Viking Mediologies: A New History of Skaldic Poetics

By Kate Heslop

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 kviðuháttr remembers histories of ruin and loss. Skaldic ekphrasis discloses and reproduces the presence of the gods. Dróttkvætt 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 dróttkvætt as the output of a syllable-spewing hurdy-gurdy—a poetry machine.

Offering both new readings of both canonical works such as Ynglingatal, Ragnarsdrápa, and Háttatal, and examinations of lesser-known texts like Glymdrápa, Líknarbraut, and Sturla Þórðarson’s Hákonarkviða, Viking Mediologies explores the powers and limits of poetic mediation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9780823298266

Kate Heslop

Kate Heslop is an Associate Professor in the Scandinavian Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on memory, mediality, and the senses in Old Norse textual culture. Recent edited volumes include (with Jürg Glauser) RE:writing: Medial Perspectives on Textual Culture in the Icelandic Middle Ages and (with Klaus Müller-Wille and others) Skandinavische Schriftlandschaften / Scandinavian Textscapes.

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Cover: Viking Mediologies, A New History of Skaldic Poetics by Heslop

FORDHAM SERIES IN MEDIEVAL STUDIES

Franklin T. Harkins and Mary C. Erler, series editors

VIKING MEDIOLOGIES

A New History of Skaldic Poetics

KATE HESLOP

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York    2022

Copyright © 2022 Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Heslop, Kate, author.

Title: Viking mediologies: a new history of Skaldic poetics / Kate Heslop.

Description: First edition. | New York: Fordham University Press, 2022. | Series: Fordham series in medieval studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021056770 | ISBN 9780823298242 (hardback) | ISBN 9780823298259 (paperback) | ISBN 9780823298266 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Scalds and scaldic poetry—History and criticism. | Poetics. | LCGFT: Literary criticism.

Classification: LCC PT7172 .H47 2022 | DDC 839/.61009—dc23/eng/20211122

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021056770

Printed in the United States of America

24 23 22 5 4 3 2 1

First edition

CONTENTS

General Abbreviations

Abbreviations for Poets and Poems

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART 1. MAKING MEMORIES

Rök and Ynglingatal

1.   Death in Place

2.   Forging the Chain

Stone—Stanza—Memory

PART 2. SEEING THINGS

3.   The Viking Eye

4.   Seeing, Knowing, and Believing in the Prose Edda

PART 3. HEARING VOICES

5.  The Noise of Poetry

6.  A Poetry Machine

Conclusion

Notes

References

Index

Color Plates

GENERAL ABBREVIATIONS

ABBREVIATIONS FOR POETS AND POEMS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A minor but persistent source of confusion for beginning students of skaldic poetry is the way that skalds refer to themselves in the first-person plural. It’s just a poetic convention, I tell my students, ducking the reasonable question—how did it become conventional? What is it about skaldic performance that this verbal tic responds to, in a convincing enough way to be taken up by generations of poets? I will suggest in this book that the skald’s art was a profoundly dialogic and intersubjective one, circulating and competing with communal, locally anchored narratives, voicing the fears and hopes of the royal retinue, and borne on into posterity by many voices and pens. The image of the monologuing skald in a purely binary relationship of exchange with his patron is in many ways a mystification, introduced in the saga transmission to serve its own ends. It is, therefore, all the more pleasurable and personally meaningful to acknowledge my own interlocutors and supporters—though I am aware that the intersubjectivity of academic work doesn’t guarantee preservation over centuries of oral transmission.

I have been enormously fortunate in my Old Norse teachers: Margaret Clunies Ross, Judy Quinn, and Geraldine Barnes in Sydney, Diana Whaley in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and Jürg Glauser in Zurich. This book rises out of the intersection of two large projects I was involved with, the Skaldic Editing Project in Sydney and Newcastle (now Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages, whose editions I gratefully cite), and the Swiss National Science Foundation project Medienwandel—Medienwechsel—Medienwissen (Mediality: Historical Perspectives) in Zurich. These projects formed my ideas of skaldic media, and I am deeply indebted to the Learned Ladies (as the General Editors of the skaldic project are known) and the members of the mediality colloquium. My current department at UC Berkeley is a supportive and stimulating new home.

