Icelandic Texts Research Articles

Óvissa um leiðsagnargildi gagna? Notkun gagna við mótun menntastefnu og skólastarfs

Greinin fjallar annars vegar um þá miklu áherslu sem lögð er á notkun gagna í skólastarfi og hins vegar um það að þau gefi litla leiðsögn í mikilvægum efnum. Umfang og margbreytileiki gagna vex hratt og margir ólíkir heimar gagna sem tengjast menntun eru í þróun. Ljóst er að trúin á nytsemi gagna er sterk bæði hjá alþjóðastofnunum og öðrum sem stýra menntun, enda eru þau oft ómissandi. Lykilspurningin er tvíþætt: Að hvaða marki leiðbeina gögn um setningu markmiða í menntun og um hvað skuli gert í menntakerfum eða í skólastofum? Rök eru færð fyrir því að þótt þau séu nytsamleg dugi þau furðu skammt í þessum tilvikum. Sama á við um rannsóknir sem gegna samt lykilhlutverki í þróun skilnings og hugmynda. Umfjöllun um markmið menntunar ætti að vega þungt í menntun fagfólks og í umræðu um menntun og nauðsynlegt er að hafa hugfast að áhersla á gögn kann að jaðarsetja umræðu um markmið.

Alterity and Occidentalism in Fourteenth-Century Icelandic Texts: Narratives of Travel, Conversion, and Dehumanization

This article analyses five fourteenth-century Old Norse travel narratives in light of the learned geographical tradition of medieval Iceland. Three of the narratives, Þorvalds þáttr víðfǫrla, Eiríks saga víðfǫrla, and Yngvars saga víðfǫrla, focus on the travels of Nordic people to eastern Europe and Asia; while the latter two, Eiríks saga rauða and Grœnlendinga saga, tell of travels to the continent later named North America. While the travels to the East deal with pilgrimage and the search for the terrestrial Paradise in the service of individual salvation and missionary activities in Scandinavia and Iceland more specifically, the travels to the West are focused on the violent conquest and Christianization of newfound peripheral areas and their peoples. What these narratives have in common, and owe to the learned (Plinian) tradition, is their dehumanized view of foreign and strange people: the giants and monsters of the East, and the skrælingar (indigenous peoples) and einfœtingar (sciopods) of the West. In these sagas travels to the East, while dangerous, introduce heroes to courtly manners, encyclopedic knowledge, and salvation; whereas travels to the West lead to mayhem and death and all attempts at settlement there fail miserably, making Greenland the westernmost outpost of Christianity in the world. This article aims to show how this learned tradition was adapted for use in saga literature to contrast the monstrous and heathen periphery with the more central and piously Christian Iceland.

Deafness and Nonspeaking in Late Medieval Iceland (1200–1550)

Disability and Deaf studies offer differing yet complementing approaches toward the investigation of deaf and nonspeaking characters in late medieval Icelandic texts. Through these approaches, which focus on the individuals and their lives as well as their ability to communicate with the hearing world, this article shifts its attention to the experiences of these characters rather than any symbolic meanings their literary representation might hold. The article is divided into four main sections, considering prose from the Icelandic sagas and various legal sources. The first focuses on the communicative possibilities that deaf and nonspeaking people had recourse to in their private and public lives. The second examines the participation by deaf and nonspeaking people in the political and legal activities so prominent in medieval Icelandic culture. The third section turns to the race, class and gender considerations of society’s approach toward deaf and nonspeaking people, stressing the issues of gender, class, and race. Lastly, the article considers accounts of people miraculously acquiring and reacquiring speech and hearing through the mediation of saints.

How similar are Heimskringla and Egils saga? An application of Burrows’ delta to Icelandic texts

Abstract Recent methodological and technological developments greatly facilitate the use of stylometry for authorship attribution. Burrows’ delta method, proposed in 2002, has been shown to yield good results for a variety of corpora in different languages. The present article demonstrates that this method is highly effective in analysing 19th century Icelandic fiction. The method is then applied to the classical question of the stylistic affinity between two 13th century texts: Heimskringla and Egils saga. Heimskringla proves to be more similar to Egils saga than it is to a variety of contemporary texts, including other kings’ sagas. This supports the theory that the two texts have the same author.

