Gísli Sigurðsson
Gísli Sigurðsson (b. 1959) has studied at the University of Iceland, U.C.D. Ireland where he did an M.Phil. in Medieval Studies, and at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. He received a Dr. Phil. from the University of Iceland in 2002. Gísli has worked on Canadian-Icelandic (language and folklore), written a book on Gaelic Influence in Iceland (1988, 2nd ed. Univ. og Icel. Pr. 2000), published a complete annotated edition of the Eddaic Poems (Eddukvæði 1998; 2nd ed. 2014), a book on Orality and the Sagas, (Túlkun Íslendingasagna í ljósi munnlegrar hefðar: Tilgáta um aðferð (Stofnun Árna Magnússonar 2002), Engl. transl. by Nicholas Jones: Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition; A Discourse on Method (Harvard Univ. Pr. 2004)), a book with Icelandic-Canadian/American settlement-lore (Sögur úr Vesturheimi 2012), a book on the sagas and their cultural role (Leiftur á horfinni öld 2013), in addition to a variety of articles, lectures and editions, focusing on the Vikings and the Vinland voyages (Introduction and notes in The Vinland Sagas: The Icelandic Sagas about the First Documented Voyages across the North Atlantic. Penguin Books 2008), Eddas, Sagas and Icelandic folklore in Iceland and in Canada. He was the founder and one of three editors of Skáldskaparmál 1990-97, and editor of Gripla 2010-12. He was the curator (with Sigurjón Jóhannesson, scenograph) of Vikings and the New World, an exhibition in the Culture House in Reykjavik which opened in April 2000, and the curator (along with Steinþór Sigurðsson, scenograph) of an exhibition on the Icelandic Manuscripts which opened in the Culture House in October 2002. Gísli is now a Research Professor and Head of the Folklore Department at the Árni Magnússon Institute in Iceland where he has worked since 1990. He teaches in the Department of Folklore at the University of Iceland and was Professor II at the University of Stavanger in Norway 2008-11. Gísli has served as a Visiting Professor at the University of Manitoba in 1988 and at The University of California, Berkeley in 2009.
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The eddas and sagas, however, reflect a unique and original departure that has no direct analogue in mainland Europe—the creation of new works and genres rooted in the secular tradition of oral learning and storytelling. This tradition encompassed the Icelanders’ worldview in the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries and their understanding of events, people, and chronology going back to the 9th century, and their experience of an environment that extended over the parts of the world known to the Norsemen of the Viking Age, both on earth and in heaven. The infrastructure that underlay this system of learning was a knowledge of the regnal years of kings who employed court poets to memorialize their lives, and stories that were told in connection with what people observed in the heavens and on earth, near and far, by linking the stories with individual journeys, dwellings, and the genealogies of the leading protagonists. In this world, people here on earth envisaged the gods as having their halls and dwellings in the sky among the stars and the sun, while beyond the ocean and beneath the furthest horizon lay the world of the giants. In Viking times, this furthest horizon shifted little by little westwards, from the seas around Norway and Britain to the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland, and eventually still farther south and west to previously unknown lands that people in Iceland retained memories of the ancestors having discovered and explored around the year 1000—Helluland, Markland, and Vínland—where they came into contact with the native inhabitants of the continent known as North America.
