Fyrirlestrar / Lectures
Miðvikudaginn 11. júní 2025 heldur Alban Gautier, prófessor í miðaldasögu við Université de Caen Normandie, tvo fyrirlestra á vegum Miðaldastofu — / — Wednesday, June 11, 2025, Alban Gautier, professor of medieval history at Université de Caen Normandie, will give two talks for the Centre for Medieval Studies:
Alban Gautier
The ‘Massacre of the Long Knives’: transformations of a narrative from the ninth to the thirteenth century
Miðvikudaginn 11. júní 2025 kl. 11.00 / Wednesday, June 11, 2025, at 11.00
Árnagarður 304
A story first appearing in the Historia Brittonum traditionally ascribed to Nennius (early ninth century) tells how, after the Saxons led by Hengest first arrived in Britain, they invited all British noblemen to meet them: in the course of the meeting, the Saxons drew their knives and each one killed his neighbour. I will retrace the transformation of this narrative over five centuries, showing how it was retold and modified in history, pseudo-history and romance, and in a variety of European languages. The most important turning point here was undoubtedly Geoffrey of Monmouth and his History of the Kings of Britain: after him, nearly all versions, from Wace’s Roman de Brut to Breta sögur, drew some inspiration from his version, still modifying it, adding or removing individual details.
Alban Gautier is professor of medieval history at Université de Caen Normandie. His research focuses on Norse culture of the Viking Age where he has researched the roots of the concept of the “noble heathen” which appears in medieval Icelandic literature. In his book Beowulf au paradis: Figures de bons païens dans l’Europe du Nord au haut Moyen-Âge (Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2017), Gautier traces the origins of this concept to the writings of medieval theologians and offers a new interpretation of Beowulf.
Fyrirlesturinn verður haldinn á ensku og er öllum opinn. / The talk will be delivered in English and is open to all.
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Alban Gautier
‘Righteous heathens’ before the age of sagas: did something change in the early twelfth century?
Miðvikudaginn 11. júní 2025 kl. 15.00 / Wednesday, June 11, 2025, at 15.00
Árnagarður 304
The notion of the ‘righteous heathen’ or ‘good pagan’ is well-known from Icelandic sagas. There abundance in North European written narratives about the pre-Christian past seems to start sometime in the first half of the twelfth century, when so-called ‘national historians’ such as ‘Gallus Anonymus’ in Poland, Cosmas of Prague in Bohemia or Geoffrey of Monmouth in Britain tell long stories about rulers from the pagan past, celebrating their virtues and their achievements. I will show that, before this date, such stories were not inexistant in the North, but were limited to some regions (especially Ireland) and to a few notable individuals (a handful of them being even regarded as possibly admitted to Paradise). So did something change in the early twelfh century, that made such stories more acceptable for writers that were no less Christian and no less clerical than their predecessors?
Alban Gautier is professor of medieval history at Université de Caen Normandie. His research focuses on Norse culture of the Viking Age where he has researched the roots of the concept of the “noble heathen” which appears in medieval Icelandic literature. In his book Beowulf au paradis: Figures de bons païens dans l’Europe du Nord au haut Moyen-Âge (Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2017), Gautier traces the origins of this concept to the writings of medieval theologians and offers a new interpretation of Beowulf.
Fyrirlesturinn verður haldinn á ensku og er öllum opinn. / The talk will be delivered in English and is open to all.
Fyrirlestrar / Lectures
Declan Taggart
“Tired of a warm boudoir and gloves filled with down”
The construction of Viking Age warrior identity
Þriðjudaginn 8. apríl 2025 kl. 16.30 / Tuesday, April 8, 2025, at 16.30
Fyrirlestrasal Eddu (E-103) / Edda auditorium (E-103)
Warriors remain a cultural staple across the globe, from kids playing with fingers for guns to the blood and guts of Gladiator and videogames like Elden Ring. That does not mean, however, that warrior identity is a straightforward topic for scholars, and this is as true for the Viking Age as for any other period in history. To put it simply, while many people can fight, not everyone who fights is a warrior. No word in Old Norse can even be said to unambiguously equate to the concept, although there are several that we can associate with it.