Dario Bullitta, Niðrstigningar saga: Sources, Transmission, and Theology of the Old Norse “Descent into Hell”. Toronto Old Norse and Icelandic Series, 11. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017, pp. XIX, 203.

Alongside the source and contextual study promised by the title, this volume also delivers an edition and the first English translation of the two primary redactions of the Old Norse version of the Descensus Christi or Harrowing of Hell translated from the medieval tradition of the Evangelium Nicodemi or Acta Pilati (for a modern Norwegian translation and parallel normalized edition of the Old Icelandic text see Odd Einar Haugen, Norrøne tekster i utval, 2nd ed., Oslo: Gyldendal, 2001 [1st ed. 1994], pp. 250–65). While the texts themselves are short and have attracted relatively little attention compared to the immense consideration afforded saga literature or Norse poetic traditions, they are nevertheless of great philological significance in the history of Old Norse-Icelandic literature and provide a window into the transmission of Latin and Christian texts. Given the amount of material covered in such few pages while retaining the fullness of the textual tradition, this study, edition, and translation is both conceptually outstanding and strong in execution. The fields of Old Norse-Icelandic language and literature and Germanic philology in a wider sense are enriched by the publication of such multipurpose volumes, whose organization should increase interest in and coverage of otherwise minor or overlooked texts.

Nærvera og túlkun þýðandans. Notkun hliðartexta í þýskri þýðingu á Pilti og stúlku eftir Josef C. Poestion

In recent decades, a discourse on the invisibility of the translator has emerged in translation studies, and this invisibility has been criticized. It is interesting, therefore, to examine historical examples of translations where the translator is highly visible and present. This is true of the translations of Josef C. Poestion from Icelandic into German. The Austrian translator made use of a vast range of paratexts, such as dedications, prefaces, footnotes, endnotes etc., to provide commentary and information. He may be said to have engaged in constant conversation with his readers. This article examines these paratexts, which reveal the translator’s attitude toward the source text and its author, as well as toward the Icelandic nation. The paper questions and analyses his interpretation of the task of the translator and his objective in translating Icelandic texts into German. It will also demonstrate that the translator assumed a certain inequality between cultural spheres, placing German-language culture in the center and Icelandic culture on the periphery, with an attendant imbalance of power.

Íslenskukennsla í Bessastaðaskóla 1806–1846 og á fyrstu árum Reykjavíkurskóla

The school at Bessastaðir in Iceland (1805‒1846) prepared students for the clergy and further studies at the University of Copenhagen. Despite its emphasis on classical languages and theological studies it is considered to have had considerable influence on the development of the Icelandic language and language norms in the 19th century. The article discusses the status of the Icelandic language in the school curriculum but it also highlights the multi-disciplinary nature of language instruction through translations from Greek and Latin under the supervision of renowned experts in Old Icelandic who also were keen supporters of Icelandic language vocabulary development. Many able students built on this experience to pioneer the development of Modern Icelandic.Icelandic lessons in the Bessastaðir School timetable consisted of translations from Latin and Danish with less emphasis on literature; some attention was paid to grammar while orthography varied. The school was cramped and the building not fi t for purpose. This state of affairs prevailed until the school moved to Reykjavik in 1846, which opened up great possibilities. Finally, teaching of modern languages, including Icelandic, could be developed in the curriculum.Timetables in the Reykjavik Grammar School show increased emphasis on the subject Icelandic, both in number of hours and variety of content. Teaching of the subject was prescribed by official regulations and included Icelandic grammar as well as modern and medieval literature. Standardised orthography was developed and firmly established in the early years of the school by rules that were largely based on Old Icelandic. These rules are still mostly applicable in modern day Icelandic texts. The article describes these developments in the first few years of the Reykjavik Grammar School, largely based on the school ̓s archives and significant essay mate-rial from students at the time.

