This article borrows from the field of cognitive psychology to add nuance to Jan Assmann’s notion of a prospective cultural memory of death. Whereas Assmann’s view accounts primarily for those cultures that tend to rely upon external honor and social status to formulate a sense of prospective memory of death, those cultures that tend to rely upon internal conceptions of righteousness or culpability have little representation in Assmann’s theory. For more than two decades, the field of cognitive psychology has been developing its own theory of prospective memory. There, prospective memory is the memory of (typically mundane, everyday) tasks an individual must accomplish at some point in the future (e.g., buying milk, meeting someone, or running an errand). Certain memory aids (e.g., a note in a calendar or a string tied around a finger) might assist individuals in the retrieval of prospective memories. So too might material, literary, or folkloric aids be culturally employed to assist a culture in remembering its prospects for death, dying, and the afterlife. This article explores ways that cognitive prospective memory might be useful in understanding how prospective cultural memories of death and the afterlife might have changes in Old Norse-Icelandic sources as the region’s religious landscape developed during the transitions from pre-Christian to Christian, and then from Catholic to post-Reformation, worldviews.

中文翻译：

---

古北欧和冰岛资料中对死亡的前瞻性记忆

本文借鉴了认知心理学领域，为扬·阿斯曼 (Jan Assmann) 的关于死亡的前瞻性文化记忆的概念增添了细微差别。虽然阿斯曼的观点主要解释了那些倾向于依靠外部荣誉和社会地位来形成对死亡的预期记忆感的文化，但那些倾向于依靠内部正义或罪责概念的文化在阿斯曼的理论中几乎没有代表性。二十多年来，认知心理学领域一直在发展自己的前瞻记忆理论。在那里，前瞻记忆是对个人在未来某个时间点必须完成的（通常是平凡的、日常的）任务的记忆（例如，买牛奶、会见某人或跑腿）。某些记忆辅助工具（例如，日历上的便笺或手指上系着的绳子）可能有助于个人检索预期的记忆。材料、文学或民俗辅助材料也可能在文化上被用来帮助一种文化记住其死亡、垂死和来世的前景。本文探讨了认知前瞻性记忆可能有助于理解死亡和来世的前瞻性文化记忆如何随着该地区的宗教景观在从前基督教到基督教的转变过程中发展而在古北欧-冰岛资源中发生变化的方式，然后从天主教改革后的世界观。