Papers by Joonas Ahola
Elore, 2020
Artikkeli erittelee erilaisia diskursseja, joissa Kalevalaa ja kansanperinnettä käsiteltiin neuvo... more Artikkeli erittelee erilaisia diskursseja, joissa Kalevalaa ja kansanperinnettä käsiteltiin neuvostokarjalaisessa suomenkielisessä lehdistössä vuosina 1928–1958. Aineisto koostuu etupäässä kirjallisuus- ja sanomalehdistöstä. Aineistossa tunnistettavassa Kalevala perinnetekstinä -diskurssissa Kalevalaa käsitellään perinnettä edustavana objektina, johon on vaadittavissa jonkinlainen oikeus. Tästä omistusoikeudesta puhutaan omistajuusdiskursseissa. Niissä omistajuutta oikeutetaan mm. sen pohjana olevan runouden alkuperäisten esittäjien kansallisuuden perusteella, joka määriteltiin eri aikoina eri tavoin. Menneisyysdiskurssissa puolestaan käsitellään mm. Kalevalassa tavattavaa kansanperinnettä teksteinä menneisyydestä, mikä puolestaan mahdollistaa Kalevalan edustaman kansanrunouden retorisen käytön yhtäältä analogiana, toisaalta kontrastina neuvosto-olojen myönteisessä arvottamisessa nykyaikaa korostavassa moderniteettipuheessa. Artikkelissa nostetaan myös esiin, kuinka diskurssit limittyvät keskenään. Diskurssien todetaan olevan reaktioita Suomessa ja muualla porvarillisessa lännessä vallitsevaan keskusteluun ja toisekseen kumpuavan suurelta osin Neuvostoliiton ja Neuvosto-Karjalan historiallisista ja poliittisista vaiheista ja kehityskuluista.
“Kalevala – the marvellous product of the people's creative work”
Discourses surrounding folklore and the Kalevala in Soviet Karelian press 1928–1958
The article discusses different types of discourses connected to folklore and the Kalevala in the Finnish language press in Soviet Karelia between the years 1928–1958. The discourses are labelled “Kalevala as a tradition-text”, “Ownerships of Kalevala as a tradition-text”, and “Tradition as a text from the past”, with certain types of subdiscourses. These interlaced discourses and the publications that embody them seem, on the one hand, to be reactions to discussions on the Kalevalathat were taking place in Finland and elsewhere in the West. On the other hand, they seem to spring from the historical and political circumstances of Soviet Karelia as a part of the Soviet Union.
Elore, 2021
Artikkeli käsittelee neuvostokalevalaisen runouden eli sosialistisen ideologian mukaisesti viritt... more Artikkeli käsittelee neuvostokalevalaisen runouden eli sosialistisen ideologian mukaisesti virittyneiden, kalevalamittaan runonlaulajien sepittämien uusaiheisten runojen kasvua tekstilajina Neuvosto-Karjalassa 1930-luvulta 1950-luvulle. Neuvostoliitossa harrastettiin samaan aikaan muidenkin kulttuurien parissa neuvostoideologiaa ilmaisevan kansanperinteen hankkimista, mihin kuului perinteen tuottajien ideologista opastusta, ja sensuurinkin sävyttämää julkaisua. Neuvosto-Karjalassa tämän uusaiheisen perinteen hallitsevaksi muodoksi valikoitui kalevalamitta. Artikkelissa kuvataan historiallisen kontekstin roolia neuvostokalevalaisen runouden synnyssä ja kuvataan itse tekstilajin kehittymistä tässä kontekstissa. Artikkelissa käsitellään myös runojen yleisiä piirteitä suhteessa suulliseen perinteeseen niin tekstien kuin tekijyydenkin näkökulmasta.
The article discusses the growth of the Soviet Kalevalaic poetry, or of poems in Kalevala metre that comply to Soviet ideology and are composed by traditional rune singers, in Soviet Karelia in the course of the 1930s–1950s. During this period, collecting of traditional texts that expressed the Soviet ideology was practiced everywhere in Soviet Union. This activity included ideological education of the traditional performers as well as selective publication of their works, which involved censorship to the same degree as in Soviet literature in general. In Soviet Karelia, Kalevala metre became the dominant form of this “tradition with new topics”. This article describes the historical context behind the birth and growth of the Soviet Kalevalaic poetry. It also provides a description of the general features of this type of poetry in relation to oral tradition, both from the point of view of the texts and of the authorship they represent.
