Sagas of Icelanders

This article focuses on one aspect of pleasure in the Sagas of Icelanders: the pursuit of pleasure by a saga character, the warrior-poet Þormóðr Kolbrúnarskáld Bersason. The parameters of this interpretation are therefore limited to the action of Fóstbræðra saga, the saga of the sworn brothers, and analysis is focused on the decision-making processes of the warrior-poet Þormóðr, a character who is depicted in the saga as having lived during the early part of the tenth century. Þormóðr lusts after several women in the saga, pursuing pleasure, but he seems incapable of loving them. This analysis will therefore test a virtue-ethics framework that could be applied more widely to saga characters in future studies. Þormóðr provides us with a case study in Aristotelian akrasia. This warrior-poet loves, lusts, and is a subject of pathos in two senses. Þormóðr is foremost subject to his own pathos, his passion, which results in his lack of deliberation before making certain decisions. Þormóðr is therefore impetuously akratic. Þormóðr is also a poet, and thus is adept at evoking pathos in his audience for rhetorical effect, as the reader can see in his skaldic verses. The focus in this article is on pathos in the first sense, that which has to do with the weight of the character’s own passions and how they affect his actions. The aim is to provide an account for why his appetite for pleasure is so great that he consequently lacks the ability to deliberate and act according to reason when it comes to his relationships with women.

According to the early fourteenth-century Hauksbók version of Landnámabók, King Haraldr hárfagri of Norway determined that early settlers in Iceland should be allowed to claim no more land than a man could carry fire around in a single day.² In chapter 4 of the probably mid-thirteenth-century Icelandic Eyrbyggja saga one such early settler from Norway, Þórólfr Mostrarskegg, carries fire in this way around land that he claims as his own on the Snaefellsnes peninsula in western Iceland: 'eptir þat fór Þórólfr eldi um landnám sitt' ('then Thorolf carried fire around his land-claim').³ Having established the boundaries between his land and the unclaimed country around him, Þórólfr has a farm and a temple built; the construction of boundaries and buildings endows both the cultivated land that he claims and the uncultivated wilderness beyond the new boundaries with meaning: in this way the land enters culture at the same time that it begins to be cultivated. The creation of boundaries is essential to the construction of a nation out of a wilderness: such boundaries are not only physical, but also mental or conceptual -boundaries between nature and culture, animal and human, and nature and the supernatural. In this essay I develop an ecocritical reading of Eyrbyggja saga that takes Þórólfr's act of land-taking (landnám) as emblematic of the saga's concern with boundaries and its revelation of their permeability.

This article examines an exchange of skaldic verses between a number of Icelandic chieftains, landholders and semi-professional poets, reported to have taken place in a period of political crisis in western Iceland in 1229. The surviving sequence, preserved in Sturla Þórðarson’s Íslendinga saga, constitutes an unparalleled example of extended verse-capping in medieval Icelandic narrative writing. The historical context of these verses and their narrative treatment in Íslendinga saga are considered in detail, and some new readings of the verse material and the political relationships they disclose are proposed. The verses are shown to illuminate the continuing value of skaldic performance as an instrument of social and political leverage in thirteenth-century Iceland, and the stimulatory function of competitive posturing in skaldic discourse. The analysis presented here suggests the need to revise some recent propositions concerning the supposed clerical and scholastic co-option of skaldic poetics in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Further stanzas composed in the period 1229–32 perpetuate the agonistic pattern developed in the initial sequence, and the narrative framing of these later compositions is shown to embody conspicuous ambivalence to the adversarial ethics underlying the continuing exchange.

This article argues that the Icelandic legendary saga Áns saga bogsveigis was written as a complementary Egils saga with an alternative outcome, one in which it is not the aggressive tyrant who wins, but the farmers. To achieve this, the author uses an option that Egill's family did not have, because it was humiliating: The hero plays the wretched fool; consequently , he is not taken seriously, and therefore he can build up power in secret until he is able to defeat the king. At the same time, Áns saga seems to be a twist on Þorsteins þáttr bǿjarmagns, which seems to be a twist on the myth of Þórr's visit to Útgarða-Loki. In the myth, the superhumanly strong hero is unexpectedly humiliated, because his opponent controls what he sees. In Þorsteins þáttr, the hero turns the tables, because he controls what his opponent sees. In Áns saga, the herculean hero chooses to be humiliated, and this is why he unexpectedly wins.

