Old Norse Folklore

To some scholars of medieval philology, as well as to some modern folklorists and ethnologists, Stephen A. Mitchell's title Old Norse Folklore can seem provocative. The post-WWII field of Old Norse/Icelandic philology has been dominated by scholars focused on manuscript history, engaged primarily in literary analysis, skeptical of archaeological research, and disinclined to consider materials from eastern Scandinavia or the late medieval era. These tendencies were viewed in their time as a necessary antidote to earlier scholarship that posited, in retrospect naively, an unbroken and unified transnational Germanic oral tradition stretching from the earliest runic and poetic works down through the Icelandic sagas, to the legends and ballads collected from nineteenth-century rural peasants of the Nordic region, the British Isles, and Germany. The disciplinary narrowness of this postwar scholarship was paralleled by similarly delimited disciplinary approaches in the fields of archaeology and art history, all deeply skeptical of interdisciplinary “forays” and the “excesses” of past scholarship, which sometimes, as Mitchell points out, used materials in support of pernicious National Socialist agendas. The subtitle of Mitchell's volume highlights a different, modern folkloristic understanding of “tradition” as an emergent process of evolving cultural norms that includes constant innovation and that is sensible through the comparative analysis of individual performances as recorded in various media (both verbal and material) over time and space. It is a viewpoint that developed in the context of modern folkloristic, anthropological, and ethnographic fieldwork, with research methods that in some ways can only be applied to medieval materials through analogy. In this anthology of thirteen articles, all written and published by Mitchell separately between 1997 and 2022, but now gathered together into three thematic categories and provided with a single updated bibliography, Mitchell makes a cogent case for the benefits of applying the emphases and analyses of modern (and classic) Folklore Studies to the examination of medieval Scandinavian narrative, belief, and custom. As Mitchell puts it: “What I trust emerges as the consistent center of all these essays . . . is the inclination to place these materials into the context of lived lives, or performed rituals” (p. xiv). Drawing capaciously on folkloristic, historical, archaeological, and Medieval Studies evidence and interdisciplinary research trends (most notably Memory Studies), Mitchell's articles seek to interpret particular poems, narratives, characters, places, and artifacts as individual instances of tradition (“performances”) that can be understood most fully through careful comparison with other extant instances and evidence. A longtime leader of and contributor to the program in Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University, Mitchell speaks in the articles of this volume primarily to medievalists—digesting, applying, and appraising the insights and emphases of modern Folklore Studies but with a clear focus on the compelling interest of medieval Scandinavian literature, culture, and society.The three categories of Mitchell's volume reflect the varied research questions which Mitchell has explored during his long and prolific career. Part 1, “Orality and Performance,” consists of four articles that originally appeared between 2001 and 2020 and that examine the ways in which written manuscripts from the medieval period can be said to draw on an oral tradition that existed at the time of their composition. Mitchell works to integrate Parry and Lord's Oral Theory and the illustrious scholars who have worked to expand and deepen it (e.g., Gregory Nagy and John Miles Foley) with more recent interdisciplinary Memory Studies and joins with other scholars in focusing attention on textual accounts that depict moments of oral performance as narrative events within poems or prose works like sagas, i.e., moments of “fictionalized orality.” These include mythic accounts of the creation of poetry from the blood of Kvasir, saga and þáttr accounts of poetic and saga performances, contests of insults and knowledge, the artistry and testimony of kennings, and accounts of riddling. Mitchell's close attention to detail and careful comparative research is evident throughout, along with his knack for bringing in intriguing, often-overlooked instances, like fifteenth-century Swedish witch trials in which the accused were alleged to have engaged in a pact with the god Óðinn (p. 47).Part 2, “Myths and Memories,” consists of six articles that appeared between 2000 and 2022. While often focusing (at least initially) on a single figure or text—e.g., the mythic fetter Gleipnir, the goddess Gná, stanza 157 of Hávamál, the runic Rök stone, the Gotlandic Guta saga, or the Danish central place Samsø—Mitchell combines close analysis of details with sweeping and erudite surveys of comparanda, providing synthetic discussions that seek to characterize the workings of traditions that are not presented as unified and unchanging but rather replete in dynamic variation, evolution, and adaptation. Mitchell carefully navigates between Norse tradition, Christian learning, and the various textual agendas of the works that contain and transmit these instances, delineating a “tradition” that can be full of contradictions, segues, and excurses. Mitchell examines both eddic poems and Snorri's erudite but often disputed interpretations of them. He discusses various sagas and þættir as sources of comparison, but also draws in Latin and ecclesiastical works like Tacitus, Saxo, Historia Norwegiæ, and the Legenda aurea. Chapter 9 evinces Mitchell's eager embrace of archaeological research regarding central places, the product of Mitchell's wide-ranging reading but also his longstanding participation in an annual archaeological field school associated with the Moesgaard Museum. Mitchell's detailed and nuanced discussion of Guta saga reflects his commitment to exploring texts from eastern Scandinavia and devoting to them the same kinds of analysis and discussion that the field has tended to reserve for medieval Icelandic works.Part 3, “Traditions and Innovations,” contains the anthology's final three articles, which originally appeared between 1997 and 2017. Mitchell describes these articles as “highlighting important inherited traditions between and among the historically connected cultures of northern Europe, as well as examples of critical cultural developments taking place in late medieval Scandinavia” (p. xvi). Chapter 11 examines Hálfs saga ok Hálfsrekka in light of a wider runic and Germanic heroic tradition, including notably Hildebrandslied, focusing particularly on narrated accounts of familial transgressions, including parricide and fratricide. Drawing on archaeological and art historical evidence, and reinvigorating a much earlier scholarly interpretation, Mitchell links these images to an ancient Germanic warrior band/Männerbunde tradition and the importance of an initiatory redirecting of individual loyalty from the family to the band. Chapter 12 examines saga evidence of the late stages of Norse skaldic tradition in the court culture of Norway and Denmark during the early fourteenth century. As Mitchell demonstrates, this is an era of increasing internationalization in continental Norse courts, and one of avid imitation and adoption of book culture, courtly romance, poetic end-rhyme, and instrumental music emanating from elsewhere in Europe. Norse skalds, predominantly Icelanders, sought with varying degrees of success to build or sustain careers in courts that no longer fully comprehended or valued their intricate alliterative creations but preferred translated and adapted works from the continent. The anthology's final chapter examines the Old Swedish poem Mik mötte en gamul kerling (I met an old crone), reproducing it in its entirety and providing an English translation. Mitchell situates the text in both Norse and continental literary contexts with detailed discussion of meter and rhyme, troll imagery, and notions of witchcraft. Mitchell discusses the Birgittine mother house at Vadstena as the text's place of production and possible composition.While some of Mitchell's assembled articles originally appeared in academic journals, many appeared in edited volumes or Festschrifts, making them more difficult to locate or access. Two appeared originally in languages other than English (Swedish and Danish). The volume thus provides the reader with a valuable consolidation of Mitchell's writings and a thoughtful arrangement of articles into groupings with an order that makes sense, proceeding from those that focus on the most ancient elements of Norse mythology and poetry to those that display the greatest degree of engagement with later medieval influences and forms. Together the articles make a cogent case for the benefits of applying folkloristic perspectives to Old Norse materials but also a clear indication of how much careful research and backgrounding is needed to do this work well, something which Mitchell has excelled in during a highly productive career that has now extended into its fifth decade

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Folklore · Literature · Old Norse · Classics · Historical and Archaeological Studies · History · Linguistics and language evolution · Medieval Literature and History