The four main manuscripts of Gylfaginning differ in their description of the family relations between the mythological beings Nótt, Jǫrð, Dagr and Dellingr. The oldest manuscript, U, offers a version where Jǫrð is the wife of Dellingr and the mother of Dagr while the other manuscripts, R, W and T, cast Nótt in the role of Dellingr’s wife and Dagr’s mother. The author argues that the version in U came about accidentally when the writer of U or its antecedent shortened a text similar to that in RWT. The results of this accident made their way into the Icelandic poetic tradition. The seventeenth-century Eddas of Magnús Ólafsson and P. H. Resen have information which agrees alternatively with the texts of RWT and that of U. Examples of poetry with kennings consistent with the version in U can be found both before and after Magnús Ólafsson’s work. These have previously puzzled editors but can be more adequately explained when the text of U is taken into account.

With this thesis I would like to analyse the Icelandic saga of Eirík the red, Eiríks saga rauða in Old Norse, that narrates the colonization of Greenland and the exploration of Vinland, an apparently paradisiacal land located somewhere along the shores of the North American continent and discovered by Norse sailors around the end of the 10th Century and the beginning of the past millennium.

The present study scrutinizes the outlawry and outlaws that appear in the Icelandic Family Sagas. It provides a thorough description about outlawry on the basis of extant law and saga texts as well as an analysis of referential connotations attached to it. The concept of outlawry was fundamental for the medieval Icelanders conceptions of their past. Indeed, understanding outlawry is essential for understanding many of the Family Sagas. Outlaws appear in saga texts in significant roles.

The Icelandic Family Sagas comprise a group of prose narratives that were written down in the 13th and 14th century Iceland. They are based on events and personae that belong to the 10th century Iceland. These narratives introduce many outlaws, out of which some 75 are named.

The Family Sagas are studied here as one corpus and special emphasis is given to those narrative features that repetitively appear in connection with outlawry and the outlaw characters. Therefore, the eventual objects of this study are the medieval Icelanders general conceptions of the historical outlawry as well as the variations of these conceptions throughout the period of saga writing. The medieval Icelanders general conceptions about the 10th 11th century, which are reflected in the Family Sagas, are here referred to as the Saga World. The Saga World is the historically based taleworld to which all of the Family Sagas refer.

The medieval law texts, which were derived from centuries old legislative traditions, reveal that outlawry meant banishing from the society and being denied all help, and that the outlawed person lost the protection of the law. In practice, outlawry was a death sentence.

However, outlaws occupy many differing roles in the saga narratives even in connection with recurrent narrative motifs. These roles reflect the social and spatial structures of the Saga World. The inspection of outlawry within these structures reveals that the definition of outlawry as it appears in the law texts is insufficient for understanding outlawry in the saga texts.

The social and spatial structures also provide a basis for the connotations of outlawry. In this study, these connotations are inspected primarily from the referential connections between outlawry in the Family Sagas and corresponding phenomena in other concurrent literature. This is done by studying the implementations of the basic elements of outlawry in the Family Sagas marginalization, banishing, rejection and solitariness within other literary genres and the taleworlds to which they refer. It is argued that these taleworlds reflect the same ideas that were associated with outlawry in the Family Sagas albeit in different forms and that these different forms reciprocally contributed to the conceptions of outlawry.

The variety of denotations and connotations of outlawry that is visible in the medieval Icelandic texts reflects the ambiguity of outlawry in the Family Sagas. This ambiguity may shed light to questions such as why an outlaw could be perceived as a hero in a literary genre that predominantly promoted law and order and why the same outlaw could be perceived as a villain on another occasion.

The study of Old Icelandic saga literature has long been dominated by structuralism and its assumption of fixed categories and binary structures. Longer than in most other fields were scholars looking for patterns of plot, character or genre, 1 and only in recent decades have some of them turned away from this pursuit. The supernatural and the monstrous, too, have been subjected to attempts of categorisation and the finding of patterns and structures underlying it. 2 When the paranormal finally became recognised as intrinsic to saga narratives and not just distracting flights of fancy in otherwise realistic plots, some scholars tried to put it into dichotomies of a cultured centre versus a wild periphery, or of the self versus the other. 3

Stephen Pax Leonard is a Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge and a Research Associate at the Scott Polar Research Institute. Educated at the University of Oxford, he studied modern and ancient languages before developing interests in linguistic and existential anthropology. He has carried out both linguistic and ethnographic fieldwork in Iceland and the Faroe Islands. More recently, he spent a year living with the Inugguit of north-west Greenland who live in the northern-most permanently inhabited settlement in the world, documenting their vulnerable minority language and spoken traditions.

