Re-membering Ragnar, Erik & Leif: Notes on audio-visual adaptations of the Eddas and Sagas

by Jón Karl Helgason, University of Reykjavík

Abstract

During the past two to three hundred years, a set of ideas about medieval Nordic culture and religion – primarily the Vikings and their  Valhalla – have become a permanent part of our universal imagination. Books have certainly played a part in the shaping and dissemination of these ideas but instrumental for this process have been the increasingly powerful channels of mass media, implementing the audio-visual. In the eighteenth and the early nineteenth century these channels were mostly limited to the theatre and opera stages but since then technical developments in the fields of printing, audio recording, radio transmission, animation, film-making, and television have opened up new avenues of propagation. Most recently, the digital revolution has extended these avenues and enhanced new ones. At the outset, original works and adaptations by Northern European artists were characteristic for this line of production but as time passed popular interest in the Viking Age became more transnational. Although occasionally concerne with history or medieval source texts, genres like Viking Films, Viking Metal, and Viking Video Games have developed their own poetics, narrative patterns, visual clichés and cultural stereotypes. In his paper, Helgason will discuss the immense influence of various products of popular culture featuring the Viking Age, partially in the context of adaptation and memory studies.

Jón Karl Helgason, University of Reykjavik, Iceland

Jón Karl Helgason is Professor of Icelandic and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Iceland, and he has a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Massachussetts, USA. The main subjects of his research have been the reception of the Icelandic eddas and saga, cultural saints of Europe, Icelandic cultural history and metafiction. Recent publications include “Echoes of Valhalla – The Afterlife of the Eddas and Sagas” (Reaktion Books, 2017) and "National Poets, Cultural Saints: Canonization and Commemorative Cults of Writers in Europe" (Brill, 2017), co-authored with Marijan Dović.