COLSONOEL conference report

From ASNC doctoral students Rebecca Merkelbach and Caitlin Ellis:

This year, it was Cambridge’s turn to host the annual Cambridge Oxford London Symposium in Old Norse, Old English and Latin on Friday, 29^th May. This postgraduate conference seeks to provide a friendly forum for doctoral and masters’ students at the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford and University College London in the fields of medieval Germanic and Latin studies to present their research. This year, in addition to lecturers from the three institutions, Prof Margaret Clunies Ross (Sydney) and Prof Heide Estes (Monmouth) also attended the symposium and contributed to the discussions.

The first session, chaired by Pete Sandberg (UCL), began with Jonathan Hui (Cambridge) discussing killer’s regret in Gautreks saga and Ásmundar saga kappabana. Next, Caroline Batten (Oxford) explored different types of shape-shifting across Old Norse literary texts. Finally, Simon Thomson (UCL) examined the creative interactions between words and images in the Old English Wonders of the East.

Following refreshments, Rebecca Merkelbach (Cambridge) chaired the second session, in which David Callander (Cambridge) convincingly argued for the Englishness of Laȝamon’s Brut based on the poem’s narrative style. Afterwards, Harriet Soper (Cambridge) investigated the depiction of birth (or the absence thereof) and infancy in the Old English Exeter Book Riddles.

After an excellent lunch, the third session – chaired by Timothy Bourns (Oxford) – featured papers both on Old English and Old Norse literature. Nicholas Hoffman (Cambridge) noted the poetic as well as pragmatic qualities of the Old English charms in comparison to heroic poetry. Turning to Old Norse eddic material, Katherine Olley (Cambridge) considered different versions of the Hildr legend and their exploration of marital and familial ties as well as the social realities underlying them. Brian McMahon (Oxford) closed the literary section of the day with a discussion of tense and person in Vǫluspá with regards to its performative potential.

The final session, chaired by Caitlin Ellis (Cambridge), turned towards more historical matters. Samuel Cardwell (Cambridge) analysed the advice offered to kings by Aldhelm, Bede and Boniface and their underlying practical concerns for edification. Next, Benjamin Allport (Cambridge) effectively challenged the historiographical consensus regarding the formation of Norwegian national identity. Last but not least, Louisa Taylor (UCL) evaluated the evidence for the participation of bishops and religious men in warfare in medieval Norway.

The day was closed by drinks at a local pub and a convivial dinner at La Margherita. We would like to thank all speakers, respondents and chairs for their contributions as well as the Scandinavian Studies Fund for its generous support. We look forward to seeing everyone in London next year.

Old English Riddles

Recent ASNC PhD graduates, Dr Matthias Ammon and Dr Megan Cavell, are pleased to announce their new blog, The Riddle Ages. Stemming in part from their participation in the department’s exciting Old English Reading Group, Ammon and Cavell have embarked upon the ambitious task of providing open access translations and commentary for every riddle in the Exeter Book. The hope is that this blog will act as a teaching and reference tool for those learning Old English, offer an easily accessible list of potential riddle-solutions for researchers and provide insight into these fascinating poems for interested members of the public.

Below is an example of the first post for Riddle 1:

Hwylc is hæleþa þæs horsc      ond þæs hygecræftig

þæt þæt mæge asecgan,      hwa mec on sið wræce,

þonne ic astige strong,      stundum reþe,

þrymful þunie,      þragum wræce

5   fere geond foldan,      folcsalo bærne,

ræced reafige?      Recas stigað,

haswe ofer hrofum.      Hlin bið on eorþan,

wælcwealm wera,      þonne ic wudu hrere,

bearwas bledhwate,      beamas fylle,

10   holme gehrefed,      heahum meahtum

wrecen on waþe,      wide sended;

hæbbe me on hrycge      þæt ær hadas wreah

foldbuendra,      flæsc ond gæstas,

somod on sunde.      Saga hwa mec þecce,

15   oþþe hu ic hatte,      þe þa hlæst bere.

