The Centre for Nordic Studies UHI invites you and your colleagues to
submit abstracts for the Inaugural St Magnus Conference, Orkney 2011 at the Centre for Nordic Studies, UHI Millennium Institute, Kirkwall, Orkney Islands, Scotland, 14-15th April, 2011.

The 2-day international conference will feature presentations on cultural and geographical connections between Scotland and the Nordic World, fostering dialogue and knowledge exchange between academia, government and the public. The theme of this event concerns cultural, geographical and historical links between Scotland and the Nordic World. However, we welcome talks on all Nordic and maritime topics, particularly comparative studies. Abstracts are due by 30/11/10.
Conference Programme

Day 1: Norroway ower the Faem (Norway over the foam) Scotland and
Norway – Intimate Contact over 1200 years.

Keynote speakers for day 1 include Judith Jesch, Professor of Viking
Studies, University of Nottingham.

Day 2: The Northern Isles and Scandinavia – Cultural and historical
connections.

Keynote speakers for day 2 include Steve Murdoch, Professor of
History, University of St Andrews.

Submission guidelines

Papers will be presented to a broad, interdisciplinary audience of
diverse interests and backgrounds and should therefore be engaging
colleagues from a variety of subject areas. The conference language is
English, and standard presentations will be 20 minutes in length.
Presenters will be encouraged to submit written versions of their papers
for inclusion in the conference proceedings. If you wish to present a
paper at the conference, please e-mail the following information to
cns@orkney.uhi.ac.uk:

● Your name
● Your institution/affiliation (if any)
● Your e-mail address
● Your telephone number (including country code)
● Abstract (150-200 words, including paper title)
● Biographical note (100 words).
● At least three keywords.

For more information, or to propose an organised session of 3-4 related
presentations, please e-mail cns@orkney.uhi.ac.uk.

1. Download the catalogue from the Society’s website. [It's also available as a pdf file.]

2. Choose which books you’d like to bid on, and the amount you’d be prepared to pay.

3. Send a list of your bids to Alison Finlay at a.finlay@bbk.ac.uk by 31 July.

4. In August, the people who bid the highest amount for each book (you don’t get to see what others have bid, and you can’t revise your initial bids) will be contacted and invoiced for the books and price of postage. Please bear in mind that the cost of postage may be substantial if you win several books or live overseas.

5. Wait for your books! (It may take some time for them to be delivered, owing to the sheer volume of orders to be processed.)

All proceeds from the sale will go towards the Peter Foote Memorial Fund, which has been established to support postgraduate students in the field of Medieval Scandinavian Studies through the provision of bursaries and prizes.

There are lots of really special items in the list, all of them made much more special by their association with Peter. So please do take a look at the catalogue, and happy bidding!

The Viking Age: A Reader

Edited by Angus A. Somerville and R. Andrew McDonald

April 2010 / 450pp / 6×9 paperback / ISBN 9781442601482 / $39.95

Drawing on a wide range of original sources, and tracing the astonishing development of the Viking Age from the first foreign raids to the rise and fall of Viking empires, this comprehensive reader is essential to an understanding of Viking history.

There’s a much more detailed account of the contents available at the UTP website. To me, this looks like filling a really important gap in the market, and I’m sure Professors Somerville and McDonald’s book will find its way onto plenty of university reading lists.

It’s out now in North America and will officially be launched in the UK in June, although it seems that it’s already possible to order a copy.

Dr Marie Stoklund, Curator Emerita and Senior Researcher at the National Museum, Copenhagen

Prof. Hans Frede Nielsen, Dept. of English, University of Southern Denmark, Odense

Prof. Henrik Williams, Dept. of Scandinavian Languages and Director of the Centre for Runology, University of Uppsala

MA Irene García Losquino, Centre for Scandinavian Studies, University of Aberdeen

Prof. Stefan Brink, Centre for Scandinavian Studies, University of Aberdeen

Dr Tarrin Wills, Centre for Scandinavian Studies, University of Aberdeen

All are welcome–if you’re interested in attending please contact Stefan Brink directly at s.brink@abdn.ac.uk

François-Xavier Dillmann has written to inform us that the latest issue of the excellent French-language journal of Medieval Scandinavian Studies, Proxima Thulé, has now been published. Here is the list of contents, followed by details of how to order a copy:

Éditée depuis 1994 par le professeur François-Xavier Dillmann, corres­pondant de l’Institut, directeur d’études à l’École pratique des Hautes Études, la revue Proxima Thulé est le seul périodique de langue française entièrement consacré à la Scandinavie ancienne et médiévale.

Le volume VI de Proxima Thulé (automne 2009, 192 pages, une trentaine d’illustrations) vient d’être publié en ce début du mois de mars 2010. Il comprend les études suivantes :

Anders Hultgård, Fimbulvetr ou le Grand Hiver. Étude comparative d’un aspect du mythe eschatologique des anciens Scandinaves.

François-Xavier Dillmann, « Brûler ses vaisseaux ». Remarques compa­ratives sur un épisode de l’Histoire des rois de Norvège de Snorri Sturlu­son.

Jan Ragnar Hagland, Les inscriptions runiques d’Irlande.

Lennart Elmevik, « Il était hospitalier et éloquent ». Sur les épithètes laudatives dans les inscriptions runiques de Suède à l’époque viking.

Elena Balzamo, Olaus Magnus savait-il dessiner ? Quelques réflexions et hypothèses au sujet des vignettes de l’Historia de gentibus septen­trionalibus.

Marie-Christine Skuncke, Gustave III de Suède et l’Opéra.

Les commandes du volume VI (et des volumes antérieurs) de Proxima Thulé (au prix de 30 euros l’exemplaire) sont à adresser — directement ou par l’intermédiaire d’un libraire — à De Boccard Édition-Diffusion

11, rue Médicis. 75006 Paris

Téléphone : 01 43 26 00 37  Télécopie : 01 43 54 85 83

Adresse de messagerie électronique : deboccard@wanadoo.fr

Site Internet : www.deboccard.com

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 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.

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.