Promoting Old Norse Studies: From a Publishing Standpoint
I’ve been working for a scholarly publisher for almost a year, and so a question that I’ve been mulling over recently is how one could promote Old Norse Studies from a publishing standpoint. For example, as my former advisor at Cornell University, Tom Hill, pointed out to me, there seems to be a definite dearth of English-language journals that cater to Old Norse-Icelandic Studies (compare that to all the 20 or 30 journals out there devoted to Old English), and there is no place to publish short notes or English translations of Scandinavian-language articles or prefaces.
So how could a publisher best promote Old Norse Studies? What are the publication needs of the Old Norse academic community? Where are the gaps in the overall existing publication framework?
Administered by 
[...] Even Be Written? Posted on September 18, 2008 by Aunt B. No offense to y’all, but how can it possibly be that Old Norse scholars are sitting around wondering how publishers can sell …? This is quite possibly the most mind-boggling thing I’ve ever read in this history of [...]
I don’t have any suggestions myself, but my advisor, Anatoly Liberman, seems to be wondering the same thing, and he is in touch with every publisher on earth. Search for his work on amazon. Or find his blog on Oxford’s blog site, by googling “online etymologist”. http://blog.oup.com/category/reference/oxford_etymologist/
In any case, I think the demand for the subject matter has significantly dropped on the scholarly level in Scandinavia itself (excluding Iceland), and that the English-language market is still overshadowed with Old Norse studies/Germanic philology by German-language publishers and journals especially. The situation in the United States is actually better for such items than Great Britain, surely, but by what degree I cannot say entirely.
If you find any answers regarding promoting publishing material that isn’t a significant text (an entire saga, short story [þættir], or something similar in the Old Norse period), I’m all ears! Unfortunately I do not foresee any kind of growth in the publishing arena for Old Norse studies, including the really important texts (let alone the articles of prefaces you mentioned). The publishing of Old Norse materials will probably never increase from its present status, especially since the only really good textbook to learn to read Old Icelandic/Old Norse is outdated (I suggest someone actually make a 3rd edition of E.V. Gordon’s “An Introduction to Old Norse; it’s long overdue).
There is a dearth of Old Norse studies journals in the English speaking world. I have also noticed that the former “glory” of the Scandinavian countries in the field is becoming even more increasingly extinct (Uppsala, for example, has less courses on the subject than the University of Illinois, of Minnesota, of Indiana, Harvard University, among many of the others). The publishing needs are to promote studies with the current theories regarding medieval literature, and unfortunately all the non-philological literary theory “fluff” floating through every university, and reviews on books being published (as expected), and linguistic-based topics, among many other things actually still happening in the field of Germanic philology. I think there are lot of scholars in the field looking for a place to publish their articles on just about any Old Norse. We’re also looking for a place to publish a companion to Gordon.
Old Norse studies is thriving in the philological crowd, albeit a shrinking one. We need just to find a way to bring the scholars back, out of Old English and comparative literature, and teaching low-level German courses, and so forth. I have no idea how that could be accomplished.
In the first comment, there’s a link to a response to Stephanie’s questions over at a blog called Tiny Cat Pants. It’s well worth clicking through and reading it. The author’s main point is that scholars in the field are missing out on a really important market by not writing books to appeal to the broader Norse public: particularly the asatru crowd. I think she’s got an excellent point: part of our publishing mission has to be to engage with as many people as possible, and healthy sales are surely good for our field and self-esteem. In recent years there’s been something of a dearth of really good new Norse books for a general audience (less of a problem in history, more in literature/mythology). Penguin must still be selling hundreds of copies of Ellis Davidson’s ‘Gods and Myths of Northern Europe’, for example, even though it’s almost fifty years old, and shows its age. To make our subject more popular, we need more, and better, popular books. (So look out for ‘Myths of the Pagan North’, coming out in 2010 (Continuum Publishing!))
