Old Norse News

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.

News of another exciting conference, this time at the University of Aberdeen:

22-23 October 2009

Myth and Theory in the Old Norse World

Background to the Conference (from the conference website)

In 2005 Scandinavian scholars assembled in Aarhus, Denmark to discuss progress in the study of Old Norse mythology.  The reason for this gathering was a fresh interest in this field (and in particular in the reassessment of its theoretical-methodological foundations), which has recently resulted in new research projects, PhD theses and academic articles.  This has generated a new fascination for the topic amongst the general public, leading to several museum exhibitions and newspaper articles.  All this has taken scholars by surprise.  In response, leading academics have decided to meet and discuss methodological foundations, sources and current issutes in the field of Old Norse mythology at an annual conference.  The aim is to construct a new theoretical foundation for future study, through discussion of a vital aspect of Early Scandinavian culture, history and religion:  namely our pagan mythology.

In 2008 it was decided that the 2009 conference should take place in Aberdeen, organised by the Centre for Scandinavian Studies (www.abdn.ac.uk/cfss).  The theme for this conference in Aberdeen is Myth and Theory in the Old Norse World, with contributions from Literary Historians, Linguists, Historians, Historians of Religions, Archaeologists and Ethnologists.

Participant speakers will reassess and qualify current scholarly opinion, and papers are expected to provoke lively debate.  Speakers will include many leading international scholars as can bee seen in the programme.

It looks like another excellent conference in a series that has already produced some highly stimulating results.  Speakers will include Robert Segal, Margaret Clunies Ross, John Lindow, Terry Gunnell, Rudolf Simek, and many more…

Next year’s annual Medieval Studies conference at Fordham University, New York has just been announced. Excitingly, the theme is New Directions in Medieval Scandinavian Studies. It will take place on 27-28 March 2010.  Key-note speakers will include Lesley Abrams, Martin Chase, Matthew Driscoll, Roberta Frank, Vésteinn Ólason, Kirsten Seaver, and Kirsten Wolf. I think this sort of event is just what the field needs, and I’ll certainly be there.

The Call for Papers has been issued, and is available at the Conference Website. Deadline for paper proposals is 2 October There aren’t many details on the site as yet, so keep checking back.

[Apologies for the long gap between posts -- I've been away.]

Chris Callow writes to give us the very heartening news that Old Norse language is returning to the syllabus at the University of Birmingham, after a few year’s hiatus. Chris will be teaching an introductory level course in the School of History and Cultures. He hopes to extend the teaching to more advanced levels in the future.

Chris also thought that Old Norse News readers might be interested in Birmingham’s new  MA in Medieval History, which has its first
intake in September 2009:
http://www.postgraduate.bham.ac.uk/prog2009/taught/arts/medieval-history.shtml.

It is expected that this will be the precursor to a series of other taught, graduate-level programmes in medieval studies and Late Antiquity which will become available over the next few years.

Finally, he mentions that Old Norse and Viking-Age scholars will be more than welcome at the annual Gender and Medieval Studies conference held in Birmingham on 7th-10th January 2010 (see http://www.medievalgender.co.uk/). The theme of the conference next year will be the family.

Obviously exciting times for medievalists at Birmingham, and I’m grateful to Chris for letting us know about them.

Part II of our series of summer 2009 Conference Previews.

It didn’t take very long to find the Scandinavian content in the programme for the 2009 Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America, which will be in Chicago from 26-29 March. It looks like there’s just one paper:

16.15 on Friday: Marianne Kalinke, ‘The Arthurian Legend in Breta sögur: Historiography on the Cusp of Romance’

The Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies’ meeting in Madison, Wisconsin (30 April-2 May) unsurprisingly has a stronger medieval Scandinavian component. It looks like being a strong strand in the programme this year: Read more »

The arrival of the programmes for the big summer conferences is one of the surest signs that spring is upon us. As a service to you, the reader, Old Norse News brings you a summary digest of the Scandinavian-interest sessions and papers at the biggest of them all: the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, Michigan (7-9 May). We’ll follow this up by looking at the Medieval Academy, SASS, and Leeds over the coming weeks.

It looks like being a fairly good year: I count ten sessions devoted solely to the Norse world, and a total of 49 papers on Scandinavian topics. It’s still perhaps not enough, considering that there are over 1500 papers delivered each year at Kalamazoo, but it’s a healthy number. Also encouraging is the interesting spread of sub-disciplines between the papers. Literature predominates, but people are talking about an interesting range of texts, including some less commonly studied ones: the session on biskupa sögur and the two papers on Tristans saga stand out, for example. There isn’t, however, very much on poetry this year. As usual, medieval Scandinavian history — even the Vikings — is a bit thin on the ground, although the titles of the individual history papers sound very interesting. It’s a shame there aren’t any sessions devoted entirely to Scandinavian history, though. There’s also a sprinkling of archaeology, and even some linguistic topics. It also looks as there are none of the major clashes between Norse sessions that annoyed some of us so much last year.

Alas, I can’t make it to Kalamazoo this year, but I shall be trying to persuade people to update Old Norse News  on what’s going on. In the meantime, there follows the digest of Scandinavian Studies sessions and papers at Kalamazoo this year; you’ll see that it will almost be possible to go to every session of the conference and only to hear papers on Scandinavia! Apologies if I’ve missed anything out. Read more »