Fyrirlestrar / Lectures
Jonathan L. Ready
The Homeric Wild Papyri and Scribal Performance
Mánudaginn 16. júní 2025 kl. 15.00 / Monday, June 16, 2025, at 15.00
Fyrirlestrasal Eddu (E-103) / Edda auditorium (E-103)
The scribal act of copying an exemplar needs to be understood as a performance. Building on linguistic anthropology’s study of oral performers, my contribution resides in explaining what scribal performance entails. I use the Hellenistic-era wild papyri of the Homeric epics to show how scribal performance involves (1) entextualizing; (2) aiming for completeness; (3) enhancing a text’s affective power; (4) operating as a tradent as well as traditionalizing; (5) negotiating an intertextual gap; (6) fashioning a bookroll; and (7) adopting a stance toward one’s work.
Jonathan L. Ready is a professor of classical studies at the University of Michigan. His most recent monograph is titled Immersion, Identification, and the Iliad (Oxford 2023). His current book project has the working title Euripides’s Orestes and Post-Critique.
Fyrirlesturinn verður haldinn á ensku og er öllum opinn. / The talk will be delivered in English and is open to all.
Fyrirlestrar / Lectures
Gareth Lloyd Evans, Brynja Þorgeirsdóttir, Carolyne Larrington et al.
Saga Emotions
A Joint Lecture on Feelings in Old Norse Literature
Fimmtudaginn 12. júní 2025 kl. 16.00 / Thursday, June 12, 2025, at 16.00
Oddi 101
How were emotions expressed in Old Norse literary texts? How can we trace the feelings of the past in sagas written centuries ago? This joint lecture explores these questions and more, marking the launch of Saga Emotions, a new academic volume that challenges and enriches our understanding of emotion in Old Norse literature.
The book investigates how emotions are represented in Old Norse literary texts, laying a particular emphasis on those genres which are regarded as quasi-historical or naturalistic. It engages with a broad range of individual emotions through close lexical examination and analysis of case-studies across a range of saga genres. The fundamentally lexemic approach is intended to grapple with the methodological issues raised by using modern emotion terms to interpret medieval texts, which risks forcing the material into preconceived and possibly anachronistic categories. In taking this approach, and by ranging beyond the better-known Íslendingasögur (sagas of Icelanders) also to consider samtíðarsögur (contemporary sagas), konungasögur (kings’ sagas), and biskupasögur (sagas of bishops) alongside other religious texts, the book reconfigures the field of emotion study in Old Norse literature. Saga Emotions is the first book to take this kind of systematic approach to Old Norse prose literature. As each chapter takes its cue from a particular Old Norse word or set of words with demonstrable emotional connotations, the book aims to bring rigour to, and to interrogate, the assumptions with which modern readers analyse these often profoundly strange medieval texts. The aim is to alert readers to emotion that is implicit or understated, and to warn against imposing modern and anglophone taxonomies on literary works that originate in a very different textual culture and social milieu.
The lecture begins with a keynote by editor Carolyne Larrington, University of Oxford, outlining the book’s main findings and approaches. This is followed by brief “lightning talks” from contributors, each showcasing key insights into how emotions like anger, grief, love, and joy appear in the medieval saga world.
- Secular love – Sif Rikhardsdottir, University of Iceland
- Going berserk and the killing mood – Gareth Lloyd Evans, University of Oxford
- Sadness – Edel Maria Porter, University of Castilla-La Mancha
- Compassion – Ásdís Egilsdóttir, University of Iceland
- Desire – Alexander Wilson, University of Leicester
- Grief – Kristen Mills, University of Oslo
- Disgust – Rebecca Merkelbach, University of Tübingen
- Pride – Katherine Olley, University of Nottingham
- Anger – George Manning, University of Oxford
- Shame – Brynja Þorgeirsdóttir, University of Iceland
The event will conclude with an open discussion, offering the audience a chance to engage with the speakers and reflect on the relevance of medieval emotional worlds to our own.
The editors of Saga emotions are:
- Gareth Lloyd Evans, Associate Professor of Old Norse at the University of Oxford.
- Brynja Þorgeirsdóttir, Assistant Professor of Icelandic Literature at the University of Iceland.
- Carolyne Larrington, Emeritus Professor of Medieval European Literature at the University of Oxford.
Fyrirlestrarnir verða haldnir á ensku og eru öllum opnir. / The talks will be delivered in English and are open to all.