The articles in this anthology discuss the application of retrospective methods to a wide range of historical disciplines: Old Norse studies in a wide sense, folkloristics, history of religion, etymology, early Germanic iconography and cultural history, Uralic historical linguistics, and historical geography. The articles are the result of the conference New Focus on Retrospective Methods, held in Bergen by the Retrospective Methods Network and the Centre for Medieval Studies (CMS) at the University of Bergen, 27–8 September 2010.

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Eingehende Analysen verschiedener Fassungen der Laxdœla saga und der Fóstbrœðra saga bilden die Grundlage von Yves Lenzins Studie. Unter den Prämissen der historischen Anthropologie nähert sich der Verfasser seinen Gegenständen mit Methoden, die in der Sagaforschung erstmals derart systematisch angewendet werden. Die Dichte seiner Beobachtungen erlaubt es ihm, Akteure zu benennen, aus deren Biographien sich die Schriftlichkeit und Individualität der Sagas erklären. Wie wurden Sagas im 13. Jahrhundert politisch instrumentalisiert? Wie begann ihre Verschriftlichung im 12. Jahrhundert? Und wie entwickelten sich die Form, der Stil und die Funktionen von Isländersagas? All dies ist Gegenstand des Bandes, der – anders als ältere Forschungsbeiträge – den Wandel in den Voraussetzungen der Sagaproduktion nicht vernachlässigt.

In this article an attempt is made to understand the way medieval Icelandic sagas stage their characters as an expression of a conflict of norms within the society which produced them, i.e. Iceland in the thirteenth century. Two contemporary sagas show how this conflict of norms is part of the reality facing chieftains in a society where they must use violence to preserve their power and protect themselves and their kinsmen, but where the fate of their souls is also at stake in a Christian world-view forcefully promoted by a militant Church. Two sagas of Icelanders are then studied in which this conflict of norms is thematized as one between Christianity and paganism. The conflict of norms in question is instrumental in generating an image of the self which is generated by the forces in presence in medieval culture.

This article focuses on the implications of ‘disabled masculinity’ within the broader religious context of medieval Iceland as it is portrayed in Brennu-Njáls saga. Njáll Þorgeirsson, the titular character of the saga, is first introduced as being unable to grow a beard; this inability to engage in this traditional performance of masculinity marks him as a disabled man within medieval Icelandic society. The article not only explores how his disabled appearance interacts with gender-based insults and ridicule from his peers, but also considers his evolving depiction alongside the changing religious landscape of saga age Iceland. The intersectional approach between gender and disability studies employed here allows for a better understanding of the function of religious and legal knowledge within medieval Iceland’s patriarchal society. https://journal.fi/mirator/article/view/98543

Natural resources managed as commons are often discussed following one of two opposed narratives: either Garret Hardin's pessimistic "tragedy of the commons" (assuming their inherent unsustainability), or Elinor Ostrom's optimistic account of the commons as resource systems that are sustainable over the long term. This article analyzes stories from the medieval sagas of Icelanders in which natural resources managed as commons play an important role. In all the examples, these resource systems appear as either vulnerable or failing. However, close readings reveal that an interpretation based on Hardin's "tragic" narrative fails to grasp the underlying meaning of these stories. In almost all cases, the sagas use various narrative means to characterize in negative ways those who endanger or terminate commons. The sagas depict egoistic and aggressive behavior as being wrong and highlight modesty and cooperation as an implicit (and sometimes explicit) ideal in the use of commons. The frequency and prominence in the sagas of stories that frame commons in this way, suggests that these stories had an important function in medieval Icelandic society: the promotion of norms, values and behavior that could facilitate long-term sustainability in the management of natural resources as commons.

This article examines from a narratological perspective the few talismans known from the Sagas of Icelanders in connection with other powerful objects in order to shed new light on the underlying concepts concerning them. The idea of powerful items with an agency of their own is widespread in the Icelandic sagas. I argue that the origin of the talismans’ inherent power can only be examined within this larger category of meaningful objects. These usually auspicious items need not necessarily refer to a numinous entity, but may also carry an energy in themselves which is connected to the gæfa (‚luck‘) of another person. Thus, newly examining the concept behind talismans and other auspicious objects could help to create a clearer image of the conceptualization of things in Old Norse texts.

Full-text pdf: https://www.nordistik.uni-muenchen.de/personen/mitarbeiter/hahn_daniela/publ_hahn/hahn_talisman.pdf

New Norse Studies: A Journal on the Literature and Culture of Medieval Scandinavia is the new annual of Islandica, a series in Icelandic and Norse studies, founded in 1908 and published by the Fiske Icelandic Collection, Cornell University Library. Devoted to all facets of the written tradition of medieval Iceland and Scandinavia, NNS seeks to bring the insights of multiple disciplines to bear upon Norse texts.