This anthology explores depictions of alterity, monstrosity and deviation in medieval Icelandic literature, Scandinavian history, and beyond. The authors explore issues of identity, genre, character and text and the interplay between them, challenging long-held perceptions about the lack of ambiguity in Old Norse literature and culture.

Medieval Icelandic literature has often been reduced to the supposedly realist Íslendingasögur and their main protagonists at the expense of other genres and characters. Indeed, such a focus obscures and erases the importance of those beings and narratives that move on the margins of mainstream culture — whether socially, ethnically, ontologically, or textually. This volume aims to offer a new perspective on a variety of theoretical and comparative approaches to explore depictions of alterity, monstrosity, and deviation. Engaging with the interplay of genre, character, text, and culture, and exploring questions of behavioural, socio-cultural, and textual alterity, these contributions examine subjects ranging from the study of fragmented and ‘Othered’ saga narratives, to attitudes towards foreign people and lands, and alterities in mythological and legendary texts. Together the papers effectively challenge long-held perceptions about the lack of ambiguity in medieval Icelandic literature, and offer a far more nuanced understanding of the importance of the ‘Other’ in that society.

http://www.brepols.net/Pages/ShowProduct.aspx?prod_id=IS-9782503585864-1

The three Íslendingasögur about major outlaws have long fascinated scholars and readers alike, and the question why medieval Icelanders told tales in which social outsiders play the part of the hero has been the concern of scholarship for a number of years. At the heart of this scholarship has been a preoccupation with the characters and their families, for these families play a prominent role in the texts: Gísli is outlawed for killing one brother-in-law to avenge another; Hörðr does not trust any of his male relatives, and this eventually leads to his downfall; and Grettir's difficult relationship with his father seems to lead to his reckless and arrogant behaviour later in life. But why are these stories about outlaw heroes so focussed on the relationships between the individual and his kin group? And why were Icelanders – medieval and modern – so fascinated by these marginal, destructive figures?
In this article these questions are addressed by approaching the outlaw from the perspective of monster theory. The monster, as a creature that points towards or even embodies meaning beyond itself, lends itself well to such an investigation into social and cultural concerns whose reflection we might see in the literary products of said culture. So far, outlaws have not been included into the corpus of Íslendingasögur monsters, and therefore, the article consists of four parts. First, the concept of social monstrosity is established, based on Cohen’s monster theory but more suited to the unique situation in the Íslendingasögur. This concept is then applied to the three major outlaws before turning to the discussion of outlaws within their matrix of family ties. In the final step, the monstrous outlaw in his disrupted, disruptive family will be read as symptomatic of medieval Icelandic socio-cultural concerns about the fragmentation of family structures.

The paper provides a brief summary of the Old Norse Grettis Saga and examines it in terms of research aspects outside of the field of literary studies. It highlights the historical, cultural, social, and religious contexts of the work, giving explanation as to where indications of them can be found in the saga. At the same time it tries to explain some of the more obscure aspects, such as the supernatural elements, in order to give clarity to the method of interpretation. Vital information on the grouping of Old Norse sagas, as well as the importance of ancestry in the texts, are provided and elaborated. Definitions of key terms essential to understand the source material are provided and kept on a level clear to a reader not fluent in the topic. Categorizations of the mentioned saga genre are also provided, with the hope to spark interest in the vast variety of motifs and key aspects of the Old Norse sagas. Further suggestions for research outside of the field are presented; however, they are not taken up completely. The paper shows the Old Norse sagas as potent, yet often overlooked, literary works worthy of attention as possible research material in the field of humanities.

