‘It’s A Kind of Magic’ The Poetic Style of Old Norse Juridical Speech Acts from a Comparative Perspective

Please join us for Bianca Patria's online lecture at 15.00 on 12.02 by registering (the registration link is to the right) to receive a Zoom link (the link will be sent shortly before the lecture).

'It’s A Kind of Magic'. The poetic style of Old Norse juridical speech acts from a comparative perspective

The 'poetical' nature of the most well-known Old Norse oath-formula (the tryggðá mál /griða mál sequence) has long been object of attention in the scholarship concerning Germanic juridical institutions. The quasi-metrical nature of the oath, as well as its resort to peculiar stylistic features, have attracted speculations concerning its allegedly primeval antiquity, its purely oral origin, and its relationship to the attested Old Norse poetic tradition. While nineteenth-century philologists had been eager to identify in these lines the relics of an ancient and uninterrupted oral tradition, recent scholarship has refrained from drawing conclusions about the text’s age, based solely on its alliterative and rhythmical form, pointing to the peculiar rhetorical ‘colouring’ that legal texts tend to assume in all kinds of cultures and ages. This lecture will propose an analysis of the style of the tryggða mál formula from a comparative perspective, juxtaposing it to that of ritual speech acts attested in other cultural contexts.