The Corpus in Context

The foregrounding of mythological and legendary narratives, and traditional poetics, is deliberate. These works often employ spatial, temporal and linguistic techniques that create a distancing or defamiliarising effect, fostering conceptual experimentation. For example, scholars have shown how fornaldarsögur use remote narrative settings as a way of probing social and ideological tensions from a safe remove,3 T. Tulinius, The Matter of the North: The Rise of Literary Fiction in Thirteenth-Century Iceland (Odense, 2002), p. 42. This is discussed further in Chapter 2. a strategy also arguably at work in mythological narratives.4 Haley-Halinski, ‘Birds and Humans’, p. 201. A comparable distancing effect is produced by poetic forms, such as skaldic kennings and eddic riddles, which conjure chimeric image-worlds that compel audiences to reflect on their own processes of cognitive categorisation. These works create narrative and linguistic spaces especially conducive to conceptual experimentation, making them valuable for examining ideas of identity, ontology and agency.

While we cannot uncritically extrapolate from works rooted in oral culture, like the Poetic Edda, to the conceptual world of medieval Icelanders, research emphasises the enduring relevance of these texts during the time of their preservation. Margaret Clunies Ross argues that myths served as cognitive and communicative systems within later medieval contexts, evident in their use as frames of reference in skaldic verse,5 ‘The Conservation and Reinterpretation of Myth in Medieval Icelandic Writing’, in Old Icelandic Literature and Society, ed. M. Clunies Ross (Cambridge, UK, 2000), pp. 116–39 (pp. 119–21). while Stephen Mitchell warns against viewing mythological poems as mere cultural relics recorded only due to antiquarian interest: as he notes, producing manuscripts such as the Codex Regius of the Poetic Edda was an expensive and laborious process, and one which reveals an underlying seriousness of purpose.6 Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages (Oxford, 2011), p. 77. Judy Quinn further observes that a robust tradition of eddic composition continued well into the thirteenth century in the contemporary sagas, challenging the notion that eddic composition was simply a vestige of the distant past.7 ‘From Orality to Literacy in Medieval Iceland’, in Old Icelandic Literature and Society, ed. Clunies Ross pp. 30–60 (pp. 44–5). These stories and literary forms were not only preserved in a later medieval context, but also represented an embedded cognitive frame for medieval Icelanders and a living component of their cultural and textual traditions.

Although my focus rests on mythological narrative, fornaldarsögur and traditional poetics, I also draw on evidence from across genres and modes. This approach reveals the enduring significance of questions surrounding human identity across the broader literary culture, and enables analysis of how the negotiation of such questions varies across textual forms. It also necessitates a somewhat critical stance on the heuristic role of genre in limiting the scope of inquiry. While genre categories can be helpful, postmedieval classificatory systems of genre have faced increasing scrutiny for their rigidity and retrospective imposition,8 Bampi, Larrington and Sif Ríkharðsdóttir, eds, A Critical Companion; J. Quinn et al., ‘Interrogating Genre in the “Fornaldarsögur”: Round-Table Discussion’, VMS 2 (2006), 275–96. an issue compounded by the history of proposed chronologies of saga production. Earlier scholarship often situated saga genres hierarchically and evolutionarily, celebrating classical Íslendingasögur as a ‘golden age’ of thirteenth-century saga production, and decrying later fornaldarsögur and riddarasögur as reflections of the literary decline of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Recent work, however, highlights how different sub-groups of the Icelandic saga developed contemporaneously and continued to interact with one another.9 M. Clunies Ross, The Cambridge Introduction to the Old Norse-Icelandic Saga (Cambridge, UK, 2010), p. 70; Bampi, ‘Genre’, in A Critical Companion, ed. Bampi, Larrington and Sif Ríkharðsdóttir (Cambridge, UK, 2020), pp. 15–30 (p. 7). Recognising this interplay, the study does not use genre as a limiting principle, instead tracing patterns and variation in the representation of identity across a diverse corpus.

