Remembering England: Cultural Memory in the Sagas of Icelanders

2017

In Viking Britain, Thomas Williams shows how the people we call Vikings came not just to raid and plunder, but to settle, to colonize and to rule. The impact on these islands was profound and enduring, shaping British social, cultural and political development for hundreds of years. Indeed, in language, literature, place-names and folk-lore, the presence of Scandinavian settlers can still be felt, and their memory – filtered and refashioned through the writings of people like J.R.R. Tolkien, William Morris and G.K.Chesterton – has transformed the western imagination.

2012

The purpose of my paper is to analyse the influence of medieval European literature on the composition of the Icelandic Sagas. The literary production in medieval Iceland becomes especially important when an antimonarchical, anti-courtly faction of intellectuals appears on the mostly monarchical European stage. The search for a cultural identity has a fundamental effect on the world of literary creation. The fundamental question of the invention of tradition in Iceland in the Middle Ages works as a trigger for the observation of the problematic involved in its literary production. Pre-Christian myths, Latin literature, old poetry and beliefs crystallized in the so called by Meulengracht Sørensen “paradox, of a copious and highly developed literature in a remote country” . The explanation given by now to this paradox from a literary and sociological approach is to consider that an exceptional society, formed in exceptional circumstances, as is the case in medieval Iceland, produced an exceptional literature. Beyond the isolating terms implied in this conception, this “exceptional” character will be our actual matter of work. Considering it not as a solitary development rooted in ancient times, but as a “response” to its contemporary European scenery. A courtly literature would have had no reception in a small farming population, organized far from a kingly structure. It is this exceptional sociological and political situation, in contrast to the birth of European kingdoms, a great companion for the creation of a literature in terms of invention of tradition. Challenging the theory of a self-constructed isolated literature, we will reveal within the texts of the sagas how the different voices from the Viking Age are set to dialogue with its contemporary European text-context referent. Bibliography: Meulengrachr Sørensen, Preben, “Social institutions and belief systems of medieval Iceland (c. (70-1400) and their relations to the literary production”, p. 10, in Clunies Ross, M. Old Icelandic Literature and Society, Cambridge University Press, 2000.

[Ph.D. thesis], 2019

The unprecedented production of English translations of the Icelandic sagas in the 1860s occurred alongside widespread cultural discussion concerning ethnic-nationalism and the developing science of comparative philology. Although the relationship between these phenomena has been examined, there has been no scholarly consensus on the reality, extent, or direction of any influence between them. This thesis reports on the seminal texts which gave context to and informed the late-nineteenth-century translations of Old Norse Íslendingasögur into English, their cultural stimuli and progeny. Firstly, the thesis examines the influence of and contextual philosophies behind J. A. Blackwell’s revised edition of Northern Antiquities, and in particular its depiction of Old Norse literature as key to understanding British ancestry. The thesis then considers the impact of Blackwell’s inclusion of Walter Scott’s Eyrbyggja saga ‘Abstract’, and the extent to which this partial translation characterised subsequent attitudes to nationality. Finally, the thesis examines the wide nationalist implications of the European interest in Friðþjófs saga, and the nature of the scholarship of George Stephens, its first English translator. The results of this study demonstrate that far from following a simplistic model of cause and effect, one needs to view the development of the reception of Old Norse literature as being intricately bound with contemporary political and national interests. Previous studies have often emphasised the unconventionality of the pioneering translators; this study underlines both their reliance on wider academic discussion and the wide-spread acceptability of their ideas within Georgian and early-Victorian Britain. The study complements previous research in providing a detailed assessment of ethnic-nationalist discourse within British Old Norse scholarship and eschewing the common view that the discussion was merely a product of foreign philosophy.

Apardjón Journal for Scandinavian Studies, 2021

The purpose of this paper is to bring new attention to Gunnars saga as an eminently fictional product and particularly to the way it rewrites and reinterprets the past to suit present needs, exploring how the self-image of Icelanders could be expressed and articulated through the literary medium. The first section, ‘Rewriting the Past’, introduces the saga and its main themes, while the following one, ‘The Text and its Literary Essence’, explores how the composition of the saga was highly informed by the tradition preceding and surrounding it. The third section, ‘The Creation of a Past’, discusses how Gunnars saga generates meaning by shaping an alternative literary past for the people of a remote area of Iceland. The section titled ‘Gunnar as an Embodiment of Iceland’ addresses the way that Icelandic history and the desires and aspirations of the Icelandic people are projected through the literary medium. ‘The saga and its Legacy’, the last section, showcases examples of how the literary creation of the saga has impacted the relationship between the people of the area in which the story takes place, their past and the landscape around them.

