TY - JOUR
T1 - The Emergence of Rationality in the Icelandic Sagas
T2 - The Colossal Misunderstanding of the Viking Lore in Contemporary Popular Culture
AU - Classen, Albrecht
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 by the author.
PY - 2022/10
Y1 - 2022/10
N2 - For a long time now, Old Norse literature has often been colonized and misappropriated by modern right-wing political groups for their own ideology, symbolism, and public appearance. A critical reading of Icelandic sagas, however, easily demonstrates that those public strategies are very short-sighted, misleading, and outright dangerous for our democratic society. To stem the flood of misinformation regarding the Viking world and its literature, this article joins a small but forceful chorus of recent scholars who are hard at work deconstructing this politicization of saga literature by way of offering new readings of those texts in which the very Viking ideology is actually exposed by the poets, rejected, and supplanted by new forms of social interactions predicated on a legal system and an operation with rationality in the public sphere.
AB - For a long time now, Old Norse literature has often been colonized and misappropriated by modern right-wing political groups for their own ideology, symbolism, and public appearance. A critical reading of Icelandic sagas, however, easily demonstrates that those public strategies are very short-sighted, misleading, and outright dangerous for our democratic society. To stem the flood of misinformation regarding the Viking world and its literature, this article joins a small but forceful chorus of recent scholars who are hard at work deconstructing this politicization of saga literature by way of offering new readings of those texts in which the very Viking ideology is actually exposed by the poets, rejected, and supplanted by new forms of social interactions predicated on a legal system and an operation with rationality in the public sphere.
KW - Egil’s Saga
KW - Icelandic sagas
KW - Laxdaela Saga
KW - Njál’s Saga
KW - conversion to Christianity
KW - laws
KW - old Norse literature
KW - rationality
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U2 - 10.3390/h11050110
DO - 10.3390/h11050110
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85141405124
SN - 2076-0787
VL - 11
JO - Humanities (Switzerland)
JF - Humanities (Switzerland)
IS - 5
M1 - 110
ER -