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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 October 2020
The scholarly motivation to classify the vast amount of Old Norse-Icelandic texts into different literary genres is perfectly understandable, as classifications ensure systematisation and thus comparability within certain segments of the established system. This motivation is based on the common opinion that Old Norse-Icelandic literature is and always has been accepted as being inherently heterogeneous. Such an opinion can, of course, be affected by at least two different fundamental premises. One would be that the literary texts themselves reflect some sort of self-referential classification or even, perhaps, a kind of genre awareness which is to be understood as an inherent aspect of the literature in question. The other would be that recipients or audiences recognise certain recurring structures, which are often treated as if they are historically stable and invariable, such as media or modes, patterns or schemes within the texts in question; this would then allow the audience to separate these texts into what we call literary genres and label these literary texts using the respective terminology.
This chapter does not aim to critique the use of a genre taxonomy, but rather to question the significance of applicability of today's academic genre terminology as a way of understanding Old Norse-Icelandic literature in a medieval and early modern text culture. The present genre terminology is useful as a way to systematise literature and to place narratives in some form of a comparable schema, but, just as any systematisation, it simplifies both the historico-cultural dimensions of Old Norse-Icelandic literature and its changeability during the transmission of narratives. Furthermore, the present genre terminology, which is used in the study of Old Norse- Icelandic literature to label certain narratives, is based on more or less arbitrary features establishing and defining rather strict boundaries of genres, as I will show later in this chapter.
The aim of this chapter is thus twofold: first, I will discuss the usefulness of today's terminology of genre in Old Norse-Icelandic literature, secondly, I will propose some directions for a more historical approach concerning the terminology of genre in Old Norse-Icelandic literature.
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