sögfræði

Sögfræði is the study of history, including the writing and interpretation of the past. It concerns how historians select sources, assess their reliability, construct narratives, and situate events within broader social, political, and cultural contexts. The discipline uses methods such as source criticism, chronology, comparison, and contextual analysis to evaluate evidence from diverse materials, including archival documents, inscriptions, manuscripts, oral testimony, and material culture. A central focus is historiography: how historical explanations and narratives have developed over time, and how different intellectual traditions and social environments shape historical writing.

The field spans political history, social and economic history, cultural history, intellectual history, and regional or national histories. It also examines the processes by which history is produced, transmitted, and received by societies, including memory, identity, and public understanding of the past. In Icelandic and Nordic contexts, sögfræði has deep historical roots in medieval chronicles and saga literature and continues through modern archival research and scholarly analysis.

Sögfræði intersects with related disciplines such as archaeology, anthropology, sociology, and political science, drawing on diverse sources and methods to interpret past human activity. Critical concerns within the discipline include source bias, representativeness, the problem of presentism, and the influence of national or ideological narratives on historical interpretation. Overall, sögfræði aims to provide well-substantiated explanations of historical phenomena and to illuminate how societies remember and interpret their past.