Viking Mediologies is a study of pre-modern multimedia rooted in
the embodied poetic practice of Viking Age skalds. Prior study of
the skaldic tradition has focused on authorship-distinctions of
poetic style, historical contexts, and attention to the oeuvres of
the skalds whose names are preserved in the written tradition. Kate
Heslop reconsiders these not as texts but as pieces in a pre-modern
media landscape, focusing on poetry's medial capacity to embody
memory, visuality, and sound. Mobile, hybrid, diasporic social
formations-bands of raiders and traders, petty kingdoms, colonial
expeditions-achieved new prominence in the Viking Age. Skalds
offered the leaders of these groups something uniquely valuable.
With their complicated poetry, they claimed to be able to capture
shared contingent meanings and re-mediate them in named, memorable,
reproducible works. The commemorative poetry in kviduhattr
remembers histories of ruin and loss. Skaldic ekphrasis discloses
and reproduces the presence of the gods. Drottkvaett encomium
evokes for the leader's retinue the soundscape of battle. As
writing arrived in Scandinavia in the wake of Christianization, the
media landscape shifted. In the poetry of the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, skalds adjusted to the demands of a literate
audience, while the historical and poetological texts of the
Icelandic High Middle Ages opened a dialogue between Latin
Christian ideas of mediation and local traditions. In the Second
Grammatical Treatise, for example, the literate technology of the
grid is used to analyze the complex resonances of drottkvaett as
the output of a syllable-spewing hurdy-gurdy-a poetry machine.
Offering both new readings of both canonical works such as
Ynglingatal, Ragnarsdrapa, and Hattatal, and examinations of
lesser-known texts like Glymdrapa, Liknarbraut, and Sturla
THordarson's Hakonarkvida, Viking Mediologies explores the powers
and limits of poetic mediation.
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