Who among heroes is so sharp and so skilled in mind

that he may declare who presses me on my journey,

when I rise up, mighty, sometimes savage,

full of force, I resound, at times I press on,

5   travel throughout the land, I burn the people’s hall,

plunder the palace? The reek rises,

grey to the roofs. There is a clamour on the earth,

the slaughter-death of men, when I shake the forest,

the quick-growing groves, topple trees,

10   sheltered by the sea, pressed into wandering

by the powers on high, sent afar;

I have on my back that which earlier covered each rank

of the earth-dwellers, flesh and spirit,

swimming together. Say what covers me,

15   or how I am called, who bear that burden.

See the original blog post for possible solutions!

Dreams and Nightmares: Festival of Ideas

Dr Elizabeth Ashman Rowe, Lecturer in Scandinavian History, who organised the ASNC contribution to the Festival of Ideas, reports:

If I say so myself, ASNC’s event for the Festival of Ideas was a great success. The theme of the Festival this year was ‘Dreams and Nightmares’, so ASNC organised a series of short talks and recitations dealing with ‘Dreams and Nightmares in Early Britain and Ireland’. The event was held in the Judith E. Wilson Drama Studio, rather than the usual lecture room, and this contributed to the theatricality of the presentations, as did six metre-high panels designed and painted by current ASNC students, which illustrated scenes of dreams, visions, and monsters from the various ASNC literatures. The three-hour programme began with Prof. Paul Russell discussing ‘Dream narratives in Old Welsh and Old Irish’, followed by students reading passages of these texts in the original. The studio quickly filled to capacity in the first half hour and stayed that way until the end. From the Celtic languages the focus turned to the Germanic side of things with Dr Richard Dance explaining where the words dream and nightmare come from and reading the Old English poem The Dream of the Rood. 

Richard Dance explicates Old English 'dream' and 'nightmare'

(photograph by Dr Margo Griffin-Wilson)

Three students read appropriate passages from Beowulf, and then Old Norse texts dealing with dreams and nightmares were read by Orri Tómasson (our teacher of Modern Icelandic) and Vicky Cribb (a postgraduate at ASNC) and explicated by Dr Judy Quinn. Dr Rory Naismith continued the English part of the programme by exploring the symbolism of the monsters and beasts that appear on Anglo-Saxon coins, and Dr Quinn capped off the event by discussing the Old Norse dreams and nightmares in compelling detail. 

Adam Kirton, a current ASNC undergraduate, reads Old English

(photograph by Dr Margo Griffin-Wilson)

The audience’s level of interest was evident not only in their attendance but also in the spontaneous question-and-answer sessions that happened after every talk. The audience’s attention was grabbed as well by the signs directing the public to the event, for student volunteers outside the building had them attached to swords, spears, and axes, and the student doorwarden keeping order in the hallway outside the drama studio was kitted out in authentic period costume. The audience was requested to fill out comment cards as they left, and most of those gave the event the highest rating. ASNC once again ably communicated the attraction and interest of our field, supported by the volunteer efforts of the many students who helped in advance and on the day.

ASNC undergraduate Becky Shercliff reads Old Irish

(photograph by Dr Margo Griffin-Wilson)

Anglo-Saxon Portraits on Radio 3

BBC Radio 3 will be broadcasting a series of 'Anglo-Saxon Portraits' in their 'Essay' slot, over thirty programmes (3 sets of ten 15-minute episodes) beginning on Monday 15th October at 10.45pm and continuing into 2013. The first essay, on Vortigern, is by Barry Cunliffe. Further information about the series here. Future programmes are set to cover Augustine of Canterbury (presented by the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams) and King Raedwald (presented by Martin Carver), amongst many other topics. And the episodes should be available from the Radio 3 website via the 'listen again' function.

Obituaries

Ray Page: obituaries published in the Daily Telegraph (22nd March) and The Times (23rd March) have celebrated the career of Prof. Ray Page. The link to the Telegraph obituary is here; the Times obituary can only be accessed by subscribers.

