Supernatural elements in Icelandic sagas have generally been treated as unworthy of much serious consideration. The quality of realism in sagas, based on depictions of societal norms underlying the stories, has been an area of central concern in scholarly research. In recent years, however, researchers have taken a new interest in sagas that were previously ignored and marginalized due to their emphasis on the supernatural. Here it is proposed that what have long been considered to be later works, and judged to be somewhat inferior to the so-called classical sagas, are not necessarily of lesser value and may not, in fact, have been written at a later point in time but were categorized on the basis of their content.
Following an introduction by the editors, this book consists of eleven chapters based on papers presented at the 2014 conference of the Old Norse Folklorists Network. Each is accompanied by an abstract and a brief note on the author's background, and all deal in some way with aspects of the role of the supernatural as recorded in Old Norse text and tradition. The editors of this book stress that the term supernatural is applied broadly to include a wide range of phenomena outside of the normal, including magic and the fantastic. They point out that supernatural encounters actually occur quite frequently in sagas, and it could be inferred that such encounters had been considered to be a part of everyday life. In that case, references to the supernatural might in fact have reflected the social, cultural, and environmental influences of the day. For instance, Miriam Mayburd discusses the environmental otherness of a landscape where boundaries between the natural and the supernatural tend to fluctuate. Jan Ragnar Hagland writes about laws and penalties concerning the conjuring of trolls and other occult activities and practices considered antithetical to the values of a Christian society. Laws against such practices indicate a belief in the supernatural while at the same time reaffirming the Christian values of the society. Stories of saga heroes battling supernatural opponents likewise represent a renunciation of paganism.
The battle between Christianity and the forces of evil seems particulary noteworthy in the three chapters that focus on encounters between Bishop Guðmundr Arason of Hólar and a strange creature called Selkolla, an animal-human hybrid that appears in various guises but is most often described as a woman with the head of a seal. According to Margaret Cormack, sagas written about this bishop “provide some of our best evidence of fourteenth-century Icelanders’ concerns regarding dangerous supernatural beings” (75). Selkolla began life as an ordinary human infant that was either replaced by an evil changeling or died and returned as some kind of unclean spirit. If a supernatural entity requires a reason for being, this character serves several purposes. For one thing, Selkolla’s story emphasizes the perils of ignoring certain religious tenets, such as the need to baptize a child in a timely manner. When the bishop arrives and literally drives Selkolla into the ground, his reputation for saintliness is enhanced. The aura of strangeness surrounding the “other” must surely be magnified and the figure of the “other” must be further marginalized when it is portrayed as something not just foreign or different but as a creature existing literally beyond the bounds of what can be considered human. Selkolla is certainly an example of inhuman “otherness” and its defeat at the hands of the bishop emphasizes the power of the church over the evil supernatural outsider. As explained by Arngrímur Vídalín, the creation of monstrous non-human “others” helped Icelanders, so far removed geographically from the center of Christianity, to envision themselves as a part of mainstream Christian society, as opposed to the pagans and monsters found on the peripheries of civilization.
Taken as a whole, this book makes a persuasive argument that the marginalized “others” among sagas, previously dismissed as works of lesser importance, are in fact deserving of further consideration. These works reflect the point of view of the people they were written for and about, emphasize the importance of Christianity in society, and aim to establish the role that the authors of the sagas believed their society should hold in the world. Whereas divisions between disciplines have lead to a lack of communication between researchers, one stated aim of this publication is to provide an interdisciplinary approach to its central topic. The authors included in the volume were selected at least in part to portray the diversity of new research in this area. These scholars seek connections between oral and written tradition, explore common themes, and examine clues to their origins. Philip Lavender, for example, traces the history of a saga to ballad tradition, and Eldar Heide connects nineteenth-century legend versions of a saga to medieval oral tradition. In her chapter on the meaning of the pre-Christian jól, Bettina Sommer comments that, rather than focusing on a single function of this or any religious practice, “it is a far more fruitful approach to acknowledge the multiple levels which function together to create a rich and complex whole” (53). It would seem that this statement could be applied to the entire volume, a book that should prove valuable not only to scholars of Old Norse literature but also to those interested in Scandinavian cultural history in general. Overall, this collection demonstrates that, by moving away from a tunnel-vision approach to research, something new can be uncovered in the study of something very old.
--------
[Review length: 908 words • Review posted on September 12, 2019]