Saga Club
Saga Club is the longest-standing reading group at UC-Berkeley. Members meet once a month to translate assigned passages of Old Norse literature with wine and snacks. Saga Club has its anchor in the UCB Scandinavian Department, but welcomes visitors, friends in other departments, and other enthusiasts with a few years of Old Norse under their belt.
Saga Club was founded in 1954 and counted noted linguists Madison S. Beeler and Stuart L. Fletcher among its first members. Around 200 people have participated in Saga Club over the years, including many local Old Norse students and enthusiasts, and a number of distinguished visitors. Saga Club recently celebrated its 60th anniversary and vows never again to read all of Heimskringla.
Useful links
Cleasby-Vigfusson’s Old Icelandic-English Dictionary
Lexicon Poeticum
Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages Database
Zoega’s Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic
The Nordic Center at UC Berkeley serves as a vibrant, interdisciplinary platform that brings together the Nordics to UC Berkeley and UC Berkeley to the Nordics. We foster dialogue, support exchanges, spark research, enable shared understandings, inform policies and practices, and further elevate the profile and global interest in the Nordics.
The Nordic Center at UC Berkeley, housed at the Institute for European Studies, coordinates a vibrant suite of activities in close collaboration with the Scandinavian Department(link is external), Berkeley Haas Center for Responsible Business(link is external), Institute for Business & Social Impact(link is external), the Peder Sather Center(link is external), and works across UC Berkeley and beyond.
The Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study (SASS) is the leading academic society in North America promoting the study of Nordic languages, literatures, history, art, music, and other area-studies topics.
SASS hosts an interdisciplinary conference on these topics every spring that is attended by several hundred scholars from North America and Scandinavia. The UCB Department of Scandinavian faculty and graduate students typically show a strong attendance at that conference and hosted it in San Francisco in 2013. For more information on the annual conference, including past and future sites and programs, click here.
SASS also has editorial responsibility for the peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal Scandinavian Studies, published by the University of Illinois Press.