Judy Quinn

The ways in which anonymity participates in the textual construction of authority is the focus of... more The ways in which anonymity participates in the textual construction of authority is the focus of this chapter, which proceeds through an investigation of the literary effects that were achieved in two different kinds of medieval Icelandic prosimetrum, examples which demonstrate how literate authors exploited the potential of orally transmitted poetry to enrich their prose. The case studies are drawn from Gylfaginning by Snorri Sturluson, where anonymous poetry simulating the speech of gods is quoted within a treatise by a named author, and Þorgils saga ok Hafliða, where stanzas by contemporary poets named and unnamed are quoted within an anonymous saga about a 12 th-century political feud. The theoretical frame is provided by reflections on authorship by Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes which, while dating from the 1960s, still hold considerable relevance for the analysis of the competing voices of prosimetrum, especially with regard to the establishment of authority within written discourse. The notion of 'an index of truthfulness', constituted by poetic quotation around which the narration develops, is explored and it is proposed that across a wide range of discursive situations voices speaking according to conventions of poetic composition are rendered authoritative through the performance of quotation.

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First-Stanza Quotation in Old Norse Prosimetrum

alvíssmál 7 (1997): 61–80 When prosimetrum involves the quotation of poetry — as medieval Scandin... more alvíssmál 7 (1997): 61–80 When prosimetrum involves the quotation of poetry — as medieval Scandinavian prosimetrum almost invariably does1 — the narrator’s voice is at once in competition with another voice, which through its poetic form is graced with significance and authority. Verse quotations in sagas are conventionally very short, most typically of only one stanza, but occasionally of two, three, or more stanzas. As the evidence of other records demonstrates, however, a verse presented by a saga-narrator as a lausavísa, or singlestanza composition, may well be an excerpt from a longer poem.2 Sometimes acknowledgement is made of the loosening of the stanza from the whole poem through the narrator’s mention of the poem’s name, particularly in kings’ sagas where praise and memorial poems are frequently cited to verify aspects of an account,3 but even in this genre — avowedly indebted to the existence of whole

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Orality, Textuality and Performance

A Critical Companion to Old Norse Literary Genre, 2020

The Endless Triangles of Eddic Tragedy: Reading Oddrúnargrátr (The Lament of Oddrún)

Studi anglo-norreni in onore di John S. McKinnell, ed. Maria Elena Ruggerini (Cagliari, CUEC, 2009), pp. 304–326, 2009

The medieval Icelandic poem Oddrúnargrátr is uniquely preserved on leaves 38v to 39v of the thirt... more The medieval Icelandic poem Oddrúnargrátr is uniquely preserved on leaves 38v to 39v of the thirteenth-century anthology of eddic poems, the so-called Codex Regis of the Poetic Edda (Reykjavík, Stofnun Árna Magnússonar, GkS 2365 4o), where it forms part of the cycle of heroic poems in the second section of the manuscript. The cycle tracks ancient Germanic dynastic history and parallels the narrative of Völsunga saga (a saga preserved in a single Icelandic witness, NkS 1824b 4o) as well as corresponding at many points with the Middle High German Nibelungenlied. The dating of eddic poems is problematic since many if not all of the poems were transmitted orally for generations before they were written down in the thirteenth century. Oddrúnargrátr can fairly securely be said to be traditional, in subject matter and in poetic form, but at exactly what point in the vigorous and long-lived eddic tradition of oral composition and recitation it came into being is not recoverable. In this essay, I offer a reading of the manuscript text of the poem (a text which editors from Rask to Kuhn have unnecessarily rearranged), in order to gain from the reading new perspectives on the aesthetics of eddic poetry.

