Kate Heslop. Viking Mediologies: A New History of Skaldic Poetics.

Skaldic poetry has a well-deserved reputation as the most inaccessible form of Old Norse-Icelandic literature.For the uninitiated, scholarship on skaldic poetics can feel nearly as intimidating as the poetry itself, even if the Skaldic Project (https://skaldic.org/)has made the corpus far more approachable for the present generation of students and researchers.Viking Mediologies is a welcome book that strikes the balance between breaking new ground and providing an entry point for newcomers to the field.The word "Viking" can be used freely in book titles, but those specifically interested in skaldic poetry as it flourished in the centuries before the introduction of book technologies will not be disappointed.Viking Mediologies lives up to its name, being deeply embedded in the sensory experience of poetry composed, performed, and chiselled into stone in the Viking Age.However, given that our present-day knowledge of the media landscape of the skalds is primarily mediated by the written manuscript page (for the majority of readers, one re-mediated by a digital device), Heslop's book is no less concerned with what changes when drttkvaett (court metre) encounters animal skin, the Latin alphabet, and the performance traditions and music theory of the western European mainstream.Viking Mediologies presents an exploratory framework for the study of skaldic poetics that replaces the idea of a transition from skaldic orality to scribal literacy with one of constant mediation and re-mediation, embodiment, and sensory perception.As Heslop demonstrates, there is no singular Viking orality that makes way for a singular Christian literacy.There are many ways of seeing, hearing, speaking, inscribing, and remembering skaldic poetry.The book grapples with "the ecstatic, agonizing, memory-erasing, poetic-tranceinducing me(a)dium of poetry, wrested by the god inn from the giants" (4) and its transformations as it passes in and out of bodies, flowing sometimes freely, sometimes violently.In working to disentangle Viking and late medieval mediologies, the volume takes a non-linear approach to media and the premodern corpus (12), shifting backwards and forwards in time and space between poems as outwardly dissimilar as Ynglingatal (List of the Ynglingar) and Lknarbraut (Way of Grace).Although the book opens with Egill Skallagrmsson heaping up a praisecairn in words to his friend, Viking Mediologies pays very little attention to skalds as authors.Regardless of one's attitude towards author-centric approaches, skaldic biography is a powerful tool for organizing poetry, with the life of the skald serving as an anchor point for a body of poems that takes on an afterlife of its own.Viking Mediologies offers a very different unifying force, namely that of the body itself-whether corporeal or imagined.Commemoration of the body, and the role of commemorated bodies in constructing landscapes of remembrance, becomes the focus of the first chapter, "Death in Place."Heslop argues in the following chapter, "Forging the Chain," that changes in medium (i.e., the introduction of the manuscript) and religion (the introduction of Christianity) brought subtle changes in how links between royal bodies are organized in poetry and prose.In her view, use of