Saturday, 25 May 2024 Organised by John Butcher (Meran Academy, South Tyrol) together with Henrike Lähnemann (Oxford Medieval Studies), Taylor Institution Library (St Giles’, Oxford OX1 3NA), Room 2.
Session 1, Chair: Nigel Wilson
Angus Bowie (University of Oxford) – A Homerist on Looking into the Nibelungenlied: Cortés or a Panamanian? Handout
10.40-11.00 John Butcher (Meran Academy) – Henry Fuseli, Homer and the Nibelungenlied
Andrea Doda (University of Oxford) – Power and Passion: The Role of Women (and Female Figures) in Homer and the NibelungenliedHandout
Session 2, Chair: Henrike Lähnemann
Joanna Raisbeck (University of Verona) – Between Homer and the Nibelungenlied: Literary and Aesthetic Debates in Heidelberg around 1800
Alan Murray (University of Leeds) – Chivalric Warfare and Heroic Combat in the Nibelungenlied
Christoph Schmitt-Maaß (LMU München / University of Oxford) – The Reception of the Nibelungenlied in Eighteenth-century Leipzig
Manuscript Workshop
Weston Library (Broad Street, Oxford OX1 3BG), Bahari Room – Homeric manuscripts with Peter Tóth and Nigel Wilson
The weather is slowly warming up, and this week marks the arrival of February: term is well and truly underway! Of course, research goes on all year round, and term time is above all about teaching. Here, then, is some fitting wisdom from the Epistolae project on the work of the teacher:
Proinde quaestiunculas quasdam discipulae doctori, filiae patri destinantes, supplicando rogamus, rogando supplicamus, quatenus his solvendis intendere non dedigneris [As pupils to their teacher, daughters to their father, we are sending you some small questions, asking you as supplicants, supplicating as petitioners, that you will not disdain the task of answering them.] A letter (716-20) from Egburg
This week’s blog post is something a little bit different: we have a call for Small Grants applications! The TORCH Oxford Medieval Studies Programme invites applications for small grants to support conferences, workshops, and other forms of collaborative research activity organised by researchers at postgraduate (whether MSt or DPhil) or early-career level from across the Humanities Division at the University of Oxford. Past small grants have supported reading groups, conferences, and creative-critical events! For full details, see the blog post here.
See below for this week’s roundup:
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
We invite applications for small grants (normally £100-250) to support collaborative activities by researchers at postgraduate or early-career level, taking place between the beginning of Hilary term 2024 and the end of Trinity term. Closing date for applications is 9 February. Full advertisement and application form.
EVENTS THIS WEEK:
Monday 29th January:
The Medieval Church and Culture Seminar meets at Bodleian Weston Library at 3.30-4.30pm for a special session on Exploring astronomical instruments and manuscripts. Please NB the different meeting time. Places limited: please email Lesley Smith to sign on.
The Medieval History Seminar meets at 5pm in the Wharton Room, All Souls College. This week’s speaker will be Andrew Wathey (TNA/All Souls), ‘Philippe de Vitry in Clement VI’s Avignon’. The seminar will also be available via Teams: The Teams session can be accessed by logging in to Teams with your .ox.ac.uk account and joining the group “Medieval History Research Seminar” (team code rmppucs). Alternatively, it can be accessed via this link. If you have any difficulties please email: medieval history.
The Sacred Literature in Interfaith Contexts Reading Group will meet at 6pm, online via Zoom. This week will be led by Professor Aaron Koller, Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Yeshiva University, USA. Prof. Koller will be speaking on ‘The Talmud among Victorian Christians: Polemics and Humanism in Interfaith Encounters‘. To register, please click here.
Tuesday 30th January:
The Europe in the Later Middle Ages Seminar meets at 2-3.30pm in the Dolphin Seminar Room, St John’s College. Tea and coffee available from 1.45pm. Undergraduates welcome. This week’s speaker will be Jose Andres Porras, Oxford, ‘Florentine Orphans and their Parents‘.
The Medieval French Research Seminar will meet at the Maison Francaise d’Oxford on Norham Road. Drinks will be available from 5pm; presentations start at 5.15pm. This week’s speaker will be Professor Sarah Kay (NYU), ‘Nature and the landscape of adventure in Erec et Enide, a Macrobian perspective’ All are welcome! For more information or to be added to the seminar maillist, please contact Helen Swift
The Oxford Medieval Society Latin and Ancient Greek Reading Group meets at 5-6pm, in the ground floor lecture room 2 at 47 Wellington Square. Ancient Greek will be read in odd weeks, and Latin in even weeks. We hope to expand our understanding of these languages for the betterment of our own medieval studies by reading texts that are referenced or known of in the medieval world; please note that this is not a strict rule. Anyone from any background is welcome to attend. To register your interest, or for more information, please contact the society at Oxford Medieval Society.
Wednesday 31st January:
The Medieval German Seminar meets at 11.15, at St Edmund Hall, Old Library. In Hilary Term, we are going to discuss the writings by ‘Frau Ava’, the first women author whose name we know, this week reading the Last Judgement. We are meeting in the Principal’s Lodgings in St Edmund Hall. Tea and coffee are provided but please bring your own mug! Further information and reading recommendations via the teams channel; if you want to be added to that: please email Henrike Lähnemann.
The Medieval Latin Document Reading Group meets at 4-5pm on Teams. A document is sent out in advance but homework is not expected. Please contact Michael Stansfield for further details and the Teams link.
The Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar meets at 5pm at The Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies 66 St Giles and online via Microsoft Teams by clicking here. This week’s speaker will be Michael Shenkar (the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) – ‘The ‘Timeless Empire’: Sasanian Iconography as a Historical Source’.
The Medieval English Research Seminar will meet at 5.15pm in Lecture Theatre 2, St Cross Building. Today’s speaker will be Elizabeth Archibald (Durham), ‘Bathing for Health and Pleasure in the Middle Ages – Literary and Social Attitudes’. The seminar will be followed by a wine reception. All welcome!
Dante Reading Group meets at 5.30-7pm in St Anne’s College, Seminar Room 11. Each week, we will be reading through and discussing a canto of the Divine Comedy in a relaxed and informal setting, delving into Dante’s language and imagination in manageable chunks. The group is open to those with or without a knowledge of Italian, the reading being sent out in the original and in translation. Refreshments, both alcoholic and otherwise, will be provided! To register or ask any questions, please email Charles West (Sponsored by TORCH).
Thursday 1st February:
The Ethics of Textual Criticism Seminar meets at 10-12 in Harris Seminar Room, Oriel College. This week’s speaker will be Harald Samuel (Oxford) – ‘Textual criticism of Hebrew texts in different textual cultures’.
The Middle Welsh Reading Group meets at 2-4pm in Jesus College, Habakuk Room. No previous knowledge of Middle Welsh is assumed. Translations will be provided with plenty of time to ask questions at the end. We’ll read a selection of early and late Middle Welsh prose and poetry to offer everyone a chance to experience the richness of Middle Welsh and its literary tradition. Please email to register your interest so that Svetlana knows how many people to expect: Svetlana Ó Siochfhradha Prešern.
The Late Roman Seminar will meet at 4pm in the Seminar Room, Corpus Christi College. This week’s speaker will be Bryan Ward-Perkins ‘Why saints were seen much more often in the late antique East than in the West’.
