Some recent news

Congratulations to Dr Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, ASNC alumna and recent PhD graduate, now at the University of Oxford, who has recently been announced as one of Radio 3's New Generation Thinkers. This initiative, run in association with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, will allow Eleanor to bring her research on the worldview of the medieval Icelanders to a wider audience.

Congratulations also to Dr Philip Dunshea, a PhD graduate of ASNC, who studied as an undergraduate with Dr Alex Woolf at the University of St Andrews, and who has recently been appointed to a temporary lectureship in Celtic History here in the Department of ASNC. Phil will be covering the teaching of Dr Fiona Edmonds, while she is on maternity leave (congratulations Fiona!).

And finally, while we wouldn't normally allow commercial advertising here on the ASNC blog, we must make a brief mention of recent ASNC alumnus, George Potts, who stars in a new advert for Virgin trains. We'll try to resist the urge to make a joke about ASNCs going far ...

Report: Communication and Cultural Contacts in the North Atlantic Community

Sarah Waidler, a doctoral student in ASNC, writes:

On 2^nd March, the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic hosted a seminar entitled ‘Communication and Cultural Contacts in the North Atlantic Community’. Held in St John’s College, this lively and intellectually stimulating event focused on the related topics of medieval commerce and the economy within this geographical area. The seminar also touched on many other forms of exchange, including cultural, intellectual, familial and political ties between the lands joined together by the North Atlantic waters. Ranging from the actual process of trade and use of currency to how crafts and ideas travelled, to the memory of specific events and preservation of literary and historical traditions, this day presented much food for thought and presented many useful insights, while at the same time highlighting how much work still needs to be done in these areas.

The event was divided into two parts. In the morning, four speakers gave 45-minute talks on different aspects of contacts in this region. The day kicked off with a presentation by Andy Woods, from the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge, on ‘An economy of scale? Considering the volume and use of coinage in Ireland c. 995 -1170’. Andy presented his work on coinage in Ireland and demonstrated how it was possible to make fruitful comparisons between Dublin and many other commercial centres in the North Atlantic world in the medieval period. As well as showing the considerable variation in Ireland’s use of coinage both regionally and chronologically, this paper answered old queries and raised new questions on the nature of currency in Ireland. Dr Colmán Etchingham of the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, was the next speaker of the morning and presented a paper entitled ‘The myth of the Irish monastic town’, in which he revisited a topic which he has discussed in other publications, including in his Kathleen Hughes Memorial Lecture at Cambridge in 2010.  Dr. Etchingham provided further evidence in support of his argument that ecclesiastical centres in medieval Ireland did not function as commercial hubs. This included a very worthwhile investigation into the semantics of terms such as ‘óenach’ and ‘marggad’, which took account of the sources in which they appear.

The Lewis Chessmen, image © Trustees of the British Museum

After a short tea break, the third speaker of the morning, Dr Alex Woolf of the University of St Andrews, discussed ‘The bishops in the Lewis chess sets’ and looked in particular at the question of provenance of these famous pieces. This paper also considered the identity of the craftsman who made such pieces as well as other high-quality goods and how the basic materials for manufacture were obtained. The morning was rounded off with a lecture by Professor Helgi Þorláksson, from the University of Iceland, on ‘Between Oddi and the Orkneys: on Icelandic Orcadian connections, c. 1180-1240’. Professor Þorláksson examined the complex relationships between families in these areas and how much insight could be gained from the extant sources regarding their relationships.

In the afternoon, a text seminar was held to investigate three primary texts which had been circulated prior to the seminar. This discussion was led by Dr Máire Ní Mhaonaigh and Dr Elizabeth Ashman Rowe of the Department of ASNC and Dr Svanhildur Óskarsdóttir of the University of Iceland. Dr Rowe introduced a text entitled ‘Gísls þáttr Illugasonar’ in which an Icelander, Gísl, comes to the court of the Irish king Muirchertach as a hostage. Dr Ní Mhaonaigh and Dr Óskarsdóttir presented the Irish text ‘Cogadh Gáedhel re Gallaibh’ and the Icelandic text ‘Njáls saga’ and examined how these texts represented the battle of Clontarf. These two sessions proved how bringing together experts from multiple disciplines to examine textual traditions can provide new insights into the material and help elucidate difficult textual quandaries. The discussion covered a range of topics, including the way in which the Irish language was portrayed in ‘Gísls þáttr Illugasonar’ and the transmission of material about specific events and wider culture phenomena between Ireland and the Norse-speaking world.