Miscallenous edited books by Joonas Ahola
Ahola, Joonas (toim. & suom.) 2016: M. A. Castrén: Luentoja suomalaisesta mytologiasta. Tietolipas 252. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura., 2016
M. A. Castrén 1853: Föreläsningar i finsk mytologi. Helsingfors: Finska Litteratur-Sällskapet.
... more M. A. Castrén 1853: Föreläsningar i finsk mytologi. Helsingfors: Finska Litteratur-Sällskapet.
Matthias Alexander Castrénin (1813-1852) Luentoja suomalaisesta mytologiasta on avainteos suomalaisen mytologian tutkimuksen historiassa. Teos ilmestyy nyt ensimmäisen kerran suomeksi käännettynä.
M. A. Castrén tunnetaan siperialaisten kansojen parissa työskennelleenä kielitieteilijänä ja tutkimusmatkailijana, mutta hän oli erityisen kiinnostunut suomalaisuudesta. Luentoja suomalaisesta mytologiasta pohjautuu vahvasti Castrénin omiin kenttätyökokemuksiin.
Castrénin mytologialuennot ovat tärkeä osa suomalaisen uskontotieteen, kielitieteen ja etnologian historiaa. Yleistajuinen ja elävästi kirjoitettu teos avaa kiinnostavan näkökulman mytologiantutkimuksen pioneerivaiheisiin, ja se soveltuu sekä tutkijoiden että muiden aiheesta kiinnostuneiden käyttöön.
Baltic Region - Conflict and Cooperation. Road from the Past to the Future. (ed. Ahola J., Bleiere, D., Bucht, L., Espersen, E., Heininen, L., Jankauskas, A., Martin, J., Sogel, U., Tammsaar, A. & Vares, P. )
Icelandic saga literature by Joonas Ahola
Elore 2 / 2014
Lectio praecursoria at the University of Helsinki on May 24. 2014
The present study scrutinizes the outlawry and outlaws that appear in the Icelandic Family Sagas.... more The present study scrutinizes the outlawry and outlaws that appear in the Icelandic Family Sagas. It provides a thorough description about outlawry on the basis of extant law and saga texts as well as an analysis of referential connotations attached to it. The concept of outlawry was fundamental for the medieval Icelanders conceptions of their past. Indeed, understanding outlawry is essential for understanding many of the Family Sagas. Outlaws appear in saga texts in significant roles.
The Icelandic Family Sagas comprise a group of prose narratives that were written down in the 13th and 14th century Iceland. They are based on events and personae that belong to the 10th century Iceland. These narratives introduce many outlaws, out of which some 75 are named.
The Family Sagas are studied here as one corpus and special emphasis is given to those narrative features that repetitively appear in connection with outlawry and the outlaw characters. Therefore, the eventual objects of this study are the medieval Icelanders general conceptions of the historical outlawry as well as the variations of these conceptions throughout the period of saga writing. The medieval Icelanders general conceptions about the 10th 11th century, which are reflected in the Family Sagas, are here referred to as the Saga World. The Saga World is the historically based taleworld to which all of the Family Sagas refer.
The medieval law texts, which were derived from centuries old legislative traditions, reveal that outlawry meant banishing from the society and being denied all help, and that the outlawed person lost the protection of the law. In practice, outlawry was a death sentence.
However, outlaws occupy many differing roles in the saga narratives even in connection with recurrent narrative motifs. These roles reflect the social and spatial structures of the Saga World. The inspection of outlawry within these structures reveals that the definition of outlawry as it appears in the law texts is insufficient for understanding outlawry in the saga texts.
The social and spatial structures also provide a basis for the connotations of outlawry. In this study, these connotations are inspected primarily from the referential connections between outlawry in the Family Sagas and corresponding phenomena in other concurrent literature. This is done by studying the implementations of the basic elements of outlawry in the Family Sagas marginalization, banishing, rejection and solitariness within other literary genres and the taleworlds to which they refer. It is argued that these taleworlds reflect the same ideas that were associated with outlawry in the Family Sagas albeit in different forms and that these different forms reciprocally contributed to the conceptions of outlawry.
The variety of denotations and connotations of outlawry that is visible in the medieval Icelandic texts reflects the ambiguity of outlawry in the Family Sagas. This ambiguity may shed light to questions such as why an outlaw could be perceived as a hero in a literary genre that predominantly promoted law and order and why the same outlaw could be perceived as a villain on another occasion.
