The presentation of saga literature in Tormod Tor-

• Main Author: Boje Mortensen
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Norway; Iceland
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.564.6992; http://www.renaessanceforum.dk/5_2008/lbm.pdf

Tormod Torfæus is the first modern attempt to capitalize on the rich Old Norse saga-literature of the 13th and 14th centuries in order to construct a narrative of Norwegian medieval history. The present paper makes the point that Torfæus’s project should be seen in its proper context of the early mod-ern learned republic and its antiquarian framework. Torfæus did not share the modern concepts of medieval ‘sources ’ or medieval literary ‘texts’: in line with contemporary usage he spoke of ‘monuments ’ which were to be represented through his Latin paraphrases – to emulate a number of other ‘national ’ collections of medieval chronicles. This gave the monuments of the past their proper voice. The subject of this paper is the first major early modern narrative of Norwe-gian history which was written by the Icelander Tormod Torfæus and pub-lished in four folio volumes in 1711 in Copenhagen with the title Historia rerum Norwegicarum. Representing a life’s work, the four volumes offers a full-scale Norwegian history from the origins up to 1387 when Norway came into a dynastic union with Denmark. Apart from its sheer size, the work is epochal especially through the new-found abundance of information on the 10th- to 13th-centuries (vol.s II & III) and the sustained attempt to harmonize Norwegian chronology with hints given in foreign texts, particu-larly English chronicles. Needless to say, much of Torfæus’s edifice was dismantled in the nineteenth century, but he was the first to have access to an almost full range of Old Norse texts of the literary crucial thirteenth cen-tury which still heavily frame any modern attempt of reconstructing early and high medieval Norwegian history, and make up the main material of the linguistic and literary history of medieval Iceland and Norway.