The reception of the old Icelandic literature in the Icelandic poetry of the end of the 20th century: Poems by Sigurður Pálsson

Abstract

The article deals with a certain case of perception of Old Icelandic culture in Icelandic poetry at the end of the 20th century, specifically the cycle of poems “Ljóð námu menn” (1988) by Sigurður Pálsson. The reception of Old Icelandic culture and literature in the 20th–21st century in Iceland is mainly text-centered and the figure of the Writer plays an important role in it. As a result, the subject of the majority of poems is the creation of certain “sagas of Icelanders”, well-known to Icelandic readers. In Sigurður Pálsson´s interpretation, the authors of these sagas resemble modern feature writers as well as cultural heroes of myths. The sagas‘ authors, or the creation process, are mythologized in different ways in the poems and acquire universal, timeless traits; at the same time, references to the contents of the certain sagas are minimized. In the final poem of the cycle, the settlement of Iceland is mythologized — and it also turns out to be unseparated from the literary creation. In the Icelandic culture of the 20th–21st centuries, subjects, concerned with Old Icelandic literature, are important national topoi. Poets, that chose them as subjects for their works, have to consider their high status in the national culture. Representation of key moments in the Old Icelandic culture and literature in Sigurður Pálsson´s poems is very subjective, but it does not contradict these topoi. In the cycle of poems examined here, historicism and factography are nearly absent and they are replaced by mythologism: writing a saga is equal to a cosmogonical act, and taking up a new land is comparable to the composing of a song.