But the popular end of the spectrum isn’t the whole story, and Stephanie and Paul’s posts address some really important issues. Paul — I’m particularly interested in your point about the lack of a decent text book for ON language: have you looked at the Viking Society’s Grammar/Reader/Glossary (Barnes et al.)? Any thoughts about it? I’m going to do a separate post about books for learning Old Norse soon.
Being one of those Heathen / Asatru folks that Stephanie refers to on Tiny Cat Pants, I’d like to say that I agree very much with the idea of marketing ON sholarship to the Heathen / Asatru community. The standard scholarly literature is read by a fair percentage of us who take the scholarship very seriously, though the majority of Heathen folk don’t want to delve into scholarly tomes too far. Hilda Davidson’s books are popular in the Asatru community for 2 reasons: 1) they are *very* easy to find, and 2) they are accessible reads. More books along the lines of what Davidson wrote (for instance, Thor Ewing’s Gods and Worshippers, 2008) would appeal to the Asatru community as a whole – and would likely be bought up, if they were easy to find (which means they need to be marketed well). The more typical ‘scholarly books for scholars’ books will also be bought and read by those of us Heathens who have a keen interest in them (and by keen interest, I mean the sort of Heathen who is reading Old Norse News avidly, as I do). I would like to add that those of us who do follow the scholarship as best we can are likely to write reviews of the books we read and either share them online or via Heathen print publications – so that is a marketing avenue that is, perhaps, not as well tapped by the publishers or authors as it could be. I can think of only one serious ‘barrier’ to Heathens buying ‘scholarly books for scholars’ books: price. Most scholarly publishing is priced at a level where a university library will purchase the book, and then the scholars who want to read it will borrow it from the library. General rule of thumb in the Heathen / Asatru community is to buy a book if it is within the ‘normal’ price range for a popular hard/soft back of similar page length; if it isn’t, we go to some length to get library cards at universities…
My apologies to Stephanie! After posting, I was skimming the original post that Stephanie made and realized she is *not* the author of the blog post from Tiny Cat Pants.
Aunt B. of Tiny Cat Pants, thank you for making some good points about publishing and readership (snarkiness aside!). I was not asking though how Old Norse scholars can get publishers to sell their books, I was wondering what a publisher could do for Old Norse scholars; that is, how a publisher could best promote academic dialogue among scholars in the field, and address scholar’s publication needs (as in, industry journals). I’m happy though to see that my post has lead to many other avenues of discussion, which was my true intent anyway, especially since discussion has highlighted the fact that publishing more popular books would be a great way to increase the popularity and vitality of the Old Norse discipline.
I’ve heard several stories from medievalists who are involved in groups like the SCA who say that they have to hide their participation from their colleagues, for fear of reprisal. (Anyone else experienced or heard of this?) That’s ridiculous. In college, I belonged to the local SCA group, and ran classes teaching Old Norse and gave performances of Old Norse and Old English poetry at SCA events in addition to other public venues. It was fabulous. The audiences were all so enthusiastic and eager to learn. But no one else at my university was reaching out to them, except for my advisor who was working with me on these projects! This is something that needs to change.
Dan, you’ve brought up another good point: price. Price is an issue that my company talks about constantly. I work for an academic publisher called Brill, who publishes scholarly books for scholars–no textbooks. Most print runs are around 200. (That’s how specialized and niche-driven Brill books are.) Our books are so expensive that they can only be afforded by libraries and institutions (even with an employee discount I couldn’t afford most Brill books–which is unfortunate, since Brill has published some interesting books recently on Old Norse). While this probably won’t change any time soon, many people at Brill are concerned about this issue, and are actively trying to figure out ways to make our books more accessible to individuals. I’m not sure what other academic publishers are doing about this issue, though.
What subject areas within Old Norse would the Heathen/Asatru community be most interested in? What Old Norse subject areas for that matter would the broader ‘amateur enthusiast ‘ community be most interested in?
