Old Norse News

Here at Old Norse News, we plan to provide reports on as many conferences, symposia, projects and courses in the wide world of Medieval Scandinavian Studies as we possibly can. The first of these is an account of this year’s Århus summer school, run under the auspices of the programme ‘Nordisk sprog, litteratur og kultur 700-1500‘. This is the third such summer school, and they’ve proved to be a great success. I’m very grateful to Maja Bäckvall for providing the following report.

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I came across an interesting article by John Stanley Martin in Nordic Notes, a publication of the Centre for Scandinavian Studies at Flinders University, Australia. John traces the long and distinguished history of the teaching of Old Norse/Icelandic and related subjects at the University of Melbourne (where Old Icelandic was the sixth language to be introduced to the university’s curriculum!)

Unfortunately, the article ends on a melancholy note, since the Viking Studies programme at Melbourne was shut down last year, ending more than half a century’s tradition and achievement. It’s an all-too-familiar story: despite Viking Studies apparently pressing many of the correct buttons for modern university administrators — interdisciplinarity, cross-cultural approaches, collaborative teaching and healthy and growing enrollments — internal politics and budget restrictions appear to have sealed its fate. A great shame.