Stanzas of Friendship. Studies in Honour of Tatjana N. Jackson, ed. Natalja Gvorzdetskaja, Irina Konovalova, Elena Melnikova, and Alexandr Podossinov (Moscow: Dmitriy Pozharskiy University, 2011), 35-47, 2011
Á Austrvega. Saga and East Scandinavia : Proceedings of 14th International Saga Conference, Uppsala. Ed. Ney Agneta, Henrik Williams, Fredrik Ljungqvist. Uppsala universitet: Uppsala 2009., Jan 1, 2009
In the society that the Icelandic family sagas depict, whose public sphere was ruled by men, viol... more In the society that the Icelandic family sagas depict, whose public sphere was ruled by men, violence was an extraordinary extent of action for women -but it takes place. The image of women in sagas responded to the ideas that prevailed in the context. Representations of the image were necessarily if not acceptable, at least conceivable but within the restrictions of the saga genre. In this paper, I will focus on social factors that would guide the interpretation of occurrences of female violence in the saga literature.
Korkeempi kaiku. Knuuttila, S. & Piela, U. (eds.). Kalevalaseuran vuosikirja; 88. Helsinki : Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura p. 161-173. 2009., 2009
Elore 12 (2005): 1, Jan 1, 2005
Heroic narratives tell about past exemplary figures that were often warriors in a European contex... more Heroic narratives tell about past exemplary figures that were often warriors in a European context. Narratives about warrior heroes served the interests of the highest strata of an aristocratic warrior society in which the narratives were created and preserved. The same applies to Icelandic Family Sagas, which derive from heroic poetry both by content and social function. Although saga heroes vary, they share characteristics such as bravery connected to fatalism and a strong sense of honour. Heroic characteristics are at their most extreme at the moment of death, of which there are numerous examples in the saga literature. However, sagas depend on genealogical and historical tradition and sometimes even the greatest of warriors die natural deaths, neutral in heroic terms. Grettis saga, the Saga of Grettir, is one of the latest Family Sagas. The death of Grettir represents a brave stand against fate, reaching the level of a myth, whereas the death of his brother Illugi represents the social aspects of heroism, significant in the Icelandic Commonwealth. Their deaths illustrate well different aspects of the form of heroism represented in the Sagas of the Icelanders.
Viking Age in Finland by Joonas Ahola
'Were there Vikings in Finland?’ Fibula, Fabula, Fact – The Viking Age in Finland is intended to ... more 'Were there Vikings in Finland?’ Fibula, Fabula, Fact – The Viking Age in Finland is intended to provide essential foundations for approaching the Viking Age in Finland. The volume consists of a general introduction followed by nineteen chapters and a closing discussion. The nineteen chapters are oriented to provide introductions to the sources, methods and perspectives of diverse disciplines. Discussions are presented from fields including archaeology, folklore studies, genetics, geopolitics, historiography, language history, linguistics, palaeobotany, semiotics and toponymy. Each chapter is intended to help open the resources and the history of discourse of the particular discipline in a way that will be accessible to specialists from other fields, specialists from outside Finland, and also to non-specialist readers and students who may be more generally interested in the topic.
In Raptor and Human: Falconry and Bird Symbolism throughout the Millennia on a Global Scale, I–IV. Ed. Karl-Heinz Gersmann & Oliver Grimm. Advanced Studies in the Archaeology of Hunting 1:1–4, Wachholz: Neumünster. Vol. II, pp. 887–934. , 2018
This chapter develops a perspective on raptors in the Iron Age and Middle Ages until c. 1500 AD i... more This chapter develops a perspective on raptors in the Iron Age and Middle Ages until c. 1500 AD in cultural areas inhabited by the speakers of the North Finnic dialects that became the Finnish, Karelian and Ižorian languages. It develops a long-term perspective on perceptions of raptors and relationships with them reflected in different traditions. This long-term perspective is complemented by linguistic evidence and is placed in dialogue with early historical written sources and general knowledge about practices involved in falconry. The discussion is extended to the position of raptors in the symbolism of historically neighbouring traditions of North Russian and North Germanic groups. The triangulation of this evidence suggests that falconry likely became known within perhaps a century of its introduction to Sweden, probably in the 6th century, but that it never achieved the social significance that it held in neighbouring cultures.
Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae Humaniora 372. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica. , 2014
The Viking Age in Åland presents a mystery. There was a (near-)complete discontinuity of language... more The Viking Age in Åland presents a mystery. There was a (near-)complete discontinuity of language and culture from the Viking Age to the Middle Ages, which produces challenging riddles concerning the people who lived there, the societies that they created, and indeed why there would be such discontinuity at all. An equally puzzling question concerns who these people were. The Åland Islands were positioned on the frontier between Scandinavian and Finnic cultural areas, in a key location along the so-called Eastern Route that connected them. Even though Åland was not a significant political or economic center during the Viking Age, its cultural and geopolitical situation makes it extremely significant to understanding the networks spanning the Baltic Sea and how these networks related to the identities of cultures, polities and individuals. At the same time, the position between Sweden and Finland has politicized the reconstruction of history as heritage, which is inevitably bound up with current identities and conflicts. The present volume introduces the topic of Åland in the Viking Age and discusses it from the perspectives of a number of different disciplines with emphasis on questions of identities. The chapters review earlier interpretations, present current views, and also offer exploratory investigations that will stimulate future discussion and will certainly be of interest to specialist and non-specialist alike.
Fibula, Fabula, Fact – The Viking Age in Finland (ed. Joonas Ahola & Frog with Clive Tolley), 2014
This chapter discusses the possibilities of recent oral traditions, especially heroic epic, to sh... more This chapter discusses the possibilities of recent oral traditions, especially heroic epic, to shed light on the historical circumstances of the Viking Age in Finland. It also makes a survey of earlier scholarship on the topic and demonstrates possibilities of a comparative approach to imply cultural connections in the past and the nature thereof.
The Viking Age in Åland: Insights Into Identity and Remnants of Culture. Ed. Joonas Ahola, Frog & Jenni Lucenius. Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae. Humaniora 372. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica. 2014.
This article is the result of a multidisciplinary collaboration that works to develop a geopoliti... more This article is the result of a multidisciplinary collaboration that works to develop a geopolitical perspective on the society or societies of the Åland Islands during the Viking Age. It seeks to situate Åland in relation to evidence of maritime networks and other polities associated with those networks. It places the question of identities in Åland in relation to social identities and the identities of polities. The article considers the possibility that thinking about the Åland Islands as a coherent geopolitical space in the Iron Age could be anachronistic, and that the Åland Islands could also have at least initially been a divided space of two polities. Finally, the probable depopulation of Åland during the Viking Age is considered as a potential factor in the absence of references to the Åland Islands in Old Norse sagas and other early literature written centuries later, by which time this already minor cultural area would, in social memory, have dropped off of the geopolitical map.
In The Viking Age in Åland: Insights into Identity and Remnants of Culture. Ed. Joonas Ahola, Frog & Jenni Lucenius. Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae Humaniora 372. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica. Pp. 227–265. , 2014
This article is the result of a multidisciplinary cooperation exploring a question that is normal... more This article is the result of a multidisciplinary cooperation exploring a question that is normally either taken for granted or marginalized. The aim of the article is not to reach a definitive answer to the question but rather to offer a general introduction to the problem that is accessible to non-linguists and to consider likelihoods of the language situations in Viking Age Åland. The limitations of the linguistic data for shedding light on the question are introduced. This is followed by an exploration of the problematics and potential for non-linguistic evidence to yield information on language. This discussion includes address of the question of Ålandic identities and considers how language and culture in Åland may relate to the contact networks in which Ålanders participated in the Late Iron Age.
In Fibula, Fabula, Fact: Defining and Contextualizing the Viking Age in Finland. Ed. Joonas Ahola & Frog with Clive Tolley. Studia Fennica Historica. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Pp. 21-84., 2014
This long article offers a synthetic overview of the Viking Age in Finland and of Finland in the ... more This long article offers a synthetic overview of the Viking Age in Finland and of Finland in the Viking Age as the outcome of the Viking Age in Finland project and introduction to the volume Fibula, Fabula, Fact - The Viking Age in Finland.
