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Continuity: Folklore's Problem Child?”
In Folklore in Old Norse – Old Norse in Folklore, vol. Ed. Daniel Sävborg and Karen Bek-Pedersen. Nordistica Tartuensis, 20. Tartu: Tartu University Press, pp. 34-51, 2014.
AbstractThis essay examines the role of continuity in the study of medieval Northern popular cultural. Among other issues, it questions: the nature of continuity as a concept; the roles “tradition” and “continuity” have played in the development of folklore studies historically (e.g., Finnish Historical-Geographic Method, the “superorganic”) and their value today in relation to, e.g., memory studies and performance theory; and the use, and the misuse, of such tools over time, including by the National Socialists. I note that that the value of our ability to employ continuity as a scientific concept rests on our ability to demonstrate and evaluate four factors, namely, communality, variation, continuity and function. Importantly, far from being static, the role of continuity in the telling or enactment—the ‘doing’—of folklore, is a dynamic, communicative and re-contextualized conception of inherited materials.
P. Hermann, S. A. Mitchell, and A. S. Arnórsdóttir, Ed.,
Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Turnhout: Brepols, 2014, pp. 254.
AbstractBuilding on and applying the theoretical debates developed in /Memory and Remembering: Past Awareness in the Medieval North/, ed. Pernille Hermann and Stephen A. Mitchell, special issue of /Scandinavian Studies/, 85:3 (2013)—itself the result of a 2012 Radcliffe Exploratory Seminar—the articles in this volume deal with the vocabulary, concepts, and functions of memory in medieval Norse texts (e.g., sagas, myths, skaldic poems, laws, runic inscriptions, historiographical writings), with reference to international memory studies. Drawing on these emerging theoretical tools for studying—and conceptualizing—memory, the collection looks at new ways of understanding medieval cultures and such issues as transmission and media, preservation and storage, forgetting and erasure, and authenticity and falsity. Despite its interdisciplinary and comparative basis, the volume remains grounded in empirical studies of memory and memory-dependent issues as these took form in the Nordic world.
CONTENTS: JÜRG GLAUSER, “Foreword” vii; PERNILLE HERMANN, STEPHEN A. MITCHELL, and AGNES S. ARNÓRSDÓTTIR, “Introduction: Minni and Muninn – Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture” 1; Part I. Memory and Narration —PERNILLE HERMANN, “Key Aspects of Memory and Remembering in Old Norse-Icelandic Literature” 13; JOHN LINDOW, “Memory and Old Norse Mythology” 41; MARGARET CLUNIES ROSS, “Authentication of Poetic Memory in Old Norse Skaldic Verse” 59; KATE HESLOP, “Minni and the Rhetoric of Memory in Eddic, Skaldic, and Runic Texts” 75; RUSSELL POOLE, “Autobiographical Memory in Medieval Scandinavia and amongst the Kievan Rus’” 109; Part II. Memory and History — RUDOLF SIMEK, “Memoria Normannica” 133; STEPHEN A. MITCHELL, “The Mythologized Past: Memory in Medieval and Early Modern Gotland” 155; GÍSLI SIGURÐSSON, “Constructing a Past to Suit the Present: Sturla Þórðarson on Conflicts and Alliances with King Haraldr hárfagri” 175; STEFAN BRINK, “Minnunga mæn: The Usage of Old Knowledgeable Men in Legal Cases” 197; AGNES S. ARNÓRSDÓTTIR, “Legal Culture and Historical Memory in Medieval and Early Modern Iceland” 211; Index 231
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The Mythologized Past: Memory and Politics in Medieval Gotland,” in
Minni and Muninn. Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture, vol. Ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Acta Scandinavica 4, Turnhout: Brepols, 2014, pp. 155-74.
Abstract‘The Mythologized Past: Memory in Medieval and Early Modern Gotland’ asks how a relatively small, increasingly heterogeneous, insular community shapes its identity over time. It focuses on two key episodes in the history of medieval Gotland and how they are represented in the island’s history over time, from the thirteenth century through the seventeenth, focusing especially on Gotland’s conversion to Christianity and the mid fourteenth-century bubonic pandemic. By reference to various objects of memory, the essay explores and explains how Gotland’s ‘men of memory’ gave their versions of history, with their many references to the memorial landscape of the island, its churches, places, prominent families, and so on. Secondly, it discusses a different kind of memory, the empty set, that is, when there is, by accident or planning, no memory. An important example of this sort of empty set from Gotland comes from an incident connected to the great fourteenth-century pandemic, known as the Black Death (or digerdöden).
