Application 26. On Paroemial Cognitive Patterning in an Old Icelandic þáttr. Presented in Panel Discussion: "'Most Evident,' or 'Most Tricky'? Toward a Methodolocy for the Paroemiological Study of Medieval Literature and Culture" sponsored by the Early Proverb Society, 50th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI 14-17 May 2015.
Richard L. Harris, English Department, University of Saskatchewan [heorot@sasktel.net]
A reconsideration in the latter decades of the twentieth century of some elements of the Free Prose Theory of saga composition accompanied a rebirth of interest across several fields of medieval literatures and cognitive linguistics in the processes of oral composition as well as of the intellectual workings of the pre-literate mind. Of much importance for saga studies was Theodore M. Andersson’s concept of “oral family saga,” the nature of which came to be clarified most usefully by Carol Clover’s theory of “immanent saga,” that “larger undertaking—the dramatic chronicle of the Icelandic settlement,” or, in other words, those innumerable stories, in whatever form, the Icelanders told about their ancestral heritage. These developments moved critical thinking away from the earlier tenets of the Book Prose Theory with its literary emphasis towards a consensus that left the saga composer selecting content more widely from oral background. Attempts to access more precise information about this diversely existent source have not proven so successful as might have been hoped. However, I think a more fruitful approach to the pre-literate narrative lies in phraseological study, the micro-textual detail of how the story was told rather than the shaping of the story’s content.
Among the formulas of oral saga narrative proverbs and their associated devices, gnomes, aphorisms, and the various array of other wisdom texts, constitute an inventory of relatively fixed phrases which served as the building blocks, can be culled from extant sources, and can then be studied both for literary critical purposes and yet also for the insights they may provide into the customs and methods of pre-literate saga narrative. Over the past decade of my work with proverbs in the sagas, I have progressed from studying composers’ inclusion of wisdom texts for the delineation of thematic structuring to their likely use of paroemial allusion as a way of emphasizing the point of their stories. Most recently, though, and with particular reference to Clover’s development of “immanent saga,” I have come to the view that the proverbs we notice in the Íslendingasögurmight be studied more accurately as partially extant evidence of the early existence of a much larger and more complex oral repository of wisdom formulas central to the ethics and mores of pre-literate Nordic culture. This repository must have been so widely embedded in the consciousness that it informed the very thinking even of the literate and in some cases highly educated saga composers, as well as the characters and utterances they described. As Walter J. Ong wrote of pre-literate society, proverbs “form the substance of thought itself. Thought . . . consists in them.”[35 ]
Elsewhere I have studied how our awareness of PCP may enhance our reading of the þáttr, or short story, of Hreiðarr heimski, or Hreiðarr the Fool. The hero of this story is not mentally deficient, but is described rather as being “always at home,” in consonance with his nickname, whose etymological roots have to do with qualities suitable at home but not abroad in society. My handout cites proverbial advice from Hávamál on the treatment of such people, and it is reasonable to regard that poem as the primary witness to the background of traditional wisdom operative in PCP. Thus, the contemporary audience, learning of Hreiðarr’s condition, automatically sought reference in this area of communal paroemial thinking in forming its expectations of Hreiðarr, his limitations and his likely behavior, as well as any dangers attendant upon his being released from the environment in which he was protected.
In this story the reader’s sympathy is engaged by Hreiðarr’s insistently seeking escape from the limited circumstances of his homely existence, which might even be seen as a proverbially noticed partial cause of the undeveloped state of his personality. As the narrative progresses, his bumptious good natured surface gives way to a more complex and cunning potential. As he argues with and manipulates people who have power over him, his surface naivety is clearly seen to be accompanied by a shrewd sense of strategy suggesting a more astute character in process of growth.
A scene where he inveigles his socially adept and protective brother, Þórðr, into taking him along to the Norwegian court begins with his exclamation, “Wake up, brother, the slug-a-bed is slow to learn! I’m onto something and have just heard a strange sound.” Although the proverb he uses is not found elsewhere in Old Icelandic, our handout shows passages of Hávamál witnessing a body of paroemial wisdom upon which he draws and which instructs his thinking and argument. And with this introduction he elicits from Þórðr the explanation of the sounding of the trumpet for an official meeting, upon which he insists on coming along for the experience.