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Papers by Joonas Ahola
“Kalevala – the marvellous product of the people's creative work”
Discourses surrounding folklore and the Kalevala in Soviet Karelian press 1928–1958
The article discusses different types of discourses connected to folklore and the Kalevala in the Finnish language press in Soviet Karelia between the years 1928–1958. The discourses are labelled “Kalevala as a tradition-text”, “Ownerships of Kalevala as a tradition-text”, and “Tradition as a text from the past”, with certain types of subdiscourses. These interlaced discourses and the publications that embody them seem, on the one hand, to be reactions to discussions on the Kalevalathat were taking place in Finland and elsewhere in the West. On the other hand, they seem to spring from the historical and political circumstances of Soviet Karelia as a part of the Soviet Union.
The article discusses the growth of the Soviet Kalevalaic poetry, or of poems in Kalevala metre that comply to Soviet ideology and are composed by traditional rune singers, in Soviet Karelia in the course of the 1930s–1950s. During this period, collecting of traditional texts that expressed the Soviet ideology was practiced everywhere in Soviet Union. This activity included ideological education of the traditional performers as well as selective publication of their works, which involved censorship to the same degree as in Soviet literature in general. In Soviet Karelia, Kalevala metre became the dominant form of this “tradition with new topics”. This article describes the historical context behind the birth and growth of the Soviet Kalevalaic poetry. It also provides a description of the general features of this type of poetry in relation to oral tradition, both from the point of view of the texts and of the authorship they represent.
Miscallenous edited books by Joonas Ahola
Matthias Alexander Castrénin (1813-1852) Luentoja suomalaisesta mytologiasta on avainteos suomalaisen mytologian tutkimuksen historiassa. Teos ilmestyy nyt ensimmäisen kerran suomeksi käännettynä.
M. A. Castrén tunnetaan siperialaisten kansojen parissa työskennelleenä kielitieteilijänä ja tutkimusmatkailijana, mutta hän oli erityisen kiinnostunut suomalaisuudesta. Luentoja suomalaisesta mytologiasta pohjautuu vahvasti Castrénin omiin kenttätyökokemuksiin.
Castrénin mytologialuennot ovat tärkeä osa suomalaisen uskontotieteen, kielitieteen ja etnologian historiaa. Yleistajuinen ja elävästi kirjoitettu teos avaa kiinnostavan näkökulman mytologiantutkimuksen pioneerivaiheisiin, ja se soveltuu sekä tutkijoiden että muiden aiheesta kiinnostuneiden käyttöön.
Icelandic saga literature by Joonas Ahola
The Icelandic Family Sagas comprise a group of prose narratives that were written down in the 13th and 14th century Iceland. They are based on events and personae that belong to the 10th century Iceland. These narratives introduce many outlaws, out of which some 75 are named.
The Family Sagas are studied here as one corpus and special emphasis is given to those narrative features that repetitively appear in connection with outlawry and the outlaw characters. Therefore, the eventual objects of this study are the medieval Icelanders general conceptions of the historical outlawry as well as the variations of these conceptions throughout the period of saga writing. The medieval Icelanders general conceptions about the 10th 11th century, which are reflected in the Family Sagas, are here referred to as the Saga World. The Saga World is the historically based taleworld to which all of the Family Sagas refer.
The medieval law texts, which were derived from centuries old legislative traditions, reveal that outlawry meant banishing from the society and being denied all help, and that the outlawed person lost the protection of the law. In practice, outlawry was a death sentence.
However, outlaws occupy many differing roles in the saga narratives even in connection with recurrent narrative motifs. These roles reflect the social and spatial structures of the Saga World. The inspection of outlawry within these structures reveals that the definition of outlawry as it appears in the law texts is insufficient for understanding outlawry in the saga texts.
The social and spatial structures also provide a basis for the connotations of outlawry. In this study, these connotations are inspected primarily from the referential connections between outlawry in the Family Sagas and corresponding phenomena in other concurrent literature. This is done by studying the implementations of the basic elements of outlawry in the Family Sagas marginalization, banishing, rejection and solitariness within other literary genres and the taleworlds to which they refer. It is argued that these taleworlds reflect the same ideas that were associated with outlawry in the Family Sagas albeit in different forms and that these different forms reciprocally contributed to the conceptions of outlawry.
The variety of denotations and connotations of outlawry that is visible in the medieval Icelandic texts reflects the ambiguity of outlawry in the Family Sagas. This ambiguity may shed light to questions such as why an outlaw could be perceived as a hero in a literary genre that predominantly promoted law and order and why the same outlaw could be perceived as a villain on another occasion.