What, then, is a Viking Age warrior? The goal of this paper is to determine and elucidate that identity, exploring how it was constructed, maintained and propagated, and examining how it was perceived by and affected others in society, a dimension of warriorhood that is rarely considered. To do so, I turn to the archaeological, iconographic and textual sources of Scandinavia and its diaspora to see how warriorhood intersected with seemingly incongruous concepts like nobility and subservience, with religion and physical presentation, with the landscape, and with activities like sailing, showing off and, of course, violence.
While I will touch on and challenge previous arguments about the aesthetics, beliefs and values of the Männerbunde, Gefolgschaft or comitatus, as warrior groups have not-unproblematically been called over the last two hundred years of research, my main focus will be on the primary sources. Understandably, given the fragmentary nature of that corpus, many conclusions about early Northern warrior groups rely on evidence that is neither Viking Age nor from or about the Nordic countries. However, by concentrating on the primary source material, I hope to offer a reasonable reconsideration of how much it is really possible to say about early warrior identity as well as, ultimately, how valid the correlation is between the modern concept of the warrior and any in an Old Norse society.
Declan Taggart is a researcher at the University of Iceland working on warrior groups and their relationship with society. His wider interests include Old Norse mythology and religion, and he has published a book on change in representations of the god Þórr called How Thor Lost His Thunder (Routledge, 2018).
Fyrirlesturinn verður haldinn á ensku og er öllum opinn. / The talk will be delivered in English and is open to all.
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Fyrirlestrar / Lectures
Holly McArthur
A New Critical Edition of Flóvents saga
Þriðjudaginn 1. apríl 2025 kl. 16.30 / Tuesday, April 1, 2025, at 16.30
Fyrirlestrasal Eddu (E-103) / Edda auditorium (E-103)
A little-known work, Flóvents saga claims to tell the story of the first Christian king of Frakkland. Translated from a now-lost chanson de geste, it survives today in 23 manuscripts with the oldest dating from the first quarter of the fourteenth century. Moreover, Flóvents saga has the (perhaps dubious) honor of being the oldest surviving relative of its particular branch of stories of Flóvent, the nephew of Constantine, connecting the narrative to epic cycles produced in Italian and German in the late medieval and early modern periods.
Despite the saga’s relative popularity in Iceland through the centuries, it was last edited in 1884, by Swedish philologist Gustaf Cederschiöld, who, as might be expected of nineteenth century philological practice, dismissed younger copies of the text, and was seemingly unaware of a major part of the saga’s transmission history.
This presentation will focus on the questions that underly a new critical edition of Flóvents saga, with particular attention paid to the balance between authenticity and accessibility, and the question of how best represent a text that holds a relatively unique place for both Old Norse and medieval European literature. It does so in light of the saga’s manuscript rich tradition which spanned almost to the twentieth century to illuminate the role of Flóvent both in Iceland and in Europe.
Holly McArthur is a 2024–2025 Leifur Eiríksson fellow and a Ph.D. Candidate in Scandinavian Philology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She holds an MA in Viking and Medieval Norse Studies from the University of Iceland (2019). Her work studies cultural transmission and literary translation between Old French and Old Norse-Icelandic.
Fyrirlestrar / Lectures
Ivar Berg
Old Norse–Norwegian
Fimmtudaginn 27. mars 2025 kl. 16.30 / Thursday, March 27, 2025, at 16.30
Fyrirlestrasal Eddu (E-103) / Edda auditorium (E-103)
What’s in a name? The terminology used for the West Nordic medieval language varies between ‘(Old) Icelandic’, ‘Old Norwegian’, ‘Old Norse’, and the combination ‘Old Norse–Icelandic’. I will discuss some ideological implications of this terminology before moving on to linguistic form.
Although Norwegian and Icelandic must have been the same at the time of settlement, there are dialectal differences already in the oldest extant texts from the 12th century, making the two languages (and Faroese) an interesting example of linguistic divergence in documented history. I will show a few central points where the dialects seem to have been different and compare them with the “textbook norm” of the standard reference works.
Finally, I will show how the Menota corpus can be used in linguistic analysis, looking at the Norwegian texts with annotation published in the corpus. This makes it possible to quantify the relation between competing variants, and shows how an annotaded corpus makes the historical linguist’s life substantially easier. My point here is at least partly methodological, as this is work in progress, but I will show how this approach allows us to get a clearer understanding of some defining characteristics of Old Norwegian.
Ivar Berg is professor of Scandinavian linguistics at the University of Trondheim (NTNU). He works on the history of Norwegian (and related languages) from philological, grammatical, and sociolinguistic points of view.
