Ymir in India, China—and Beyond Michael Witzel, Harvard University Abstract: In examining the Old Norse mythological creation story about Ymir, that is, the creation of the world from the body of a primordial giant, from a broadly comparative perspective, this essay refers to a… Read more
Series Foreword This series is dedicated to the empirical study of oral traditions in their historical contexts. The rigorous methods of investigation developed by Milman Parry and Albert Lord, as documented in Lord’s The Singer of Tales (Harvard University Press 1960; Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature 24. Read more
Foreword The relationship between oral tradition and literary authorship is a classic bone of contention in the study of early epic narrative. Works like the Iliad, Beowulf, La Chanson de Roland and Njáls saga have all been interpreted as orally transmitted texts, but they have also been… 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… 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… 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… 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… 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… 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… Read more
