“Thou Fearful Guest. Addressing the past in four tales in Flateyjarbók”

A STRANGER APPEARS at the court of a Norwegian king
known best for bringing Christianity to the North. Variations
of this seene appear four times in the fourteenth-century
manuseript Flateyjarbok. Thou Fearful Guest analyzes how these
episodes ereate meaning by their connections to custom, law,
myth, diseourses of historical and spiritual truth, typological
understandings of time, and the historical context of the
manuseript in which they appear. Thou Fearful Guest explores
how and to what end medieval Icelanders thought about taies
of heathen gods and heroes.
MERRILL KAPLAN is Associate Professor of Folklore and
Scandinavian Studies at the Ohio State University. She writes
on Oki Norse myth and mythography, legend and folk belief,
and folklore on and off the Internet. She is co-editor with
Timothy R. Tangherlini of News from Other Worlds: Studies in
Nordic Folklore, Mythology, and Culture.

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