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video Old Icelandic sagas
Philologist Fyodor Uspensky on the meaning of genealogical series, false sagas and the interest of the Norwegian kings in Iceland 14.08.2015 3 6 780
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This material is part of the course "Culture of Medieval Scandinavia" Scandinavian sagas, or rather it would be more accurate to say "Icelandic sagas", because the vast majority of sagas were recorded in Iceland, about Iceland, although not only, and only in Iceland.
Icelanders in this sense were considered a people who can compose sagas and never lie.
In one of the ancient prefaces, the Latin speaking author explains why he used some information that came from the Icelanders precisely because they are a people who are not subject to lies and lies.
Sagas are a wonderful phenomenon, there are no analogues in Western Europe in that era, for sure.
There are Irish sagas, but this is an erroneous name: Irish sagas have nothing in common with Scandinavian sagas.
Sagas are a kind of oral story about significant and important events.
At the same time, the sagas that have reached us, and unfortunately, not as many as they could have reached us, unfortunately, but even what has reached us is the pearl of European literature, which is difficult to talk about it without enthusiasm.
At the same time, sagas — I would not call sagas a genre, but rather a form and type of a story about the past — break up into some varieties within this current.
7 pillars of medieval Scandinavian Culturefedor Uspensky about why poets called women "the linden of the wrists", how the author of the "Younger Edda" died and what else you need to know about the culture of the ancient Scandinavians There are generic sagas — these are Icelandic sagas that tell about the Icelanders themselves.
They are remarkable for their amazing attention to everyday life, to some collisions that occur in everyday life.
Historians do not have such a source, because usually all medieval sources do not write about this, not about how people prepare breakfast, how they quarrel at a wedding, because of what one stole his wife from another, and so on — all this somehow falls out of the scope of the chroniclers.
Meanwhile, for the Icelandic compiler of the saga, if it is a generic saga, this is the main subject of interest, he is most interested in just life as it was, and not the life of the whole country, but of individual, the brightest and best representatives.
And, on the other hand, he is, of course, interested in various kinds of legal conflicts, legal subtleties.
Since the law accompanied the life of every Icelander of the X XII centuries, then, of course, the compiler or narrator of the saga is interested in some difficulties, intricacies of legal situations, how who came out of them.
And, of course, everyone was interested in bloodshed, crimes, adultery — all this is present in abundance in the saga.
But what is remarkable is that in the saga this is not told for attraction, not to make the story about this or that Icelander more interesting, but it is told as it is: if there was no adultery, then the compiler or narrator of the saga will not attribute to his hero some special treason or something like that.
Any narrator of a saga, when uttering a saga — and, apparently, sagas have been in oral form for a very long time of course, felt himself in some sense as a bearer of truth, that is, he was telling a true story about the past.
And in general, almost all the characters of the sagas, especially the ancestral sagas, the Icelandic sagas that have come down to us, are really historical persons, persons who really lived in Iceland in the X — XI centuries.
A saga is usually a story about the past, and this is very significant, because it immediately colors the entire narrative style.
The fact that negligent students will miss today, even if they read the Russian translation of the saga, in fact, we must understand that they will miss the very salt of the saga story, namely: first of all, everyone skips genealogies.
Any saga begins with the fact that there lived such a person, his father was such and such, his grandfather was such and such, his grandfather was married to that, and his wife's grandmother was such and such, she lived on that farm, and this grandmother's great grandmother came to Iceland, then she fled, and it went.
He builds up the most complex genealogical series, which, indeed, without being an expert, probably, there is nothing special to read for.
The genealogical series for the narrator of the Icelandic ancestral saga of that time were the main information, since they made everything that he reports reliable.
At least because there was such a simple thing: when building the entire genealogical structure during the story of the saga, there were probably people in the audience who were simply relatives of the hero about whom it is being told.
And, as a skald who could not lie in front of the kings in a sense, he, the narrator of the saga, could not lie in front of his audience.
A little different thing is the royal sagas, they were also mostly written by Icelanders, but these are not stories about Iceland — Iceland appears there constantly, but they are mainly stories about the political dynastic history of Norway — the closest friends, enemies and neighbors of Icelanders.
