When the Dead No Longer Rest: The Religious Significance of Revenants in Sagas set in Viking Age Settlements Around the Time of Conversion

TY - CHAP

T1 - When the Dead No Longer Rest

T2 - The Religious Significance of Revenants in Sagas set in Viking Age Settlements Around the Time of Conversion

AU - Baier, Katharina

AU - Schäfke, Werner

PY - 2016/4/11

Y1 - 2016/4/11

N2 - This paper applies Hans-Peter Hasenfratz's model of two cultural concepts of death-the severe (e.g., untimely, sudden) death and the social (non-biological) death1-to revenant episodes in a number of quite similar genres of Old Norse saga literature. The corpus consists of Sagas of the Icelanders,2 Færeyinga saga about the settlers of the Faroese Islands, and Eiriks saga rauda, one of the two Vinland sagas that narrate the lives of the settlers on Greenland. The revenant episodes in these sagas are set during the Time of Conversion of Iceland and the neighboring islands settled by Vikings. Based on our analysis, we argue that revenant episodes are narrative devices fulfilling one out of three functions (and in a few cases a combination of them): Revenant episodes demonstrate the necessity of Christianization, as pagan burial rituals do no longer suffice to usher the dead from the world of the living; they foreshadow the death of another character; they are a heroic test for the saga's protagonist. In the last case, they function like the revenant episodes found in the saga genre of the Fornaldars-gur, that conveys pagan-heroic matter in narrative patterns similar to those of Arthurian romance.

AB - This paper applies Hans-Peter Hasenfratz's model of two cultural concepts of death-the severe (e.g., untimely, sudden) death and the social (non-biological) death1-to revenant episodes in a number of quite similar genres of Old Norse saga literature. The corpus consists of Sagas of the Icelanders,2 Færeyinga saga about the settlers of the Faroese Islands, and Eiriks saga rauda, one of the two Vinland sagas that narrate the lives of the settlers on Greenland. The revenant episodes in these sagas are set during the Time of Conversion of Iceland and the neighboring islands settled by Vikings. Based on our analysis, we argue that revenant episodes are narrative devices fulfilling one out of three functions (and in a few cases a combination of them): Revenant episodes demonstrate the necessity of Christianization, as pagan burial rituals do no longer suffice to usher the dead from the world of the living; they foreshadow the death of another character; they are a heroic test for the saga's protagonist. In the last case, they function like the revenant episodes found in the saga genre of the Fornaldars-gur, that conveys pagan-heroic matter in narrative patterns similar to those of Arthurian romance.

U2 - 10.1515/9783110436976-005

DO - 10.1515/9783110436976-005

M3 - Book chapter

SN - 9783110442304

T3 - Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture

SP - 131

EP - 154

BT - Death in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times

A2 - Classen, Albrecht

PB - De Gruyter

ER -