As a graduate student in the field of Germanic philology (at the University of Minnesota), AND as a practicing heathen in my own life (so-called Ásatrú), I would still suggest that keeping the two suggestions separate makes the most sense. I don’t like mixing scholarship on a historical language and literature with recreating an almost-forgotten religion based on these texts. While I agree that extending the readership of scholarly material is ideal for both interests, there is an obvious lack of correlation between the two on a fundamental level. My own sentiment is that I would like to promote medieval Germanic studies for the very reason that I believe in these things personally, but as a scholar and researcher in the field I realize that attempting to enjoin the two is setting myself, or any competent scholar, up for utter failure. There are definitely not enough heathens who are reading scholarly material on a regular basis, just like there are not enough scholars promoting their work to this “popular” crowd. Clearly scholarship should not abandon its purposes and the Ásatrú community cannot expect that institutional scholarship abandon its goal to promote the academic studies, research, and writing on these topics.
I have not had the proper time to go through the Viking Society’s Old Norse textbooks as of yet, but I encountered the reader (vol. 2, I believe) in the University of Iceland’s bookstore this summer. I am only disappointed that they are not all three printed in one binding, but my opinion of them is derived mostly from my advisor’s (Anatoly Liberman). His opinion was along the lines of, “They are absolutely horrendously organized and stupid in their approach.” Although I cannot say in any way how well they are written, or how well they may work in teaching a course in Old Icelandic/Old Norse, I take his word on it until they arrive in the mail and I can spare at least a few hours for preliminary deep analysis (I’m just ordering them now, after all, what can it hurt to possess them). There is, as you may know, another great book by Jan Faarlund on Old Norse syntax released by OUP. But this is another story entirely.
As far as a standard textbook for the pedagogical side of Old Norse, I am still firmly convinced that Gordon, in all its errors and weaknesses, is the best available. Anatoly Liberman also wrote an extensive commentary (not another edition, unfortunately) on the entirety of the prose texts in Gordon, totaling around 100 pages, but Oxford won’t even publish it (and he is in their “grasp of love”!). This commentary would function perfectly as a teacher’s manual to the prose texts (there isn’t that much poetry in Gordon anyway). As it is now, I will possess this when I (hopefully) can teach a course in Old Norse and essentially no one else but students registered for his course.
I would really like to see the new edition of Gordon come into existence that Jesse Byock has promised the world. I asked the director of the Sigurðal Nordal Institute about Gordon, and he (Úlfar Bragason, still director until this coming spring I believe) is just as anxious as I am about a new edition even though he is an Icelander, and Úlfar is the one who noted that Jesse Byock has been telling everyone for over 10 years that he has already completed it! I guess we’ll have to keep waiting (or someone, please! start emailing Jesse and begging him to release his treasure, because as we all know, hoarding treasure will turn you into a dragon).
As far as the tiny cat pants blog is concerned, I think the author completely missed the point of the conversation because they are either dense or were having a bad day. I’m in the heathen community and I know full well that the demand for new journals in especially obscure topics within the field of Old Norse is not very high. Sure, H.R. Davidson is still selling like wildfire and Viktor Rydberg (one of my favorites) is making a comeback, but there are definitely a small number of Ásatrú members who can actually read a single prose sentence in Old Icelandic, let alone skaldic poetry or Old East Norse (Old Swedish, Danish) manuscripts and texts (my speciality). This is one of those points where I have just to come out and say, “Please leave this topic to the big boys” (with intention condescending tone).
Last point: I’ve never heard of anyone “hiding” their interests in older Germanic anything, except that because of career demands most of the best pursue something entirely different (modern German studies, comparative literature, English as a second language, etc.). I teach beginning Swedish, with long hair and a full-sleeve of Norse tattoos with runic inscriptions. I know I certainly don’t hide.
What subject areas within Old Norse would the Heathen/Asatru community be most interested in? What Old Norse subject areas for that matter would the broader ‘amateur enthusiast ‘ community be most interested in?
