Thou Fearful Guest

A stranger appears at the court of a Norwegian king known best for bringing Christianity to the North. Variations of this scene appear four times in the fourteenth-century manuscript Flateyjarbók. Thou Fearful Guest analyzes how these episodes create meaning by their connections to custom, law, myth, discourses of historical and spiritual truth, typological understandings of time, and the historical context of the manuscript in which they appear. Thou Fearful Guest explores how and to what end medieval Icelanders thought about tales of heathen gods and heroes.