Icelandic Sagas Research Articles

Discourse in Old Norse Literature

Discourse in Old Norse Literature

Kumlbúa þáttr, an Eschatological Event: The Traumatic Ontology of Being in Time in Medieval Iceland

<i>Kumlbúa þáttr</i>, an Eschatological Event: The Traumatic Ontology of Being in Time in Medieval Iceland

Рецепция "саг об исландцах" в современной исландской поэзии: Поэма Хатльгрима Хельгасона «Муж короткий»

The article deals with the particular case of reception of the "Sagas of Icelanders“ in modern Icelandic poetry. The plot of the poem "Maðr inn skammi“ (The Short Man) by Hallgrímur Helgason is based in the Chapter 66 of Egil's Saga, namely the fight of Egil and Atli the Short. This episode is being detached form the original context of the saga and turns into an allegory of an encounter of an "ordinary person“ with the literary tradition, as it is not Egil himself, that takes part in the encounter, but the Saga of Egil. For a common person, like Atli in the poem, a tragic death is the only chance to get into a significant work of literature. In modern Icelandic poetry such a reception of interaction of a person with a signifiant text of culture is unique, as normally there are psycological motivations of the saga characters' deeds that prevail in modern literature based on Old Icelandic works. Still, Hallgrímur's perception is determined by the significance of the saga texts in modern Icelandic culture.The article is supplied by the translation of the poem into Russian, done specially for this publication.

Timber as a Marine Resource: Exploitation of Arctic Driftwood in the North Atlantic

Abstract The North Atlantic islands of the Faroe Islands, Iceland and Greenland have always been relatively poor in terms of native timber resources, due to their cold climate and exposed topography. Nevertheless, timber was vital to the material culture of the Norse settlers of these islands, and driftwood often met this need. As in subarctic Norway, where trees are also scarce, driftwood use and ownership were prescribed in medieval law codes. Historical documentary evidence shows that wealthy landowners bought driftwood rights as valuable assets, and ethnohistorical sources reveal a wide range of local and regional customs related to driftwood exploitation. However, driftwood was an unstable resource, and its delivery depended on a range of unpredictable factors related to climate and ocean currents. There is also ongoing debate regarding the relative importance of imported timber, which is for example often referenced in the Icelandic sagas. The use of driftwood is difficult to demonstrate through macroscopic, microscopic, or (geo-)chemical analysis. Similarities in the microscopic anatomy of boreal wood taxa preclude definitive provenancing through taxonomic analysis, and material traces of immersion in seawater are often either impermanent or ambiguous, especially in archaeological wood remains. This paper presents a comprehensive review of current historical and archaeological research on the exploitation of driftwood timber in the Medieval North Atlantic and explores potential future directions in this field. Furthermore, it asserts that this line of research should be pursued with some urgency, as anthropogenic climate change threatens both driftwood delivery and the preservation of archaeological wood remains.

Saving a life by poem

The present Old Norse case report concerns how a poem saved the life of the famous viking, named Egil Skallagrimsson. By some scholars he has been considered a person with dissocial personality disorder, i.e., psychopathy correlates - although not completely - to antisocial personality disorder, a personality disorder in the cluster B type. A core symptom of dissocial personality disorder is lack of empathy. The craving for appreciation and fulfilment of own needs is moreover a part of the disorder. Furthermore, an incredibly good ability to explain away actions and to project outwards, a low threshold of aggression, and the lack of responsibility are found. All together an alloplastic personality disorder with a tendency to blame the surroundings for the problems [1-3]. For the general population, exact epidemiological data on psychopathy prevalence does not exist. However it is estimated to be 3% in forensic psychiatric samples [4]. For adult male offenders, structural abnormalities in the cingulate have recently been reported to correlate with the gold standard diagnostic criteria (Psychopathy Checklist-Revised) for psychopathy [5]. The eminent power to manipulate others is not rare in these individuals [3]. Can a psychopath, however, captivate another psychopath? Reading the Old Norse Kings Saga, Heimskringla, you may wonder whether this could be a possibility, as described in the oral tradition 1000 years ago, later written down by most likely Snorri Sturluson, considering the meeting between Egil Skallagrimsson and Eric Bloodaxe. Once investigating this stunning Icelandic saga characters, it often falsely leads to the conclusion of a psychopath diagnosis or their suffering from other personality disorders rather than just enjoying the storytelling.