-I think I may have identified my response in my last post. Almost none of them (the “popular” heathenry crowd) are interested in the “nitty gritty” of Old Icelandic or Scandinavian studies academically. Introductory books, “manuals” of a sort which introduce the religious elements in the literature, and books on myths are the most popular (and as explained by another respondent, they are usually cheap and readily available). I would really like to see a translation of “Altnordische Philologie: Norwegen und Island,” even though I am competent enough to read it in German (and in its original Norwegian, “Handbok i norrøn filologi,” edited by the Norwegian philologist Odd Einar Haugen).
This again gets to the need for another, more “basic” introduction to the Old Norse language and literature itself like Gordon’s “Introduction to Old Norse,” as well as a more comprehensive one for scholars like us. Again, I’m awaiting personal judgment on the Viking Society trilogy, but I suspect my advisor was at least on the more correct side of judgment.
Some substantial texts in Old Norwegian and Old Swedish have never been translated into a modern language and deserve at least a scholarly edition from the 21st century (most haven’t been touched since the 19th century). Albeit Old Icelandic has the most literature, and there is surely work left to be done in that area, some Old Norwegian (almost identical and definitely interconnected to Old Icelandic) hasn’t been touched. And again back to my specialty in Old Swedish, “Gutalagen” hasn’t been translated into Swedish, German, or English, neither has the “West-Gautish/Geatish Law” (“Västgötalagen”). Erik Magnusson’s “Landslagen” (“Law of the Realm”) did just get translated into English by a Finn. Lastly, “Didrikskrönikan” (“The Chronicle of Didrik”) has not seen the light of English, but it just get translated into Modern German. “Didrikskrönikan” is the 15th century Swedish summary (and much more clear and concise rendition) of the Old Norwegian manuscripts containing the later known “Þiðreks saga af Bern” found in Icelandic hands after being copied to the point of nonsense (Edward Haymes translated this saga). This whole tradition contains alternatives to the Nibelungenlied and the entire Theodoric and Sigurd legends of the pan-Germanic world.
http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didrikssagan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thidreks_saga
I also think there are a couple of less attractive Fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda (we all know “Völsunga saga,” “Ragnar Hair-Breeches,” “Hrólf Kraki ok kappa hans,” etc.) which haven’t been translated or published for a general audience. But all of this talk is in the “nitty-gritty,” so I’ll leave the discussion at that.
To return to Stephanie’s original question, I would say that the state of publishing in medieval Scandinavian studies is not too dire. Books get published. Brill, Brepols, Boydell and Brewer, the Viking Collection from Odense, the Toronto Old Norse/Icelandic series, Blackwell’s, OUP, the Viking Society: all these publishers have an ongoing interest in the field, and they keep putting out good scholarship in English. And of course, there’s plenty going in on in Iceland, Scandinavia, and Germany. Apart from the Viking Society (who concentrate on editions and translations of texts, in the main), there isn’t an English-language press devoted solely to the subject (since the demise of Hisarlik, who had a really interesting publication programme in the nineties), and there are challenges in the pricing and dissemination of monographs, in particular, but overall it seems like we’re not too badly served.
Journals are a different matter, as we’ve heard. Even here, though, I think the problem is not that there aren’t enough venues to publish Scandinavian articles: it’s a question once again of their availability, price, and the difficulty of keeping up with such a widespread and diffuse bunch of publications. And then there’s the phenomenon of the disappearing journal: what’s happened to Alvíssmál, for example? For a decade, it seemed like a model journal: international, progressive in its methodological perspectives, freely available on the web as well as in print. But there’s not been an issue since 2004, and no word–as far as I know–about what’s happened to it. Mediaeval Scandinavia is another case in point: it died, was revived, but now it’s been two years since the last issue. (And good luck trying to find any information about its publication schedule on the web!) It seems that the existence of some specialist periodicals, unless they’re well established and backed by an institution, is both ad hoc and perilous. And there aren’t as many institutions who are interested in backing Norse journals as there are in medieval English, it seems.