„annaðhvort með dönskum hala eða höfði, enn að öðru leiti íslenskt“: Um tengsl íslensku og dönsku á 19. öld og áhrif þeirra

Icelanders were the subjects of Danish kings for more than five centuries. This article focuses on Icelandic-Danish language contact towards the end of this period, i.e. in the 19th century when Icelandic is assumed to have been heavily influenced by Danish. This assumption is, however, based primarily on metalinguistic evidence and random examples rather than on empirical research. The purpose of the present article is to question this, seeking to evaluate the impact of Danish on Icelandic vo-cabulary based on investigations of 19th century texts. In the spirit of historical socio-linguistics, we examine a variety of published and unpublished texts, and refer both to the external sociohistorical situation and language use as it appears in our texts.In the 19th century, the Danish kingdom was losing territories and changing from a multiethnic and plurilingual empire, into a national state with Danish as the national language. Together with the prevailing 19th century ideology of nationalism in Europe, the changes within the state promoted ideas of national independence for Iceland, and the Icelandic language became a central symbol of nationhood. At the same time, direct contact between Icelandic and Danish, formerly quite limited and mostly confined to a small group of high officials, increased. Travels between the two countries became easier and more frequent, a growing number of Danes sett led in Iceland (and vice versa), and bilingualism became more common among the general Icelandic public. The political struggle for national independence, as well as the growing presence of Danish in Iceland, is reflected in the language discourse of the 19th century, where the impact of Danish was a constant concern. It was seen as a serious threat to Icelandic, most prominent in the speech in Reykjavik, the fastest growing urban centre. This article presents the results of two investigations of lexical borrowings, based on recently compiled corpora of 19th century Icelandic texts: a corpus of printed newspapers and periodicals, and a corpus of unpublished and handwritten private lett ers. The first study included words in both corpora, that contained one of four borrowed affixes, an-, be-, -heit and -era, which were commonly featured in contemporary (negative) comments on foreign influence. The results show that such words were, in fact, rare in the texts, and that their number, relative to the total number of running words, decreased in the course of the century, especially in the newspapers. The second investigation was directed at recent borrowings (including one-word code-switches) in a subcorpus of newspapers from the last quarter of the 19th century. The results show a very moderate number of tokens relative to the total number of running words in the texts as a whole (0.37%). We do, however, see a clear increase between 1875 and 1900, as well as a higher proportion of lexical borrowings in the Reykjavik newspapers than in those published elsewhere. Furthermore, the words in question were particularly prominent in advertisements compared to the rest of the text. The main conclusion of the article is that both the contact situation and the amount and character of the borrowed words found in the texts, place 19th century Icelandic on step 1 of Thomason and Kaufman’s borrowing scale, and that the over-all results show much less influence from Danish than contemporary metalinguistic comments indicated.

Vikings Of The Round Table: Kingship in The Islendingasögur and the Riddarasögur

Arthurian literature had an enthusiastic reception in Scandinavia. The Norwegian King Hákon Hákonarson (1217–1263) commissioned translations of Brother Thomas’ Tristan legend and Chrétien de Troyes’s romances as a form of entertainment in order to emulate the Angevin courts of Henry III; these translations articulate a relationship between the Norwegian court and the English courts. The majority of the surviving Scandinavian manuscripts, however, were translated or copied in Iceland by Icelanders who did not have kings or courts. Reading Arthurian Icelandic texts such as Ívens saga (1226) and Möttuls saga (ca. 1250) against Icelandic family sagas such as Egils saga (ca. 1220–1240) and Laxardal saga (ca. 1220–1240) reveals that Icelandic Arthurian texts express a preference for the knights that travel as opposed to the kings. Icelandic Arthurian texts are distinct from their French counterpart by the addition of Viking customs, such as gift-giving, and by the different ideologies that engendered the texts. The Icelandic Saga af Tristram ok Ísodd, for example, innovates a Spanish Tristan, marking Scandinavian Arthurian literature as transcultural, and distancing the story from English and French versions of the tale.

