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Reliquary Pendants, Past and Present

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25/11/2024

17:23

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By Caroline Croasdaile in conversation with Mickey Alice Kwapis, Contemporary Artist and Jeweller of Meaningful Material

Medieval Material

A small piece of stone, a snippet of fabric, a tiny lock of hair. All of these materials would be just as at home within a hollow late medieval pendant, as in a sentimental locket made weeks ago. What is it about these things, detritus in any other context, that makes them more precious than their gold or jewelled containers? Why have people throughout time collected and enclosed these materials as special, religious, magical, or memorial in containers that they wear close to their bodies?

These are some of the questions that are explored in my D.Phil. dissertation entitled, Wearable Containers of Meaningful Things: English Late Medieval and Early Modern Jewellery to Enclose, Conceal, and Enshrine. It is in this project that I examine artefacts like pendants and rings, and the changes this unique type of object undergoes, particularly in light of the Reformation. While medieval examples of these objects have widely been labelled ‘reliquaries’, the startling variety of their contents includes coins, hair, plant matter, textile, stone, or textual amulets. The diversity of their contents has opened the door for a wider consideration of what exactly is a ‘relic’, and what ‘relic-making’ or memory-making practices medieval people engaged in. Not everyone had access to the body parts or materials of saints in the late medieval period, which were often closely guarded in the treasuries of churches. However, medieval people could draw on the blessings of priests, tokens obtained through pilgrimage, or the ritual of prayer to create or enhance special materials to be worn in aid of devotion or to protect the body. During my research, I was struck by the stark similarities that present-day sentimental jewellery holds with these medieval artefacts. While their contexts of belief may be different, many of the types of materials contained are the same, and are similarly capable of capturing big ideas, world-views, and emotions, within tiny interior spaces. 

Pendant containing a drop of blood caught on a tiny piece of tissue paper. By Mickey Alice Kwapis. Photo courtesy of Mickey Alice Kwapis. 

The Hockley Pendant, British Museum: 2012,8046.1, English, c.1500-1550, gold, 3x25mm. Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS): ESS-2C4836. The engravings on this hollow pendant depict devotion to the bleeding wounds of Christ. Its edges are inscribed with the names of the three magi, which were recited or used in magical charms. This pendant was found to contain unprocessed flax stem pieces. It was recovered near Hockley, Essex. Rights Holder: The British Museum https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/.

Mickey Alice Kwapis: Contemporary Material 

Mickey Alice Kwapis is an American artist living in Chicago who specialises in the creation of  jewellery, stained glass, taxidermy, and cyanotypes. Her work explores aspects of death, grief, and the natural world. As part of her practice she makes tiny precious lockets, which can be used to contain almost any kind of meaningful material for her clients, who send or provide her with these fragments from their lives. She has kindly agreed to answer some questions I have posed to her in Q&A format regarding her locket pendants. While we cannot query the original makers of medieval objects, her thoughts on her own work provide a useful point of entry for thinking about the enduring and very human act of curating meaningful material, and the desire to carry and wear these things on the body within objects of jewellery. 

Q&A: 

What first inspired you to begin making pendants that serve as containers for meaningful material(s)?

When I was 22 my Aunt Beth passed away unexpectedly. I had already been making jewellery using glass vessels containing things like squirrel teeth, mouse tails, and dandelion seeds so as the funeral services were wrapping up it just felt natural to grab a few different flowers to dry for eventual use in my work. I ended up making a locket for each of the women in our family so they could have something to hold onto.

Are you interested in, or have you looked to historical examples for inspiration for making this kind of object? If so, do you have a favourite historical piece, period, or influence?

I really enjoy looking at Edwardian and Victorian-era mourning jewellery, mostly containing hair, on eBay. They aren’t hugely historically significant pieces on their own, but each one was handcrafted to celebrate someone’s love, life, or both and I think that’s incredibly beautiful. I grew up Catholic so I’m fascinated by stationary and wearable reliquaries. As a kid I loved learning about the Ancient Egyptians’ mourning and burial rituals including canopic jars. The influence of Egyptian art on the Victorians especially, and now the revival of the Victorian mourning tradition in modern times, follow a thread through human history of wanting to remember those we have lost through preserving them in some tangible way.

What are some of the materials, common or unusual, that people have sent you to be included in pendants?

Most commonly I receive orders for memorial jewellery made with cremated remains, pet hair, and human hair — after all, they’re literally parts of our loved ones so they are obvious choices when it comes to honouring their lives. Some of the less traditional materials I have gotten to use in mourning lockets include broken Fiestaware, a drop of blood on tissue, dyed eggshells from Easter eggs, the bristles of a paintbrush, pottery glaze powder, and a plethora of other incredible materials truly unique to those being remembered. I have helped women celebrate their friendship with a matching set of lockets with sugar from their favourite diner, made pieces for brides containing pieces of their bouquets and lost sequins from their dresses, and honoured hardships with soil reliquaries from sold family homes and pieces of brick from a house fire. Getting to make each one is an honour beyond words.

What are the key steps that go into crafting these lockets, and what are some challenges that this medium presents? What skills as an artist do you draw on?

The hardware for each locket is made using the lost wax casting process and once finished, the materials are secured beneath precision-fit watch crystals that I had specially manufactured to fit my lockets. I took my first metalsmithing class at 14 and have just been building on that skill set ever since so it feels like second nature at this point. When it comes to handling each client’s materials, some require special PPE — especially powdered materials like pigments.

Do you have a memorable or surprising background story or narrative that someone has shared with you about why they have chosen a certain material for inclusion in a locket?