Hreiðarr’s use of the proverbial background of thinking is most persistent and most obvious when he persuades his brother to take him first to Norway, and then to the king’s court. Demanding to leave Iceland with Þórðr, who would prefer to leave him behind, he warns he may get into more trouble alone in Iceland than with his brother abroad: “Your part will be no easier if I come to blows with men or am otherwise embroiled with those who are after my money and try to steal it away from me.” [171] And when he wants to heed the signal of the trumpet, he objects to his brother’s demand that he stay behind: “We should go together. It will not turn out better for you if I go alone, and you’re not going to talk me out of this trip.” [172] King Magnús wants to have Þórðr with him at court, but with Hreiðarr staying elsewhere: I think you would be lodged better where there are fewer people.” [174] With reference to communal wisdom on the dangers of gossip, he responds, “there are never so few people that word of what is said doesn’t get around, especially when it seems amusing . . . It might happen that people are angered at my words and mock me and make too much of what I have said in jest.” And he then returns to his favorite theme, “it seems to me wiser to be near someone who cares for me, like my brother Þórðr, rather than to be where there are few people and none to take a hand on my behalf.” [174] By this time even a reader possessed of the most basic familiarity with the paroemial inventory of Old Icelandic culture will have felt in his rhetoric the impact of the proverb, “Bare is his back who has no brother,” which, though not in Hávamál, occurs in two of the later Íslendingasögur and is found also in Saxo, who had Icelandic informants for narrative materials known from their country. One might recall here Carolyne Larrington’s observation upon that “living, pulsing, gnomic background” of which Hávamál provides partial witness and which lies at the cognitive core of old North Germanic prose forms as well as its poetry.
We can see how, in Hreiðars þáttr heimska, a composer can use the traditional Nordic wisdom of which Hávamál is the primary extant encoded manifestation for quite various narrative purposes. On the one hand, he refers to the early Icelandic perception that some individuals are better off at home than in public assemblies or a continental court. On the other, he lets his hero use the psychologically persuasive power of this wisdom to get his way with those whom we would expect rather to have power over him. While we might anticipate that proverbial knowledge originates, instructs, and is maintained without being subverted by the unwise or the disingenuous, or subjected to the third eye of ironic reflection, such proves not to be the case in our reading of the Old Icelandic corpus, expecially works of later composition. Though sentential strings arise from, and in their linguistic marking signal, their origin in the human impulse to encode and to impart the limits of productive social behavior, these formulaic admonitions can be and are used creatively by those whose purpose it is to describe the human condition with all its capacities for behavior, including those which lie far outside the normative ways which proverbs were originally used to delineate. In the hands of the saga composers, what was in the first place a body of instruction in wisdom becomes another rhetorically based tool for defining meaning and refining nuance in their narrative descriptions of the whole range of the human potential and aspiration.
Application 26. Handout. On Paroemial Cognitive Patterning in an Old Icelandic þáttr. Presented in Panel Discussion: "'Most Evident,' or 'Most Tricky'? Toward a Methodolocy for the Paroemiological Study of Medieval Literature and Culture" sponsored by the Early Proverb Society, 50th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI 14-17 May 2015.
Richard L. Harris, English Department, University of Saskatchewan heorot@sasktel.net
Walter J. Ong on the pre-literate repository of knowledge and its structuring of human thought:
“How could you ever call back to mind what you had so laboriously worked out? The only answer is: Think memorable thoughts. . . . you have to put your thinking into mnemonic patterns . . . Your thought must come into being in . . . epithetic and formulary expressions . . . in proverbs which are constantly heard by everyone so that they come to mind readily and which themselves are patterned for retension and ready to recall, or in other mnemonic form. Serious thought is intertwined with memory systems. Mnemonic needs determine even syntax. (Havelock 1963, pp. 87-96. 131-2. 294-6).” p. 34.