60- Valkyries

The Pre-Christian Religions of the North, 2020

Mythological Motivation in Eddic Heroic Poetry: Interpreting Grottasöngr

In an article on Grottasöngr from 1990, Joseph Harris promoted the view of Eddic tradition as a f... more In an article on Grottasöngr from 1990, Joseph Harris promoted the view of Eddic tradition as a form of intertextuality—each oral poem a kind of &quot; concretation of tradition &quot; —and advocated the exploration of, as he put it, &quot; the principles of code coherence in the matrix form &quot; revealed by each text (1990, 238–239). Some of Harris&#39;s ideas were taken up by Vésteinn Ólason, who, in his 2005 analysis of the poem, considered its evident artistry as well as its relationship to other Eddic mythological poems. In this chapter, I take up the challenge posed by Harris to articulate in detail the codes underlying the poem&#39;s composition by analyzing the way in which Grot-tasöngr switches between discursive modes and draws on conventions of Eddic staging, with particular attention to the degree to which mythological ideas are engaged in the work. The title of the poem, which like those of many other Eddic poems is a compound made up of a noun denoting the sound of human speech and the possessive form of a name (Quinn 1990), departs from the pattern in using the possessive form of the name of an inanimate object (the millstone Grotti) as the fi rst component of the compound , rather than the personal names of the speakers, Fenja and Menja, who identify themselves as giantesses during the course of the poem. In this defl ection from convention, we may perceive the principal conceit of the poem: the song of Grotti is the expression of supernatural power misap-prehended by Fróði, the unwise king who interprets the sound of milling as the fulfi llment of his greedy exploitation of the mill-workers to mint him wealth. Accordingly, the song that he is unable to tune into refers both to the sound of the milling and the words chanted by the giantesses, the latter making explicit his political misprision. Being voiced by giantesses, the millstone&#39;s song is invested with considerable mythological portent, and an encounter between a king and his slaves is transformed in the poem into a clash between giant-kind (who are represented as controlling the natural resources of the world) and a human leader exposed for his folly in believing he could exploit their power without having fi rst gained their favor. The mode of the poem, the dramatization of an encounter between speakers from diff erent mythological spheres, is one familiar from a number of Eddic poems, with Vafþrúðnismál (The Words of Vafþrúðnir)

Poetry from the Treatises on Poetics: Parts 1 and 2

The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 2019

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Emotions in Njáls saga and Egils saga: Approaches and literary analysis

The fundamental question of this dissertation is how we as modern readers can understand the feel... more The fundamental question of this dissertation is how we as modern readers can understand the feelings depicted in literature written on the periphery of Europe over seven hundred years ago — that is, what might be hidden in the text that we, due to our unfamiliarity with the distant culture, might not fully grasp. My study analyses the emotional expression in Egils saga and Njáls saga, two particularly rich and complex thirteenth-century Old Norse Íslendingasǫgur (Sagas of Icelanders). The genre is notorious for the apparent emotional reticence of its narrative style. This dissertation challenges that notion from the fundamental premise that, to understand the literary representations of emotions in medieval literature, we must equip ourselves with a model of the knowledge systems of the culture that created it. To reach this goal, the study applies interdisciplinary methods of literary criticism, intellectual history, cognitive linguistics, anthropology, and manuscript studies, and is thus situated at the cross-section of these disciplines. To access the emotional depiction in the two sagas, I argue for the necessity of an approach from three angles: through the analysis of emotive words, bodily metaphors, and the performance and practice of emotions manifested in the sagas. I. Words. The emotion words in the sagas have hitherto not been comprehensively explored. In this section, I explain my construction of a digital database of the words used to express emotions in the two sagas. The database enabled the plotting of various variables, such as character, gender, social status, and speaker, against one another. This uncovered narrative patterns and formulas for action, as well as allowing the identification of anomalies and the production of the first lexicons of the two sagas' emotional vocabulary. The results demonstrate that, contrary to what has often been assumed, the sagas contain a wide variety of emotion words that are applied systematically, precisely, and purposefully to achieve specific narrative aims [...]

A Handbook to Eddic Poetry

Liquid Knowledge: Traditional Conceptualisations of Learning in Eddic Poetry

Types of Texts, Relations and their Implications, 2010

I n this essay I explore some of the implications of the metaphorical expression, in Old Norse my... more I n this essay I explore some of the implications of the metaphorical expression, in Old Norse mythology and eddic poetry, of knowledge as a liquid, a liquid that once imbibed confers learning or, in the case of the mead of poetry, has a transformative effect on the verbal powers of the recipient. In the first part of the essay I will analyse the metaphor of ‘drinking in’ knowledge, and following that, I will examine the nature of the liquids which are depicted as having transformative powers on the intellect. The movement of the metaphor in eddic texts has a particular bearing on the themes of this volume: the 1

<i>Learning and Understanding in the Old Norse World: Essays in Honour of Margaret Clunies Ross</i> (review)

