From January 7-10, the project’s Postdoctoral Researcher, Dr Timothy Bourns, attended the Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention “in Toronto” (via Zoom). The theme for 2021 was Persistence.
Timothy’s paper, titled ‘Non-Human Emotion in Old Norse Literature’, was included in a panel on Old Norse Emotion, chaired by Jay Paul Gates. The other papers were ‘Social Distancing and the Emotional Life of the Old Norse Outlaw’ by Matthew Bardowell, and ‘The Emotional Landscape of Hrafns saga Sveinbjarnarsonar‘ by Melissa Mayus. It was a dynamic session which acknowledged the exemplary scholarship on Old Norse emotions that has come before, while also exploring exciting new directions for the field.
Timothy examined the potential for non-human emotionality in Old Norse sources, recognising that in recent years, medieval scholarship has embraced both ecocriticism and animal studies on the one hand, and emotion studies on the other, but these turns have rarely intersected. By tracing the textual emotions performed by non-human animals, trees and trémenn (‘tree-people’), and bergbúar (‘rock-dwellers’), he argued that emotionality was not only thought to be a human phenomenon in the Old Norse-Icelandic worldview. Emotion emerges as a literary tool for authors to imbue the non-human with textual subjectivity and literary selfhood.
