Icelandic and Irish Sagas in Comparison

The vernacular prose narratives of Iceland and Ireland (their sagas) are almost always studied in isolation, by specialists in Germanic or Celtic languages and cultures. Recent scholarship has begun to open up both branches of literature to comparative study, building on an awareness that they represent the largest and most varied bodies of vernacular secular narrative prose in mediaeval Europe, standing in an ambivalent relation to the Continental mainstream. Such comparison has usually proceeded in one of two ways: (a) by investigating historical links between the two literatures, focusing on the question of contact between the two cultures and on whether Icelandic saga-writing was sparked off by settlers’ awareness of Irish saga-writing or storytelling (as in the important survey by Gísli Sigurðsson, Gaelic Influence in Iceland, 1992), and (b) by looking for common Germanic-Celtic social or mythological motifs in order to reconstruct earlier Indo-European ideologies (as in the work of Georges Dumézil and his successors).

Professor Ralph O’Connor, the lead supervisor for this project and a member of both the Department of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Studies and the Centre for Scandinavian Studies, is one of a handful of scholars who has carried out a different approach, drawing on the tools of comparative literature. This is the approach taken by the current project. Here, different aspects of Icelandic and Irish sagas are compared with each other to see what can be learned about each individual tradition by the act of comparison. This approach has been productive in highlighting crucial differences as well as suggestive similarities between the two bodies of literature, and therefore in sharpening our sense of what defines and characterizes each individual corpus. Because this approach attends to each text as a whole rather than motifs in isolation, it also provides a useful tool for testing some of the Indo-European reconstructions offered by comparative mythologists, as in Professor O’Connor’s own recent study of warrior-frenzies and shapeshifting in Irish and Icelandic sagas (a chapter in Kings and Warriors in Early Northwest Europe, ed. Rekdal and Doherty, 2016, the outcome of a 1-year research project funded by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in 2012-13). Professor O’Connor is currently researching in two related areas, perceptions of historicity and fiction among Icelandic and Irish saga-authors and scribes, and narratives about amorous stepmothers in mediaeval and early modern Irish and Norse-Icelandic literature. Two of his recent PhD graduates have carried out much-praised analyses of masculinity and status in Irish and Norse-Icelandic literature and madness in Irish and Norse-Icelandic sagas.

In this project, applicants who are familiar with the two literatures (in the original or in translation) and who have a good working knowledge of at least one of the relevant languages (Old Norse-Icelandic or Old and Middle Irish / Old and Middle Gaelic) are invited to identify an aspect of Irish and Icelandic saga-writing for comparison, using the methods of literary criticism, literary history and/or reception studies. Applicants are invited to approach this material in a way which seeks, first and foremost, to understand the sagas themselves as literary works in their own right, although in some cases this approach may subsequently lead to insights on the sagas’ usefulness as sources for the history of much earlier periods. Potential focal points could include, but are not limited to: representations of a common mythological or social theme, treatment of a shared narrative pattern such as the feud or bridal quest, aspects of narrative structure on a small or large scale, stylistic or rhetorical features, or the distribution or treatment of different kinds of text in the respective manuscripts (many of these now available freely online via www.handrit.is and www.isos.dias.ie ). Whichever angle is chosen, a clear sense of focus will be essential to a successful application. Because of the distribution of current scholarship on Irish-Icelandic comparisons, an ability to read German and/or modern Icelandic will be an advantage, but is not essential at the outset.

The successful applicant will join the lively, convivial and cutting-edge research community of Aberdeen’s Centre for Scandinavian Studies, which houses the largest concentration of experts on mediaeval Scandinavia and Iceland in the UK. Directed by Professor Stefan Brink, the Centre currently has 14 doctoral students, 6 members of research-active staff (5 of whom are mediaevalists) and several taught postgraduate students, besides several staff in other departments with research interests in mediaeval Scandinavia. The successful applicant will also benefit from the Centre’s informal affiliation with the university’s department of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Studies and its own research community.