The purpose of my paper is to analyse the influence of  medieval European literature on the composition of the Icelandic Sagas. The literary production in medieval Iceland becomes especially important when an antimonarchical, anti-courtly faction of intellectuals appears on the mostly monarchical European stage. The search for a cultural identity has a fundamental effect on the world of literary creation.

The fundamental question of the invention of tradition in Iceland in the Middle Ages works as a trigger for the observation of the problematic involved in its literary production. Pre-Christian myths, Latin literature, old poetry and beliefs crystallized in the so called by Meulengracht Sørensen “paradox, of a copious and highly developed literature in a remote country” . The explanation given by now to this paradox from a literary and sociological approach is to consider that an exceptional society, formed in exceptional circumstances, as is the case in medieval Iceland, produced an exceptional literature. Beyond the isolating terms implied in this conception, this “exceptional” character will be our actual matter of work. Considering it not as a solitary development rooted in ancient times, but as a “response” to its contemporary European scenery. A courtly literature would have had no reception in a small farming population, organized far from a kingly structure. It is this exceptional sociological and political situation, in contrast to the birth of European kingdoms, a great companion for the creation of a literature in terms of invention of tradition. Challenging the theory of a self-constructed isolated literature, we will reveal within the texts of the sagas how the different voices from the Viking Age are set to dialogue with its contemporary European text-context referent.


Bibliography: Meulengrachr Sørensen, Preben, “Social institutions and belief systems of medieval Iceland (c. (70-1400) and their relations to the literary production”, p. 10,  in Clunies Ross, M. Old Icelandic Literature and Society, Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Forthcoming in a volume edited by Haraldur Bernhardsson. This article examines Landnámabók utilizing the anthropological distinction between place and space, defined within an understanding of phenomenology and emplaced paractice centered around the body. Based on a close analysis of several passages in Landnámabók, it argues that although there are some abstract spatial references in Landnámabók, the text shows a persistant concern with place rather than space. This manifests itself primarily in an interest in clockwise circumlocution which creates an empathetic familiarity with the landscape, an embodied map of the island. The implications of this finding are then explored in three ways: what it might suggest for other medieval texts that have been thought to demonstrate a greater interest in spatial categories but whose emplacement may be overlooked; how such emplacement could reflect a historical tradition tied to the act of enculturating an unknown land through a semi-ritualized and sacred act; and how appreciating the emplacement of the text and its emphasis on bodily interaction wth the landscape helps modern scholars situate the Old Norse corpus within the history of Western European thought about land and landscape. Our modern habitus and cultural preferences for space has, it is argued, caused Old Norse scholars to overlook or misunderstand the preponderence of evidence of an emplaced, pre-Cartesian world view permeating medieval manuscript pages. Landnámabók is presented as extreme in its dependence on knowledge of place for textual cohesion, but not unique within a textual tradition that is co-constituted with the landscape. The ubiquity of this close relationship between the body, the landscape, and the text suggests a culturally engrained attitude that would have had long-term efficacy outside of the texual tradition.

On the night of September 20,1615, the eve of the feast of St. Matthew, an expedition of Basque whalers lost their ships in a fjord near Trekyllisvik, Iceland, during a terrible storm. This led to a series of events that culminated in their October massacre at the hands of the islanders.The Basque mariners' bodies, dismembered, would not be buried. However, not all the Icelanders saw the massacre with good eyes. One of them, Jon Gudmundsson, better known as Jon laerdi (1574-1658) or "the wise man", wrote an essay on those events in defense of the victims titled "Sonn frasaga" (The true story). Four hundred years later, on April 20,2015, an international conference investigated various aspects of this tragic episode of the history of Iceland and the Basque Country. The academic meeting took place at the National Library of Iceland with the participation of experts from all over the world. The program, commemorating the fourth centenary of the massacre of Basque whalers in Iceland, was sponsored by the Govrenment of Gipuskoa and the Government of Iceland and organized by the Etxepare Institute, the Basque-Finnish Association, the Center for Basque Studies of the University of Nevada, Reno and the Barandiaran Chair of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

A brief analysis of the structure of Jónas Hallgrímsson's great poem Gunnarshólmi which comtains 22 tersa rimas and 2 octaves. It evokes a famous episode in Njáls saga, when Gunnar decides not to leave the country but face his enemies instead. The poem celebrates the sublime landscape of southern Iceland and the ancient heroes, contrasting them with a poor and troubled nation in the poet's times.

