Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Social institutions and belief systems of medieval Iceland (c. 870–1400) and their relations to literary production
- 2 From orality to literacy in medieval Iceland
- 3 Poetry and its changing importance in medieval Icelandic culture
- 4 Óláfr Þórðarson hvítaskád and oral poetry in the west of Iceland c 1250: the evidence of references to poetry in The Third Grammatical Treatise
- 5 The conservation and reinterpretation of myth in medieval Icelandic writings
- 6 Medieval Icelandic artes poeticae
- 7 A useful past: historical writing in medieval Iceland
- 8 Sagas of Icelanders (Ílendinga sögur) and þœttir as the literary representation of a new social space
- 9 The contemporary sagas and their social context
- 10 The Matter of the North: fiction and uncertain identities in thirteenth-century Iceland
- 11 Romance in Iceland
- 12 The Bible and biblical interpretation in medieval Iceland
- 13 Sagas of saints
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
10 - The Matter of the North: fiction and uncertain identities in thirteenth-century Iceland
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Social institutions and belief systems of medieval Iceland (c. 870–1400) and their relations to literary production
- 2 From orality to literacy in medieval Iceland
- 3 Poetry and its changing importance in medieval Icelandic culture
- 4 Óláfr Þórðarson hvítaskád and oral poetry in the west of Iceland c 1250: the evidence of references to poetry in The Third Grammatical Treatise
- 5 The conservation and reinterpretation of myth in medieval Icelandic writings
- 6 Medieval Icelandic artes poeticae
- 7 A useful past: historical writing in medieval Iceland
- 8 Sagas of Icelanders (Ílendinga sögur) and þœttir as the literary representation of a new social space
- 9 The contemporary sagas and their social context
- 10 The Matter of the North: fiction and uncertain identities in thirteenth-century Iceland
- 11 Romance in Iceland
- 12 The Bible and biblical interpretation in medieval Iceland
- 13 Sagas of saints
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
Summary
How and why did sophisticated prose fiction appear in medieval Iceland? It is tempting to seek the answer to this question by comparing it with the nearly contemporary development of fiction in the vernacular elsewhere in the West during the High Middle Ages. In this chapter, I will look at the development of literature in Iceland as a result of an historical and cultural evolution similar to that of the rest of Europe. This shows how the literature of Iceland was an intrinsic part of Western medieval literature and also provides improved insights into why it developed in its own way. It is important to consider the saga corpus as a whole, especially the role of a group of sagas hitherto only accorded a marginal role in the appearance of literary fiction in Iceland, the fomaldarsögur Norðurknda.
This will show us how the various types of sagas expressed various aspects of contemporary culture in different ways. It will in particular enable us to understand better the special nature of the most celebrated saga genre, the family sagas. As I will show, these seem to deal more than others with uncertain identities, a feature which is of particular importance in understanding the relationship between literary development and social change in medieval Iceland.
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- Old Icelandic Literature and Society , pp. 242 - 265Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000
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