Viking and Medieval Scandinavia

This article examines the meaning of the term virki and its synonyms in Icelandic literary sources from the thirteenth century and assesses the extent to which such an analysis is useful for our understanding of the Icelandic Commonwealth. Vocabulary and terminology in Old Icelandic are analysed in the context of Latin parallels in European literary sources from the same period. The comparison between medieval Iceland and the process of encastellation, with the castle, the motte, and the fortified house in the medieval West offers a good epistemological basis when looking for fortifications in medieval Iceland and their functions. We argue that the concentration of power is parallel to the development of this new type of fortified housing which is connected to the new centres of power. The narrative sources indicate their use within the game of power and their symbolic roles within the new elites.

This article presents an analysis of two Old Norse translations of vision literature, Duggals leizla and Gundelinus leizla, and the way in which they represent friendship. I argue that these texts demonstrate the continued importance of elite male friendship during the end of Iceland’s Commonwealth period and the transition to Norwegian rule. Supporting my claims are a discussion of the similarities, differences, and overlap between political and spiritual relationships, the growth of the Church and monastic culture in Iceland, as well as its challenges, and the emotions and beliefs reflected in these visions’ portrayal of punishment and reward.

The Malt stone was erected by a man called Vifröd to commemorate his father, Tole. The first line of the inscription asks: ‘Who is the oldest of æsir?’ The answer is given three lines below: Tyr. This god is invocated to drive a dwarf called Billing out of the stone and into the sunshine through the triple use of the rune that bears the god’s name. Those runes are referred to as æiwinrunar ‘eternity runes’, i.e. protective runes. There is also a mention of tæitirunar ‘joyful runes’, which are runes hidden in the text in the commemorative phrases. If spelled out they form the sequence iafraiu which probably means hja Frøyju ‘with Frøyja’ or perhaps ja Frøyju ‘Frøyja’s yes’, celebrating that the deceased father has joined Frøyja at Folkvang. The line left of the written futhark says: Swa a i dindultindull ‘Thus, the *tindull (a derivation of ON tindr “tooth”, “spike; pinnacle”) has a tail in itself’, a metaphorical play with two rhyming words, referring to the short vertical lines (the tail) in the stone. There are a number of West Norse linguistic traits in the inscription, which can be roughly dated to the ninth century.

The article focuses on presenting the ideological goals of creating Sven Aggesen’s chronicle, and in particular showing his views on history and the concept of the state. By analysing the themes and plot structures, as well as presenting the chronicle on a comparative background and considering the context of compiling it, the author concludes that the work of the Danish chronicler is an example of an extremely modern historiography composed in the spirit of the so-called twelfth-century renaissance. The main point of Sven’s interest is the state and its historical and institutional development, which organizes the historical threads in the chronicle. Even though Sven Aggesen’s chronicle is a small work, it was constructed extremely neatly to express very specific ideas. They are largely shared by his contemporaries from other regions of Christian Europe, such as the Norwegian chronicler Theodoric and the Polish chronicler, Wincenty Kadłubek. However, it is Sven’s small chronicle that seems to be the most thoroughly thought-out, in terms of the essence and meaning of national history, whose historiosophical view was based on the authorities in this matter of that time, primarily St Augustine. The analysis of the ideological message of the chronicle allows the author to try to answer the question: Why did Sven write his work? It seems that this task could have been part of an effort to regain the family’s lost esteem and return to the political stage in Denmark.

This article argues that play is prioritized and placed centrally in the Prose Edda. It shows that this medieval text engages with play both on a metacommunicative level and in the stories it tells. It points out that the actual subject matter of the Prose Edda, skaldic poetry, is a serious mode of expression which contains several play-elements. The article draws on theories of play (Huizinga, Caillois, Sutton-Smith, Classen) and investigates how various definitions of play can help us to qualify and explain play as a complex and ambiguous phenomenon in a particular textual and historical setting.

In Old Norse philology, there is limited debate on emendations and the choice between textual variants in the eddic poems. Considerations of this topic are mainly found in commentaries and editions, but even the largest ones explain only part of their underlying logic. Furthermore, new-philological critique of editorial interventions often bypasses concrete examples, including ones where most ‘new’ and ‘old’ philologists would likely agree that emendation is necessary. The article therefore focuses on concrete cases. It first revisits the epistemological underpinnings of a scribal versus a reconstructive focus, concluding that even the act of reading an Old Norse manuscript text requires some reconstruction of the scribe’s intentions. The ideal of non-invasive philology is thus a pipe dream, and this means that there is a real need for the skill and methodology of philologists. The question then rather becomes how far the reconstruction can proceed while retaining probability on its side, and this must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. From this vantage point, the article explores a range of examples to which plausible and largely ‘common-sensical’ emendations have been proposed. It takes its starting point in an important but largely overlooked article by Finnur Jónsson, where Finnur anticipated much of the later debate. Finnur’s typology of innovations is somewhat cumbersome, however, and the article instead follows one presented by R. D. Fulk, with the addition of the category of ‘analogy’. The findings support Leonard Neidorf’s ‘lexemic theory’, suggesting that scribes tended to focus on individual words rather than context, and that resulting innovations are therefore often nonsensical. Unlike Neidorf, however, I note that this analysis may not be applicable to prose. Due to its focus on concrete examples, the article also includes a range of observations that are not easily summarized.

This article examines Gunnlaugr Leifsson’s Merlínusspá by placing it in conversation with the socio-historical context of both its creation and the creation of its source text, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Prophetiae Merlini. Both works situate themselves as translations navigating cultural and linguistic boundaries. I begin by discussing Geoffrey’s Prophetiae Merlini as a syncretic text, which plays with both the Welsh and Latinate prophetic and historical traditions. Next, I place Merlínusspá in Þingeyrar Monastery around the year 1200, where I argue that the intellectual milieu was distinctly outward-looking as the monks produced translations and original writings in Old Norse-Icelandic and Latin. The Benedictine monastery of Þingeyrar was a centre for saga-writing which engaged with both domestic and foreign literature. I read Merlínusspá as an adaptation that attempts to draw connections between the Nordic prophecies of Vǫluspá and the Brittonic prophecies of Merlin. By reading Merlínusspá in its historical context and by approaching it as a conscious adaptation of Geoffrey’s poem, I argue that Gunnlaugr navigates a continuity of tradition with Old Norse-Icelandic literature while rethinking how Icelanders attempt to incorporate themselves into the larger European literary and historical traditions. Merlínusspá navigates a worldview in which Icelanders were geographically and ideologically marginalized, but, like the British of Geoffrey’s legendary history, works to renegotiate Icelandic literature’s place in the larger contemporary European literary conversation. Gunnlaugr not only successfully remoulds Old Norse-Icelandic prophetic and apocalyptic material by linguistically and thematically connecting Merlin’s prophecies to Vǫluspá, but ultimately connects this Old Norse-Icelandic literary tradition with perhaps the most popular European author of the twelfth century.