This seminar was attended by many of the members of the Faculty from the Department of ASNC, several distinguished speakers and visiting academics, as well as post-graduates and students.  This event was an excellent example of how interdisciplinary approaches can hugely benefit research and present new findings. I’m sure that much of what was discussed at this seminar will go on to influence many of the attendees’ work and it is hoped that the many fruitful discourses that began at this seminar will continue for some time to come!

Communication and Cultural Contacts in the North Atlantic Community

Dr Máire Ní Mhaonaigh writes:

Several members of the Department journeyed to Oslo last week to participate in a seminar and workshop on the broad theme of ‘Communication and Cultural Contacts in the North Atlantic Community 1000-1300’, hosted by Professor Jón Viðar Sigurðsson. The focus of this particular event was bishops, saints and Church organisation. Detailed evidence was presented from areas ranging from Ireland to Iceland via the Isle of Man and the diocese of Sodor (and many more besides). In many of the varied contributions, links between both religious and political centres of power were to the fore, Dr Sarah Thomas demonstrating the central role played by Bishop Mark of Galloway in key political negotiations. Such connections were also explored in the accounts of Church organisation in Ireland, Iceland and Norway presented by Dr Colmán Etchingham and Jón Viðar Sigurðsson among others, points of comparison being particularly revealing. The universality of saints, as well as their differences were highlighted in contributions by Professor Ásdís Egilsdóttir and Dr Fiona Edmonds, the latter illuminating a layered nexus of saintly connections crossing the Irish Sea. Such networks facilitated transfer of texts, the influence of some of which we saw at work in the depictions of Icelandic bishop-saints, as well as in the portrayal of St Knud by Dr Jonny Grove. Two days of intense, profitable discussion underlined the importance of analysing the evidence from these areas in tandem. The productive debate will continue in a series of further seminars to be arranged.

AHRC awards money for skills training in Viking Studies

The Arts & Humanities Research Council has awarded a grant of £45,000 to the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Nottingham and the Highlands and Islands for a skills training programme for PhD students and Early Career Researchers in the field of  Old Norse-Icelandic and Viking Studies: Extending Academic Research about the Viking Diaspora and its Heritage in the British Isles.

This project addresses the skills gap in the AHRC's strategic area of Heritage and engages with the emerging theme of Translating Cultures. It comprises a preparatory workshop bringing together academics, young scholars and heritage professionals, followed by a field school in Orkney, providing hands-on experience of a heritage landscape.

Giant squid spotted in Iceland?

ASNC lecturer in Scandinavian History, Dr Elizabeth Ashman Rowe, recently found the following notice in a medieval Icelandic annal:

1345: A strange thing appeared east in Lagarfljót and the Fljóts Dale district, and people know that it was alive. Sometimes it looked like large islands but sometimes it shoots up coils and gaps in between, and many hundreds of fathoms long. No-one knew the size of it, and neither a head nor a fishtail has been seen on it, and for this reason people do not know what [kind of a] wonder it was.

The Icelanders were familiar with ordinary fish and marine mammals, but this creature was new to them. On the basis of the reference to 'coils', Dr Rowe at first was reminded of the Loch Ness Monster, but on further reflection a giant squid seemed more likely. Dr Rowe is currently at work on producing the first English translation of the medieval Icelandic annals, and further unsual events are sure to turn up.

Image from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Giant_squid_logy_bay.png

Public lecture in ASNC

The 2011 E.C. Quiggin Memorial Lecture will take place on Thursday 1st December, at 5pm, in room GR.06/07 of the English Faculty Building, 9 West Road, Cambridge.

Prof. Odd Einar Haugen, of the University of Bergen, will speak on:

'So that the writing may be less and quicker, and the parchment last longer':

The Orthographic Reform of the Old Icelandic First Grammatical Treatise

An abstract is available here.

The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception in the social space of the English Faculty Building.

All welcome.

Memories of Old Awake

As part of the 'Cambridge Ideas' series, learn more about Dr Emily Lethbridge's exploration of the landscapes of the Icelandic sagas ...

More congratulations!

The awards and prizes are flooding in this month! Here are some more:

Dr Nick Zair, Research Fellow in Peterhouse and Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Classics in Cambridge has been awarded the Johann-Kaspar Zeuss Prize for the best PhD in Celtic Studies of 2011. The title of his dissertation, which was completed in Oxford, is: ‘The reflexes of the proto-Indo-European laryngeals in Celtic’. The prize is awarded by the Societas Celtologica Europaea.