I love the stories behind every single request I get, because the stories are just as personal as the materials being used. Many of them are bittersweet so I’ll share one that’s not: I received an order for a locket containing sand, for an Egyptologist who had recently returned from an archaeological dig. She didn’t bring the sand home on purpose (as it’s highly frowned upon to take materials from dig sites) but it’s impossible to live in a tent in the desert for weeks at a time and not track at least a little bit of sand everywhere you go. Once she was back home in the US, she found sand inside the lining of her suitcase while unpacking and decided to send it my way. 

Have you made lockets for your personal use and ownership, and are you comfortable sharing what these are and what they mean to you?

The first ones I made were in memory of my Aunt Beth, with flowers from her funeral. After my Great-Grandma Mickey passed in 2020 I made myself a locket containing soil and sand from three different places on Belle Isle, an island park in Detroit where we spent lots of time in our respective formative years as well as time together. Not too long after, I dropped a mug that had belonged to my Uncle John, who died by suicide but is still listed as a missing person — there was no funeral, no body to say goodbye to. I had the mug repaired using traditional kintsugi practices but the artist did not need the smallest shards of ceramic that broke off and I couldn’t bear to throw them away so I kept them and made a locket with that. I also have lockets containing a fossil my mom found on the beach, and one with a tiny gummy bear that reminds me of my dad, fishing flies and raw sapphires from a trip to Montana I took with a friend. My beloved cat Phil just passed away and I plan to make a locket with his soft orange fur under one lens and his white fur under the other. When you see me in public, I make jingling noises from my jewellery. I’m basically a walking advertisement for my work at this point.

The lockets that you produce are visually accessible, but intended to remain sealed. This is in contrast to the other forms of lockets both contemporary and historical. What led to this choice? 

Many modern jewellery makers utilize epoxy resin to contain materials like hair or ash, but it is a relatively new technology. This material can begin to yellow quite quickly and it also permanently alters the sentimental material, making it unrecoverable. My lockets, though sealed closed, function as containers for the free-moving materials inside and in theory could be smashed or cut open to recover the materials should the owner ever wish to do something else with them. 

Ash and tooth in sterling silver. By Mickey Alice Kwapis. Photo Courtesy of Mickey Alice Kwapis

How do you understand the role of memory and its connection to material in your work?

Our memories of the past are a big part of what informs who we become in the present day, and the people or things we have lost or experienced along the way are also part of us. Having a piece of memorial jewelry that can be worn day-to-day helps remove our lost memories from the abstract and brings them into the present in a tangible form.

Hundreds of years from now if an archaeologist, museum, or curious collector were to find one of your lockets what is something you would want to tell them about your work to help them understand it?

Humans across millennia have collected and saved sentimental things, and I would hope that centuries or millennia from now we are not so disconnected from each other and ourselves that we can’t recognize the merit of a sentimental object. I think if anyone knew the back story of any single one of my pieces, from the history of the material itself to its meaning and impact on the person who commissioned it, the archaeologist would have the same feeling that I get making my work and looking at it now. After all, memory is something that ties all of us together.

Agnus Dei Pendant, English, c.1400-1540, gilt silver, PAS: GLO-43B24A. This pendant was found to contain, ‘fragments of a woven fabric’ and ‘thick layers of fine white strands that are most likely hair’. There is evidence for a broken-off attachment loop on the upper edge. Recovered in Gloucestershire. Rights Holder: Bristol City Council, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/.

Links to the website and work of Mickey Alice Kwapis: 

https://www.mickeyalicekwapis.com/about

https://www.instagram.com/kwapkwapkwap

Croasdaile, Caroline, 2025, Wearable Containers of Meaningful Things: English Late Medieval and Early Modern Jewellery to Enclose, Conceal, and Enshrine, Oxford: University of Oxford (D.Phil. Thesis, forthcoming) 

Further Reading: 

Cherry, John, 1994, The Middleham Jewel and Ring, York: Yorkshire Museum. 

Husband, Timothy B., 1992, ‘The Winteringham Tau Cross and Ignis Sacer’, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Journal, vol. 27, pp. 19-35. 

Jones, Peter Murray and Lea T. Olsan, 2000, ‘Middleham Jewel: Ritual, Power, and Devotion’, Viator, vol. 31, pp. 249-290. 

Writing for Oxford Medieval Studies

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12/10/2024

11:51

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Medieval Studies at Oxford is a venerable and traditional sort of enterprise. We’re used to working with the Bodleian’s centuries-old manuscripts and its worthy, weighty tomes. But how to communicate our expertise in our areas of interest to a wider audience – and, indeed, to each other? 

We on the OMS steering group would like to encourage all of you within our community to consider writing for us here on our blog.  The OMS website exists to help us learn about the exciting research going on all around the collegiate University, as well as to bridge the gap between scholarship and public engagement.

Blogposts offer a unique platform to distil complex concepts into accessible, attention-grabbing pieces. They can showcase ongoing research, spark discussions, and even attract potential collaborators (or students) to the field. Their immediacy allows us to reach busy colleagues, to break down our proverbial ivory tower, and to respond swiftly to current events (for instance, by drawing parallels between medieval history and contemporary issues).

Writing for OMS can also be a springboard to wider engagement or to pitches to external websites and media publications such as The Conversation. 

Please get in touch to pitch your research and your ideas so that we can grow interest in our discipline and strengthen the links within it. The rest of this post sets out some ‘dos and don’ts’ for blog-posting – and, indeed, other public writing. We hope you will find them useful as you articulate your passion for all things medieval. It would be our pleasure to put that passion into print. 