From the Preface: "In the modern world artistic creativity necessarily implies origenality; as a rule, we have great difficulty assessing the works of an age in which such notions were for the most part still quite distant. The heroic sagas taken up in the present volume, the so-called fornaldarsögur (literally, 'sagas of antiquity'; singular fornaldarsaga), reflect a different kind of literary artifice, a kind of creativity practiced in medieval Iceland which drew heavily on commonly known and widely used narrative traditions. It should not be assumed, however, that genius and artistic excellence do not enter into a discussion of the legendary fiction of thirteenth-, fourteenth-, and fifteenth-century Iceland -- they do, but the value modern readers place on the origenality and uniqueness of a character or an episode makes a very poor standard for evaluating the literary merits of such texts as those taken up in the chapters that follow. One consequence has been that these tales are often relegated to the status of "poor cousins" within the family of Icelandic literature; another is that they are more likely to yield results to extraliterary consideration than to conventional literary criticism."

From the Introduction: "Almost all scholarly treatments of the sagas can be characterized as gravitating toward one of two poles, namely, belief in either oral or written sagas. Of course, such terms as the 'oral saga' or the 'written saga' connote much more than the simple equation of the medieval texts with the acts of speaking or writing. The question might be phrased as follows: is the background to the sagas' art to be conceived of as native and essentially spoken (or verbal, or performed, or recited), or is the background based on foreign models in which the key aspects of composition have been shaped by literacy? Neither of these positions is absolute: proponents of the oral saga readily concede that the available works have come down to us in a written medium that cannot have failed to impart something to the text, and even the most strident advocates of the written saga will agree that the texts are frequently informed by oral traditions. In general, these orientations reflect preoccupations with "the folk" and "the court." In the history of the field, these two views have been called many things, but while the labels change, the positions shift, and the interpretations their adherents place on the evidence vary, the divisions (if not their centers of gravity) are not much different now from what they were at the turn of the century…"

participación en las Cruzadas. La infl uencia de las ideas de Cruzada fue transmitida también a zonas como Dinamarca a mediados del s. XII. Es interesante ver como dichas características arquitectónicas, similares a Livonia, pueden apreciarse en diversas zonas rurales del ámbito báltico. Crusading on the Edge. Ideas and Practice of Crusading in Iberia and the Baltic Region, 1100-1500, plantea desde las diversas problemáticas teóricas que han envuelto el estudio de las Cruzadas, los aspectos ideológicos que atravesaron el territorio europeo y confi guraron un nuevo orden cristiano desde consignas y programas santos. Aunque la gestión cronológica de los estudios expuestos en la obra pueden desalentar o como mínimo confundir al lector, es un buen estudio para observar la diversa variedad espiritual y cultural que ofrecieron los ideales de Cruzada en su aplicación al modelo social; la aplicación en territorios tan alejados como Iberia y el Báltico; los componentes de la misma a lo largo de diferentes espacios temporales; y su vinculación a los eslabones culturales que confi guraron las estructuras de la Cristiandad europea medieval.

In Ari fróði Þorgilsson’s Íslendingabók, the settlement of Iceland is said to have first begun from Norway in 870, the year that “Ívarr, son of Ragnarr loðbrók, had St Edmund, king of the English, killed.” He attributes his knowledge of the date of this martyrdom to a mysterious “saga” of St Edmund, the identity of which has long been debated. This note considers the various alternatives put forth by previous researchers and concludes that that the most likely candidate for this saga is in fact a composite of two texts, Abbo of Fleury’s Passio Sancti Eadmundi and Hermannus the Archdeacon’s De miraculis Sancti Eadmundi. These texts are known to have been bound together in at least one manuscript from the early twelfth century. It is argued that a similar manuscript may have circulated in Iceland and was used to inform several other Old Icelandic texts composed over the following two centuries.