What I think we need is better information about what’s being published, who’s accepting submissions, and that sort of thing. Many journals could help simply by making sure their websites are up to date. I think there is room in the market for more periodicals in the field: the market’s not saturated, and I don’t think there’s a high-quality web-journal that specialises in medieval Scandinavia yet, for example (I’m happy to be corrected if wrong on that). But above all I think we’d benefit from having more centralized sources of information, which can draw together all the farflung strands of scholarship and give the readers an overview of what’s going on. A regular bibliography (like the old BONIS) would be great, but takes a lot of effort. Perhaps I should just write another ‘Journal Round-Up‘ for Old Norse News for the time being?
I think one possible answer to the decline in the numbers of both journals and accessible books, certainly over the last few years, is that a vast portion of the money, time and effort in Old Norse scholarship is going into online projects (e.g. Sagnanet and the Skaldic Editing Project). Such resources are accessible to everyone who can get online, are relatively self-explanatory and, of course, are free! But again we come back to the problem of centralization, of collating these sources. If you are not already ‘in the know’ or able to spend hours / days sifting through the net to find these things and then weigh up their various merits…
To approach the problem of centralization from a different angle: how does one scholar know that they are not duplicating what another scholar is working on? Or to put it more positively: how can multiple scholars working on similar topics collaborate / share ideas? The traditional fora of for such debates are academic journals, books, conferences, etc. Modern Old Norse scholarship has latched on to the possibilities of the internet as a new publication source, but arguably it has yet to use it to its full potential.
In a small yet incredibly international field, which is now making use of an instant and limitless medium of publication, one or more central hubs of dialogue within that medium are key. Scholars need to know what resources are out there, they need to know where they can find them and they need to be able to discuss these and other important issues with something like the same speed they are being published.
It is my contention that sites like this one could allow scholars to do just that. What do you think?
From Stephanie:
What subject areas within Old Norse would the Heathen/Asatru community be most interested in? What Old Norse subject areas for that matter would the broader ‘amateur enthusiast ‘ community be most interested in?
From Dan:
I’m very glad to see Paul’s post, and generally agree with his comments about keeping ON scholarship clearly separate from the contemporary Heathen/Asatru religious practice, theology, etc – particularly about where the line should be drawn on when scholars should be doing the scholarship. But the two are linked, if only because those of us with an amateur scholarly bent go raiding the scholarship for “facts” and/or ideas.
I’ll leave aside the debate about use / mis-use of scholarship in that, in favor of answering Stephanie’s question:
Subject Areas: Religion (religious practice, beliefs, what philology & linguistics can shed on the subject), Social Structure in different time periods, relevance of Literature to both Religion and Social Structure/History
As an example of the “ideal” scholarly book, I’d point you to Thor Ewing’s Gods and Worshippers. It’s accessible, affordable, and directly addresses all of those subject areas. (Which is not to say that I agree with all that he says, however! And I recognize that some ON scholars might want to put quotes around ‘scholarly’ in my first sentence.)
I recommend to anyone who can read Swedish to check out another book, maybe with more of a scholarly bent than Thor Ewing’s books, called “Hednagudar och Hövdingadömen i det gamla Skandinavien” by John Kraft. I’m curious why this book has fallen through the cracks as such, since it is highly interesting to the scholar of Scandinavian myths and archeology. http://www.ukforsk.se/UKF/kraftbok.htm
Scroll down a quarter of the way to read the English summary. If there were money available for translation of Scandinavian non-fiction, this would be my first project (I’m essentially fluent in Swedish, being a Swedish teacher after all)! Any suggestions?
Well, I must say (from my third-world-scholar point of view), that probably the best way to sell books on old norse subjects has to do with providing something that is at the same time readable for the non-specialist and with average to low prices.
As Stephanie points out, many high-quality publishers (like Brill, Brepols) print books that are too expensive even for the specialist, and this means that the “casual reader” (who, we must remember sometimes lack the knowledge to tell the difference between a good book and a bad book, even if they have the same price) will naturally prefer the cheapest one, leading sometimes to worsen the problem.