Pitching:

The pitch for any piece of public writing needs to be brief and arresting. It should grab the editor’s attention. They need to see the point, and the relevance, immediately. Find the hook. Do you want to write about this subject because it is timeless or topical? Has something happened in the world that your medieval expertise can speak to? Why is your work fascinating for educated readers, or important for the advancement of knowledge or debate as a whole? 

200 words is always plenty.

Writing:

Blogposts need to be written differently from academic prose. They can be far less formal (colloquialisms and first-person speech allowed). They need a simpler readable style. Short sentences are your friend – but so too are more nuanced, complex ones, interspersed amongst them. Avoid excessive jargon and technical terms. However, don’t underestimate you readers either (many of them will be studying, or have studied, at Oxford!). Signal aims and objectives clearly in the introduction. Give concrete examples to illustrate your points. Write a conclusion with a twist.

Titles and subheadings:

Breaking up your text is always hugely helpful to readers, even in a post as short as 800 words. We all have such short attention spans these days. Titles and subheadings need to be intriguing, to draw a potential reader in. But they also need to be informative: where is this piece going? Rhetorical questions can be useful, so long as they are not overdone. A good editor will help you bring out substance even as you polish the style.

Images:

A picture can speak a thousand words. Make sure you include at least a feature image for your post’s header. However, two or three within the blogpost’s body will almost always make it better. Remember to have reproduction permissions for images that have copyright, and to caption and credit all images accurately. 

Word Count:

Oxford Medieval Studies is interested in posts between 800 and 1,500 words in length. Any shorter and you will have hardly had space to develop your thesis. Any longer and you are halfway towards that elusive academic article. As with those famed five-minute ‘elevator pitches’, less can be more when you’re trying to get yourself across.

Image: Late 15th-century miniature of the author and translator Jean Miélot (d. 1472), Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Sheep Liver Divination for US Election

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20/09/2024

13:32

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Explanation of the result of the inspection of a sheep liver in the Old Library of St Edmund Hall. Dr Selena Wisnom (Leicester) researches ancient Mesopotamian divination, and asks the question: Will Donald Trump win the 2024 US election?

You can watch the inspection in this video:

Inspection of the sheep’s liver in the kitchen of The Queen’s College, Oxford
Explanation of the results in the Old Library of St Edmund Hall, Oxford

and you can watch the alternative Babylonian reading in this video:

Alternative reading of the result

Disclaimer: the extispicy is for entertainment and research purposes only!

Dr Wisnom held a Junior Research Fellowship in Manuscripts and Text Cultures at The Queen’s College, Oxford from 2016-2020 and is currently Lecturer in the Heritage of the Middle East at the University of Leicester.

Vǫluspá: An Original Poetic Translation and Performance by Clare Mulley

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21/08/2024

10:52

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The long wait is over! We are extremely excited to finally present a complete video recording of the Old Norse eddic poem Vǫluspá (The Seeress’s Prophecy) by Clare Mulley:

This was the premiere performance of Vǫluspá by Clare Mulley, which took place at The Oxford Story Museum, in honour of the third Old Norse Poetry and Performance Conference (Oxford, June 2023). This was later followed by a repeat performance at The Aarhus Old Norse Mythology Conference (November 2023), and both performances have since aided and inspired other exciting projects by scholars and artists alike. This is just the beginning of a larger exciting project, so keep your eyes peeled for more!

Professor Terry Gunnell of the University of Iceland wrote of this performance, “Clare Mulley’s Vǫluspá is a multi-dimensional work of art that steps off the page to touch the lives of its twenty-first century audiences. Based around a new, creative, free translation of the original Old Nordic work, and effectively given additional depth by the atmospheric musical of Kjell Bråten, Mulley’s powerful presentation returns the poem to its original conception as a piece of essentially oral poetry, something designed to perform in both space and time. Like the original, which it builds on while retaining creative freedom, the translation is couched in striking musical, alliterative language and rhythm, evoking stark images of the original creation and eventual destruction of the world. Firmly touching the ancestral past of the ancient work, this is a presentation that simultaneously effectively draws on the present. It is something that needs to be experienced.”

The performance features soundscapes, backing vocals, accompaniment and sound recordings by musician Kjell Braaten.

It was filmed by Natascha Domeisen and edited by Ashley Castelino, with the support of Oxford Medieval Studies (OMS) and The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH).

Read more about Clare’s experience interpreting, translating and performing the poem here: https://medieval.ox.ac.uk/2024/01/15/voluspa-a-performative-journey/.

A Medievalist Menologium

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10/06/2024

14:03

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A Year in the Life of the OMS Communications Officer and MSt Academic Mentor

As we come to the end of the teaching year and Medieval Matters shuts down for the summer, I was asked to reflect on the year’s happenings, and on some of the work that I do in my role as Communications Officer and my twinned role as the Academic Mentor for the Interdisciplinary MSt in Medieval Studies. As such, I’ve compiled a “menologium” of sorts, highlighting the goings on that have happened across the year. This has been my third year in post since I joined the team in 2021, and it’s been such a delight to see Oxford’s medieval community go from strength to strength during that time. In some ways, then, this report is less about my own work, and more about the strength of the community: which I have been honoured and privileged to witness first hand as your medieval herald and mentor!

JULY

July is the month of beginnings! This might seem odd: Trinity Term is traditionally an end-point for the academic year! But July is the point at which we at OMS are planning forward for the year ahead, and so marks the beginning of the OMS calendar. This is the time of year when we begin planning the Medieval Mystery Plays, thinking about which speakers we will invite and which events we want to host in the year ahead. It’s a very exciting time of year! In 2023, we were planning our OMS lectures and also asking for submissions for the Impact Report.

