Review: The Latin Discursive Tradition Behind the Icelandic Accounts of the First European Journey to America
For centuries it has been taught in schools all around the globe that Christopher Columbus was the first European who had ever travelled to America in 1492. Nowadays we know it was a misconception, as the discovery of a Viking settlement in L’Anse aux Meadows (Canada) in the 1960s proved that the Norse reached the North American coast five centuries before Columbus.
A review on Jerold Frakes’ article „Viking, Vínland and the Discourse of Eurocentrism“.
Tell Me Where You Come From and I Will Tell You Who You Are – Ibsen, the Modern Sami and the Medieval Finnar
Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson argued that people exposed to the nature of the North could experience the same adventures as the characters in the sagas. Strange as this assumption may appear to us, Ibsen seemed to agree with it. In one quarter of his plays the main characters have strong connections to the North, and their portrayal was undoubtedly to a certain degree influenced by Ibsen’s contemporaries, but mainly by the Finnar’s depiction in the sagas he had read.
Review: Time to Get Back Home: The Icelandic-Danish Fight for Manuscripts in the 20th Century
For some, a medieval manuscript is not very exciting: simply an old book with on the damaged pages a handwriting barely readable. But for others, “manuscripts are like a part of them like flesh of their flesh and blood of their blood”.
A review on Guðmundur Hálfdánarson’s chapter „Interpreting the Nordic Past: Icelandic Medieval Manuscripts and the Construction of a Modern nation“.