The Earth as Body in Old Norse

2018

Religious practices and worship of and at natural landmarks such as hills, rocks, mountains, sacred groves etc. played an important part in Old Norse religions and was closely connected to the belief in various spirits and deities thought to dwell in these places. In this seminar paper I take a close look at what literary sources tell us about the Old Norse nature spirits called landvættir who were thought to live in the natural landscape and seen as having an important role for the land's well-being and protection as well as being able to influence the life and prosperity of its human inhabitants. I then mention examples of some related mythological beings who share characteristics with these spirits of the land, especially with regard to inhabiting certain landmarks. In the final part of my paper I consider the famous álfar and finish by looking at the development of meaning that finally led to the contemporary image of álfar or elves as inhabiting the Icelandic landscape as well as the popular place they inhabit in the contemporary imagination regarding Icelandic culture.

The Fantastic in Old Norse. Icelandic Literature. Sagas and the British Isles. Preprint papers of the 13thInternational Saga Conference. Durham and York, 2006. P. 1114-1131.

This paper discusses references to mythological situations in skaldic poetry of the thirteenth century. The quotation in the title comes from the famous passage in Íslendinga saga, ch. 190, where a legendary person, Guðrún Gjúkadóttir, appears to a young girl in a dream — the name of the latter is Jóreiðr. Their conversation is reported to have taken place in 1255 AD at the household of Miðjumdalr, South Iceland.

New Norse Studies, edited by Jeffrey Turco, gathers twelve original essays engaging aspects of Old Norse–Icelandic literature that continue to kindle the scholarly imagination in the twenty-first century. The assembled authors examine the arrière-scène of saga literature; the nexus of skaldic poetry and saga narrative; medieval and post-medieval gender roles; and other manifestations of language, time, and place as preserved in Old Norse–Icelandic texts. This volume will be welcomed not only by the specialist and by scholars in adjacent fields but also by the avid general reader, drawn in ever-increasing number to the Icelandic sagas and their world. Table of Contents Preface; Jeffrey Turco, volume editor: Introduction; Andy Orchard: Hereward and Grettir: Brothers from Another Mother?; Richard L. Harris: “Jafnan segir inn ríkri ráð”: Proverbial Allusion and the Implied Proverb in Fóstbrœðra saga; Torfi H. Tulinius: Seeking Death in Njáls saga; Guðrún Nordal: Skaldic Poetics and the Making of the Sagas of Icelanders; Russell Poole: Identity Poetics among the Icelandic Skalds; Jeffrey Turco: Loki, Sneglu-Halla þáttr, and the Case for a Skaldic Prosaics; Thomas D. Hill: Beer, Vomit, Blood and Poetry: Egils saga, Chapters 44-45; Shaun F. D. Hughes: The Old Norse Exempla as Arbiters of Gender Roles in Medieval Iceland; Paul Acker: Performing Gender in the Icelandic Ballads; Joseph Harris: The Rök Inscription, Line 20; Sarah Harlan-Haughey: A Landscape of Conflict: Three Stories of the Faroe Conversions; Kirsten Wolf: Non-Basic Color Terms in Old Norse-Icelandic

This article, the inaugural winner of the journal's Gurli Aagaard Woods Undergraduate Publication Award, combines the analysis of ancient literature with an archaeological approach in an effort to further interpret the presence and significance of trees in medieval Scandinavian culture. The analysis of textual references to trees such as Yggdrasill and Barnstokkr found in the Norse works Völuspá, Grímnismál, Gylfaginning, and Völsunga Saga, are combined with academic articles, juxtaposed with the examination of archaeological sites at Fröso, Herresta, Bjarsgård, Österfärnebo, and Karmøy, and integrated with modern Scandinavian attitudes to explore an interest in tree-human relationships, literature, and archaeology in medieval Scandinavia. RÉSUMÉ : Cet article, premier lauréat du prix de la revue Gurli Aagaard Woods de publication pour étudiant de premier cycle, combine l'analyse d'une littérature ancienne avec une approche archéologique, dans un effort pour interpréter davantage la présence et l'importance des arbres dans la culture scandinave médiévale. Les analyses des références textuelles à des arbres tels que Yggdrasill et Barnstokkr trouvées dans les travaux Norse Völuspá, Grímnismál, Gylfaginning et la saga Völsunga, sont combinées à des articles académiques, juxtaposées à l'examen de sites archéologiques à Frösö, Herresta, Bjarsgård, Österfärnebo et Karmøy, et intégrées à des attitudes scandinaves modernes afin d'explorer un intérêt envers les relations arbre-humain, la littérature et l'archéologie en Scandinavie médiévale.