Medieval Self-Fashioning: Rǫgnvaldr Kali Kolsson and Orkneyinga Saga

This article investigates the process of self-fashioning depicted in the medieval Icelandic text _Orkneyinga saga_, the ‘Saga of the Orkney Islanders’. It argues that the character of Rǫgnvaldr Kali Kolsson, Earl of Orkney, is shown to fashion himself in the model of previous Scandinavian rulers as a means of asserting his right to govern, and that the relationship between poetry and prose is key to this process. Through the composition and recitation of verse, the character of Rǫgnvaldr asserts the power to craft his own story and thus to fashion his own identity and that of his subjects. In particular, the article demonstrates that Rǫgnvaldr’s expedition to Jerusalem is central to the construction of the earl’s story and of his self. It concludes by suggesting that such a depiction of self-fashioning may have been particularly resonant in medieval Iceland, itself a site of hybrid and shifting identities following Norwegian colonisation.

IceMorph: An Automated Morphological Analyzer and English-Language Lookup Tool for Old Icelandic

INTRODUCTION The advent of inexpensive computing and the creation of large machine-actionable corpora consisting of well-structured digital texts have made it possible to analyze and mark for morphosyntactic features significant amounts of text (> 1,000,000 tokens) with a high degree of accuracy (> 80 percent) rapidly and automatically. Although the problem of automatically tagging text with part-of-speech (POS) information has been largely solved for languages with little morphonological complexity, (2) more complex languages, such as Old Icelandic (OIc) and other ancient languages, continue to pose problems for automated systems. Despite these difficulties, rich morphosyntactic markup that includes lemmatization holds great promise for both linguistic and textual scholarship. Accurate markup would enable the development of sophisticated online study environments that allow researchers to perform complex searches, make comparisons across multiple texts, and generate calculations concerning word-use and syntactical patterns. Our work, focusing on Old Icelandic, confirms that even for morphonologically complex Indo-European languages, the information gain offered by automatic morphosyntactic analysis of texts, measured as the percentage of correctly tagged tokens, sentences, and complete texts over the extant corpus, offers a marked improvement over previously available hand-marked texts (Rognvaldsson and Helgadottir 2008, 2011). (3) Even the most detailed and accurate indexes produced in the past centuries--such as Oniforradet i de dista islandska handskrifterna (Larsson 1891), which provides an accurate and exhaustive word-form index for a number of the oldest Old Icelandic manuscripts (ranging from late twelfth- to mid-thirteenth-century manuscripts)--offer only minimal coverage when compared to the very large number of extant Old Icelandic texts. For a researcher interested in the study of the entire Old Icelandic corpus (or a large sub-corpus of Old Icelandic literature), these early handbooks, no matter how accurately compiled, are of limited use. Unfortunately, it is not economically feasible to extend the earlier practice of manual encoding to a greater number of manuscripts; the manual compilation of handbooks is costly and requires tremendous amounts of time, expertise, and energy. The old paper-and-pen approach does not, to borrow a term front computer science, scale well. A dream of many researchers in Old Icelandic is to be able to work with a large number of texts (and manuscript witnesses to texts)--or even a comprehensive corpus--that include the high level of morphosyntactic detail of the early handbooks mentioned above. Similarly, historical linguists (especially syntacticians) are eager to work with a much larger parsed corpus of Old Icelandic texts than is currently available. Recent work, such as that of the Icelandic Parsed Historical Corpus group (IcePaHC) (Wallenberg et al. 2011) is a major step toward making such resources available, as it provides a considerable number of texts tagged in a semi-supervised fashion, and moves us closer to a comprehensive parsed Old Icelandic corpus. Yet, it is unlikely that IcePaHC alone will provide adequate coverage for Old Icelandic textual research, in part because it is focused on the historical development of Icelandic up through the present, and in part because it provides limited lemmatization of the texts. As such, IcePaHC diverges from our project, which has as its sole focus the morphosyntactic analysis and lemmatization of Old Icelandic texts. We believe that the computational methods developed by our group can augment those of IcePaHC and others, and have the potential to not only extend the necessarily limited scope of the earlier historical handbooks, but also increase considerably the number of richly marked texts available to researchers. (4) Automatic morphosyntactic analysis of Old Icelandic oilers an efficient method for accurately tagging millions of tokens in the growing corpus of machine-actionable texts. …

