Old Norse Literature discussion

http://www.penguinclassics.co.uk/nf/s...

Hallgrímur Helgason (modern Icelandic author, most famous for 101 Reykjavík) writes on the Icelandic sagas, what they mean to the Icelanders and why they are still relevant today.

Good summary. I liked the fact that he addressed issue of boredom. Were you convinced that they are relevant?

Thanks for the link-- I think I'll forward it to my students. Should be a bit more accessible for them than all the secondary lit I've been having them read. I've got to say, though, the talk about the sagas being "written by Iceland" seems unnecessarily Romantic-- the concept of an "author" probably isn't relevant here, true, but let's not go so far in the other direction that we flatten out the messy and regional reality of oral and manuscript cultural production. But then again, Iceland has never really pulled itself out of the National Romantic era-- understandable, since they spent that period under the thumb of Denmark. Hm, I think I've just gotten cranky after spending a year in Iceland getting the usual elementary school party-line on the sagas from anyone outside the academy...

Carl wrote: "Thanks for the link-- I think I'll forward it to my students. Should be a bit more accessible for them than all the secondary lit I've been having them read. I've got to say, though, the talk abo..."

What's 'the academy'? Were you working at Háskóli Íslands?
I think a lot in the way that the Icelanders view the sagas and how they are used to construct national identity can be explained by the fact that Iceland is a 'postcolonial' country - if you'll forgive the term. The period of settlement (freedom loving heroes who just wouldn't stand for Harald Fair-hair's tyranny) and the medieval commonwealth is imagined as the 'golden age', followed by a long period of subservience and oppression which does not represent the 'true Icelandic character', with independence posited as the ideological return to that golden age. Even though, as Hallgrímur points out, the sagas themselves are a sort of wistful historical fiction.
I think that probably the sagas are still the lynchpin in modern Icelandic national identity - if you take them away there's not all that much left. It's problematic for modern Icelandic authors, I imagine, because you can't really get away from them. Less so today perhaps, but certainly when Laxness wrote Gerpla in the 50s a lot of people were outraged in a way that is pretty difficult to understand from an outsider's perspective. No other European country thinks of itself to such an extent as built directly upon its medieval past, and takes so much pride in their closeness with that past. How many times, for example, do you hear the 'modern Icelanders can still read the sagas in the original' line? I'm not even sure how true it is (I think most Icelandic publications these days have modernised spelling, etc), but the idea is incredibly important. You can embrace the sagas, as Hallgrímur does in this article, or you can subvert them, as Halldór does in Gerpla, but you can't really ignore them in the same way as pretty much everybody in Britain, for example, ignores Beowulf.

Sorry, was using "the academy" as an abstract term-- a bit pretentious, I guess. I was doing my dissertation research at Stofnun Árna Magnússonar, but was referring more to the fact that when I talk and think about Icelandic literature, it's in the context of academic study of that literature-- but I agree, the sagas are such an enormously important part of their national identity that it's understandable that we still get statements like "written by Iceland". I'm just too unused to dealing with contemporary Icelandic culture, I think-- even my modern Icelandic is very iffy, I did a horrible job engaging in Icelandic conversation while there and have never gotten around to reading Laxness-- something I've been trying to get around to remedying for a while...

Oh, Laxness is amazing. And a knowledge of the sagas is a good background to bring to his work; you'll get some of the references that other English readers don't. I don't know whether you've ever studied Icelandic folklore, but that's useful too. Under the Glacier (eða Kristnihald undir jökli) is particularly interesting on the relationship between the sagas and modern Icelandic identity.
Just how close is modern to old Icelandic? If you went about talking Old Norse would they be able to understand you at all? I only know a bit of modern.

Oh, modern is pretty close, relatively speaking-- in fact, when learning Old Norse many people just pronounce it as Modern Icelandic if they speak it out loud. I think my main problem is that I've only got a reading/translating knowledge of Old Norse (meaning I'm used to reading through very similar texts with similar vocabulary and a dictionary for when I get into trouble) and have not forced myself to speak in Icelandic regularly enough. I'm hoping reading in modern Icelandic will help me get up to speed. But if you know some modern, you could probably do fairly well reading the sagas in the original-- the Islenzk Fornrit series is a good compromise between the original and something more readable to modern Icelanders-- or at least that's my impression.