The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were a time of major social, political, economic, juridical and literary change in Iceland. The gradual monopolisation of power by a handful of rival elite families, coupled with the increasing influence of the Norwegian crown, culminated in the Icelandic Commonwealth’s dissolution in 1262–64, ending over three centuries of local governance. Over the next one hundred years or so, Iceland was transformed into a Norwegian dependency through the substitution of Norwegian law codes for Icelandic ones, the re-organisation of the Alþing, the abolishment of the goðorð, the appointment of Norwegians to the leading public offices of Iceland and the introduction of large-scale reforms of property ownership, ecclesiastical law and priesthood by the church.10 E. A. Rowe, ‘Generic Hybrids: Norwegian “Family” Sagas and Icelandic “Mythic-Heroic” Sagas’, SS 65.4 (1993), 539–54 (p. 548); E. Sigurdson, The Church in Fourteenth-Century Iceland (Leiden, 2016), p. 10. Under Norwegian colonial rule, Iceland secured access to vital commodities such as timber, grain and iron,11 P. Meulengracht Sørensen, ‘Social Institutions and Belief Systems of Medieval Iceland (c. 870–1400) and their Relations to Literary Production’, trans. M. Clunies Ross, in Old Icelandic Literature and Society, ed. Clunies Ross, pp. 8–29 (p. 24). and with these resources came new intellectual and literary influences from abroad. The Icelandic dependency on foreign trade brought with it an increased Europeanisation in self-presentation among Icelandic elites,12 E. Pierce, ‘Impressions at the Edge: Belonging and Otherness in the Post-Viking North Atlantic’, in Creating Material Worlds: The Uses of Identity in Archaeology, ed. E. Pierce, A. Russell, A. Maldonado and L. Campbell (Oxford, 2016), pp. 135–52. and a growing emphasis on intent and individual agency emerged in legal procedures from the mid-thirteenth century.13 Likely a result of continental theological discussions which distinguished between intentional and unintentional sin, thereby placing more emphasis on personal responsibility and self-awareness. O.-A. R. Nordby, ‘The Self in Legal Procedure: Oath-Taking as Individualism in Norwegian Medieval Law’, in Approaches to the Medieval Self, ed. Eriksen, Holmqvist and Bandlien, pp. 177–94.

Amid these upheavals, literary production in Iceland burgeoned: textualisation increased and new literary modes emerged.14 The technology of writing using the Latin alphabet came with the introduction of Christianity in the early eleventh century, marking a major shift in how knowledge was transmitted. Nonetheless, rich vernacular oral traditions both preceded and accompanied the textualisation of Old Norse literary genres (Quinn, ‘From Orality to Literacy’). Many sagas (Íslendingasögur, fornaldarsögur, konungasögur, samtíðarsögur) were written down in this period, and a major part of the corpus of Old Norse poetry was committed to vellum, embedded in sagas or other works such as poetic treatises (M. Clunies Ross, A History of Old Norse Poetry and Poetics (Cambridge, UK, 2005), p. 206). The fourteenth century, in particular, witnessed a surge in manuscript production, the flourishing of religious literature, the development of historical genres like annals, and the emergence of new genres, such as riddarasögur (Sigurdson, Church in Fourteenth-Century Iceland, p. 30). Scholars have hypothesised a link between the political disintegration that occurred in the thirteenth century and the writing of this literature, undertaken by a higher stratum of society who keenly felt the loss of independence at the level of cultural identity.15 Literacy was largely restricted to the elite, educated at chieftains’ farms, monasteries and episcopal seats – centres for the composition of works and production of manuscripts (Bampi and Sif Ríkharðsdóttir, ‘Introduction’, in A Critical Companion, ed. Bampi, Larrington and Sif Ríkharðsdóttir, pp. 1–14 (p. 3)). Given this provenance, we could question whether the cultural expressions of human identity in this literature are inclusive of the experiences of medieval Icelandic society at large. The implicit universality of the phrase ‘human identity’ may be misleading, as it is unclear to what extent literary explorations of the human condition resonated with Icelanders across the spectrum of class, ethnicity and gender. The relationship between literature and society is viewed as reciprocal: Icelanders’ historical experience and social circumstances provide the basis for their literature, at the same time as that literature ‘contributed to the shaping of history in a self-affirming process whereby a people with a special historical recollection and mode of thought made narratives about the past a meaningful part of their present’, as Preben Meulengracht Sørensen writes.16 ‘Social Institutions’, p. 11.

Given the ‘special lustre’ attributed to the past in this literature,17 To borrow Meulengracht Sørensen’s phrase (ibid., p. 28). earlier scholars often sought to excavate Viking Age mentalités (that is, the underlying worldview and cultural assumptions of Scandinavian peoples in the late eighth to the eleventh centuries) from these texts, overlooking the later medieval contexts in which they are preserved.18 This approach reflects a broader philological tendency prevailing in earlier scholarship to reconstruct a putative authorial original underlying a given text. On the history of textual criticism in an Old Norse context, see J. Quinn, ‘Principles of Textual Criticism and the Interpretation of Old Norse Texts Derived from Oral Tradition’, in Studies in the Transmission and Reception of Old Norse Literature: The Hyperborean Muse, ed. J. Quinn and A. Cipolla (Turnhout, 2016), pp. 47–78. Today, however, research increasingly recognises how the past is refracted through the concerns and ideologies of the present:19 E.g., Torfi Tulinius, Matter of the North, p. 39; Merkelbach, Monsters in Society, pp. 4–5. these works offer windows onto the time of their composition and dissemination.20 This parallels the shift towards New Philology in Old Norse editorial practices. See M. J. Driscoll, ‘The Words on the Page: Thoughts on Philology, Old and New’, in Creating the Medieval Saga: Versions, Variability, and Editorial Interpretations of Old Norse Saga Literature, ed. J. Quinn and E. Lethbridge (Odense, 2010), 85–102; K. Wolf, ‘Old Norse, New Philology’, SS 65 (1993), 338–48. Each chapter therefore situates its readings within the intellectual and historical conditions of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Iceland, treating these works as products of a living and self-reflective literary culture.