Old Norse News

October’s Journal Round-Up concludes with Saga-Book, Northern Studies, and the latest number of JEGP.

The new edition of the Viking Society’s Saga-Book has just been sent out to members. (If you’re not a member, might I urge you to consider joining?) Volume 32 contains three articles and no fewer than 17 reviews:
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After a slightly longer delay than planned, here is the second of our surveys of what is going on in recent periodical literature in the field of Medieval Scandinavian Studies. There’s something of a historical slant to today’s selection, which includes no fewer than three historiske tidsskrifter and the Norwegian journal Collegium Medievale. Finally, we have a recent edition of Skírnir from Iceland. In a second post we’ll have details — hot off the press — of the 2008 numbers of Saga-Book from the Viking Society for Northern Research and its Scottish equivalent, Northern Studies. Don’t forget that these journals are listed with their web addresses and publication details on our links > journals page.

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(An occasional feature devoted to our subject’s appearances in the mainstream media, and what becomes of it out in the wider world…)

Iceland has been in the news plenty recently, but only for rather gloomy reasons. You can revisit the old clichés (perpetuated by the new Icelanders themselves, it has to be said) about Icelandic entrepreneurs being the embodiment of the ‘Viking spirit’ in this BBC article from 2006: The Vikings are coming. Or you can wonder, as you read an article like The party’s over for Iceland, the island that tried to buy the world (Guardian), whether the methods of the original Vikings (unsubtle though they seemed to some) weren’t preferable to the activities of some of their descendants. The hedge-fund has turned out to be a less effective weapon than fire and the sword for subjugating the rest of Europe.

That digression into macro-economics put swiftly aside, it was rather nice to see, also on the Guardian’s site, an article asking whether the Sagas of Icelanders are not Europe’s most important book. The use of the singular in the title seems odd, but the author, Ben Myers, seems to think that we may view the whole corpus as a single unified literary entity. It’s a position I think I’d have trouble defending, but it’s good to see the sagas even being discussed in such a forum.

If you’ve been frustrated by the meagre results that you get when you type “Egill Skallagrímsson” + “Eminem” into Google, help is at hand. The March 2008 issue of The Journal of Popular Culture (not something that I’d normally include in our Journal Round-Ups, necessarily) has an article by Brian Anse Patrick of the University of Michigan, which rejoices in the title ‘Vikings and Rappers: The Icelandic Sagas Hip-Hop across 8 Mile’ (subscription possibly needed to read the whole thing). I just thought you might like to know.

Irmeli Valtonen sends details of her new book, The North in the Old English Orosius: A Geographical Narrative in Context, which has been published in the series Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki.

The description of the North in the Old English Orosius in the form of the travel accounts by Ohthere and Wulfstan and a catalogue of northern people are examined in this study in the context of ancient and medieval textual descriptions of the North, with special emphasis on Anglo-Saxon sources and the reign of King Alfred. This is the first time that these sources, an interdisciplinary approach and second literature, also from Scandinavia and Finland, have been brought together.

Please click the following link for full details of this important and most welcome contribution to the field: The North in the Old English Orosius.

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’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?

I don’t know if any reader of Old Norse News is illustrious enough to picture themselves as the Director of the Árni Magnússon Institute in Reykjavík, but applications are now being sought for one of the most prestigious and important jobs in the field of Icelandic studies:

Position as the director of the Arni Magnusson Institute for Icelandic Studies available

Applications are being sought for the position as the director of the Arni Magnusson Institute for Icelandic Studies. The appointment will be for five years from 1 March 2009. The deadline for submitting applications is September 30, 2008. For further details of the announcement: www.arnastofnun.is/english

The Arni Magnusson Institute for Icelandic Studies was established by law in the Icelandic Parliament on June 2, 2006. The function of the Institute includes “carrying on research in Icelandic studies and related fields, especially in the area of Icelandic literatureand language.”

The very best of luck to any reader who thinks of applying!