“Fixed, often rhythmically balanced, expressions of this sort . . . can be found occasionally in print, indeed can be ‘looked up’ in books of sayings, but in oral cultures they are not occasional. They are incessant. They form the substance of thought itself. Thought in any extended form is impossible without them, for it consists in them.” p. 35.
Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word. NY, 1982, 2002.
“I contend that there was a body of folk-wisdom, not yet in metrical form, a body which can be sensed as a living, pulsing, gnomic background to all Germanic poetry—not just verse specifically intended as didactic.” Carolyne Larrington, A Store of Common Sense, Oxford, 1993, p. 18.
Work particularly with the process of proverbial allusion has led me to consider the proposition that the proverbs which we notice in the Íslendingasögur might be studied more accurately as partially extant evidence of the early existence of a much larger and more complex oral repository of wisdom formulas central to the ethics and mores of the pre-literate culture. In fact, it must in its immanent entirety have delineated those conceptual structures describing the behavioural expectations of the pre-literate society of Iceland and its inhabitants’ continental forebears. Such a repository was so deeply embedded in the consciousness and of such profound psychic impact that it informed, at least in part, the very thinking even of the literate and in some cases highly educated composers of the sagas, as well as that of the characters whose utterances and undertakings they described. This paroemial cognitive patterning of the pre-literate saga mind, though so far of purely conjectured existence and with little clarity of form or content, may eventually prove useful to us in our effort to understand what the sagas, written as they were on the cusp of that society’s transition into literacy, were meant to be about.
Richard L. Harris. ‘In the Beginning was the Proverb: Communal Wisdom and Individual Deeds in the Íslendingasögur,’ for “Word-Play: Proverbs in the Middle Ages,” session sponsored by Classics, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Univ. of Saskatchewan. The 48th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, 9 May 2013.
My adoption of the term paroemial cognitive patterning was meant to address perceived reflections of an ancient background of communal wisdom in particular passages of [saga] narrative where there is neither utteranceof, nor the least explicit allusionto its formulaic encoding in proverb texts.
Richard L. Harris, ‘On the Decline of Paroemial Cognitive Patterning in Some Later Icelandic Sagas,’ for Old Norse Discussion Group, MLA, Chicago, 10 January 2014.
The character of Hreiðarr heimski:
Hann var ljótr maðr ok varla sjálfbjargi fyr vits sǫkum. Hann var manna frávastr ok vel at afli búinn ok hógværr í skapi, ok var hann heima jafnan. [ÍF XXIII. Morkinskinna I. 26. 152.]
. . . an ugly man and had scarcely the wits to take care of himself. He was swift of foot and very strong, with an easygoing disposition. [Andersson and Gade, tr. Morkinskinna 24. 171.]
1. Foolish people: the witness of Hávamál to the paroemial background:
St. 6. Þá er horskr ok þǫgull kømr heimisgarða til,/sjaldan verðr víti vǫrom;/þvíat óbrigða vin fær maðr aldregi/en manvit mikit. [ ]
When a wise and silent man comes to a homestead seldom does shame befall the wary; for no more trustworthy friend can any man get than a store of common sense. [Larrington, The Poetic Edda. “Sayings ot he High One”. 6.15.]
St. 17. Kópir afglapi er til kynnis kømr,/þylsk hann um eða þrumir;/allt er senn, ef hann sylg um getr;/uppi er þá geð guma. [ ]
The fool gapes when he comes to visit, he mutters to himself or keeps silent; but it’s all up with him if he gets a swig of drink; the man’s mind is exposed. [Larrington, The Poetic Edda. Sayings ot he High One. 17.16.]
St. 27. Ósnotr maðr, er með aldir kømr,/þat er batst at hann þegi;/engi þat veit at hann ekki kann,/nema hann mæli til mart./veita maðr hinn er vetki veit,/þótt hann mæli til mart. [ ]
The foolish man in company does best if he stays silent; no one will know that he knows nothing, unless he talks too much. [Larrington, The Poetic Edda. Sayings ot he High One. 27.18.]
