Gripla - 20.12.2016, Qupperneq 297

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CAROL J . CLOVER
SAME FRAME
Sagas and Movies
Speech delivered on the occasion of Professor Clover’s acceptance
of an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Iceland, October 2nd 2015
when sveinn yngvi [Egilsson, Professor of Icelandic literature and
Head of Íslensku- og menningardeild 2014–16] and I agreed that my talk
today should be a casual one explaining the relation of my two fields, film
and medieval, I breathed a sigh of relief. Largely because it’s something
I’ve had to think about and have even spoken about once before, on orders
from my colleagues, at my retirement in 2007. I tried then, and will try
again here – though in a very different way, for the obvious reason that
you are a very different audience, an audience of whom not just some of
you know what the Íslendingasögur are, but all of you. What a pleasure.
I met sagas and film in the same year: 1959. It was in San francisco,
where I’d come to college with the plan of studying music. My third night
there, I decided to go to a movie. I’d seen only a handful of movies in my
life up to then, so going to “the cinema” seemed like a cool, city thing to
do. I lived just two blocks from the Surf theater, a well-known art-film
venue (though I didn’t know that at the time). the film I saw was Ingmar
Bergman’s Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries). I found it bewildering but
powerful, and I knew I wanted to see more films like it. and I did – lots.
By Christmas I’d seen films by not only Bergman, but Bunuel, Godard,
Dreyer, Pabst, and Kurasawa; and I’d met other film buffs with whom
I’d go to movies and afterwards to a café for discussion over wine. It was
informal education, but education nonetheless.
In the meantime, at school, one of my required courses had to be
in literature; I chose a survey of western epic, a course that began with
Gilgamesh and marched through the Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, Chanson de
Roland, Nibelungenlied, Beowulf, and, finally, Njál’s Saga (in the old Dasent
Gripla XXVII (2016): 297–313