Fyrirlesturinn verður haldinn á ensku og er öllum opinn. / The talk will be delivered in English and is open to all.
Fyrirlestrar / Lectures
Tonicha Upham
“Very Unsatisfactory, Inaccurate, and Sometimes Entirely Fabulous”
Fact and Fiction in the Arabic Sources for the Viking World
Fimmtudaginn 13. mars 2025 kl. 16.30 / Thursday, March 13, 2025, at 16.30
Fyrirlestrasal Eddu (E-103) / Edda auditorium (E-103)
Medieval Arabic geographical sources have become a popular source for the study of the Viking world, especially where the Rūs are concerned, and many of the surviving sources are incredibly rich. Nonetheless, scholars of the Viking world often voice concerns – about how much geographers and observers really understood when hampered by linguistic and cultural barriers, about the sources of the information used by geographers, and about the overall trustworthiness of these sources, especially when geographers begin to tell tall stories about the north. This leaves us with a huge amount of material that is neglected by scholars, both because it is not easily accessible, and because it is not considered trustworthy.
This lecture reckons with the line between fact and fiction, and the overall problem of source reliability, by exploring what the Arabic sources on the Viking world say and setting this against what scholars want them to say. Looking back to the earliest uses of these sources by Viking historians and antiquarians, and tracing layers of geographical transmission through understudied Arabic sources, this lecture offers an assessment not only of how Viking Studies can use and approach the Arabic geographical material, but of what it means for a geographer to write accurately about the far north.
Tonicha Upham is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for the World in the Viking Age (WiVA), Uppsala University. She has a PhD in History from Aarhus University (2023), and an MA in Viking and Medieval Norse Studies from the University of Iceland (2019). Her work deals with the Islamicate sources for the Viking world, and during her current project she is concentrating on the Arabic sources for Scandinavia.
Fyrirlesturinn verður haldinn á ensku og er öllum opinn. / The talk will be delivered in English and is open to all.
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Fyrirlestrar / Lectures
Gunnar Harðarson
Fingraför spekinnar: Kaflar úr sögu íslenskrar heimspeki á miðöldum
Framsaga og umræður
Miðvikudaginn 11. desember 2024 kl. 16.30 / Wednesday, December 11, 2024, at 16.30
Fyrirlestrasal Eddu / Edda auditorium
Síðsumars kom út bókin Fingraför spekinnar: Kaflar úr sögu íslenskrar heimspeki á miðöldum þar sem rakin eru spor eftir heimspekilega hugsun í miðaldaritum Íslendinga. Rannsóknin leiðir í ljós hugmyndir um heimspeki, beitingu heimspekilegra hugtaka og rökfærslur af heimspekilegum toga. Meðal annars er gerð tilraun til að skilja og túlka þá mynd af heimspekinni sem sjá má teiknaða í handritinu GKS 1812 4to, en einnig er rýnt í heimspekileg og siðfræðileg hugtök í Hómilíubókinni og Hávamálum, sem reynast vera gerólík. Þá eru heimspekilegar rökfærslur í formála Snorra-Eddu brotnar til mergjar og fyrri sjónarmið endurskoðuð. Jafnframt er gerð grein fyrir því með hvaða hætti alfræðileg hugsun birtist í handritum á borð við Hauksbók, þrátt fyrir að ekki sé hægt að kalla slík handrit alfræðirit, og þau sett í samband við lögmannsstarfið. Í lok bókarinnar er síðan gefið yfirlit um rannsóknir á siðfræði Íslendingasagna.
Höfundur flytur framsögu um efni bókarinnar en síðan munu tveir viðmælendur, Salvör Nordal og Hjalti Snær Ægisson, bregðast við og eftir það verða almennar umræður.
Gunnar Harðarson er prófessor emeritus við Háskóla Íslands. Hann lauk á sínum tíma doktorsprófi í heimspekisögu frá Panthéon-Sorbonne háskólanum í París og hefur einkum kennt námskeið á sviði heimspekisögu og listheimspeki og jafnframt stundað rannsóknir á sögu heimspekinnar á Íslandi.
Fyrirlesturinn fer fram á íslensku og er öllum opinn. / The talk will be conducted in Icelandic and is open to all.
Fyrirlesturinn er haldinn í samstarfi við Heimspekistofnun Háskóla Íslands
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