In her dissertation, The Irruption of the Past in 'Nornagests páttr' and Allied Texts, Department of Scandinavian Ph.D. candidate Merrill Kaplan describes how four medieval Icelandic narratives evidence a complicated desire on the part of medieval Christian Icelanders to confront and come to grips with the pagan age. In each of these episodes, an old man appears at the court of one of the kings Olaf, bearing stories about the deeds of heroes and kings of the pagan age. The king listens fascinated to his guest’s tales, even if the bishop stands at his other shoulder and urges him to retire and say his evening prayers. Kaplan’s study reveals how these stories may have functioned for the people who wrote and consumed them as a “technology for thinking about the past and its persistence in the present.”