http://hdl.handle.net/10900/53306 2026-05-12T21:36:27Z 2026-05-12T21:36:27Z Kulmar, Tarmo http://hdl.handle.net/10900/46217 2019-10-30T02:13:56Z 2002-01-01T00:00:00Z

The importance and meaning of sagas in the ideas of the Estonian Germanist Rein Sepp Kulmar, Tarmo Rein Sepp, the great Germanist of the 20th century Estonia, was born on April 23, 1921. His studies at the University of Tartu were interrupted by World War II, in which he participated in the ranks of the Nazi German army. After a Soviet prison camp in Siberia he committed himself to translating various writings, mainly from the Old Icelandic, German and English languages: Saemundra-Edda (1970), Nibelungenlied (1977), Parzival (1989), Beowulf (1990), Snorra-Edda (1990), Anglo-Saxon Chronicles and Early English Poems (1992). As a member of the students’ corps “Sakala”, he mentored several generations of students, who often visited him in his country home. Rein Sepp died on January 25, 1995. Rein Sepp’s personality was strongly influenced in its formative stages by the atmosphere in his home (one of his uncles was Hendrik Sepp, an Estonian historian), his travel years and tough experiences, his good knowledge of human nature, his outstanding linguistic talent and, naturally, his extensive knowledge both of medieval history and culture and of natural and exact sciences. He was characterized by original thinking and the capability of generating extraordinary ideas. Modest in recording his ideas on paper, he was all the keener to present and argue for them in private conversations. *Following is an analysis of Rein Sepp’s ideas about the origins and meaning of Saemundra-Edda. For Rein Sepp, the central issue was man’s identity, and the main concern was loss of that identity everywhere within the reach of modern European culture. He deemed such degeneration to have been caused by increasing superficiality, recklessness and irresponsibility. “The ice age draws on when people working the land grow tired for some reason, resulting in the neglected nature slacking off and cooling down in its turn,” wrote R. Sepp, and continued, “Since the deathly silence of the ice age is caused by people’s tiredness, thoughtlessness or slackness, we need to maintain alertness and ability to perform in order to avoid spiritual dying out in the first place, and to strive for the integrity of man and nature.” To this end, a text interpreting for man the world as well as man’s place and purpose in it might, in R. Sepp’s opinion, serve as the order-generating foundation. For him, such a text was first and foremost Saemundra-Edda - “a text that is mentally alive and dynamic” - which raises questions at a very high level and contains millennia of experience. R. Sepp was of the opinion that during the post-ice age millennia, there emerged in Scandinavia and the Eastern Baltic region a way of life that he called “ancient Nordic culture”. He identified it with the archeologically established proto-European Kunda culture in the Eastern Baltic region, which apparently had a strong impact on the neighbouring lands and ethnic groups. He considered its centre to be the surroundings of Lake Võrtsjärv in Estonia. He deemed the lake’s name, Võrtsjärv, to contain the genitive of Vyrd (Urdr), an Old Scandinavian name for God. In the subsequent millennia, which saw the immigration to the Baltic region of proto-Indo-European tribes, the ancient Nordic people were assimilated into and passed on to the former their worldview and experience. The ideology of the ancient Nordic people led to the separation of the Estonian and Livonian peoples from the rest of the Balto-Finnic peoples as well as that of North Germanic peoples and proto-Baltic peoples from the rest of the Indo-European peoples. This would mean that many of the words in the Estonian language that are considered to be loans from the Old Germanic language are actually Ancient Nordic loans to both Old Germanic and the Balto-Finnic languages. Rein Sepp was convinced that Saemundra-Edda was not an original North Germanic work but a phenomenon of the ancient Nordic culture, which later germanised. In Saemundra-Edda there is undoubtedly a very strong stratum of the Indo-European North Germanic culture; however, it is a much later one than the ancient Nordic stratum. For instance, he thought that among the 18 most important Old Scandinavian deities, 16 were of ancient Nordic origin. Further, the text and the development of Saemundra-Edda show in their turn that the substratum of the ancient Nordic culture survived the longest in Iceland, one of the latest regions in Europe to be influenced by Christianity, where the influence was also one of the weakest. Thus, the ancient Nordic culture did not disappear but was preserved as a somewhat concealed foundation of the Old Scandinavian culture endowing the latter with creativity and order. Rein Sepp supposed that on Estonian territory the traces of the ancient Nordic culture could most often be observed in West and South West Estonia: in the use of numerals, in the toponymy and in the behavioural logic. The traces manifest themselves in the conduct and mutual communication of people, the placement of buildings and roads in nature and in the place names and their logical relationship to the landscape and other names. Many Estonian and Latvian place names, which mean nothing in their respective languages, do have a meaning in Old Icelandic (as, for instance, Võrtsjärv, Ipiki, Igali and Vingali). Even today, the placement of buildings on the landscape would often betray a high degree of resemblance to that described in some passage of Saemundra-Edda, and one may come across the psychological and physical types of humans described in the Eddas and see them behave according to the same logic as recorded in the ancient sagas. Thus, Rein Sepp deemed that the oldest strata of the beginnings and development of Saemundra-Edda may originate from the Mesolithic proto-European Kunda culture in the Eastern Baltic region, one of the common sources for the Balto-Finnic, the Baltic and the Old German (particularly, of course, Old Scandinavian) culture, way of life and thinking. This standpoint was unexpectedly supported by the recent studies of the Finnish linguist Kalevi Wiik, which imply that the traces of the substrate tribes in the languages and cultures of the Nordic peoples are much better observable than those of the Finno-Ugrian tribes, which later immigrated from the east. That substratum in the Eastern Baltic region as well as, to a great extent, in Scandinavia, is exactly the proto-European Kunda culture, along with its archaeologically established neighbouring cultures. This would mean that the deepest roots of Saemundra-Edda, which was set down in Iceland in the 11th and 12th centuries, reach back in time for at least seven thousand years, to the ancient Nordic era, which was the oldest common prehistoric period for the entire Nordic region. “We do not know what was accomplished or initiated in these spiritual, natural and historical developments and beginnings here on these strips of land to the east of the Baltic sea, for instance. We can only guess that the further back into the past, the more united must have been the ancient Nordic prose of existence. As the nature grew more varied, however, it became more diversified, and increasingly so with the passage of time.”

