Record Detail

The article investigates the arguments upon which the integration of texts
written in 13th century Scandinavia into a Germanic ›antiquity‹ rests and proposes
a different approach to the early stages of Old Norse-Icelandic literature. While
the notion that for instance Eddic poetry represents early medieval culture is based
upon the idea that oral tradition was stable and faithfully recorded in writing later on,
a closer look at the oldest texts written in the vernacular reveals that the authors very
consciously and carefully investigated oral tradition and integrated features of oral
story-telling into narrative frames which are dominated by Latin conventionality. It
is suggested that the ›classical‹ saga genres display a similarly controlled literary
discourse, which due to socio-political and intellectual developments consciously
imitates oral tradition in a many-voiced discourse. It is argued that literary history
as a history of datable texts is more suitable for detecting change in in this discourse
than an ›archaeological‹ focus on traditions behind single genres.