Orality in a Norse-Icelandic Perspective

Students of early Scandinavian literature and folklore face analogous problems when dealing with oral tradition. For most readers of the Icelandic sagas, that tradition constitutes no more than a stylistic and factual backdrop to the developed artistry of literary narrators taking their cue from works written at the major centers of European civilization; for most folklorists of the early twenty-first century, oral narrative has more to do with individual self-expression than with loyalty to the collective memory. One Scandinavian folklorist has gone so far as to question the validity of the international folktale typology of Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson (Aarne and Thompson 1961), stating that the nineteenth-century records of oral prose tradition rather give the impression of kaleidoscopic variation of motifs and episodes. This influential scholar also held that complex folktales probably could not be remembered over long periods of time (Holbek 1987:256). In ballad research a similar trend has been perceptible under the influence of the oral-formulaic theory, the stability of the inherited song text being played down in favor of spontaneous re-creation in performance. Some East European and Irish folklorists insist, however, that the oral transmission process is (or was) understood by tradition bearers themselves as essentially reproductive. In a West and North European context the role of verbatim memorization has undoubtedly been underestimated: once famous but now-forgotten examples include the Icelandic scribe who reconstructed a saga lost in the great Copenhagen fire of 1728 (Helgason 1926:42-44), and the illiterate Irishman some two centuries later who could repeat a romantic tale almost word for word as it had been read to him from a published edition (O Duilearga 1981:xi). The fate of oral literature has in fact been interwoven with that of written literature at least since the