Margaret Clunies Ross, Klaus Müller-Wille, Karin Sanders, and Jonas Wellendorf read earlier versions of my manuscript in whole or in part and gave valuable feedback, as did members of the Townsend Fellowship group, the Medieval Studies program, and the Old Norse graduate seminar at Berkeley. I also profited from the comments of the anonymous readers for Fordham University Press. Too many colleagues to name helped with advice and materials—to them, heartfelt thanks. For help with translating, checking, proof-reading, bibliography, and indexing, I am grateful to Campbell Ewing, Nicola Barfoot, Michael Lawson, Rue Taylor, and Stephanie Ward. None of these people are responsible for those of my errors which remain despite all of our best efforts.

I have presented parts of this study to audiences in Zurich, Basel, Reykjavik, Oslo, Berkeley, Kalamazoo, Oxford, and Cambridge and to meetings of the Society for Advancement of Scandinavian Study and have benefited greatly from questions and feedback at those places. Most of Part II was written while I was a Snorri Sturluson Fellow at the Stofnun Árna Magnússonar in Reykjavik and on sabbatical at the University of Zurich. I am grateful to my hosts in both places for their hospitality and access to their excellent collections and libraries. I gladly acknowledge the financial support of the Stofnun Sigurðar Nordals and the Osher Foundation. For permission to reproduce objects in their collections, I thank the Swedish National Heritage Board, Bavarian State Library, Swedish National Museum, Dalarna Museum, Uppsala University Library, and Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies.

Friends in Zurich and Berkeley accompanied this project through its long gestation, and, especially in the last phases of writing, offered the support which enabled it to get done. My wife, Sevgi, and daughter, Eleanor, have been remarkably patient when my book robbed them of time and attention that was rightly theirs.

INTRODUCTION

Egill Skallagrímsson, then a surly teenager, met Arinbjǫrn Þórisson on his first trip out of Iceland. Egill was impressed by the older youth, ‘sought [his] friendship and followed him around everywhere.’¹ Their relationship was to last for the rest of Arinbjǫrn’s life. The friends meet in Norway, England, Frisia. They give each other presents (a shipload of timber, gold rings, a sword, a decorated sail, a silk cloak, a suit of clothes made of multicolored English cloth). Egill marries one of Arinbjǫrn’s cousins, Ásgerðr, and takes up the cause of another, Þorsteinn, and of Arinbjǫrn’s sister Gyða. For his part, Arinbjǫrn intercedes on Egill’s behalf with his royal patrons Eiríkr blóðøx (blood-axe) and Hákon Aðalsteinsfóstri (foster son of Æthelstan). Most importantly, Arinbjǫrn is a kind of muse, knowing just what to say to make his friend break into verse. His rhetorical skill extracts Egill’s poetic confession of love for Ásgerðr. (This is a case where the saying applies that you can tell anything to a friend, Egill admits.)² And when the two find themselves in a tight spot in York and have to persuade Eiríkr blóðøx to accept a poem as a head-ransom, in lieu of Egill’s life, it is Arinbjǫrn who reminds the king of the poet’s command of posterity: "If Egil has spoken badly of the king […] he can make recompense with words of praise that will live for ever (uppi vera)."³ As impresario, Arinbjǫrn has an ear for what his star soloist needs to deliver:

My advice is for you to stay awake all night and make a poem in praise of King Eirik. I feel a drapa of twenty stanzas would be appropriate, and you could deliver it when we go to see the king tomorrow.⁴

When a twittering swallow distracts Egill, struggling in his garret to eke out twenty stanzas, who sits outside on the roof all night to keep the shape-shifter at bay but Arinbjǫrn?

