Baby-naming Rituals and Shamanism in Three Icelandic Family Sagas with Cross-Cultural Comparisons
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores baby-naming traditions in connection with shamanism in three Íslendingasögur, Egils saga Skallagrímssonar, Laxdæla saga, and Gísla saga Súrssonar, as well as others. It argues that the baby-naming rituals seen in those sagas are rooted in shamanistic social practices. A cross-cultural analysis of baby-naming traditions in Sámi, Icelandic, and Greenlandic Inuit communities from post-Reformation accounts supports this claim. This comparison of the sagas with cultural practices creates a dialogue between literature, cultures, and contexts and provides a path of inquiry into the Old Norse depictions of a remembered pagan and early Christian culture around birth. Old Norse texts and post-Reformation accounts suggest that baby naming in Icelandic communities to some degree is comparable to both Sámi and Greenlandic Inuit traditions of coupling babies with dead relatives through naming. Babies’ namesakes functioned along with other supernatural aides to provide societal advantage and prestige, as well as spiritual support for individuals’ shamanic development. Furthermore, depictions of namesakes in the sagas create parallel structural units, providing insight into oral traditions or kinship storytelling patterns. This research on baby-naming rituals and the roles of shamans or others with shaman-like skills is a beginning step in our understanding of the intricacies of birth and naming practices in the Old Norse corpus.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".