have been different in one way or another, at least in terms of audience and accompany-
ing atmosphere. Indeed, this fact would also have applied to the period after these works
came to be recorded, because it is probable that the recorded and copied Eddic poems,
like the sagas, would have tended to have been received by most people read aloud rather
than through private reading. This means, in essence, that for most people, as with a
play (or at the very least, a poetry-reading or a stand-up comedy performance), the actual
text of these works was only one relatively limited part of the overall received ‘work’. In
short, these works were not composed solely of words: they were also received as a form
of music with varying tones, rhythms and inflections, although it is hard to say whether
they were sung, spoken or chanted.^1 In short, as John Miles Foley ( 2002 : 60 ) has noted
recently about oral poetry:
Oral poetry is endemically plural, naturally diverse... Any oral poem, like
any utterance, is profoundly contingent on its context. To assume that it is detach-
able – that we can comfortably speak of ‘an oral poem’ as a freestanding item – is
necessarily to take it out of context. And what is that lost context? It is the
performance, the audience, the poet, the music, the specialised way of speaking, the
gestures, the costuming, the visual aids, the occasion, the ritual, and myriad other
aspects of the given poem’s reality... And when we pry an oral poem out of one
language and insert it into another, things will inevitably change. We’ll pay a price.In other words, scholars who ignore the aural and visual aspects of the performance of
Old Norse poetry and limit themselves to the ‘safe’ fixed text are doing little more
than examining the equivalent of a dead butterfly pinned to a board in a museum. The
object they are viewing has little to do with the work as it was conceived by the original
performer.
A natural reaction to the above statement is to argue that we know nothing about the
context of the Eddic poems, since there are no objective accounts of the presentation
of the Eddic poems outside the fictional, and slightly questionable account given in
Norna-Gests þáttr in the Flateyjarbók manuscript from the fourteenth century, where
Norna-Gestr recites Helreið Brynhildar and parts of Reginsmál apparently to the accom-
paniment of a harp (see Norna-Gests þáttr). Certainly, nothing at all exists from the
prehistoric pagan times about the performance of such works. All the same, as has been
implied above, the extant versions of the Eddic poems were collected from the oral
tradition, and these can be assumed, for the main part, to be relatively trustworthy
records of the form and content of these works as they existed in the thirteenth century
(see further Tangherlini 2003 ). Furthermore, it can also be safely assumed that the
extant form of these works was shaped by the performance conditions they were
intended for at that time, if not also in earlier centuries, just as the form of Shakespeare’s
plays was governed by the theatrical conditions of Elizabethan England, and the shape
of oral ballads and folk tales is governed by the fact that their audience had to be able to
follow what was going on at any given time: they could not flick back through the pages
of the book (see also Lönnroth 1978 : 12 ).
This brings us to the additional information about performance provided by the form
of the Eddic poems themselves and the manuscripts in which they are contained. First
of all, it is clear that the use of the expression ‘Eddic poem’ as a genre description is
highly misleading, not least because the main Eddic manuscript, the Codex Regius,
–– Terry Gunnell––