Arc Humanities Press, 2021

This volume traces the origins and development of five post-Reformation Icelandic folktales in an attempt to understand cultural memories of Christianization and Reformation in Iceland and elsewhere in the North. While the study of cultural memory has in recent years become a keen interest for scholars of the medieval North, relatively little attention has been given to the cultural memory of the post-medieval period, and even less consideration has been given to what post-medieval folk stories might contribute to memory studies. The present volume seeks to fill that gap by drawing connections between Icelandic folktales collected during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—with special attention given to Jón Árnason’s vast collection of tales published in 1862 and 1864—and their earlier counterparts in Old Norse-Icelandic sagas and Eddic poetry. The five Icelandic folktales that “anchor” the following chapters were selected because they meet criteria that set them apart as especially useful lenses through with to view the diachronic developments of cultural memory in Iceland: (1) each tale has deep and discernible roots in literary history, folkloristic development, and theological undercurrents not only in Iceland but throughout Scandinavia; (2) each displays a distinct concern for one of five fundamental aspects of religious belief (respectively, death and mourning, gender, supernatural attendance, sacred spaces, and the renewal of self); and (3) the development of each tale shows evidence of a demonstrable transformation over time of how those fundamental aspects of belief are perceived within cultural memory. Since discernible vectors can be articulated from these tales backwards into literary history and cultural memories of the past, these folktales illuminate the development of Icelandic cultural memory from the medieval period to the later age, for, as will be argued in the following pages of this book, folktales do not change without purpose; they rather transform in response to the cultural, religious, and interpersonal influences around them. These narratives can therefore reveal elements of a society’s cultural development that would otherwise go unnoticed if looking only at more traditionally conceived historical evidence.

History Compass, 2021

The Vikings are an excellent example of the significance of cultural memory: from post-Viking-Age sources to their rediscovery in the Victorian period to their popular appeal in current times. Ancestry is a key dimension as vikings could be dynasty founders or imbue a region with Scandinavian heritage. The importance of settlements remaining connected with Iceland and the Old Norse cultural milieu is highlighted. Archaeological evidence and non-Scandinavian sources can highlight the gaps in Norse memory, where specific events have been forgotten and some regions of the Viking world have received less attention than others. Stretching from America to Russia, the impact of postmedieval political events, of modern marketisation and of different scholarly approaches is also considered.

Mediaevistik 21, 2008

PMLA Vol 131: 2, 2016

This essay discusses strategic efforts to develop new digital research tools and approaches as key elements of an interdisciplinary research initiative in progress, Inscribing Environmental Memory in the Icelandic Sagas (IEM), which aims to study aspects of Icelandic literature, history, archaeology, environment, and geography in order to better understand societal responses to environmental change over the longue durée. The essay showcases a particular digital humanities project, Icelandic Saga Map (ISM), which not only provides an extremely useful tool for helping achieve many of the identified aims and methodological needs of an integrated environmental humanities initiative such as IEM but also is a valuable example of how innovative digital humanities tools can foster new research trajectories and open up new horizons for interdisciplinary engagement and synthesis of knowledge and diverse data.

2015

The north acts as an Other space; somewhere that lies beyond. It is also a real place, however. In this article, I tease out the parameters that Iceland’s landscape offers for an understanding of the tensions between virtual north and real north. The first part of the article discusses the context of 19th-century antiquarian adventuring to Iceland. Foreign visitors journeyed to Iceland to reconnect with a past that was being lost in the industrializing landscapes of Western Europe. The second part of the article focuses on present-day archaeological surveys of a group of islands in Breiðafjörður, West Iceland. Drawing on a phenomenological approach and a discussion of 19th-century visits to Iceland by travelers, such as William Morris and W. G. Collingwood, the article explores how sagas and other local histories influence the production of archaeological knowledge and placemaking.

Viking and Medieval Scandinavia, 2020

Despite their shared ancestry with the Icelanders, it is evident that people of Scandinavian origin in other settlements are not depicted monolithically in the Icelandic sagas. This article examine...