Baby-naming Rituals and Shamanism in Three Icelandic Family Sagas with Cross-Cultural Comparisons
Why this work is in the frame
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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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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it