Egill’s greatest gift to his friend is a poem. The saga reports that Egill was getting on in years and permanently settled back in Iceland when he composed a poem usually referred to as Arinbjarnarkviða (Poem about Arinbjǫrn). A single fragmentary medieval text survives.⁵ Its central conceit is ancient: the praise of a gift.⁶ Generosity is to miserliness as praise is to slander, Egill insists, right speech and action allow what is good to circulate. Or, expressed in the paradoxical way typical of this kind of poetry, Arinbjørn is fierce to money (fégrimmr, st. 22), ridding himself of wealth as if he hated it, and Egill, no friend-thief (vinþjófr, st. 13), repays him with the praise that is his due. Poetry is embedded in an interpersonal situation and a context of economic exchange. But the poem destabilizes these neatly balanced oppositions with another, parodic, gift to whose giver Egill is anything but grateful.⁷ King Eiríkr gives Egill his head in the head-ransom episode, but only in the sense that he forbears from taking it, so Egill offers the recompense to Arinbjǫrn instead, in the form of an extraordinary blazon of his own head. It is a wolf-grey hood’s stump (ulfgrátt hattar staup, st. 7) adorned with dark hair (døkkva skǫr, st. 3), a voice-plane, or tongue (omunlokarr, st. 15), a multitude of teeth (tannfjǫlð, st. 9), blackish hollows of deep brows, or eyes (sǫkk sámleit síðra brúna, st. 8), and hearing-tents, gifted with listening, or ears (hlertjǫld hlustum gǫfguð, st. 9). Bizarrely arresting circumlocutions such as mouth of hearing (hlustamunnr, st. 6) and handspan of audition (spǫnn heyrnar, st. 19), both of which refer to the ears, center as they destabilize the most intimately felt of unities. Further body parts, the homesteads of the halberd (hands: atgeirs toptir, st. 21) and speech-servant (tongue: málþjónn, st. 25), circulate alongside both the rings (hringar, st. 22) offered by the generous lord, and material and corporeal metaphors for the poem: wood worked by the tongue, a cairn climbed by poetry’s feet, or, dragging Arinbjǫrn’s fame up to new heights, a pulling-rope (drógseil, st. 19) of the ears. In their willed obscurity, kennings (as these circumlocutions are called in Norse poetics) raise questions of representation with unusual insistence—in what respect is this similar to that? How far can likeness be pushed before it collapses? Those of Arinbjarnarkviða, with their kaleidoscopic shifts of vehicle, do so in an acute form referred to as monstered (nykraðr) or centaured (finngálknaðr) in the poetological treatises.⁸ They are typical of a poetics whose metaphorical language sets the master medium of premodernity, the body, in motion among other media—gold, words, stones.

Egill’s poetry about Arinbjǫrn offers a justly famous memorial image:

25. Vask árvakr,

bark orð saman

með málþjóns

morginverkum;

hlóðk lofkǫst.

þann’s lengi stendr

óbrotgjarn

í bragar túni.

(I was awake early,

I bore words together

with the speech-servant’s

morning stint;

heaped up a praise-cairn,

one that’ll long stand,

uneager to break

in poetry’s homefield.)

The poet lugs words together and piles them high in imitation of another memorial technology, the cairn (kǫstr). Rather than simply claiming durability for the linguistic form the poet constructs, the image of the cairn, delicately circumscribed by the litotes of uneager to break (óbrotgjarn), suggests that poetic memorialization is shared and processual. A cairn stands because many hands maintain it. Egill’s poem lives on, barely, thanks to an unending labor of repetition. Such persistent but vulnerable claims to mediate memory, presence, and praise lie at the heart of skaldic poetry.

The present book is a study of premodern media. It investigates the conditions of possibility for poetic performance in the Viking Age (c. 750–1050 CE), maps the place of poetry in the media landscape of premodern Scandinavia, explores the mediologies that key works elaborate, and reflects on media change in the Icelandic High Middle Ages (c. 1050–1300 CE). At its heart is the figure of the skald (poet). Skalds were the masters of poetic praise and blame at the courts of Scandinavian rulers in the Viking Age. Their poetic trademark, an intricately figured stanzaic form known as dróttkvætt (court poetry), was invented sometime around the beginning of this period. As the name dróttkvætt suggests, the skalds claimed the discursive formation of courtliness as their prerogative. But they needed to carve out a domain for themselves in competition with other media of aristocratic self-representation: visual arts, runic monuments, and the common Germanic heritage of alliterative poetry. In skaldic verses we eavesdrop as experts hammer out ideas about the power and limits of their new kind of poetry.

