Reading Roman Civil War in Iceland: Rómverja Saga and the Reimagining of Lucanian Ambiguity
Abstract
Lucan’s Bellum Civile has long been read through the disjointed persona of its emotional narrator. In its unique adaptation of Lucan’s epic, the medieval Icelandic Rómverja saga (The Saga of the Romans) turns this distinctive equivocation on its head. This paper considers how Rómverja saga adapts two key aspects of Lucan’s poem – the characterization of the two central figures, Julius Caesar and Pompey Magnus, and scenes of mass battle – along saga literary conventions. In each case, Rómverja saga removes key moments of ambiguity in the Bellum Civile while simultaneously introducing novel domains of interpretive uncertainty, thus preserving a central Lucanian feature while radically reshaping it.
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