Volume 47, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Saga Conference

Around the year 1060, the misbehaving Icelandic skald Sneglu-Halli arrives at the court of king Haraldr harðráði and manages to provoke the king and his fellow courtiers, yet he leaves a richer and more successful man as a result. A literary analysis of Morkinskinna ’s Sneglu-Halla þáttr shows that the protagonist’s portrayal is a deliberate if somewhat exaggerated construction of how Icelanders abroad should behave, as well as which memories of the 11th century the 13th century Icelanders wished to preserve. Sneglu-Halli’s provocative behavior is seen as a positive character trait that, if pursued moderately, helps establish the uniqueness of the Icelander at court. This behavior is juxtaposed with the famous skald Þjóðólfr Arnórsson, whose undoubted success at court is downplayed in the þáttr due to his running away from his meager Icelandic beginnings. Cultural Memory studies are the key to understanding this artistic manipulation, since the way we remember the past establishes our perception of the present. This article’s framework was first established in a course taught by Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir at Aarhus University—as a part of the Viking and Medieval Norse Studies program—and I would like to thank her for the systematic introduction into Cultural Memory and Memory studies. Many thanks are due to Ármann Jakobsson and Pernille Hermann for their crucial and very generous comments along the various stages of this article’s writing. Finally, heartfelt thanks should be given for Steven D. Shema and Kevin French’s English comments, and to the journal’s anonymous reviewer and editorial staff. Any fault found in the article is entirely my own and not of any of the above mentioned, if memory serves.

The aim of this article is to show that foreshadowing in various types of Old Norse saga differs in both content and form. In the individual chapters typical features of foreshadowing in family, king’s and legendary sagas are described. These features are shown through the following categories: the form in which the given foreshadowing occurs (a dream, premonition, curse, etc.), the content of the given foreshadowing, the time extent of the foreshadowing (how far into the future the given foreshadowing extends) and geographical range (to what places the given foreshadowing is bound). The subsequent comparison of foreshadowing in various saga genres reveals great differences between these four categories. In the article’s conclusion, possible causes of these differences are suggested.

In a close reading of a short story by the Danish writer Solvej Balle (in Ifølge loven. Fire beretninger om mennesket , København 1993; According to the Law: Four Stories about Humankind), this article examines how the game of chess not merely appears as a motif thematized in the text but also regulates the text as an underlying structural and epistemological model. The story presents a shift back from the Copernican to the Aristotelean system through an analogous shift in narrative perspective from that of the chess player to that of the chess piece. In this way it narratively re-enacts the epistemological situation of (post-)modernity: the futile quest to regain transcendence after its loss.

In this article, I will discuss Knut Hamsun’s connection to the Danish capital Copenhagen, and his lifelong acquaintance with the famous Danish author, Johannes V. Jensen. By the end of the 19th century, Copenhagen was the cultural capital of the Nordic countries. Together with many other eminent Nordic artists, Knut Hamsun spent considerable time in Copenhagen and experienced personal and professional growth during his stays there. Johannes V. Jensen and Hamsun knew each other for years and held each other in high esteem, yet their acquaintance was marked by both fascination and critique. Johannes V. Jensen, in particular, had mixed feelings and opinions about Hamsun. This article focusses on the similarities and differences between Knut Hamsun and Johannes V. Jensen, and discusses how an initially shared value system could lead them in two opposite political directions.

This article explores and examines the narratological concepts of metalepsis and disclosure as they manifest themselves in Karen Blixen’s Seven Gothic Tales (1934/1935) and Winter’s Tales (1942/1943). At the core of the examination lies the inference that it is possible to trace metaleptic movements in a wide-ranging selection of Blixen’s tales. Furthermore, it becomes evident that metaleptic movements and disclosure functions have the potential to destabilize ontological boundaries between fiction and reality in a way that deepens the literary communication between author, text, and reader.

This article examines the literary representation of infanticides in Scandinavian literary texts from the 19th and 20th centuries. While most research on infanticide addresses the problematic situation of the mother who has killed her newborn child, the role of the father has suffered unwarranted neglect. It is therefore the purpose of this article to give an overview of central Scandinavian texts treating infanticides and to investigate more deeply how the father’s responsibility or guilt is discussed. Another important question is how law and justice are thematized in the texts. It will be argued that the literary texts take into account the fathers‘ (joint) guilt in the child’s death more often than commonly assumed. The article also shows that the literary texts do not take the androcentric perspective of the governing legislation for granted, but rather call it into question. It can thus be said that the literary texts on infanticide are implicitly critical of social institutions and legal norms for being ignorant of their own shortcomings.

