Memory, Mediality, and the “Performative Turn”: Recontextualizing Remembering in Medieval Scandinavia

Abstract

Introduction Scandinavia's longest runic inscription, the visually and textually imposing early ninth-century Rok stone, opens in a way that serendipitously illustrates the memory, media, and performance triad this essay--In (aft) Vemoor stand these runes (runaR). And Varinn coloured (faoi) them, the father, in his dead son. say the folktale (sagum mogminni). (1) Rok, just like several thousand other rune stones, is concerned with in a most basic and obvious sense, in that many stones were expressly carved and erected as memorials to--in of (aft)--dead people. (2) Expanding the sense what is remembered at Rok, however, is a phrase that appears repeatedly throughout its text-both verbatim and implied--sagum mogminni, usually translated as I tell the memory. (3) Clearly, a compound the folk memory sort evokes, not the individual a bereaved relative for a dead kinsman, but rather a different sort memory, that is shared, memories that are at once cultural and communal, what we might more readily recognize with a different appellation--namely, tradition; (4) and, indeed, the Rok text alludes time and again to narrative traditions largely unknown to us now. The inscription's other repeated formulation sagum, I say, I tell, and so on, emphasizes the highly performative nature the text, performances acted out both by its fictional (or perhaps historical) I, and, more notably, by what must have been the repeated reading aloud the text by each new viewer the stone capable the task. (5) One quickly understands, too, that the public declarations sorrow and respect such memorial stones represent are meant as lasting elegiac performances, acts to honor the dead that, given their lithic nature, are inherendy frozen in time. Yet these proclamations are also, as in the case sagum, but now for the text in its entirety, re-enacted with each new attempt by a passerby to read the inscription. And it is not difficult to imagine that further performances--rituals or ceremonials various sorts--accompanied the erection and dedication such stones; it would be perverse to imagine that the stones were silently tipped into position without the accompaniment familial or local ritualized behaviors one sort or another. (6) Finally, one cannot help but be struck by the obvious self-conscious mediality the monument. Not only does the text note its own corporeal existence--stand these runes--but the father's, Varinn's, role in the physical production the monument is expressly referred to. Knowledge runic writing, or runacy (a neologism meant to capture for runic writing the same sense literacy has for alphabetic writing; cf. Spurkland 2004), and thus the written word as a medium for preserving, even enshrining, memories and thoughts, had been used in Scandinavia for half a millennium at the time the Rok stone was carved. Although the epigraphic system associated with Christianity would in time become the principal vehicle for the written word in northern Europe, (7) beginning roughly at the time Rok, even exemplified by Rok, runic writing entered into an era enormously expanded use. Throughout the Viking and the Middle Ages, Scandinavians were acutely aware runic mediality, as they would also in time be about Latin and manuscript culture: the relationship between the self-conscious written text and its narrative was much more diverse and complicated than simply the fact the story or sentiment being recorded, as a number recent studies have emphasized, and as the example from Rok suggests. (8) In fact, it is anything other than happenstance that the Rok stone's opening focuses on memory, mediality, and performance: these functions were at the heart such monuments, their production, and their performance. The paradigm shift we have witnessed in recent decades in Old Norse studies away from formalist approaches, which were long in vogue, and toward so-called performance and media studies, premises well-suited to the contextualization our inherited goods to their cultural moments, was long in coming (cf. …