Abstract

In this chapter, I propose that the literary communications in Johan Ludvig Runeberg’s The Moose Hunters (1832) and Matthew Arnold’s Balder Dead (1855) build on a range of intermedial practices. Not only are they multimodal in the virtual sense of representing “several modes of sensory perception” (Elleström in Iconic investigations. John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2013, p. 96), but also in that reading the poems with attention to such intermedial phenomena can enhance the reading experience and the understanding of how the poems make meaning on symbolic levels. To a high degree, the poems’ communications hinge on an aesthetic illusion that arises from vivid description. Employing intermedial practices such as cross-modal description and what (Rajewsky, Intermédialités 6:43–64, 2005) identifies as intermedial reference, this technique recruits a range of sensory modalities that are organized semiotically under the narrative frameworks of the epic tradition, producing the effect of the north as a stage on which broader political and cultural issues are thematized.