Morkinskinna ed. by Ármann Jakobsson and Þórður Ingi Guðjónsson

Reviewed by: Morkinskinna ed. by Ármann Jakobsson and Þórður Ingi Guðjónsson John Kennedy Morkinskinna. 2011. Eds. Ármann Jakobsson and Þórður Ingi Guðjónsson. 2 vols. Íslenzk fornrit XXIII-XXIV. Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag. Pp. lxviii + 329; ci + 268. A new publication in the Íslenzk fornrit (Old Icelandic Texts) series is a major event in the realm of Icelandic saga scholarship. The first volume published in the series, Sigurður Nordal's edition of Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar, became available eighty years ago in 1933, and after progress that the publisher's website describes a little generously as "steady rather than spectacular," we now have the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh volumes to appear out of a planned thirty-five. But while the wait for some volumes has been long indeed, and some of the earlier ones are inevitably now dated in some respects, the Íslenzk fornrit editions of the sagas remain the ones most widely used and cited internationally by those students, scholars, and translators whose needs are met by sound and attractively produced normalized editions of saga texts. These handsome books also enjoy considerable prestige in Iceland, even if many book buyers there elect for less scholarly editions or versions employing modern orthography. Morkinskinna, the work that has now appeared, is a chronicle of the kings of Norway. Both the beginning and the end are missing, and in its present form it extends from about 1035 to 1157, but scholars believe that it originally probably covered the period 1030 to 1177. The first two kings of the period, Magnús Óláfsson and his remarkable uncle [End Page 110] Haraldr harðráði (hard ruler) Sigurðarson, whose highly dramatic career ended at Stamford Bridge in 1066, receive considerably more attention than most later monarchs. (The text relating to the first two kings is in volume 1, the remainder in volume 2.) Rather awkwardly, the name Morkinskinna refers both to the literary work and to the primary manuscript that preserves it, GKS 1009 fol in the Royal Library in Copenhagen. "Morkinskinna" means "rotten parchment," a name given to the manuscript late in the seventeenth century by the Icelandic scholar Torfæus (Þormóður Torfason). As GKS 1009 fol, despite its defects, is not rotten, the name is mysterious and may allude to an original binding no longer extant. The task of editing Morkinskinna for the Íslenzk fornrit series was entrusted in 2003 to Ármann Jakobsson, who has published extensively on the text, including a 2002 monograph Staður í nýjum heimi: Konungasagan Morkinskinna (A place in a new world: The saga of kings Morkinskinna). When the task of editing this long text proved more demanding than expected, Þórður Ingi Guðjónsson was appointed in 2008 to assist. Þórður Ingi augmented the notes on the text Ármann had prepared and played a major role in seeing the work through the publication process. Ármann had laid the groundwork for the edition of the text, and the lengthy introduction is mainly his work, except for the section "Um þessu útgáfu" (About this edition), which is by Þórður Ingi, the jointly prepared section on the verses embedded in the text, and the acknowledgments. Somewhat usually split between the two volumes, the introduction includes sections covering ground one would expect to find in any scholarly edition of an ancient or medieval text. There is discussion of the manuscript, dated here, as is usual, to about 1275, and of the authorship, date of the original text, and provenance. Ármann uncontroversially dates the original Morkinskinna text to about 1220, notes difficulties with the concept of an "author" for sagas of this kind, and affirms its Icelandic provenance. After exploring the widely held view among earlier scholars that there was an older Morkinskinna significantly different from the presently extant one, often regarded as having numerous later interpolations, he resolutely concludes that there is no incontestable evidence for such a view. Sources and works influenced by Morkinskinna are duly considered, as are earlier editions (and the only translation into any language to date, that of Theodore M. Andersson [End Page 111] and Kari Ellen Gade...

