The International Saga Conference 1971—2022
- Edinburgh, 21—29 August 1971:
The Icelandic Sagas and Western Literary
Tradition
.
- Reykjavík, 2—8 August 1973:
Fornsögurnar og íslenskt
miðaldaþjóðfélag (The Sagas and
Society)
.
- Oslo, 26—31 July 1976:
The Kings’ Sagas
.
- München, 30 July—4 August 1979:
The Legendary Sagas (Fornaldarsögur)
.
- Toulon, 2—8 August 1982:
Les sagas de chevaliers (Riddarasögur)
- Helsingør, 28 July—2 August 1985:
Christianity and West Norse Literature
.
- Spoleto, 2—8 September 1988:
Poetry in the Scandinavian Middle Ages
.
- Göteborg, 11—17 August 1991:
The Audience of the Sagas
.
- Akureyri, 31 July—6 August 1994:
SamtíðarsögurContemporary
Sagas
.
- Trondheim, 3—9 August 1997:
Sagas and the Norwegian Experience
.
- Sydney, 2—7 July 2000:
Old Norse Myths, Literature and Society
.
- Bonn, 28 July—3 August 2003:
Scandinavia and Christian Europe
.
- Durham/York, 6—12 August 2006:
The Fantastic in Old Norse-Icelandic
Literature
.
- Uppsala, 9—15 August 2009:
Á austrvega: Saga and East Scandinavia
.
- Aarhus, 5—11 August 2012:
Sagas and the Use of the Past
.
- Zürich/Basel, 9—15 August 2015:
Sagas and Space
.
- Reykjavík/Reykholt, 12—17 August 2018:
Íslendinga sǫgur
.
- Helsinki/Tallinn, 7—14 August 2022:
Sagas and the Circum-Baltic Arena
.
The International Saga Conference Archive
The International Saga Conference, held every three years, is the principal scholarly
event in the field of Old Norse-Icelandic studies. Initiated by Hermann Pálsson
(1921–2003), professor of Icelandic studies at Edinburgh University and a
well-known, though not always uncontroversial, scholar and translator, the
conference was first held there in 1971 and was attended by more than 100 scholars from
all over the world. It was deemed an unqualified success, and has been followed by
conferences held in various countries — Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany,
France, Italy, Australia, Great Britain and Switzerland. In August 2018 the conference returned, for the third time, to Iceland.
Owing to the Corona-pandemic, the 2020 conference, which should have been held in Helsinki and Tallinn, was postponed until August 2022.
The theme of the first conference was The Sagas and Western Literary
Tradition
, reflecting Hermann Pálsson’s own interests and those of a number
of like-minded younger scholars at the time. Subsequent conferences have all had
themes, reflecting local interests and global trends in varying measure.
In his potted history of the International Saga Conference, given as a keynote speech
at the 14th conference in Aarhus in 2012, Lars Lönnroth said that Hermann Pálsson managed to start the saga
conferences at exactly the right time
. He continues: And the first
conferences in Edinburgh, Reykjavik, Oslo and Munich became a battleground for
younger scholars with controversial ideas and for their older opponents within
the philological establishment.
As a result of this, he says, scholarly
discussion became more open, intense and unpredictable, new and fruitful areas
of research were explored, Old Norse studies flourished and attracted during the
seventies more international attention than it had for many years.
From the start, the papers delivered at the conferences were published, either afterwards, as proceedings,
or, increasingly, beforehand, as preprints, the idea being that one could read a
printed version of a paper before hearing it presented. Although many of these
conference papers subsequently appeared in revised versions in proper
publications,
the bulk are only available in this form and have become increasingly hard to get
hold of. The purpose of the present website, maintained by the Arnamagnæan Institute at
the University of Copenhagen and sanctioned by the Advisory Board of the
International Saga Conference, is to collect materials from these conferences and
make them available on the web for use by scholars and other interested parties.
The archive currently holds PDF versions of over 1300 papers and/or abstracts by some 600 scholars, scanned in most cases from the original proceedings/preprints.
Where revised versions of these papers exist, these too can be made available if the authors so wish, as can handouts, powerpoint presentations and similar material.
Impressum
This website was developed by:
M. J. Driscoll
Den Arnamagnæanske Samling,
Institut for nordiske studier og sprogvidenskab,
Københavns Universitet,
Njalsgade 136,
DK-2300 København S.
https://nors.ku.dk/
and is currently maintained by:
Pétur Húni Björnsson
Stofnun Árna Magnússonar í íslenskum fræðum,
Árnagarði við Suðurgötu,
IS-102 Reykjavík.
https://arnastofnun.is/is
Institut for nordiske studier og sprogvidenskab,
Københavns Universitet,
Emil Holms Kanal 2,
DK-2300 København S.
https://nors.ku.dk/
Webmaster: Pétur Húni Björnsson
Created: 21-06-2015. Last revised: 27-07-2024.
The material on this website is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License,
which means it may be freely reproduced and distributed for non-commercial purposes, without modification, with acknowledgment.
Copyright resides with the individual authors, however, and any other use therefore requires their permission.