The Legendary Saga As a Medium of Cultural Memory : A Study of Late Medieval Icelandic Manuscripts.

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Valpola-Walker, Alisa.

Contributor:

UK Research and Innovation UKRI, Funder.

Series:

Memory and the Medieval North Series

Memory and the Medieval North Series ; v.4

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (218 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Berlin/Boston : Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2025.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Acknowledgments

Contents

List of Abbreviations

List of Illustrations

Note on Manuscripts, Editions, and Translations

1 Introduction

2 Overview of AM 589a–f 4to

3 The Legendary Past in AM 589a–e 4to

4 Sturlaugs saga starfsama

5 Göngu-Hrólfs saga

6 Overview of AM 586 4to

7 The Vocality of AM 589a–f 4to and AM 586 4to

8 The Manuscripts in Context

9 General Conclusion

Appendices

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

This eBook is made available Open Access under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0

Dissertation University of Cambridge 2023.

ISBN:

9783111338651

3111338657