2002-01-01T00:00:00Z Fleming, Damian http://hdl.handle.net/10900/46202 2019-10-30T02:12:57Z 2002-01-01T00:00:00Z

Sex, lies and the Íslendinga sögur Fleming, Damian Past scholars used to look upon the Icelandic family sagas as ideal witnesses to pre-Christian Germanic customs and morality. The sagas were believed to contain unbiased accounts of how men conducted their lives nobly and simply before the conversion to Christianity. More recent scholarship however has argued for, and in some cases shown, direct Christian influences informing the action and stories of the sagas. In my paper, I consider the perception of lying as it is described in the family sagas within this scholarly framework. In particular I focus on the lies told in the sagas between men and women in sexual relationships. In doing so, I demonstrate that in these situations the narrators of the sagas do not condone lying, as the clearly pagan Eddic poem Hávamál does when it recommends, among other things, “Ef þú átt annan, / þannz þú illa truir/ vildu af hánom þó gott geta:/ fagrt scaltu við þann mæla,/ enn flátt hyggia/ oc gialda lausng við lygi.” (Stanza 45).” Rather in the sagas often we find condemnation of lying, especially situations involving men and women, not by the characters within the stories, but by the often hidden voice of the narrator. In particular, I examine an incident in Njáls saga where the condemnation of lying in one situation is so subtle as to have been overlooked by scholars. By this investigation, I add evidence to the argument against the idea that the morality of the sagas is free from Christian influence and suggest that close readings of saga incidents can lead to a better understanding of the moral system at work.

2002-01-01T00:00:00Z Bergur Þorgeirsson http://hdl.handle.net/10900/46201 2019-10-30T02:12:58Z 2002-01-01T00:00:00Z

From excavation to the interdisciplinary perspective - The Reykholt Project Bergur Þorgeirsson A international research project has been developed in connection with the famous historical site, Reykholt, in Western Iceland.1 The project, called The Reykholt Project, is centred on the most well-known and powerful medieval Icelander, the historian, poet and politician, Snorri Sturluson, born 1178 or 1179, died 1241. There are many reliable written sources on Snorri, and now, in recent years, the medieval ruins that possibly represent Snorri s own housing and surroundings in Reykholt have been unearthed. The project, progressive in its methods and scientific aproach, has therefore great potential.