AUGUST

August is a time for harvesting… submissions for the Impact Report, that is! We had such a lot to celebrate, from book launches to new seminars and reading groups. I am always struck by the phenomenal range of our medieval offerings at Oxford, but collecting all of the information together really emphasised the wealth of languages, approaches and disciplines that we have here.

I was also busy ‘harvesting’ CFPs for a special summer CFP booklet. We had 20 pages of CFPs for Leeds IMC, New Chaucer Society, and Kalamazoo panels hosted by Oxford Medievalists: such an astounding range of submissions that they barely fit in a pdf! We had everything from Alfredian Voices to Medievalisms in Times of Crisis: Reception, Adaptation, and Remediation; from “Authentic” Translation?’ to Medieval Onomastics: Crisis or Stasis?

SEPTEMBER

September is the month of preparation! This is the month when I am busy assembling the Medieval Booklet for the term ahead. Of extreme importance, of course, is selecting which manuscript will illuminate the weekly newsletter. This year I opted to highlight one of the offerings at St John’s College, where I am currently appointed. The newly digitised MS 61 bestiary is both delightful to look at and a real testament to the ongoing work of our library and collections staff in making medieval resources more easily available. Special thanks to Sophie Bacchus-Waterman for giving as a sneak peek behind the curtain of archival work in her blog post for us! When choosing images for the emails, I am looking both for entertaining pictures and for those that might be particularly suited to points in the year, and collecting a folder of them for later use. Some of the images are chosen far in advance (like this week 1 image of a Medievalist with their copy of the booklet), whilst others take my fancy on a weekly basis.

Regular recipients of Medieval Matters will know that another important collection is the wisdom quotations. This year I decided to highlight the work of the Epistolae project, based at Columbia University, which catalogues letters to and from medieval women. Featuring quotations from these letters was intended not only to link Oxford’s medievalists to an exciting resource outside of Oxford, but also to provide an inspirational and aspirational model for interdisciplinary, boundary-pushing, open-access and digital humanities work.

September is also the time when we look ahead to our incoming MSt cohort, so we were putting together welcome events and looking ahead to the start of term! An important September task is updating our mailing list: making sure that incoming students and academics are included, and that those leaving us for pastures new have passed on their new details.

OCTOBER

October is the month of welcomes. For the MSt this year this took the shape of the traditional introductory tea, co-run with Prof. Elena Lombardi, the convener of the MSt. It’s so exciting to get to meet all of Oxford’s newest Medieval researchers, and I am always struck by the fantastic range of interests and the sheer passion for the medieval that our MSt students have. On the OMS side, we had a Medievalists’ welcome party co-run with the Medieval Church and Culture graduate seminar: it was lovely to see lots of you there, both old colleagues and new ones! This is also a time of year when my email inbox is particularly busy, as I am fielding questions from both the OMS and MSt side of things in order to make sure that everyone can find their way around the Oxford system. I’m so honoured to be many peoples’ first port of call for discovering the amazing range of medieval happenings at Oxford, and to be able to welcome everyone in our Week 1 Medieval Matters email!

A big part of my October job is making and distributing the term’s medieval booklet, and preparing the newsletter templates This is a big job, and I’ve been extremely grateful for the support of our Graduate Assistant, Eugenia Vorobeva, who has taken on the huge and important task of adding all of the upcoming events to our Google Calendar, to keep everyone informed and up to date.

NOVEMBER

November is a month of social activity. A big part of what we do at OMS is sharing Oxford’s research and community with the wider world. In this I’ve been ably assisted by Ashley Castelino, our Social Media Officer, who has done stellar work on our socials. Some stats for you: our social media following is steadily growing as always, with (at last count) 6396 followers on Twitter/X, 1531 on Facebook, 858 on Instagram, 577 on Mastodon, 202 on Threads, 320 on TikTok, and 80 on our new LinkedIn page. Our most popular video on TikTok so far has been a primer on medieval heralds by Emma-Catherine Wilson with over 2800 views. We also had some very pleasing numbers on the youtube channel. In particular the two live presentations of books / manuscripts from the study day on Homer and the Nibelungenlied have each drawn over 1,500 views by now! The subscriber base also has grown considerably to 427 subscribers. with 17.383 viewings between them.

There is so much going on at Oxford socially that it’s hard to keep up: any medievalist is spoilt for choice! Having reviewed the booklets from the last year, I count regular events working on at least nine languages:

  • English
  • German
  • French
  • Latin
  • Anglo-Norman
  • Norse
  • Celtic
  • Old Occitan
  • Medieval Hebrew

And a huge range of approaches, including:

  • Queer and Trans Medievalisms
  • Visual Culture
  • Environmental History
  • Digital Editions
  • Music
  • Women’s Writing

The fact that I am guaranteed to have overlooked at least two or three regular languages and could only provide a selection of our range of approaches is testament to the richness of our medieval community. But with so much going on, it’s very hard to keep track!

This is where my job as herald comes in. I usually prepare the outlines for each week’s newsletter at the beginning of term, but there are last minute additions, changes, or cancellations every week. So my Monday morning task every week is to sort through my emails to find anything that needs to be added or altered in the draft blog. I am often alerted for example, to new opportunities, or events that have been newly organised; to seminars changing their paper titles or rooms; or just to a good old fashioned cancellation! When I have made all of the changes, the post then passes to my colleague Henrike Lähnemann for review before finally making its way to your inbox. Any medievalist knows that no text would be complete without a set of errata, addenda or corrigenda, so of course I monitor my emails throughout Monday afternoon in order to send out any last minute changes in as few additional emails as possible. It’s busy work, but after three years in post it has become more streamlined, and it’s lovely to come into my office on Monday mornings and know exactly what I’m working on first!

