Learning to Feel in the Old Norse Camelot?

Abstract

were consequences, for instance, of having Middle English feelings, as distinct from Anglo-Norman, Welsh, French, or Latin ones? asks Sarah McNamer (2007, 248). Or, indeed, Old Norse feelings? These surely existed, even if we can map neither modern nor Middle English word onto an Old Norse equivalent. If, as McNamer suggests, language-specific emotional systems exist, then that of Old Norse can seem hard to locate, for famously objective narrators of Islendingasogur are reluctant to speak directly about love, anger, fear, or disgust, and other saga genres are equally reticent. (1) The translated Arthurian romances do, however, depict a range of emotional situations that are often intensely experienced by their protagonists. Here, then, we can begin both to map Old Norse emotional lexis and to probe its cultural uniqueness. In my chapter on translated lais in The Arthur of North (Larrington 2011), I briefly examined language of feeling in two thirteenth-century Strengleikar translations, Geitarlauf and Januals Ijod, and explored how Marie de France's subtle emotional calibrations were mediated from verse into prose and from Anglo-Norman into Norse. The recent work of Suzanne Marti (2012, 2013), Stefka Eriksen (Johansson and Eriksen 2012; Eriksen 2013), and Sif Rikhardsdottir (2008, 2012, forthcoming) has highlighted importance of recognizing how translation must always involve adaptation of source text's signifying systems, in order to signify for target audience a move that often lays bare ideological processes at work in both texts. As Sif Rikhardsdottir observes, the negotiation of separate semiotic systems of French text and its Norse translation, evident in diverse behavioural patterns that manifest innate ideological principles, underscores elements that define cultural conceptualising of self and social environment (2012, 74). What is true of ideological systems is also true of emotional systems. In terminology of psychologists such as Keith Oatley (1994, 1999; see also Mar et al. 2011) and Ed Tan (1994), literary texts provide models of which, if effectively implemented in terms of characters, behavior, and situation, will elicit both empathy and aesthetic appreciation in listening audience. As listening audience runs simulation, appropriate and congruent emotional reactions should be produced. (2) Norse audiences for translated texts would thus be required to process different (individual components of text's simulation) contained in emotion-episodes narrated to them, if they were to engage and empathize with plot and its characters. Translation requires adaptation of source in order to arouse emotions of target culture. The changes between source texts and translations illuminate cultural differences in and also, crucially, over time will come to affect development of emotion simulations and scripts in target culture's signifying system. In this article, I focus on some key emotional episodes in Parcevals saga, Norse translation of French poet Chretien de Troyes's romance Le Conte de Graal (ca. 1180), in order to investigate how Norse translator depicts both basic emotions (such as anger, fear, joy, sorrow) and complex emotions (such as resentment), adapting his emotion scripts for his audience. (3) Cognition, performativity, behavior, and somatic effects are verbalized in ways that differ from source that Norse translator had before him; these scripts open up comparisons with similar emotion episodes in native Norse texts, primarily sagas. This analysis will in turn illuminate extent to which of Parcevals saga cohere with simulations intended to evoke audience empathy in other genres. Finally, a brief comparison with lexis of emotion in representative examples of texts from other Norse genres will explore how Old Icelandic literary language already had a well-developed emotional range before transmission of translated Arthurian sagas to Iceland. …