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10 - The Matter of the North: fiction and uncertain identities in thirteenth-century Iceland

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 October 2009

Margaret Clunies Ross
Affiliation:
University of Sydney
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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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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2000

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