Parergon, 2009

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Darraðarljóð and Njáls saga

Die Faszination des Verborgenen und seine Entschlüsselung – Rāđi sa¿ kunni, Jul 24, 2017

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Text - Anonymous íslendingasögur, Eyrbyggja saga

Old Norse studies in the new world : a collection of essays to celebrate the jubilee of the teaching of Old Norse at the University of Sydney, 1943-1993

A Handbook to Eddic Poetry: Myths and Legends of Early Scandinavia

Forthcoming with CUP 2016

Learning and Understanding in the Old Norse World: Essays in Honour of Margaret Clunies Ross

Co-edited with Judy Quinn and Tarrin Wills, 2007

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‘I remember giants’: Mythological Remembering through Vǫluspá

Acta Scandinavica, 2021

Review of Eddukvæði, red. Jónas Kristjánsson a Vésteinn Ólason. 2 vols. (Íslenzk fornrit.) Reykjavík 2014: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag. 460 p. + 466 p

Review of Eddukvaeði, red. Jonas Kristjansson & Vesteinn Olason. 2 vols. (Islenzk fornrit.) Reykj... more

Studies in the Transmission and Reception of Old Norse Literature

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Þuríðr Barkardóttir and the Poetry of Eyrbyggja saga

Þáttasyrpa – Studien zu Literatur, Kultur und Sprache in Nordeuropa

Anonymity and the Textual Construction of Authority in Prosimetrum

In Search of the Culprit, 2021

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First-Stanza Quotation in Old Norse Prosimetrum

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Orality, Textuality and Performance

A Critical Companion to Old Norse Literary Genre, 2020

The Endless Triangles of Eddic Tragedy: Reading Oddrúnargrátr (The Lament of Oddrún)

Studi anglo-norreni in onore di John S. McKinnell, ed. Maria Elena Ruggerini (Cagliari, CUEC, 2009), pp. 304–326, 2009

60- Valkyries

The Pre-Christian Religions of the North, 2020

Mythological Motivation in Eddic Heroic Poetry: Interpreting Grottasöngr

Poetry from the Treatises on Poetics: Parts 1 and 2

The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 2019

Download

Emotions in Njáls saga and Egils saga: Approaches and literary analysis

A Handbook to Eddic Poetry

Liquid Knowledge: Traditional Conceptualisations of Learning in Eddic Poetry

Types of Texts, Relations and their Implications, 2010

<i>Learning and Understanding in the Old Norse World: Essays in Honour of Margaret Clunies Ross</i> (review)

Parergon, 2009

Download

Darraðarljóð and Njáls saga

Die Faszination des Verborgenen und seine Entschlüsselung – Rāđi sa¿ kunni, Jul 24, 2017

Download

Text - Anonymous íslendingasögur, Eyrbyggja saga

Old Norse studies in the new world : a collection of essays to celebrate the jubilee of the teaching of Old Norse at the University of Sydney, 1943-1993

A Handbook to Eddic Poetry: Myths and Legends of Early Scandinavia

Forthcoming with CUP 2016

Learning and Understanding in the Old Norse World: Essays in Honour of Margaret Clunies Ross

Co-edited with Judy Quinn and Tarrin Wills, 2007

Download

Creating the Medieval Saga: Versions, Variability, and Editorial Interpretations of Old Norse Saga Literature. Edited by Judy Quinn and Emily Lethbridge

by Emily Lethbridge and Judy Quinn

Brynja Þorgeirsdóttir, Stefanie Gropper, Judy Quinn, Tarrin Wills, and Alexander Wilson, ‘Investigating the Íslendingasögur as Prosimetrum: A New Methodology’, Viking and Medieval Scandinavia, 18 (2022), 51–82

by Brynja Þorgeirsdóttir, Judy Quinn, and Stefanie Gröpper

Viking and Medieval Scandinavia, 2022

This article lays out methods of analysing the combination of prose and verse in the Íslendingasö... more This article lays out methods of analysing the combination of prose and verse in the Íslendingasögur (Sagas of Icelanders) using a database that categorizes the prosimetric features of the corpus. The article gives an overview of the design of the database and explains how it achieves two major research goals. The first is to facilitate quantitative analysis of patterns observed across the prosimetric sagas. The second is to provide a foundation for qualitative investigation of the corpus as a whole by enabling the classification and possible correlation of prosimetric aspects in the Íslendingasögur.

Judy Quinn

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