Representations of Supernatural and Magical Beings in Icelandic Sagas

The saga literature of mediaeval Iceland is famous for its realism and its detached, objective narrative style. Yet it is also unparalleled in mediaeval Europe as a collection of secular narratives about supernatural, magical and uncanny phenomena, from witchcraft and second sight to the Otherworldly folk-menagerie of dwarves, trolls, gods, guardian-spirits and the walking dead. There is a long and valuable scholarly tradition of using saga descriptions of these practices and creatures as sources for investigating the reality of pre-Christian Nordic belief and cult, alongside Viking Age archaeology and historical research. But there is also a more recent scholarly tradition, focused on the thirteenth-century and later producers and audiences of the extant sagas, to which the present project belongs. This approach seeks to understand what functions these supernatural representations play in each individual text when taken as a literary whole, and what these representations meant for their mediaeval audiences. Both approaches, benefiting from dialogue with each other, are fundamental to the research culture 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 for the present project will become part of the Centre’s lively, convivial and cutting-edge research environment. Supervision of the project will be led by Professor Ralph O’Connor.

A number of recent saga studies have greatly enhanced our understanding of the authors’ purposes and cultural assumptions when representing the supernatural. Productive lines of inquiry have been set out by (for example) the detailed case-studies about specific magical creatures in Germanic mythology and literature in Tom Shippey’s edited collection The Shadow-Walkers, Martin Arnold’s longue durée account of the god Þórr, Alaric Hall’s analysis of elves in Norse and Anglo-Saxon literature and belief, Ármann Jakobsson’s studies of trolls and the trollish, Vincent Samson’s book on berserkir, Annette Lassen’s detailed study of the god Óðinn and Karen Bek-Pedersen’s monograph on Norns, to mention only a few. In these studies, the more fantastic and even entirely fictional representations of supernatural beings in saga literature are not discarded as inauthentic. Instead, they have been shown to play important functions in the texts themselves, taking on new meanings in relation to the needs of mediaeval Icelandic society and culture. This new wave of research has by no means exhausted the material available. Such is the range of supernatural representations found in the sagas, and and the sheer number and variety of sagas available to discuss, that there is plenty of room for groundbreaking work to be done in understanding the dynamics and functions of supernatural representations in the Icelandic sagas and what they meant for the communities which produced these texts.

The choice of texts for analysis and the precise approach taken will be tailored to the applicant’s own interests and training, whether primarily literary or historical. Some applicants may prefer an in-depth focus on one or two texts featuring a wide range of supernatural representations; others may be inclined to undertake a narrower thematic analysis tracing one kind of supernatural representation across many different texts, or comparing them with other kinds of text such as eddic poetry. A willingness to explore texts outside the standard canon of ‘classical sagas’ is especially welcome, although this need not exclude the better-known texts from discussion. Applicants will find plenty of unexplored or little-known territory in the many legendary and chivalric sagas (fornaldarsögur and riddarasögur), and in the most neglected group of all, the later and more fantastic Sagas of Icelanders (the so-called ‘post-classical’ Íslendingasögur). These three groups of sagas are the main focus of Professor O’Connor’s own current research: besides several research articles on and translations of these sagas, he is currently completing a monograph on attitudes towards historicity and fantasy as reflected in these texts, as part of a two-year project funded by the Leverhulme Trust (‘The Emergence of Fiction in Icelandic Saga-Writing, 1150-1900’).