DECEMBER

December is the month of holidays: a time of celebrating and community. Though the days were dark and cold, luckily we had lots to keep our spirits high! In particular we benefited from the medievalists coffee mornings and from the fantastic opening of the Chaucer: Here and Now exhibition!

This is also a time when many of our MSt students are looking at PhD / DPhil programmes. One of my main roles in December as an Academic Mentor is to support students in preparing doctoral applications. I was delighted to host a number of our students for tea at my college to discuss their progress and their career plans – the future of our field looks very bright indeed!

JANUARY

January is the month of new things. In 2023-24, we saw the establishment of several new and exciting additions to OMS. In particular we welcomed the new Dante Reading group, which successfully secured OMS small-grants funding, and convened by one of our very own MSt students, Charlie West. We were also exciting to welcome a new research group, The Oxford Medieval Manuscripts Group (OMMG), a collective of eight of our postgraduate students and early-career researchers who bonded in Oxford over their passion for medieval manuscripts. We also welcomed a new TORCH funded network, Poetry in the Medieval World, lead by Ugo Mondini, Jennifer Guest, Dirk Meyer, Jim Mallinson and Ida Toth. All of these new groups show that even though we often work with dead languages or the distant past, the study of the middle ages is very much alive at Oxford, with new voices and approaches joining the conversation every year!

January is also, of course, the month of our Hilary Term Medieval Booklet, so I am busy assembling that – making sure that everyone’s submissions are received and that they are formatted with our standard font size, layout etc. and are passed on to Eugenia and Ashley to disseminate across our socials and our Google calendar.

FEBRUARY

February is the month of busy research, when the new academic year is in full swing. At OMS, I was excited to be able to highlight a number of our exciting research outputs this year through a series of blog posts, featured prominently in the weekly newsletter. We had submissions on creative-critical approaches to Beowulf; medieval piggy-banks; and a medieval governance workshop – to name just three! I have so enjoyed reading all of our blog post submissions, and sharing them with a wider network at Oxford and beyond. We have also had a number of exciting new monograph publications, including How to Read Middle English Poetry, by Daniel Sawyer; The Old Testament in Medieval Icelandic Texts: Translation, Exegesis and Storytelling, by Siân Grønlie; and Emperor John II Komnenos: Rebuilding New Rome 1118-1143 by Maximilian Lau, amongst many others!

MARCH

March is the month of the OMS Hilary Term lecture! This year we were thrilled to host the distinguished historian of medicine, Peregrine Horden for a talk on ‘Healthy Crusading in the Age of Frederick II: The Puzzle of Adam of Cremona’. We were very fortunate to host this in the Chapel of Harris Manchester – a perfect medievalism space! Thank you so much to everyone who came along, and to Peregrine for such a fantastic talk.

This is also the month when we at OMS try to have a steering group meeting to work out plans for the future: in particular on connections outside of Oxford, and thinking about new events we can run. We were also making plans for our Trinity Term provision.

APRIL

April (with his shoures soote) is the month of new life and of piercing ‘the droghte of March … to the roote’, so a perfect time to celebrate our newest medievalists!

In April all of our MSt students are hard at work producing their dissertations, and every year those on the Medieval Studies MSt present their work at the Medieval Church and Culture Seminar. This year we had a fantastic range of papers, from ‘The Old English and Old Norse ‘Joshua’: translation and readership in context’ to ‘Envisioning Division: marginal medallions in medieval Judaic and Islamic manuscripts’ to ‘Cruising Hell: seeing and writing Dante’s sodomites’. I am always so inspired by the range of approaches and the interdisciplinarity coming out of this MSt programme.

April also marks the Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference, which this year took the theme of Signs and Scripts. For a write-up of the conference and its goings-on, and to be inspired by the newest generation of medievalists, do read Ashley Castelino’s review blog post.

This year we also saw the much-awaited return of the Cambridge, Oxford, and London Symposium on Old Norse, Old English, and Latin (COLSONOEL), sponsored by Oxford Medieval Studies and TORCH. In 2024 a new committee at the University of Oxford, headed by Natasha Bradley, and comprising of Ashley Castelino, Simon Heller, and Mary Catherine O’Connor, took up the reins to bring this symposium back to life.

April is the month of the Trinity Term Medieval Booklet, so at this time of year I am once again collecting submissions, formatting them, and getting ready to share them with our community across all channels!

MAY

May is the month of plotting, and the OMS team were hard at work making plans for the triumphant return of the Medieval Mystery Cycle!

This year we were also busy plotting ways to improve our blog and newsletter, resulting in the move of our WordPress server on May 16th to enable us to host plenty more medieval blog posts and images. Behind the scenes OMS was struggling with server space, meaning a rationing of images and reduction in the number of blog posts we could host. Luckily we have been saved by St Edmund Hall, who have so kindly agreed to host this blog and allow it to continue in all of its manuscript-illuminated glory. Floreat Aula!

JUNE

June heralds the end of a busy medievalist year! As seminars and reading groups start to wind down for the summer, the Medieval Matters Newsletter starts to look shorter and shorter. Our MSt students are all busy finalising their dissertations, so I rarely get to see them, but it’s always a delight to hear how they are getting on. As the end of the academic year, June is a time for goodbyes, as visiting academics and graduate students depart. Thus, my final work of the year is to remind everyone to stay in touch: once an Oxford Medievalist, always an Oxford Medievalist!

