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Famously, the skalds of Iceland successfully took over the mantle of court poet in tenthand particularly eleventh-century Norway (and to an extent in England and other centers of Scandinavian diasporic populations as well). In this way... more
Famously, the skalds of Iceland successfully took over the mantle of court poet in tenthand particularly eleventh-century Norway (and to an extent in England and other centers of Scandinavian diasporic populations as well). In this way they sustained a partial livelihood. In this paper I am going to propose that we can detect a sense of Icelandic (and to a lesser extent Orkney) identity in some of their verses. These markers might already have been symptomatic of an emerging ideology, to be more explicitly expressed in later prose texts, where “ individual Icelanders, especially upwardly mobile young Icelandic men, are, on a case-by-case basis, represented as better, cleverer, and more gifted than any individual Norwegian, except perhaps the Norwegian king, against whom they frequently measure themselves. Their special talent thus enables them as individuals to be successful in Norwegian society, even though they come from the cultural margin.” 1 That the sense of a community identi...
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... so far as to posit a battle of Maldon fought in 988: mention of this battle is found, not in the Chronicle, but in Liber Eliensis and Byrhtferth's Life of Oswald; it would antedate the well-known (second) battle... more
... so far as to posit a battle of Maldon fought in 988: mention of this battle is found, not in the Chronicle, but in Liber Eliensis and Byrhtferth's Life of Oswald; it would antedate the well-known (second) battle of Maldon by three years.9 In these circumstances skaldic poetry may have ...
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To discuss the verses of a saga, rather than the work as a whole, may seem reactionary in an age when we are schooled to seek organic unity in almost all literary compositions?even in those, like the Old English Dream of the Rood, which... more
To discuss the verses of a saga, rather than the work as a whole, may seem reactionary in an age when we are schooled to seek organic unity in almost all literary compositions?even in those, like the Old English Dream of the Rood, which many of our predecessors would have seen as self-evidently the product of multiple authorship, of re vision and amplification. So if I isolate certain verses of Gunnlaugs saga from their prose contexts, it is, I hope, with good justification: that the prose and the verse arguably represent different strata of composition, and that the artistic merits of the verses have been ob scured by their prose setting. The verses I shall discuss are numbered 10, 11, 13, 14, and 16 in editions of the saga. They form a distinct group: Gunnlaugr is the speaker and he laments his thwarted love for Helga. This group is pre ceded by a more loosely knit group of verses most of which have to do with Gunnlaugr's peripatetic and lucrative existence as a court poet, and is followed by a third group which covers the hostilities between Gunnlaugr and Hrafn, his rival in poetry and love, and the death of both men.
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The heroes of mythology and fantasy are typically faced with plot progressions that are 'troublesome, challenging, [and] transformative'. Yet these words from Wisker and Robinson (2009, p. 318) are descriptive not of... more
The heroes of mythology and fantasy are typically faced with plot progressions that are 'troublesome, challenging, [and] transformative'. Yet these words from Wisker and Robinson (2009, p. 318) are descriptive not of mythology's generic formula but of the conceptual thresholds confronting novice scholars negotiating academic literacy. The challenges to heroes often entail their 'humbling' as they mature; yet this word describes the learning processes that enable 'critical moments of irreversible conceptual transformation' (Meyer and Land 2005, p. 376). The development of advanced literacy, 'a social process of enculturalisation into the values and practices of specialist communities' (Schleppegrell, 2002, p. 10) enables such transformation. This paper investigates a pedagogy enabling the development of advanced literacy. Any course for first year students must provide a threshold into the discipline. Like the liminal spaces within literature - the Erceldoune forest where True Thomas accesses a rule-bound yet enabling fairy world, for example - the liminal first year course needs to give ready access and to effectively link different cultures of the diverse entrants with those of academia.
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Vikingarvisur, a poem on the early exploits of Olafr Haraldsson, contains a series of stanzas describing Olafr' s battles in England during the troubled years that preceded Knutr's conquest of the country. Certain details in the... more
Vikingarvisur, a poem on the early exploits of Olafr Haraldsson, contains a series of stanzas describing Olafr' s battles in England during the troubled years that preceded Knutr's conquest of the country. Certain details in the poem remain obscure, and among them is Sighvatr's reference in verse 8 to an English people or tribe called the Partar. The main topic of the stanza is Olafr' s alleged subjugation of Canterbury.