The scholarship around Eddic poetry has been based on the idea that these poems, which all agree were written down from oral tradition in the 13th-century, can and should be dated to differrent centuries from the 9th-century onwards, based more or less on circular arguments and differences in language, style, form and content. Even though the difficulties, if not impossibilities, of dating are dawning on more and more scholars, many have been reluctant to take the full oral comparative approach which would suggest that all these differences could be much better explained with different individual preferences of the singers and their audiences, based on their sex, social status, geographical surroundings and other factors. When applying the oral approach we can thus explain the differences in the poems with the oral variation as a result of the conditions around their performance and writing, rather than as the product of a Darwinian literary development of taste in static and fixed poetic texts that were composed by an individual at some point in time and then put to imperfect memory of preservers until the time of writing. If we read the written poems from the thirteenth century as the products of an oral culture (as opposed to seperate works of authors in different ages that were memorised verbatim), we see before us a variation of the main heroic stories or themes based on different perspectives that can be attributed to different interests of women and males as I demonstrate here, some focusing on the heroines and their emotions and others thinking more about the male heroes and their physical activities in a male dominated warrior context, still others reflecting special interests in the lower social classes, even showing some geographical preferences and so on. From that oral perspective we can classify and understand the similarities and differences between the poems in light of a multivoiced variation that is likely to have been alive at the time when these texts were written – rather than as the product of many different but singlevoiced time periods, each with their stylistic and thematic preferences.
The eddas and sagas, however, reflect a unique and original departure that has no direct analogue in mainland Europe—the creation of new works and genres rooted in the secular tradition of oral learning and storytelling. This tradition encompassed the Icelanders’ worldview in the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries and their understanding of events, people, and chronology going back to the 9th century, and their experience of an environment that extended over the parts of the world known to the Norsemen of the Viking Age, both on earth and in heaven. The infrastructure that underlay this system of learning was a knowledge of the regnal years of kings who employed court poets to memorialize their lives, and stories that were told in connection with what people observed in the heavens and on earth, near and far, by linking the stories with individual journeys, dwellings, and the genealogies of the leading protagonists. In this world, people here on earth envisaged the gods as having their halls and dwellings in the sky among the stars and the sun, while beyond the ocean and beneath the furthest horizon lay the world of the giants. In Viking times, this furthest horizon shifted little by little westwards, from the seas around Norway and Britain to the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland, and eventually still farther south and west to previously unknown lands that people in Iceland retained memories of the ancestors having discovered and explored around the year 1000—Helluland, Markland, and Vínland—where they came into contact with the native inhabitants of the continent known as North America.
The scholarship around Eddic poetry has been based on the idea that these poems, which all agree were written down from oral tradition in the 13th-century, can and should be dated to differrent centuries from the 9th-century onwards, based more or less on circular arguments and differences in language, style, form and content. Even though the difficulties, if not impossibilities, of dating are dawning on more and more scholars, many have been reluctant to take the full oral comparative approach which would suggest that all these differences could be much better explained with different individual preferences of the singers and their audiences, based on their sex, social status, geographical surroundings and other factors. When applying the oral approach we can thus explain the differences in the poems with the oral variation as a result of the conditions around their performance and writing, rather than as the product of a Darwinian literary development of taste in static and fixed poetic texts that were composed by an individual at some point in time and then put to imperfect memory of preservers until the time of writing. If we read the written poems from the thirteenth century as the products of an oral culture (as opposed to seperate works of authors in different ages that were memorised verbatim), we see before us a variation of the main heroic stories or themes based on different perspectives that can be attributed to different interests of women and males as I demonstrate here, some focusing on the heroines and their emotions and others thinking more about the male heroes and their physical activities in a male dominated warrior context, still others reflecting special interests in the lower social classes, even showing some geographical preferences and so on. From that oral perspective we can classify and understand the similarities and differences between the poems in light of a multivoiced variation that is likely to have been alive at the time when these texts were written – rather than as the product of many different but singlevoiced time periods, each with their stylistic and thematic preferences.
Sigurðsson examines how orally trained lawspeakers regarded the emergent written culture, especially in light of the fact that the writing down of the law in the early twelfth century undermined their social status. Part II considers characters, genealogies, and events common to several sagas from the east of Iceland between which a written link cannot be established. Part III explores the immanent or mental map provided to the listening audience of the location of Vinland by the sagas about the Vinland voyages. Finally, this volume focuses on how accepted foundations for research on medieval texts are affected if an underlying oral tradition (of the kind we know from the modern field work) is assumed as part of their cultural background. This point is emphasized through the examination of parallel passages from two sagas and from mythological overlays in an otherwise secular text.