2. The Slug-a-bed.
“Vaki þú, bróðir! Fátt veit sá er søfr.” [ÍF XXIII. Morkinskinna I. 26. 153.]
“Wake up, brother. The slug-a-bed is slow to learn.” [Andersson and Gade, tr. Morkinskinna 24. 171.]
3. A brother’s protection: Hreiðarr heimski argues with his brother Þórðr and with King Magnús using this idea:
“. . .mun þá hverr maðr draga af mér fé okkat, alls ek kann engi forræði þau er nýt eru. Ok era þér þá betra hlut í at eiga ef ek ber á mǫnnum eða gerik aðra óvísu, þeim er um fé mitt sitja at lokka af mér, en eptir þat sé ek barðr eða meiddr fyr mína tilgerðir; enda er þat sannast í at þér mun torsótt at halda mér eptir er ek vil fara.” [ÍF XXIII. Morkinskinna I. 26. 152.]
“Everybody will set about cheating me out of our money since I have no management skills that will avail. Your part will be not easier if I come to blows with men or am otherwise embroiled with those who are after my money and try to steal it from me. It might turn out that I am beaten or wounded because of my actions. It is also true that it will be hard to hold me back if I want to make the voyage.” [Andersson and Gade, tr. Morkinskinna 24. 171.]
“Svá er þat ok,” segir hann, “en eigi mun svá mannfátt vera at eigi komi þat þó upp er mælt verðr, allra helzt þar er hlœgi þykkir í, en ek maðr ekki orðvarr, ok jafnan berr mér mart á góma. Nú kann vera at þeir reiði orð mín fyr aðra menn ok spotti mik ok drepi þat at ferligu er ek hefi at gamni eða mælik. Nú sýnisk mér hitt vitrligra at vera heldr hjá þeim er um mik hyggr, sem Þórðr er bróðir minn, þótt þar sé heldr fjǫlmenni, en hinnug þótt menn sé fáir ok sé þar engi til umbóta. [ÍF XXIII. Morkinskinna I. 26. 157.]
“That is so,” said Hreiðarr, “but there are never so few people that word of what is said doesn’t get around, especially if it seems amusing. I’m not cautious in my speech, and a lot of words slip out. It might happen that people are angered at my words and mock me and make too much of what I have said in Jest. It seems to me wiser to be near someone who cares for me, like my brother Þórðr, even if there are a lot of people present, rahter than to be where there are few people and none to take a hand on my behalf.”[Andersson and Gade, tr. Morkinskinna 24. 174.]
Saxo’s version of Berr er hverr at baki, nema sér bróður eigi:
O-R Liber quintus. 114. III. 8. At ubi ad regiam perventum est, prior introitum petens fratrem pone consequi iubet. . . . Ericus itaque semifusus nudum habere tergum fraternitatis inopem referebat.
PF Book V. 128. Erik approaches Frothi's court:
When he reached the palace, before seeking admittance he asked his brother to follow close behind him. . . . Erik, leaning at an angle, remarked that a brotherless man has a bare back. 42 HED 77 42This is a popular saying quoted more than once in the sagas: Berr er hverr at baki, nema sér bróður eigi (Bare is the back of the man without a brother). This is found in Njáls Saga 152 and Grettis Saga 82. cf. Kallstenius p. 20, no. 17, where he gives a Danish equivalent.
Saxo (Kallstenius) 20. Frändskap. 17. nudum habere tergum fraternitatis inopem, referebat, s. 13519. – Bar er broderløs Bag, Vedel s. 8911. Se vidare D n:r 395 med komm., Rosenberg a. a. II s. 601 not, Gering Ark 32 s. 6 och JR II n:r 169 (s. 19).
