The Passion of the Old and the New: Saga Studies on the Fatal Shore

Old Icelandic was formally introduced at the Universities of Sydney and Melbourne in the 1940s, around the time the Republic of Iceland was consituted. The teaching of the subject enjoyed a level of popularity from the 1960s to the 1980s which, given the distance between Australia and Iceland, was surprising. But Australian saga scholars made up for geographical remoteness with very close textual engagement. They showed an intellectual passion for the sagas that was at times expressed in terms of a link between the nature of Australian cultural and intellectual life and the sagas' representation of established and emerging social codes during the Icelandic settlement age (870-930). This connection brought the sagas closer to Australia; when viewed as stories of settlement, conflict, freedom from Scandinavia, and voyages back to European courts, the sagas seemed perfect objects of the types of analyses made possible by the intellectual spirit of post-war Australia.