From Ruins to Ruin is a family saga told as a collection of linked short stories, not in chronological order. When Gonçalo and Beatrice meet near their respective hometowns in Portugal, they are driven by impulse and romanticism. The collision of these characters proves to be less than romantic. Beatrice feels trapped by her overprotective parents and is looking for an opportunity to leave, but Gonçalo is not the ticket she’d hoped for. Hardened by an early life of loss, loneliness, and poverty, Gonçalo is cruel and abusive. From Ruins to Ruin is an exploration of the way pain and suffering, when left to fester, are inherited by our children. Beatrice and Gonçalo’s three children each absorb the hostility their parents displayed towards each other and themselves: Raquel struggles to love her body, Olivia struggles in abusive relationships, and CJ struggles handling relationships with women in his life. Their individual conflicts are, of course, informed by their experience as first-generation children growing up in America, the same way their parents’ conflicts were influenced by their own respective upbringings. From Ruins to Ruin is still missing several perspectives that I have begun working on. I plan to include stories exploring Beatrice’s parents, siblings, and extended family, which further inform Beatrice’s character as well as her children’s. The environment that shaped each character—time period, location, political climate—informs each character’s story, which led to my decision to format this narrative as a collection of short stories. The inspiration for this collection began in 2016, when I noticed that our country’s increasing embrasure of the far-right had not only removed the inhibitions of the most bigoted people in the United States, but also begun to inform the way the students I tutored at my undergraduate university’s writing center understood and reacted to the world around them. Those in positions of power embraced this normalization, and often times used the fascist rhetoric of “family values” to defend their hatred. It reminded me, horrifyingly, of the rhetoric shared by people half a decade older than me (my sister’s classmates), who were old enough to have their worldviews informed by the toxic post-9/11 atmosphere. Both sides of my family immigrated to the United States from Portugal, but at different moments. My own parents were only young children by the time António de Oliveira Salazar was no longer Prime Minister, but those who raised them early in their lives were influenced by his motto: “Deus, Pátria, e Família,” or “God, Fatherland, and Family.” While my mother’s parents believed primarily in supporting their community, and therefore felt supported in return by their neighbors during hard times, my father’s experience in his early life was not as fortunate. His family was as isolated and insular as they were unkind, and without a warm support system to turn to, he became bitter and resentful. Much of this translated into his treatment of the women in his life—his mother, his grandmother, and ultimately his wife. When we lack social safety nets and a larger community to rely on, we internalize any potential hatred, hostility, and mistreatment as normal, and often that translates to inherited trauma. From Ruins to Ruin is not necessarily based on true events, but it is inspired by this small trend in inherited familial traits. Tracing the roots of what makes a person (their inability to forgive, their quickness to anger, their tendency to accept mistreatment) has always fascinated me. I purposely wanted to write a collection of linked short stories rather than a novel to allow individual focus on each character when I felt it was needed. While this collection is currently incomplete, and mainly includes one half of the family tree, I felt that giving these characters their own space and own story was important. My hope is that each of these stories can stand alone, but that reading them as a collection further informs the reader’s understanding of the characters. My decision to write this family saga in short stories stems, too, from my belief that most people experience their own lives as a series of vignettes. As I worked on this collection and interviewed family members to gather details that would texturize it, I found myself drawn to create characters that both frustrated me and demanded sympathy—or at least understanding. In his essay “On Defamiliarization,” Charles Baxter writes about the importance of recognizing ourselves in character who are ultimately different from us: Defamiliarization is finally more about the way in which we recognize ourselves in an action and simultaneously see someone we don’t recognize… Recognition is re-cognitions: not finding ourselves when we expected to be but where we did not expect to be found, and at a moment when our defenses are down. (38) While the characters in this collection are deeply flawed, I hoped readers could see themselves in the mistakes they make. My desire to explore these characters was, ultimately, an investigation into understanding not only myself, but the self in general. I believe fiction is a great tool to understand people we otherwise thought different from ourselves. I don’t think this necessarily requires us to forgive or like these sorts of people, but knowing them feels more conducive to crafting a better world that we hope to live in.

