Gunnell, Terry. The rights of the player.

• Author: Gunnell, Terry
• Title: "The rights of the player": Evidence of Mimi and Histriones in early medieval Scandinavia
• Published in: Comparative Drama 30, 1
• Year: 1996
• Pages: 1
• E-text: ProQuest
• Reference: Gunnell, Terry. "The rights of the player": Evidence of Mimi and Histriones in early medieval Scandinavia." Comparative Drama 30, 1 (Spring 1996): 1.

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Annotation

The aim of the article is to analyse the figures of the mimi and histriones as they are portrayed in Scandinavian literature of the tenth and eleventh centuries, while addressing them through a linguistic, literary and historical point of view. The article opens with a quick overview of the lack of drama studies concerning the Old Norse medieval literary tradition and then moves on to the linguistic analysis of the terms connected to performance and drama in the Old Norse language. For this analysis Gunnell takes into consideration the words leikar, loddar and truor, their relation to their Latin synonyms and counterparts, the terms mimi, histriones and ioculatores, and the implications of this relation. In the second half of the article, the author moves on to explore the nature of these figures with an analysis of their identities, provenience, arts, general reception and role in the courts, all supported by extracts from various kinds of Norse medieval texts.

Lýsing

Texta vantar

References

Chapter 23: sögðu að þar var Kaupa-Héðinn : " the conventions of saga narrative seem to dictate that no distinction should be made between a named character in a saga and any disguise that he or she might adopt: thus, in accounts involving disguise, a character becomes the role that he or she plays, and is named accordingly for the duration of the disguise. Typical examples of this are found in Njáls Saga, where Gunnar Hámundarson ‘becomes’ ‘Kaupa-Héðinn’ (p. 2)"

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• Written by: Giulia Mancini
• Icelandic/English translation: