Saturday, December 28, 2013

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As I was returning home from taking my wife to work yesterday, I heard comments on the radio about skaldic poetry, the highly allusive and complicated verse typified by the works of Snorri Sturluson and Egill Skallagrímsson.  In them, the speaker (whose name I sadly forget) noted the deep background knowledge that audiences of skaldic verse had to have to understand what the skalds were saying to them.  (As the skalds were usually saying nice things about the lords who supported them, the audiences usually had reason to know what was being said; even the doughty Nordic folks liked hearing people speak well of them.)

I know of people who might say that we have lost the ability to have such things, that we do not teach our children enough of the old ways and common backgrounds for us to have such a body of work.  But I think those people are wrong; we do still have the ability to make such works happen, to refer to things in arcane kennings, through obscure metonymy and synecdoche.  Indeed, we are more able to do so; more people can be counted on to know more things or, failing that, to know where to go to learn of those things.  For instance, when I wrote some days ago that "The Muse is far away / On Oreb or on Sinai," I expected that my readers would either mark the association with Milton's Paradise Lost (Book I, lines 6-7), already having the knowledge or running a simple search for "Oreb or on Sinai," and so would understand what I wrote without my having to write it.  Or when I wrote earlier that "Jeff Lynne's cheery call has been answered abundantly," people would know who Lynne is or would find out quickly.  And there are other examples besides.

We still refer to things form our past, and we recognize now that our past is far more complicated and glorious than we had been led to believe in that same past.  More value is ascribed to more things, not less, and so more is referenced now than once was.  Not only in poetry: are there not Arthurian overtones in the Zelda series (perhaps an essay for another time), and do we not still celebrate retellings of old tales on screens silver, small, and digital?  It is because there are more symbols to navigate that my part of The Work, my study of the academic humanities and teaching of the same, remains valuable.  My colleagues and I are the ones who examine what is done for what works well and what works poorly, writing of how they function and what those functions assert about both the people who produce and the people who consume.  It is only through looking to the past that we can do so; without knowing that Oreb and Sinai are linked by Milton, the repetition of that link makes little sense, and without the training in looking for such things and looking at them in ways admittedly esoteric, what they reveal of writer and reader is hardly evident.

And it needs to be.  For one, there is the link to the cultures of the past from which the cultures of the present are sprung, a link that may lead at times to uncomfortable realizations of ancestral errors but that still serves to ground people in the long line of humanity.  For another, the presentation and manipulation of such symbols as my colleagues and I are wont to explicate serves to influence the thoughts and perspectives of people; media saturation ensures that it is so.  Being able to recognize the symbols that are presented and understand their contexts of origin allows for greater self-control, greater immunity from the ploys of marketers and demagogues, and greater ability of the self to be the self.  And that is certainly a worthy thing.

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