Author: Timothy Bourns

Apart from participating in the Emotions and the Self project, I am also preparing a digital edition of a section of the Middle Dutch Lancelot compilation. Sometimes these two activities intersect. The episode that I am now editing is about Bohort’s experiences in the so-called Palace of Adventures in the Grail Castle. When Bohort visited the Grail Castle for the first time, he was spared a night in this dangerous place because of his pious attitude towards the Grail. Previously, Gawain, who had more eyes for the Grail maiden than for the Grail, was forced to spend the night in the Castle, suffered all kinds of abuse and disgrace, and was shamefully escorted out on a cart. Bohort has been admonished by a damsel some time ago that he really should have visited the palace and now is quite eager to experience its adventures. He finds a wonderful bed and is wounded by a lance that comes flying out of nowhere as he sits on the bed. Invisible hands take out the lance, but then Bohort has to fight a huge knight. When the fight goes Bohort’s way and he seems to have won, the wounded knight retires to an adjacent room and returns completely restored. Bohort resumes the fight, but now also takes care to keep the knight from entering the recovery room. He defeats his opponent and makes him promise to present himself at Arthur’s court. A colourful serpent then appears and fights a leopard. When the serpent is unable to win the fight, it draws back and the leopard disappears. From the mouth of the serpent a number of smaller serpents emerge. They begin to fight with their parent, until in the end all are dead. Bohort gets the strong impression that this all means something for the future (and it does, since the serpent stands for King Arthur who will in the Mort Artu section be attacked by his own kin while fighting Lancelot, the leopard).

And the night has only just begun. Next up is a very pale, greyish man with a precious harp. Two snakes that continuously bite him lie curled around his neck. He is lamenting and crying. The Alice Cooper look-a-like then tunes his harp and begins to sing a song about Joseph of Arimathea and his confrontation with a magician called Orphei about a magic castle on the Scottish moors. Afterwards, the harpist tells Bohort that only the knight who will sit in the Perilous Seat at the Round Table (that is: the Grail hero Galahad) will be able to end his suffering. Bohort might as well leave, such is the obvious message.

What strikes me in connection to emotions and the Self is what happens next. Bohort has been given this down-putting message and heard all kinds of wondrous things in the song, but what he asks the harpist is: How can you stand those biting snakes around your neck? Of all the things he could ask, this seems a minor detail and not very important for the story-line, yet his empathy works to create a sense of self for this young knight, I think. In our explanation of the term Self, we have said: “The constitution of medieval selfhood is premised on the reader’s (and the audience’s) projection of emotionality – and consequently of a presumed emotive interiority – onto the textual object.” That is exactly the case here, I think: Bohort becomes more of a self/person because he asks the most empathic, human question. The pale man then explains that he is being punished for the sin of pride and is actually glad to undergo this torment in his earthly life, because it may mean that he will not end up suffering eternally in hell. When he leaves the scene, he calls Bohort “lieve vrient” (“Dear friend”, l. 29.453), which is quite a different sentiment from his earlier put-offish attitude. Details like Bohort’s question are unobtrusive and easily overlooked when just reading the text, but editing, providing explanatory footnotes and translations brings them to the fore.

The well-known series of handbooks The Arthur of… was set up to replace the seminal Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages: A Collaborative History (ed. R.Sh. Loomis, 1959), better known as ALMA. The tenth and final volume closes off the series, published by the University of Wales Press. It is dedicated to the Arthurian Literature in Dutch and Flemish, the languages of the medieval Low Countries, and provides an overview of the historical and social context in which Middle Dutch Arthurian romances were created from the beginning of the thirteenth century onwards. There is an early fragment of a Tristan-story from the Rhine-Meuse region, but the main cradle was the multilingual county of Flanders. Quite a few French Arthurian romances originated in that county as well, as a separate chapter explains. Attention is paid to the manuscript tradition and the portrayal of Arthur in historical works. The three core chapters of the book reflect the development of the genre by first describing the translations of French verse romances, then the indigenous romances influenced by these translations and, finally, the translations of French prose romances. It is remarkable how popular the figure of Gauvain/Walewein was in the Low Countries; there even is an original Walewein-romance, describing his quest for a chessboard, a super sword and a lovely princess: Penninc and Pieter Vostaert’s Roman van Walewein. The most popular story, however, was that of Lancelot. The Old French Prose Lancelot was translated three, and probably even five, times into Middle Dutch, in verse translations as well as a prose version. In the 1320 Lancelot Compilation, a translation of the Lancelot–Queste del Saint Graal–Mort Artu was enriched by inserting seven Middle Dutch Arthurian romances into the larger narrative frame of the rise and fall of Lancelot, the Grail and King Arthur. And there is also a cycle of Merlin texts, based on the Old French Estoire de Merlin and Robert de Boron’s Joseph d’Arimathie and Merlin, and preserved in a Middle Low German rendition. The connections to German Arthurian material, sometimes based on Middle Dutch sources are discussed in a separate chapter, while an overview of modern Arthurian stories, plays, music, and games rounds off the book. It looks great, as the picture shows, and will be available for your perusal in the Reykjavík (2022) conference. Writing a review is also an option, just let me know (F.P.C.Brandsma@uu.nl)!

