Icelandic Sagas Research Articles

Weapon of Assault: Combat, Protective Magic, and the Fatal Throat Bite in Icelandic Sagas

Abstract Icelandic sagas contain a literary motif little known in other pre-modern literary traditions: the throat bite. There are 10 scenes in the sagas in which one character bites, almost bites, or contemplates biting the throat of another character. The throat bite was used by saga authors strategically and purposefully, whether to resolve conflict, similar to a more conventional murder; to signify paranormal characteristics – or lack of paranormal characteristics; or to denote interpersonal power dynamics within a saga narrative. Due to the prevalence of the throat bite in extra-narrative contexts, including its use as hunting technique among non-human animals and the documented use of human teeth as a weapon among human populations, the saga writers of medieval Iceland accurately recognized that human teeth can serve as a weapon of assault and they craftily integrated the throat bite into the composition of select sagas.

Quantifying Feelings

The medieval sagas of Icelanders, celebrated for their emotionally restrained narrative style, merge prose with verse in a genre-defining prosimetrum. Traditional analysis has largely focused on the prose for emotional insights, while acknowledging that the poetry in the sagas conveys feelings more openly. This paper presents findings concerning the use of emotive language in the poetry from “The Íslendingasögur as Prosimetrum“ (ÍSP) database, which contains a comprehensive collection of quantitative data on the features of all 722 stanzas in the corpus of the sagas. The database facilitates diverse analytical explorations and assessments of correlations, allowing for a comprehensive quantitative scrutiny of established assumptions within the entire corpus of sagas. Consequently, it emerges as a robust and influential instrument for scholarly inquiry. The present study finds that internalized self-expression through first-person emotive words is relatively rare in saga poetry, representing less than a fifth of instances where emotion words are used. More frequently, self-expression is externalized, with speakers reflecting on their emotions as if they were external forces. The most prevalent usage of emotion words is in the description of others’ emotions, rather than as direct expressions of the poet’s own inner state. This suggests that the “inner world” of the poet, as scholars describe, is most often not explicitly revealed through direct emotive language but is instead implied through these observations. Thus, emotive words in the sagas’ poetry serve more to imply than to directly convey the poet’s internal experience. Furthermore, emotive stanzas in sagas often function as performative narrative elements, complementing or contrasting with direct emotional expressions. Analysing their roles may provide deeper understanding beyond merely reflecting the poet’s psyche.

Teaching The Legal Culture of Icelandic Sagas In a First-Year Writing Seminar

Teaching The Legal Culture of Icelandic Sagas In a First-Year Writing Seminar

Рецепция древнеисландской словесности в исландской поэзии 1990-2020 гг.

The reception of Old Icelandic literature in the Icelandic poetry of the 1990-2020ies is to be found mainly in its' contents. Contemporary Icelandic poets seek mostly to the well-known sagas of Icelanders or mythological songs of the Elder Edda. There are events, characters and winged words of the Old Icelandic texts, that become the objects of the reception. There can be several approaches to that materail: 1) drawing“ the ancient text near to the modern time by means of its' psychologization; 2) reassuming it as a precedential text for some universal situations; 3) ironical attitude to the ancient text and parodizing it (actually, not so much the text itself, as its' hugh status in the modern culture); 4) using the Old Icelandic text as a starting point for the poet's personal associations. All of these approaches can be obsereved during the whole period examined, but in length of time the ironical approach is being reduced, and the psycologizing and the universalizing one become more wide-spread; partly it is related to the fact, that the young generations of poets appear.

Sending a Message to the Future: (Deep) Time Travel in and through Medieval Icelandic Literature

ABSTRACT This article seeks to understand how medieval Icelandic authors may have considered the possibility of speaking to the future. In the absence of explicit statements to this effect, it does this by looking at representations of time travel — or chronodisplacement — within medieval Icelandic sagas. When something from the past abruptly appears in the narrative, the past is seen as communicating with its future. The examples looked at include undead mound-dwellers, long-lived wanderers and the Icelandic version of the Seven Sleepers. The frequent association of voices emerging from the past with the underland is considered, particularly in relation to Iceland’s geology. This is also linked to the possibility for medieval Icelanders to engage with deep time. The analysis reveals that Icelandic authors were interested in the dynamic of the past speaking to its future, but chose always to represent it within a past setting. Moreover, authors seem to have been aware that speaking to a future inevitably involves changes in media and the materiality of communication.

