Old Norse News

Details of this year’s summer school in Medieval Scandinavian Manuscript Studies, to be held in Copenhagen, have now been published. It will take place on 12-20 August 2010. This event has been amazingly successful, and usually gets booked up quickly, so if you’re interested it would be a good idea to register as soon as possible.

Good news from the University of Aberdeen, where–despite the economic difficulties that are smiting higher education in Britain–the Centre for Scandinavian Studies is offering four funded PhD places for 2010/11 and a further four for the next academic year. They are looking for qualified candidates in the following subject areas:  Nordic medieval law and policy, Old Norse sagas and poetry, the pre-Christian religion and mythology of Scandinavia, Christianization of Scandinavia, Viking Studies, early landscape studies or related fields.

These studentships are fees-only, although they say that they may also be able to contribute to students’ maintenance. Three posts each year are for British or EU students with the other one open to candidates from anywhere in the world. See the advertisement for details or the Centre’s own website.

The Viking Society is holding its annual student conference in London on 13 February. Everybody is welcome to attend–whether a student or not or a Society member or not.

The theme of this year’s conference is Skaldic Poetry, and the programme is as follows:

10.30 Coffee, Registration (Jeremy Bentham Room)

11.00 Richard North (London): ‘Skaldic verses. How to read them; how not to fear them’.

11.45 Debbie Potts (Cambridge): ‘Myth and metaphor in the self-referential language of early skaldic verse’.

12.30 Erin Goeres (Oxford): ‘My hope of wealth died”: Personal gain and personal grief in the commemorative verses of Glúmr Geirason and Eyvindr skáldaspillir’.

1.15 LUNCH

2.00 Alaric Hall (Leeds): ‘Kennings, personal names, and understanding supernatural beings’ (across the skaldic corpus as a whole, but definitely with some reference to Ragnarsdrápa).

2.45 Heather O´Donoghue (Oxford): ‘Skaldic verse in saga prose’.

3.30 David Ashurst (Durham): ‘Verse as sex act: chiefly in Kormaks saga‘.

4.15 TEA

The conference will be held in the Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre, University College London. (South Junction of the main building, at the top of the stairs. Registration and refreshments will be in the Jeremy Bentham Room.)

To Register: Please email Alison Finlay <a.finlay@bbk.ac.uk> by Monday 8 February to inform us of your intention to attend. The conference costs £10 — which covers the cost of coffee, tea and a sandwich lunch. Please send a cheque for this sum to Alison Finlay, Department of English, Birkbeck, University of London, Malet Street, WC1E 7HX (to arrive by 12th February) OR pay using a credit card via PayPal at the Society’s website.

Helen Leslie kindly wrote in to tell us about a conference to be held at the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Bergen on 13-14 September 2010. Here’s how Helen introduces the theme of the conference:

The conference is organized by the Retrospective Methods Network in cooperation with the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Bergen, Norway. The purpose of the network is to promote and develop retrospective methods in historical studies in a wide sense. The background is the growing interest in folklore and other 19th and 20th century evidence as a supplement in studies of pre-Christian Scandinavian beliefs. Methodologically this is highly problematic, however; we must not use late evidence in the same naïve way as the scholars of the early 20th century. Therefore, a renewed effort in the development of retrospective methods is required, hence the network and the conference.

The conference is open to all and only half of the papers will be invited. Papers on all kinds of retrospective approaches are welcome, from all kinds of fields, treating all kinds of topics and material, as long as they can help develop better and more explicit methods for retrospective reasoning. The organizers hope that a renewed discussion of retrospective methods can lead to a higher level of methodological consciousness and a stronger demand for explicitness in claims, methods and reasoning in Old Norse studies.

The Call for Papers is out now, with a deadline of 15 February. Please see the conference website for further details.

I just wanted to wish all readers of Old Norse News a very gleðileg jól. Thanks to everybody who’s contributed to discussions on the site or sent me new items to cover. The site’s really started to take off in 2009, with over 20,000 visits, and I hope you’ve found some of the information we’ve given out useful or our conversations interesting. I hope to do a lot more with the site in the new year–posting more often will be a priority, to being with. For now, though, I’m off to try and finish my mythology book, and so there will be an official hiatus in activity here until January.

I recently got an enquiry from an American student (Hi, Meg!) about the universities in the States that might offer courses in Old Norse at either undergraduate or postgraduate level. At Kalamazoo last year, in a round-table on the state of Saga Studies in the USA, one of the speakers claimed there were 38 institutions (I think) that offered Old Norse language in their syllabus. But I didn’t get a list, so I thought that we might try to compile one together. When we’ve identified likely universities, I’m going to try to get in contact with teachers in various locations and ask them to describe the opportunities available to students in our field.

So: where do (or can) you study Old Norse literature, language, and Medieval Scandinavian history/archaeology in North America (Canada is certainly to be included). Please leave a comment or use the contact page to let us know.

The information that would be most useful is:

• What courses are available?
• Which departments offer them?
• Are they undergraduate or postgraduate level?
• Are there opportunities for PhD research in these disciplines?

Once we’ve built up a database of North American institutions, we’ll move on to the rest of the world. Thanks for your help!

This Viking-Age figurine has already provoked quite a lot of interest on the net. Jonas Wellendorf brought it to my attention on norrønt.no; it’s also been discussed in posts at Norse and Viking Ramblings and The Viking Rune. But is it really Odin, as people have already claimed?

Roskilde Museum is confident that this 2cm-high silver artifact represents Odin on his throne with his two ravens. It was found at Lejre, although not as part of the main excavations there.

It now probably won’t be long before the hall-complex at Lejre is claimed to be the prototype for Valhalla as well as for Beowulf’s Heorot … but how convincing do you find the identification with Odin? Do you have an alternative explanation for this intriguing little icon? Do you agree with Martin Rundkvist that it’s in fact a female figure–Freyja perhaps? Let the speculation begin!