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Smoking Crow posted:Why are all the sagas in Icelandic? By sagas, are you referring specifically to the Icelandic family and historical sagas, or to Norse mythology and literature works like the Eddas? The family and historical sagas are just sort of an Icelandic thing, they largely detail genealogies and family histories, feuds, etc. Mostly kinda dry stuff, honestly, if you're familiar with parts of the Bible's Old Testament, they're similar to the genealogy sections there in some ways but with Nordic flavor. Dad and mom had a son who killed a guy*, then there was a blood feud between the two families which was resolved when the son paid a fair price of twenty head of cattle to the family of the man he'd killed. Then the son got hitched and had three more kids, and they went to the Allthing and there was politics, etc. Genealogy, history, little bit of politics, and blood feuds. Loooooots of blood feuds. Anyway, those sagas are written in Icelandic simply because it's a uniquely Icelandic medieval literature tradition. If you're asking about why many of our source texts for Viking/Old Norse literature and mythology are in Icelandic, that's for two reasons that I know of. One was a (Christian, notably) Icelander named Snorri Sturlurson who compiled a bunch of Old Norse skaldic poetry (most of which was handed down orally previously) into what's called the Prose (or Younger, or Snorri's) Edda. His intention was to teach readers how to understand the complex structure and idioms (kennings) used in skaldic poetry. The Edda compilation contains a ton of Norse creation and religious mythology, but Snorri edits it to make clear that he's a Christian and even though he's recording pagan mythology the focus is on the art form and not the religious content. The second is for whatever reason, more manuscripts survived in Iceland than elsewhere. The modern Icelandic language has changed relatively little from Old Icelandic, so it's very similar to the various dialects of Old Norse that Viking-age literature is written in. So it's not really that Norse mythology was specifically written down in Icelandic, it's simply that more important texts survived there than elsewhere in the Old Norse speaking world. I remember distinctly one of the saga manuscripts we got to handle was massive and bound with wooden boards, it had actually been used as a cutting board by whatever family it belonged to for many years (you could see the knife marks). *in medieval Icelandic society, if you killed someone "honorably" all you had to do was pay appropriate restitution to the family and everything was chill. By honorable, it meant you killed him openly and not in cold blood and then walked around the village proclaiming you were responsible and were going to make your amends. If you were sneaky about it or didn't tell everyone you killed the guy, then you were a murderer! This is pretty central to the plot of probably the most famous of the sagas, The Saga of Burnt (Burning) Njal.
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Jul 3, 2013 18:04
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Deceitful Penguin posted:Where you from btw? Icelanders in general drink pretty much like most of the harder European nations; the Polish, Lithuanian or Latvian peeps I've gotten hammered with were mildly impressed by the Icelandic appetite for vodka. Do you the Christmas beer thing like they do in Denmark? For the month of December all the local breweries (Carlsberg, Tuborg, etc) roll out their special Christmas beer, which is just like their regular beer except with around twice the alcohol content 
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Jul 27, 2013 02:20
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