La Maríu saga est une saga hagiographique anonyme d’origine monastique faisant le récit de la vie de Marie, de sa conception à son Assomption, rédigée en langue vernaculaire et composée entre le dernier tiers du XIIIe siècle et la seconde moitié du XIVe siècle en Islande. Assortie d’une traduction inédite du texte, la présente étude se propose comme une nouvelle approche de la Maríu saga que nous inscrivons dans la longue tradition littéraire et théologique des Vies de la Vierge, des biographies homilétiques mariales tributaires des évangiles apocryphes composées par des moines et théologiens du VIIe au Xe siècle dans l’Empire Byzantin, et que nous situons dans le contexte littéraire et culturel européen médiéval afin de mettre en lumière les enjeux poétiques et doctrinaux que soulève l’acte d’écrire et de réécrire la vie de la Vierge en Islande au Moyen Âge. Pour ce faire, nous envisageons l’œuvre de différents points de vue, d’abord de l’histoire de la réception des textes bibliques et parabibliques, ensuite contextuel et philologique, puis littéraire et enfin théologique. Nous nous employons à montrer à travers son étude poétique et doctrinale que, à l’exemple des vies de Marie médiévales ecclésiastiques, la Maríu saga manifeste des spécificités propres au foyer culturel de son époque : medium entre la littérature et la théologie, l’œuvre est un texte hagiographique narratif qui présente le double intérêt d’être à la fois un témoin de la pratique de la réécriture hagiographique en langue vernaculaire et le reflet du développement dogmatique et de l’évolution de la réflexion théologique sur Marie, et de fait sur le Christ, en Islande médiévale. / Maríu saga is an anonymous hagiographic saga relating the story of Mary’s life, from her Conception to her Assumption, written in the vernacular and composed in the monastic milieu between the last third of the thirteenth century and the second half of the fourteenth century in Iceland. Coupled with an unprecedented translation of the text, this dissertation offers a new approach to Maríu saga that I situate within the long literary and theological tradition of the Lives of the Virgin – these Marian biographic homilies which draw on apocryphal gospels were composed by monks and theologians from the seventh to the tenth century in the Byzantine Empire –, and that I put into the European medieval literary and cultural context in order to examine the literary and doctrinal issues raised by the act of writing and rewriting the life of the Virgin in Iceland in the Middle Ages. I successively consider Maríu saga from different perspectives: in a first part, from the history of the reception of biblical and parabiblical texts; in a second part, from an historical and a philological aspect; in a third part, from a literary point of view; and in a fourth part, from a theological angle. My aim is to demonstrate through the study of its poetics and its doctrine that, like the medieval ecclesiastical lives of Mary, Maríu saga bears specific features of its cultural area of its time: medium between literature and theology, this work is a narrative hagiographic text that presents the double interest of being the witness both to the practice of hagiographic rewriting in the vernacular and to the doctrinal development and the evolution of the theological reflection on Mary, and in fact on Christ, in medieval Iceland.

Cette thèse vise à explorer les banquets en Norvège et en Islande aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles. Le sujet de cette étude, évoqué de manière éparse par l’historiographie, a pour objectif cardinal de de contrer cette lacune en fournissant un portrait global des festins à l’époque concernée. L’approche empruntée accorde une importance particulière aux rares descriptions de banquets ainsi qu’aux détails exceptionnels contenus dans les sources historiques. Cette enquête ambitionne également d’identifier et de comprendre les divers rôles joués par les réunions festives en Norvège et en Islande selon deux axes principaux. Le premier est celui de la convivialité, de la sociabilité, faisant un usage positif de ces rassemblements. Inversement, le second voyait l’instrumentalisation du festin comme appareil de distinction sociale et d’une affirmation agressive du rang de chaque convive. Cette approche permet de formuler une ébauche de catégorisation des banquets, de leur usage et de leur richesse. De plus, l’analyse offre l’occasion de constater les dimensions uniques de ce phénomène culturel prévalent de la Scandinavie de l’Ouest, mais également d’observer les similitudes entretenues avec le reste de l’Europe. Enfin, le dernier aspect abordé dans cette thèse vise à examiner en surface la translation de coutumes festives et courtoises d’un espace à un autre en fonction des relations politiques entre la Norvège et l’Islande. Pour y arriver, nous recourrons à des textes législatifs issus des deux régions à l’étude, de sagas royales, de sagas de contemporains et de documents produits dans l’environnement de la cour norvégienne. / This thesis explores feasting in Norway and Iceland during the 12th and 13th centuries. The subject of this work, often only merely mentioned by historiography, aims to fill this need by painting a general picture of banquets during the chosen time period. We aim to specifically address the topic by garnering exceptional details present in historical documents. This study also wishes to establish the various roles played by banquets by following two main axes. The first one sees the feast serving as a conveyer of social cohesion and friendships and also as a building tool for relationships. Inversely, the second exposes how feasts could serve more hostile purposes, notably distinguishing every attendee and underlining social inequalities among a given group. We also aim to categorize feasts, to identify their uses and their breadth. Through these efforts, we also identify unique traits that define this practice around western Scandinavia, but also the differences it entertains against other European regions. Finally, this study aims to touch on the transmission of customs surrounding feasting from Norway to Iceland incidental to increasing political relationships. To achieve the aforementioned goals, we solicited the use legal texts from both regions, king sagas, contemporary sagas, as well as documents coming from the Norwegian court.

