Paper Short Abstract:

A study of a 19th century folk music tradition based on the works of the Icelandic poet Guðmundur Bergþórsson (1657-1705) with a focus on the role that gender dynamics play in the transmission, recollection and documentation of this tradition.

Paper Abstract:

This paper analyses a 19th century Icelandic folk music tradition based on poetry attributed to the male author Guðmundur Bergþórsson (1657-1705). Unlike other folk traditions based on his life and works, women comprise a significant proportion of those who performed, transmitted and documented this tradition. This study is based on tape recorded performances and discussions, mostly collected by married couple Helga Jóhannsdóttir and Jón Samsonarson between 1963 and 1971. In these tapes, popular epic poems are more commonly sung than the metrical romances that made Guðmundur famous. Audiences comprise of multiple generations, and the stage is the baðstofa- a communal living, working and sleeping quarters found in old Icelandic turf houses. Performers discuss their relationships with the texts, related musical traditions, and their work and family life. Women describe singing while completing childcare and handiwork tasks, and touch on the role played by these performances in the upbringing of children, at a time when education largely took place within the home.

Júlíana Þóra Magnúsdóttir identified the audio archive as having greater source value than printed corpuses on Icelandic women’s narrative traditions and cultural and spatial experiences (2018; 2021a; 2021b). This analysis studies how the ways in which informants’ recollections of this tradition could be influenced by gender-specific experiences of culture and social spaces, and how gender dynamics could in turn have contributed negatively to the attention this material has since garnered. Lastly, it considers the role of Guðmundur Bergþórsson’s physical impairment, which made the domestic sphere his sole working environment.