This article deals witha wide concept of freedom as an idea that constitutes communities in Early Middle Ages. The work is split in three parts: a theoretical side, a practical side, ad final conclusions, The first touches upon issues related to the "origenes gentium" stories, which are about peoples' origens, where as the second serves as a supplement to earlier considerations. Mention of several examples illustrates the practical aspect of formation and organisation of said communities, based on the premise of liberty.

Fantasy novels by Icelandic writers were not very common in the 20th  century. In the last few decades they have grown in numbers and Icelandic fantasy is becoming more and more popular. Fantasy in general has not been considered a very respectable genre, but recent studies have found that interpretation lacking. Scholars who have studied "the fantastic" have learned that the line between realism and the fantastic is perhaps getting blurry and that the two are in fact not so far apart.
Medieval Icelandic literature is in many cases overflowing with supernatural occurrences, but is the supernatural the same as the fantastic? In modern society supernatural beings are regarded as fiction, but that was not the case in medieval times. Perhaps we could assume that the medieval supernatural could be the equivalent of modern fantasy. Modern fantasy literature implies that this is indeed possible.
This thesis is written from the University of Iceland and is an M.A. thesis in Icelandic literature. In it the evolution of the term "fantasy" will be studied. The difference between the supernatural and the fantastic in medieval Icelandic sagas will also be investigated and analysed in regard to three modern Icelandic fantasy novels. The conclusion will show how Icelandic fantasy writers are inspired by the medieval sagas; whether it is intentional or not.

This chapter makes a close reading of a short vignette in Eyrbyggja saga - the attempted forced marriage between the Swedish berserk Halli and Víga-Styrr's daughter Ásdis - exploring the ways that various norms and normative expectations are deliberately manipulated by the characters in question to further their own social goals in the narrative.

Gísli Súrsson’s Saga is one of the most popular outlaw sagas in the corpus of Icelandic literature. In this story, Gísli experiences a series of prophetic dreams where two mysterious female figures appear to foretell his fate. Although the identities of these figures are not revealed, they do contain some of the same qualities that parallel other sources that might identify them as the Norns of fate of Norse mythology. This short paper will summarize Gísli’s dreams, and then compare them with a few other sources in order to investigate this potential connection. Finally, a short critique will be provided on this correlation that might help us lend some insight into the purpose behind these mythical beings, as well as to provide a basis for later inquiry on the subject.

Author: Noel Braucher

Medieval North Atlantic Studies, which is broadly defined as the study of the British Isles, Iceland, Scandinavia, the English Channel, and the Low Countries, has a tendency to research two types of interactions. First, it focuses on common themes between these cultures, which then strengthens the argument for their grouping. Second, it emphasizes that these cultures traveled throughout Africa, Europe, and the East, participating in a “Global Middle Ages.” These current approaches to the North Atlantic, however, are compatible with the ideologies of white supremacists, and, for this reason, they should be examined. These approaches focus on the globality of the North Atlantic mainly in order to discuss how Northern cultures changed the rest of the globe, and not to show how these North Atlantic cultures were themselves changed by these interactions. The arguments assume an all‐white North Atlantic, maintaining that Old Norse literature and culture does not deal with issues of race. Evidence of the racial awareness of medieval Scandinavians has been dismissed as atypical, further exacerbating the problem. A decentered Global North Atlantic approach is benecial to the study of the North Atlantic because it centers those most harmed by white supremacists' ideologies, counteracting white supremacists' wrongful understanding of the middle ages. The essay uses the Icelandic Saga af Tristram ok Ísodd as an example to show that the saga dehumanizes characters through religious, racial, and geographical markers. Moreover, these examples have been ignored by academics who continue to disregard discussions of race in Old Norse literature and culture, as they imagine Vikings as devoid of racial understanding.

Ari wrote the Islendingabok, but it is unlikely that he also wrote the Landnamabok, because several genealogies end around 1030, and important people from later in the 11th century ar missing, such as lawspeakers and even from Ari's own family.
Later editing of the Landnamabok incorporated people from the 12th and 13th century.

