Introduction

Introduction This special issue bringstogethera set of papers delivered at the most recent Australian Old Norse Workshop on Medieval Icelandic Fiction and Folktale held in the English Department of the University of Sydney from 25-27 August, 1989. Since the early 1970s, the relatively small Australian community of scholars and others interested in Old Norse-Icelandic Studies have come together once every two to three years to hold a workshop on some aspect of medieval or early modem Scandinavian literature. The proceedings of a previous workshop, on Skaldic Poetry and Skald Sagas, edited by Ursula Dronke, were also pubhshed in Parergon, No. 22 of original series, December, 1978. Most of our Old Norse Workshops have been held in Canberra at the Australian National University, thanks to the generous hospitality and organizational abilities of Hans Kuhn, to whom, as isfitting,we dedicate this volume whose publication coincides with his retirement from the Chair of Germanic Languages at the Australian National University. In more recent times, w e have held a workshop at the University of Melbourne, where John Stanley Martin has acted as host. O n this last occasion, in 1989, w e met at the University of Sydney. The workshop on fiction and folktale was organized by members of the local Andfaetlinga Samband, a group of Sydney Old Norse scholars, senior undergraduates, postgraduates, and other interested ex-students of Old Norse who gather regularly at each others' houses to read and discuss Icelandic literature. When we established this group in 1984, our inspiration was the Icelandic reading circle at the University of California, Berkeley. It has been customary for the Australian organizers of these workshops to invite one or two international guests to attend, present papers and contribute to the discussion. W e would dearly like to have more visitors but our financial resources are limited. At the 1989 workshop we were fortunate to have as our guest Jiirg Glauser from the Deutsches Seminar of the University of Zurich, whose expenses were partly met by financial support from the Sydney Department of EngUsh. Peter Buchholz, of the University of South Africa at Pretoria, was unhappdy unable to attend after the programme had been drawn up. He was to have presented a paper entided 'Verbal and non-verbal traditional cores in thefornaldarsaga corpus. Besides the articles by Geraldine Barnes, Ian Campbell, Jiirg Glauser, John Kennedy, Bernard K. Martin, and John S. Martin, all of which are published here, several other papers were delivered at the Workshop. These included Hans Kuhn's 'Vilmundar saga vidutan: saga and rlmd and m y own The Anglo-Saxon and Norse Rune Poems: a comparative study', whichfilledthe gap created by 2 Introduction Peter Buchholz's absence.1 Hans Kuhn decided his paper was unsuitable for publication in this volume, as it was based on an extensive and detailed comparison oftexts.Another paper deUvered at the workshop but not published here was Andrew NeweU's 'Cldri saga: riddarasaga or m&rchensagd. Judy Quinn, who undertook much of the practical organization of the workshop, did not deUver a paper. However, w e are publishing here her article on T h e Naming of Eddic Mythological Poems in Medieval Manuscripts', which is part of her recendy accepted PhD thesis at the University of Sydney on The Eddic Tradition: A Study of the Mode of Transmission of Eddic Mythological Poetry in the Middle Ages (1990). The papers and their themes The Sydney Workshop on Medieval Icelandic Fiction and Folktale is only one of a number of conferences and publications in recent years that have attempted to reevaluate a neglected area of Scandinavian studies, namely the popular Uterature of late medieval and early m o d e m times, including the genres of romance (riddarasogur), mythical-heroic sagas {fomaldarsdgur), rimur, baUads and chapbook collections. As Jiirg Glauser observes in his article, the 1979 and 1982 International Saga Conferences, held in Munich and Toulon on the subjects offomaldarsdgur and riddarasogur respectively, gave a major impetus to this process, though it had in fact begun in the earUer 1970s.2 Since then there has been a series of major studies by several scholars intiiisfield, including two of those whose papers appear here (Barnes and...