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Encounters in 17th Century Iceland: The Saga of Hamlet
24th February: 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm GMT
The story of Hamlet is well-known throughout the world, having been popularized through Shakespeare’s play, but it has roots in a medieval Danish work. This talk will focus on a lesser-known version of this story that was written in Iceland in the seventeenth century. What would have happened if Hamlet’s murderous uncle had not shipped him away to be executed off-stage by the king of England? What if, instead, he had been sent to the Ottoman Empire, where he ended up fighting alongside Tamburlaine (Timur) against Emperor Bayezid? The Icelandic saga imagines an answer to these questions with cultural encounters between Scandinavia and Asia Minor, as well as between Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and pagan. The talk will present this cosmopolitan material and address what these cultural encounters would have meant for Icelandic audiences during the turbulent seventeenth century. In this online talk Philip Lavender, Gothenburg, will discuss the Saga of Hamlet. Professor Michael Scott will chair.
This event is sponsored by the Future of the Humanities Project and Blackfriars Hall, Oxford. It is part of the series, Cultural Encounters: Books that Have Made a Difference.
Online. Free and open to all. Registration is required.
Philip Lavender is a researcher in the field of Old Norse and Early Modern Icelandic literature at the University of Gothenburg. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Copenhagen. He is the author of Long Lives of Short Sagas (2020) and co-editor along with Matilda Amundsen Bergström of Faking It!: The Performance of Forgery in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture (2022).
Upcoming events in this series
Clare Asquith
3 Mar: ‘Willa Cather: Death comes for the Archbishop’
Barbara Mujica, Georgetown,
3pm, 17 Mar: ‘Cervantes: Don Quixote’
Dominic White O.P.
3pm, 24 Mar: ‘Lucy Beckett: A Postcard from the Volcano’
Maureen Corrigan, Georgetown
31 Mar: ‘F Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby’
Richard Finn O.P.
7 Apr: ‘Pope Leo XIII: Rerum Novarum’
TBA
14 Apr
Martin Ganeri O.P., The Angelicum (PUST)
28 Apr: ‘The Hindu Scripture Bhagavad Gita’
Contact:
Las Casas Institute with Georgetown University
lascasas@bfriars.ox.ac.uk