doi:10.7592/FEJF2002.20.

literary

WORDS AND MUSIC:

ORAL AND LITERARY
Joseph C. Allard
Most scholarly and critical work concerning medieval Icelandic literature over the past one hundred and fifty years has assumed that
the eleventh and twelfth centuries witnessed a shift in the practice
and mode of learning in Iceland from an oral tradition, what Walter
Ong terms primary orality (Ong 1982: 13), to a mainly literate and
literary one. The argument goes that 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 in a culture that previously had been almost purely oral, runic inscription being the exception. My contention in this essay is that the oral and literary traditions at their
extremes are different in kind: the oral being essentially a performance art, the literary a text specific one. Away from the extremes,
however, there is a regular and fruitful interface between the oral
and the literary that should always be borne in mind when considering the origins of the literature that we have today.
During the years in question, and for a long time after, the oral and
literary traditions happily co-existed. Since the seventeenth century the study of Old Icelandic literature and culture has focused
upon the written, later printed, word. From the philological developments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the twentieth century bookprose arguments of the Icelandic School, which
consider the sagas to be authored texts, most of our approaches to
the past have been governed by the written record and our interpretations of it. The proponents of the so-called freeprose theories, who maintain that the sagas as we have them are the result of
the inscriptions of oral traditions, were fighting a losing battle in
the last century. The bookprose theorists dont deny the vigour
and importance of an oral tradition but, since their business is about
words on the page, they find it difficult to say very much about
orality in practice. I believe that to approach the creation of the
literature as either/or, freeprose/bookprose, misrepresents what
actually happened, rather than clarifies anything. It has been too
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easy to imagine the oral tradition in Iceland to have been equivalent to what we know about ancient Mesopotamia or the pre-literate tribes in twentieth century Africa discussed by Jack Goody (Goody
1987). Although it is generally acknowledged that an oral tradition
and writing can co-exist in the same society, ancient Egypt for example, it is thought that they remained exclusive. The two existed
side by side, not, of course, within the same group (Southern Slav)
but certainly within the same district. (Lord 1060: 135, my emphasis)
I believe these traditional and, it seems, universally accepted attitudes are too extreme. The late eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth
centuries in Iceland, and, indeed, many centuries after, saw the
comfortable, and mutually nourishing, co-existence of several modes
of composition, memory and inscription. The older oral traditions
werent displaced, replaced, or suppressed by newer literate and
literary modes as we so often presume. They carried on in good
health for centuries forming what has recently been called a
shadowgrowth of literature that has simply been ignored by scholars until very recently (see the recent work of Driscoll, Glauser,
and Jn Karl Helgasson). We have tended in the past century and a
half to view the history and development of Icelandic literature from
an increasingly narrow, literate point of view. I hope to show here
that a consideration of different kinds of musical inscription and
performance in the last two hundred and fifty years reveals an analogous variety that can shed light on the years during which old Icelandic literature was composed, performed, read, listened to and
inscribed.
In our various speculations about the origins and continuities of
Icelandic literature we tend to forget that from the beginning and
for many centuries thereafter it was largely a performance art
whether oral or written. Almost all elements of poetic and narrative production were shared in the community during the kvldvaka
(literally evening-wake), the evening entertainment on farms during the winter which began with the lighting of the oil lamp usually
an hour after sunset. This was the arena for sagnaskemmtun (literally saga-diversion) when, according to Eggert Olafsson and Bjarni
Plsson in their 1772 Reise igiennem Island, the head of the household or a young boy or a guest read or related sagas or performed

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rmur, the metrical versions of these and other tales. The point of
the exercise, according to Eggert, was to keep people entertained
and alert as they performed their evening chores (spinning and carding wool, knitting and so forth) (Driscoll 1997). Such performances
were not unidirectional reader or teller to the audience but were
participatory. The audience wasnt passive. According to the Scots
bible promoter Ebenezer Henderson, who spent the winter of 1814
15 in Iceland, the reader is frequently interrupted, either by the
head, or by some of the more intelligent members of the family,
who make remarks on various parts of the story, and propose questions, with a view to exercise the ingenuity of the children and
servants. Eirkur Magnsson notes in an unpublished Cambridge
lecture the interest taken in these readings is very remarkable.
The handmaidens, as well as everybody else [,] make their laconic
remarks as the story develops on the character of this or that hero,
and on the tragic as well as the comic interest of the whole situation. The intelligence, yea even acuteness of the art[ist]ic perception which manifests itself in the remarks of the women is often
very striking. As I will argue in due course, this kind of performance atmosphere has more in common with audience and performers in a jazz performance than with either the much more formal
and one-directional nature of the classical music performance, which
is so firmly rooted in a prescriptive notational tradition, or with the
experience of reading in silence to oneself.
The last century has been a period of communicative multiplicity
we have been living for a long time with the coexistence of a literary tradition and more recent ones concerned with the visual and
aural image (Radio/Cinema/TV/IT/DVD, etc.). This is what Ong terms
secondary orality (Ong 1982: 133). Further to illuminate the multiplicities Im suggesting, its worth recalling in some detail the distinctions Richard Perkins makes between the oral and the literary
traditions:
A: primary oral tradition: transmission: orally, by sound waves;
reception: aurally, by sound waves; storage; cerebrally, in human
brains.
B: literary tradition: transmission: cerebrally, by temporary storage in the brain, and then manually or mechanically, by the writing
of manuscripts and printing of books; reception: visually, by light

