating in more detail since it is a characteristic common to most of the types of texts belonging to the broad genre of the medieval Icelandic saga. Indeed the restaging of poetry that was composed in the past (or was purported to have been) functions as an important token of authenticity for most saga narratives about the past.