Interpretation of Icelandic Sagas in the Light of Oral Tradition # 80978
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Interpretation of Icelandic Sagas in the Light of Oral Tradition. A Hypothesis on Method. By Gísli Sigurðsson.
The book introduces a new approach to discussing the role of oral tradition in medieval Icelandic society. By using field research on oral tradition, it examines the relevance of assuming that the stories stem from such a tradition when reading ancient texts; a tradition in which the experience, knowledge and knowledge of society were passed down from generation to generation through stories and poems.
The first part asks how the legal historians took to the literary culture that can be assumed to have undermined their position of power, and what the literary horizon of an intellectual from the ranks of the Sturlungs, Ólafur Þórðarson the White Poet, looked like in the mid-13th century. The second part discusses the characters, families and events of the Eastfjords sagas in light of the idea that those who wrote the sagas assumed a certain knowledge of the story's subject matter on the part of their audience. The third part deals with the Vínland riddle using the methods presented in the book. Instead of viewing the sagas of the Vínland voyages either as sources of events or as literary tradition, they are read as sources of oral tradition that verifiably preserved the memory of actual voyages to foreign lands. The final section summarizes the findings on the changes in the assumptions of research in Icelandic medieval studies if the oral tradition behind the ancient sagas is taken into account — with examples of related narratives in the Finnbogi saga framework and Vatnsdæla saga and mythological patterns in Hænsna-Þóris saga. Finally, a thorough abstract in English follows.
Gísli Sigurðsson's doctoral dissertation.
The book introduces a new approach to discussing the role of oral tradition in medieval Icelandic society. By using field research on oral tradition, it examines the relevance of assuming that the stories stem from such a tradition when reading ancient texts; a tradition in which the experience, knowledge and knowledge of society were passed down from generation to generation through stories and poems.
The first part asks how the legal historians took to the literary culture that can be assumed to have undermined their position of power, and what the literary horizon of an intellectual from the ranks of the Sturlungs, Ólafur Þórðarson the White Poet, looked like in the mid-13th century. The second part discusses the characters, families and events of the Eastfjords sagas in light of the idea that those who wrote the sagas assumed a certain knowledge of the story's subject matter on the part of their audience. The third part deals with the Vínland riddle using the methods presented in the book. Instead of viewing the sagas of the Vínland voyages either as sources of events or as literary tradition, they are read as sources of oral tradition that verifiably preserved the memory of actual voyages to foreign lands. The final section summarizes the findings on the changes in the assumptions of research in Icelandic medieval studies if the oral tradition behind the ancient sagas is taken into account — with examples of related narratives in the Finnbogi saga framework and Vatnsdæla saga and mythological patterns in Hænsna-Þóris saga. Finally, a thorough abstract in English follows.
Gísli Sigurðsson's doctoral dissertation.