Old Norse Myths, Literature and Society by Margaret Clunies Ross (review)

Abstract

MLRy 98.2, 2003 533 Old Icelandic Literature and Society. Ed. by Margaret Clunies Ross. (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 42) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2000. xii + 336pp. ?47.50. ISBN 0-5216-3112-2 (hbk). Old Icelandic Literature and Society differs from other introductory surveys of Old Icelandic literature, not simply, as the title suggests, by paying attention to the society which produces and consumes the manuscripts in which it is preserved, but, more distinctively, by a quite conscious effortto cut loose from earlier preoccupations in order to signal the new directions of twenty-first-centuryscholarship. Now that the 'bubble of romantic nationalism has burst', suggests Margaret Clunies Ross in her introduction, the literature can be recontextualized in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the period when much of it was written down, rather than as artefacts of the tenth and eleventh centuries, when the best-known sagas ofthe Icelanders are set and when much of the poetry, both Eddic and skaldic, was composed. The crucial moment in Icelandic literature, then, is no longer the Conversion in 999 or 1000, or even the composition of the firstvernacular text, Islendingabok, in the 1120s, but rather the ending of Iceland's independence in 1262-64 with its capitulation to the Norwegian crown, sundering Iceland from the institutions and traditions of its past. The volume is primarily a reliable account of Icelandic literary genres, with a wel? come focus on those, such as the indigenous romances or the biblical translations, which have generally been accorded less attention; only the sagas of Icelanders escape comprehensive survey treatment. Most chapters, however, slant their consideration of the generic range in keeping with the book's overall intention of recontextualization . Thus Judy Quinn's account of oral material within literary genres gives way to an interesting analysis of oral/literate interaction in such areas as list-making in laws and manuals of poetics; both Kari Ellen Gade and Gudrun Nordal highlightthe changing roles of poets and poetry in the thirteenth century, as skaldic tradition gives way to eyewitness accounts in the writing of sagas, and as the main Icelandic chieftain families begin to employ poets to compose panegyrics for them in the manner of earlier Norwegian kings. Jiirg Glauser's short but ambitious chapter, nominally about the sagas of Icelanders, pinpoints their post-1262 origin in manuscript as cru? cial for understanding the sagas' dialogic engagement with the past; their awareness ofthe rupture of 1262-64 makes it impossible to read the sagas as repositories of unbroken tradition, but rather as containing a cultural memory of that which is now irrecoverable. Diana Whaley's long chapter on historical writing in Iceland, centrally placed, is a well-thought-through account of how historiography impinges on other genres, informing our understanding of literature and of its social context and origins. Torfi Tulinius's chapter argues fora socio-politically grounded antiquarianism in the fornaldarsogur, noting their fascination with a highly idealized concept of monarchy once Iceland was subject to the Norwegian king. Whether with Glauser's appropriationof JanAssmann's idea of 'cultural memory', Tulinius's noting of how Icelandic genres interact within a literary system, as defined by Umberto Eco, or Geraldine Barnes's analysis of how the riddarasogur 'persuade us exuberantly of the power oflanguage', with their knowingly ironic narrators, the book provides a well-grounded and interesting introduction to Old Icelandic literature, with the bonus ofmultiple signposts towards new directions in Old Norse scholarship. St John's College, Oxford Carolyne Larrington ...