Miðaldastofa Háskóla Íslands

Næstu opnu fyrirlestrar

The First Astronomers: How Indigenous Elders Read the Stars

Fyrirlesari: Duane Hamacher Associate Professor of Cultural Astronomy in the School of Physics at the University of Melbourne.

• Þriðjudaginn 28. mars 2023, kl. 16:30
• Tuesday, March 28, 2023, at 16:30
• Staðsetning: Lögberg, Stofa 101

Fyrirlesturinn verður fluttur á ensku og er öllum opinn. — The talk will be delivered in English. All are welcome. Streymi/Live stream: https://eu01web.zoom.us/j/65121313779

Indigenous Elders of the world are expert observers of the stars. They teach that everything on the land is reflected in the sky, and everything in the sky is reflected on the land. These living systems of knowledge contain a wealth of empirical science and information about natural events, cycles, and transient events, challenging conventional ideas about the nature of science and the longevity of oral tradition. In this seminar, we will explore the ways Indigenous astronomy is influencing the history and philosophy of science, how it is leading to new advances in astrophysics, how it is helping us better understand natural hazards and climate change, and how we can move forward by scientists collaborating with the Elders.

Miðaldastofa Háskóla Íslands — The University of Iceland Centre for Medieval StudiesStofnun Árna Magnússonar — The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies
í samstarfi við Félagsfræði-, mannfræði- og þjóðfræðideild og Íslensku- og menningardeild Háskóla Íslands

A Berserkr in Shining Armour

Berserker Fury, Werewolf, and Mental Trauma in Kentao Miura’s manga Berserk

Fyrirlesari: Minjie Su DPhil in English (Old Norse focus), the University of Oxford. 

• Fimmtudaginn 30. mars 2023, kl. 16:30
• Thursday, March 30, 2023, at 16.30
• Staðsetning: Lögberg, Stofa 101

Fyrirlesturinn verður fluttur á ensku og er öllum opinn. — The talk will be delivered in English. All are welcome. Streymi/Live stream: https://eu01web.zoom.us/j/65121313779

Written by Kentaro Miura (1966 – 2021), Berserk is a dark fantasy seinen manga (young adults’ manga) that has enjoyed immense popularity both in Japan and overseas since its initial publication in 1989. Still ongoing today (despite the author’s recent death), the manga has been adapted in the subsequent years into two animated TV series (aired between 1997 and 1998, and between 2016 and 2017, respectively), an animated film trilogy (2012), and a memorial edition in 2022.

Firmly grounded in the fantasy genre, the manga makes creative uses of an impressive array of medieval and medievalist images, to such an extent that it is frequently compared to George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones and regarded by many viewers as its Japanese manga-esque counterpart. However, the central idea is, as its title suggests, constructed around the image of the Old Norse-Icelandic berserkr/úlfheðnar warriors, manifested in the characterisation of Guts, a mercenary-turned-monster-slayer around whom the manga unfolds. However, while Guts does start as someone who fights in a similar style to the Old Norse berserkir as perceived in popular culture (i.e. whose battle frenzy comes from within and who are characterised by lack of protective clothing), his berserkr-ness is represented as originated from his personal trauma, and he does not become a berserkr proper (in the manga’s terms) until he has obtained the Berserker Armour—a full-sized wolf-shaped armour that gradually externalises his fury and trauma, thus contributing to his healing and re-incorporation to the human world. Both the armour’s existence and function, therefore, are the very opposite to the core of the conventional berserkr tradition.

In this paper I address this deviation and the nuanced image of berserkr as portrayed in the manga, which is by no means unique to Berserk; likewise, externalisation of the berserkr fury (originated from some traumatic memories/emotions) in an armour is also found in Fate/Zero, another popular Japanese animated series in recent years. To do so, I divide the paper into three parts. The first two parts focus on the portrayal of trauma—the central theme of the manga—on two levels: societal and individual; the former serves as an introduction to Berserk’s medievalist storyworld—especially its historico-mythological set-up—so as to lay the foundation for the latter, where the role of the Berserk Armour and the multi-layered meaning of berserkr are developed and contextualised. In the second part, i.e. individual trauma, I analyse the two stages of Guts’ development: when he fights physically as a human but in essence as a conventional berserkr; and when he fights physically as the berserk (in the manga’s terms) but in essence as a human. For the second stage, I will also introduce to my analysis the Old Norse-Icelandic werewolf narratives, as the Berserk Armour symbolically transforms him into a wolf, thus uniting two different yet connected traditions from the Old Norse. In third part, I take a step back to look at the larger picture and contextualise Miura’s creation in the discourse of (global) medievalism, inviting the audience to ponder over the a series of questions that Berserk’s presentation of the ‘medieval’ raises and, in particular, the potentials of interpreting the medieval through the lens of modern popular culture.