Sturla Þórðarson: his work in context of his time and an analysis of the authorial intent The purpose of this thesis is to analyse the literary-historiographical works of Sturla Þórðarson with regard to the specific historical situation at the time of their origin and the methods and authorial intent of this 13th century Icelandic historian. The introductory chapters give a brief overview of Sturla Þórðarson's life in a broader historical context, based on the extant primary sources, and of his literary and literary- historiographical works. The major topic of the thesis is an analysis and comparison of two of the author's works, Íslendinga saga and Hákonar saga Hákonarsonar, in context of various scholars' views of medieval historiography. The former saga belongs to the genre of samtíðarsögur (contemporary sagas), the latter to the genre of konungasögur (kings' sagas). Both works present the same historical period. The major object of analysis is the differences in the author's approach to the historical material in his literary-historiographical works of different genres; this analysis is followed by an attempt to explain the differences. The first part of the thesis presents a separate analysis of each saga in context of the given genre. Both sagas are among the latest extant works in their respective...

La place du mort est une étude topographique des sépultures païennes de l'âge de fer en Islande. Le but de ce travail est d'étudier la localisation des tombes et d'en déterminer le sens. Les résultats se fondent sur une révision critique de toutes les données disponibles en matière de site funéraire en Islande, et sur la fouille de chaque sépulture répertoriée. Les données obtenues permettent l'élaboration d'un modèle de localisation des tombes qui les situe a) loin des fermes, mais près des frontières et des routes, b) à proximité des fermes et à une courte distance de leur zone d'activité principale et c) au carrefour entre la route principale et l'allée menant au corps de ferme. Ces résultats ont été testés et confirmés par d'autres explorations de terrain et des fouilles récentes. La comparaison des tombes situées en a) et en b) met en évidence une différence intéressante : près des fermes, les tombes sont souvent orientées nord-sud, les sépultures sont en petit nombre et d'une variété limitée, et la population des défunts est majoritairement constituée d'hommes adultes ou âgés. Les tombes éloignées des fermes quant à elles sont le plus souvent orientées est-ouest, présentent une variété plus importante de biens funéraires, et contiennent des hommes et des femmes de tous âges. Les spécificités topographiques sont interprétées comme reflétant les différentes étapes du processus de la colonisation humaine de l'Islande, qui a eu lieu à la fin du IXe siècle : au stade initial, les sépultures sont placées près de l‘unique endroit important aux yeux des premiers colons : leur habitation. Puis la croissance de l'immigration entraîne de nouvelles règles, dont l'élaboration de frontières entre les propriétés agricoles, frontières signifiées entre autres par les cimetières qui y sont établis. Vers la fin de la colonisation, les démarcations sont nettes et convenues. Les frontières sont désinvesties et les lieux d'importance sont alors déplacés aux carrefours entre route principale et allée conduisant au nouveaux corps de ferme construits au sein d'établissements prééxistants. / The Place of the Dead. Viking Pagan Burial in Icelandic Cultural LandscapeLa place du mort is a topographical study of pagan burials from the late Iron Age in Iceland. The aim of this work is to investigate where burials are located, and explain the reason behind the choice of place. The results are based on a critical revision of all available data on known burial sites in Iceland, and a survey of each site in the field. The main results are presented as a model of burial location, which shows that graves were placed either a) away from farmhouses, on boundaries and by roads, or b) close to farms, and a short distance outside the main activity area of the farm, or c) at the crossroads between the main road and the home lane leading to the farm. These results were tested – and confirmed - by further field survey and excavation. When the details of each grave at the two extreme locations were compared, and interesting difference became apparent: At locations near farms, the graves are frequently orientated N-S, the grave-goods are in small numbers and of a limited variety, and the population are predominantly adult or old men. The graves far away from the farm, are most often oriented E-W, there is a greater number and a greater variety of gravegoods, and there are male and female graves of people of all ages.The differences between locations are explained as different stages of the process of the human colonisation of Iceland which occurred in the late 9th century : at the initial stage, burials were located near to the only significant place of the first settlers, the habitation. With growing immigration, people establish boundaries between farms by placing cemeteries there. Towards the end of the colonisation, where boundaries have been agreed upon, the most significant location shifts again, from boundaries, to the junction between the main road and the home track, leading to the farm which has been located between two already established settlements.