Parergon, 2009

Recent scholarship has indicated that the conception of the Old Norse god Þórr as a thunder god may have been unfamiliar to Viking Age and medieval Icelanders and even to some Scandinavians. This throws much of the mythological poetry concerning the deity into a new light, and, in this article, I focus on the consequences for the interpretation of images of shaking and fire in two poems, Lokasenna and Þrymskviða. These images are compared with similar portrayals of natural calamities, also related to Þórr, in Hallmundarkviða and Haustlöng. The perspective suggested is that, in some contexts, poets and audiences associated quite conventional cosmological imagery of disruption with specific natural phenomena, including volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, and that the turmoil in Hallmundarkviða, Lokasenna and Þrymskviða may attest to an extra-literary – if still weak – connection between Þórr and these other phenomena. Thereafter, I analyse the textual function of this seam of cosmological imagery and conclude that its primary function is to advertise the strength of the supernatural being causing it, in keeping with the persistent characterisation of Þórr in terms of his physical power in Old Norse-Icelandic literary traditions. By drawing out the cultural and textual significances of these motifs, this article aims to demonstrate the competing demands of genre, characterisation, and environment in the composition of Old Norse myths centring on Þórr and to elucidate the extent to which these images mediate responses to the terrains of Iceland and Norway.

New Norse Studies: Essays on the Literature and Culture of Medieval Scandinavia, 2015

This article proposes that the oft-dismissed Sneglu-Halla þáttr (Tale of Sarcastic Halli) is not simply a series of virtuoso vituperations peppered with sexual-cum-barnyard humor, nor “a series of episodes that could have been arranged otherwise as well,” but a text that repays close attention, both for original audiences as well as for scholars of Old Norse-Icelandic literature. I argue that its eponymous hero establishes his social position at the royal Norwegian court by ensconcing himself within a sustained series of allusions to myths of the Norse god Loki, while framing his peers, and even his superiors, as the sexual deviants, low-lifes, and numbskulls of a déclassé “folktale” world. Sneglu-Halla þáttr thus presupposes considerable literary connoisseurship, detailed knowledge of the Norse mythographic tradition, and a consciousness of high and low genre that reflects concerns of shifting social classes and political powers in thirteenth and fourteenth-century Iceland. Ultimately, I leverage this reading to articulate a reappraisal of medieval Icelandic narrative prose—most often lauded for its “realism," "straightforwardness," and "objectivity”: I offer that this deceptively “simple” tale adheres to the same aesthetic principles of complexity, ambiguity, and allusiveness that characterize the Skaldic poetry that is its ostensible subject.

Journal of Scandinavian Studies 90:4, 2018

Interdisciplinary Journal for Germanic Linguistics and Semiotic Analysis

The few Norse loanwords attested in late Old English poetry can be shown to have added factual plausibility to poems in praise of prominent contemporaries. Why did such loans remain part of the vocabulary of poems after the Norman Conquest? And how did Norse loans attested in late Old English and early Middle English prose likewise become part of the Middle English poetic vocabulary? This paper shows that the uses of the Norse loans erl, dreng, swain, and gersum in post-Conquest poems reflect a partial loss of their connection with the real world. They had turned into means of poetic colouring applied to a prehistoric , largely fictional subject matter, mostly by poets who addressed audiences in regions that had come under strong Danelaw influence before the Norman Conquest.