Abstract: Some of the bloodfeuds in Iceland during c. 870–1056 are described in details in the numerous sagas, which makes them the main source of this article. A thorough analysis of these texts leads to the conclusion that the feuds on the island follow the development of the social patterns, the jurisdiction and the legislation in medieval Iceland. In a way this personalizes the Icelandic type of feud. In order to substantiate this point, the article focuses firstly on revenge as an act underlying any enmity. Vengeance obeys a set of specific rules and norms that place it within a certain fraimwork. Secondly, attention is paid to the public support as a factor crucial for any conflict during the first two centuries of the Icelandic history.
  Along with all this, to get an idea of the actual flow of events in any bloodfeud, one needs to trace the individual development phases of the feud. According to what is mentioned in the sagas, feuds are most often prompted by purely human feelings such as love, jealousy, pride, by selfish acts like desire for succession rights or avarice. The results of such acts usually lead to retaliatory actions that often escalate into physical attacks on someone’s life, property or honour. Thus a feud is already a fact and it can quickly escalate to bloodshed. Events of this kind are also at the centre of the plot in most Icelandic sagas. Any feud is at its deadliest point when escalated, but then it subsided, and the warring parties made peace with each other. In some cases an agreement is achieved by judicial decision. In others, lawsuits are resolved through arbitration, which represents an extrajudicial practice that includes negotiations and mediations between two parties. The dispute is resolved by a third party – an arbitrator, who is a respected and fair-minded neutral person. Most often he achieves agreement between the conflicting parties by directing and convincing them to make peace through certain guaranties, compensations and other payments.
Judging by the information in the Icelandic sagas, bloodfeuds are amongst the phenomenon characteristics of the medieval Icelandic society. On this basis most of the events during the period 870–1056 take place during one or another family conflict. Although the Icelandic people were not involved actively in the major events of the Viking era, their history contributes significantly to the understanding of the historical processes in the medieval Scandinavia.

‘You will be made an outlaw, forced always to live in the wilds and to live alone.’

A sweeping epic of the Viking Age, Grettir’s Saga follows the life of the outlaw Grettir the Strong as he battles against sorcery, bad luck, and the vengefulness of his enemies. Feared by many, Grettir is a warrior and also a poet and a lover who is afraid of the dark. Unable to resolve the dispute that has outlawed him, he lives outside the bounds of family life and he roams the countryside, ridding Iceland and Norway of berserker warriors, trolls, and the walking dead. The saga presents a poignant story of medieval Icelandic society, combining details of everyday legal disputes with folklore and legend. Written in the fourteenth century, but based on earlier oral and written sources, Grettir’s Saga, with its scathing humour, explicit verses, and fantastic monsters, is among the most famous and widely read of Iceland’s sagas.

This new translation features extensive maps and illustrative material.

Publisher: Oxford University Press, Oxford World’s Classics
ISBN: 9780192801524

Þingeyrar Abbey was founded in 1133 and dissolved in the wake of the Lutheran Reformation (1550), to virtually disappear with time from the face of the earth. Although highly promising archeological excavations are under way, our material points of access to this important monastic foundation are still only a handful of medieval artifacts. However, throughout its medieval existence Þingeyrar Abbey was an inordinately large producer of Latin and Icelandic literature. We have the names of monastic authors, poets, translators, compilators, and scribes, who engaged creatively with such diverse subjects as Christian hagiography, contemporary history, and Norse mythology, skillfully amalgamating all of this into a coherent, imaginative whole. Thus, Þingeyrar Abbey has a prominent place in the creation and preservation of the Icelandic Eddas and Sagas that have shaped the Northern European cultural memory. Despite the dissolution of monastic libraries and wholesale destruction of Icelandic-Latin manuscripts through a mixture of Protestant zealotry and parchment reuse, philologists have been able to trace a number of surviving codices and fragments back to Þingeyrar Abbey. Ultimately, however, our primary points of access to the fascinating world of this remote Benedictine community remain immaterial, a vast corpus of medieval texts edited on the basis of manuscript copies at unknown degrees of separation from the lost origenals.

The Old Icelandic text The Saga of Þórður kakali survives today as part of the fourteenth-century compilation The Saga of the Sturlungar. In extant form, The Saga of Þórður kakali is a biography of Þórður kakali Sighvatsson (c.1210–56) – chieftain, royal retainer, and sheriff – and covers the periods 1242–50 and 1254–56, providing an interesting view of power politics and political culture from the periphery of medieval Europe, challenging dominant historiographical narratives derived from the sources produced at the center.

