Putrid fables and true histories: Perceptions of authenticity and the management of scepticism in Northern humanist fornaldarsaga scholarship

Narratologists and philosophers have long been aware that the identification of any text as history or fiction depends not on its structure, style or content, but on its truth-value as perceived by its audiences, both actual and implied. The same story can be presented as historical or as fictional depending on what kind of contract is set up between narrator (or author, or editor) and audience. The medieval literary works known to us as fornaldarsögur have been transmitted and re-appropriated across a very large span of time and for very different kinds of audiences, so it might be expected that some of them have passed through a range of different positions on the history-fiction spectrum (or even several positions at once) when being rewritten and received in different contexts over the centuries.