Sounds Icelandic - Essays on Icelandic Music in the 20th and 21st Centuries - Þorbjörg Daphne Hall

Sounds Icelandic - Essays on Icelandic Music in the 20th and 21st Centuries - Þorbjörg Daphne Hall

Rímur: From National Heritage to Folk Music

Sounds Icelandic - Essays on Icelandic Music in the 20th and 21st Centuries - Þorbjörg Daphne Hall

Ragnheiður Ólafsdóttir [+-]
Musician
Ragnheiður Ólafsdóttir PhD (Australian National University), Cand.Mag (University of Oslo), B.Ed (Teachers College Reykjavík) has lived and worked in Norway, Australia and Hong Kong but has now returned to her mother-country Iceland. Having been through a wide variety of jobs, from assisting drug dependents in Oslo and Canberra, to organizing the Summer Institute for Arts and Humanities at the Hong Kong University, singing, writing songs, translating scholarly texts and literature, her main occupation now is to teach a class of 9 year olds in the Reykjavik area, and continue her study into traditional, Icelandic music.
Nicola Dibben [+-]
University of Sheffield
Nicola Dibben is Professor in Music, and Director of the Humanities Research Institute, at the University of Sheffield, UK. Her publications include the co-authored Music and Mind in Everyday Life (2010) and monograph Björk (2009) that lead to a collaboration on the artist’s multi-media app album, Biophilia (2011).

Description

In this chapter, I will show how the Idunn Society of Intoners and Versifiers (Kvaedamannafelagdi Idunn) influenced the old rímur tradition. Rímur are epic poems, traditionally performed by one intoner (kvaedamadur). Rímur (pl.) are regarded as part of the Icelandic literary heritage, although the melodies were transmitted orally, until the beginning of the 20th century, even if the performers often used printed books for the verses. The oldest rímur manuscript dates from 1380. Performances used to take place in the Icelandic turf houses on farms, when nearly all Icelanders lived in rural areas (90% in 1890). When the Idunn Society was founded in 1929, their main concern was to preserve the melodies known by the members, and in 1935-6 they recorded 200 rímur melodies. In their efforts to preserve the rímur tradition, the Idunn Society paradoxically caused the tradition to change in many ways.

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Citation

Ólafsdóttir, Ragnheiður ; Dibben, Nicola. Rímur: From National Heritage to Folk Music. Sounds Icelandic - Essays on Icelandic Music in the 20th and 21st Centuries. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 39-56 Apr 2019. ISBN 9781781791455. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=24113. Date accessed: 07 Oct 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.24113. Apr 2019

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