Les méthodes de transfert de temps actuelles atteignent des performances telles que leur utilisation permet de tester les lois de la Physique Fondamentale. Dans ce cadre, la mission ACES vise, entre autres, l'étude des effets de la Gravitation sur le battement des horloges à travers un lien de communication performant, le Lien Micro-Onde. Ce manuscrit se focalise sur la comparaison des horloges de cette mission pour en développer un modèle précis au dixième de picoseconde. De ce modèle découle un algorithme de traitement des mesures brutes qui servira lors de la mission. Des tests de ce programme ont été réalisés à l'aide d'une simulation des mesures de la mission afin d'en évaluer les performances. Par ailleurs, les besoins de la mission en précision de l'orbitographie des stations et des calibrations temporelles de la mission sont approfondis et montrent de limites moins contraignantes que celles naïvement estimées. Enfin, la résolution statistique des ambiguïtés de phase est étudiée à l'aide d'un modèle réaliste de bruit des mesures. Ce travail conduit à des méthodes permettant de réduire considérablement le taux d'échec de cette détermination. Ce travail s'ouvre sur l'étude du projet SAGAS et de son concept avancé de lien optique. Des combinaisons de mesures et leur optimisation permettent d'évaluer les performances du projet sur plusieurs de ses objectifs scientifiques, tels que l'exploration spatiale, les tests des lois de la Gravitation ou les ondes gravitationnelles.

This thesis takes a fresh, character-based approach to the Íslendingasögur. It is inspired by a narratological study that unites the functional and structural role of characters with their human, individualistic portrayal. My major objective is to demonstrate the important connection between characterisation and structure in the sagas. By drawing attention to characters that I term narrative triggers, I offer a way of reading the sagas that relies both on the narrative conventions of tradition and on the less predictable, personal interactions between the cast of any given saga. In the case of both major and minor figures in the Íslendingasögur a certain type of character is often present to perform necessary motivational functions, allowing the plot to develop. In Part I I emphasise the functional aspect of these characters, before exploring unusual examples that emphasise their individuality in Part II.The motivation of the plot is linked throughout to the figure of the ójafnaðarmaðr. A secondary objective is to provide a clearer understanding of the nature and function of this commonly occurring character type. The ójafnaðarmaðr is frequently alluded to in scholarship,but this thesis provides the first in-depth study of the portrayal of these characters. The quality that informs them (ójafnaðr,‘inequity’, lit. ‘unevenness’) is a threat to one of the core values of saga society and hints at an ‘unbalancing’ of social interactions and of the narrative equilibrium itself. That this unbalance leads to changes in the social structure of the setting is a key factor in driving the plots of the sagas along. For this reason, a detailed examination of the figure of the ójafnaðarmaðr is long overdue: they can be observed to perform a specific narrative function but are always fitted to suit their particular context. Focussing on the structural conventions of character introduction, Part I establishes my methodology and catalogues the examples of characters introduced as ójafnaðarmenn. The scope is limited to those introduced as such because it allows me to establish for the first time the full corpus and conventions of these characters and their introductions. Following developments in our understanding of the oral background to the sagas, my approach to these narratives is built upon the evidence of their shared origins in pre-literate storytelling [...]. The intersection between functionality and individuality in character brings certain aspects of the Íslendingasögur to the fore. Part II of this thesis shows that in combination with the structural markers explored in Part I, the sagas employ the collective perspective of the general public, other characters and ‘irrational’ motivators such as fate to contribute to their techniques of characterisation. Because disruptive qualities speak inherently of a difference in the way an individual sees themselves and in the way the public sees them, or we as an audience are meant to see them, figures termed ójafnaðarmaðr are an ideal focal point for the development of this study.

