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Myths to play with: Bósa saga ok Herrauðs (5258 words) |
 | After a discussion of Bósa saga’s fornaldarsaga characteristics and a reassessment of recent criticism, I shall examine the presence of allusions to (stories about) Norse gods in three scenes of the saga. |
| During their voyages they encounter famed kings known from historical traditions, to which at the end of the saga a link is made: Herrauðr’s daughter Þóra is given as a wife to Ragnarr loðbrók. |
| For the sake of the argument, therefore, we assume that the author was aware of the differences in narrative mode and subject matter of what we nowadays consider a fornaldarsaga and a chivalric romance. |
| Chip Robinson (9130 words) |
| As for the legendary sagas, beyond providing entertainment, there was a persistent interest in the old traditions and in Norway, and the old beliefs simply persisted or found expression in Christianity. |
| “Not only was the fornaldarsaga the one literary genre in which Icelanders’ wish-fulfilment fantasies were played out, it was also the one tailored precisely for the handling of vexed and hidden problems, by virtue of its long-ago, far-away, and pagan setting” (Tulinius 2002, 186). |
| Only by long work at the old traditions and continual interaction with the religious thinking of past times and natively sensitive people, can the ability gradually be acquired, again somewhat correctly to recognize, what in the few preserved rests of the oldest folk religion lies contained of religious, primitive thought. |
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