TPMA 2. 128. BRUDER/frère/brother 1. Ein Bruder ist wertvoll und von grossem Nutzen 1.3. Wer keinen Bruder hat, ist nackt (ungeschützt) Mlat. 9 Nudum habere tergum fraternitatis inopem, referebat (scil. Ericus) Er (Ericus) rief, dass der Bruderlose einen ungeschützten Rücken habe SAXO GRAMM. 135, 19. Nord. 10.11 Berr er hverr á bakinu (NJÁLS SAGA: at baki), nema sér bróður eigi Jeder ist am Rücken nackt, ausser demjenigen, der einen Bruder hat GRETTIS SAGA 82, 13 (= JÓNSSON, ARKIV 25. GERING S. 6. JÓNSSON 22). NJÁLS SAGA 152, 5. 12 Fratribus orbatus est pro nudo reputatus. – Bar ær brodherløss man Jemand, der seiner Brüder beraubt ist, wird als nackt angesehen. – Ein bruderloser Mann ist nackt LÅLE 395. Variiert: 13 Opt kømr mér Mána brúþar (H.s.: bjarnar2) Í byrvind Brœþraleyse; Hyggjomk umb, Es hildr þróask Oft kommt mir der Mangel an Brüdern in den Sinn (wörtl.: in den Fahrtwind der Mondbraut [des Mondbären]); ich denke darüber nach, wenn der Kampflärm anschwillt EGILL, SONATORREK 13, 1 (→EGILS SAGA S. 305).
Andersson, Theodore M. “The Displacement of the Heroic Ideal in the Family Sagas,” Speculum 45 1970 575-93.
___________________ . “The Textual Evidence for an Oral Family Saga,” Arkiv förnordisk filologi 1966 81 1-23.
Clover, Carol. “The Long Prose Form,” Arkiv förnordisk filologi 1986 101 10-39.
Danielsson, Tommy. Hrafnkels saga: eller Fallet med den undflyende traditionen. Södertälje 2002.
________________ . Sagorna om Norges kungar: Från Magnús góði till Magnús Erlingsson. Södertälje 2002.
Gísli Sigurðsson. The Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition. A Discourse on Method. Cambridge, Mass. 2004.
________________ . “16. Orality and Literacy in the Sagas of the Icelanders,” in A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture, ed. R. McTurk. Oxford 2005 285-301.
Harris, Richard L. Concordance to the Proverbs and Proverbial Materials in the Old Icelandic Sagas.
______________. “In the Beginning was the Proverb: Communal Wisdom and Individual Deeds in the Íslendingasögur” Presented at the 48th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, May 2013.
______________. “ ‘Jafnan segir inn ríkri ráð.’ Proverbial Allusion and the Implied Proverb in Fóstbræðra saga.” To appear shortly in New Norse Studies, ed. Jeffrey Turco, a volume in the Islandica Series of the Fiske Collection, Cornell University.
______________. “The Literary Uses of Proverbs in Njáls saga.” Presented for CMRS, St. Louis University, at the 36th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, 6 May 2001. Published in Proverbium 18 2001, 149-166, in a revised and expanded version.
______________. “The Proverbial Heart of Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða: ‘Mér þykkir þar heimskum manni at duga, sem þú ert,’” Scandinavian-Canadian Studies 16 2006 28-54.
Larrington, Carolyne, tr. The Poetic Edda. Oxford 1996.
________________________ . A Store of Common Sense: Gnomic Theme and Style in Old Icelandic and Old English Wisdom Poetry. Oxford 1993.
Morkinskinna. Ed. Ármann Jakobsson and Þórður Ingi Guðjónsson. 2 vols. Íslenzk fornrit. 23-24. Reykjavík 2011.
Morkinskinna. The Earliest Icelandic Chronicle of the Norwegian Kings (1030-1157) Tr. Theordore M. Andersson and Kari Ellen Gade. Islandica 51. Ithaca 2000.
Thesaurus Proverbiorum Medii Aevi. Lexikon der Sprichwörter des romanisch-germanischen Mittelalters. Kuratorium Singer. Vols. 1-13 & Quellenverzeichnis Berlin & New York 1995-2002.
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