Historians in the 19th century accepted the sagas as more or less accurate accounts, except where they clearly ventured into mythology and fantasy. But in the 20th century many historians began looking at the sagas more critically. Some dismissed them as fiction, and would not accept that they had any historical value at all.
Today, many historians view the sagas as a romanticized but crucial piece of history. Some say they are basically family stories relating the ancestry of individual characters.
"But archaeology is actually proving that a lot of these stories have a good basis in fact, so much so that [archaeologist] Helge Ingstad could use them to find the L'Anse aux Meadows site," the archeological site in Newfoundland believed to have been a Viking settlement around in the 11th century, said William Fitzhugh, the director of the Arctic Studies Center at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. and the curator of a major Viking exhibit at the museum in 2000.
Among Icelanders, the sagas remain enormously popular.
"Excerpts from [the sagas] are part of our curriculum in primary school," Björnsson said. "Pagan gods … were like our personal buddies, similar to Tarzan or Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings."
Comments :
Post a Comment