Weaving words: Law and performance in early Nordic tradition

The reference to malrunar or 'speech runes' in Sigrdrifumal suggests a performative aspect to the practice of early Germanic law that transcends the swearing of oaths and the reciting of law codes attested to by literary sources. Indeed early runic texts often feature alliteration, much as do the old Scandinavian legal tracts. This parallelism suggests that early Northern legal language was not stylised merely for mnemonic purposes, but instead reflects an oral-performative praxis similar to that which appears to be reflected in early Irish sources. But the relationship between performance and memorisation has not always been demarcated clearly in recent scholarship. Oralperformative theory is often called upon today without reference to explanations of social action. The privileging of generative performance over pre-literate memory culture seems to represent only an awkward victory of the medievalistic 'anthropological turn' over other key expressions of socio-cultural theory.