The Medieval Women’s Writing Research Seminar meets at 5-6.30pm at the Main Hall of the Taylorian. This week’s speaker is Sophie Bacchus-Waterman (St John’s College Library, Oxford), ‘The French Psalter of Anne Boleyn‘. Stay up to date with events by joining our mailing list or following us on X @MedievalWomenOx. Funded by the “TORCH Critical-Thinking Communities” fund.
The Celtic Seminar meets at 5pm, online via Zoom. Please contact a.elias@wales.ac.uk for the link. This week’s speaker will be Nathan Abrams (Prifysgol Bangor), ‘Capturing and preserving north Wales’s Jewish history’.
Friday 2nd February:
The Medieval Coffee Morning meets as usual 10:30am in the Visiting Scholars Centre of the Weston Library (instructions how to find it) with presentation of items from the special collections, coffee and the chance to see the view from the 5th floor terrace.
The Late Antique Latin Reading Group meets at 12-1pm, in the Hovenden Room, All Souls College, and is open to anyone engaged in research on the late antique world. Though prior knowledge of Latin is required, we welcome people with a range of abilities. We particularly welcome graduate students and early career academics. If you would like to attend, or you have any questions, feel free to contact either of the convenors. Please do RSVP if you intend to attend, so that we can gauge numbers and circulate the readings. Contact: David Addison and Alison John.
The Oxford Medieval Manuscripts Group (OMMG) meets at 2pm at The Weston Library. This week’s seminar will be a study and discussion of illuminated manuscripts. Limited spaces, write to the email below. First come first served basis. To subscribe to our mailing list, participate in library visits, propose a presentation of your research for work in progress meetings, or submit any queries, please write to: Elena Lichmanova.
The Crafting Documents Project Launch will take place at 3-4pm in the Memorial Room, Queen’s College. The speakers will be Professor Julia Smith (All Souls’ College), Professor Ira Rabin (BAM, Berlin), Dr Ana de Oliveira Dias (Faculty of History), and Dr José Andrés Porras (Wadham College). To read more about the project, please click here.
Chaucer Now, with Patience Agbabi and Creation Theatre Company will take place at 6pm in the Weston Library. The prize-winning poet Patience Agbabi performs some of her versions of the tales, iand these poems are interspersed with excerpts from The Wife of Willesden, Zadie Smith’s 2021 version of The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale. The performances will be framed by an introduction and a Q&A. After the performance, the exhibition Chaucer Here and Now will be open for viewing with curator Marion Turner. Attendance is free but booking is essential: to book, and for further information, click here.
The Tolkien 50th Anniversary Seminar Series meets at 4-5pm in Merton College T.S. Eliot Lecture Theatre. This week’s speaker will be Bond West (University of Oxford), ‘Mr. Underhill: Topography and the Ring’s Temptation’. Free access (no need to book). Please email Julia Walworth if you need step-free access.
The Anglo-Norman Reading Group meets at 5-6.30pm, at St Hilda’s College, and on Zoom. Please let us know if you would like to attend, either in person or on Zoom. The text – some Jousting Letters from Edingburgh – will be provided via Padlet, and refreshments as usual to help us along. All welcome, at any level of Medieval French! Please contact Stephanie Hathaway <stephanie.hathaway@gmail.com> or Jane Bliss <jane.bliss@lmh.oxon.org>for further details.
Finally, some more wisdom on the importance of teaching and teachers:
non volvitur dies neque nox elabitur ulla sine memoria magisterii tui. [Not a day nor a night goes by without some remembrance of your instruction.] A letter (716-20) from Egburg
Whether you are teaching or being taught this week (and of course, we all do both to some degree!) I wish you a fruitful week. May all of your instruction be memorable!
[Medievalists exchanging memorable instruction] St John’s College MS. 61, f. 103 v. By permission of the President and Fellows of St John’s College, Oxford Viewable in full at Digital Bodleian
I do hope that everyone is enjoying being back in Oxford, and returning to seminars and reading groups. It’s lovely to see Oxford’s medievalists coming back together to think and talk about the middle ages: in all of its many facets and languages! We are so lucky to be able to collaborate across so many different faculties, and to discuss with colleagues from so many different disciplinary backgrounds. Here is some wisdom from the Epistolae project on the importance of community discussion:
Haec cogitate, haec inter vos die ac nocte, in secreto et in publico tractate. [Consider these things, discuss them between yourselves day and night, in private and in public.] A letter (1100) from Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury to Richeza
This week’s blog post, written by Prof. Marion Turner, also highlights the incredible diversity and variety of the “medieval”, and its potential to spark discussion across many different places and times. Prof. Turner writes about curating the ‘Chaucer Here and Now’ exhibition, which runs from 8 December 2023 to 28 April 2024 at the St Lee Gallery, Weston Library (Bodleian Libraries). The exhibition draws attention to the hugely diverse ways that Chaucer has been interpreted, imagined, and reimagined around the world. To read all about the fantastic exhibition and the rationale behind its curation, read Prof. Turner’s blog post here.
In the spirit of celebrating the plenitude of Oxford’s medieval offerings, we also have a second blog post this week! Elliot Vale explores the translation of Genesis B, the only verifiable example of a vernacular-to-vernacular translation from pre-conquest England. To learn more about the evolving relationship with the continental Saxons, read Elliot’s blog post here. Elliot will be exploring the translation of Genesis B in more detail at the first OCCT discussion group of Hilary Term: Monday 22nd February, 12.45–14.00, Seminar Room 10, St Anne’s College. Lunch provided.
Of course, nowhere is the diversity of Oxford’s medieval community more visible than in the Medieval Booklet! The finalised booklet is now available to view online here, in all of its glory. A reduced-quality pdf version is also attached to this week’s email, for your convenience. See below for the full list of events taking place this week.
EVENTS THIS WEEK:
Monday 22nd January:
The Medieval French Palaeography Reading Group meets at 10.30-12 in the Weston Library. This group is open to anyone with an interest in Old French, Middle French and Anglo-Norman manuscripts. We study and read manuscripts from the 12th century to the late 15th century. If you are interested in joining the group or would like more information, please write to: laure.miolo@history.ox.ac.uk
The Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation (OCCT) meets at 12:45-2pm in Seminar Room 10, St Anne’s College. Elliot Vale (University of Oxford) will speak on The Saxon ‘Other’ and the Saxon ‘Self’ in the Translation of Genesis B.
The Medieval Archaeology Seminar meets at 3pm in the Institute of Archaeology, Lecture Room. This week’s speaker will be Brandon Fathy (University of Reading), Becoming Ipswich: A Story of Urban Emergence in the Early Middle Ages.
The Medieval History Seminar meets at 5pm in the Wharton Room, All Souls College. This week’s speaker will be John Merrington (Oxford), ‘Did Charlemagne Worry about his Body?’. The seminar will also be available via Teams: The Teams session can be accessed by logging in to Teams with your .ox.ac.uk account and joining the group “Medieval History Research Seminar” (team code rmppucs). Alternatively, it can be accessed via this link. If you have any difficulties please email: medhistsem@history.ox.ac.uk.