Viking Age in Finland by Joonas Ahola
“Kalevala – the marvellous product of the people's creative work”
Discourses surrounding folklore and the Kalevala in Soviet Karelian press 1928–1958
The article discusses different types of discourses connected to folklore and the Kalevala in the Finnish language press in Soviet Karelia between the years 1928–1958. The discourses are labelled “Kalevala as a tradition-text”, “Ownerships of Kalevala as a tradition-text”, and “Tradition as a text from the past”, with certain types of subdiscourses. These interlaced discourses and the publications that embody them seem, on the one hand, to be reactions to discussions on the Kalevalathat were taking place in Finland and elsewhere in the West. On the other hand, they seem to spring from the historical and political circumstances of Soviet Karelia as a part of the Soviet Union.
The article discusses the growth of the Soviet Kalevalaic poetry, or of poems in Kalevala metre that comply to Soviet ideology and are composed by traditional rune singers, in Soviet Karelia in the course of the 1930s–1950s. During this period, collecting of traditional texts that expressed the Soviet ideology was practiced everywhere in Soviet Union. This activity included ideological education of the traditional performers as well as selective publication of their works, which involved censorship to the same degree as in Soviet literature in general. In Soviet Karelia, Kalevala metre became the dominant form of this “tradition with new topics”. This article describes the historical context behind the birth and growth of the Soviet Kalevalaic poetry. It also provides a description of the general features of this type of poetry in relation to oral tradition, both from the point of view of the texts and of the authorship they represent.
Matthias Alexander Castrénin (1813-1852) Luentoja suomalaisesta mytologiasta on avainteos suomalaisen mytologian tutkimuksen historiassa. Teos ilmestyy nyt ensimmäisen kerran suomeksi käännettynä.
M. A. Castrén tunnetaan siperialaisten kansojen parissa työskennelleenä kielitieteilijänä ja tutkimusmatkailijana, mutta hän oli erityisen kiinnostunut suomalaisuudesta. Luentoja suomalaisesta mytologiasta pohjautuu vahvasti Castrénin omiin kenttätyökokemuksiin.
Castrénin mytologialuennot ovat tärkeä osa suomalaisen uskontotieteen, kielitieteen ja etnologian historiaa. Yleistajuinen ja elävästi kirjoitettu teos avaa kiinnostavan näkökulman mytologiantutkimuksen pioneerivaiheisiin, ja se soveltuu sekä tutkijoiden että muiden aiheesta kiinnostuneiden käyttöön.
The Icelandic Family Sagas comprise a group of prose narratives that were written down in the 13th and 14th century Iceland. They are based on events and personae that belong to the 10th century Iceland. These narratives introduce many outlaws, out of which some 75 are named.
The Family Sagas are studied here as one corpus and special emphasis is given to those narrative features that repetitively appear in connection with outlawry and the outlaw characters. Therefore, the eventual objects of this study are the medieval Icelanders general conceptions of the historical outlawry as well as the variations of these conceptions throughout the period of saga writing. The medieval Icelanders general conceptions about the 10th 11th century, which are reflected in the Family Sagas, are here referred to as the Saga World. The Saga World is the historically based taleworld to which all of the Family Sagas refer.
The medieval law texts, which were derived from centuries old legislative traditions, reveal that outlawry meant banishing from the society and being denied all help, and that the outlawed person lost the protection of the law. In practice, outlawry was a death sentence.
However, outlaws occupy many differing roles in the saga narratives even in connection with recurrent narrative motifs. These roles reflect the social and spatial structures of the Saga World. The inspection of outlawry within these structures reveals that the definition of outlawry as it appears in the law texts is insufficient for understanding outlawry in the saga texts.
The social and spatial structures also provide a basis for the connotations of outlawry. In this study, these connotations are inspected primarily from the referential connections between outlawry in the Family Sagas and corresponding phenomena in other concurrent literature. This is done by studying the implementations of the basic elements of outlawry in the Family Sagas marginalization, banishing, rejection and solitariness within other literary genres and the taleworlds to which they refer. It is argued that these taleworlds reflect the same ideas that were associated with outlawry in the Family Sagas albeit in different forms and that these different forms reciprocally contributed to the conceptions of outlawry.
The variety of denotations and connotations of outlawry that is visible in the medieval Icelandic texts reflects the ambiguity of outlawry in the Family Sagas. This ambiguity may shed light to questions such as why an outlaw could be perceived as a hero in a literary genre that predominantly promoted law and order and why the same outlaw could be perceived as a villain on another occasion.