Year: 2018
Type: article
Abstract: In an article from 2010, Judy Quinn argues that the metaphor of "liquid knowledge" in eddic poetry refers to the liquidity of the oral society where the eddic poetry was composed and transmitted. The aim of the present article is to expand on and nuance this interpretation based on two main factors: (1) the poetry is known to us from manuscripts produced in a highly evolved literate culture, and (2) the commonness of the metaphor linking ingestion and digestion, on the one hand, and cognitive transformation, on the other, in medieval Christian texts and rituals. This evidence suggests that the metaphor of drinking and eating knowledge has a great degree of plasticity and may refer both to the liquidity of an oral culture and to theological paradigms in medieval Christian literate culture. This has implications for our understanding of the Old Norse literary system in general and for attitudes to knowledge in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Old Norse culture.
Source: Viator
Author: Stefka G. Eriksen
Institution: Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research
Language: English
Subfield: Classics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2963494854