A good trick is to print books in places where the printing costs are cheap. This is a very common thing here in the spanish-speaking world. Some spanish printing houses print books that will be sold mostly in Spain in poorer (thus, cheaper) countries like mine or Mexico. So with the same amount of money they could produce 200 books in spain, they produce 1000 here.
On finding the right way to create “attractive” books, I´ll suggest taking a look at the books by some classical french medievalists. Georges Duby or Jacques LeGoff were able to live “in both worlds” at the same time, publishing for the general public and for academia with excellent results in both fields…
I´ll add that the neo-pagan communities (at least here) buy a lot of books and pay some attention to anything that looks norse (or celtic, or anglo-saxon, or…). They´ll probably buy a cheap book and like it if its written by a scholar, even if probably they won´t go as far as buying something that is too scholarly.
On the issues of web-based sources: well, these projects are an amazing tool for us and everybody. Paper-based journals are nice, but at least for me, .pdf is far superior in all senses as a research tool (Even if I am not that sure about books, as reading the screen can be horribly tiresome…). In fact, I have to agree plenty that there is no “high-quality web-journal that specialises in medieval Scandinavia yet”. But this is not too hard a project to create. Its cheap to mantain, and the core issue is quality… The main problem, IMHO, is how to get a good set of peer-reviewers to assure high-quality.
These were my two cents on these issues.
PD: Thanks for reviewing heimskringla.no. I´ve helped in the project for a few years , and I was glad to read the review.
Well, I’m a bit late to the discussion…..so I hope the ONN sees this. But there is a venue that while not catering *specifically* to Old Norse Studies would welcome *ANY* Old Norse themed paper, whether archaeology, language, history, literature, edition, translation, long note, short note, etc. Email me and we’ll talk. You won’t make any money, we’re a mere online journal with an international board focused on academic studies, but we’d welcome a partnership, or even just Old Norse themed submissions. I do have a recent PhD from SLU doing some translations for an upcoming issue, but would love to have more Old Norse material.
Larry Swain
Hi Larry, and thanks for the input. I should of course have mentioned The Heroic Age as a very good example of the possibilities of online publication in the field. I also very much admire what they’ve done with the online version of Oral Tradition, for example. As I said further up this thread, I don’t think we lack places to publish and read good scholarship on Norse matters, necessarily, but I find it a bit puzzling that Scandinavianists have been in general so slow to move onto the internet, when such a diverse, international, and sometimes lonely field might well benefit enormously from the opportunities that the Web offers.
I agree. I’ve offered Old Norse themed issues and asked for submissions to Old Norse themed conference sessions and haven’t received a single submission. There are a couple of things in the pipeline now, the translations I mentioned, an article on a Scandinavian game, a “state of the field” paper out there somewhere….but seriously, we’d welcome any submissions. I have a three Old Norse specialists in my reading pool who are bored still, people! Keep ‘em busy, eh?
I too, btw, really like what they’ve done with Oral Tradition site, though they’ve kept some of the “trappings” of the print incarnation which makes people more comfortable I think, in contrast to a journal that’s been completely on the Net.
Well as I said previously I do not think that Norse scholars have problems using the net per se, the multiple number of online Norse projects strongly suggests the contrary. But most of these projects are either the self-started enterprises of individuals, or group efforts that all have the basis of their collaboration strongly fixed in non-web interactions.
I may be wrong here but Norse scholars seem inherently distrustful of an online community partly due to the fact that they are wary of/unable to deal with the modern pagans who have been making use of the communal potential of the internet for quite a long time. I do not have any particular solution to this: can those whose interests in Norse stem from such different agendas usefully interact? This particular thread discusses and demonstrates the arguments both for and against such a dialogue.
The lack of Norse input to Larry’s scholarly journal however, possibly has its origins in another issue that is simultaneously causing Norse scholars general unwillingness to engage with or create an online community: the isolate nature of the scholars themselves and the field as a whole.
