Icelandic Folklore and the Cultural Memory of Religious Change

The book is structured around five folktales taken from the great collection compiled in the mid-nineteenth century by Jon Arnason and Magnus Grimmson. Bryan situates these in relation to thematically linked stories from Icelandic sagas, Scandinavian literature and, indeed, the wider Indo-European narrative tradition. He is particularly interested in the way in which the Reformation affected the development of stories. Iceland’s long winter nights ensured the continuance of a strong oral tradition. Against a view which sees a popular oral culture preserving pagan resistances opposing a Christianising elite literary culture, Bryan argues that vernacular storytelling represented a continual reworking to achieve a unified religious worldview....

This book is a fascinating exploration of the connections between various Icelandic folktales and a valiant attempt to relate them to religious change. ... I would recommend the book to anyone interested in Icelandic folklore, or indeed the functioning of folklore more generally.

~Lola Sharon Davidson, Journal of the Australian Early Medieval Association 17, no. 2 (2021): 198–200

Among the main questions posed in the introduction are that of proximity of the beliefs of laypeople to the doctrines of the church and that of relationship between post-Reformation beliefs and post-conversion beliefs—and, further, to the pre-Christian pagan beliefs of the

medieval North. This research shows that cultural memory in Iceland resisted replacement of old beliefs with new.[...] [T]he volume makes

a valuable contribution to understanding the changes undergone by beliefs and folklore motifs in the course of time and in the context of differing religious environments.

~Yelena Sesselja Helgadóttir, Speculum 97, no. 3 (2022): 794-96