Professor Sif Rikhardsdottir
Date: Thursday 13 October 2016 - 5:15pm (doors open at 5:00pm)
Poetic Voice and Interior Emotionality in Old Norse Literature
Events details
Venue: Project Room, 50 George Square
Biography
Sif Rikhardsdottir is Associate Professor and former Chair of Comparative Literature at the University of Iceland. She is the author of Medieval Translations and Cultural Discourse: The Movement of Texts in England, France and Scandinavia, published by Boydell & Brewer in 2012, and a forthcoming edition of the Middle English romance Partonope of Blois, co-edited with David Lawton. She is project leader on a three-year collaborative research project on ‘Voice and Emotion in Medieval Literature’ and is currently working on a monograph tentatively entitled Voicing Emotion in Old Norse Literature in connection with the project as well as on a co-edited volume on Charlemagne in the Norse and Celtic Worlds with Helen Fulton in connection with an international project on ‘Charlemagne: A European Icon’.
Lecture Abstract
The Norse literary tradition is well known for its objective narrative style and an apparent lack of interest in the emotions of its characters. The seemingly laconic mode of portraying emotions in the Icelandic sagas - when compared with continental romance, for instance - does, however, not negate the presence of underlying emotion. Many of the sagas are in fact no less emotionally laden than the romances. This difference suggests that the emotive force of a text does not necessarily rely on emotion words or gestures (noticeably absent in sagas, but abundant in romances), but rather on the emotional signifiers with which the reader engages and to which he responds.
This lecture will focus on the way in which poetic voice, i.e. versification, is used in Old Norse literature to convey interior emotionality. Given the preferred objective narratorial mode of the saga literature, poetry frequently serves as means of conveying and expressing an emotive interiority otherwise denied or suppressed in the prose text. The lecture will touch upon examples from the saga literature, including the better known sagas Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar and Brennu-Njáls saga, as well as some Eddic poems to consider how emotions are conveyed in Old Norse literature.
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