Fyrirlestrar / Lectures
Málþing á vegum Miðaldastofu Háskóla Íslands — A University of Iceland Centre for Medieval Studies Symposium
Föstudaginn 5. júní 2026 kl. 14.00–17.00 — Friday, June 5, 2026, at 14.00–17.00
Fyrirlestrasal Eddu (E103) — Edda auditorium (E103)
Dagskrá — Programme:
14.00–14.30 Bianca Patria, University of Florence: The Karlevi poet and extemporary composition in dróttkvætt
14.30–15.00 Petter Jensen, University of Oslo: Haustlǫng 1–13: a culinary conundrum or a sabotaged sacrifice?
15.00–15.30 Klaus Johan Myrvoll, University of Copenhagen: Lítt sá hǫlðr inn hvíti — the intricate journey of a dróttkvætt verse
15.30–16.00 Kaffihlé — Coffee Break
16.00–16.30 Mikael Males, University of Oslo: Sigmundr the Dragon-Slayer
16.30–17.00 Haukur Þorgeirsson, Stofnun Árna Magnússonar í íslenskum fræðum: The Eddic fairy-tales
Málþingið fer fram á ensku og er öllum opið. — The symposium will be conducted in English. All are welcome to attend.
Miðaldastofa Háskóla Íslands — The University of Iceland Centre for Medieval Studies
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Bianca Patria
The Karlevi poet and extemporary composition in dróttkvætt
In sagas, many lausavísur are portrayed as the product of improvisation, with saga characters pronouncing verses in the most unlikely circumstances: while facing mortal duels, colossal drunkenness, when first falling in love or, typically, with their very last breath. Most scholars today are skeptical about the improvised nature of such verses, which probably required something more than a few minutes to be composed. But what would an (almost) improvised stanza in dróttkvætt look like? The Karlevi stone was erected sometime in the late tenth century on the island of Öland by the retainers of a certain Sibbi; a runic inscription containing dróttkvætt lines celebrates the fallen warrior. This paper will argue that this stanza can tell us something about skaldic composition on short-notice, while the poetic echoes it contains might shed light on the artistic network of its anonymous author.
Bianca Patria is a tenure-track researcher in Germanic Philology at the University of Florence. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow in Old Norse philology at the University of Oslo, where she obtained her Ph.D. in 2021. Her research focuses on intertextual phenomena in Old Norse poetry, skaldic diction and Germanic metrics.
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Petter Jensen
Haustlǫng 1-13: a culinary conundrum or a sabotaged sacrifice?
The skaldic poem Haustlǫng by Þjóðolfr ór Hvini was composed during the latter half of the 9th century and is preserved in manuscripts of Snorri’s Edda, written during the first half of the 13th century. The poem is one of the oldest extant pieces of Old Norse literature and is filled with kennings which can only be understood with knowledge of Old Norse myth, poetics and an understanding of the context of the poem. In order to explore the last point, we need to address the question: what exactly is the narrative context of Haustlǫng? The talk will investigate this topic through stylistic analysis and linguistic evidence not previously discussed in the context of Haustlǫng.
The question of context is especially pertinent for the poems first half, 1–13 of a total of 21 stanzas, or the Þjazi-episode as it is also known. This episode depicts the conflict arising from the giant Þjazi disturbing Óðinn, Hœnir and Loki as they are attempting to cook an ox which they serve from a heilagr skutill ‘holy trencher’, which eventually leads to the kidnapping and rescue of the goddess Iðunn. The presence of a ‘holy’ trencher during the god’s meal was taken as evidence by Anne Holtsmark’s (1949) that the Þjazi-episode described a sacrificial ritual being performed by the gods. The sacrifice theory contradicts the explanation provided us by Snorri in Skaldskaparmál, who writes that the episode was the result of a misadventure by the gods where lack of food forced them to steal an ox and attempt to cook it. The most recent edition of the poem in Skaldic Poetry of the Middle Ages (SkP) rejects Holtsmark’s sacrifice theory and reads the poem on the basis of the context provided by Snorri’s prose. This conservative approach is fairly typical of SkP and is understandable in a standard edition. In the analysis of pagan poetry, however, it seems reasonable to assume that Snorri’s interpretations may have been adapted to render the poems acceptable for transmission within a Christian context, whether by Snorri himself or during the preceding two Christian centuries. If indications to this effect can be detected, we gain new evidence both for pagan perceptions and Christian reception. This is the aim of the present talk, which evaluates the probability of the cultic hypothesis versus Snorri’s prose description.