Ursula Donke: sadly, another eminent Cambridge-based medievalist has passed away in recent weeks, namely Ursula Dronke, the distinguished scholar of Old Norse literature. An obituary, published in the Guardian, can be found here.

Cultures in Contact: Conference for Teachers interested in the Medieval World

Dr Elizabeth Boyle writes:

On Saturday 14th January, just before the return of our students and the beginning of the new term, the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic welcomed sixty school teachers, from all over the country, for a one-day conference on the theme of 'Cultures in Contact'. The conference sought to present to teachers working in a variety of disciplines (History, English Literature, Classics and Religious Studies were all well-represented), and at a variety of schools, some of the cutting-edge research being undertaken in the Department, with the general aim of drawing attention to the richness and diversity of medieval studies (now often sadly neglected in the GCSE and A Level curricula). The conference - which was fully booked well in advance (and, indeed, was over-subscribed) - featured the following papers:

Dr Andrew Bell - 'Thinking about early medieval Europe'

Dr Richard Dance - 'Roots, blends and buttocks: finding the Vikings in the English language'

Professor Simon Keynes & Dr Rory Naismith - 'Money talks: wealth and power in Anglo-Saxon England and Scandinavia

Dr Paul Russell - 'Reading Ovid in medieval Wales'

Dr Elizabeth Boyle - 'From Shakespeare to Tennyson: Celtic influences in English literature'

The day concluded with a Q&A session, which covered a wide variety of topics, ranging from aspects of the University's admissions process to themes which had emerged from the papers earlier that day. Having received overwhelmingly positive feedback from the teachers who participated - and having been delighted at their enthusiasm for, and interest in, all things medieval - we certainly hope to repeat the event in future years.

The Department would like to say an enormous 'thank you' to Dr Denis Casey for co-ordinating the event so efficiently, and to our departmental secretary, Mrs Jayne Riley, for her invaluable support.

The influence of Old Norse on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Dr Richard Dance writes about his current research project, an etymological survey of words derived from Old Norse in the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight:

The language of the Scandinavians who settled in Viking Age England had a profound influence on the history of English, including its vocabulary. A number of important, everyday Modern English words have been traced back to Old Norse (e.g. die, egg, ill, law, leg, low, seem, sky, take, window, not to mention the pronouns they, their and them), and there are hundreds of other likely instances in texts written during the Old and Middle English periods. The sociolinguistic context of the contact between speakers of Old English and Old Norse in the Viking Age, and the mechanisms by which material was transferred from one language to the other, have been the subject of important research in the last several decades (see notably M. Townend, Language and History in Viking Age England: Linguistic Relations Between Speakers of Old Norse and Old English (Turnhout, 2002)). But there is still much work to do in order to understand the loaned vocabulary itself, particularly the Scandinavian influence on the lexicon of the great medieval English literary monuments composed in the North or North Midlands. My current research project explores one important work, the fourteenth-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

A view of 'Lud's Church', Staffordshire (possible inspiration for the 'Green Chapel'

in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight). Photo: Dr Richard Dance 