Iceland was first visited by Irish anchorites (papar), sometimes towards the end of the 8th century, but permanent settlement in the country cannot be established until about 870 onwards. Many of the settlers at that time came directly from Norway but a considerable number came from Norse colonies in the British Isles where many had married local women. It was also common practice to bring slaves, in all likelyhood bought on the Irish slave market which flourished during the settlement period in Iceland. Recent genetic studies have now confirmed this Gaelic contribution to Icelandic culture, concluding that about 60% of the original female population was of Irish and Scottish ancestry and about 20% of the males. When we add to that all the Norsemen who came to Iceland from their recently established colonies in the British Isles we have a substantial cultural contribution from that part of the world which has largely gone unacknowledged up to now. Many of the people coming from the British Isles were Christian, while the purebred Norwegians were heathens. Therefore, from its very beginnings, Iceland had a mixed population, forming and creating a different culture from the neighbour countries of Norway, Scotland, and Ireland.
It is a well known fact that the Irish and Scots had developed a much higher standard of literary entertainment than was known in Scandinavia in the Viking age. Even though the Norsemen may have come into contact with that culture in the British Isles it is more likely that in order to have a profound influence in Iceland we have to look at the people of Gaelic extraction who settled in Iceland, either as free settlers, wives of Norsemen, or as slaves -- who are often referred to in the Icelandic sources, but rarely receive much attention.
Gaelic influence in Iceland is also to be detected in several old place names and loan-words but the reason why these are not more numerous than they are could be that: 1) the Gaels did not introduce any new working technique into the mainly Norse society, 2) their work was supervised by Norsemen, 3) the slaves were renamed with Norse names, and 4) the language of the slaves was probably not popular with their masters. The low social status of most of the Gaels in Iceland could also explain why named Gaelic heroes do not appear in Icelandic works even though numerous instances have been traced of similar motifs and ideas that are attributed to Gaelic influence on Icelandic tradition.
The professional art of court poetry, skaldic poetry, fits well into this picture. It was mainly practised by Icelanders and most named poets came from areas where Gaels are known to have been among the first settlers. There is evidence to suggest that the art of skaldic poetry was acquired through special training, though this seems to have been confined to certain families rather than acquired at professional schools as in Ireland. Moreover, skaldic metres differ considerably from older Germanic and Scandinavian metres but show similarities to those found in Old Irish poetry.
Most noteworthy also is that one of the major achievements of the Viking Age, the discovery around the year 1000 of the North American continent west and south of Greenland, a land the Vikings called Vínland (the land of grapes), can largely be credited to people whose families are traced both to Norway and the Gaelic world, thus allowing us to speak of the Hiberno-Norse voyages to Vínland.
The Gaelic people contributed substantially to the culture in this “First New Society” which was emerging in Iceland in the late 9th and early 10th centuries, both in the fields of folklore, by telling stories and composing/reciting poetry at a much higher professional and artistic level than the Norsemen had developed at the time, and by teaching their children about Christianity in a society that was ruled by heathen Norwegian male-chieftains—whose language dominated in the official culture—but which was largely run by Irish and Scottish wives and workers, even slaves from the thousands that were traded on the Dublin market during the settlement period in Iceland according to the Irish annals. These people left their mark not only on the genes of the modern Icelanders but also in loan words, place names, personal names, literary motifs in the Icelandic medieval sagas as well as on the folklore and folkbeliefs of more recent times, for example about elves and the hidden people that settled in Iceland with the more visible settlers from Ireland, Scotland and the Isles.
We have therefore here a case of a major contribution to a national culture which has been suppressed, largely because it can mostly be traced to people of relatively low social status or to women who have not enjoyed their fair share in history due to their gender. Both social groups however are likely to have had a major impact on the upbringing of young story tellers and poets who later made a name for themselves in the world of kings and chieftains.