How To Read Middle English Poetry

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12/05/2024

19:54

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By Daniel Sawyer

[Workers rebuild Troy, in a copy of John Lydgate’s Troy Book: Manchester, John Rylands Library, MS Eng 1, f. 31v. Reproduced under a Creative Commons licence, CC-BY-NC 4.0.]

For most people, poetry in Middle English—roughly 1100 to 1500—is a world unknown. I’d long thought this a shame, but it was only through shaping How to Read Middle English Poetry as an accessible guide for students that I grasped just how innovative and thrilling the period in truth is.

Did you know, for instance, that someone unwittingly wrote a Shakespearean sonnet more than a century before Shakespeare’s birth? Or that the first poem we can attribute to a named woman displays a unique and startlingly intricate form? And while we think of English blank verse—metrically-regular poetry without regular rhyme or alliteration—as the mainstay of things like early-modern drama and Paradise Lost, the idea occurred to poets at least twice, independently, before the third (re)invention that started its sixteenth-century flourishing. Such facts lurk in the Middle English centuries, making these in some ways the most exciting spell in English poetry’s history.

What made this period so experimental?

For centuries after the Norman conquest of England in 1066, French stuck around as another spoken language alongside English—and a spoken language with more cachet. Latin, meanwhile, filled the role of the normative written language, often coming baked-in with literacy: those who learned to read learned to read in Latin, other literacies coming as a kind of by-product. 

Consequently, English lacked the reach of a prestigious tongue, but it also lacked prestige’s pressures. Several poetic traditions coexisted in English, without a clear hierarchy of prestige sorting them: it would, after all, always seem more elevated to write in Latin or French. As a result, this was the great age of experiment in English poetry.

It is in this period that we first see English poetry in alternating metres descended from post-classical Latin and early French. These metres are the ancestors of most regular verse of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. This was the metrical family in which Chaucer worked; within it, he invented the five-beat line that would one day propel poetry from Thomas Wyatt to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, not to mention the plays of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Jonson.

At the same time, Middle English sustained a separate metrical family of poems descended from Old English verse habits: alliterative verse. Though somewhat changed from the Old English model, the verse of Piers Plowman, (most of) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and of the Alliterative Morte Arthure recognisably sits within English’s original and longest-lasting verse tradition. Such poems have a formal lineage which runs back before English was English. Also in this bucket lurks Layamon or Lawman, whose curious early Middle English Brut provokes expert debate over its classification, and offers the earliest known tales in English of King Arthur and King Lear.

Neither alternating verse nor alliterative verse held a place of straightforward prestige, distinguished from other poetry. The Gawain stanza switches between the two, showing us a poet comfortable shuttling across metrical lineages. Moreover, mixing traditions brought forth a third body of work, alliterative-stanzaic poetry, which married alliterating half-lines in alliterative metre to end-rhyme, often together with a fireworks display of other effects. One example, today known as ‘Three Dead Kings’ and preserved uniquely in the Bodleian, has a claim to the title of the most complex stanza-form in English at any time.

[The start of ‘Three Dead Kings’, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 302, f. 34r.]

In the sixteenth century and after, rising five-beat alternating lines—‘iambic pentameter’—would ascend to prestige as a standard form for art poetry. Through the same centuries, English slowly took over from Latin and French in the worlds of academia, government, religion, and the law. Today, English is a global language, and is the world’s most frequently learned tongue. For some contexts, it has come to hold the kind of roles that French and Latin once held in England: a prestige language, a source of loanwords and models.

In the twenty-first century, then, we might learn a few things by delving into the middle of English’s history, the language’s time of least social importance: Middle English teaches us to see how English is not a transparent default, but a tongue alongside others; it teaches us to appreciate the quirks in English, and in the other languages we meet. And often it is Middle English poetry that offers this lesson most clearly, while also forming a wildly creative and varied body of work in its own right.

Daniel’s book is due out in May 2024 from Oxford University Press. Readers can use the code AAFLYG6 to get 30% off either the hardback or the paperback when ordering How to Read Middle English Poetry direct from OUP.

Poems for the Women of Beowulf: A Creative-Critical Project

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04/03/2024

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Dr Laura Varnam, University College, Oxford

Hwæt

Indeed.

We have heard of the Danes.

We never stop hearing about them.

Those death-and-glory Danes.

Them, their demons, and their glory-

days. Me, I’d prefer a little variation.

If you’d like to,

listen–

this is our sisters’ side of the story.

This is the opening poem in the collection that I’m currently working on, inspired by the women of the Old English epic Beowulf. It deliberately subverts and upends the original poem’s call to attention and lays the foundation for my own feminist re-imagining of the world of Beowulf. How you deal with Beowulf’s opening hwæt is a litmus test for a poet or translator and it sets the tone for what’s to follow; think of Tolkien’s grand ‘lo’, Seamus Heaney’s dignified ‘so’, and Maria Dahvana Headley’s unapologetic ‘bro’. My ‘indeed’ raises an eyebrow at the original poem’s confidence that of course we’ve heard of the Spear-Danes, of the glory of the kings of that people. In Old English hwæt can means both ‘what’ and ‘why’ and in this poem I want to draw the reader’s attention to the masculine heroism that we never cease hearing about in order to question what other stories might be hiding between the lines. My project asks, what might happen if we imagined a female poet or scop reciting Beowulf? How might the poem’s monsters and queens appear through her eyes? And if we unlock this new wordhoard, how might a change of perspective enable and encourage more new voices and stories to emerge?

