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Manuscripts and Codicology
- Edited by Massimiliano Bampi, Carolyne Larrington, Sif Rikhardsdottir
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- Book:
- A Critical Companion to Old Norse Literary Genre
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 15 October 2020
- Print publication:
- 17 July 2020, pp 89-112
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Summary
Should you order a manuscript to the reading room of one of the several libraries in the world where medieval Icelandic manuscripts are kept, the book will probably look very different from what it once was. Even in the best of cases you will see stiff or fragile parchment, holes, tears, damage from damp, soot and mould, repairs, loose and fragmentary leaves, faded ink, scribbles, and it may have been rebound in a modern binding. Nevertheless, when up close to a manuscript, the reader feels a tangible connection to a time hundreds of years gone by, a time when to own a book – even one with the lowest production value – was the preserve of the few. Whatever its state now, it is immediately apparent from any medieval manuscript that making a codex demanded a substantial quantity of raw material (animal hides, ink and pigments, twine, leather and wood), special tools and labour. The hides needed to be processed into parchment of the correct size, the layout painstakingly prepared, the text laboriously copied, the leaves and quires sewn together and attached to the external binding, which was also custom-made. The page format (sometimes called mise-en-page) varied: the text was arranged in one or two columns, with wide or narrow margins, the hand was spaciously or densely spaced, and the design incorporated paratext such as rubrics, majuscules and decorated initials, even large illuminations. The way a manuscript was designed is no coincidence. Rather, the material features, which are often not rendered in a printed edition, convey meaning no less than the text itself: they indicate where the text fits into the literary polysystem, steer the reader through the book and articulate which aspects are more important than others. When working with a medieval text in a modern edition, it can be easy to forget how differently medieval readers experienced it, but as I will discuss in this chapter, taking material aspects into account in the analysis of any given text can enhance our understanding of its genre, and the literary and historical context from which it emerged.
For many Icelandic medieval manuscripts, very little explicit knowledge exists about where they were originally produced, by whom, for whom, and what the patrons thought about the texts in them.
‘With mirthful merriment’: Masquerade and Masculinity in Mágus saga jarls
- Edited by Gareth Lloyd Evans, Jessica Clare Hancock
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- Book:
- Masculinities in Old Norse Literature
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 06 October 2020
- Print publication:
- 17 July 2020, pp 77-94
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Summary
Mágus saga jarls (also known as Bragða-Mágus saga) is an innovative saga that draws on a vast array of sources to tell a story that explores the boundaries between reality and fantasy, true and false identities, the performance of gender, the basis of power, and the ideal qualities of leaders. The action moves all over Europe and includes stock features of the late medieval sagas, including some of their most colourful battle descriptions, but wry intertextual references to traditional Norse motifs are also used effectively. That this saga was wildly popular through the ages should come as no surprise: it is a riveting tale involving wronged heroes, tyrannical kings, cross-dressing, shrewd and subversive women, comically evil villains, and the crafty magician Mágus. Beneath its raucous exterior, the saga raises important questions about power, rulership, and ethics, and through its playful engagement with clichéd roles from both native and courtly culture, it presents gender in its different manifestations as performative.
Scholarship on the Icelandic legendary sagas and romances – considered as one genre by some – has taken off recently, illuminating the ways in which Scandinavians interacted with new ideologies and literary conventions that Francophone romances brought to the North. Gender issues have constituted a large part of this discussion: the gender models favoured in these texts were quite at odds with native ones and Old Norse-Icelandic vocabulary for emotion differed considerably from French and Anglo-Norman. Translators adapted their texts for Norse audiences, dispensing with tropes such as the weeping, intensely emotional knight who expresses fear. Instead, the Norse Arthurian knight takes on characteristics of heroic masculinity, displaying courage and assertiveness – qualities which would have been much more palatable to the audience. The courtly model for aristocratic male sexuality, based on chivalry and restraint towards ladies, made more impact on the Icelandic literary scene than the ‘feeble’ Arthurian knight and became dominant in Icelandic romances. This conception of masculinity made its mark on Mágus saga as it did on others, but the saga is unusual in that it engages playfully with the model by having it performed by a cross-dressing woman. The courtly paradigm intersects with ideas about proper rulership and conduct at the monarch's court – no longer a band of warriors but a gathering of knights.
17 - The representation of gender in eddic poetry
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- By David Clark, University of Leicester, Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir, Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies
- Edited by Carolyne Larrington, University of Oxford, Judy Quinn, University of Cambridge, Brittany Schorn, University of Cambridge
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- Book:
- A Handbook to Eddic Poetry
- Published online:
- 05 August 2016
- Print publication:
- 19 August 2016, pp 331-348
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Summary
Introduction
The text of the Codex Regius begins with a seeress asking for silence so that she can recite her prophecy about gods, giants, and men; a story of creation and destruction, rise, fall, and rebirth. We learn how Óðinn and his two brothers set up Miðgarðr, the realm of the gods, and bring order to chaos, ostensibly living in civilised harmony until discord arrives in the guise of Heiðr. The vǫlva (seeress) then describes how – through escalating discord – the gods bring their own universe to destruction, causing it to be ravaged by monsters. No one survives apart from a select few individuals who people a new world, but the vǫlva disappears into the ground at the end of the poem. Vǫluspá sets the thematic tone for what is to come in the rest of the eddic corpus, where characters appear in multidimensional roles, whether positive or negative, active or passive, human or monstrous, traditional or subversive, admired or stigmatised.
In this chapter, we begin with an overview of how normative versions of masculinity and femininity are represented in eddic poetry, as well as of those characters and behaviours that fall outside these categories. More importantly, perhaps, we also examine where male and female gender roles blur or overlap, or where they are rendered ambiguous. Our readings are informed by different aspects of gender theories and the tools they offer in analysing eddic texts, as well as the work of previous Old Norse scholars, which has contributed to a better understanding of gender representations. Finally, we present several case studies of gendered images, highlighting what we consider to be some of the most important aspects of gender representations and their ideological functions. The goal of this chapter, then, is to give the reader an insight into the diverse, complex, and fascinating perspectives on gender found in eddic poetry, and to offer possible ways of interpreting them.
Defining ‘gender’
Arguably, the inclusion of gender perspectives has until recently been marginalised in Old Norse scholarship (and in eddic studies more narrowly). Nonetheless, gender constructions condition every subject's identity and limit the scope of available and forbidden roles, both for male and female figures. They are thus fundamental to understanding eddic texts and the society from which they emerge.