The past has always been remade in the present, remoulded in collective and personal
memory to serve different contemporary ends, whether ideological, political, religious,
social, moral, or other. As the existential opening lines of T. S. Eliot’s poem “Burnt
Norton” (the first in his
Four Quartets collection, written between 1935 and 1942) remind us: “Time present and time past
/ Are both perhaps present in time future / And time future
contained in time past” (171). A slightly different formulation is found later in
the first section of the poem:
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present. (172)
Time, memory, and (Christian) salvation are the core matter of this poem and these
themes are explored from an intimately personal and grounded perspective as well as
from the perspective of all of humankind. As with Eliot’s other major works, the poem
resonates and opens the mind with every new reading. Eliot (b. 1888) was a slightly
younger contemporary of the pioneering sociologist and scholar of collective memory
Maurice Halbwachs (b. 1877). The themes and foci of their inter-war work intersect
and overlap in many respects, though their intellectual background, circumstances,
and emphases were different and I am not sure that they knew each other personally,
or directly engaged with each other’s work. Their personal fates were also very different.
Eliot died in England, his adopted home, aged 76 in 1965; Halbwachs died aged 68 in
the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald in 1945. Eliot—whose antisemitism has come
under scrutiny in recent decades—is commemorated in “Poets’ Corner” in Westminster Abbey in London; Halbwachs (along
with others murdered at Buchenwald
and other Nazi concentration camps) has no personal grave but his name is in the Book
of the Dead for the Buchenwald concentration camp.
Memory as a sociocultural phenomenon is a universal and eternally productive topic.
What is remembered? How? By whom? For whom? Via what media? And how, subsequently,
are memories adapted and reworked in new contexts and at different scales? These are
huge questions that can never be answered absolutely or comprehensively. Indeed, part
of the appeal of the critical study of collective memory lies in the multitude of
possibilities that exist for developing and refining theoretical approaches, in conjunction
with case studies drawn from different societies and different time periods that focus
on sources in a variety of media. In the second decade of the twenty-first century,
this interdisciplinary field is a well-established one. Review essays and chapters
that chart the historiographical development of memory studies as an emerging discipline
point to how the critical thinking and work produced in the 1980s and 1990s by figures
such as Jan and Aleida Assmann, Pierre Nora, and (in the field of medieval studies)
Mary Carruthers and Michael Clanchy, amongst others, laid the foundations for the
current “memory boom” (see Astrid Erll 2011, 3–5)—with all of this work, of course,
building on the pioneering work of earlier figures
such as Maurice Halbwachs. In the twenty-first century, the publication of handbooks,
readers, dedicated journals, and book series, together with the founding of research
centres and dedicated university degree courses that focus on memory studies, are
taken as marking the canonization of memory studies as a field of academic research
within the humanities and the social sciences. As Marek Tamm observed in his 2013
article “Beyond History and Memory: New Perspectives in Memory Studies,” “the 2000s
have been characterised primarily by the institutionalisation, organisation
and systemisation of memory studies” (Tamm 458).
In Old Norse studies, memory as a phenomenon and its function and importance in social,
literary, and legal contexts in medieval Iceland and elsewhere in Scandinavia was
of course always of interest to philologists, historians, and other scholars working
in the field, from the origins of modern scholarship in the nineteenth century and
throughout the twentieth century. But in the past couple of decades, the application
and adaptation of theoretical ideas developed within memory studies to the multidisciplinary
field of Old Norse studies have yielded inspiring and thought-provoking results. Individually
and collaboratively, a number of researchers have already made important contributions
to scholarship in this rapidly expanding area within Old Norse studies. These new insights have shed light on how extant textual and visual sources for early
medieval Scandinavia were shaped by the collective memories of historical events to
which the figures or groups who produced them had access, for example, as well as
improving our understanding of techniques by which important information was memorized
and passed down. There is naturally an enormous amount of work still to do, however, and the alliance
between memory studies and Old Norse studies looks set to be a productive one for
years to come.
The publication of the present special issue of Scandinavian-Canadian Studies is testimony to how vibrant and open the field is—as well as to how much there is
still to do and where early career scholars might direct their intellectual energy
and curiosity. All of the articles included in this volume present insightful case
studies covering important themes and angles: they consider memory with regard to
environmental history, landscape, gender, belief, law, literary, and material culture.
In sum, they add detail and depth to the critical current of thinking and state of
the art as, for example, summarized in the milestone two-volume Handbook of Pre-modern Nordic Memory Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches edited by Jürg Glauser, Pernille Hermann, and Stephen A. Mitchell and published in
2018.
It is especially encouraging to see that the articles in this issue are all authored
by Old Norse early career scholars who, hopefully, will have the chance in future
decades to take their thinking and analysis of the wide range of sources discussed
here even further. It is not uncommon to come across observations in reviews or historiographical
surveys within the field that refer to a perceived time-lag of many years—even decades—with
regard to the take-up and application of new critical approaches to medieval Icelandic
and Scandinavian studies. I don’t believe it can be said that this is the case here
with regard to the meeting of memory studies and Old Norse studies, however, and Simon
Nygaard and Yoav Tirosh, the early career editors of the present volume, also deserve
credit and recognition for playing a part in pushing the agenda ever onwards and upwards
and helping to create a platform for these young scholars to publish their work. Bringing
publication projects to completion in the time of the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic
deserves an extra round of applause. I’m sure that this volume will inspire other early career researchers as well as
those who are further along in their academic careers, demonstrating the great potential
that lies in combining analysis of textual and material culture of Viking and Medieval
Scandinavia with theoretical frameworks and methodologies from memory studies. So
without further ado (as the narrator in Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” asks), “Shall we follow?”
Emily Lethbridge is Associate Research Professor at the Árni Magnússon Institute for
Icelandic Studies, Reykjavík, Iceland.