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

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

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.

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.

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.

Larry Swain

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.