Fyrirlestrar / Lectures
Miðvikudaginn 11. júní 2025 heldur Alban Gautier, prófessor í miðaldasögu við Université de Caen Normandie, tvo fyrirlestra á vegum Miðaldastofu — / — Wednesday, June 11, 2025, Alban Gautier, professor of medieval history at Université de Caen Normandie, will give two talks for the Centre for Medieval Studies:
Alban Gautier
The ‘Massacre of the Long Knives’: transformations of a narrative from the ninth to the thirteenth century
Miðvikudaginn 11. júní 2025 kl. 11.00 / Wednesday, June 11, 2025, at 11.00
Árnagarður 304
A story first appearing in the Historia Brittonum traditionally ascribed to Nennius (early ninth century) tells how, after the Saxons led by Hengest first arrived in Britain, they invited all British noblemen to meet them: in the course of the meeting, the Saxons drew their knives and each one killed his neighbour. I will retrace the transformation of this narrative over five centuries, showing how it was retold and modified in history, pseudo-history and romance, and in a variety of European languages. The most important turning point here was undoubtedly Geoffrey of Monmouth and his History of the Kings of Britain: after him, nearly all versions, from Wace’s Roman de Brut to Breta sögur, drew some inspiration from his version, still modifying it, adding or removing individual details.
Alban Gautier is professor of medieval history at Université de Caen Normandie. His research focuses on Norse culture of the Viking Age where he has researched the roots of the concept of the “noble heathen” which appears in medieval Icelandic literature. In his book Beowulf au paradis: Figures de bons païens dans l’Europe du Nord au haut Moyen-Âge (Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2017), Gautier traces the origins of this concept to the writings of medieval theologians and offers a new interpretation of Beowulf.
Fyrirlesturinn verður haldinn á ensku og er öllum opinn. / The talk will be delivered in English and is open to all.
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Alban Gautier
‘Righteous heathens’ before the age of sagas: did something change in the early twelfth century?
Miðvikudaginn 11. júní 2025 kl. 15.00 / Wednesday, June 11, 2025, at 15.00
Árnagarður 304
The notion of the ‘righteous heathen’ or ‘good pagan’ is well-known from Icelandic sagas. There abundance in North European written narratives about the pre-Christian past seems to start sometime in the first half of the twelfth century, when so-called ‘national historians’ such as ‘Gallus Anonymus’ in Poland, Cosmas of Prague in Bohemia or Geoffrey of Monmouth in Britain tell long stories about rulers from the pagan past, celebrating their virtues and their achievements. I will show that, before this date, such stories were not inexistant in the North, but were limited to some regions (especially Ireland) and to a few notable individuals (a handful of them being even regarded as possibly admitted to Paradise). So did something change in the early twelfh century, that made such stories more acceptable for writers that were no less Christian and no less clerical than their predecessors?
Alban Gautier is professor of medieval history at Université de Caen Normandie. His research focuses on Norse culture of the Viking Age where he has researched the roots of the concept of the “noble heathen” which appears in medieval Icelandic literature. In his book Beowulf au paradis: Figures de bons païens dans l’Europe du Nord au haut Moyen-Âge (Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2017), Gautier traces the origins of this concept to the writings of medieval theologians and offers a new interpretation of Beowulf.
Fyrirlesturinn verður haldinn á ensku og er öllum opinn. / The talk will be delivered in English and is open to all.
Fyrirlestrar / Lectures
Declan Taggart
“Tired of a warm boudoir and gloves filled with down”
The construction of Viking Age warrior identity
Þriðjudaginn 8. apríl 2025 kl. 16.30 / Tuesday, April 8, 2025, at 16.30
Fyrirlestrasal Eddu (E-103) / Edda auditorium (E-103)
Warriors remain a cultural staple across the globe, from kids playing with fingers for guns to the blood and guts of Gladiator and videogames like Elden Ring. That does not mean, however, that warrior identity is a straightforward topic for scholars, and this is as true for the Viking Age as for any other period in history. To put it simply, while many people can fight, not everyone who fights is a warrior. No word in Old Norse can even be said to unambiguously equate to the concept, although there are several that we can associate with it.
What, then, is a Viking Age warrior? The goal of this paper is to determine and elucidate that identity, exploring how it was constructed, maintained and propagated, and examining how it was perceived by and affected others in society, a dimension of warriorhood that is rarely considered. To do so, I turn to the archaeological, iconographic and textual sources of Scandinavia and its diaspora to see how warriorhood intersected with seemingly incongruous concepts like nobility and subservience, with religion and physical presentation, with the landscape, and with activities like sailing, showing off and, of course, violence.
