Pre-modern seminar No 47: Annette Lassen

On Thursday November 23^rd Professor Annette Lassen from the University of Copenhagen will give a talk called:

“Óðinn and Medieval Magicians”

The seminar will take place in Jakobi 2-114 at 18.15

Annette has sent us a short presentation of her lecture:

“Medieval Icelanders had no direct access to Nordic pagan tales or even archeaological finds from the pre-Christian period. They knew the names of Óðinn and other pagan gods from skaldic verse and placenames, but the stories about the gods, if any such stories had survived, were inevitably transformed over more than two centuries of exclusive Christianity. When writing about Old Norse mythology Medieval writers were therefore – to some extent – free to compile, invent, and fabricate new narratives about the pagan gods. The paper discusses some of the many textual transformations of Óðinn in the Middle Ages.”

Everybody is welcome!

The Pre-modern seminar is an interdisciplinary and informal seminar at Tartu University organized by the Department of Scandinavian Studies and led by Professor Daniel Sävborg. It was founded in 2010 and has so far arranged 46 meetings with talks by scholars on different levels, both from Estonia and from abroad. The focus is on pre-1800 issues of all kinds.

Daniel Sävborg
Professor of Scandinavian Studies
Network coordinator