Paper short abstract:

The paper will explore the role of gender in the migration of narratives of rural Iceland in the past, arguing that those similarities found in traditions from different parts of Iceland may rather be rooted in the tendency of women to move between communities than the seasonal travels of men.

Paper long abstract:

The folk narrative archives of the earlier rural communities of Iceland and its recent digitalization have left us with invaluable opportunities to revise some of the assumptions made by earlier scholars and to engage with aspects of tradition that have been largely overlooked in the past. One of these aspects concerns gender-roles and gender-based experiences in the past and the influence of these roles on the ability to become active storytellers in local communities. This paper will present a fresh analysis of the largely ignored role of women in the migration of oral stories in the Icelandic earlier rural community, exploring various types of material contained in the Icelandic folk archives, focusing predominantly on the information provided by the female informants of the Icelandic folklore collector Hallfreður Örn Eiríksson (1932-2005).

As the paper will show, it is evident that a surprisingly large number of the women in these archives, especially those with large repertoires, evidently moved as adults to new parts of Iceland, often as result of marriage. In past scholarship, folklorists have tended to credit those similarities found in the oral narrative traditions of different parts of Iceland to men's seasonal travel, seeing women as having little role to play in migration of narratives. The paper will argue that while this should not be underestimated as source of narrative migration in the past, the more permanent geographical emigration of women often offers better explanations for many of these similarities.