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Words and Music: Oral and Literary

waves reflected from manuscripts or printed pages and aurally when
read aloud in company; storage: in manuscripts and printed books
to be retrieved cerebrally and aurally by reading and listening.
(Perkins 1989: 239240).
C: secondary oral tradition: transmission: visually and aurally by
light and sound waves from a variety of mechanical and electronic
sources; reception: visually and aurally, by light waves broadcast
from screens and sound waves from speakers; storage: electronically in computer memories (for IT) or as images on film (Cinema,
TV) or sound recordings on wax, vinyl, tape or disk.
I think it significant that the human brain plays a much less significant role in secondary orality. Our memory is now measured in
gigabytes and stored in a box on the desk. These further complexities to Perkins model in the electronically generated images (visual
and aural) in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the fact
that our book-related pursuits have happily coexisted with, indeed
have been shaped by secondary oral modes, suggest to me that it
has been a mistake to over-prioritise the literate at the expense of
the oral. This places us in a position better to appreciate what might
really have happened during the medieval Icelandic years in question.
It seems to be a commonplace assumption in much of the scholarship of the last century that an older oral tradition of saga entertainment in which performers had to rely on their memories and
narrative skills, was gradually replaced by saga reading. It is probably more correct to imagine that oral performances and readings
would have coexisted for many years. Indeed, certain at least partly
oral modes and practices like the rmur and other poetic forms had
an unbroken continuity from the fourteenth into the early twentieth century. The rmur tradition was a written form but intended
for oral (and aural) delivery and reception. There is an instability in
the rmur texts that suggests in Driscolls words that in the process of copying, and presumably also in performance, copyists and
kvamenn would not have felt themselves bound to reproduce in
every detail the exemplars in front of them (Driscoll 1997,1: 236).
Elsewhere Driscoll records another telling anecdote: Jnas
Kristjnsson has told me that as a child he was told sagas by his
grandfather. Although he may sometimes have consulted written
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Joseph C. Allard
texts- in at least some cases the rmur rather than the prose texts
beforehand in order to refresh his memory, no written texts were
ever used in the actual telling. This kind of re-telling of sagas and
saga episodes to children was probably not uncommon in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Driscoll 1997,2: 199
200).
Another common scholarly assumption is that many of these forms
were either superseded by literacy and reading or were suppressed
by the Church and ceased to exist. Quinn puts it like this: At the
other end of the spectrum of oral discourses are ethnic traditions
that were deliberately suppressed by the Church. Needless to say,
the textualization of these traditions is unlikely to have taken place,
but we do know a little about some of them from the wording of
their explicit suppression. Bishop Jn Ogmundarson (d.1121) forbade the reciting of love poems (mannsngskvi, mannsngsvsur),
an apparently popular tradition in which a man and a woman exchanged improvised verses (Quinn 2000: 36). That Bishop Jn
wanted to suppress a tradition doesnt necessarily mean that he
was very successful. Icelandic literary history is packed with indignant clerics and intellectuals denouncing wicked and foul or vulgar and common modes of popular poetry. It is a list of notables
including Gubrandur orlksson (c.15411627), Ludvig Harboe (in
Iceland 17411746), Magns Stephensen and Hannes Finnsson during the Enlightenment (I have often suffered from the knowledge
that on many farms troll stories and fairy tales filled with vulgarities and superstitions were read 1796), Jnas Hallgrmsson in his
article in Fjlnir in 1837 (the rmur destroy and spoil all feeling for
what is beautiful and poetic and worthy of good poetry), representatives of the Romantic movement like Benedikt Grndal (1826
1907) in his dismissive review in jlfur in 1852 of Fjrar
Riddarasgur (I know that people would be bored by lists of vulgarities, Danicisms, totally warped geographical descriptions, and
the like; but should anyone desire to see that sort of thing, then let
him read Fjrar Riddarasgur, and no-one would believe that such
a thing could be published in 1852!), (trans. Glauser 1994) and into
the twentieth century. To be contentious and deadly serious about
literary matters has always been a quality of Icelandic intellectual
life. Consider, more recently, the parliamentary and legal furore in
the 1940s concerning Ragnar Jnsson, Stefn gmundsson and