Approaches to Dating the Poetry in the Sagas of Icelanders

Approaches to Dating the Poetry in the Sagas of Icelanders

ОБ ИСПОЛЬЗОВАНИИ "НАСТОЯЩЕГО ИСТОРИЧЕСКОГО" (PRAESENS HISTORICUM) ВРЕМЕНИ В ИСЛАНДСКИХ САГАХ

The article examines the phenomenon of alternation of tenses in the Icelandic sagas, or more precisely, the inclusion into a narrative of past events, as the sagas are, along with the normal forms of the past tense, forms of the so-called “present historical”. This practice is not an exclusive feature of the Old Icelandic language but is found in Indo-European languages of different historical eras and geographical locations. Saga scholars, whose works are discussed here, have paid much attention to this phenomenon and put forward numerous interpretations of this narrative mode, both grammatical and stylistic. The author of the article adheres to the view that the alternation of tenses was so extensively used by the saga authors because it enabled them, within the framework of the stylistic objectivity inherent in the saga genre, to make the narrative more lively and emotional, as if the events described were happening before the eyes of their listeners/readers.

Seaxes and skalms: Single-edged weapon in the Old Icelandic texts

The article examines the problem of the use in combat conditions and classification of single-edged short-bladed weapons of the Germanic and neighboring peoples of Europe in the early Middle Ages — combat knives seaxes. The authors consider the numerous existing archaeological finds in the context of terms used in modern Scandinavian languages, and also turn to the analysis of options for using the terms “seax” and “skalm” in archaic texts. A contextual analysis of the use of these terms in the poetic texts of songs from the Elder Edda and the prose of Icelandic sagas belonging to various subtypes is presented. According to the authors, the term “skalm” had a very specific purpose and fell out of everyday use — as a designation for a real type of weapon — long before the Viking Age. In the texts describing the Viking Age, it is not people who are consistently armed with skalms, but the dark and negative characters opposing them — trolls, jotuns, etc. However, in the heroic epic tradition, skalms, on the contrary, are used by heroes; It was the skalms that became part of the poetic formulas describing the equipment of the heroes of the epic. There is reason to believe that this term comes from ancient times and by the Viking Age it became an anachronism, acquiring new connotations and negative meaning.

Между росами и варангами: этерия пехотинцев в гвардии византийских императоров в последней трети X века

Introduction. The article is dedicated to the study of the hetaireia of infantrymen – the Byzantine Imperial Guard troop in the 970–980s, which included mercenaries from Rus’ and Scandinavia. Methods. The research is based on a combination of systemic and institutional approaches in the analysis of Byzantine and Old Icelandic written sources that allow us to establish a chronological framework for the existence of this military formation, its composition, structure and place in the development and transformation of the foreign mercenary corps in the Byzantine Empire during the 10th century. Analysis. The unit is known by the rank of its commander, the hetaireiarches of infantrymen, mentioned in “Escurial Taktikon” (970s). The main information on the hetaireia of infantrymen and related foreign mercenary groups in Byzantine service is contained in the treatise “De Cerimoniis” (963), the historical work by Leo the Deacon (late 10th century), the military treatise “De castrametatione” (second half of the 980s) and in the Old Icelandic sagas such as “Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða”, “Finnboga saga ramma”, “Hallfreðar saga vandræðaskálds” and “Brennu-Njáls saga”. Results. As the study shows, the hetaireia of infantrymen was organised during the reign of the emperor John I Tzimiskes (969–976) and existed from 970 to 988–989, becoming one of the stages in the formation of the so-called “Varangian-Russian” corps as part of the Byzantine armed forces. Presumably, this unit consisted of two troops of northern mercenaries with a total number of about 400–800 warriors.

Islandskie sagi kak «neistoricheskij» istochnik po istorii Rusi

This article presents the illegality of the usage of Icelandic sagas by an archaeologist D.A. Machinsky with the tendentious purpose of glorifying Swedish history and including Russian history in it.

Konec řádu na kraji světa. K historické sociologii islandských ság

This article discusses the historical background to the medieval Icelandic sagas. It draws on the work of Icelandic historians, especially Gunnar Karlsson, to argue that the key factor was a distinctive political order established in Iceland before the conversion to Christianity. This was not a peasant democracy, as some idealizing interpretations have suggested; it was an oligarchy sui generis, with power (and a remnant of religious authority) vested in an elite of chieftains. However, there was no executive centre. This decentralized regime left its mark on the Christianizing process; the Icelanders accepted Christianity without monarchy, and for a long time without a fully empowered Church. Together with a pronounced cultural focus on narrativity, this political context explains the rise of a vernacular literature that was in many ways influenced by Christian sources, but retained a connection to pre-Christian traditions.

