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Guest lecture by Odd Einar Haugen and Nina Stensaker, University of Bergen

The Faculty of Humanities is pleased to invite students, staff, and the general public to a lecture by Odd Einar Haugen and Nina Stensaker (University of Bergen): "Two Old Norwegian dialogues: Barlaams saga ok Jósafats and Konungs skuggsjá".

The lecture takes place in Jinonice (room 5022) from 9.30 am to 10:50 am on Tuesday, November 13. The lecture will be held in English.

The Old Norwegian literature offers a wide variety of works especially from ca. 1200 to 1350, when the Black Death came to Norway and led to a drastic fall in the production of literary works. From the prolific 13^th century we would like to introduce you to two dialogues written probably in the 1250s and preserved in manuscripts from the 1270s.

Odd Einar Haugen will talk about a translation from Latin of the legend about the hermit and monk Barlaam and the young prince Jósafat (in Latin Josaphat). This is an extended dialogue in which Barlaam expounds the Christian doctrine, while the prince mostly asks leading questions for the monk. While some passages of this text are somewhat long-winded, there are a number of amusing stories, exempla, interspersed in the text as a kind of comic relief. Many of these are tales of Oriental origin, and they are also known from several medieval collections of exempla. This lecture will give an overview of these stories in Barlaams saga ok Jósafats, and discuss in some details one of them, the fable of the devils that deceive men. You may indeed be familiar with this story, since it is also told in the Decameron by Boccaccio. So how does this rather profane story fit into a religious work like Barlaams saga ok Jósafats?

Nina Stensaker continues with Konungs skuggsjá, also known as Speculum regale, which is regarded as the most significant work of the Norwegian Middle Ages. It is written as a dialogue between father and son, where the son humbly asks for advice as to how to make his way in the world. The work consists of a prologue and three distinctive parts. The first part is referred to as the Merchant’s Chapter, and takes us through the discussion of the merchant’s trade and what a young man needs to know in order to be successful. An important part of this chapter is passages describing geography, especially Iceland, Greenland and Ireland. The chapter also provides information about natural phenomena, where God is the creator of everything, and thereby one can study Nature as God’s plan. The second part is about the king and his court, where the father introduces the virtues of a retainer in the king’s court and what the son should consider in order to make a good appearance before the king. The last part concerns the role of the king and how he is expected to act in order to answer to the demands of being the representative of God in earthly matters.