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Halldr Laxnesss edition of Hrafnkatla with modernised spelling
(which was outlawed by parliament: a decision later overturned by
the Supreme Court), or the debate in the 1950s about whether the
modernist Atom Poets were writing poetry at all. The exchange of
verses (usually sung) between men and women remains a fixture of
any good orrablt (although not, usually, improvised). There are,
clearly, several dominantly oral modes that might form a part of
the kvldvaka that continued in daily practice for centuries. In a
similar oral tradition as recently as 1935 the popular peoples poet
Hjlmar fr Hofi was challenged to a poetic duel (heiarlega
hlmgnguskorun) by his rival Sveinn Skld fr Elivogum. Orustan
var h 30. marz 1935 Vararhsinu Reykjavk fyrir fullu hsi af
heyrendum. (battle was joined on March 30th 1935 in Vararhusi
in Reykjavik in front of a full house of listeners). Although a number
of poems by both Hjlmar and Sveinn were published in mid-century, the poems from the duel were, in their nature, oral and are
not, as far as Im aware, recorded (Hjlmar fr Hofi 1950).
In The Nature of Narrative Robert Kellogg uses both the Homeric
poems and the Icelandic sagas as part of his discussion of oral composition. Formal characteristics include formulaic diction that
is, the language is controlled by a traditional grammar which provides a limited number of patterns selected from the total language
of the culture by which metrically (in the case of poetry), syntactically, and semantically appropriate utterances are formed. Kellogg
maintains that the saga style evinces just such a grammar, which
is the basis of the Icelandic achievement, and explains the highly
stylised nature of the prose. Another characteristic of oral narrative is consistency in the thematic significance of motifs, topoi, and
plots conventional narrative elements that govern the storys representation and its illustration of ideas.
If I am right that the oral and newer literary traditions co-existed
quite comfortably in twelfth century Iceland then we might expect
that the surviving written texts from the period would be less fixed
and specific, and might exhibit a greater variety of nuance and suggestion, than the writing from a later, more text dominated period.
Our almost utter enslavement to the text post-dates printing and
is, like so much in our learned culture, a symptom of certain lateeighteenth and nineteenth century developments that have had an

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exaggerated and distorting influence on thought, methodology and
understanding since. The over-emphasised dominance of the
(printed) text has led to the situation in which we find it very difficult to cope sensibly with the oral tradition. It is part of our intellectual tradition either to ignore or avoid the oral tradition or to
treat oral texts that have been inscribed as if they were the same as
texts authorially written. The differences between the two, however, are great. The written text is far more prescriptive, specific
and, in a way, limited than its oral counterpart. As Foley puts it:
[the] written text is a more deterministic libretto, its unitary character providing enough (and precise enough) signals to marshal the
readers activity quite or at least comparatively strictly; variation in the experience of a written work is thus relatively closely
controlled by the work itself. However the reader performs the
written work, the text from which he creates the experience is fundamentally original and unique, the only one of itself. (Foley 1987:
198) In the oral tradition the variety of performance prototypes would
be neither so strictly controlled nor so singular in specificity that
is, there is a larger number of types of sagas and stories than we
normally acknowledge.
I would like to suggest a further analogy that sheds light on the
differences in question. That is a comparison of musical performance (and inscription) in the classical tradition and the jazz performance. The classical performance is in the literate tradition. At
the start of the process the performer reads the text. Since the
late eighteenth century the text dictates an increasing multiplicty
of directions: in addition to key and time signatures and the pattern
and duration of notes and rests in harmonic space (which are essential for any musical notation) there are directions for tempo, phrasing, dynamics, mood, and so on. A text for piano by Schumann will
have twenty-eight or more directional indicators (see appendix). The
performance, thus, is a representation of an original and unique
text strictly determined by the composer. In the performance, which
is not unlike a religious ritual, a passive audience sits in rapt silence to watch and listen to the recreation of a somehow sacred
text by an inspired player. The performance is judged, partly if not
largely, upon fidelity to an original text. Pushed to extremes this
can lead to the idea of the perfect performance that is an exact
representation of an original.

