Oral to literary: kvöldvaka, textual instability, and all that jazz

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dc.contributor Skandinavistik / Universität Tübingen de_CH
dc.contributor.author Allard, Joe de_DE
dc.date.accessioned 2004-02-02 de_DE
dc.date.accessioned 2014-03-18T09:51:43Z
dc.date.available 2004-02-02 de_DE
dc.date.available 2014-03-18T09:51:43Z
dc.date.issued 2002 de_DE
dc.identifier.other 109762053 de_DE
dc.identifier.uri http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:21-opus-10730 de_DE
dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/10900/46211
dc.description.abstract Saga entertainment (sagnaskemtun) was a regular element of any social gathering in medieval Scandinavia (cf Þorgils saga ok Hafliða; Íslendings þáttur sögufróða;Stjörnu-Odda draumr, etc.). Many studies of the old literature suggest that the eleventh and twelfth centuries witness a shift in the practice and mode of learning in Iceland from a dominantly oral tradition to a dominantly literate and literary one. With the invention and development of a method of writing Old Norse/Icelandic after the advent of Christianity, Icelanders with the new technology gradually became the dominant voice. Our critical and scholarly positions in the last century don’t deny the vigour or importance of the oral tradition, but since our business has been about words on the page, we have found it difficult to say very much about orality in practice. In many recent discussions of the oral tradition and the newer literary tradition is has been assumed that the literary gradually replaced the oral; that sagas increasingly were ‘read’ from texts, rather than recited from memory; and if recited from memory had been learned from texts ( Foote, Pálsson, Lönnroth, Goody etc). My paper argues that several modes of performance co-existed from very early on in Iceland’s history, and that a particular kind of improvisational oral pattern was certainly one of them. Amongst other examples I will consider Halldor Snorrason’s position as a teller of tales in the saga tradition, and reflect upon Jón Karl Helgason’s observations about the evolution of the ‘truth’, in an oral transmission, about the burning of Njal and his family (in The Rewriting of Njal’s Saga). Finally I will use several of the inconsistencies, narrative shifts and poor poetry in Stjörnu-Odda draumr to argue that, like jazz as opposed to score-based classical music, there are motifs and techniques in the recorded version of the þáttur that reveal its originally oral and improvisational nature. en
dc.language.iso en de_DE
dc.publisher Universität Tübingen de_DE
dc.rights ubt-nopod de_DE
dc.rights.uri http://tobias-lib.uni-tuebingen.de/doku/lic_ubt-nopod.php?la=de de_DE
dc.rights.uri http://tobias-lib.uni-tuebingen.de/doku/lic_ubt-nopod.php?la=en en
dc.subject.classification Saga , Island de_DE
dc.subject.ddc 839 de_DE
dc.subject.other Oral tradition , saga entertainment , co-excistence of performances en
dc.title Oral to literary: kvöldvaka, textual instability, and all that jazz de_DE
dc.type ConferenceObject de_DE
utue.publikation.fachbereich Sonstige - Neuphilologie de_DE
utue.publikation.fakultaet 5 Philosophische Fakultät de_DE
dcterms.DCMIType Text de_DE
utue.publikation.typ conferenceObject de_DE
utue.opus.id 1073 de_DE
utue.opus.portal sagas de_DE
utue.opus.portalzaehlung 9.19000 de_DE

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