Creative practice as research in Old Norse-Icelandic studies: Ancillary characters as storytellers

AbstractThis article is a discussion between two writer-academics about projects that re-imagined medieval Icelandic sagas from the perspectives of female characters in these works, and in ways that adopted conventions of interiority and point of view associated with modern creative writing. The discussion examines the potential for creative practice to form a research methodology within Old Norse-Icelandic studies. In particular, the contingent or open-ended nature of creative practice makes it a vehicle by which to raise new questions in relation to texts that have been the subject of extensive prior study. While creative practice as research is to some extent limited by its personal and often quite individual nature, it does offer methods by which imagination and the deeply engaged act of making and re-telling can form part of our understanding of Old Norse-Icelandic texts.

Pre-Modern Nordic Memories in their Literary Contexts

The study of memory has become a central field in saga scholarship in recent years. The present article deals with a number of remarkable mnemonic phenomena in Old Norse-Icelandic narratives. It contextualizes them in biblical, classical, and more modern examples of memory culture. These serve as texts of reference for the Norse narratives that are in the focus of this article. Some of the analyses are inspired by the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg’s work on how myth has always already transgressed to memory (reception) and the art historian Aby Warburg’s concept of pathos formulae that produce emotional impacts and mnemonic tropes.Aspects that are treated are for instance acts of commemoration as social and cultural activities, eddic mytho-narratives as stories to remember, the importance of the body and the senses in terms of memory studies, the interrelationship of remembrance and oblivion, and finally pre-modern mediologies. Central texts discussed in the article are eddic poems such as Völuspá (The Seeress’s Prophecy), skaldic poetry and its mnemonic pictorality, Icelandic sagas and historical writings (Icelandic Book of Settlement), examples of folklore. Some outstanding features are stellar memories, the question whether the place of memory is in the human breast or brain, or the importance of avian imagery in narratives about birds as preeminent media of remembering and forgetting.The article has a comparative approach. It attempts to show how Old Norse-Icelandic literature is closely contextualized within a web of Scandinavian and non-Scandinavian narratives and thoroughly shaped by features of cultural memory, shifting constructions of and dealings with ever changing imaginations of pasts.

Dating and Authenticity of Skaldic Verse in some Sagas of Icelanders

Dating and Authenticity of Skaldic Verse in some Sagas of Icelanders

Reykjaholt Revisited: Representing Snorri in Sturla Þórðarson's Íslendinga saga

Reykjaholt Revisited: Representing Snorri in Sturla Þórðarson's <i>Íslendinga saga</i>

Þistil, mistil, kistil: Plants of Death, Rebirth, and Magic in Medieval Scandinavian Runic Inscriptions

<i>Þistil, mistil, kistil</i>: Plants of Death, Rebirth, and Magic in Medieval Scandinavian Runic Inscriptions

How Icelandic Is French Law? A Few Remarks about the Discovery and Usage of Icelandic Antiquities in French Legal Historiography during the Nineteenth Century

How Icelandic Is French Law? A Few Remarks about the Discovery and Usage of Icelandic Antiquities in French Legal Historiography during the Nineteenth Century

Sagas and genre: A case for application of network analysis to manuscripts preserving Old Norse-Icelandic saga literature

Abstract This study applies statistical approaches to the analysis of the genre relationships of Old Norse-Icelandic literature in order to expand our understanding of the relationships between works, their transmission, and their possible modes of reception, as manifested in the extant manuscripts. This article contributes to the ongoing discussion of the genre boundaries of Old Norse-Icelandic literature and presents an alternative method of engaging with this material in the form of computer-assisted analysis, i.e. data visualization and network analysis. Using data collected from major online databases of Old Norse-Icelandic manuscripts, we present the most complete to date network of co-occurrences in manuscripts of works belonging to a number of literary genres. The present study empirically demonstrates the manifoldness of the connections between the Old Norse-Icelandic works which transcend traditional scholarly genre boundaries. The study identifies two main communities within the network: a community of romances, or works of narrative fiction, which includes mainly legendary sagas (fornaldarsögur) and chivalric sagas (riddarasögur), and a community of historicizing narratives, or pseudo-history, which includes mainly sagas of Icelanders (Íslendingasögur) and kings’ sagas (konungasögur).

Men Who Brew: Masculinity and the Production of Drink in Medieval Icelandic Literature

Men Who Brew: Masculinity and the Production of Drink in Medieval Icelandic Literature

Bishops in Early Iceland

Bishops in Early Iceland