And the Norwegians showed exceptional interest and attention to the Icelanders, especially the Norwegian kings, all the time trying to make Iceland part of Norway, but the Icelanders, of course, were keenly interested in what was happening in Norway.
That is why these sagas are called royal: they tell about the royal political fate of Norway from the most ancient times to the XIII XIV centuries, the XIV to a slightly lesser extent.
Finally, the compiler and narrator of these sagas, the royal sagas, speaking about them, whether it was Snorri Sturluson or some nameless narrator, always proceeded from the fact that he was telling the truth in the form in which it reached him.
Moreover, this truth reached him orally, as part of someone's testimony, some stories from other sagas or other people.
And any narrator of the saga always, when he talks about some bizarre things, especially those that happened in ancient times, it is important to refer to something, indicate from whom he learned it, and restore a certain chain, a channel for receiving information.
This is very clearly seen, for example, in the preface of the great Icelander Snorri Sturluson to the set of royal sagas "The Circle of the Earth".
There, most of this preface is devoted to just that: he explains where he got this information from, and mentions a number of famous Icelanders who told him, and those were told by an even more famous Icelander, and that even more famous.
As at a trial, it is important for him to restore the circle of witnesses or the channel through which information from ancient times came.
Law in medieval Scandinavia Philologist Fyodor Uspensky about the oral traditions of the law of the Viking age, the naivety of the Scandinavian judicial officials and the prohibition of skaldic poetry, while the royal and ancestral sagas were certainly true, and there the truth breathes literally in every line, although it is clear that the compiler of the saga had to finish some minor things in the course of the story, for example, character dialogues.
He had in his head some essence of what his characters were talking about, and he, of course, composed the dialogues himself.
And in this sense, it is absurd to accuse him of trying to falsify the dialogues of the X century — no, he simply told about it in the way that, according to his ideas, people of the X century could speak, it is difficult to accuse him of lying.
And along with these two types of truthful sagas, in which the truth is manifested from the very beginning to the end, there were so called false sagas lygisogur.
These are sagas, which, apparently, were rather similar in type to fairy tales, and there the narrator or compiler was always extremely concerned about the entertainment of the story: of course, dragons fly there, of course, heroes run there, who pierce twenty people with one throw of a spear, "kill seven in one fell swoop" and so on.
Of course, there are a lot of fantastic things there, and it is no coincidence that these sagas clearly enjoyed mass popularity, because they were preserved in a huge number of lists, they were rewritten, retold.
This is something that could probably be compared with modern pulp fiction, with mass literature.
But in a remarkable way, these sagas were called false sagas, that is, the very name of the subtype of these oral stories already contained an indication of their some untruthfulness.
And the very existence of lygisogur, false sagas, suggested that there are sagas that are true, false.
So there is no need to be surprised at such a strange division.
It is known, for example, that the rulers of Norway, especially in the XII century, especially King Sverrir, certainly liked false sagas more than everyone else.
Nevertheless, the same ruler of Norway, loving false sagas, loving when he is entertained and occupied, as ideological propaganda (he was an impostor, he had to justify his rights to the throne) did not find anything better than to order a saga about himself as just such a political document justifying the rights to the throne.
And it is known that at least partially this saga was written with his participation, where he told the compiler of the saga what exactly should get into his biography of such a special type.
In general, I did not accidentally say that the saga is not a genre, the saga is something else, it is a type of story and a type of text, because for the Scandinavians of that time, the saga clearly had such an all consuming and dominant property that literally everything was drawn into it.
This is such a sponge that sucked in all genres, all types of narratives.
If the lives of the saints were translated, it would be the saga of the Apostle Paul, if the Bible was translated, it would be the saga of some biblical events or the saga of the Jews, and so on and so forth.
In this sense, the saga was a type of text that, like an umbrella, covered any forms of verbal ancient Scandinavia.
Fyodor Uspensky, Doctor of Philology, Deputy Director of the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Leading Researcher at the Laboratory of Medieval Studies of the Higher School of Economics All materials of the author
Icelandhistory of Culturaliteraturepravoscandinaviasturluson Snorri
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