Mobile, hybrid, diasporic social formations—bands of raiders and traders, petty kingdoms, colonial expeditions—achieved new prominence in the Viking Age.⁹ Skalds offered the leaders of these groups something uniquely valuable. They claimed to be able to capture communal and contingent meanings, the stuff of place-based memoria and embodied experience, and re-mediate them in authored, memorable, reproducible works. Like contemporary runic monuments and visual art, the dróttkvætt stanza held out the promise of permanence, wide dissemination, and performative force. As writing arrived in Scandinavia in the wake of Christianization (c. 1000), the media landscape shifted again. Skaldic poetry, the most conservative of Old Norse literary genres, continued in some ways in the furrow plowed by the earliest poets. Change also came to the skalds. In the poetry of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, they adjusted to the new demands of a literate audience. At the same time, vernacular writing on poetry and rhetoric in the Icelandic High Middle Ages used the skaldic poetic tradition to explore fundamental questions about language, representation, and belief.

The mediology of my title is meant in two interlocking senses. Conceiving of skaldic poetry as a node in a network of medial practices, I study its place in the broader media landscape of the Viking Age and seek to describe how different media interacted in this particular historical setting. I also investigate how the poems understand their own materiality and ability to act in the world—how they are a kind of talk about media. The medial imaginary is a reservoir of thought, in Hans Blumenberg’s words, a catalytic sphere from which the universe of concepts continually renews itself.¹⁰ In Old Norse this stretches from rare explicit theorizations, through self-reflexive moments at the thresholds of texts, to a profusion of medial metaphors—talking heads, automatic verse-generators, eyes transformed into starry memorials, and the ecstatic, agonizing, memory-erasing, poetic-tranceinducing me(a)dium of poetry, wrested by the god Óðinn from the giants. Interferences, discontinuities, and impurities characterize the premodern Scandinavian media landscape, lending it enormous richness and potential.

Despite this, the dichotomy of oral versus literate transmission dominates many studies of skaldic poetry. Gripped by the nationalist passions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the protagonists of the bookprose/ freeprose debate in Old Norse studies clashed over the roles of indigenous, collective oral tradition and individual, learned authorship in the genesis of the long prose form known as the saga. This controversy left its mark on debates about other Old Norse literary genres too. In the case of skaldic poetry, it drives an implicit division of the corpus at the convenient watershed between orality and literacy provided by the conversion of Scandinavia to Christianity. And, crucially, it obscures the rich media environment in which Viking Age and medieval poets worked, both before and after the arrival of writing. In this book I aim to break with this exclusionary dualism, focusing instead on the interferences between media practices and discourses in the premodern North.

THE MEDIUM AND THE MEDIA

Media studies in its classic form concerns itself with the forms, content, history, and effects of mass media technologies: newspapers, radio, television, film, and so on.¹¹ From this perspective, media are communications media, and the word medium names the ideally neutral or noiseless channel that carries a message between sender and receiver, described in Shannon and Weaver’s theory of information transfer.¹² But the concept of a medium existed long before the media became the word for our information-saturated contemporary lifeworld—a terminological innovation that dates from the mid-eighteenth century.¹³ The idea of the medium as a third term that intervenes between two extremes has a prehistory stretching back to antiquity, as recent work has disclosed.¹⁴ Here the key move is not from here to there, as in Shannon and Weaver’s metaphor of the channel, but suspension in an in-between-ness already signaled by the etymology of the word medium itself. Medium is ultimately derived from the Indo-European root *medhios (radical *me- plus adverbial -dhi, the whole meaning: in the midst), as is the equivalent Greek expression to metaxu.¹⁵ Not yet the object of a systematic theory, the premodern medium is a loose array of practices and reflections upon them in domains such as perception, religious belief, and representation.

