Ambiguity as a Narrative Strategy in the Íslendingasögur

• Applicant: Dr. Andreas Schmidt
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 522486190

The aim of my project is to systematically develop the concept of ambiguity as a narratological category for analyses of the Sagas of Icelanders as well as their context. Old Norse studies have so far not been prominent in the respective discussions amongst scholars of literature and medieval studies, even though the corpus of the Íslendingasögur and research on it suggest rich perspectives. My project argues that these narratives strategically generate ambiguity across the corpus in an intentional manner, in the sense of mutually exclusive interpretive options, which must be solved in some way if a text as a whole is to be interpreted. Such ambiguation especially concerns socially constructed norms and their individual applications as well as the suprahuman conditioning of the depicted, fictive diegeses. The reason for this is, that these sagas are narrated and staged in dialogical manners in the sense of Mikhail Bakhtin’s work as well as being transmitted in such way because of the manuscript variance and intertextuality characteristic of the genre. Thus, the social focus on the diegetic level of these texts is mirrored by ‘social’ principles of narration. This entails a dialogical relation between texts and recipients as well, meaning the audience’s interpretive interaction with the texts. The sense of this creation of ambiguity can be explained on an anthropological basis, through the social relevance and functionality of the texts it creates, as theoretically argued by Albrecht Koschorke. Literary studies have repeatedly shown such ambiguation as a potential of literature, while appreciation for the use of fictive and ambiguous narratives is also substantiated by studies on the history of medieval mentalities. My project will investigate these theoretical and historical bases and demonstrate the narrative mechanisms for the generation of ambiguity derived from the corpus of the Íslendingasögur as a whole, analysing them in selected case studies in the form of a monograph. Central questions will be which mechanisms of narration and transmission are generating ambiguity, and which topics this affects in what ways upon reception and interpretation by the audience. To do that, former perspectives of scholars will be brought together and deepened, thereby developing a renewed approach for analyses for those texts, in order to connect the corpus to interdisciplinary theoretical discussion. The perspectives thus acquired will in conclusion be tied back to the cultural and sociohistorical background of the texts’ time of production and transmission in the form of propositions for further investigation.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants