The Practice of Repentance in Medieval Iceland: Indigenous Ideas and Christian Influences
Kanerva Kirsi
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi-fe2021042821221
Tiivistelmä
This article deals with repentance
as emotion in medieval Icelandic culture circa 1200–1400. It studies
representations of repentance in medieval saga literature, concentrating on
repentance as practice (as defined by Monique
Scheer), including attitudes towards and meanings given to repentance in
religious and secular contexts.
Iceland was Christianized in
999/1000, but conversion did not result in radically drastic changes of
mentality or worldview. Confrontation of two worldviews, Christian and
indigenous, occurred when Christian ideas of penitence were adopted. In
Christian thought, repentance as emotion was associated with certain norms and
emotional practice. Sometimes these “foreign” norms and expectations in terms
of strong displays could collide with vernacular theories of emotion: some
emotions considered good and appropriate in Christian thought might be viewed
from the native perspective as bad, unwanted, or detrimental to health.
The sources used in this study consist of
vernacular sagas written in Iceland circa 1200–1400. I will concentrate on two
cases, one in Dámusta saga and one in
Laxdæla saga. I will examine the
representation of repentance in the two sources intertextually in connection
with other medieval Icelandic sagas in order to show how Dámusti’s and Guðrún’s
repentance as emotional practice would have been viewed in light of vernacular
conceptions of emotions. I will suggest that while there existed a model for
repentance that emphasized the bodily nature of the experience and drastic
emotional expression, this was not the only model. Another type, which represented
the practice of repentance as a ritualistic performance, avoided excessive
emotions and bodily displays of remorse. The first model was problematic
because it ran counter to the indigenous conceptions of what emotions are and
how they operate, and thereby contested the local norms of emotional
expression.
Kokoelmat
- Rinnakkaistallenteet [19207]