The Old Norse Reading Group meets at 5.30-7pm. We’ll be translating a range of exciting Old Norse texts! To join the mailing list, email Ashley Castelino.
Tuesday 23rd January:
The Centre for Early Medieval Britain and Ireland Lecture takes place at 1pm at the Memorial Room, Worcester College. Today’s speaker will be Prof. Rory Naismith, University of Cambridge: ‘Silver Linings: Money, Plague and Economic Change in 7th and 8th c. England’. Any inquiries should be directed to Meredith Cutrer meredith.cutrer@worc.ox.ac.uk.
The Europe in the Later Middle Ages Seminar meets at 2-3.30pm in the Dolphin Seminar Room, St John’s College. Tea and coffee available from 1.45pm. Undergraduates welcome. This week’s speaker will be James Cogbill, Oxford, ‘A City of Dynasts? Patronage, Competition and Challenge in later medieval Constantinople‘.
The Old High German Reading Group will meet at 4pm in the Committee Room, 41 Wellington Square. If there is appetite amongst attendees, the group will migrate to the Lamb and Flag after the session. Handouts will be provided and no prior knowledge is required! This term the texts—with a different theme for each session—will be chosen from different sections of the Althochdeutsches Lesebuch (Braune 1994), alternating between verse and prose. This week will be Biblical (verse), Christus und die Samariterin (Braune XXXIV) – “Christ and the Samaritan Woman”.
The Medieval Church and Culture Seminar meets at Wellbeloved Room, Harris Manchester College. Tea & coffee from 5pm; papers begin at 5.15pm. This week’s speaker is Ana Dias (History Faculty), ‘Scribes and Scripts: the curious case of early medieval relic labels‘. Everyone is welcome at this informal and friendly graduate seminar!
Wednesday 24th January:
The Medieval German Seminar meets at 11.15, at St Edmund Hall. In Hilary Term, we are going to discuss the writings by ‘Frau Ava’, the first women author whose name we know, transmitted in the Vorau Manuscript. This will be a close reading session led by Dr Anna Wilmore and Dr Linus Ubl. Further information and reading recommendations via the teams channel; if you want to be added to that: please email Henrike Lähnemann.
The Medieval Latin Document Reading Group meets at 4-5pm on Teams. A document is sent out in advance but homework is not expected. Please contact Michael Stansfield for further details and the Teams link.
The Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar meets at 5pm at The Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies 66 St Giles and online via Microsoft Teams by clicking here. This week’s speaker will be Natalija Ristovska (University of Oxford) – ‘The Byzantine Craft of Enamelling and its Links with Islamic Metalwork, c. 800-1204’.
The Medieval English Research Seminar will meet at 5.15pm in Lecture Theatre 2, St Cross Building. Today’s speaker will be Miri Rubi (QMUL), ‘Black/Beautiful: the History of Song of Songs 1:5’. The seminar will be followed by a wine reception. All welcome!
The London Old and Middle English Research Seminar (LOMERS) takes place at 5.30-7.30pm at Senate House, London (Room 102) and onlinevia Teams. Professor Francis Leneghan will speak on the topic of his new project, ‘Towards a New Literary History of Old English Prose’. To register, please visit: https://ies.sas.ac.uk/events/towards-a-new-literary-history-old-english-prose.
Dante Reading Group meets at 5.30-7pm in St Anne’s College, Seminar Room 11. Each week, we will be reading through and discussing a canto of the Divine Comedy in a relaxed and informal setting, delving into Dante’s language and imagination in manageable chunks. The group is open to those with or without a knowledge of Italian, the reading being sent out in the original and in translation. Refreshments, both alcoholic and otherwise, will be provided! To register or ask any questions, please email charles.west@regents.ox.ac.uk (Sponsored by TORCH).
Thursday 25th January:
The Ethics of Textual Criticism Seminar meets at 10-12 in Harris Seminar Room, Oriel College. This week’s speaker will be Alison Salvesen (Oxford) – ‘Hebrew authority, textual criticism, and translation technique: Symmachus and the Megillot’.
The Environmental History Working Group meets at 12.30-2pm, in the History Faculty. For further information, please contact Ryan Mealiffe.
The Middle Welsh Reading Group meets at 2-4pm in Jesus College, Habakuk Room. No previous knowledge of Middle Welsh is assumed. Translations will be provided with plenty of time to ask questions at the end. We’ll read a selection of early and late Middle Welsh prose and poetry to offer everyone a chance to experience the richness of Middle Welsh and its literary tradition. Please email to register your interest so that Svetlana knows how many people to expect: svetlana.osiochfhradhapresern@jesus.ox.ac.uk.
The Late Roman Seminar will meet at 4pm in the Seminar Room, Corpus Christi College. This week’s speakers will be David Addison, Martina Carandino, and John Merrington, ‘Soul and Embodiment in the Late Antique World: Three Case-Studies’
The Seminar in Medieval and Renaissance Music meets at 5pm via Zoom. If you are planning to attend a seminar this term, please register using this form. For each seminar, those who have registered will receive an email with the Zoom invitation and any further materials a couple of days before the seminar. If you have questions, please just send an email to all.souls.music.seminars@gmail.com. This week’s presenter will be Susan Forscher Weiss (Peabody Institute and the Johns Hopkins University), ‘Roman de Volvelles: A Story of Revolving Diagrams in Early Modern Quadrivial Texts’, and the discussants will be Mary Carruthers (Oxford and New York University) and Michael Dodds (North Carolina School for the Arts).
The Medieval Visual Culture Seminar meets at 5pm in St Catherine’s College, Arumagam Building. This week’s speaker will be Emily Guerry (University of Kent), ‘Diplomacy and Devotion in the Gothic Wall Paintings of Angers Cathedral.
The Medieval Women’s Writing Reading Group meets at 5-6.30pm in Lincoln College Lower Lecture Room. This week’s reading will be Frau Ava’s Poetry. Stay up to date with events by joining our mailing list or following us on X @MedievalWomenOx. Texts for the reading group are shared on the mailing list.
The Celtic Seminar meets at 5.15pm, in Memorial Room, Jesus College, and online via Teams. Please contact david.willis@ling-phil.ox.ac.uk if you need a link to join online. This week’s speaker will be Caitlyn Brinkman-Schwartz (University of Oxford), Race, Revival and Revolution: Defining the Irish ‘Celt’.
Friday 26th January:
The Late Antique Latin Reading Group meets at 12-1pm, in the Hovenden Room, All Souls College, and is open to anyone engaged in research on the late antique world. Though prior knowledge of Latin is required, we welcome people with a range of abilities. We particularly welcome graduate students and early career academics. If you would like to attend, or you have any questions, feel free to contact either of the convenors. Please do RSVP if you intend to attend, so that we can gauge numbers and circulate the readings. Contact: David Addison (david.addison@all-souls.ox.ac.uk) and Alison John (alison.john@all-souls.ox.ac.uk).
Exploring Medieval Oxford through Lincoln Archives meets at 2-3pm, in Seminar Room 2, EPA Centre, Museum Road. Anyone interested in analyzing primary sources and conducting a comprehensive examination of the documents are welcome to attend. Those who are interested can contact Lindsay McCormack and Laure Miolo via email: lindsay.mccormack@lincoln.ox.ac.uk and laure.miolo@history.ox.ac.uk
The Tolkien 50th Anniversary Seminar Series meets at 4-5pm in Corpus Christi College Auditorium. This week’s speaker will be Elena Vermeer (University of Oxford), ‘Tolkien’s ‘Sellic Spell’ and Beowulfian Poetics: the Artist and the Critic‘. Free access (no need to book).
