Icelandic Men and Me

Sagas of Singing, Self and Everyday Life

Robert Faulkner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351929233
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

A sparsely populated island in the North Atlantic recently made worldwide headlines in the Global Financial Crisis and for volcanic eruptions that caused unprecedented chaos to international air travel. Large contemporary audiences have formed very different images of Iceland through the vocal music and music videos of Björk and Sigur Rós. Just below the Arctic Circle, Icelandic men engage in more everyday vocal practices, where singing, literally for one's Self, is an everyday life skill set against a backdrop of unique natural, historical, economic and social phenomena. Their sagas of song and singing are the subject of this book. The original Icelandic Sagas - among the most important collections of medieval European literature - are valued for richly detailed portrayals of individual lives. This book's principle protagonists and collaborators share a heritage where Sagas remain central to national and local identity. While the oral traditions associated with them were largely overwhelmed by European romanticism just over a hundred years ago, ironically, this new vocal music became a key technology for national renewal. Written by an 'immigrant' musician who lived in a remote Icelandic community for over twenty years, this volume focuses upon individual and collective stories about singing as personal and social work. Drawing upon everyday ethnographic and sociological studies of music, and emerging discourse about musical identity, the study uses anthropological, historical and musicological evidence in thinking about songs, singing and Self, and the genderedness of this particular singing practice.

Chapter 1

Telling Tales and Setting the Scene

As both literature and historical document, the significance of the Icelandic sagas can hardly be over-estimated. From a historical perspective they provide meticulous records of events not just in the medieval Icelandic Commonwealth, but also in Scandinavia and the British Isles. They chronicle the earliest voyages by Europeans to the New World, Viking trade with Russia, the first crusades to Palestine and the capture of Jerusalem – even the suppression of uprisings in Bulgaria! As accounts of Viking mythology, the Icelandic Edda poems are undeniably the most important extant sources available. They continue to inspire artists in all kinds of media and provide a practical handbook for contemporary followers of the Viking religion or heiðnitrú. Their misappropriation in the pursuit of radical philosophical, political and social agendas contributed significantly to the rise of Nazism, barbaric pogroms and a World War. The Gods in Edda have even given their names to several days of the week in the modern English-speaking world, though not, interestingly, in contemporary Iceland itself.

However, Icelandic sagas are not concerned just with special events; as literature, they are valued above all for their richly detailed characterizations of everyday life, of family dramas, romances and tragedies. This large collection of literature has played an extensive and complex role in Icelandic identity, a central construct of which is the concept of individuality so prominent in the sagas themselves. Characters in Icelandic medieval literature – Gods and mortals, men and women alike – are often drawn with a keenness for physical and even psychological detail that might easily be mistaken for contemporary idiographic case-study. This kind of representation clearly resonates with a widely held view that every Icelander is a very ‘special case’ and that there is a particularly Icelandic emphasis on autonomous individuality as opposed to the social.¹ Given that little more than a quarter of a million people live on this island of some 100,000 square kilometres, it is easy to see how such a view has been sustainable.

The significance ascribed to the Icelandic sagas in the construction of modern Icelandic identity should thus be recognized from the outset in any ethnography of the descendants of these ninth-century Vikings. Even allowing for Irish monks’ earlier presence, these Norwegian emigrants are considered the first permanent settlers, or landnámsmenn, of this remote and mostly uninhabitable island just south of the Arctic Circle precariously straddling the European and North American tectonic plates on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Against the life- and nation-threatening instability of both climate and geology, it is not surprising that the perceived intransientness of the written word would lead to the sagas becoming the bedrock of modern Icelandic nationhood. In the face of some of the most devastating natural disasters anywhere in the world in the past millennium – notably the Láki volcanic eruptions in 1783 – of consequent famine, poverty, regular smallpox epidemics and often bitterly harsh weather conditions, little else could be pressed into service as a template for renewal and independence. The impact of the 1783 eruptions was felt all over Europe, North America and Africa in failing harvests, extreme weather conditions, a huge spike in mortality rates and even as a key catalyst to the French Revolution. Further large eruptions in the 1870s and extremely hard winters saw around 15,000 Icelanders set sail for a new life in North America. These eruptions make the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull that caused chaos to European and transatlantic air travel for several weeks seem almost insignificant by comparison. No wonder then, that the saga manuscripts themselves, kept safe during several hundred years of hardship and insecurity, became a kind of animist embodiment of ‘authentic’ Icelandicness, as is evidenced by nationalist writings in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and by the importance attached to returning original manuscripts to Iceland. Whilst independence from Denmark was secured in 1944, there is a sense in which Icelandic selfhood was only fully restored with the homecoming of these manuscripts nearly 30 years later. The sagas were one of the most important agents for establishing continuity with the past, a process that, as Hobsbawm and Ranger² observe, was central to the formulation of nationalistic values all over nineteenth-century Europe. Significantly, the sagas and Icelandic language were also being adopted in the nineteenth century by Scandinavian intellectuals, particularly in Denmark, as important elements in common Norse experience.³

