Aus unseren Neuerwerbungen – Nordische Philologie 2019.5

Super­nat­ur­al encoun­ters in Old Norse lit­er­a­ture and tra­di­tion
The Ice­landic sagas have long been famous for their alleged real­ism, and with­in this con­ven­tion­al view, ref­er­ences to the super­nat­ur­al have often been treat­ed as anom­alies. Yet, as this vol­ume demon­strates, such ele­ments were in fact an impor­tant part of Old Norse lit­er­a­ture and tra­di­tion, and their study can pro­vide new and intrigu­ing insights into the world-view of the medieval Ice­landers.
By pro­vid­ing an exten­sive and inter­dis­ci­pli­nary treat­ment of the super­nat­ur­al with­in sagas, the eleven chap­ters pre­sent­ed here seek to explore the lit­er­ary and folk­loric inter­face between the nat­ur­al and the super­nat­ur­al through a study of pre­vi­ous­ly neglect­ed texts (such as Berg­búa þát­tr, Selkol­lu þát­tr, and Illu­ga saga Gríðar­fós­tra), as well as exam­in­ing gen­res that are some­times over­looked (includ­ing for­nal­darsögur and bysku­pa sögur), law codes, and learned trans­la­tions. Con­trib­u­tors includ­ing Ármann Jakob­s­son, Mar­garet Cor­ma­ck, Jan Rag­nar Hagland, and Bengt af Klint­berg explore how the super­nat­ur­al was depict­ed with­in saga lit­er­a­ture and how it should be under­stood, as well as ques­tion­ing the ori­gins of such mate­r­i­al and inves­ti­gat­ing the par­al­lels between saga motifs and broad­er folk­loric beliefs. In doing so, this vol­ume also rais­es impor­tant ques­tions about the estab­lished bound­aries between dif­fer­ent saga gen­res and chal­lenges the way these texts have tra­di­tion­al­ly been approached.
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The coun­try of the blind: a new inter­pre­ta­tion of the plays of Hen­rik Ibsen
The Coun­try of the Blind chal­lenges the reign­ing con­cep­tion of Ibsen as social crit­ic. It offers new and unique inter­pre­ta­tions stress­ing his pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with the lim­i­ta­tions and fail­ings of humankind that do not change, in par­tic­u­lar one’s reluc­tance or inabil­i­ty to con­front unpleas­ant truths about one’s self and the con­se­quent attempts to con­ceal those truths from self and from oth­ers. The result, in the plays con­sid­ered, is that his per­son­ae are not what they appear to be. We shall observe that Mrs. Alv­ing is not an hero­ic fig­ure who has sac­ri­ficed all for her beloved son; that the „vir­tu­ous“ par­son Man­ders may in fact be the father of Oswald; that nei­ther Gregers Wer­le nor Dr. Thomas Stock­mann are the ide­al­ists they pro­fess to be; that Hed­da Gabler and Hal­vard Sol­ness are the very antithe­ses of the per­sons they imag­ine them­selves. This gulf between illu­sion and actu­al­i­ty is evi­dent even in the case of sec­ondary agents, con­firm­ing the sup­po­si­tion that Ibsen believed self-decep­tion insep­a­ra­ble from the human con­di­tion. The pro­tag­o­nists’ strat­a­gems nec­es­sar­i­ly inter­act, for­bid­ding each knowl­edge of each and all knowl­edge of the mean­ing of exter­nal cir­cum­stance. They are, and they remain, igno­rant of their own nature, and of the char­ac­ter of their clos­est asso­ciates, impris­oned by the maze they have joint­ly fash­ioned. The book should be of inter­est to the gen­er­al read­er, to com­pa­nies inter­est­ed in per­form­ing the plays ana­lyzed, to Ibsen schol­ars, and as a text for cours­es in Ibsen.
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