An Image of the Konungr in the Old Norse Literature: a Search for Weltanschauung Stereotypes

An attempt is presented at the structural analysis of "Eymundar Юбttr" which aims to reveal some principles of the arrangement of a medieval text and to elicit from a literary work produced in the late 13th century some information on the Weltanschauung of the Vikings' time. A model is constructed in which a Scandinavian and an Eastern konungs are described as being the elements of the binary opposition: "belonging to one's folk – stranger" and "good - evil". The former pair is in regard to the latter is in subordinate position because the description of the "stranger" (intercultural opposition) is performed by employing the formulae characteristic of the description of the "evil" inside one culture. The position of a Scandinavian konungr is disputed by two personages. For that reason a supplementary opposition ("traditional" – "nontraditional") is singled out within the first element of the model. In the history of development of the text one may conditionally distinguish two versions. One belongs to the time of the text's existence in the oral form while the other was formed either when the story was transferred onto the paper or shortly before that time. When producing the first version the authors were guided by traditional worldview patterns, and in this case the relations between the Scandinavian and the non-Scandinavian were predominant. At the final stage of the юбttr formation the opposition between the konungs that belonged to the distinctive cultures was reduced to the level of a standard literary stereotype and the first place appertains now to the opposition between Eymundr who remains faithful to the tradition and Уlafr who destroys it.

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