            This project, as I’ve discussed in detail in my 2022 article in postmedieval, arose directly from my teaching (‘Poems for the Women of Beowulf: A “Contemporary” Medieval Project’, postmedieval 13, 105-21). Beowulf is a poem that over the last seventeen years has taken root in my mental landscape and returning to it, year on year with new groups of students, has only increased my fascination with the ways in which the poem is able to speak to our present moment– and for our present moment to speak back. And for women’s writing and rewriting, the question of speech is all important. It is striking that only one woman in Beowulf speaks, Queen Wealhtheow, and when she does so, no one answers her. The Old English Maxims declares that ‘gleawe men sceolon gieddum wrixlan’ [wise men must exchange songs or tales] but what about wise women? How can they speak when they have been silenced by the original text?

            The feminist poet and critic Adrienne Rich famously asserted in her essay ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision’ (1972) that for women:

            Re-vision– the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text          from a new critical direction– is for us more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an   act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we    cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a           search for identity: it is part of her refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-          dominated society.

Rich’s ‘act of survival’ is a driving force of my collection, especially when it comes to Grendel’s Mother, the so-called ‘monster’ at the centre of the poem, whose gender, ferocity, and very existence poses a threat to the patriarchal society represented by King Hrothgar and his hall. In my poems I give Grendel’s Mother a voice, both to ‘answer back’ to the poets and translators who deal with her troubling presence by silencing and misrepresenting her, and to give her an afterlife outside of the original text– to give her the gift of survival.

            A selection of my Grendel’s Mother poems will be published by Nine Arches Press in August 2024 in Primers Volume Seven (https://ninearchespress.com/primers) and this poem gives a flavour of the voice and approach:

Grendel’s Mother addresses the Author

For all your bluster, warrior-poet,

Your puffed-up preening,

Your sword-swagger and shield-shuffling,

You still won’t look at me.

Petrifying people? That’s not my style.

It’s not my stare that needles your braggadocio.

Any road, you started it.

Edging me out, making me your mearcstapa,

your boundary-stalker, border-controller.

I never wanted to shoulder those lines.

You kettle me into the corners of your compounds,

Tuck me into the bottom drawer of your wordhoard,

Shushed and smothered by your fabrications.

Water-witch, she-wolf of the deep, troll-dam?

Give over. Don’t be so nesh.   

This poem was inspired by the moment when the Beowulf-poet introduces Grendel’s Mother into the narrative but can’t quite keep his eyes on her (lines 1265-76). His narrative focus is drawn back to Grendel, to the relative safety of the comprehensible male monster, as though giving Grendel’s Mother too much attention might be to draw a dangerous, Medusa-like, gaze. In my poem, Grendel’s Mother uses the northern dialect of my foremothers (‘nesh’ being a dialect word for feeble or wimpy) and she calls out the ways in which her presentation by translators, too, has caused her to ‘shoulder’ the burden of men’s anxieties about female power. It’s striking that in Tolkien’s field-changing 1936 lecture and essay ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’ that for all his insistence that the monsters are at the imaginative heart of the poem, he only focuses on Grendel and the dragon. Grendel’s Mother only merits a brief footnote.

            In Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women’s Rewriting (2011), Liedeke Plate comments that ‘in women’s rewriting, distrust, disbelief, anger, and a desire to set things right converge to give shape to a reader’s response in the productive reception of literature’ (p.42). This ‘re-righting’ impulse has particularly shaped my poems on grief and mourning when it comes to Grendel’s Mother. In Beowulf itself, ritual mourning is a fundamental part of the poetic economy; indeed, Gale Owen-Crocker famously argued that the structure of the poem revolves around funerals, beginning with Scyld Scefing and concluding with Beowulf’s own funeral pyre (The Four Funerals in Beowulf, 2000). But Grendel’s Mother is accorded no such commemorative rituals in the poem nor is she given the space to mourn her only son, outside of her violent revenge. And yet there are hints that the Beowulf-poet, and even Beowulf himself, recognises the legitimacy of maternal grief, despite the fact that it causes Grendel’s Mother kill Aeschere, Hrothgar’s counsellor. When he returns to the Geatish kingdom and relives his adventures for King Hygelac, Beowulf admits that she travelled on her ‘sorhfull’ (grief-filled) journey in pursuit of ‘gyrnwræc’ (revenge for injury, 2118-19). In my poetry collection, I have a number of poems which perform the work of mourning for Grendel’s Mother: poems where she laments the loss of her son; an elegy for the loss of Grendel’s Mother herself in the voice of Queen Wealhtheow; and a poem which constructs a textual burial for her.

            In this poem, entitled ‘Grave for an Uncuð Woman’, I use both the content and form of the poem to create a resting place for Grendel’s Mother. In Old English ‘uncuð’ means both strange and unknown, and in the poem I play with the paradox that by burying her, we both honour her memory and, paradoxically, pin her down to a safe location. While the monsters in Beowulf are left unceremoniously for dead– the decapitated Grendel with his mother on the floor of the mere, the dragon pushed off the cliff as Beowulf’s own funeral pyre is erected– there is an imaginative freedom in their refusal to be bound by human rituals of mourning.

Grave for an Uncuð Woman

In this poem, I construct a burial for Grendel’s Mother that reflects, and aims to compensate for, her marginalised status in the original poem. The fox-tail and cowrie-shell are symbols of maternal ferocity and fecundity; the seax or dagger is her weapon of choice in her mere. The goose-flute offers her the voice she was denied and the shoes dignify the joyless journey she makes into death, mirroring her grief-fuelled approach to Heorot.