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Klaus Johan Myrvoll
Lítt sá hǫlðr inn hvíti — the intricate journey of a dróttkvætt verse
In the skaldic record, there are some identical or almost identical verses across poems. Snorri Sturluson prescribes in his Edda that it is all right to reproduce a verse or less (“vísuorð eða skemra”); more than that, it is implied, is bad custom. In recent studies of Old Norse poetry, Bianca Patria has drawn the attention to such instances of intertextuality within the corpus. Some of these overlaps can be assigned to the wish or desire to make conscious allusions to earlier skalds and poems central to the canon. Others may just be attempts by late epigons to create something “genuine” or at least acceptable when faced with the difficulty of providing a certain amount of poetry in sagas of Icelanders. In these last-mentioned cases, one should probably recognize plain borrowings over literary allusions.
In some rare cases, we have three instances of more or less the same verse. One such case is lítt sá hǫlðr enn hvíti in a stanza by Gunnlaugr in Gunnlaugs saga (Gunnl 13/5), which is reminiscent of lítt mun halr enn hvíti in both a stanza by Hallfrøðr in Hallfreðar saga (Hallfr 20/1) and a stanza attributed to Óláfr Haraldsson inn helgi in the sagas about him (Ólhelg lv 7/1). Both Bjarne Fidjestøl (1982) and Russell Poole (in SkP I, 2010) refer to these verses as “formulaic”, a characteristic I think is misleading. In my opinion, one of the three stanzas is likely to be the original, and the others are, then, reworkings stemming from that original.
In this paper, I will follow the path this verse has taken and explain why this is the most likely explanation. The results will be, I think, highly unexpected and perhaps even disturbing to scholars holding too firm views on the order of things in Old Norse literature.
Klaus Johan Myrvoll is an associate professor of Old Norse philology at The Arnamagnæan Institute, University of Copenhagen. Previously, he was a professor of Nordic linguistics at the University of Stavanger. His research focuses on Old Norse poetry, literary history and manuscript transmission as well as the history of the Nordic languages.
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Mikael Males
Sigmundr the Dragon-Slayer
In Old Norse and German tradition, Sigurðr/Siegfried is the son of Sigmundr/Siegmund and slays a dragon. In Beowulf, by contrast, being by far the oldest source to the Vǫlsungar tradition, Sigemund is the one who slays a dragon. Anglophone scholars have long assumed that the version in Beowulf is more archaic, whereas most German and Scandinavian scholars have favoured the German-Norse attribution of the dragon-slaying to Sigurðr/Siegfried.
This talk argues that the Old Norse tradition offers more support for Beowulf’s version than scholars have realised. One problem has been a tendency to interpret early references through the lens of the late Vǫlsunga saga, being the most extensive source. In addition, the chronology of relevant poems needs to be revised. Most importantly, closer inspection reveals that there is considerable evidence that the richest poetic source, Fáfnismál, dates to the twelfth century. The evaluation involves a reassessment of the validity of one of the most important formal dating criteria (alliteration in vr-). Through this and other instances of refined dating methodology, as well as close reading of key tenth-century poetry, evidence emerges that Sigurðr was only attached to Sigmundr in that century, and that Sigurðr gradually eclipsed Sigmundr from the second half of the tenth century onwards. German evidence is consistent with these observations, although that topic can only be touched upon in the present talk.
Mikael Males is professor of Old Norse philology at the University of Oslo. He has published mainly on skaldic poetry and grammatical literature, but also on eddic poetry, saga literature and Irish-Norse influence.
