Folklore in Old Norse: Old Norse in Folklore (Nordistica Tartuensia, 20)

During the 20th century, Old Norse philology has been strongly textually oriented. This is evident in saga scholarship, where the book-prose ideology turned the issue of the origin of individual sagas into an issue of direct influences from other written works. This focus has methodological advantages, but it has also meant that valuable folkloristic knowledge has been neglected. The present volume targets the advantages, the problems and the methods of using folklore material and theory in Old Norse scholarship. An important theme in folklore is the encounter with the Supernatural, and such stories are indeed common in saga literature. Generally, however, scholars have tended to focus on feuds and the social structure of the sagas, and less on encounters with Otherworld beings. In this volume, the supernatural themes in the sagas are discussed by means of several approaches, some folkloristic, some traditionally philological. Daniel Sävborg, Karen Bek-Pedersen / Folklore in Old Norse – Old Norse in Folklore. Introduction 7 Aðalheiður Guðmundsdóttir / The Other World in the 'Fornaldarsögur' and in Folklore 14 Stephen A. Mitchell / Continuity: Folklore’s Problem Child? 41 Thomas A. DuBois / Anatomy of the Elite: 'Learned' vs. 'Folk' in the Analysis of Avowedly Pre-Christian Religious Elements in the Sagas 59 Karen Bek-Pedersen / Reconstruction: On Crabs, Folklore and the History of Religion 83 Annette Lassen / The Old Norse Contextuality of 'Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss': A Synoptic Reading with 'Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta' 102 Camilla Asplund Ingemark / The Trolls in 'Bárðar saga' – Playing with the Conventions of Oral Texts? 120 Ralph O’Connor / 'Bárðar saga' Between Orality and Literacy 139 Eldar Heide / 'Bárðar saga' as a Source for Reconstruction of Pre-Christian Religion? 170 Author presentations 181