for Saswati and Pratichi Preface ‘That’s my cue,’ says my father when he wants to get in with one of his stories and link it in with something someone else has just said apropos of something completely different. My interest in the oral telling of stories and reciting of verses goes back, like so much else in our lives, to influences in my childhood. At the… Read more
Introduction. Written Texts and Oral Traditions The Medieval World View and the Individuality of Iceland Life in Scandinavia lies beyond the horizons of most courses in medieval studies, based as they are almost entirely on ecclesiastical sources from continental Europe. To be sure, specialists in the field are aware of the writings in Latin of Adam of Bremen, Theodoricus, and Saxo Grammaticus, but the unique literature… Read more
1. From Lawspeaker to Lawbook A Power Struggle between the Church and Secular Leaders? [1] There can be little doubt that the rich and varied secular literary works that flowed from the pens of the writers of medieval Iceland in their vernacular tongue can only be explained against a background of a people with a stock of tales to tell about… Read more
2. Óláfr Þórðarson Hvítaskáld and the Oral Poetic Tradition in the West of Iceland c. 1250: The evidence of the verse citations in The Third Grammatical Treatise Collections, Anthologies, and the Literary Corpus As pointed out in the Introduction (p. 6–17), there is good reason to reject the often expressed idea that Snorri Sturluson had to ‘construct’ the passages of prose narrative in his Edda out… Read more
3. Conclusions to Part I As described in the Introduction, the debate about oral tradition and the Icelandic sagas under the opposing labels of ‘freeprose’ and ‘bookprose’ came to a dead-end since the methods and ideas available proved unable to shed new light on the problems. All discussion of oral tradition in ancient times and the oral background to the sagas was based on a) direct information… Read more
4. The Same Characters in More Than One Saga As a literary genre, the sagas of Icelanders (‘Íslendingsögur’) are defined by their geographical setting (Iceland) and their historical setting (from the settlement of the country down to shortly after the conversion in the year 1000). These sagas show considerable internal consistency in matters such as the structure of the society depicted and the ethical values portrayed, the… Read more
Pre-Christian Religions of the North and the Need for Comparativism: Reflections on Why, How, and with What We Can Compare Jens Peter Schjødt, Aarhus University Abstract: This article is concerned with some of the problems we have in attempting to reconstruct the pre-Christian religion of the North from extant sources which are for the most part much later than the beliefs and practices they describe. Read more
Methodological Challenges to the Study of Old Norse Myths: The Orality and Literacy Debate Reframed Pernille Hermann, Aarhus University Abstract: In pointing to a theme of importance for source evaluation, this essay gives an overview of the study of Old Norse myths from the perspective of the orality/literacy debate. It seeks to provide a picture of emerging tendencies and directions in scholarship. Taking off… Read more
Framing the Hero: Medium and Metalepsis in Old Norse Heroic Narrative [1] Kate Heslop, University of California, Berkeley Abstract: This essay argues for a medial perspective on heroic legend. Traditional iconographic approaches to this material are methodologically problematic and their potential for generating new readings seems limited. The essay proposes focusing instead on the primary sources’ own discourse on… Read more
The Æsir and Their Idols Jonas Wellendorf, University of California, Berkeley Abstract: Accounts of the destruction of cult figures are conventional narratives that present a standardized sequence of events, although details may vary from one text to the other. The multitude and longevity of such accounts show that they remained popular through millennia. The standard polemic against cult figures includes lines such as “They… Read more
