Saga criticism
Under Saga criticism refers to a line of research among historians that the source value of the Sagas contests for the writing of history. A special branch of the saga criticism is the so-called "Icelandic School", which deals with the Icelander sagas. There is also a branch that deals with the sagas of the king in the Heimskringla Snorris .
The "Icelandic School"
The "Icelandic School" was supported by a number of Icelandic researchers who disputed the source value of the Icelandic sagas and declared them to be novels and thus assigned them to fiction and literary research. The roots go back to Konrad Maurer in the 19th century . But it was formulated by the first professor of Icelandic language and literature at Reykjavík University Björn M. Ólsen. It received its full international impact after the 1960s through Ólsen's successor Sigurður Nordal and other Icelandic researchers such as Einar Ólafur Sveinsson and Jón Jóhannesson. Sigurður Nordal wrote the book The Historical Elements in the Icelandic Family Sagas during his time as ambassador to Denmark. His great authority in the field of saga research left the other historians no longer able to use the sagas as a historical source. His rejection of the sagas as a source was based on the concept that the historian should limit himself to the historical facts that can be found in historical accounts. Since the Icelander sagas are literature, they are outside the work and competence of a historian. He wrote at a time when research had set itself the goal of distinguishing between truth and fiction. The fact that the sagas could be historical sources for the representation of social processes in Iceland in the Middle Ages was out of sight.
Saga criticism in Norwegian history
origin
Edvard Bull wrote in his introduction to his 2nd volume in 1931 of his work Det norske folks liv og historie :
“ We have to give up any idea that Snorri's mighty historical epic bears a deeper resemblance to what really happened between the Battle of Hafrsfjord and the Battle of Re. "
This pushing aside of saga literature, which did away with the traditional conception, had already begun with the Swedish brothers Lauritz and Curt Weibull. In the treatise Kritiska undersökningar i Nordens historia omkring år 1000 ( Critical Investigations in Nordic History around the Year 1000 ) by Lauritz Weibull, he showed how far the saga authors had falsified the reality of history. Influences of wandering motifs, a nationalistic tendency and the propensity for constructions are responsible for this. He considered all of this to be pure poetry with no particular reference to facts.
Further education in Norway and Germany
In Norway, Halvdan Koht initiated the “ saga criticism ” in 1913 in a lecture The conception of sagas on ancient history , which appeared a year later in the Historisk tidskrift under the title Sagaernes opfatning var vor gamle historie . In his opinion, the sagas were written tendentially from the perspective of the 13th century. Under the impression of the struggle between the aristocracy and royal power in Norway at the end of the 12th century under King Sverre , Snorri concluded that the entire earlier period of the unification of the empire was characterized by continuous struggle. But that was wrong according to Koht. Back then, at the time of the unification of the empire, after him the king and aristocracy worked well together on the contrary. In Germany, too, the saga criticism has been dealt with in connection with the Svolder problem (see literature and source criticism ).
In Germany, Walter Baetke represented a very extensive criticism of the saga. In his work Christian Lehngut in the Sagareligion , for example, he wrote: "As in the oral tradition in general, from the religious realm, too, at most individual facts or processes, i.e. external data, have been passed on, but little or nothing at all that affects religious life, or as far as the religious beliefs of the people are concerned. ”And:“ The bearers of tradition were Christians for two centuries. After a few generations, not only did knowledge of pagan religion fade, but understanding of it as well. And to the same extent the danger increased that the facts handed down were also reinterpreted and rearranged. ”This view of the sagas, that they were the products of a late written culture that was not based on reliable older tradition, continued until the end of the 20th century Discussion dominated. Today, on the basis of archaeological findings, in particular the representations on gold bracteates and place-name research, the testimony of the sagas is more differentiated.
example
The Fagrskinna , written around 1220, describes Harald Hårfagre as follows:
“ Harald, son of Halvdan Svarte, took over the kingship after his father. He was still young at that time, but he already had the full manhood that a civil king must have. His hair was long and a strange color of pale silk. He was the most capable of all men and unusually strong and as tall as you can see from the stone on his grave, which is in Haugesund. He was an extraordinarily clever man. He was forward-looking and daring, and he was lucky. He set himself the goal of mastering the kingdom of the Northmen, and at this time his family raised the land to great honor, and it is to remain so at all times. "
This is obviously the ideal of a 13th century king. The author did not want to describe Harald, but wanted to praise and legitimize the ruling family after him. Nevertheless, the saga criticism did not doubt Harald Hårfagre's list of descendants.
