En ny verden set fra udkanten: Europa-forestillinger hos Snorri Sturluson

Resumé

A New World Seen from the Edge: Snorri Sturluson and Images of Europe:

In the beginning of the 13th century, the Icelander Snorri Sturluson wrote the Prose Edda. The prologue to this text describes how the linguistic, political and religious preconditions for Northern Europe were to be found in Asia. Snorri’s perspective was determined by his position in the Christian world, and his work articulates both Christianity’s universality and history’s teleological character. Like other learned people in Medieval Europe, Snorri was guided by his knowledge of the high cultures, Antiquity’s and Christianity’s, and these were decisive for the description he gives of the North. This essay shows how the Nordic countries, positioned on the periphery of the Christian world, through the assimilation of Trojan emigrants and pre-historical Nordic people, were in the Edda assigned a status equivalent to those of the high cultures. Through a cultural translatio, Snorri modified the prevailing centre-periphery division of the world and the view that the North was subordinate to the high cultures.