Aud the Deep-minded in the historical Icelandic narrative

In the reception of the Old Norse universum in contemporary Icelandic historical novels, the narrative in them is, as a rule, based on some certain Old Icelandic literary texts, and there are created intertextual links to them. The novels by Vilborg Davidsdottir: “Aud” (2009), “Crimson Skies” (2012) and “The Bloody Earth” (2017) differ from this trend, as they are devoted to the person, about whom there exists no single detailed Old Icelandic text, Aud the Deep-Minded. The leading motifs of the trilogy are: the gender issue, paganism and christianity, the issue of personal choice and personal freedom, interaction between the Scandinaves and the Celts. As the period descibed in the trilogy is the time just before and during the settlement of Iceland, it can be stated, that Aud the Deep-minded stands “on the other side” of the Old Icelandic narrative tradition, as the main events of her life occur before the emerging of this tradition. The poetics of the trilogy is largely derived from the absence of a developed narrative tradition about Aud both in Old and in modern Icelandic literature, as well as by the fact, that a considerable part of its contents could have never become the material of Old Icelandic literature at all (e.g. the daily life of women and the details of the Irish slaves’ fate). The trilogy by Vilborg Davidsdottir lies between the specific Icelandic („saga-centered“) and the non-Icelandic form of the historical novel.