Developments and Consequences
In the period between the two world wars, the representatives of saga criticism interpreted Norwegian history of the 11th and 12th centuries as a logical consequence of economic and social laws. They constructed inevitable lines of development from the Migration Period to the Christian Middle Ages . This partly led to an uncritical use of the sagas if they supported the preconstructed theory.
The critical and careful work on the texts initiated by Gustav Storm at the turn of the century was replaced by a more coincidental use of the sagas, especially when the focus was on the ambiguous archaeological finds that were not meaningful for political history.
Paradoxically, the saga criticism weakened the conscientious handling of the texts. The saga criticism expanded into a general, radical source criticism for some researchers. Examples are Peter H. Sawyer and especially Régis Boyer . According to Boyer, the sagas are not credible because they were written down hundreds of years after the events. The rune stone inscriptions only represent a thin upper class. Archeology is too imprecise in its methods of classifying the finds over time. The laws only reflect a desired condition, but not the actual condition, and the Frankish and Anglo-Saxon annals of Christian monks describe the events in a Christian-subjective way and thus falsified. In contrast, serious research tries to extract credible information from the sources through careful text analysis. Jón Viðar Sigurðsson and Horst Zettel belong to them. Just as paradoxically, the Marxist character led to a national fixation of the subject, where it should rather have been placed in a pan-European context.
Criticism of exaggerated saga criticism
After the Second World War, criticism was expressed of the unscrupulous handling of the saga sources. Georges Dumézil expressed himself against the background of his comparative comparison in the context of common Indo-European religion and linguistics:
“ It is therefore no longer permissible, according to the popular practice of the latest critics , to exclude the features attested to [in other Icelandic sources] in the Loki narratives of the Prose Edda nowhere than in Snorri. And with that, most of our material is recovered in one fell swoop. "
One of the main points of criticism is that with the rejection of all sources, all understandable access to the events described is lost. As a rule, the sources are then used in the presentation, but there is no justification according to which criteria information can be used as credible so that a history of events can be created at all.
Sørensen also objects to rejecting Snorri's descriptions as unhistorical. In Snorri there was a reliable, well-oriented and trustworthy attempt by a medieval historian to give a picture of pagan cult and the relationship between power and the sacred. The ideal source of the source-critical historians would be a description of the cults by a contemporary domestic well-informed person. There is no such thing, but the ideal reveals the mistake of this source criticism: If one had such a source, one would not be able to understand it without translating it into today's terminology. In fact, one has such authentic sources on the rune stones of Eggjum and Rök or in the mythological skald poems. But these texts could not be interpreted with certainty and, therefore, could not readily be used for the present conception of pagan religion.
The dispute over correct, meaningful and measured saga criticism continues to this day.
literature
- Walter Baetke : Christian fief in the saga religion, The Svoldr problem. Two contributions to saga criticism. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin, 1951 ( reports of the proceedings of the Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig, philosophical-historical class Vol. 98, No. 6, ISSN 0138-5151 ), (there the battle are the different descriptions Olav the Holy in Svoldr).
- Claus Crag: Vikingtid og Rikssamling. 800-1130. Aschehoug, Oslo 1995, ISBN 82-03-22015-0 ( Aschehougs Norges Historie 2).
- Olaf Olsen: Hørg, hov og kirke . Copenhagen 1966.
- Rudolf Simek : Religion and Mythology of the Teutons. Scientific book society. Darmstadt 2003, ISBN 3-534-16910-7 .
- Preben Meulengracht Sørensen: At fortælle historien. Telling history. Study in the gamle nordiske literature. Studies in Norse literature. Trieste 2001.
Footnotes
- ^ Sigurður Nordal: The Historical Elements in the Icelandic Family Sagas . Glasgow 1957.
- ^ Sigurður Nordal: The Historical Elements in the Icelandic Family Sagas . Glasgow 1957, p. 14.
- ↑ Jesse L. Byock: Island i sagatiden. Samfund, maid og fejde. Copenhagen 1999. p. 65 ff.
- ↑ Baetke 1973, p. 329.
- ^ Régis Boyer: The pirates of the north. Life and death as a Viking . Stuttgart 1997 on the first 60 pages.
- ^ Jón Viðar Sigurðsson: Norsk historie 800-1300. Frå høvdingsmakt til konge og kyrkjemakt. (Norwegian history 800–1300. From chief power to king and church power.) Oslo 1999; Horst Zettel: The picture of the Normans and the Normans invasions in West Franconian, East Franconian and Anglo-Saxon sources from the 8th to 11th centuries. Munich 1977.
- ↑ Sørensen 2001 p. 167.