Yes / Icelandic settlement (Landnám) period farmsteads offer opportunities to explore the nature and timing of anthropogenic activities and environmental impacts of the first Holocene farming communities. We employ Bayesian statistical modelling of archaeological, paleoenvironmental and documentary datasets to present a framework for improving chronological robustness of archaeological events. Specifically, we discuss events relevant to the farm Hrísbrú, an initial and complex settlement site in southwest Iceland. We demonstrate that tephra layers are key in constraining reliable chronologies, especially when combined with related datasets and treated in a Bayesian framework. The work presented here confirms earlier interpretations of the chronology of the site while providing increased confidence in the robustness of the chronology. Most importantly, integrated modelling of AMS radiocarbon dates on Hordeum vulgare grains, palynological data, documented evidence from textual records and typologically diagnostic artefacts yield increased dating reliability. The analysis has also shown that AMS radiocarbon dates on bone collagen need further scrutiny. Specifically for the Hrísbrú farm, first anthropogenic footprint palynomorph taxa are estimated to around AD 830–881 (at 95.4% confidence level), most likely before the tephra fall out of AD 877 ± 1 (the Landnám tephra layer), demonstrating the use of arable fields before the first known structures were built at Hrísbrú (AD 874–951) and prior to the conventionally accepted date of the settlement of Iceland. Finally, we highlight the importance of considering multidisciplinary factors for other archaeological and paleoecological studies of early farming communities of previously uninhabited island areas.

The study is focused on the Old Norse "contemporary sagas" (texts composed with a short time distance from the events of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that are recorded in them) and some of the bishops' sagas as images of the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Icelanders' identity and their relationship to other lands, especially Norway. It aims at analysing the roles and meanings of various identity bearers portrayed in these sources - chieftains, royal representatives, ecclesiastical dignitaries, and saintly bishops. The approach to the sources is based on an analysis of how recent historical events were transformed into a narrative discourse, in which they were connected to the more distant past that formed the medieval Icelandic society's cultural memory. That way, these events themselves became a part of this society's cultural memory, and the given historical knowledge was endowed with specific meanings, which were not inherently present in the knowledge itself, but were based on its contextualization. The study shows how the narrativization of the recent events and their integration into the cultural memory creates a meaningful relationship between the past and the present. The objective of the study is to show how the narrative sources reflect the society's perception of its recent...

The aim of this master’s degree essays is to analyse and compare the first-contact situations and means of communication as described in four different sagas including Legendary Sagas and Sagas of Icelanders, more specifically Vínlandsagas. Two additional papers on contacts and communication with indigenous people from the perspectives of Spanish conquistadores and Brittish settlers in Australia were reviewed to establish a baseline for behaviour in contact situations with unknown peoples. The analysis of both sagas and additional sources shows that neither of them focus in their description on communications tools and instead focus on the different behaviour of the indigenous people as observed by the settlers and conquistadores and on the actions and transactions with the indigenous peoples. / Das Ziel der vorliegenden Arbeit war es, die Beschreibungen von Erstkontaktsituationen und Kommunikationsmitteln in vier verschiedenen Sagas zu vergleichen und zu analysieren. Zu diesem Zweck wurden Vorzeitsagas und Isländersagas, insbesondere Vínlandsagas untersucht. Zudem wurden zwei ergänzende Artikel zu Erstkontakten und Kommunikation mit indigenen Bevölkerungen aus der Sicht von spanischen Conquistadores und britischen Kolonisateuren in Australien aufgearbeitet, um eine Operationslinie für das Verhalten in Kontaktsituationen mit fremden Bevölkerungen zu haben. Die Analyse von sowohl Sagas als auch den ergänzenden Quellen zeigt, dass weder Sagas noch spätere Aufzeichnungen Beschreibungen der Kommunikationsmittel en detail erwähnen. Stattdessen liegt der Fokus auf dem vom eigenen abweichenden Verhalten und dem Umgang mit den indigenen Bevölkerungen.