A Critical Companion to Old Norse Literary Genre, ed. Massimiliano Bampi, Carolyne Larrington, and Síf Rikhardsdóttir. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020, xiii, 373 pp.

Abstract

Abstract Genre has always been a debated subject, the best-known exemplars (in the eye of the critic if not the author) always on the verge of breaking out from imagined constraints. Generic distinction can be externally reinforced by editorial decisions on the large scale, as illustrated by the nineteenth-century publishing project Íslenzk fornrit, which for decades focused on what was tacitly presented as “sagas of Icelanders,” giving these works quasi-generic status, vis-à-vis other prose forms, as well as a kind of sui generis prominence not without a nationalistic coloration. The editors tackle these and related matters in the very interesting present volume, which, recognizing the inherent problematics, is organized in three parts: Theory, Themes, and Genre in Focus, the last of which is actually about genre in practice, i.e., individual works by medieval Icelandic authors and Torf-Einarr Rgnvaldsson of Orkney, no mean theorician himself.