According to premodern thinkers, the medium is what allows distant objects to actively affect the sensorium. It is thus central to explanations of perception. The visual ray, for instance, is emitted by the eye, travels through the diaphanous in-between (to metaxu) seeking its object, and returns to the soul bearing the shape and color of the percept.¹⁶ Aristotle argues that multiple listeners can hear the same sound thanks to subtle and mysterious affections of the air, not without body.¹⁷ Ideas of mediation also explain how human beings can communicate with the divine, by the mediation of angels.¹⁸ Christ as mediator joins man to God. (For there is one God, and one mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus.)¹⁹ By his dual nature Christ is in the middle (medium) between God and man, partaking in the essence of both.²⁰ Objects such as icons and relics mediate grace according to different representational schemas—the likeness, sometimes miraculous like Veronica’s veil (vera icon), or the metonymical fragment, such as the earth from Golgotha.²¹ Much premodern art and literature uses concepts of mediation to make what is absent present, whether this involves transcendent realms of faith or the ontological play of the illusion. Against the communicative focus of modern media studies, premodern ideas of mediation emphasize processes of perception and representation: how bodies apprehend the world and how signs can stand for, or make present, something else.

These two ways of conceptualizing the medium, as channel of communication and as numinous in-between, might be called in shorthand the technological and the cultural. They first meet in the work of the postwar media theorists Marshall McLuhan and Friedrich Kittler.²² These writers draw attention to the imbrication of medium and message and the shaping force that media technologies, broadly conceived, exert on culture in general. Their insights have been developed, especially in the German-speaking world, into a highly ramified set of hyphenated Medien- subdisciplines (Medien-Archäologie, -Philosophie, -Geschichte, and so on)²³ referred to in English as German media theory.²⁴ Although these theoretical endeavors gladly avail themselves of the prestige of antique roots and the notion of a deep time of media, the Middle Ages has until recently been something of a blind spot.²⁵ This is now changing, first in the German-speaking world, where this body of theory was originally at home, and more recently elsewhere too.²⁶

If a definition of the medium is to encompass both the media of our contemporary lifeworld and the medieval concept of a medium—and maybe this is an impossible ask—it would have to be rather general. Semiotician Roland Posner suggests that the medium is a system of means of communication that enables repeated communications [but] imposes certain consistent restrictions on the semiotic processes that are generated within it.²⁷ Although still limited to communication, his definition usefully shifts attention from semantics, the what of cultural meaning, to how cultural meaning is produced, transmitted, and received and how these meanings are conditioned by materialities of communication.²⁸ Analogous moves in literary study have generated a proliferation of alternatives to critical reading: Franco Moretti’s advocacy for distant reading, Rita Felski’s celebration of everyday reading, Eve Sedgwick’s disavowal of paranoid reading, or Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s passion for presence.²⁹ Such post-hermeneutic currents underlie interest in the mediality of medieval culture, with its potential to throw new light on both the premodern material³⁰ and—perhaps more importantly—on the assumptions that are brought to its study.³¹

MEDIALITY

In medieval studies, the mid-twentieth-century theorizations of oral and literate mentalities of Eric Havelock, Walter Ong, Jack Goody and Ian Watt, Ruth Finnegan, and Michael Clanchy are the best-known instances of the heuristic potential of a medial perspective.³² Media theorists such as McLuhan (who taught Ong at Saint Louis University) and his University of Toronto colleague Harold Innis were important influences on these sociological studies of the civilizational effects of media.³³ Complementary to them, and especially influential in Old Norse studies, was the Oral Theory of Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord, with its focus on the effects of oral culture on literary creativity.³⁴ More recent research into premodern mediality moves beyond merely contrastive accounts of orality and literacy. Paul Zumthor’s pathbreaking concept of vocality began to bring the constitutively mixed nature of medieval media into focus.³⁵ Studies of cultural techniques concern themselves with a broader range of phenomena, investigating how ensembles of signs, practices, and technologies gradually come together into new medial forms.³⁶ More recent work also recognizes the historical specificity of particular media constellations, something that tends to be elided in the sweeping pronouncements of scholars of orality and literacy. In Old Norse studies, this has combined fruitfully with the new philological interest in medieval manuscripts as the work of multiple hands, produced, used, copied, and rewritten in specific contexts, to produce microhistories of particular writing practices. A few examples giving a sense of the range of this approach are recent projects on the textual culture of Vadstena Abbey, the manuscripts of Njáls saga, or the versions of the eddic poem Vǫluspá.³⁷

