Stephen’s Saga: “old cawcaws huggin and munin for his strict privatear”

Joyce interweaves characters, names, and situations from saga plots and narratives to create his Irish saga, Finnegans Wake, using Norse mythological elements, reworking a Nordic-Irish past and creating the Earwicker family, the central family of his final work, from Old Norse gods. Joyce fuses his family history within text segments, as shown in this chapter’s “Mamalujo” and “1132” sections. Joyce’s literary alter ego, Stephen, is the nucleus of this chapter, which moves through the textual environment Joyce creates, analysing his naming strategy in the text. This onomastic search reveals Joyce’s autobiographical “Engrvakon saga” around Stephen, the protagonist in his earlier novels and a central character in Ulysses. Nordic material and fairy tales, ostensibly written for children, also play a significant role in Joyce’s writing; repeated allusions to these sources of inspiration underpin his poetry and critical writing, emphasising an overlooked autobiographical element throughout his work. Therefore, Joyce’s only known examples of children’s stories, The Cat and the Devil and The Cats of Copenhagen, which he wrote in epistolary form for his grandson, Stephen, conclude the chapter.