Memory

Summary

In this essay genre will be treated in the context of memory. It will be of particular interest to discuss how genres generate, and function as repositories of, cultural memory. Many Old Norse genres, both prose and poetry, are preoccupied with events of the past, making it relevant to treat them as media of cultural memory. The focus will be on a few examples only, but my reflections have broader implications and it will be possible to apply them to other cases. ‘Cultural memory’ is a much-debated concept; here it is understood to cover situations from the past that are believed to be important for collective identities and self-images, or more broadly speaking, it is a concept that covers ‘the interplay of present and past in socio-cultural contexts’.

Composition in Early Literary Culture

The discussion of genre in Old Norse scholarship has long roots. Old Norse- Icelandic genre divisions are often the results of nineteenth-and twentieth-century scholarship, and the terms that are used nowadays to cover the medieval texts and the various branches of the Icelandic sagas are rarely to be found in the texts themselves. Consequently, some uncertainty attaches itself to the generic categories that may or may not have existed in the minds of medieval authors and their audiences. Even if it is a contested matter, it seems to me as if literary production in twelfth- to fourteenth-century Iceland was to a relatively high degree guided by knowledge of generic conventions and features, and medieval and post-medieval manuscripts indicate that the authors chose specific generic markers related to time, space, content, mode, etc., when composing narratives about the past. Saying this does not imply, for instance with regard to the saga genre, that there was no development and gradual refinement over time, nor that the saga genre was a static phenomenon; It is highly likely that we have to reckon with ‘a century of experimentation with the long narrative form’. A relevant definition of genre in this context goes back to Hans Robert Jauss’ definition of medieval genres, which takes into account, among other features, existing norms and expectations, and which sees genres: ‘as intrinsically dynamic, as categories of literary expression that change over time and, as such, display a varying amount of variability in content and form’.