Friederike Richter

Friederike Richter, M.A.
Advised by Prof. Dr. Lena Rohrbach,
Scandinavian Studies, Humboldt-University Berlin

Contact: E-Mail

With grimaces and winged shoes: Old Norse gods in text and image in Early Modern Edda-manuscripts
The dissertation analyses different strategies of (de-)heroizing stagings of Norse mythology in text and image in the light of the context of its genesis in Iceland. For this purpose four illuminated manuscripts of Poetic Edda and Prose Edda from the 17th and 18th century will be examined in which comprehensive image representations of old Norse gods appeared for the first time since Viking age. The analysis follow the approach of Material Philology, which incorporate the materiality of manuscripts, that is all the manuscript’s characteristics beyond the actual text. This project focuses especially on illumination with the accompanying captions but includes more aspects e. g. the compilation of the manuscripts with the other texts preserved in the manuscripts. The analysis of these characteristics will reveal, which cultural context Norse mythology was associated in Early Modern age and how the different representations within the manuscripts come to be.