OPPORTUNITIES:
Finally, a little piece of wisdom to help us all cope with the horribly cold weather that we’ve been having this past week:
ex grandine pretiosi lapides procreentur [precious gems may be generated from a hailstone] A letter (1156-57) from Osbert of Clare to Adelidis of Barking
It’s true that the beauty of Oxford’s colleges in January, when the winter light hits them, almost makes up for the cold and rain! I hope that your week contains more precious gems than hailstones, and that you find joys even in unlikely places!
[Medievalists find it easier to enjoy the ‘precious gemstone’ of Oxford in winter from the safety of indoors, where no hailstones can reach…] St John’s College MS. 61, f. 2 r. By permission of the President and Fellows of St John’s College, Oxford Viewable in full at Digital Bodleian
by Professor Marion Turner (English). All images by Ian Wallman.
Chaucer Here and Now, a major exhibition at the Bodleian Library, was opened on December 7th by Sir Ben Okri, and it runs until April 28th. I’ve curated this exhibition about Chaucer across time; about inspiration, creativity, and readers. It brings extraordinary medieval manuscripts and early printed books together with modern film, animation, cartoons, and contemporary poetry. Across time, Chaucer has been re-imagined in many different ‘heres and nows,’ made to fit changing expectations and tastes. The show is accompanied by a lavishly-illustrated book of essays about the ideas and themes of the exhibition.
The exhibition includes the oldest Canterbury Tales manuscript, the Hengwrt Chaucer, on loan from the National Library of Wales. It also showcases some of the most beautiful illuminated Chaucer manuscripts, alongside particularly gorgeous manuscripts of Dante and Boccaccio’s work. The first and second editions of the Canterbury Tales, printed by William Caxton in 1476 and 1483 are some of the most important early printed books in existence. William Morris’s Kelmscott Chaucer, perhaps the loveliest of all Victorian books, is another jewel, and there are also collections of Victorian children’s Chaucers, eighteenth-century Chaucerian ballads, and a cluster of translations into languages such as Ukrainian, Japanese, Farsi, Esperanto, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Hebrew, French, and Korean.
The exhibition reveals that readers have always been actively responding to Chaucer’s texts. In the first case, three manuscripts are open at the same tale, Chaucer’s unfinished Cook’s Tale. While one scribe simply says that Chaucer did not finish the tale, another finishes it off for him, while a third adds a completely different tale (not by Chaucer) calling it a second Cook’s Tale. Early scribes and editors did not treat the text with reverence – indeed they had to make decisions about what to do with the unfinished texts that Chaucer had left behind.
In later centuries, translators and adaptors became concerned about Chaucer’s discussions of sex and the body, and censored his texts heavily. Pope’s translation of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue cuts out all the references to sex, the genitals, desire, and the body, leaving a short and fairly unrecognisable text. In the nineteenth century, the popular tales included the Clerk’s (about female submissiveness), the Knight’s (about chivalry and courtly love), the Nun’s Priest’s (an animal fable), and the Man of Law’s (female suffering again). The tales about farting, adultery, and sex in trees, were less popular. In contrast, in the twentieth-century, many readers focused exclusively on those fabliaux tales – the prime example being Pasolini’s film.
While in the nineteenth-century, Chaucer was seen as a poet of empire, whose texts should be sent out around the world to promote a certain kind of Englishness, in more recent decades, Chaucer has been reimagined as a poet of diaspora and refugees. The exhibition brings together the Refugee Tales volumes (from 2016 onwards), the records of a project whereby refugees and writers walk the pilgrimage route and tell their stories. Other texts that link Chaucer’s focus on travel and giving voice to diverse storytellers to modern diasporas include Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze’s translation of part of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue into Jamaican English, Marilyn Nelson’s Cachoeira Tales, which uses the Canterbury Tales as an inspiration for writing about the forced migration of enslaved people, and Zadie Smith’s Wife of Willesden which transposes the Wife of Bath’s Tale from Arthurian Britain to a community of Maroons (the descendants of formerly enslaved people) in eighteenth-century Jamaica.
This exhibition shows how the idea of Chaucer as the Father of English Literature developed, and became firmly established in sixteenth century printed editions, which featured dominating portraits of father Chaucer, positioned in such a way as to construct him as the Father of the Nation. This authoritative idea of Englishness elides the multilingual background of Chaucer’s own texts and life: the exhibition showcases Chaucer’s multilingual sources, his own translations, and his use of different languages in his texts. The global author of today – translated into many languages, and inspiring many writers from diverse backgrounds – is not so far away from the fourteenth-century traveller and diplomat.
The exhibition offers various ways to engage with Chaucer’s texts. You can put on headphones and watch some of the BBC animated Canterbury Tales. On the back wall, the opening couplet of the Tales is projected in multiple languages. Every seven minutes, a one-minute monologue is projected onto one wall: the Knight, Miller, or Wife of Bath, talks about themselves in modern English. And just outside the main exhibition, in the transept, there is a pilgrimage wall, with graphics of the pilgrimage route, onto which visitors are encouraged to stick their own pilgrim creations. Craft materials are provided, along with video tutorials by artists about how to draw Chaucer cartoons or make Chaucer puppets.
Students have been involved in various aspects of the exhibition: the review in the Times opened with discussing the area of the exhibition which features photos of current Oxford students and quotations about what Chaucer means to them. The journalist singled out the student who has a Chaucer tattoo on her forearm.
In his opening speech, Sir Ben Okri talked about the fundamental importance of Chaucer, saying that his work and ideas were like a river running underneath world literary culture. He walked on to the podium to the song ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale,’ which faded after the line ‘as the Miller told his tale.’ It was a great example of how Chaucer seeps into people’s consciousness, and continues to inspire poets, playwrights, artists, students, and all kinds of other people, from all over the world, in many different heres and nows. I hope people have fun in the exhibition, and that it surprises them.
Friday 2 February 2024: Chaucer Now: an event to celebrate recent rewritings of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. (click here to find out more)
Saturday 27 April 2024: Creating Chaucer: join us to explore Chaucer’s world through creative activities, talks and discussion. (click here to find out more)
Elliot Vale will be exploring the translation of Genesis B in more detail at the first OCCT discussion group of Hilary Term: Monday 22nd February, 12.45–14.00, Seminar Room 10, St Anne’s College. Lunch provided.
The Old English poem Genesis B is unique as the only verifiable example of a vernacular-to-vernacular translation during the Anglo-Saxon period. Interestingly, its source language Old Saxon and target language Old English were closely related and mutually intelligible. John Hines argues that the residual ‘Old Saxon’ nature of the Old English poem ‘displays the cultural connexions of a now Saxon-dominated England with the Christian Continent’. In this, Genesis B epitomizes the Anglo-Saxons’ continued and evolving relationship with the continental Saxons, exhibiting both the Saxon ‘other’ and the Saxon ‘self’.