Nevertheless, the word saga alludes to oral traditions too. It implies a telling or, more literally, a saying. Given that most sagas were actually written down from a significantly post-hoc position, even generations after the events they claim to report, it is clear that this oral tradition of saying was very largely responsible for their transmission before they were committed to calfskin by mostly unknown writers. Sigurdsson⁴ has reminded us that a reassessment of the Icelandic sagas in the light of what we now know about oral, story-telling cultures is long overdue. Tonkin’s⁵ writings about oral histories might make a particularly useful contribution to any such reassessment in arguing that both literary and oral genres are products of temporal and economic conditions and that the association of oral traditions with social processes and perspectives, and of written ones with historical perspectives, is a fundamentally unsatisfactory antithesis. Tonkin calls for a consistency of theoretical frameworks for both social cognition and historical production in pursuit of understanding situated human beings. Icelandic sagas ought perhaps to be reassessed not just as an oral tradition that was then formalized in a particular, written genre, but, as we shall see, as a collective consciousness that was manifest in extensive retellings, rewritings and singings for centuries after their ‘original’ transcription. Leaving that debate to one side for the moment, we need now only acknowledge that these written forms, centuries later, facilitated the illusion of purity and permanence that was key to their employment on the building site of modern national identity.

This privileging of written forms and romanticizing of universal Icelandic literacy was accompanied by an institutionalized rejection of oral traditions, especially, as we shall see, those musical vocal forms that had survived from pre-Reformation times into the early twentieth century. During the second half of the nineteenth century vocal traditions were adopted increasingly from mainland Europe, explicitly aiming to create a new, collective, national voice. This presents something of a contradiction to earlier claims about the importance of the individual, since older vocal forms like Epic singing or kveðskapur, which are discussed in this book in Chapter 3, would appear to provide a good deal more scope for individualism than notated four-part choral arrangements. Even here though, Icelandic singers found subversive ways to combine strong oral and aural traditions with prescriptive notation-based practice that will be examined later. Nevertheless, it is true that four-part choral singing was employed as a deliberately purposeful agent in this reconstruction of national identity. Firstly, this extreme musical identity ‘make over’ was to be achieved through the nationwide introduction, even imposition, of new vocal styles in churches and homesteads by missionary-musicians who travelled the length and breadth of this difficult terrain introducing these ‘new songs’. Secondly, this was accompanied and facilitated by the publication of new song books and psalters, often prefaced with rhetoric about the symbolic value of ‘singing’ in building family, community and nation.^6,7 Thirdly, the songs, initially simply imported from Europe, were endued with texts, mainly by the Icelandic nationalist poets from the 1830s onward, which extolled desirable Icelandic values. They were particularly Icelandic because they were identified either in the sagas or in that other central theme of Icelandic national identity – landscape and nature. So, as these Icelandic sentiments were being expressed with a new and very foreign musical voice of European romanticism and four-part choral harmony in particular, the older and more indigenous vocal styles were being systematically repressed as symbols of Iceland’s dark ages and its associated material and cultural poverty.

