Memory, poetry, storytelling : medieval Iceland mirrors its Viking past

Icelandic medieval literature can be seen as an expression of the shared memory of what has been known for some time as the "Viking diaspora". This is a group of people from Scandinavia, living in a vast geographical area stretching from Russia to Greenland, and united by a common language and memory. Their knowledge of ancient stories and poems, as well as the practice of scaldic poetry, seem to have made the Icelanders specialists in the memory of the medieval Nordic world. They composed poems in honor of Norwegian or Danish sovereigns, informed their historians or themselves wrote chronicles of their reign or that of their predecessors. At the same time, Icelandic society reflected on itself, through narratives of local events from the recent past or from its origins in Viking times. This second lecture will explore the links between poetry, memory and storytelling, invoking examples drawn from several sagas belonging to different genres: sagas of contemporaries, royal sagas and sagas of Icelanders.