TY  - CHAP
A1  - McMahon, Brian
T1  - Speech-wrangling : shutting up and shutting out the oral tradition in some Icelandic sagas
T2  - Openness in Medieval Europe / ed. by Manuele Gragnolati and Almut Suerbaum ; Cultural Inquiry ; 23
N2  - This chapter considers the role of prolegomena and authorial interventions in constraining and contextualizing orally derived saga narratives in high medieval Iceland. It examines the question of whether prolegomena were intended to be included in oral renditions of the sagas and, if so, in whose 'voice' they were understood to be spoken. The 'openness' of a saga text - the extent of editorial freedom enjoyed by those concerned with extracting it from the oral milieu - has been much discussed; however, less attention has historically been paid to the freedom which the written texts then afforded any would-be reciter for emending or adapting their content when reading them aloud to a live audience. Prolegomena provide our most instructive source of contemporary commentary on how the written sagas should be understood and transmitted, and they therefore represent distinct and important critical texts in their own right, which inform our understanding of how 'open' or 'fixed' medieval Icelanders understood these extant written sagas to be.
KW  - Oral tradition
KW  - Prologues
KW  - Epilogues
KW  - Authority
KW  - Recitation
KW  - Old Norse
KW  - Saga
KW  - Altnordisch
KW  - Island
KW  - Mündiche Überlieferung
KW  - Schriftlichkeit
KW  - Prolog
KW  - Epilog
KW  - Autorität
Y1  - 2022
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/68700
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-687003
UR  - https://press.ici-berlin.org/doi/10.37050/ci-23/mcmahon_speech-wrangling.pdf
SN  - 978-3-96558-029-9
SN  - 978-3-96558-030-5
SN  - 2627-731X
SP  - 66
EP  - 84
PB  - ICI Press
CY  - Berlin
ER  -