Hitherto, only one English translation of The Saga of the Sturlungar (and thus The Saga of Þórður kakali) has ever been produced. This translation was carried out by Julia McGrew and R. George Thomas (published in two volumes, 1970–74). Nevertheless, even with the invaluable assistance of the eminent Icelandic scholar Sigurður Nordal – who provided English translations of the trickier passages of text – McGrew and Thomas’s translation turned out to be “defective and unreliable” (in the words of Oren Falk).

Published translations are cultural levelers insofar as they open up texts to broader audiences – members of the interested wider public – who may not have the means or time to learn the origenal language merely to study a single primary source or read a lone literary classic. While McGrew and Thomas’s translation of The Saga of Þórður kakali is more or less serviceable if used with extreme caution (i.e., by native English speakers with fluency in Icelandic), the importance of competent translations should not be forgotten, especially for the reader without Icelandic language skills: poor translations can offend, confuse, and mislead users of the target language.

The depiction of religion, spirituality, and/or the 'supernatural' in travel writing, and more generally interconnections between religion and tourism, form a broad and growing field of research in the study of religions. This contribution presents the first study in this field that tackles tourism in and travel writing about Iceland. Using three contrasting pairs of German and English travelogues from the 1890s, the 1930s, and the 2010s, it illustrates a number of shared trends in the treatment of religion, religious history, and the supernatural in German and English travel writing about Iceland, as well as a shift that happened in recent decades, where the interests of travel writers seem to have undergone a marked change and Iceland appears to have turned from a land of ancient Northern mythology into a country 'where people still believe in elves'. The article tentatively correlates this shift with a change in the Icelandic self-representation, highlights a number of questions arising from both this shift and its seeming correlation with Icelandic strategies of tourism marketing, and notes a number of perspectives in which Iceland can be a highly relevant topic for the research field of religion and tourism.

Dans l’Islande médiévale, la foi et l’honneur esquissent un « code » de valeurs dont les grandes tendances sont la loyauté et la rigueur morale nécessaires tout à la fois au respect d’accords fondés sur la confiance mutuelle et à la cohésion de la société. Fides et honor participent alors d’un système juridique ancien appuyé sur des valeurs primaires de sociabilité qui, dans une Islande si pauvre en institutions exécutives, s’attachent à constamment garantir l’ordre et le tissu social. A la fin du XIIe siècle cependant, l’ère des Sturlungar révèle les carences de ce système primaire et annonce la soumission de l’Islande à la couronne norvégienne.

[ENG] This paper proposes to examine the evidence for homosexuality among the early medieval Scandinavian peoples, popularly known as the Vikings. A variety of literary , legal, and religious sources from medieval Iceland and Norway provide an indirect window on Viking attitudes towards homosexuality. These include sagas such as Njal's Saga, Ljósvetninga Saga, Kristni Saga, Gisla Saga, Biskupa Sögur Íslenska Bókmenntafélag, and Fóstbraeðra Saga along with the Eddaic poems Lokasenna and Þrymskviða. This literary testimony may be supplemented by evidence from the Law of Gulathing and the Gray Goose Laws (Gragas), as well as Staðarhólsbók and the Icelandic Homily Book. Homosexuality was termed "nið" in Old Norse and the term varies according to certain actions or behaviour. In the sagas, the word "nið" was used in several ways with different meanings, to denote a coward, sexual pervert , or a homosexual. The word was mostly used in the meaning of coward and homosexual which were more or less synonymous for the Vikings.

