The image of Greenland in Icelandic Saga tradition: to the question on formation of binary image of Home and Anti-Home

Currently, the national humanities science shows particular interest in the phenomena that have been previously outside its area of expertise. These phenomena include materialistic objects, which in the context of cultural-semiotic approach turn into meaningful constants. One of such materialistic-spiritual phenomena is the concept of “home”. For Icelanders, during the period of civil war marked in history as the Age of the Sturlungs, the phenomenon of “home” undergoes substantial transformation. Forced exile from the country, loss of relationship with family, and building a new life contribute to conception and formation of the new semantic space structured on the binary image: Home – Anti-Home. Within the Icelandic Saga tradition, the image of negative home belongs of the island of Greenland, which provided an temporary shelter and reflected the overall atmosphere of forced migrants. The article is dedicated to the examination of the image of Greenland in Icelandic Saga tradition. The author reveals the key parameters of formation of the image of Greenland as an “alien” space, formed among the Icelanders who were forced to leave their country. This leads to the emergence of antithesis in Saga literature: home and homelessness. The concept of “home” is associate with Iceland and saturated with additional shades of meaning, turning into and object of reminiscence and becoming the embodiment of spiritual substance. Greenland, on the contrary, was endowed with the traits of hostile space with regards to a person.

Alterity and Occidentalism in Fourteenth-Century Icelandic Texts: Narratives of Travel, Conversion, and Dehumanization

This article analyses five fourteenth-century Old Norse travel narratives in light of the learned geographical tradition of medieval Iceland. Three of the narratives, Þorvalds þáttr víðfǫrla, Eiríks saga víðfǫrla, and Yngvars saga víðfǫrla, focus on the travels of Nordic people to eastern Europe and Asia; while the latter two, Eiríks saga rauða and Grœnlendinga saga, tell of travels to the continent later named North America. While the travels to the East deal with pilgrimage and the search for the terrestrial Paradise in the service of individual salvation and missionary activities in Scandinavia and Iceland more specifically, the travels to the West are focused on the violent conquest and Christianization of newfound peripheral areas and their peoples. What these narratives have in common, and owe to the learned (Plinian) tradition, is their dehumanized view of foreign and strange people: the giants and monsters of the East, and the skrælingar (indigenous peoples) and einfœtingar (sciopods) of the West. In these sagas travels to the East, while dangerous, introduce heroes to courtly manners, encyclopedic knowledge, and salvation; whereas travels to the West lead to mayhem and death and all attempts at settlement there fail miserably, making Greenland the westernmost outpost of Christianity in the world. This article aims to show how this learned tradition was adapted for use in saga literature to contrast the monstrous and heathen periphery with the more central and piously Christian Iceland.

Men and Masculinities in the Sagas of Icelanders

This volume is the first book-length study of masculinities in the sagas of Icelanders. Spanning the entire corpus of the sagas of Icelanders—and so taking into account a number of little-studied sagas as well as the more well-known works—it comprehensively interrogates the construction, operation, and problematization of masculinities in this genre. Men and Masculinities in the Sagas of Icelanders elucidates the dominant model of masculinity that operates in the sagas, demonstrates how masculinities and masculine characters function within these texts, and investigates the means by which the sagas, and saga characters, may subvert masculine dominance. Combining close literary analysis with insights drawn from sociological theories of hegemonic and subordinated masculinities, notions of homosociality and performative gender, and psychoanalytic frameworks, the book brings to men and masculinities in saga literature the same scrutiny traditionally brought to the study of women and femininities. Ultimately, this book demonstrates that masculinity is not simply glorified in the sagas, but is represented as being both inherently fragile and a burden to all characters, masculine and non-masculine alike.

Dario Bullitta, Niðrstigningar saga: Sources, Transmission, and Theology of the Old Norse “Descent into Hell”. Toronto Old Norse and Icelandic Series, 11. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017, pp. XIX, 203.

Alongside the source and contextual study promised by the title, this volume also delivers an edition and the first English translation of the two primary redactions of the Old Norse version of the Descensus Christi or Harrowing of Hell translated from the medieval tradition of the Evangelium Nicodemi or Acta Pilati (for a modern Norwegian translation and parallel normalized edition of the Old Icelandic text see Odd Einar Haugen, Norrøne tekster i utval, 2nd ed., Oslo: Gyldendal, 2001 [1st ed. 1994], pp. 250–65). While the texts themselves are short and have attracted relatively little attention compared to the immense consideration afforded saga literature or Norse poetic traditions, they are nevertheless of great philological significance in the history of Old Norse-Icelandic literature and provide a window into the transmission of Latin and Christian texts. Given the amount of material covered in such few pages while retaining the fullness of the textual tradition, this study, edition, and translation is both conceptually outstanding and strong in execution. The fields of Old Norse-Icelandic language and literature and Germanic philology in a wider sense are enriched by the publication of such multipurpose volumes, whose organization should increase interest in and coverage of otherwise minor or overlooked texts.

‘Á Kálfskinni’: Sagas and the Space of Literature

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 (