THE EMBER OF THE HANDS – MEMORY AND TRANSMISSION THROUGH KENNINGS IN HARALDSDRÁPA
THE EMBER OF THE HANDS – MEMORY AND TRANSMISSION THROUGH KENNINGS IN HARALDSDRÁPA

Summary/Abstract: On 21 April 1042, the Varangian warrior and future king Haraldr harðráði blinded in public the Byzantine Emperor Mihail and his uncle Constantine. The episode is narrated by two of Haraldr’s skalds: Þórarinn Skeggjason and Þjóðolfr Arnórsson. In spite of the substantial amount of analysis that has been produced on their stanzas, doubts about the participation of the entire Varangian guard still abound (Kari Ellen Gade 2009). My study answers the question by making use of memory activated through the corpus of kennings analyzed as units of repeated speech in the conceptual field of Eugeniu Coseriu’s text linguistics. Essential dimensions of the internal dynamics of the text, the evocative relations represent the key problem of text linguistics. The appearance of a kenning in different texts represents, each time, an act of translation from a poetic memory to a communicative memory. Due to the reinsertion and reconfiguration processes which can be applied to them, the kennings gain new evocative functions, despite their conventional repeated nature. My study inspects the imagery in the kenning glóðum handa (embers of the hands) of Þórarinn Skeggjason’s Haraldsdrápa, which also occurs in the kenning glóðs Rínar (the embers of the Rhine) in Liðsmannaflokkr, composed c. 1015-16. The analysis of kennings as units of repeated speech in Haraldsdrápa and Liðsmannaflokkr provides consistency through the activation of the evocative functions and a sharper focus on the broader perception of the collective memory as a shared body of knowledge in Old Norse poetry.

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