Forgery · Forging Ahead: Faking Sagas and Developing Concepts of Cultural Authenticity and National Identity in 17th- and 18th-Century Scandinavia
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2017-09-01 → 2019-08-31
- EU contribution
- €173,857
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
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Results in brief
Forging Ahead: Faking Sagas and Developing Concepts of Cultural Authenticity and National Identity in 17th- and 18th-Century Scandinavia
The high-stakes game of forgery, from priceless art to counterfeit banknotes, has stimulated public and professional interest for centuries. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Scandinavia a number of texts appeared for the first time which subsequently came to be identified as literary forgeries. The most famous (although still relatively unknown) are Hjalmars och Hramers saga, Krembres saga and Hafgeirs saga Flateyings. Since their appearance very little research has been done on these works: as literary forgeries they are deemed to have minimal value in the intellectual and literary history of Scandinavia. This project aims to demonstrate, on the contrary, that these texts have played a central role in the development of literary and philological studies in the region, as well as having ramifications more generally as regards various key concepts used by researchers: fiction, history, textual unity and, not least, national identity. It does so by showing that they are symptomatic of a paradigm shift, linked to the widespread use of the printing press in popular and intellectual culture and the political ramifications of nascent nation-state formations. Through an in-depth study of the texts as a group, along with supporting information gleaned from a large amount of relevant peripheral material, the mechanisms by which saga forgeries could be produced and texts could, for the first time in a northern context, even be characterised as forgeries, are laid bare. In practical terms, this project had three main objectives: (1) gathering the corpus – these texts had never been looked at alongside each other as a group – and making it available to a wider audience; (2) putting the corpus into the context of Scandinavian philology and antiquarianism as well as that of European forgery and intellectual history; and (3) determining the web of motivations and causes which led to the production of these forgeries as well as their eventual exposure.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The high-stakes game of forgery, from priceless art to counterfeit banknotes, has stimulated public and professional interest for centuries. This project adds to the body of relevant examples, and feeds back into the broader theoretical frameworks, by looking at a number of texts which appeared for the first time in 17th- and 18th-century Scandinavia and were revealed to be forgeries. The most famous (although still relatively unknown) are ‘Hjalmars och Hramers saga', ‘Krembre saga' and ‘Hafgeirs saga Flateyings'. Since their appearance very little research has been done on these works: as literary forgeries they are deemed to have little value in the intellectual and literary history of Scandinavia. This project will prove, on the contrary, that these texts play a central role in the development of literary and philological studies in the region. Moreover, their very existence problematises many of the basic concepts employed by researchers of Scandinavian texts: fiction, history, philology, textual unity, authorial intention and not least national identity. While the overall aim of the project is to bring the importance of these forgeries to light, this will be carried out through three subsidiary aims: 1) Studying the interconnectedness of philological developments with developments in forgery. As forgers develop new techniques, philologists do so too in order to expose fakes, but these dialectical movements are not just opposites, but may also involve a blurring of techniques and aims. 2) Looking into the ways in which international trends have fed into Scandinavian forgery, taking classical and renaissance cases of forgery and forgery exposure as well as enlightenment and romantic causes celebres. 3) Analysing forgery as national fantasy, by using the ideosyncrasies found in forgeries to glimpse the aspirations and interests of both producers and consumers, seen as representative of certain culture-specific desires.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- GOETEBORGS UNIVERSITET · GoeteborgCoordinatorSweden
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union