Foreword

Abstract

Foreword e very culture is to a significant degree defined by the way it relates to its own past and defines itself through memory. This observation is nothing more than a commonplace in the study of cultural history, but it points to the fact that ever since the time of ancient cultures -from the ancient egyptian culture's veneration of the dead, to the scepticism against writing as expressed in ancient Indian and classical Greek texts, to the Greek and roman theory of rhetoric -different forms of memory presentation have again and again given rise to reflections about the phenomena of creating, disseminating, storing, re-creating, and re-writing memories, and of dealing with collective and cultural memory, activities central to every society.If proof were needed that culture and memory have been linked together from their beginnings, memory studies undertaken within the field of cultural analysis in recent decades will remove any doubts, as they have been able to demonstrate with innumerable examples that the history of human culture can only be understood when its memorial performances are adequately taken into account. This novel and intense interest in questions of memory in recent cultural studies does, of course, not come out of the blue, but must be seen in the context of the historical developments and political turmoil of the twentieth century. This is why, for example, the German preoccupation with its own past received new currency during the 1980s and 1990s, and that was, in turn, one of the reasons for the renewed interest in questions of the construction of the past, and of the critical re-evaluation of images of the past, especially in German-speaking research.The debate about the construction of 'pasts' and memories of them, and the preoccupation with their meanings and functions for the present and the future, are, however, in no way only modern phenomena, but themselves have a long tradition which reaches partially back to classical antiquity, as, for example, with regard to concepts and images of memory, be it as storage or as creation. It will suffice here to mention only two small, but rather prominent, examples from Greek and roman tradition; in contemporary memory studies,

Exploring Religious Ritual Frameworks in the Oral Performance of the Old Norse, Eddic-Style Praise Poems <em>Hákonar­mál</em>, <em>Eiríksmál</em>, and <em>Hrafnsmál</em>

“…Indeed, the kenning system into which they could com press their vast knowledge of the Old Norse mythology and religion, shows that these performers were in possession of an enormous amount of pre-Christian mythically and religiously-based knowledge. This knowl edge may furthermore be viewed as culturalmemory, something which has been noted by, among others, Jürg Glauser (2014), Russell Poole (2018), andPernille Hermann (2020). Assmann (2010: 117) defines cultural memory as 'mythical history, events in absolute past' that reaches back in the 'mythical primordial time', and is 'mediated in […] icons, dances, rituals, and performances of various kinds' by 'specialized carriers of memory' using '"classical" or otherwise formalized language(s)'.…”

How Gylfi’s Illusion Breathes Life into the Sky

“…(Snyder 1984: 96) Advances in memory studies in recent decades have shown that preliterate societies almost invariably develop and cultivate powerful memory techniques without the support of books and writing. Classical orators, for example, describe how they learned their speeches by associating their text with familiar buildings that they could then 'travel through' in their minds while delivering the speech (Glauser 2014). This technique is by no means restricted to the orations of ancient Greeks and Romans and some version of it appears to be almost universal.…”