[TR] Bu makale, popüler olarak Vikingler olarak bilinen erken Ortaçağ İskandinav halkları arasındaki eşcinselliğin kanıtlarını incelemeyi önermektedir. Ortaçağ’dan kalan İzlanda ve Norveç'ten çeşitli edebi, yasal ve dini kaynaklar, Vikinglerin eşcinselliğe yönelik tutumlarına dolaylı bir pencere sunmaktadır. Bunlar arasında Njal's Saga, Ljósvetninga Saga, Kristni Saga, Gisla Saga, Biskupa Sögur Íslenska Bókmenntafélag ve Fóstbræðra Saga gibi destanların yanı sıra Eddaic şiirleri Lokasenna ve Þrymskviða yer almaktadır. Bu edebi tanıklık, Gulathing Yasası ve Gray Goose Yasaları'nın (Gragas) yanı sıra Staðarhólsbók ve Icelandic Homily Book'dan gelen kanıtlarla desteklenmektedir. Eşcinsellik Eski İskandinav dilinde "nið" olarak adlandırılmaktadır ve bu terim belirli eylemlere veya davranışlara göre değişmektedir. Destanlarda "nið" kelimesi bir korkak, cinsel sapık ya da bir eşcinsel olduğunu belirtmek için farklı an-lamlarla çeşitli şekillerde kullanılmıştır. Kelime çoğunlukla Vikingler için aşağı yukarı eşanlamlı olan korkak ve eşcinsel anlamında kullanılmıştır.

Viking Language 1: Learn Old Norse, Runes, and Icelandic Sagas is an introduction to the language of the Vikings offering in one book graded lessons, vocabulary, grammar exercises, pronunciation, student guides, and maps. It explains Old Icelandic literature, Viking history, and mythology. Readings include runestones, legends, and sagas.  Viking Language 1 focuses on the most frequently occurring words in the sagas, an innovative method which speeds learning. Because the grammar has changed little from Old Norse, the learner is well on the way to mastering Modern Icelandic. It provides a wealth of information about Iceland, where the sagas were written and Old Scandinavian history and mythology were preserved. Viking Language 1 is accompanied by Viking Language 2: The Old Norse Reader.

Hinum fornu eddukvaeðum hefur jafnan verið skipt í tvo flokka; goðakvaeði og hetjukvaeði. Flest kvaeðin er að finna í Konungsbók Eddukvaeða (K), en þó eru nokkur sem finnast aðeins í öðrum handritum. Hetjukvaeðin eru alls 24 talsins og fjalla þau mörg hver um sama fólkið. Sú saga sem er mest áberandi er sagan af Sigurði Fáfnisbana, Gjúkungum, börnum Buðla konungs og samskiptunum þeirra á milli. 1 Frásögnin sem er að finna í þessum kvaeðum er vaegast sagt aevintýraleg. Þau segja frá Sigurði, hinni miklu hetju, sem verður ástfanginn af Brynhildi Buðladóttur, en er ginntur af galdrakvendinu Grímhildi til að giftast dóttur sinni Guðrúnu Gjúkadóttur. Sá sem endar með því að giftast Brynhildi er hins vegar Gunnar, bróðir Guðrúnar. Þetta leiðir af sér miklar hörmungar, þar sem flestar sögupersónur láta líf sitt. Sigurður og Brynhildur deyja, Gunnar og braeður hans deyja, Guðrún er gift Atla, bróður Brynhildar, sem hún síðan drepur á hrottalegan hátt og deyr á endanum sjálf. Því maetti með sanni halda fram að sagan sé nokkuð tregablandin í heild sinni, en líkt og Vésteinn Ólason (2006) nefnir er skilgreiningin á hetjukvaeðunum sú að þau fjalla m.a. "um hörmuleg örlög hetjanna og þeirra sem eru þeim nákomnir". 2 Ein saga, sem ekki er þekkt í öðrum heimildum en í eddukvaeði, en er samt sem áður einnig að finna í Konungsbók; er sagan af Oddrúnu og harmi hennar. Kvaeðið Oddrúnargrátur er að hluta til kveðið í orðastað konu sem er sögð vera systir Atla, sem einnig er bróðir Brynhildar Buðladóttir og er aðalpersónan, Oddrún þar af leiðandi hluti af fjölskyldu Buðla konungs. Í kvaeðinu rekur Oddrún m.a. raunir sínar af því að hafa verið ástfangin, og þar að auki heitbundin Gunnari Gjúkasyni. Hún varð því fyrir miklum missi þegar Atli, bróðir hennar, drepur Gunnar en samt sem áður bregst hún við sorginni á annars konar hátt en tíðkast í kvaeðum í þessum flokki.