Telling Stories of Everyday Musical Lives

I am already in danger of misleading the reader: this book is not primarily concerned with musical forms in the musicological or analytical sense, neither does it focus on the Icelandic sagas themselves, but on the stories that contemporary Icelanders tell about singing – what they have to say about the songs they sing. More precisely, this book attempts to record Icelandic men’s accounts of singing’s agency in both everyday life and special events, and their thoughts about its meaning and function. I also undertake to interpret these stories in the light of my own observations and experiences, and theorize about how singing is used in the construction, representation and maintenance of personal and social identity. This highlights an important difference between how we identify others, and how people identify themselves. We might even question if people really engage in this reflexivity except that a researcher asks what particular behaviours mean to them and who individuals think they are. The possibility that any account of the behaviour of a group of Icelanders might lose sight of the special individuals in it is an almost impossible thought in traditional Icelandic society where individuals’ unique identities, with all their contradictions, complexities, homo- and heterogenies, are never far from centre stage.

Ethnomusicological studies like those, for example, by Titon,⁸ Rice⁹ and Bakan¹⁰ have all focused on individuals’ experiences in order to make claims about the general, and on the process of theory building as a progression from the idiographic to the universal. Titon¹¹ even sees the knowing of people making music as the ethnomusicology’s new epistemology. Implicit in these enquiry methods is the ‘special case’ mentality so entrenched in Icelandic identity, so that whilst no claims are made for this book as an ethnomusicology, a range of recent European ethnomusicologies do resonate strongly with it. Apart from Rice’s¹² work on music in Bulgaria with a special focus on the Varimezov family, Sugarman’s¹³ study of Albanian singing, Bithell’s^14,15 research into engendered song in Corsica, Finnegan’s¹⁶ seminal documentation of amateur music makers in Milton Keynes, England, Stokes and Bohlman’s¹⁷ edited volume on Celtic music and Stokes’¹⁸ on the musical construction of place in general, all spring to mind. Other recent studies share the Nordic setting of this book, notably Ramnarine’s¹⁹ investigation into Finnish nationalism through new folk music practice and its practitioners, and Goertzen’s²⁰ work on Norwegian fiddle music and its role in Norwegian revival and identity.

In placing individuals centre stage, concepts of local or national identity move to the inter-subjective realm of individual ‘lived’ experiences. The ‘knowing’ of music-makers and their conscious experience also moves the psychological into focus. Key informers’ perceptions of phenomena become the lens through which we examine personal and collective identity. Such studies, like the present one, need unashamedly to emphasize the historical locatedness of all individual experience and its saying, and to admit to partial and transient views of musical behaviours and their meaning. Similarly, they should acknowledge, as Jackson²¹ reminds us, that narrative stories themselves are not lived before they are told, but are part of story-tellers’ lives; it is our dialogue with them that is of central importance in both ethnography and in the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis²² that framed my systematic investigation into Icelandic men’s lived experiences. Such dialogue should help researchers and writers resist the temptation to reify individuals by implying a consistency that may not reflect the reality of the complex and often contradictory thoughts and behaviours that make up those lives.

Furthermore, unlike the written sagas, but like their interpretation, identity is always transient; it is always a work in progress. Nevertheless, for the sake of our psychological integrity we fulfil a need to recognize ourselves, and to be recognized by others, by tying our identity down somewhere and in particular ways, depending on situations and contexts. We associate ourselves with things, people, places, behaviours and values that facilitate a kind of objectification of the otherwise subjective Self. It is this reification of what passes in consciousness that shapes S...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• CD Contents and Notes
• Introduction
• 1 Telling Tales and Setting the Scene
• 2 Baldur’s Saga
• 3 Icelandic Sagas and Songs
• 4 Singing Social Connections
• 5 Songworlds: The Body and Vocal Places
• 6 Songs, Spirituality and Self Therapy
• 7 Singing Himself: Singing and the Construction of Gender Identity
• 8 My Saga
• 9 Vocal Events and Singing’s Agency in Change
• 10  Conclusions, Closure and the Vocal Celebration of Self
• Gallery
• Bibliography, Sound and Film Recordings
• Index