Ryder C. Patzuk-Russell

The Masterpiece of Einarr Hafliðason

Reading Lárentíus saga in its Historical Context

Fimmtudaginn 16. október 2025 kl. 16.30 / Thursday, October 16, 2025, at 16.30
Fyrirlestrasal Eddu (E-103) / Edda auditorium (E-103)

The historical significance of Einarr Hafliðason’s Lárentíus saga has long been understood, in the basic fact that it is the only saga which describes people and events in fourteenth-century Iceland. Nonetheless, it remains a little-read text, and scholarship is only just beginning to fully understand the unique perspective it provides on Icelandic culture, literature, and history. Einarr Hafliðason, who spent many decades as one of the most powerful priests in northern Iceland, was among the most influential and interesting Icelandic figures of the 1300s, not least because of his authorship of a biography of his mentor. With a narrative beginning in the 1260s, written by Einarr around a century later, and preserved in manuscripts from the end of the Middle Ages, Lárentíus saga looks back on the dawn of the Late Middle Ages with a significant amount of hindsight.

This lecture will explore what we can understand by reading Lárentíus saga from the perspective of its author, not only as the young student and deacon he is in the saga, but as the wise and weathered priest and politician he became, looking back on his youth in light of the many turbulent events of the mid-fourteenth-century in northern Iceland. It will tentatively suggest that the saga is not a story of the slow consolidation of a stabilizing Church in Hólar diocese after the tumult of the late thirteenth century, but rather a reflection on the continuing tensions, power shifts, and political upheavals which Einarr experienced over the course of his long career.

Ryder C. Patzuk-Russell is a member of the Centre for Nordic and Old English Studies at the University of Silesia in Katowice. He completed a PhD at the University of Birmingham in 2017 under Chris Callow, and his first monograph, The Development of Education in Medieval Iceland, was released in 2021 and is available open access. He is a specialist in medieval Icelandic history and culture, focusing on the Church, education and schools, and the Late Middle Ages. He is in the process of publishing a new English language translation of Lárentíus saga.

Fyrirlesturinn verður haldinn á ensku og er öllum opinn. / The talk will be delivered in English and is open to all.