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Haukur Þorgeirsson
The Eddic fairy-tales
The Eddic fairy-tales are a group of eight alliterative poems of medieval origin recorded from oral tradition in Iceland in the 17th century. The talk will give an overview of these poems and recent research on them. The points of discussion will include signs of medieval origin and formulaic composition, the variety of the oral tradition, the feminine perspectives of the poems, recent scholarly editions, and planned future work. The talk will take a look at the main similarities and differences between the Eddic fairy-tales and the Eddic poems collected in the 13th century and the reasons to think that they are authentically parts of the same tradition.
Haukur Þorgeirsson is research professor at the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic studies. His interests include Old Norse and later Icelandic poetry, historical linguistics, and metrics.
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Málþingið fer fram á ensku og er öllum opið.
The symposium will be conducted in English. All are welcome to attend.
Miðaldastofa Háskóla Íslands — The University of Iceland Centre for Medieval Studies
Fyrirlestrar / Lectures
Adinel C. Dincă
By the Book!
Literacy and the Societal Development of the Transylvanian Saxons in the Middle Ages (ca. 1350–1550)
Þriðjudaginn 5. maí 2026 kl. 16.30 / Tuesday, May 5, 2026, at 16.30
Fyrirlestrasal Eddu (E-103) / Edda auditorium (E-103)
This talk explores various forms of textual evidence that underscore the significance of literacy and learning in the history of a particular wave of Western European settlers in the southeastern regions of the continent, commonly known as the Transylvanian Saxons, during the Late Middle Ages. It examines the chronology and typological development of textual production in parallel with its social significance, extending to the community-level strategic implications of accumulated knowledge.
A granular, horizontal analysis of charters, private and institutional correspondence, accounting registers, liturgical texts, sermons, and theological or legal compilations (whether handwritten or printed) attending to their graphic, aesthetic, material, and institutional dimensions, as well as their circulation through domestic or foreign collections, highlights how reading and writing practices functioned not only as markers of literacy but as active forces in the co-constitution of literacy and community life: each shaped and reinforced the other.
Within this framework, meticulously reconstructed historical contexts and rigorous theoretical inquiry are accorded equal weight: while literate behaviour in premodern settings appears to be shaped by both structural acculturation and locally embedded agency, its study now demands an updated methodological toolkit capable of interrogating surviving and fragmentary sources, as well as vanished traces — or even texts that may never have existed.
Adinel C. Dincă is Associate Professor at Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca in Romania. In addition to his individual research on the medieval history of Southeastern Europe, legal literacy, and history of the Latin Church, Adinel Dincă is also supervising critical editions of primary sources regarding Transylvania and manages several international projects on textual heritage.
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
Ondřej Tichý
Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online
The Story of a Dictionary and its Digitization
Fimmtudaginn 9. apríl 2026 kl. 16.30 / Thursday, April 9, 2026, at 16.30
Fyrirlestrasal Eddu (E-103) / Edda auditorium (E-103)
The Anglo-Saxon Dictionary by Joseph Bosworth and T. N. Toller has been the leading lexicographical resource in the study of Old English since its publication over a century ago. However, for that same period of time it has also proven to be a highly contentious resource and sometimes downright an irritating tool to use. This talk will briefly introduce the history of the Dictionary and it use, but the focus will be squarely on the project of its digitization that has over the years lead to the online application used almost two million times every year at bosworthtoller.com.
The aim of this digitization project has been to create a faithful representation of what the printed Dictionary has to offer and present it freely online for the widest audiences adding new features made possible by its transformation.
The talk will cover the history of the project and the basic methodology of the digitization — from OCR to XML and finally the online app. It will introduce the educational or pedagogical aspects of its development; the tools and standards similar digitization projects may or should use and the follow-up projects that may be encouraged by the adherence to these standards.
Finally, it will also tackle the technical and lexicographical difficulties encountered during the development: such as the structural inconsistency of the Dictionary, the level of fidelity in its digital representation, the disambiguation of some of its data and the reliability of its sources. These are shown to be on one hand common to all similar digitization efforts, but on the other hand often intimately associated with the peculiar history of the Dictionary that may, in its new digital form, finally overcome some of its limitation and after more than 150 years realise its full potential online.
