The Legendary Saga as a Medium of Cultural Memory

This book examines the representation and historical significance of the legendary Scandinavian past as it is depicted in two late medieval Icelandic saga manuscripts: AM 589a–f 4to and AM 586 4to. It situates the manuscripts within their literary, media, and historical contexts to read the legendary sagas (or fornaldarsögur) within them as works of historical writing. The qualities about them that are often used to deny them the label of ‘history´ — their proximity to romance and ‘folklore’, and their playfully self-conscious narration — are reinterpreted as conscious attempts to reconfigure cultural memory to suit the needs of the manuscripts’ fifteenth-century patrons. The first half of the book takes a literary approach, offering an intertextual and genre-based analysis of AM 589a–f 4to. The second broadens out to view the manuscripts as historically situated media. It examines their relationships to orality and literacy and then argues that they served particular functions at the time of their production and continued to shape cultural memories as they were read (or vocalised) in the centuries that followed. Drawing on insights from cultural memory studies and material philology, this book will be of interest to scholars of Old Norse literature, folklore, and manuscript studies.