“You’d Come Back to Me”: Comparing Storytelling Across Time in Taylor Swift’s Songs and the Old Norse Saga of the Volsungs

Description

This essay examines how narratives separated by centuries and cultural contexts can converge in form, emotion, and meaning by considering Taylor Swift’s songs and the Old Norse prose The Saga of the Volsungs in dialogue. It aims to demonstrate how the parallels between the two bodies of work can be indicative of storytelling as a universal language. 

The comparison is specifically conducted between the Norse legend of Brynhild, Sigurd, and Gudrun and five of Swift’s songs—“betty”, “august”, and “cardigan” from folklore, “champagne problems” from evermore, and “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys” from The Tortured Poets Department. 

Through close reading and comparative analysis, this essay traces recurring patterns of love, betrayal, memory, and fate across the songs and the saga, analyzing plot correspondences, shared metaphors, and narrative structures. It also studies shifts in perspective, where Swift’s use of fragmented, multi-voiced storytelling differs from the saga’s linear, omniscient narration. 

This essay concludes that these resonances reflect a shared narrative inheritance that persists across time. Storytelling emerges as an ongoing, collective practice in which stories are perpetually reshaped, retold, and recognized in various forms. There remains an underlying continuity in narrative logic despite differences in medium and historical context. Reading across temporal and cultural boundaries thus allows us to understand how stories—and their reinventions—live on, for evermore.

Team

Members

Student: Zimu (Angelina) Wang

Supervisor: Ann Marie Rasmussen