Ondřej Tichý is currently the deputy head of the Department of Linguistics and the head of the Center for Digital Humanities at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University (Univerzita Karlova) in Prague. Among his research interests are historical corpus linguistics, quantitative analysis and digital humanities. He has worked on topics such as lexical and multi-word mortality, quantitative analysis of spelling variation, grammaticalization of countability, quantitative typology, automatic morphological analysis and lemmatization and digital lexicography. He is the author of the online version of the Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. He is currently working on a number of digital projects including Lexico-semantic Database of Czech, a database of medieval Czech textual sources in translation, an online tool for visualisation of diachronic change in collocations and LLM benchmarking tools for DH.
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
Árni Einarsson
Akuryrkja á Suðurlandi á miðöldum
Nýir fornleifafundir
Fimmtudaginn 19. mars 2026 kl. 16.30 / Thursday, March 19, 2026, at 16.30
Fyrirlestrasal Eddu (E-103) / Edda auditorium (E-103)
Fjöldi merkja eru um kornyrkju hér á landi á miðöldum og virðist hún hafa verið útbreidd, einkum sunnan- og vestanlands. Má þar nefna fornleifar á bæjum, frjókornagreiningar á jarðvegi, sögurnar og máldaga kirkna og önnur fornbréf. Hingað til hafa örugg, sýnileg merki akra verið fá og bundin við sjávarsíðuna vestanlands, einkum Garðskaga og Breiðafjarðareyjar, en einnig á tveimur bæjum í Mýrdalnum. Í erindinu verður sagt frá fornökrum sem nýlega fundust við fornleifarannsóknir í Rangárvallasýslu. Komu þeir í ljós við hnitmiðaðar loftmyndatökur af fornum bæjarstæðum. Akrarnir eru á Keldum, Bergvaði (nú Móeiðarhvoli), Skeiðvöllum og Lunansholti.
Fornakrarnir á Keldum á Rangárvöllum tengjast flóknu og hugvitsamlegu áveitukerfi frá 10.–11. öld, þar sem Keldnalæk var veitt um annars þurra Tunguheiði með torfhlöðnum stokkum og stíflugörðum. Af 19 hekturum sem áveitan vökvaði á Tunguheiði eru 3 hektarar með sýnilegum akurrákum. Akrar á Bergvaði (1 hektari) tengjast torfgirðingakerfi sem virðist gefa til kynna talsverða nautgriparækt. Kynnt verður hugmynd um hvernig sauðfjár og nautgriparækt hefur verið fyrir komið þar til forna. Akrar í Lunansholti (0,3 hektarar hinn stærri) og á Skeiðvöllum eru á fornum bæjarstæðum með fjölda tófta, sumum með þeim stærri af sinni gerð. Stærsti akurinn af þremur á Skeiðvöllum er 2,2 hektarar að stærð, hinir tveir 0,8 og 1 ha.
Þessir fornleifafundir eru sérstakt fagnaðarefni fyrir það hve akurlöndin eru lítt röskuð og öll umgjörð þeirra óspillt. Frekari rannsóknir munu geta skilað miklum upplýsingum um akuryrkju á Íslandi á miðöldum, til dæmis hvenær hún hófst og hvenær henni lauk, hvað var ræktað, hve mikill áburður var notaður, hvort fleiri akrar leynist undir yfirborðinu og margt, margt fleira.
Árni Einarsson er líf- og fornvistfræðingur, fyrrum forstöðumaður Náttúrurannsóknastöðvarinnar við Mývatn og gestaprófessor við Háskóla Íslands um skeið. Hann hefur lengst af helgað sig rannsóknum á lífríki og sögu Mývatns, en einnig á fornminjum og bókmenntum frá miðöldum.
Fyrirlesturinn verður haldinn á íslensku og er öllum opinn. / The talk will be delivered in Icelandic and is open to all.
