The Supernatural in Íslendingasögur: A Theoretical Approach to Definition and Analysis

Cand. Mag. thesis, Aarhus Universitet, 2012 I first became interested in accounts of the supernatural at a very early age. In fact I grew up on Icelandic folktales of encounters with revenants, or afturgöngur, and during my first trip to Aarhus in 2009 to attend a summer school on paganism and Christianity organized by Pernille Hermann and Rolf Stavnem, my interest was rekindled, not least due to Stephen A. Mitchell’s lecture on the demonification of Óðinn in the late Middle Ages. The following summer I returned to Aarhus Universitet to attend an intensive course titled 'From Greenland to Hell', and was inspired by the many fantastic lectures given there, in particular the ones given by Jonas Wellendorf and Daniel Sävborg on visionary literature and the so named post-classical Íslendingasögur. These lectures became the seeds for this thesis, which I quickly expanded upon during my first semester as a graduate student at Aarhus Universitet, after returning from a conference in Bergen held by the Retrospective Methods Network, where the seedling of my hypothesis had started to come into bloom. By the end of the semester I had, under Rolf Stavnem’s supervision, produced a preliminary research paper on this subject, which I then pursued from another angle during my second semester in a paper for the course 'History and Cultural Memory' taught by Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. This thesis paper is a thorough examination of the many rocks I turned during these studies.