Despite its celebrity as one of the pinnacles of Middle English literary achievement, and, what is more, though its vocabulary has frequently been held up as one of the most striking known instances of Scandinavian influence, there has been no complete etymological survey of Norse loans in Sir Gawain. This is perhaps because the identification of a list of these words is a task accompanied by so much uncertainty: the number of lexical items in the text whose development could be attributed to Norse input is very large, but (once we get beyond the obvious candidates) there is surprisingly little consensus about which exactly to include. At a minimum there are just over a hundred different words in Sir Gawain demonstrably derivable from Norse on the basis of comparative formal criteria (these include phonological ‘tests’ like the presence of a distinctively ON /sk/ in words like skete ‘quickly’, to be derived from ON skjótt rather than OE scēot- with its initial palatal, cp. MnE shoot). At the other extreme, taking into account the etymological labels and other remarks of the historical dictionaries, the glossaries (and notes) of the standard editions and assorted other studies, I have so far collected more than 450 total instances for which some influence from Norse has been suggested, including many for which the evidence is much shakier (amongst the more interesting and tentative are words like fysken ‘scamper’, gryndel ‘fierce’, runisch ‘rough, violent’). The disparity between these two extremes is nicely indicative of the difficulties that beset the etymological identification of Norse loans in general, and which result from two basic deficiencies in the pool of evidence: on the one hand the sheer formal similarity of Old English and Old Norse, which has self-evident consequences not only for the relatively easy transfer of material between the two, but for our capacity to identify it after the fact; and on the other the patchiness of the record of both languages in the periods before and during which contact took place. The first step in the investigation of these words cannot therefore be a simple matter of compiling a list of ‘bona fide loans’; but the grounds upon which Scandinavian influence has been identified need careful scrutiny and considered presentation before any further analysis can be undertaken. Taking Sir Gawain as my sample, my project therefore aims to discover not only what can be achieved by a thoroughgoing collection of all the many and various suggestions for Norse input in scholarly publications, it also sets out to be a reassessment of the methodological underpinnings of a subject central to English lexical history, whose principles have seldom been set out or discussed since the magisterial work of Erik Björkman (Scandinavian Loan-Words in Middle English (Halle, 1900–1902)).

I have been working on this material intermittently for a number of years, and my approach to the etymological arguments has evolved as I have collected more and more suggested loans. Over the next few months I intend to prepare the main elements of my research for publication. This task has been greatly facilitated by the generosity of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), whose ‘Fellowships’ scheme has enabled me to take an additional term of sabbatical leave in order to work on Sir Gawain. Looking further ahead, I hope that my survey of the vocabulary of this important text will sow the seeds for a large-scale, collaborative project to collect words of possibly Scandinavian origin from a great many more Middle English texts.

Woruldhord Project at Oxford University

Anna Caughey writes:

On behalf of Dr Stuart Lee and the Oxford University Faculty of English, I am pleased to announce the launch of the Woruldhord Project, which opened on the 1st of July 2010 and is now receiving submissions.

The Woruldhord Project is a joint initiative of the Oxford University Computing Services and the Faculty of English. It aims to combine the expertise of literary scholars, historians, archaeologists, art historians and linguists together with material from museums, historical sites and members of the general public to create a comprehensive online archive of written, visual and audio-visual material related to Old English and the Anglo-Saxon period.

The Project is currently inviting contributions from anyone researching or teaching on the Anglo-Saxon period at a university level. We are particularly interested in images, audio/video recordings, handouts, essays, articles, presentations, spreadsheets, databases, course notes, lesson plans and materials used in undergraduate teaching, but welcome submissions of any type.

Any material submitted will be made freely available worldwide for educational purposes on the Project Woruldhord website, hosted by the University of Oxford. However, all intellectual property rights in the material will be retained by the contributor, contributors will be named on the site, and all visitors will be provided with a citation guide enabling them to properly acknowledge the authors of the resources. Contributors can also, if desired, attach links to their own or their University’s website to their contributions,
increasing their own web presence.

Timed to correspond with renewed public interest in the Anglo-Saxons following the recent discovery of the Staffordshire Hoard, this project presents an excellent opportunity to apply computing technology to the study of Anglo-Saxon literature, history and culture. It also aims to allow members of the public across the world to access rare or difficult-to-obtain material as well as the expertise of specialists in the field. We hope that academics and teachers are willing to share this material, especially if they feel it will be of benefit to the discipline. The Woruldhord Project follows on from the Great War Archive, a very successful project which
collected manuscript material, letters and other materials from the First World War from March-November 2008.

To submit material to the project, simply visit http://poppy.nsms.ox.ac.uk/woruldhord. This page will take you through the simple-to-use submission process where you can upload your object and provide some basic information about it. Other pages that may be of interest include: the main website, the project blog, our 'help' section including a 'how to get started guide' and an FAQ, and a discussion group for the project

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to email the project at: woruldhord@oucs.ox.ac.uk

Thanks in advance for any contributions you may send!