The 2011-2012 Francis Lee Utley Lecture co-sponsored by the Center for Folklore Studies and the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies will be given by Emily Lethbridge (Research Fellow, Emmanuel College, Cambridge). In this lecture Lethbridge will discuss some of her findings during her current work on Icelandic family sagas. Since January 2011, she has devoted scholarly attention to reading the Íslendingasögur (Icelandic family sagas) in the places in which they are set around Iceland. These medieval narratives are rooted in the landscape, and contextualising them in this physical way is transforming her academic understanding of what the stories convey. Exploring how the events that the sagas describe are mapped onto the landscape and commemorated in place-names—as well as witnessing how modern Icelanders continue to engage with their local saga—is proving to be a compelling approach to this remarkable body of literature. A bio and her research blog can be found on Blogspot.
Free and open to the public.