In this blogpost, I will survey the historical and linguistic interrelation of the Anglo-Saxons and the Old Saxons to understand what might have motivated the translation of Genesis B.
Let’s begin before the beginning with the pre-migration linguistic situation of Germanic Europe. The Germanic dialects spoken in north and north-west Europe around the 5th century are known as the ‘West Germanic’ languages. They consisted of three main groups, the ‘Irminonic’ (which became modern High German), ‘Istvaeonic’ (which became modern Dutch), and ‘Ingvaenoic’ (which became modern Frisian, Low German, and English). This last group, also known as ‘North Sea Germanic’, divides further into Anglo-Frisian (a branch including both Old English and Old Frisian) and Low German (which includes Old Saxon). During the Age of Migration from the 4th to the 6th century, peoples whose languages were closely related and mutually intelligible migrated in groups and merged. This seems to have happened with the Germanic tribes who migrated to Britain in the 5th century.
This migration made a distinction as well as highlighted a commonality between what would become the Anglo-Saxons in Britain and the Old Saxons on the continent. In his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, the Northumbrian scholar Bede names three Germanic tribes who migrated to Britain in the fifth century: the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. He has this to say about them:
‘The people of Kent and the inhabitants of the Isle of Wight are of Jutish origin […] From the Saxon country, that is, the district now known as Old Saxony, came the East Saxons, the South Saxons, and the West Saxons. Besides this, from the country of the Angles, […] which is called Angulus, came the East Angles, the Middle Angles, the Mercians, and all the Northumbrian race […] Angulus is said to have remained deserted from that day to this.’ (Bede 51)
The peninsular Jutes seem have been absorbed by Danish expansion westward into the apparently deserted homeland of the Angles (thought to be Angeln in Schleswig Holstein). Only the Saxons became distinguishable as two peoples, the insular Anglo-Saxons in the southern English Kingdoms of Wessex, Essex, and Sussex and the continental Old Saxons in Old Saxony. Consequently, the Germanic inhabitants of Britain could maintain a connection with the continent they had migrated from, defining themselves both in relation to and in opposition to it.
After their own Christianisation, the Anglo-Saxons pursued missionary activity on the continent among related Germanic tribes, primarily the Frisians and the Saxons. Missionary work was conducted among these groups because they spoke languages (namely Old Frisian and Old Saxon) that were closely related to and mutually intelligible with Old English. In the early 8th century, St. Boniface, a Northumbrian monk, established an important abbey for the Saxons at Fulda in Germany. In a letter, Boniface implored the Anglo-Saxon bishops in England to ‘Take pity upon them [the Saxons]; for they themselves are saying: “We are of one blood and one bone with you”’ (75). Clearly, it was recognized that the insular and continental Saxons were connected historically, linguistically, as well as ethnically.
With Christianity came literacy, and the Saxons seemed to define their nascent literary culture in the light of the Anglo-Saxons who converted them. This is exemplified in a pair of Latin texts, the Praefatio and Versus, which are thought to have once prefaced an edition of Heliand, an Old Saxon gospel poem. Among other points touching on Saxon poetry, these texts describe a Saxon shepherd who was divinely inspired to compose vernacular biblical poetry. This is clearly modelled on the Cædmon legend as narrated in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, a text Anglo-Saxon missionaries took with them to the continent. In Bede’s account, a lay brother at Whitby Abbey abandons a feast in shame at his inability to perform a secular song. Nevertheless, he is visited by an angel and divinely inspired to create religious alliterative poetry, thereby fusing the traditional Germanic verse form with Christian subject matter. A Saxon scribe seems to have borrowed this legend to provide a similar ‘origin story’ for Saxon religious alliterative poetry.
Cultural influence seems to have been mutual, however. For example, Barbara Raw has shown how the illustrations in the Junius 11 manuscript cohere more with Genesis B than Genesis A. From this observation, she argues that the illustrations must derive from an illustrated edition of the complete Old Saxon Genesis. This now lost manuscript was likely given as a wedding gift to King Æthelwulf (Alfred’s father), who married the daughter of the Frankish Emperor Charles the Bald in 856. Furthermore, King Alfred’s educational reforms drew many scholars from the continent, such as a man known as ‘John the Old Saxon’. Alfred’s biographer Asser describes him as ‘a man of most acute intelligence, immensely learned in all fields of literary endeavour’ (93). Alfred’s prioritization of the translation of Latin texts into English also strongly suggests that Genesis B was translated at his court. Thus, Anglo-Saxons helped to establish a Saxon literary culture that consequently influenced the further development of their own.
An important text Alfred commissioned to be translated was the fifth-century Latin History Against the Pagans by the Spanish theologian Paulus Orosius. The Old English version of this work contains an interpolated pair of texts, editorially named ‘Ohthere and Wulfstan’. These texts detail anecdotally the passage of two seafarers all around Scandinavia and the Baltics. An editorial aside as Wulfstan approaches his native Hedeby on Jutland remarks that ‘[t]he English lived in that region before they came to this country’ (Orosius 43–5). So we have come full-circle: the Anglo-Saxons’ continued sense of themselves as a migrant nation only strengthened their ties to their ancestral homelands on the continent.
The Anglo-Saxons never forgot their origins on the continent nor played down their continued relations with it but used it in the formation of their own identity. Genesis B is an Old English poem in language and style but retains enough Old Saxon features to nevertheless convey a deliberate ‘feeling of foreignness’. Lawrence Venuti argues that ‘translation wields enormous power in the construction of national identities for foreign cultures’ (‘Regimes’ 209). As a translation, Genesis B constructs a foreign identity for a national culture, containing in its hybrid language and literary style the Saxon ‘other’ and the Saxon ‘self’.
Elliot Vale holds a BA in English from the University of York and an MSt in English 650–1550 from the University of Oxford. His research interests lie in applying modern translation theory to medieval texts and the reception of Old English poetry from the 19th to the 21st century, especially through translation. He has written on translational ‘bias’ in the Old English poem Exodus and the Old English Hexateuch and on the stylistic analysis of metrically imitative translations of Beowulf. He translates from Old English and Swedish.
Title image: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Junius 11, p. 31.
Works cited
Asser. Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources, edited and translated by Michael Lapidge and Simon Keynes, Penguin Books, 1983.
Bede. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, edited and translated by Betram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford University Press, 1969.
Boniface. The Letters of Saint Boniface, translated by Ephraim Emerton, Norton, 1976.
Hines, John. ‘Attitude Problems? The Old Saxon and Old English Genesis Poems’. Language Structure and Variation: A Festschrift for Gunnel Melchers, edited by Magnus Ljung, Stockholm Studies in English 92, 2000, pp. 69–90.
Magoun, Francis P., Jr. ‘The Praefatio and Versus Associated with some Old Saxon Biblical Poems’. Medieval Studies in Honor of Jeremiah Denis Matthias Ford, edited by Urban T. Holmes, Jr. and Alex J. Denomy, Harvard University Press, 1948, pp. 107–136.
Orosius, Paulus. The Old English History of the World: An Anglo-Saxon Rewriting of Orosius, translated and edited by Malcolm Godden, Harvard University Press, 2016.
