Immanent Seas, Scribal Havens: Distributed Reading of Formulaic Networks in the Sagas of Icelanders

Slavica Ranković

European Review, 2014, vol. 22, issue 1, 45-54

Abstract: Medieval sagas of Icelanders are considered one of the most significant ‘contributions made by Nordic culture’,1 among ‘the great marvels of world literature […] so timelessly up-to-date’ and characterised by ‘a supreme, undistorted sense of actuality’.2 ‘We will never comprehend’, the famous novelist Milan Kundera said, ‘the significance of the fact that the first grand, enormous body of prose composed in a European national language sprang from the genius of a very small nation, perhaps the smallest in Europe … the glory of the sagas is indisputable’.1,2 What follows is an attempt to make comprehensible some of the aesthetic mechanisms through which the sagas attain their remarkable representational complexity. This is not in order to diminish the glory of the genius that Kundera refers to – the genius of the people and the many geniuses from among the people – but rather to appreciate it even more, as usually results from a deeper understanding of the workings of things.

Date: 2014
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