Fyrirlestrar / Lectures
Dick Harrison
The Era of Evil
The Development of Witch Persecutions and Trials in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Eighteenth century
Fimmtudaginn 19. febrúar 2026 kl. 16.30 / Thursday, February 19, 2026, at 16.30
Fyrirlestrasal Eddu (E-103) / Edda auditorium (E-103)
In the early Middle Ages, the Christian church of Europe regarded magic in much the same way that we do today. It was regarded as superstition, as a bundle of ideas that should be combatted not because they could result in real harm, but because they were stupid. Since all power emanated from God, the very notion that Satan or one of his demons could be called upon to render assistance to witches and wizards was nonsense. Hence, witches and wizards were not taken seriously, and they could be (and were) used in stories and plays as elements of entertainment.
However, in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century, this attitude began to change. In the 1320s, the pope himself acknowledged that magic users should be taken seriously, for the same reason that heretics were to be feared. Since heretics—i.e., Cathars and Valdensians—did exist and, moreover, caused serious harm to Christianity, it was only logical to assume that they were inspired by Satan and the forces of evil. In all probability, these dark powers also tried to exert influence over the world by employing witches and wizards. Accordingly, practitioners of magic were to be dealt with in the same fashion as heretics: by investigations and persecutions and, as a last resort, by burning at the stake.
This was the beginning of a development that created an atmosphere of fear of magic that resulted in sporadic eruptions of witch hunts. Eventually, tens of thousands of innocent Europeans were tried and killed, with a culmination in the seventeenth century. The processes varied considerably: for example, the vast majority of the victims in continental Europe were women, while the majority of the Icelandic victims were men. In present-day Estonia and Latvia, there were few witch trials but many werewolf trials. In Spain, some of the biggest persecutions of the era were launched, but they were quenched by the Inquisition, since this well-trained ecclesiastical court demanded reliable pieces of evidence. In Sweden, on the other hand, many women were condemned to death simply because local children made up stories about their alleged visits to Blåkulla, where they were supposed to have made pacts with the Devil.
How was this possible? Why did learned intellectuals embrace popular ideas that had previously been regarded as ludicrous? And why did the witch craze stop? What made judges, priests and princes realise that the accused were innocent?
Dick Harrison is Professor of History at Lund University in Sweden. He has published more than a hundred books on various historical subjects, with a major focus on the Middle Ages. His book about the Black Death was rewarded the August Prize for best Swedish non-fiction book in 2000, and he was the editor (and a major contributor) to the eight-volume work Sveriges historia (“The History of Sweden”). Harrison appears frequently as an expert in Swedish radio and television.
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
Helgi Þorláksson
Klofasteinar fyrir norðan
Geta klofasteinar sagt eitthvað um landnám Íslands og þá hvað helst?
Fimmtudaginn 5. febrúar 2026 kl. 16.30 / Thursday, February 5, 2026, at 16.30
Fyrirlestrasal Eddu (E-103) / Edda auditorium (E-103)
Fyrirlesari birti grein árið 2023 þar sem settar eru fram ábendingar um að stórtækir landnámsmenn á Íslandi muni hafa getað ákveðið hvar mörk skyldu vera milli svæða eða stórra jarða sem þeir námu og útdeildu. Vísbendingar um þetta taldi fyrirlesari vera allstóra, klofna steina, svonefnda klofasteina, á mörkum á Suðurlandi, suðvesturhorni landsins og í Borgarfirði, alls 34 dæmi. Hann rökstuddi að steinarnir hefðu iðulega fengið þetta hlutverk á elstu tíð. Fyrirlesari ber núna saman við 39 klofasteina á mörkum í þremur sýslum nyrðra, Húnavatnssýslu, Skagafjarðarsýslu og Eyjafjarðarsýslu.
Helgi Þorláksson er prófessor emeritus í sagnfræði við Háskóla Íslands. Hann fékkst í kennslu og rannsóknum einkum við Íslands- og Norðurlandasögu frá um 900 til um 1800, svið pólitískrar sögu, félagssögu og hagsögu. Doktorsritgerð hans fjallar um hagsögu Íslands á 13. og 14. öld og náin tengsl við Noreg.
Fyrirlesturinn verður haldinn á íslensku og er öllum opinn. / The talk will be delivered in Icelandic and is open to all.