Raw, Barbara. ‘The Probable Derivation of Most of the Illustrations in Junius II from an Illustrated Old Saxon Genesis’. Anglo-Saxon England, vol. 5, 1976, pp. 133–148.
Venuti, Lawrence. ‘Translation as cultural politics: Regimes of domestication in English’. Textual Practice, vol. 7, no. 2, 1993, pp. 208–223.
On behalf of OMS, welcome back to Oxford, and to this term’s Medieval Matters newsletter! I hope you are all feeling well rested and ready for a busy term of medieval events. Oxford always feels very quiet in the first week of January, and this extract from the Epistolae project summarises the feeling of waiting for the medievalists to return for the new term:
Revertere […] ut […] in tuo reditu laetitia redeat universis [Return […] so that […] by your return, happiness may return to all] A letter from Rotrud of Rouen, archibishop, to Eleanor of Aquitane
It’s a delight and a happiness to welcome you all back. To bring further happiness, I come bearing New Year’s Gifts in the form of the Medieval Booklet, which lists all of the events, seminars and reading groups happening this term, alongside a whole host of opportunities, from CFPs to micro-internships. Click here to view the booklet. A final version will be attached to next week’s email as a pdf. New year, though, is a time for fresh things as well as old ones, and inside the booklet will find the return of many old favourites, but also some brand new groups and events joining us for the new year. A particularly warm welcome to the brand new Middle Welsh Reading Group, Oxford Medieval Studies Greek and Latin Reading Group, and Oxford Medieval Manuscripts Group!
A further happiness and New Year’s Gift can be found on our blog. To herald the new year, poet and DPhil student, Clare Mulley, recounts her experience of interpreting, translating and performing one of the most famous poems in the Old Norse canon for the Old Norse Poetry in Performance 2023. Read Clare’s wonderful account on our blog here.
We have so much in store for you this term, and I for one am excited for it all to begin. In particular, please save the date for our termly OMS lecture, in which Peregrine Horden (All Souls) will speak on ‘Healthy Crusading in the Age of Frederick II: the puzzle of Adam of Cremona‘. The lecture will take place on Tuesday5th March (8th Week), 5pm: mark it in your diaries and calendars! For now, here is this week’s roundup:
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Save the Date: Oxford Medieval Society. Thurs 29 Feb / 7th week : “The hooly blisful martir for to seke: Manuscripts with Chaucer’s pilgrims”. Oxford Medieval Society talk and manuscript session with Andrew Dunning (Bodleian, Jesus) and Alison Ray (St Peter’s, All Souls). Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales tell the story of pilgrims ‘from every shires ende / Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende’. Experience these journeys, both real and imagined, at 15:00–16:30 at the Weston Library Lecture Theatre, where we’ll explore the Chaucer Here and Now exhibition at the Bodleian Library and enjoy a private showing of manuscripts relating to pilgrimage and Thomas Becket. Please register your attendance at Oxford Medieval Society.
The Medieval French Palaeography Reading Group meets at 10.30-12 in the Weston Library. This group is open to anyone with an interest in Old French, Middle French and Anglo-Norman manuscripts. We study and read manuscripts from the 12th century to the late 15th century. If you are interested in joining the group or would like more information, please write to: laure.miolo@history.ox.ac.uk
The Medieval History Seminar meets at 5pm in the Wharton Room, All Souls College. This week’s speaker will be Conor O’Brien (Oxford), ‘The Rise of Christian Kingship and the De-Secularization of the Latin West’. The seminar will also be available via Teams: The Teams session can be accessed by logging in to Teams with your .ox.ac.uk account and joining the group “Medieval History Research Seminar” (team code rmppucs). Alternatively, it can be accessed via this link. If you have any difficulties please email: medhistsem@history.ox.ac.uk.
Tuesday 16th January:
The Europe in the Later Middle Ages Seminar meets at 2-3.30pm in the Dolphin Seminar Room, St John’s College. Tea and coffee available from 1.45pm. Undergraduates welcome. This week will be a discussion session.
The Medieval Church and Culture Seminar meets at Wellbeloved Room, Harris Manchester College. Tea & coffee from 5pm; papers begin at 5.15pm. This week’s speaker is Emma-Catherine Wilson (Hertford), ‘Crying Rich Folks’ Lauds: the social status of heralds in the late Middle Ages‘. Everyone is welcome at this informal and friendly graduate seminar!
The Old Occitan Literature Workshop meets at 5-6pm at Taylor Institution, Hall. In Hilary term, we will read and translate extracts from texts written in Old Occitan. All welcome! Please email the address below for details of the texts we will be working on. Interested members will be invited to translate short passages which we will then workshop in meetings 2 and 3. To sign up, or for any other queries, email Kate Travers.
Wednesday 17th January:
The Medieval German Seminar meets at 11.15, at St Edmund Hall, Old Library. This week we will have a shorter organisational meeting. In Hilary Term, we are going to discuss the writings by ‘Frau Ava’, the first women author whose name we know, transmitted in the Vorau Manuscript. We will work with the edition by Maike Claußnitzer and Kassandra Sperl. We will meet in the Old Library in St Edmund Hall. Tea and coffee are provided but please bring your own mug! Further information and reading recommendations via the teams channel; if you want to be added to that: please email Henrike Lähnemann.
The Medieval Latin Document Reading Group meets at 4-5pm on Teams. A document is sent out in advance but homework is not expected. Please contact Michael Stansfield for further details and the Teams link.
The Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar meets at 5pm at The Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies 66 St Giles and online via Microsoft Teams by clicking here. This week’s speaker will be Christian Sahner (University of Oxford) – ‘How Zoroastrians Debated Muslims in the Early Islamic Period‘.
The Medieval English Research Seminar will meet at 5.15pm in Lecture Theatre 2, St Cross Building. Today’s speakers will be Jasmine Jones (Oxford), ‘Monasticism, Mystery and the Mind: The Vernacular Theology of the Old English Daniel’ and Charlotte Ross (Oxford), ‘Manuscripts and Readers of Thomas Hoccleve’s The Regiment of Princes‘. The seminar will be followed by a wine reception. All welcome!
Dante Reading Group meets at 5.30-7pm in St Anne’s College, Seminar Room 11. Each week, we will be reading through and discussing a canto of the Divine Comedy in a relaxed and informal setting, delving into Dante’s language and imagination in manageable chunks. The group is open to those with or without a knowledge of Italian, the reading being sent out in the original and in translation. Refreshments, both alcoholic and otherwise, will be provided! To register or ask any questions, please email Charles West (Sponsored by TORCH).
Thursday 18th January:
The Late Roman Seminar will meet at 4pm in the Seminar Room, Corpus Christi College. This week’s speaker will be Ana Dias, ‘‘May the voice of the faithful resound’: colophons in early Iberian manuscripts’.
The Ethics of Textual Criticism Seminar meets at 10-12 in Harris Seminar Room, Oriel College. This week’s speaker will be Tristan Franklinos (Oxford) – ‘On whose authority? Editing ancient and medieval Latin texts – some examples’.
