Lyric, Meaning, and Audience in the Oral Tradition of Northern Europe. By Thomas A. Dubois. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. Pp. viii + 268; 1 illustration. $30.

The title of this erudite book should not mislead the reader. Dubois examined the reception of various small forms in Northern Europe, but never asked what is lyric poetry. The seven chapters of the book are as follows. 1. "Introduction: Lyrics and the Issue of Meaning." 2. "Pausing in a Narrative's March: the Interpretation of Lyrics within Epics." In it Dubois looks at laments embedded in larger narratives: Gudrúnarqvida (the so-called First Lay of Gudrún), Sonatorrek (Egill Skallagrímsson's dirge composed after the death of his son), the Hrethel digression in Beowulf (an old father mourns the death of his son shot accidentally by his other son), and two Old English elegies: The Wanderer and The Seafarer. 3. "The Ritual and Wit: The Hermeneutics of the Invocational Lyric." This chapter is devoted to Sámi joik ("…a way of recalling other folk; some are remembered with hate, some with love and some with sorrow. And often these songs concern certain places, or animals: the wolf, and the reindeer, and the wild reindeer"; Petrus Laestadius, a nineteenth-century Sámi missionary, p. 67), shepherds' calls and charms (Scandinavian), charms (Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Karelian, Scottish Gaelic, and Old English), laments in funerals and weddings (Irish, Finnish), and piobaireachd (Scottish bagpipe performances).