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Jazz, on the other hand, is centrally improvisational and communal. Usually there is a basic idea (a traditional song or tune) and
certain formulaic grammars and structures (12 bar blues, for example) but the end of a jazz performance is an ever new interpretation
of, or play with, these basic motifs. No two jazz performances will
be alike. To inscribe, to write down, a particular performance is to
fix it, certainly, and to preserve it for future improvisation, but, in
itself, the inscription is a pretty artificial exercise. But any real jazz
performance, whether based on an inscription or not, will be unique
and different from all others. The ideal jazz gig is a collection of
players who join the evolving musical process when they have something to say. As in the oral prose tradition there is a grammar (modal and harmonic structures), there are traditional motifs, a formulaic diction if you will. But there is always a good deal of freedom. The arrangement of the Thelonius Monk number (see appendix) has almost a third of the directional symbols as the Schumann:
as few as eleven.
This distinction between the classical written and read tradition
and jazz improvisational tradition has more than simply analogic or
metaphoric significance to our concerns with the oral as opposed to
the written narrative traditions. In music, as in literary studies, it
is during the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the text
achieves such complexity and dominance. Earlier composers and
performers were given less direction and, one imagines, expected
to be more improvisational. The text of the Bach Ricercar (see
appendix) sent to Fredrick the Great as part of his Musikalisches
Opfer (Musical Offering) in 1747 is closer to Monk than to
Schumann: here there are as few as nine commands. Performers
would be expected to play with it, rather than simply reproduce it.
In fact the Ricercar is Bachs own later inscription of his improvisation on the theme during his visit to Fredricks court at Potsdam
in 1744.
We can better understand the way the jazz tradition functions if we
consider the recording of two performances by the Modern Jazz
Quartet in the 1950s. Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise (from Oscar
Hammerstein and Sigmund Rombergs New Moon) was a regular
part of their performance repertoire.1 In the April 1952 recording
with Milt Jackson (vibes), John Lewis (piano), Percy Heath (bass)

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and Kenny Clarke (drums) the performance lasts for three minutes
and twenty-five seconds. On their album Concorde, recorded in
July 1955, with Connie Kay on drums, the performance lasts for
seven minutes and fifty-seven seconds. The differences are instructive. The second is still based on the Hammerstein/Romberg idea
but it is now started and concluded with a play with Canon V from
Bachs Musikalisches Opfer (see appendix) from 1747. The Bach
makes perfect musical sense in the context. Each time the MJQ
performed Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise, or indeed any other
number, they performed it differently a prime example both of
freedom of improvisation and of textual instability indeed, a near
absence of text altogether.
Roger Scruton makes an interesting observation in this context:
The jazz performer is, in a sense, also the composer, or one part of
a corporate composer. But to describe free improvisation in that
way is to assume that composition is the paradigm case, and improvisation secondary. It would be truer to the history of music, and
truer to our deeper musical instincts, to see things the other way
round: to see composition as born from the writing-down of music,
and from the subsequent transformation of the scribe from recorder
to creator of the thing he writes. Jacques Derrida has famously
criticised Western civilisation as logocentric privileging speech
over writing, as the purveyor of human intention. The criticism is
the opposite of the truth: writing has been so privileged by our
civilisation, in religion, law, and politics, as well as in art and literature, that we tend to lose sight of the fact that written signs owe
their life to the thing which is written down (Scruton 1997: 439).
Written texts are more prescriptive and determined than their oral
counterparts, which depend much more on the freedom of performance. If Im right then we should be able to discern some qualities
in the saga style that incline towards the performance [the often
noted paratactic style, terseness, laconism, few adjectives, little or
no qualitative commentary from the saga inscriber]. Imagined back
into the kvldvaka situation during which, as we know, the listeners might often interrupt, and members of the household might
have their thoughts and feeling solicited, the performance situation becomes much clearer the function of the text as it has been
transmitted to us, becomes more transparent and, perhaps, potentially even more unstable.

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An Icelandic sitting-room at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Illustration provided by author.

Words and Music: Oral and Literary

APPENDIX

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Robert Schumann Humoreske Op.20, 1839.

1. title
2. dedication
3. opus number and date
4. mood suggestion
(bilingual)
5. metronome marking
6. clefs
7. key signature
8. time signature
9. note and rest symbols
10. dynamic marking

11. fingering
12. pedal point
13. slur/phrasing mark
14. staccato
15. a dynamic suggestion
(dim.)
16. appoggiatura (to
lean)
17. crescendo
18. accent/attack

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19. tempo suggestion

(retard.)
20. tie
21. grace note
22. tempo/mood change
23. bass crescendo
24. triplet
25. quintuplet
26. trill
27. grace series
28. pause

Words and Music: Oral and Literary

Thelonious Monk Blue Monk, 1954; arranged by Steve Hill (to reflect Monks
own individual, timeless style), 1993.
1. title
2. mood
3. clefs
4. key signature
5. time signature
6. note and rest symbols
7. harmonies
8. tie
9. agogic accent
10. triplet
11. grace note

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J. S. Bach Ricercar from Musikalisches Opfer, 1747.

1. title
2. clefs
3. key signature
4. time signature
5. note and rest symbols
6. tie
7. mordent
8. staccato
9. trill

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Comments
1
A sample of the following two recordings can be found on the following
addresses. Please note, that the samples are 4 MB and 9 MB, respectively.

http://www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol20/allrd01.mp3
http://www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol20/allrd02.mp3

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