How genres influence concepts of sagas: Concept of the body in various saga genres

Abstract

There are many levels and aspect that can be brought up as the concept of the body. This paper has chosen the most concrete one, about the outer appearance in our understanding.

First, a survey of how the different saga genres work with body descriptions was presented, focusing on three: king sagas, Icelandic family sagas and legendary. Then these results were used to discuss the Jomsvikingasaga which has traits of all these three saga genres.

Keywords

• genres
• Jomsvikinga saga
• king sagas