2002-01-01T00:00:00Z Helgi Skúli Kjartansson http://hdl.handle.net/10900/46208 2019-10-30T02:13:14Z 2002-01-01T00:00:00Z

From the frying pan of oral tradition into the fire of saga writing : The precarious survival of historical fact in the saga of Yngvar the Far-Traveller Helgi Skúli Kjartansson The Saga of Yngvarr used to be classified as a Legendary Saga (Fornaldarsaga) on account of its vague and distant geographical setting and unrealistic subject matter, despite its being set in the 11th century - with Swedish Vikings as champions of Christianity in the East. Lacking the mythological or heroic connections of the more “classical” Legendary Sagas, it was considered late and obviously devoid of any historical value. Research of the last quarter century, philological (Hofmann) as well as historical (e.g. Larsson), has turned all of this upside down. The saga’s own dating of its main events to around 1040 is credible. So is its account of its own composition. It is a translation into Icelandic of a Latin saga, written by the Benedictine monk Oddr Snorrason, better known as the author of a Latin history of King Óláfr Tryggvason of Norway (like Yngvar’s Saga only preserved in translation). The translator or editor summarizes a letter by the author where he accounts for his three different oral sources (one of them representing a Swedish tradition) and his doubts regarding certain points. The letter was addressed to the two leading aristocrats of South Iceland, both of them respected for their clerical education. The saga must have been finished before the death of one of them in 1197 – i.e. some 150 years after the events took place. For they did take place. Not only is Yngvarr an historical person, attested to by scores of Swedish rune stones, but his expedition, across the Caucasus from the Black to the Caspian Sea, is mentioned in a contemporary Georgian source, with sufficient detail provided to confirm its identity with the events described by the saga. Yngvar’s Saga, then, represents no less than state-of-the-art historical research in Iceland at a time when Danish and Norwegian historians readily acknowledge the superiority of Icelanders as preservers of historical tradition. A first-rate scholar undertakes, presumably encouraged or recruited by the two Southern aristocrats, to produce an export quality version, in the language of international scholarship, of an oral tale. He approaches the task methodically by finding and tapping oral sources representing different strands of the tradition. Yngvar’s Saga belongs to the period of saga writing which precedes the 13th century constellation of distinct saga genres. Its closest relative may, in some ways, be the Saga of the Jomsvikings (Jómsvíkinga saga), also centered on one unusual event of historical proportions, i.e. the invasion of Norway by a peculiar band of Baltic Vikings, set some 50 years before Yngvar’s expedition. Among the memorable events of those 50 years were the Vineland expeditions, and the Battle of Clontarf in Ireland (Brjánsbardagi) 1014. Both were the subject of codified stories, probably at more or less the same time as Yngvar’s Saga, but now only known as used by subsequent saga writers. Less similar to Yngvar’s Saga, and perhaps a bit younger, is the Saga of the Faeroe Islanders (Færeyinga saga). All of these works represent attempts to reconstruct extraordinary events on the basis of 150–200 years of storytelling tradition. In the case of Yngvar’s Saga, at any rate, the result turns out to be remarkably unhistorical. One may wonder how typical it is as an example of the difficulties involved in preserving historical fact as oral tradition. First of all, to be viable in oral transmission, historical fact has to be given a narrative form, in line with the tastes of a given oral culture. In a single chain of transmission, some content is necessarily lost. Then the tradition either degenerates or is replenished with new content. Only by creative transmission can the story retain its appeal. With multiple and interlocking chains of transmission, content is not necessarily forgotten. The creative inclusion of extra content would occur all the same, at least in some of the chains. A diligent scholar – say Oddr Snorrason in the case of the Yngvarr expedition – might conceivably have access to all the facts related by storytellers 100 years earlier. They would, however, be mixed with fiction in various proportions. His problem would be to tell one from the other, and then to make narrative sense of what he chose to believe. It is Oddr’s superstition which makes his mistakes so glaring to the modern reader. A saga writer with less of a taste for the supernatural would not give himself away so easily. But if the oral story was open to the inclusion of supernatural elements, it would have been equally open to other types of extra content, and the less superstitious saga writer would be no better placed than Oddr to tell fact from that sort of fiction. Similarly, the sense that Oddr gives to his story tends to be ecclesiastical, which strikes some readers as un-sagalike, whereas a different author might lean towards a more political interpretation – without necessarily staying any closer to his oral sources than Oddr. Compared with domestic events, the distant scene of Yngvar’s Saga may have contributed to a more creative transmission. On the other hand, the time span of 150 years is short compared with many sagas with serious historical content. Oddr’s material is oral narrative. Different arguments may apply to the oral transmission of different content, such as poetry, law, and geneology. Even narrative may retain accurate fact for any length of time. But when evaluating saga narrative as an historical source, the crux is not the potential for accuracy but the danger of distortion. The grim fate of historical fact in the Saga of Yngvarr the Far-Traveled is a reminder of that danger.

2002-01-01T00:00:00Z