A Critical Companion to Old Norse Literary Genre

A Critical Companion to Old Norse Literary Genre

Sagas in Time and Time in the Sagas: an Attempt at a Historiographical Review

This article is devoted to the perception of time in early Iceland (from the establishment in 930 of the Althing, an annual national assembly, to the submission of the Icelanders to the Norwegian king in 1262—1264). This is not, however, a result of my work with medieval sources (first of all, Icelandic sagas and historical writings) but an attempt to present an overview of this issue in the assessment of international historiography, mainly of the last fifty years, but with a significant emphasis on the 2020s. If by 2017, as noted in the scholarly literature, very little had been published on time in medieval literature in general, and in the sagas in particular, in the last few years three monographic studies have been published that deserve attention and evaluation. The article is divided into two parts. The first one contains a description of general trends and methods of studying time in the works of Old Norse literature, while the second one presents the analysis of three recent works, thematic and methodological intersections in which are an obvious consequence not of interdependence, but of the general situation in the study of this issue.

Skandynawski „błędny rycerz”, czyli zestawienie Olafa Tryggvasona Odda Snorrasona z Percewalem Chrétiena de Troyesa

In courtly literature, the subject of the Errant Knight appears frequently, such as Eretz, Lancelot, and Perceval. In the Icelandic sagas, we can also meet such figures as. The purpose of this article is to show that the Olaf Tryggvason described by Odder Snorrrson was the Errant Knight as well. The author wants to show it by comparing Olaf Tryggvason with Perceval through their lives and their correlations. The author wants to show it by comparing Olaf Tryggvason and Perceval’s lives. These characters are correlated with each other. This is because Oddr and Chrétien de Troyes have built the plot of their works based on religion and love plots. They wanted to show a character who strives for the ideal through mistakes and learning.

A source within a source?

The sagas of Icelanders contain a great wealth of personal names both of historical and fictional nature. Personal names function both as identifiers for individuals but also evoke associations that supersede the name’s lexical or identifying meaning, for example, cultural or social associations such as age, ethnicity, and ideology. This article examines personal names as a source within a source and appraises the use of literary and socio-onomastics in the context of the Íslendingasögur using the example of the elusive difference between “Icelanders” and “Norwegians” in the sagas. The onomastic analysis is based on seven shorter tales and explores the differences in personal names in Icelandic and Norwegian individuals. Based on the onomastic data gathered, this article concludes that there are certain regional differences in name-giving visible in the sagas and that saga authors either had authentic onomastic material at hand or tried to emulate realistic personal names.

Teaching William Morris, edited by Jason D. Martinek and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller

