Icelandic Folklore and the Cultural Memory of Religious Change

"Nearly all recent examinations of Icelandic (and Scandinavian) folklore from the nineteenth century and earlier have concerned themselves with the origins and production of folktales rather than with the cultural implications of their content. This volume extends those discussions by offering an interdisciplinary methodology that weaves together the literature, religious and political history, and other cultural phenomena that have impacted folk narratives as evidence of the emergent cultural memory of a society undergoing the religious developments of Christianization and Reformation. Iceland's uncommon proclivity towards storytelling, its robust tradition of medieval manuscripts, and the "re-oralization" of those narratives after the medieval period, create a body of folktales and legends that have encoded a hidden account of how orthodox and heterodox beliefs (sometimes pagan in origin) intermingled as Christianity, and later Reformation, spread through the North. This volume unlocks that secret story by placing Icelandic folktales in a context of religious doctrine, social history, and Old Norse sagas and poetry. The analysis herein reveals a cultural memory of belief." --