Þá varð hlátr mikill: On the role of laughter in Old Norse saga literature ...
The field of emotion research is vast and continuously growing, and laughter might be the most prominent and contagious of all emotions we experience. Even though the word ‘laughter’ can be found in a plethora of study titles, the reader is frequently left disappointed as the focus is most often hum...
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English |
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Apollo - University of Cambridge Repository
2022
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| Online Access: | https://dx.doi.org/10.17863/cam.96927 https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/350341 |
| Summary: | The field of emotion research is vast and continuously growing, and laughter might be the most prominent and contagious of all emotions we experience. Even though the word ‘laughter’ can be found in a plethora of study titles, the reader is frequently left disappointed as the focus is most often humour, not laughter. Contrary to popular belief of both scholars and the general public, laughter is not about humour — it is about relationships. The question of laughter’s role in *Íslendingasögur*, *Íslendingaþættir*, and *fornaldarsögur* — both in terms of its literary function as well as means to convey moral and social conventions to a contemporary audience — takes centre stage in this dissertation. Together, these three corpora contain forty-nine sagas that depict more than one hundred instances of laughing, grinning, and smiling, represented by Old Norse *hlæja* (to laugh), *glotta* (to grin), *brosa* (to smile), and their cognates. Even though this analysis is informed by all of these instances, a selection ... |
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