            In the opening poem in my collection, I invite the reader to ‘listen’ to my alternative version of Beowulf, ‘if you’d like to.’ In these poems, and in the collection as a whole, I aim to open up a space for different voices to be heard and new perspectives to uncovered in a manner that is welcoming and hospitable to new readers too. Beowulf’s opening hwæt is as insistent as ever when it calls for our attention but perhaps in returning our gaze we might look afresh and askance at the stories it discloses. In a piece of creative non-fiction in Annie Journal last year, combining poetry and prose, I even went so far as to translate hwæt as ‘welcome’ (https://www.anniejournal.com/g%C3%A6sthus-with-beowolf-laura-varnam). I hope that by shaping new approaches to Beowulf, in the content and form of my poetry and creative-critical reflections, that readers will be similarly inspired to welcome the poem anew into their own imaginative landscapes… and see where it might lead them.

Dr Laura Varnam is the Lecturer in Old and Middle English Literature at University College, Oxford. She is the author of The Church as Sacred Space in Middle English Literature and Culture (2018) and the co-editor of Encountering The Book of Margery Kempe (2021). A selection of her Grendel’s Mother poems are forthcoming in Primers Volume Seven (Nine Arches Press, August 2024). You can find out more about her work on her website: https://drlauravarnam.wordpress.com/ Or on twitter/X: https://twitter.com/lauravarnam

Scales of Governance: Local Agency and Political Authority in Eurasia, 1000-1500

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05/02/2024

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Worcester College, Oxford – 12th and 13th January 2024

by Annabel Hancock, Bee Jones, James Cogbill, and Susannah Bain

This workshop grew out of a discussion group the four of us started in Michaelmas term 2022 on ‘Governability across the Medieval Globe’. By ‘governability’ we meant why and how certain people and societies were more or less easily governed, although we had several big discussions about the usefulness of the term. Our conversations kept coming back to the utility of thinking from localities when trying to conceptualise how governance functioned in the central and later Middle Ages, and to how both medieval governance and our analysis of it had to operate across large differences in scale – from local officials and forms to (often unsubstantiated) claims of regional or even universal hegemony.

These questions relate to a great deal of cutting-edge work in medieval history, particularly in terms of new ‘global’ approaches and how we read sources to get at political culture. As a result, we decided to organise a workshop to bring together scholars pushing our understanding forward to assess where we are as a field and where we are going.

We were very fortunate to be offered funding from the Past & Present Society, the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research, and the Oxford Medieval Studies Network. This funding allowed us to bring a fantastic set of speakers and respondents to Oxford, including a mix of established, early-career, and doctoral scholars. We wanted to centre discussion and use our eight papers and four responses to stimulate broader conversations on governance in this period. The papers were pre-circulated and speakers summarised their thoughts on the day, which afforded us more time for discussion. Our contributions covered Iberia, France, Germany, China, Egypt, Byzantium, Italy, and north Africa from the eleventh to fifteenth centuries, which provided some range in our coverage even though we could not possibly do justice to the entirety of Eurasia across five centuries.

The workshop went absolutely brilliantly: we were delighted with the papers and responses, and we thought that the discussion was stimulating, wide-ranging, and very fruitful. Although not without important questions and possible issues, ‘scales of governance’ emerged as a useful conceptual lens to cut across ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ models of political organisation, drawing attention to sets of local and bureaucratic knowledges and highlighting the critical importance of varied social relationships to governance, both within a given locality and as an imposition upon it by rulers and/or bureaucracies. Governance was also closely related to the socialisation of elite men into certain kinds of authoritative masculinity, and to gendered social relationships between individuals and families. These dynamics are more difficult to access in most of the sources available to us for this period, but they enrich our understanding of how people and communities were actually governed.

Many of the papers highlighted the roles of different kinds of intermediaries situated between their communities and regional rulers. These figures, mediating and translating between knowledges at different scales, in many cases actually did most of the governing in a given locality. In some cases, local players seem to have been torn between evading oversight and control by rulers or larger political units on the one hand, and maintaining and strengthening their own power and position in their community on the other, including in some cases by steepening local hierarchies in their own favour. Recognising this led us to a discussion of how important it is to consider how formal or informal governance in a particular locality was, and hence the importance of processes of ‘formalisation’ of power through bureaucracies, regulations, and the imposition of officials.

Through the papers and discussions, we gained glimpses of medieval people of all social strata operating across different scales to get things done, such as Arabic-speakers leveraging their expertise in privileged documentary practices in twelfth-century Toledo or non-noble property-owners in thirteenth-century Carcassonne appropriating the language and frameworks of royal justice and official historical memory. Medieval people were in many cases capable of appropriating the language of their rulers and the procedures of governing institutions, and were not afraid to buy into the claims of rulers where it suited their own purposes, even while avoiding control from above in other ways.

We would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to the funders of the workshop, as well as to all the speakers, respondents, and other participants.

Curating ‘Chaucer Here and Now’

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22/01/2024

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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.

The exhibition runs from 8 December 2023 to 28 April 2024 at the St Lee Gallery, Weston Library (Bodleian Libraries). Admission is free. Find out more on the Bodleian Libraries website.

There are two upcoming FREE special events:

  • 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)

Völuspá: a performative journey

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15/01/2024

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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.

For a review of the performance, see: https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2023/30-june/comment/columnists/paul-vallely-voice-of-prophetess-speaks-to-the-soul

For a poem on the Old Norse cosmos by the author, see: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/ginnungagap-clare-mulley/