While I will touch on and challenge previous arguments about the aesthetics, beliefs and values of the Männerbunde, Gefolgschaft or comitatus, as warrior groups have not-unproblematically been called over the last two hundred years of research, my main focus will be on the primary sources. Understandably, given the fragmentary nature of that corpus, many conclusions about early Northern warrior groups rely on evidence that is neither Viking Age nor from or about the Nordic countries. However, by concentrating on the primary source material, I hope to offer a reasonable reconsideration of how much it is really possible to say about early warrior identity as well as, ultimately, how valid the correlation is between the modern concept of the warrior and any in an Old Norse society.
Declan Taggart is a researcher at the University of Iceland working on warrior groups and their relationship with society. His wider interests include Old Norse mythology and religion, and he has published a book on change in representations of the god Þórr called How Thor Lost His Thunder (Routledge, 2018).
Fyrirlesturinn verður haldinn á ensku og er öllum opinn. / The talk will be delivered in English and is open to all.
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Fyrirlestrar / Lectures
Holly McArthur
A New Critical Edition of Flóvents saga
Þriðjudaginn 1. apríl 2025 kl. 16.30 / Tuesday, April 1, 2025, at 16.30
Fyrirlestrasal Eddu (E-103) / Edda auditorium (E-103)
A little-known work, Flóvents saga claims to tell the story of the first Christian king of Frakkland. Translated from a now-lost chanson de geste, it survives today in 23 manuscripts with the oldest dating from the first quarter of the fourteenth century. Moreover, Flóvents saga has the (perhaps dubious) honor of being the oldest surviving relative of its particular branch of stories of Flóvent, the nephew of Constantine, connecting the narrative to epic cycles produced in Italian and German in the late medieval and early modern periods.
Despite the saga’s relative popularity in Iceland through the centuries, it was last edited in 1884, by Swedish philologist Gustaf Cederschiöld, who, as might be expected of nineteenth century philological practice, dismissed younger copies of the text, and was seemingly unaware of a major part of the saga’s transmission history.
This presentation will focus on the questions that underly a new critical edition of Flóvents saga, with particular attention paid to the balance between authenticity and accessibility, and the question of how best represent a text that holds a relatively unique place for both Old Norse and medieval European literature. It does so in light of the saga’s manuscript rich tradition which spanned almost to the twentieth century to illuminate the role of Flóvent both in Iceland and in Europe.
Holly McArthur is a 2024–2025 Leifur Eiríksson fellow and a Ph.D. Candidate in Scandinavian Philology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She holds an MA in Viking and Medieval Norse Studies from the University of Iceland (2019). Her work studies cultural transmission and literary translation between Old French and Old Norse-Icelandic.
Fyrirlestrar / Lectures
Ivar Berg
Old Norse–Norwegian
Fimmtudaginn 27. mars 2025 kl. 16.30 / Thursday, March 27, 2025, at 16.30
Fyrirlestrasal Eddu (E-103) / Edda auditorium (E-103)
What’s in a name? The terminology used for the West Nordic medieval language varies between ‘(Old) Icelandic’, ‘Old Norwegian’, ‘Old Norse’, and the combination ‘Old Norse–Icelandic’. I will discuss some ideological implications of this terminology before moving on to linguistic form.
Although Norwegian and Icelandic must have been the same at the time of settlement, there are dialectal differences already in the oldest extant texts from the 12th century, making the two languages (and Faroese) an interesting example of linguistic divergence in documented history. I will show a few central points where the dialects seem to have been different and compare them with the “textbook norm” of the standard reference works.
Finally, I will show how the Menota corpus can be used in linguistic analysis, looking at the Norwegian texts with annotation published in the corpus. This makes it possible to quantify the relation between competing variants, and shows how an annotaded corpus makes the historical linguist’s life substantially easier. My point here is at least partly methodological, as this is work in progress, but I will show how this approach allows us to get a clearer understanding of some defining characteristics of Old Norwegian.
Ivar Berg is professor of Scandinavian linguistics at the University of Trondheim (NTNU). He works on the history of Norwegian (and related languages) from philological, grammatical, and sociolinguistic points of view.
Fyrirlesturinn verður haldinn á ensku og er öllum opinn. / The talk will be delivered in English and is open to all.