Reviewed by: Teaching William Morris ed. by Jason D. Martinek and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller Carolyn Lesjak (bio) Teaching William Morris, edited by Jason D. Martinek and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller; pp. ix + 308. Vancouver: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2019, $105.00, $99.50 paper. Jason D. Martinek and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller's edited collection Teaching William Morris makes good on just about everything it promises, which is no small feat given the range and diversity of Morris's interests and artistic endeavors. The collection aims to provide the "connective tissue" missing from so many approaches to teaching Morris that focus on a part rather than the whole of his work (3). As its title makes clear, this is a book about teaching Morris, and it offers a rich set of essays that cover multiple sites of teaching—from university extension programs in the early twentieth century, to the Hull-House Labor Museum in Chicago and workshops at the Kelmscott House Museum in Hammersmith for school-aged children, to undergraduate and graduate courses at a variety of postsecondary institutions—and multiple paths and modes for introducing students to Morris and capturing the expansiveness of his career. The collection is organized into five broad categories that are meant less to divide up the areas within which Morris worked than to give shape to his "multivarious complexity," and it covers an impressive amount of ground (2). Sections on "Pasts and Presents," "Political Contexts," "Literature," "Art and Design," and "Digital Humanities" touch on Morris's Icelandic sagas; political speeches and writings from The Commonweal (1885–94); poetry; wallpaper designs, tapestries, and other artisanal crafts; architecture; his founding of "the firm" (222); his relationship to the fine arts movement; his utopian novels News from Nowhere (1890) and A Dream of John Ball (1888); and his unorthodox translation of the Odyssey (1887). The list itself says it all in terms of what "multivarious" means when it comes to Morris. Matching this range are the various responses to and forms of engagement with Morris, be it writing a young adult novel about him, as John Plotz discusses; creating the first ever William Morris blog, followed by YouTube videos and Twitter threads, a digital project of Tony Pickney's; looking at how Morris was taught to tenement dwellers in Chicago around 1900, as Elizabeth Helsinger does; or thinking about how he can best be taught today in an era defined by increasing specialization and alienated forms of labor, intellectual and otherwise—in short, the very things at the heart of Morris's critique of his own society. Against these present tendencies, Martinek and Miller's collection hopes to keep in play the "threads of interconnections that pass between and among [the essays]" both within and across the sections of the volume (4). In this brief review, I cannot hope to do justice to all the fine essays brought together here. Instead, I will focus on a number of key themes, challenges, and innovative pedagogical approaches that emerge across the collection. A central question addressed in many of the essays is how we might get current students interested in Morris at all, a considerable task. Deanna Kreisel begins her essay on News from Nowhere by bluntly stating that "literary utopias are boring," and that Morris's is no exception, as her [End Page 459] undergraduate students made clear in no uncertain terms (161). Given this shared experience, many of the essays helpfully describe different attempts to pique students' interest in Morris. KellyAnn Fitzpatrick invites students to read Morris's medievalism against J. R. R. Tolkien in order to see how "various manifestations of medievalism have made their way into contemporary fantasy" (70). David Latham focuses on five key transformations that Morris envisions—some of which seemed far-fetched during Morris's day but have now come to pass—in order to illustrate the power of the utopian ideal and to prompt students to think about where we "find our inspiration for thinking, for living, for improving the world" (116). As he concludes, "If we can change the weather, and our health and our height, then we may answer 'yes, surely,' we can find time to consider a different kind of...

Lov og lovgivning i middelalderen. Nye studier av Magnus Lagabøtes landslov

Lov og lovgivning i middelalderen. Nye studier av Magnus Lagabøtes landslov

When a King of Norway Became a King of Russia

When a King of Norway Became a King of Russia

Библейский перформатив в раннехристианской германской культуре

The study aims to determine the specific features of the performative power of the word in the texts of the Christianisation period of Germanic tribes and in the texts that have preserved the pagan character of culture. Scientific novelty lies in identifying the biblical character of the performative in comparison with the pagan tradition of the ancient Germanic tribes. By analysing the ancient texts of Icelandic sagas belonging to the Poetic Edda and the ancient Germanic texts of the early Christian period the following results were obtained: the performative category is represented in the Christian tradition by a number of characteristics, i.e. the word spoken by God is equal to action, the illocutive power of the phraseological unit “in the name of the Lord” is the result of contractual relations, there is a strong cognitive connection in the pair “call” - “action”, while the pagan tradition is dominated by orality and the concept of conversation.

