Remembering Heathen Women in Medieval Icelandic Literature

ABSTRACT: Several Icelandic texts from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries depict female characters from the pre-Christian past. In both poetry and prose, these heathen women are often portrayed as recalling the old, pre-Christian religion or the magical practices associated with it. Within this literature, different genres correlate with strata of cultural memory that are associated with different periods in Norse history and pre-history. This link between genre and era is largely independent of the actual dates of composition of the texts or the historicity of the events they describe. An analysis of illustrative examples from this corpus reveals how the evaluation and representation of heathen women depend on how deeply in the past they are situated by the narratives that describe them.