The Middle Welsh Reading Group meets at 2-4pm in Jesus College, Habakuk Room. No previous knowledge of Middle Welsh is assumed. Translations will be provided with plenty of time to ask questions at the end. We’ll read a selection of early and late Middle Welsh prose and poetry to offer everyone a chance to experience the richness of Middle Welsh and its literary tradition. This week Svetlana will be waiting at the porters’ lodge by the Turl Street entrance until about 2:05pm. For any late comers, please email the address below. Please email to register your interest so that Svetlana knows how many people to expect: Svetlana Ó Siochfhradha Prešern.
Friday 19th January:
The Ethics of Textual Criticism Seminar meets at 12-3.30 in Ioannou Centre, 66 St Giles. This week’s speaker will be Irene Peirano Garrison (Harvard) – ‘Latin grammar in the Age of Philology’.
The Late Antique Latin Reading Group meets at 12-1pm, in the Hovenden Room, All Souls College, and is open to anyone engaged in research on the late antique world. Though prior knowledge of Latin is required, we welcome people with a range of abilities. We particularly welcome graduate students and early career academics. If you would like to attend, or you have any questions, feel free to contact either of the convenors. Please do RSVP if you intend to attend, so that we can gauge numbers and circulate the readings. Contact: David Addison and Alison John.
Exploring Medieval Oxford through Lincoln Archives meets at 2-3pm, in Seminar Room 2, EPA Centre, Museum Road. Anyone interested in analyzing primary sources and conducting a comprehensive examination of the documents are welcome to attend. Those who are interested can contact Lindsay McCormack and Laure Miolo via email: lindsay.mccormack@lincoln.ox.ac.uk and laure.miolo@history.ox.ac.uk
The Tolkien 50th Anniversary Seminar Series meets at 4-5pm in Merton College T.S. Eliot Lecture Theatre. This week’s speaker will be Mark Atherton (University of Oxford), ‘The Arkenstone and the Ring: wilful objects in Tolkien’s The Hobbit’’ Free access (no need to book). Please email Julia Walworth if you need step-free access.
The Oxford Medieval Manuscripts Group (OMMG) meets at 5pm at Merton College, Hawkins Room. This week’s seminar will be Reading and discussion of Elina Gertsman, The Absent Image: Lacunae in Medieval Books (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021). All welcome. Write to the email below if you do not have access to the online version of this book. To subscribe to our mailing list, participate in library visits, propose a presentation of your research for work in progress meetings, or submit any queries, please write to Elena Lichmanova.
The Anglo-Norman Reading Group meets at 5-6.30pm, at St Hilda’s College, and on Zoom. Please let us know if you would like to attend, either in person or on Zoom. The text – some Jousting Letters from Edingburgh – will be provided via Padlet, and refreshments as usual to help us along. All welcome, at any level of Medieval French! Please contact Stephanie Hathaway Stephanie Hathaway or Jane Bliss for further details.
OPPORTUNITIES:
Oxford Medieval Manuscripts Group (OMMG): To sign up for the Weston library visit (Week 3) or to present work at the WIP meeting (Week 5), please email Elena Lichmanova by 21/01/2024.
CFP: Bristol Centre For Medieval Studies Graduate Conference DEADLINE: 22 January 2024. We encourage abstracts from postgraduates and early-career researchers, exploring aspects and approaches to bodies and boundaries in all relevant disciplines pertaining to the medieval period, broadly construed c.500- c.1500. Abstracts are 300 words for 20-minute papers. This year’s conference will be a hybrid event, taking place both online and on the campus of the University of Bristol. For full details see here.
CFP: Brut in Bristol, Thursday 27 June – Saturday 29 June 2024: The Centre for Medieval Studies at Bristol is very excited at the prospect of hosting the International Brut Conference, Thursday 27th – Saturday 29th June 2024. We invite proposals for 20-minute papers in English or French on the wider Brut tradition from all angles and disciplines, including medieval and Early Modern languages and literatures, and art, book, cultural, intellectual, political, religious, or any other kind of history. Proposals are welcome from academics at all career stages and from independent scholars. For more information contact: brut-conference2024@bristol.ac.uk.
CFP: COLSONOEL: After a four-year hiatus, we are excited to announce the rebirth of the Cambridge, Oxford and London Symposium for Old Norse, Old English and Latin! This symposium will take place on Friday 3 May at St. Hilda’s College, University of Oxford. We invite abstracts from postgraduates, both masters and PhDs, currently undertaking degrees or recently graduated from the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and from the London group. Papers will be twenty minutes in length and followed by questions. Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words with a short biography to colsonoelsymposium@gmail.com. Deadline for abstract submissions is 31st January 2024.
CFP: International Courtly Literature Society British and Irish Branch Conference 2024: Court Cultures: Texts and Contexts, Trinity College, the University of Dublin, 18-19 June 2024. We invite proposals in English or in French (maximum 200 words) for either 20-minute papers or full panels of three papers (each of 20 minutes duration) to be submitted by 5 p.m. on Friday 16 February 2024 to Dr Sarah Alyn Stacey (salynsta@tcd.ie) and Dr Thomas Hinton (T.G.Hinton@exeter.ac.uk ). Acceptance of papers will be confirmed by Friday 1 March 2024.
If you have forgotten to submit your Medieval Booklet entries, please do not worry: we will send a finalised version next week. Here is some final wisdom, which was almost certainly written with ‘Medieval Matters: Addendum’ emails in mind:
Miraculorum quaedam vel oblivioni tradita vel antea incognita nunc vero comperta notitiae vestrae praesentare cupio. [ I desire to present to your notice certain miracles either forgotten or hitherto unknown which have truly now been discovered.] A letter from Ubaldo, bishop of Mantova, to Matilda of Tuscany
I look forward to presenting you all with forgotten or hitherto unknown reading groups and seminars next week! In the meantime, may you have a week filled with productive research and welcoming back friends and colleagues!
[A Medievalist realises that they forgot to submit their contribution to the HT Booklet…] St John’s College MS. 61, f. 50 r. By permission of the President and Fellows of St John’s College, Oxford Viewable in full at Digital Bodleian
To herald the new year, poet and DPhil student, Clare Mulley, recounts her experience of interpreting, translating and performing one of the most famous poems in the Old Norse canon for the Old Norse Poetry in Performance Conference 2023.
Update 21 August 2024: The whole performance is now available to watch on youtube and discussed in a new blogpost. With thanks to Natascha Domeisen for filming and Ashley Castelino for editing!
When I walk, barefoot, to centre stage from the shadowed doorway, the silence of the wood-panelled room is an excruciatingly loud one; loud in a way that can only come from a lot of bodies keeping themselves deliberately suppressed, but still shifting and audibly breathing. Under the lip of my hood, I can just make out the shadowy faces of the front rows, many of whom are friends and colleagues. They know there will be a performance of sorts, and many of them know more than I do the poem I am interpreting, but it is in these couple of seconds where anything could happen. This is, perhaps, the most exciting part of all.
I wait just long enough to feel their anticipation – the space between us is electric, humming with charge and stretched to full tension. A metre away, someone else is waiting: my co-performer, Norwegian musician and sound engineer Kjell Braaten, is poised over his sound system and various gorgeous wooden instruments, completely attuned to my every movement. Aside from his work for film and television, he has been performing at festivals and concert venues for years, and knows exactly what he is doing in building an atmosphere. In a few seconds, the pure gut surge of sound he is about to create will reverberate off the walls like echoes in a cave, and make itself felt in the bellies of all present.
