Professor Wellendorf’s research focuses on the interface between the vernacular Old Norse literature and the Latin tradition. He is particularly interested in learned literature, broadly defined, mythography, the skaldic poetry of the Old Norse renaissance around 1200, and Old Norse treatises on grammar and poetics.

He wrote his doctoral dissertation on vision literature and has also published on runes, The saga of king Sverrir (and Saxo Grammaticus), the Icelandic bishops’ chronicle Hungrvaka, the Icelandic Book of Settlements, Old Norse cosmology, hagiography, idolatry, mythology, and many other topics. Common to these studies is that the Old Norse texts are studied against the backdrop of a wider classical and medieval Latin tradition.

Wellendorf’s recent book Gods and Humans in Medieval Scandinavia: Retying the Bonds examines the changing understandings of pre-Christian Scandinavian myth and religion in the period ca. 1200–ca. 1700.

Other publications include:

“Honey and Poison: Reframing the Pagan Past at Ǫgvaldsnes and Elsewhere.” Temenos 55 (1): 55–74. 2019

“Letters from Kings: Epistolary Communication in the Kings’ Sagas (until c. 1150).” In Moving Words in the Nordic Middle Ages: Tracing Literacies, Texts and Verbal Communities, edited by Amy Mulligan and Else Mundal, 113–41. Acta Nordica. Turnhout: Brepols. 2019.

These and other publications can be read here.

Books

Gods and Humans in Medieval Scandinavia: Retying the Bonds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 

The Fourth Grammatical Treatise, ed. with Margaret Clunies Ross. London: The Viking Society, 2014 [download complete text].

Fjöld veit hon frœða: Utvalde arbeid av Else Mundal, ed. with Odd Einar Haugen and Bernt Øyvind Thorvaldsen. Bibliotheca Nordica 5. Oslo: Novus, 2012.

Kristelig visionslitteratur i norrøn tradition. Bibliotheca Nordica 2. Oslo: Novus, 2009.

Oral art forms and their passage into writing, ed. with Else Mundal. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2008.