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.
