This chapter offers a brief overview of the field of emotion studies and surveys its contribution to the study of Arthurian literature. It then expands on the role of emotion – both as a critical category and as a narrative focus – in the development of the Arthurian canon, focusing on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as a late exemplar of the development of the courtly romance over time. Ultimately, it considers what emotions may tell us about the narrative intent and structures of the Middle English romance and, more broadly, what the study of Arthurian emotions has to offer to the field of emotion studies.

The introduction stages the concept of ‘voice’ as a narrative, literary and conceptual topos that is then elaborated across the volume. It considers the fraught nature of voice as an embodied yet fleeting phenomenon that leaves only traces of its existence as a memory, a textual remnant or as a transient sensation of aerial vibrations. Tracing the development of the theoretical debate of voice and what it might constitute from antiquity to modern critical theories, it seeks to showcase its multiplicity, its evasiveness and its potentiality, both as a narrative tool and as a mode of understanding medieval approaches to and perceptions of literature, vocality and aurality. It expands across classical theories on voice, narratology, feminist criticism and interdisciplinary studies on auditory perceptions. Ultimately, it presents the multiple meanings of voice – i.e. the notion of the authorial voice, the implicit or intended aurality of the text and vox as authority or moral imperative, but also, in a Bakhtinian sense, the multiplicity of narrative voices within a text and the aural soundscapes provided by absent, imaginary and actual voices.

This chapter explores the ways in which medieval authors imagined their own pasts as voiced and embodied artefacts through a comparative analysis of two very dissimilar works, the alliterative Middle English St Erkenwald and the Old Norse saga Egils saga Skallagrímssonar. Although the two works stem from different cultural contexts and represent very different literary conventions, both display similar means of repurposing their pagan past as foundational myths, suggesting that medieval authors may have struggled with the inherent contradictions of the pagan past and its foundational historicity and actively sought to reaffirm or reformulate those memorials. Moreover, they do so through the positioning of voice as a medium of the past and through its materialisation into text, staging the reappropriation of those pasts as the material (and immaterial) foundation for a Christianised modernity. The chapter thus suggests that both these works utilise voice as a metaphorical tool to rearticulate the past – affirming its existence and its reconfigured function through the materialisation of that voice as poetry and, ultimately, as the text we hold in our hands today.

This chapter provides an overview of the riddarasögur as a genre, beginning with the first transmission of romance material to Norway in the thirteenth century. It describes how this material was translated, adapted and reworked in Old Norse-Icelandic literature, giving rise to a blossoming literary tradition in Iceland which drew on the translated riddarasögur but featured a uniquely local perspective and narrative emphasis. The chapter discusses the relationship of the translated and indigenous romances to other genres within the Old Norse-Icelandic literary corpus, and argues that the romances introduced an ‘emotive script’ which offered a means of exploring concepts such as masculinity, femininity, honour and identity in a different way from existing genres. It surveys current scholarly interest in the sagas, looking in particular at their attitude to emotion, gender and agency – focusing on the so-called maiden king romances – as well as the geographic expansionism of the works, which offered their readers a vision of the world far beyond the borders of Iceland, informed by contemporary cosmographical learning.