It may sound almost as silly as ‘Icelandic banks = modern-day Vikings’ but the reason why many people are attracted to studying the literature and culture of a small isolated medieval community is because they rather like living/working in small isolated communities! This is a massive generalisation, but I think there is just enough truth in it to explain why, although some Norse scholars may have secondary specialisms in other fields, there is not a huge involvement of Norse scholarship with projects such as Larry’s whose primary concern isn’t Norse.
Such ‘isolationism’ is evident on several levels of Norse scholarship, not just the internet related. For example think about the huge growth in private collaborative projects and Norse specific conferences/symposia in the last few years compared to the patchy participation of Norse scholars in general medieval conferences such as Leeds and Kalamazoo over the same time period. Obviously more projects and greater interest is extremely positive for the field, but at the same time quite a lot of the new projects within the field seem to have at their core an isolate almost secretive attitude which may not be particularly helpful for those on the peripheries of Norse scholarship or those from related fields with an interest.
Do any of the schools in the Ivy League offer Old Norse courses that undergraduates can take? I know Columbia doesn’t.
Hi Mike,
A brief search suggests that Cornell is your best bet for undergrad Old Norse in an Ivy League school. Yale definitely teaches it, but only to graduate students (as far as I can tell). I couldn’t find an option at Harvard, even though they employ two first-rate Norse scholars. Most of these schools have some Norse-related courses on the undergrad curriculums, but don’t offer the language.
Dear Mike,
I would say as well that Cornell is your best bet in the Ivy League (I swear I’m not just saying that because I went to Cornell myself and studied Old Norse there!). Cornell offers a two-course series each year in Old Norse, consisting of Old Norse I and Old Norse II. The focus is ON-I and the rest of the Old Norse languages are touched upon briefly, though I feel that the amount of attention paid might depend on the instructor. The courses are taught by Icelanders who come over from the University of Iceland’s linguistics department on an exchange for a year, or sometimes longer.
Cornell has a long relationship with Iceland dating back to the time of the first Cornell librarian and professor of Scandinavian languages, Daniel Willard Fiske, who was a Scandinavian philologist and book collector as well as a librarian. He put together an incredible collection of Old Norse material, which he donated to the Cornell Library on his death, along with money to be used for funding the Icelandic student exchange and growing the collection. His collection, called The Fiske Icelandic Collection, I believe, is the largest collection of Old Norse-related material outside of Reykjavik (the Fiske has over 40,000 volumes).
Beyond the two-course Old Norse series, there is an active and serious but small group of faculty and students at Cornell interested in Old Norse. They meet regularly as the Old Norse Reading and Discussion Group to read and translate texts (the group also hosts an annual conference each year on medieval Icelandic studies, which I am co-organizing; I’ll be announcing information about it on Old Norse News in a few months). While Cornell doesn’t have an appointed professor of Old Norse or Scandinavian Studies, there are two professors in the English department who do both Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse, a professor in the History department who does Scandinavian history, a professor in the Linguistics department and a Cornell librarian.
As far as I know, Chris is right about Yale, Harvard and Columbia not offering Old Norse to undergrads (or at all). However, if you’re interested in studying Old Norse as an undergraduate, there are other universities outside of Ivy League who offer it. There is a listing of Scandinavian Studies programs on the SASS’ website (The Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies), which might be a good starting place.
If you want more information about Cornell I’d be happy to talk off-list, so to speak.
Cheers,
Stephanie
Nice to be mentioned in dispatches, so to speak. Somewhat to my own surprise, my other book Viking Clothing seems to be outselling Gods and Worshippers and is currently awaiting its second reprint!
There is certainly a popular market for books on Viking Studies, but I suspect that Norse scholars have tended to shy away from reaching out to embrace this popular readership, because the subject also attracts a thriving lunatic fringe. I’m thinking in particular about writing on Viking religion here. I sometimes get the feeling that they’re saying, “Walk on, please. There’s nothing to see here!” But the less the scholarly community engages the imagination of the general public, the more they will turn to alternative sources for their information.
Best wishes,
Thor