Pernille Hermann, Mnemonic Echoing in Old Norse Sagas and Eddas, Memory and the Medieval North 1. Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2022, xiii, 262 pp.

The title of this book requires some unpacking. The ‘echo’ is depictions of memory-related acts and attitudes in Old Norse literature, that is, how the author portrays the role of memory in the lives of the characters of the sagas and heroic poetry, and how events in these texts are determined by the principals’ awareness of the past and in the resulting narratives. No strictly theoretical texts on mnemonics are preserved − if ever written − although the Norse approach to memorialization, memorization, recall, and literary recasting is broadly comparable to that of cultures, mostly literate ones, which do have a theoretical foundation. What we might call the totemic animals or familiars of Norse memory studies are Óðinn’s ravens Huginn and Muninn, whose names suggest thought and memory, and who scour the world daily for information. This proximity to the paramount god clearly indicates the importance of memory over time, since the past may hold the seeds of the future, especially if the ravens are gathering information pertinent to the apocalyptic battle of Ragnarǫk and the fall of the gods. The preservation of cultural memory is no less important. As for literary texts as a possible model for cultural practice, Hermann writes: