(The following article by Prof. Torgrim Titlestad of the University of Stavanger [pictured above] was published by Saga Bok Publishers on their website here. What follows is my translation, posted here at the request of Saga Bok. lw)
Changes in attitudes toward the sagas
Up until the 1900s, the sagas were regarded as highly reliable, and Norway had several eminent professors in the field, such as Gustav Storm and Alexander Bugge. But in the past century the sagas have been regarded as generally unreliable as historical sources. Instead, they have been described as brilliant romances. Progressive historians like Lauritz Weibull (of Sweden) and Halvdan Koht (of Norway) promoted this view through most of the 20th Century. Nevertheless it appears that, beginning in the 1990s, this trend has begun to change, and Prof. Sverre Bagge of the Univ. of Bergen was the first, in 1995, to publicly point out the damage caused by this “hyper-critical” view of the sagas. “The early middle ages and the Viking Age remain the most neglected fields in medieval history in Norway. This is arguably the result of source difficulties in the wake of the destructive attack on the sagas at the beginning of that century.” Prof. Vidar Sigudsson of the Univ. of Oslo renewed this critique in 2010: “The harsh criticism which was directed against the use of the sagas as sources resulted in that aspect of our past being neglected.”
The Weibullian and Kohtian view that we must reject the sagas was that, by and large, they are not contemporary records, but were written down about 300 years after the events described. This “modernist” view ruled out any appreciation of the sagas as the product of oral culture: That is, that both Norway and Iceland, as mostly illiterate societies (though runes were used for shorter messages) had developed specialized mnemonic techniques in order to preserve historic events. In this context the unusual skaldic poems must be emphasized. Their unique form (“as if carved in stone”) testifies to the historical confidence of the Vikings, and their trust that this technique of oral memorization would permit memories to live on for a long time. (Similar techniques can be found, and continue to be found, in other mostly illiterate cultures.) Continue reading "The Six Pillars of Saga Reliability"