The thesis compares the depictions of paganism found in the Middle Irish Togail Troí (‘The
Destruction of Troy’; first half of the twelfth century) and the Old Norse Trójumanna saga
(‘The Story of the Trojans’; first half of the thirteenth century), which are both based on Dares
Phrygius’s Late Antique De excidio Troiae historia. The two vernacular adaptations are
presented in the wider context of the medieval popularity of Dares’s text. The in-depth
analysis of the pagan references (most of which relate to mythology and ritual), reveals Togail
Troí’s and Trójumanna saga’s general source-based approach and their shared reliance on
Latin mythographic scholarship, but also a different approach concerning the literary
presentation of paganism. The Irish text’s ‘Christian’ approach to the issue (as seen through
authorial comments and historical contextualisation) is shown to be in contrast to the Norse
text’s ‘classicising’ approach (i.e. paganism presented as in the classical sources themselves).
The findings of this analysis are then compared with the literary attitudes towards
paganism encountered in medieval Irish and Norse texts more widely (especially in those set
in Ireland or Nordic countries). This comparison reveals a general sympathy for many pagan
characters that finds some parallels in the Trojan texts as well, but also a different
representation of pagan deities in the two traditions. Indeed, the Irish tendency to avoid
depicting the gods as such and the opposite Norse tendency, to portray them in an explicit way
(often from a pagan point of view), mirror the evidence furnished by Togail Troí and
Trójumanna saga. The literary attitudes to paganism and particularly towards mythology,
which are encountered in the two texts, are further explored from the point of view of
authorship. It is shown that the Irish author is writing in a historiographical mould, while the
Norse author is writing in what could be described as a mythographical mould. Two
complementary lines of interpretation are sketched for this phenomenon. The first one
emphasises the existence of two different cultures of dealing with paganism in Irish and Norse
literature respectively. The second line of interpretation draws to the fore two different
approaches to the author-text relationship, examined through the framework of medieval
literary theory.
The final chapters highlight the importance of the research both for our understanding of
the unique and complex literary cultures of medieval Ireland and Iceland and for the light that
can be shed on the multifaceted relationship between authors and texts in medieval literature
through the prism of paganism
