Introduction: Intellectual Culture and Medieval Scandinavia

The Emergence of Rationality in the Icelandic Sagas: The Colossal Misunderstanding of the Viking Lore in Contemporary Popular Culture

“…I would not go so far as Semler (2020) to recognize here definitive elements of Aristotelian concepts concerning the role of free will within a world determined by fatalism and contingency, but it is certainly very reasonable to argue, as Semler does ("On one hand, they accept that their lives operate according to a deterministic world setup. On the other hand, they demonstrate that this fatalism is compatible with human agency," 46), that some of the sagas clearly signal an intellectual transformation, also seen in late medieval Iceland, which we can associate with the long renaissance of the twelfth century (again, see the contributions to Eriksen 2016;and to Münster-Swendsen et al 2016). Here we observe, just as in contemporary continental literature, a new emphasis on communication, on the deliberations by wise and learned individuals, and on communal exchanges and agreements.…”

“…Instead, as we will observe a number of times, there was, in general, a new focus on the employment of rationality, justice, and legal principles, certainly tenuous, but undoubtedly present in many of the situations described in the sagas. The global awareness of the past gone, also for Icelandic society; the interest in historicizing sagas as mirrors of a previous world; and the various reflections on legal issues and the formation of new communicative strategies, suggest a subtle but significant paradigm shift we can associate with the renaissance of the long twelfth century (as to religious conversion, new art forms, multilingualism, and contacts with foreign cultures, see the contributions to Eriksen (2016); regarding the intellectual transformations in Denmark, see the contributions to Münster-Swendsen et al 2016).…”

Medieval Scandinavian Studies—Whence, Whereto, Why

“…Whereas this linguistic dimension-in between learned wishfulness, practical demands, and administrative decisions-has been troubling scholars for decades, another 'national' trait of Medieval Scandinavian Studies recently seems to have reemerged: the tendency to confine research to one's own country, straightway contradictory to any lip service regarding interculturality. As recently as 2016, to give two examples, both a Danish (Münster-Swendsen et al 2016) and a Norwegian (Eriksen 2016) collective volume gathered the results of two research projects on intellectual culture in medieval Scandinavia. Significantly, whereas the Danish book confined its concept of Scandinavia primarily to Denmark, the Norwegian volume limited Scandinavia mostly to Norway.…”