Taking the exhibition entitled “Carl Larsson – friends and enemies“ (Stockholm 2013) as its starting point, this study seeks to shed new light on the interplay of selected people in Larsson’s personal networks. It examines an issue, which has to date received little attention, the interaction between Larsson’s artistic and literary work. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, the study explores a range of personal relationships expressed both cooperatively and antagonistically, but is concerned less to demonstrate any conscious strategies on the part of Larsson than to reveal gradually evolving patterns of interaction. Indeed, in the fight for symbolic capital, Larsson’s combined genre of literature and art reproductions in the form of albums (1895–1910) is increasingly growing in importance.

The “space of literature” is a metaphor for literature introduced by the French writer and critic Maurice Blanchot to express the specificity of literary discourse, which says what otherwise cannot be said. In this it produces a community around the unsayable. This ability to say something previously unsaid makes literature to some extent akin to scientific inquiry. In the last decades, research in Old Norse-Icelandic studies has not focussed on this aspect of the saga literature. The study of the sociological conditions for literary production in medieval Iceland can explain why the self-conscious pursuit of literary expression resulted in the emergence of a unique literary genre, the Saga about early Icelanders ( Íslendingasögur ). This group of sagas projects on a particular temporal and spatial construct, that of Iceland during the Settlement and Conversion periods, the unspoken concerns of their time of writing, the Sturlung age and its aftermath.

The paper discusses a number of versified runic inscriptions, mainly from Scandinavia, and from ca. 400 to 1400 AD, to explore what they reveal about the forms and functions of early Scandinavian poetry outside the manuscript tradition. With a particular focus on ‘authors’ and ‘audiences’, as defined by Bredehoft in his work on Anglo-Saxon inscriptions, the paper elucidates the potential oral contexts of Scandinavian runic verse and concludes that, although runic writing is a form of literacy, the examples show that for most of its history it is associated with various kinds of oral context. Runic verse shows that inscriptions provide one of the best ways into understanding the Scandinavian oral tradition, not only before the arrival of manuscript literacy, but also during its infancy.

This article examines the intimate connection between the senses and memory. The focus lies on vision, which was believed to be one of the main routes of access to memory in medieval culture. Because descriptions of and reflections on memory are evident across genres, examples will be drawn from various corners of the Old Norse textual landscape and reference will be made to sagas, eddic poetry and the Prose Edda . Of central importance for the analysis is the image of the mind’s eye ( auga hugar ), perhaps the most suitable example of the prominent position of sight for mental storage and processes of recollection. The article also discusses the relationship between literature and memory. It examines how organizational principles similar to those characteristic of ‘artificial memory’, a type of memory based principally on spatial structures (often architectonic structures) and images (frequently visually striking images) had an impact on the content and structure of Old Norse literature.

It is in vain that one looks for realistic descriptions of landscapes in skaldic poetry. There is no interest in the landscapes where the actions which are the only concerns of this genre take place. However, landscape features such as mountains, the sea, trees, caves or the sky are perceptible in the system of the kennings, yet only as more or less abstract ideas. They mostly lack congruence within their semantic and situational contexts as is shown by the examples of kennings for ‘earth’ and ‘sea’. However, a more inclusive research shows that there are images of landscapes that may be called metaphorical or mythical. These may be conceptualized as different types: (1) The emotional state of individual characters can be projected on to landscapes (e.g. Hallfreðr, Óláfs Erfidrápa 19). (2) The inner space of a human being can be depicted as a landscape. This is the case in countless kennings for ‚breast‘ used as metaphors for the insides of a human being, found most frequently in various kennings for ‘poetry’. (3) Descriptions of sea-voyages on the turbulent sea are situated at the border of real and mythical landscapes in as much as the sea may be depicted as a threatening monster ready to devour the ship (e.g. Refr Gestsson, Ferðavísur ). Alternatively, the storm that generates the churning sea may be personified as a giant (Egill Skallagrímsson, Lausavísa 23). (4) Þórsdrápa presents a special case in its depiction of Þórr’s journey to Geirrøðr and the land of giants. In this instance there appears to be some kind of interchangeable relation between the landscape – especially rivers – and demonic or mythical beings.