Congratulations to Dr Eleanor Barraclough (ASNC) who has been awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Oxford.  Dr Barraclough will hold her fellowship in the Faculty of English, with an affiliation to The Queen’s College, and will be working on a research project mapping the literary landscape and conceptual geography of the medieval Norse world, with close readings of the sagas at the heart of the investigation. This literary analysis will be supported by an interdisciplinary methodology that explores the links between the sagas’ literary designs and the geographical conditions, historical reality, socio-political conditions and cultural memories underpinning Norse society.

The Saga-Steads of Iceland: A 21st-Century Pilgrimage

We would like to alert you to the adventure-cum-academic-project which is about to be undertaken by one of our Research Fellows, Dr Emily Lethbridge. Her blog can be found at http://sagasteads.blogspot.com/, but we also include an outline of her project below.

Dr Emily Lethbridge writes:

I complete my term as a post-doctoral Research Fellow (in medieval Icelandic literature) at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in December 2010 and I am planning an ambitious and exciting project for 2011. I intend to move to Iceland in January 2011 in order to embark upon a year-long '21st-century pilgrimage to the saga-steads of Iceland'. I will drive from the UK to Denmark, where I will catch a ferry from Hirtshals over to the Faroe Islands, and then on to Iceland, weather at sea permitting. Once in Iceland, over the course of the year, I will travel around and across the country reading each one of the 13th-century Íslendingasögur (the Icelandic family sagas) in the physical landscapes in which they and their 9th-, 10th-, and 11th-century action are set. I will live for the most part out of my Land Rover ambulance and will move from farm to farm on the basis of introductions I already have and growing awareness and interest in the project. I want to talk to people I meet about their personal interests in, and responses to, the sagas and I hope to persuade people to tell oral versions of sagas they know, or episodes from sagas that are local to their part of the country.

* * *

In addition, I will draw on published 19th-century travel accounts by figures such as William Morris, W. G. Collingwood, and Sabine Baring-Gould, comparing what they found on visiting the saga-sites with what is to be found now. As I travel, I will write up my experiences and the end-product will be a book that will be published by a mainstream commercial publisher, and will be of interest not only to those who are already knowledgeable about Iceland and familiar with the sagas, but the wider British reading public. In essence, the book will be about Iceland and its unique landscape, the sagas against and within that landscape, the Icelandic people and their relationship with the landscape and the sagas, and continuity and change in Iceland from medieval to present times. The book will be illustrated with my photographs.

* * *

The financial collapse in 2008 and the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in 2010 flung Iceland onto the global stage--albeit under a cloud, literally and metaphorically. British perceptions of Iceland are (often negatively) based on the after-effects of these events--i.e. the lock-down of international air travel--and on images of a bleak and inhospitable landscape used as the backdrop to 4-by-4 car adverts. I want to redress this situation by communicating to the British public how much more there is to Iceland. Most of what is written about Iceland for general consumption is based on the superficial experiences of commercial writers who have little or no previous knowledge of the country, its history and culture, and most importantly, the Icelandic language. I speak Icelandic fluently, however, and I know rural parts of the country well (and how Icelandic rural life works) as a result of working on a dairy farm in the north of the country.

* * *

Beyond the book, additional project outputs will be high-profile media coverage (national newspapers, magazines, radio), and I will also keep a blog in which I will report on my progress. By these means, I hope to communicate something of the remarkable character of Iceland--founded on informed knowledge and experiences--to the wider, non-academic public in the UK.

Icelandic at Cambridge

Vicky Cribb writes:

There is more to Iceland than banking crises and volcanic eruptions, as you will discover if you come along to the Modern Icelandic language classes offered by the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, with generous support from the Icelandic government. The classes, which are free of charge, are open to all members of the University and cater for beginners and intermediate students (depending on demand). They are not assessed but are taught on an informal basis, combining grammar instruction with practice in speaking, listening and reading.

There will be introductory sessions for both levels on Friday 15th October: beginners at 3 pm in Rm G-R04, intermediate at 5 pm in Rm S-R25 of the English Faculty. All members of the University are welcome.

For more information about the classes and learning resources, including links to online courses and Icelandic media sites, as well as opportunities for further study, see the Modern Icelandic webpages.

Instructor: Ragnheiður Guðmundsdóttir (rg432@cam.ac.uk). Until 15th October, please address any queries about the course to Vicky Cribb: vac32@cam.ac.uk.

Michaelmas Term Timetable:

Beginners: Michaelmas Term 2010, classes start 15th October and end 3rd December: 1 x 50 min/week, 3 pm, Friday, Rm G-R04, English Faculty.

Intermediate: Michaelmas Term 2010, classes start 15th October and end 3rd December 2010: 1 x 50 min/week, 5 pm, Friday, Rm S-R25, English Faculty.