An important aspect of the historical specificity of Old Norse textual culture is the fact that it is much more committed to the preservation of pre-Christian material than are neighbor literatures such as medieval German, French, or English. In western Europe perhaps only the Celtic literatures are comparable in their wealth of vernacular texts that transmit such material. Old Norse textual culture, preserved in the main in Icelandic manuscripts, is characterized by a mixing of Latinate, learned clerical traits with a vigorous lay imagination in which elements of pre-Christian narratives and ways of looking at the world remained important well into the era of writing. Distinct temporal and representational logics are proposed in the pre-Christian mythology preserved in Old Norse texts—needless to say, most of it at a greater or lesser remove in time and framed by Christian reception. For Christian authors, mediation was an essential but temporary state of affairs. It was the only way humans could gain some knowledge of God at the present moment, but it was due to be permanently short-circuited, for the saved at least, at the end of time. Metaphors of mediated vision were important in conveying this theological truth. By contrast, eschatology seems to have been of less importance in pre-Christian Norse conceptions of time, where cyclical structures are also prominent. When the eschaton does come into view, in eddic poems such as Vǫluspá and Vafþrúðnismál, the gods are actively seeking to delay it, and humans, while not totally absent (they comprise the patiently waiting einherjar) do not play a very significant role. Not even the gods themselves dwell in eternity, as they are destined to die at ragnarøkkr. The medial strategies used for representing and communicating with the divine are also different when the gods are multiple and multiform, as the pre-Christian Norse gods are. The Norse cosmos is not Tertullian’s book of nature, written by God and meant for human interpretation, but a collection of transformed body parts involved in ongoing acts of creative destruction. Its meanings are historical and particular, like the stars Þórr makes from Þjazi’s eyes, in Hárbarðsljóð, to commemorate the defeated giant:³⁸

19. Ek drap Þjaza inn þrúðmóðga jǫtun,

upp ek varp augum Allvalda sonar

á þann inn heiða himin;

þau eru merki mest minna verka,

þau er allir menn síðan um sé.

(I killed Thiazi, the powerful-minded giant,

I threw up the eyes of Allvaldi’s son

into the bright heaven;

they are the greatest sign of my deeds,

those which since all men can see.)³⁹

Indigenous notions combine in Old Norse texts, not always seamlessly, with the Aristotelean, biblical, and patristic ideas of medium and mediation common to all of Latin Christendom. The interference of the pre-Christian temporal and representational regimes briefly sketched above with these ideas could perhaps begin to be traced in the Norse reception of the concept of figura, a key model of the mediation of meaning for medieval Christian thinkers. Figural interpretation of the Bible proposed that the Jewish history of the Old Testament was a promise, of which the New was the fulfilment. This structure imparted a meaning to history, which played out in real events as it also transcended them in its orientation toward a future immediacy of truth, to be found in Judgement Day and the Kingdom of Heaven. The word figura’s roots in antique rhetoric, traced by Erich Auerbach in a classic article, lent to it as well the sense of a shadow (umbra), "the rhetorical image or circumlocution that conceals, transforms, and even deceives […] a figura under which something other, future, true, lies concealed."⁴⁰

The doctrine of figura taught that historical events were mere mediating instances for a fuller truth. Unsuitable for the Christianizing reception of pre-Christian Norse belief, and incompatible with its conception of gods who cyclically die and reappear, figura nonetheless retained its importance in Old Norse interpretive cultures. The two Norwegian King Óláfrs were understood in a figural sense, and the term figura often appears in rhetorical and poetological contexts in Old Norse.⁴¹ Here it enters into reflections on the shadowiness of dark figures (myrku fígúrur), directly implicating the traditional means of skaldic poetics, Lilja’s hidden old words (hulin fornyrðin), which are also significantly referred to in fourteenth-century poetry as "wiles of the Edda" (eddu list).⁴²

The idea that meaning is hidden within its mediating instance and cannot be known directly (im-mediately), key to theologically inflected thinking about the medium, is indexed in Old Norse less by miðla, the equivalent of mediate, than by a range of