Startseite Literaturwissenschaften The Legendary Saga as a Medium of Cultural Memory
book: The Legendary Saga as a Medium of Cultural Memory
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The Legendary Saga as a Medium of Cultural Memory

A Study of Late Medieval Icelandic Manuscripts
  • Alisa Valpola-Walker
Sprache: Englisch
Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 2025
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Memory and the Medieval North
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Über dieses Buch

This book examines the representation and historical significance of the legendary Scandinavian past as it is depicted in two late medieval Icelandic saga manuscripts: AM 589a–f 4to and AM 586 4to. It situates the manuscripts within their literary, media, and historical contexts to read the legendary sagas (or fornaldarsögur) within them as works of historical writing. The qualities about them that are often used to deny them the label of ‘history´ — their proximity to romance and ‘folklore’, and their playfully self-conscious narration — are reinterpreted as conscious attempts to reconfigure cultural memory to suit the needs of the manuscripts’ fifteenth-century patrons. The first half of the book takes a literary approach, offering an intertextual and genre-based analysis of AM 589a–f 4to. The second broadens out to view the manuscripts as historically situated media. It examines their relationships to orality and literacy and then argues that they served particular functions at the time of their production and continued to shape cultural memories as they were read (or vocalised) in the centuries that followed. Drawing on insights from cultural memory studies and material philology, this book will be of interest to scholars of Old Norse literature, folklore, and manuscript studies.

Information zu Autoren / Herausgebern

Alisa Valpola-Walker, London, Großbritannien.

Informationen zur Veröffentlichung
Seiten und Bilder/Illustrationen im Buch
eBook veröffentlicht am:
17. Februar 2025
eBook ISBN:
9783111338651
Gebunden veröffentlicht am:
17. Februar 2025
Gebunden ISBN:
9783111338439
Seiten und Bilder/Illustrationen im Buch
Frontmatter:
16
Inhalt:
201
Abbildungen:
4
Farbige Abbildungen:
5
Heruntergeladen am 7.1.2026 von https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111338651/html
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