Introduction

Summary

Literary works from all time periods are read, studied and classified by way of generic definitions that are either more or less explicitly codified within the culture to which they belong or must be (re)constructed a posteriori. In either case, the importance of the notion of genre – understood both as a set of formal and stylistic conventions for composing all kinds of literature and as a hermeneutic instrument for analysing literary works and their semantic potential – is hardly disputable. Defining the relevant genre of a literary work is indeed the starting point of any critical work, whether aimed at historical contextualisation or the critical analysis of its stylistic aspects or narrative structures. The relevance of the question of genre goes far beyond what may at first appear mainly as a nominalistic modern preoccupation, for it has a bearing on how modern readers approach literary works and seek to interpret them as historically determined artefacts. The study of Old Norse literature is of course no exception. The broad corpus of texts that have been preserved to our day in an astonishingly large number of medieval and post-medieval manuscripts is quite varied and heterogeneous in terms of style, structure, content and mode, thus bearing witness to the vitality and richness of Old Norse literary expression throughout the medieval period.

The problem of the definition of genre has inevitably attracted sporadic attention from the very beginning of philological and literary studies in the nineteenth century, when the first editions of Old Norse works were made available. Over the last forty years, though, there has been renewed interest within Old Norse scholarship in studying genres in medieval Icelandic literature, especially with regard to the classification of sagas. Much scholarly effort has indeed been expended on discussing whether it is appropriate to categorise the surviving saga corpus using a taxonomy established in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although some genre names, i.e. riddarasögur (chivalric sagas) and konungasögur (kings’ sagas), are attested in the Middle Ages, the current labels are largely modern constructs.