| Summary: | This chapter argues for the dramatic possibilities created by the many echoing responses of the Old Norse-Icelandic eddic dialogue poem Skírnismál. Insights from modern linguistics, especially conversational pragmatics, have the capacity to illuminate the workings of inter-speaker echo in the poem, including the ways in which its echoing retorts may open up opportunities for speakers to convey different attitudinal stances in dramatic performance, choosing from various options for intonation and delivery. In particular, Du Bois’ theory of ‘dialogic syntax’ highlights how repeated words and structures can signal a variety of different kinds of interpersonal stance, not purely competitive or antagonistic, in a manner which has considerable implications for the complexity of the utterances in Skírnismál and their potential articulation in performance. Previous research into the ‘mirror and surpass’ feature of flyting exchanges is of some value when approaching the poem, but tends to understate the sheer versatility of cross-speaker parallelism – echoing utterances need not be understood as purely antagonistic in nature, but rather capable of signalling a range of possible attitudinal stances, from affirmation to scepticism to evasion, even while the exchange as a whole may be broadly antagonistic in nature. Within Skírnismál, the poem’s speakers describe processes of amplification and reverberation at key moments in the text, offering in this imagery a correlate to the verbal echoes, spillages and amplifications which shape the poem on a verbal level, and signalling their importance.
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