It is a truism that the medieval Icelandic saga avoids emotive or subjective positioning, preferring an objective narrative style that favours subtle situational or behavioural hints over explicit verbalisation or gestural behaviour when it comes to emotions. Yet there is ample evidence that beneath the apparently calm surface of many saga characters there is an abundance of passion and emotional turbulence. The deceptively laconic reactions and lack of verbalisation of internal emotional states or feelings are not due to a lack of literary means of displaying emotion – as is evident from emotive portrayals in other Old Norse literary genres – or a fundamental impassiveness of saga characters. Rather, such passages suggest an emotive script that favours somatic indicators over verbal expressions and indicates a valuation of reticence modulated into action over emotive expressiveness.

This volume considers the representation of emotion in Old Norse literature as a means of exploring the modes of emotive staging and the potentially associated generic, gendered, linguistic or cultural parameters. It is argued that the literary heritage of Iceland presents multiple different literary identities and that these literary identities in turn exhibit a complex system of emotive scripts (defined in chapter 1) that inform their generic borders and their signifying potential. It considers the transformations of the intrinsic emotive code of the continental romance once refashioned into Norse as well as the reformulation of the generic (and signifying) functionality of romance as an indigenous genre in the fourteenth century. Moreover, it considers the ambivalence of emotive scripting evident in the borders between prose and poetic language, and in the articulation of gendered behavioural codes. The concept of voice provides one of the theoretical tools utilised to tease out instances of emotive expressivity. Voice is theorised as a critical concept in chapter 3, but the tension between emotive vocalisation and reticence motivates to a certain extent the discussion throughout. The theoretical framework is intended to articulate and illustrate the literary staging of emotive interiority in Old Norse literature.

The volume spans a wide array of Old Norse materials – from translated romances through Eddic poetry and Íslendingasögur (sagas of Icelanders) to indigenous romance.