Mikael Males: Snorri and the Sagas
Lögberg
101
Fyrirlestrar Miðaldastofu Háskóla Íslands
Mikael Males
Snorri and the Sagas
Medieval Icelandic authors and their methods
Fimmtudaginn 26. október 2017 kl. 16.30
Lögberg 101
The use of Icelandic sources to bolster the historical pedigree of the Scandinavian states from the seventeenth century onwards has been relatively well studied. In the case of Sweden, the seventeenth century saw the rise of the Swedish political star at the expense of the Danes, and the Icelandic sources provided the Swedes with a welcome opportunity to match the present state of affairs with a respectable historical background. These sources were used to show how old and excellent the Swedish nation was, and in our present era of Western self-criticism, such practices have attracted much attention in Scandinavia, Germany and elsewhere. Less interest has been accorded to the fact that the Icelandic sources were so readily useful for later nationalistic purposes, and why this might have been the case. This must be explained through recourse to the texts themselves, and this book focuses on the methods and interests of the medieval Icelandic authors in presenting their own cultural history and that of the Scandinavian realms.
There can be little doubt that medieval Icelanders took their role as transmitters of Nordic history seriously, but it is equally clear that their own past as pagan Vikings was often as fascinating and exotic to them as it was to many in later periods, and still is. Their way of transmitting the past was therefore an active and often a creative one. Awareness of this fact has, at least since the early twentieth century, led to a long debate regarding whether the Icelandic texts can be trusted as historical witnesses, and many studies have focused on to what extent the sagas are right or wrong. Others have opted for solving the problem by treating the sagas as literature without taking their diachronic value into account. This book aims for an intermediate solution, namely that of focusing on the methods of the authors in presenting their past, and how this conditioned the nature of the literary corpus. It argues that an analysis of their methods and interests, preferably on a case-by-case basis, may be a fruitful approach to Old Icelandic texts as witnesses to history.
Mikael Males is Associate Professor of Old Norse Philology at the University of Oslo, specializing in skaldic poetry and grammatical literature.
Fyrirlesturinn verður fluttur á ensku og er öllum opinn.
Miðaldastofa Háskóla Íslands
The University of Iceland Centre for Medieval Studies
Mikael Males is Associate Professor of Old Norse Philology at the University of Oslo, specializing in skaldic poetry and grammatical literature.