From March 24th-26th, the project’s intrepid doctoral student, Meritxell Risco de la Torre, “went to Denmark” and presented at the 14th Interdisciplinary Aarhus Student Symposium on Viking and Medieval Scandinavian Subjects (via Zoom).

Meritxell’s presentation was titled ‘Gender Rules / Gender Roles: Sex, Emotions, and Power in Partalopa saga and La Historia de L’Esforçat Cavaller Partinobles’. It compared two translations of the French romance Partonopeu de Blois and analysed the establishment of gendered power structures during Partonopeus and Melior’s first sexual encounter. 

Further details about the conference, including the full programme, can be found here.

Our project’s Principal Investigator, Professor Sif Ríkharðsdóttir, recently gave a talk on ‘Sorg og sársauki í Íslendingasögunum’ (‘Pain and Sorrow in the Icelandic Sagas’), which was delivered in a session organised by the Society for the History of Medicine at The Annual Meeting of the Icelandic Medical Association (18-22 January 2021). Vilhelmína Haraldsdóttir, Consultant of Internal Medicine and Hematology at the National University Hospital of Iceland, chaired the session. Other speakers included Óttar Guðmundsson, psychiatrist and author and Chair of the Society, Torfi H. Tulinius, Professor of Medieval Icelandic Literature, and Aðalheiður Guðmundsdóttir, Professor of Medieval Icelandic Literature. The conference was held in the concert and conference hall Harpan in Reykjavík city centre and streamed live to audiences.

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.

 

 

The project’s doctoral student, Meritxell Risco de la Torre, “went to Madrid” last week and presented some of her recent research at the 2nd Congreso de Jóvenes Investigadores JIMENA (CJIJ). Her conference paper was titled ‘El Yo, el cuerpo y las emociones en el Roman de Silence’ (‘Self, body, and emotion in the Roman de Silence’).

The online congress was organised by JIMENA, an organisation of medieval studies students at the Complutense University of Madrid, and it was held from November 30^th to December 2^nd. The theme this year was ‘El Cuerpo en el Medievo’ (‘The Body in the Middle Ages’). Further details, as well as the conference programme, can be found here.

The project’s Postdoctoral Researcher, Dr Timothy Bourns, recently “went to Norway” to attend the online conference ‘Ecocriticism and Old Norse Studies’, the Fourth Workshop of the Ecocritical Network for Scandinavian Studies (ENSCAN).

Timothy’s conference paper was titled ‘Trees in the Saga Dreamscape’. In the sagas, trees in people’s dreams take a different shape according to a character’s fate and identity, and the motif is widespread; while disappearing from the Icelandic landscape, trees were growing in the saga dreamscape.

The event was hosted by the University of Agder and was held on November 26^th-27^th. Further details, as well as the conference program, can be found here.

Our project’s Principal Investigator, Professor Sif Ríkharðsdóttir, “went to Oxford” last week and presented some of her recent research at the Old Norse in Oxford Research Seminar. Her talk, held online on November 24th, was titled ‘Pain, Emotion and Embodiment in Old Norse Literature’.

Three of our team members – Massimiliano Bampi, Carolyne Larrington, and Sif Ríkharðsdóttir – have edited an exciting new book with Boydell & Brewer: A Critical Companion to Old Norse Literary Genre!

“We cannot read literary works without making use of the concept of genre. In Old Norse studies, genre has been central to the categorisation, evaluation and understanding of medieval prose and poetry alike; yet its definition has been elusive and its implications often left unexplored.

This volume opens up fundamental questions about Old Norse genre in theory and in practice. It offers an extensive range of theoretical approaches, investigating and critiquing current terms and situating its arguments within early Scandinavian and Icelandic oral-literary and manuscript contexts. It maps the ways in which genre and form engage with key thematic areas within the literary corpus, noting the different kinds of impact upon the genre system brought about by conversion to Christianity, the gradual adoption of European literary models, and social and cultural changes occurring in Scandinavian society. A case-study section probes both prototypical and hard-to-define cases, demonstrating the challenges that actual texts pose to genre theory in terms of hybridity, evolution and innovation. With an annotated taxonomy of Old Norse genres and an extensive bibliography, it is an indispensable resource for contemporary Old Norse-Icelandic literary studies.”

Further information available here.

One of our team members, Dr. Frank Brandsma, has been awarded the competitive and prestigious James Randall Leader prize by the International Arthurian Society’s North American Branch for 2019, ex aequo with Don Hoffman. The annual award recognizes the academic excellence of an author of the best article to appear on an Arthurian subject in the previous year.

The article, published in the journal Arthuriana 29.4 (2019), is titled “‘Al was hi sward, wat scaetde dat?’ Emotions and courtly cultural exchange in the Roman van Moriaen”. Brandsma points out that there is no word for ‘race’ in Middle Dutch and that ‘Dutch Arthurian research has not (yet) taken a postcolonial “turn”.’ He demonstrates that a noble black knight can be accepted by Middle Dutch courtly heroes, as well as by modern readers, and that this acceptance is enabled by emotional affect, which encourages the audience to sympathize with the protagonist, Moriaen.

It can be accessed online on Project MUSE: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/745569.