Violence and Risk in Medieval Iceland: This Spattered Isle, by Oren Falk

Medieval Iceland was, according to its sagas, a society riven with feud. Numerous prose narratives composed from the thirteenth century onwards related narratives that focused on feud, set in the centuries from the island’s settlement (around 870) to just after its conversion to Christianity (roughly 1030). These are conventionally known as the ‘sagas of Icelanders’ (Íslendingasögur). During the same period, a further set of sagas was composed, dealing with more recent history, from the mid-twelfth century up until a few decades before the date of composition: these are known as the ‘contemporary sagas’ or samtíðarsögur. Both saga genres derive their narrative material and dramatic impetus from stories of kin-group-based reciprocal violence. Much has been written, by historians, literary scholars, legal historians and anthropologists about the violence apparently endemic in medieval Icelandic society. Can anything new be said about it? The answer to this question turns out to be an emphatic ‘yes’. This new book, by Oren Falk, takes a fresh look at violence as a phenomenon in the saga corpus. Falk propounds a complex and persuasive analysis of violence, as being concerned not only with the exercise of power and the creation of symbolic significance, but also—as his title signals—with risk. Falk nuances standard theories of violence as instrumental or expressive with a sophisticated understanding of the ways in which violent actors assess risk; he incorporates notions of jeopardy with regard to multiple factors, and ‘edgework’—the recognition that some actors do not care about minimising risk, but rather take pleasure in exhibiting their particular skills in risky situations.

The Emergence of Rationality in the Icelandic Sagas: The Colossal Misunderstanding of the Viking Lore in Contemporary Popular Culture

For a long time now, Old Norse literature has often been colonized and misappropriated by modern right-wing political groups for their own ideology, symbolism, and public appearance. A critical reading of Icelandic sagas, however, easily demonstrates that those public strategies are very short-sighted, misleading, and outright dangerous for our democratic society. To stem the flood of misinformation regarding the Viking world and its literature, this article joins a small but forceful chorus of recent scholars who are hard at work deconstructing this politicization of saga literature by way of offering new readings of those texts in which the very Viking ideology is actually exposed by the poets, rejected, and supplanted by new forms of social interactions predicated on a legal system and an operation with rationality in the public sphere.

Perceived stress and hair cortisol concentration in a study of Mexican and Icelandic women.

Hair cortisol concentration (HCC) represent a potential biomarker of chronic psychological stress. Previous studies exploring the association between perceived stress and HCC have been limited to relatively small and selected populations. We collected hair samples from 881 women from the Mexican Teachers' Cohort (MTC) and 398 women from the Icelandic SAGA pilot-cohort following identical protocols. HCC was quantified using liquid chromatography coupled with tandem mass spectrometry. The self-reported Perceived Stress Scale (PSS, 10 and 4 item, range 0-40 and 0-16) was used to assess psychological stress. We conducted multivariable linear regression analyses to assess the association between perceived stress and log-transformed HCC in the combined sample and in each cohort separately. MTC participants had slightly higher HCC and PSS scores than SAGA participants (median HCC 6.0pg/mg vs. 4.7pg/mg and mean PSS-10 score 12.4 vs. 11.7, respectively). After adjusting for sociodemographic factors and health behaviors, we observed a 1.4% (95% CI 0.6, 2.1) increase in HCC for each unit increase in the PSS-10 score in the combined sample. Furthermore, PSS-10 quintiles were associated with a 24.3% (95% CI 8.4, 42.6, mean logHCC 1.8 vs 1.6) increase in HCC when comparing the highest to the lowest quintile, after multivariable adjustment. Similar results were obtained when we analyzed each cohort separately and when using the PSS-4. Despite relatively small absolute differences, an association between perceived stress and HCC was found in a sample of women from two diverse geographical and cultural backgrounds supporting the hypothesis that HCC is a viable biomarker in studies of chronic psychological stress.

Diebstahl und Raub in den Isländersagas: Einfallstore in die norröne Erzähl- und Vorstellungswelt

Diebstahl und Raub in den Isländersagas: Einfallstore in die norröne Erzähl- und Vorstellungswelt

Men and Masculinities in the Sagas of Icelanders

Men and Masculinities in the Sagas of Icelanders

Rowing in the Breca Episode from a Narrative Perspective

Rowing in the Breca Episode from a Narrative Perspective

Northern Memories and the English Middle Ages

Northern Memories and the English Middle Ages