“Stories for all time” is a three-year research project on Icelandic fornaldarsögur.
Its aim is to investigate the transmission of the texts from the middle ages onwards, mapping their production, dissemination and reception in relation to broader historical, social and cultural processes. At the same time, the project is preparing electronic editions of some of the more important and/or interesting manuscripts in which the sagas are preserved, thereby making the texts available to researchers, students and other interested parties.
From the description of the project:
The fornaldarsögur norðurlanda (literally ‘ancient sagas of the northern lands’, but often referred to in English as ‘mythical-heroic’ or ‘legendary’ sagas) represent one of the major genres of mediaeval Icelandic saga narrative. Unlike many of the standard saga genre designations – Íslendingasögur, konungasögur etc. – which actually are attested in the medieval literature, the term fornaldarsögur is a modern coinage, however, first used by Carl Christian Rafn as the title of his three-volume edition, published in Copenhagen in 1829-30, which brought together, for the first time, essentially all the prose narratives preserved in Old Icelandic dealing with the early history of mainland Scandinavia before the unification of Norway under Haraldr hárfagri and the settlement of Iceland. Rafn’s edition thus defined the corpus and gave that corpus its name in accordance with that definition.
In their present form, the fornaldarsögur date pre- dominantly from the 14th and 15th centuries, and thus represent one of the younger genres of saga literature. However, most of them have at least some basis in a significantly older tradition, and it has been customary to distinguish between them on the basis of their relationship to that tradition. Thus while works such as Völsunga saga and Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks, which are demonstrably related to and/or derived from ancient Germanic poetry, have long been accorded a measure of scholarly respect, others, such as Egils saga einhenda ok Ásmundar berserkjabana and Bósa saga, with their fondness for the fabulous, stock characters, lengthy battle scenes and so on, have often been dismissed as historically unreliable and of scant artistic merit. It was, however, perhaps not surprisingly, these same sagas which were generally the most popular, as attested by the very large number of manuscripts in which they are preserved – over 1500 individual texts in nearly 800 manuscripts.
The importance of the fornaldarsögur is many-fold. They are, to begin with, a valuable source of information on the history – at least the legendary if not the actual – of early Scandinavia. Fornaldarsögur-like narratives were used as a source by Saxo in his Gesta Danorum, as he himself acknowledges, and the sagas were combed for information about the early histories of the kingdoms of Denmark and Sweden by 17th- and 18th-century scholars: in fact, the first saga texts ever to be printed in the original were fornaldarsögur, published in Uppsala in the second half of the 17th century.
The influence of the fornaldarsögur is also to be found in other literary works. Almost all of them were turned into the lengthy Icelandic metrical romances known as rímur, generally more than once, and many also formed the basis for ballads in Norway, Denmark, Sweden and the Faeroe Islands. They have also served as a source of inspiration for more ‘serious’ writers. Johannes Ewald’s Rolf Krage: et Sørgespil (1770) and Adam Oehlenschläger’s Helge: et Digt (1814) were both based on Hrólfs saga kraka, the former via Saxo, the latter directly, while Esaias Tegnér’s poem Frithiofs saga (1825), praised by Goethe and famous throughout 19th-century Europe, was based on Friðþjófs saga ins frœkna. Wagner drew on Völsunga saga at least as much as he did on the Nibelungenlied for his Der Ring des Nibelungen (1876), and while specific models are harder to identify, the influence of the fornaldarsögur on J. R. R. Tolkien’s works, the Star Wars films and on modern fantasy in general is also considerable.
Unfortunately, study of the fornaldarsögur has long been hampered by a lack of reliable editions. Recognising this, the Arnamagnæan Commission agreed in 1937 that a new edition of the complete fornaldarsögur corpus should be among its first priorities. A detailed plan for the work was drawn up and an editor for the project, the Icelandic scholar Einar Ól. Sveinsson, was appointed in 1939. The advent of the war prevented the editor from taking up his duties, however, and the project was abandoned. Although a handful of fornaldarsögur have subsequently appeared in scholarly editions, it is unfortunately still the case that the majority of them have yet to be edited properly.
The aim of the three-year research project “Stories for all time” has been to investigate the transmission of the fornaldarsögur from the middle ages onwards, mapping their production, dissemination and reception in relation to broader historical, social and cultural processes. At the same time, the project is preparing electronic editions of some of the more important and/or interesting manuscripts in which the sagas are preserved, thereby making the texts available to researchers, students and other interested parties.
The research project “Stories for all time” is based at Nordisk Forskningsinstitut (NFI), a research institute within the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Copenhagen. Its members of staff conduct research in the fields of Early Scandinavian language and literature, manuscript studies, dialectology, socio-linguistics, onomastics and runology. Funding is provided by the Velux foundation.
From March 2011, the three-year project will investigate the transmission of the fornaldarsögur from the middle ages onwards, mapping their production, dissemination and reception in relation to broader historical, social and cultural processes.
As part of the project, a bibliography of manuscripts, editions, translations and secondary literature on fornaldarsögur norðurlanda has been compiled.
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