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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.

The PI for our project, Professor Sif Ríkharðsdóttir, was featured yesterday on Iceland’s National Public Radio! The series, called „Samtal“, explores the personal and social significance of emotions and airs on Rás 1 on Sunday mornings and again on the following Wednesday, but can be listened to any time. Sif’s talk focused on emotions in medieval literature and can be heard here.

The PI has been awarded a Visiting Research Fellowship at St John’s College, University of Oxford for the spring term of 2020. She will be presenting some of the early results of the project at the Medieval English Research Seminar at the University of Oxford, working on some of the research components of the project as well as collaborating with Carolyne Larrington on the final preparations of the upcoming workshop.