In the darkness, I can practically see the poem stretching out in front of me, a long, luminous thread whose tail-end I must grasp, or a path I must follow without stumbling, treading down to make the way clearer for future walkers. But first, I have to step into the shoes of the seeress (or völva, as she is known in Old Norse) using the words that have identified her for centuries.
I grip the staff in my hand and begin, reciting the first and foremost line in Old Norse: ‘Hljóðs bið ek allar helgar kindir…’ Give me a hearing.
For the next half hour, I will exist in another space outside of time: the space of ritual time.
***
Völuspá, the opening poem of the Poetic Edda,was my introduction to Old Norse poetry, and from the first time I read it (on a train journey between Manchester and Bradford) I was spellbound. Everything about it – its combination of slow-building tension and fast-moving scenery, mystic tonality and hypnotic refrains – suggested a vast, echoing space, evocative in turn of the mythical Ginnungagap in which the Old Norse cosmos has its origin story. Within that space, the female narrative voice itself remains an enigma, and is a presence which commands absolute attention. Interpreted sometimes as a resurrected völva or elemental being, sometimes as a human woman performing seiðr who has become a mouthpiece for an older consciousness, her voice not only hovers somewhere between the corporeal and supernatural, but speaks to an audience (the so-called helgar kindir ‘holy kindred’) which is itself situated in a poetic present that spans generations. Any audience experiencing the poem may automatically count themselves as part of the crowd she addresses, adding to its immediacy in effect.
A year after first reading the poem, I arrived in Oxford to begin another journey into the study of Old Norse receptions, but all the time I was settling into my studies, Völuspá stayed on the margins of my consciousness. It was an insistent, probing voice that would not go away. Each time I read or heard later translations and performances, I couldn’t help fixating on what I would have done differently, or on how certain word choices might sit in various settings. Eventually, I gave in to the urge to play with it: I sat down very late one night and began a poetic translation, which allowed for some leeway in expression and for some opening up of the mythology for audiences who did not have contextual knowledge. After some time working on the piece, and especially after studying Terry Gunnell’s work on performance archaeology, I finally realised that I was writing according to how my own speaking voice worked, and that I was saying phrases aloud as part of the selective process. Clearly writing the poem down wasn’t enough for the storyteller bone in the back of my skull; I wanted to work my way through a performance.
I have always been fascinated by the idea of oral poetry as a cross-temporal process, or moving body; one made up of performance, memory (both living and cultural) and textual records, spanning generations with some level of consistency and yet inevitably received in and affected by what Carolyn Dinshaw aptly terms the ‘hermeneutic now.’ Drawing a venn diagram between the spheres of textual study and practical experience, I reasoned, would not only help me to investigate how certain textual material can have performative implications, and how those might practically play out on a stage, but, on another level, would also allow me to experiment with the blank margins outside the text that depend upon personal interpretation (such as tone of voice, settings, speed, musical accompaniment or other voices etc). While certain questions around how Medieval Scandinavians might have worked with or presented the poem will always remain unsolved, having to tackle certain practicalities would perhaps provide further insight into what might have been possible for readers or performers in a medieval context. Icelanders had always been famed and sought out in Medieval Scandinavian courts for their incredible narrative memories; could I now recreate something of the process by which they remembered longer works and captured their audiences? The upcoming Old Norse Poetry in Performance Conference 2023 provided the perfect setting (and excuse) for the experiment, and my storyteller bone thrilled at the thought.
One key decision I made was to do with setting; when performed with one voice, the poem is so unrelenting in its intensity that there seemed a real risk of not being able to sustain its energy unsupported for more than half an hour without boring an audience (I often wonder, incidentally, if any medieval performers might have been faced with the same dilemma, or if this might strengthen any theoretical arguments for multiple voices.) Music seemed the natural answer in my case, as I find it far easier to hold space with accompaniment, and this was where Kjell came in. I had watched him perform his new album Blóta the previous summer at Midgardsblót, a festival held among the burial mounds in Børre, and had seen nearly the whole room cry in response to his music. Some internet searches revealed that he had also participated in sound work on The Northman – one of my favourite ever film soundtracks, and a pleasing aesthetic match to what I considered Völuspá’s naturally dark quality. Luckily for me, Kjell loved my idea and generously consented to take part in the experiment, accordingly transporting several cases’ worth of nordic instruments from Bergen and risking his spine in the process.
***
It would require a great deal more space than I presently have to detail all the theory, planning and sources that went into the project in full, and, as I intend to write more formally about those in future, I’m not going to do that here. Suffice to say that, after two performances, performing any oral medieval work (even a more loosely-interpreted one) teaches you a lot more than you bargained for, and is an absolutely terrifying and sublime experience all by itself. The intensity magnifies tenfold when done in the dark, in proper stage lighting and with body-shuddering music at your back. It didn’t take much effort to evoke ritual time, or pretend that my memories went back to the creation of the world – while the text on its own makes you feel like you are seeing creation happen, I felt like I was actively making creation happen.
Perhaps the most intense part of the experience, however (aside from worrying about forgetting your lines, or about which academic interpretations you tend towards in your writing), is the sheer viscerality of the onstage experience due to energy exchange, and how quickly this affects what you considered fixed or rehearsed. What Ursula Le Guin terms ‘primary orality’ – in other words, the unique and powerful symbiotic relationship between a live performer and their audience that has no equivalent in other media – is blank margins territory; something that is almost impossible to communicate in a regular poetic structure, although the sense of the narrator commanding rapt attention is, again, palpable in the text. Onstage, this energy is practically solid, and rushes to meet you in staggering fashion. As though you had two, parallel brains, you are aware throughout of the delicate balance between holding onto deep memory while existing in the sharp, present consciousness of the room. If there is the slightest flicker of a face within your eyeline, the slightest sigh, jump or intake of breath, you are immediately aware of it and seeking to react in a way compatible with the energy directed at you. This weird dual consciousness can cause the most surprising changes to vocabulary you have rehearsed for hours, and to smaller actions to do with movement, volume and even facial expression.
In the second performance Kjell and I did at the Aarhus Old Norse Mythology Conference in November 2023, I decided to increase my involvement in the soundscape, and played a bone rattle and a skin drum at key moments in the narrative. The drum especially can be felt throughout the body as you play it and inspires an almost trancelike state, giving weight to your words and transmitting a physical sensation to your listeners; considering its history in Sami shamanistic practices, and the taboo surrounding it in the time of witch hunts, its cultural weight and physical effects added another, holistic layer to the work. From these experiences, I now have fresh awareness that no two performances can ever be the same, as every new context and audience forces a different synergy, and that in itself bears thinking about in an academic context; while we are left with the ‘bones’ of the poem in manuscript form, and the idea that a consistent memory of the structure is definitely there, how many forms might have been laid across similar skeletons in an oral context? How many people worked with the consistencies we know today to make their own work? The possibilities are endless.
To me, one thing is for certain. As simplistic as it sounds, whatever the end result of a performance on a received text, there is nothing quite like the deafening silence at the end of it all, right before the applause hits, to remind you why such texts were probably written down in the first place: because someone, somewhere, had exactly the same reaction to something they heard, and wanted to capture the moment. Putting that text back into the voice felt like completing a circle.