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow: Hair Loss, the Tonsure, and Masculinity in Medieval Iceland

IN AN ARTICLE ENTITLED Size Matters: Penile Problems in Sagas of Icelanders published in 2007, I set out to evaluate the usefulness (or otherwise) of psychoanalytic theory as a lens through which to examine the relationship between men's bodies and their gendered identities in the medieval Norse-speaking world. I wrote at the beginning of that article that determining the relative importance of nature and is a central problem in the understanding of human gender and sexuality, and the issues at stake become most pressing at the site where biology and meet: the human body, especially those parts of the body that are endowed with significance as markers of gender or instruments of sexual activity. (Phelpstead 2007, 420) In Size Matters I was particularly interested in the way that the penis was endowed with meaning within culture, specifically how it was constructed as a marker of gendered identity. Other parts of human bodies are also, of course, culturally constructed as marking gender, and this essay continues the dialogue between psychoanalytic theory and the study of medieval masculinities by turning to a different part of human anatomy: hair. When examining Icelandic texts about castration, erectile dysfunction, and an oversized penis it seemed impossible to ignore psychoanalytic theory. It is true that for some critics psychoanalytic theory is self-evidently devoid of value, but as I argued in my earlier article, whatever its therapeutic efficacy, psychoanalysis is embedded in contemporary discourse to such an extent that it inevitably informs one's thinking about issues of gender and sexuality; in such a situation its claims warrant interrogation (Phelpstead 2007, 421). My earlier article concluded that Freudian psychoanalytic theory has limitations as a framework for analyzing medieval Icelandic texts but suggested that there might be advantages in developing an approach that is sensitive both to history and to the insights offered by psychoanalysis because psychoanalytic theory claims to account for the way in which a phenomenon may both be a biological reality and also signify culturally, i.e. have meaning. Thus, a psychoanalytical approach that takes account of historical context might provide a path between constructionism (where because everything is cultural the concept of culture becomes meaningless) and biological determinism (where biology explains everything, leaving no space for meaning) (cf. Phelpstead 2007, 434). I suggested that the seeds of a more historically sensitive psychoanalytic approach might be found not in the work of Sigmund Freud but in that of the French psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan. Lacan develops Freud's ideas about castration to suggest that men and women a which--importantly--is symbolic rather than anatomical. (1) He uses the terra to refer not to the anatomical organ, but rather to that which the organ symbolizes, a transcendental signifier to which the subject relates sans egard a la difference anatomique des sexes (Lacan 1971a, 104) [without regard to the anatomical difference of the sexes (312)]. Gender is constructed in relation to this social signifier so that, as Robert Mills puts it, the (Lacanian) represents male subjects (think they) have and what female subjects (are considered, culturally speaking, to) lack (2004, 110). Because the phallus, in Lacan's sense, is symbolic, it need not necessarily be associated with the penis. Lacan himself argues that, paradoxically enough, at a certain stage of psychological development a woman's clitoris is promu ... a la fonction du phallus (1971a, 105) [raised to the function of the phallus (313)]. (2) The penis will often symbolize that which Lacan calls the phallus, but this need not be so. It is therefore possible that the symbolic work of the might at times be carried out by a different part of the physical organism. …

In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery by Annette Kolodny (review)

Reviewed by: In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery by Annette Kolodny Andrew Lipman (bio) In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery. Annette Kolodny. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. 426 pp. Tracing the journeys of both real and imagined Vikings through the American past, Annette Kolodny provides a fascinating, erudite, and sprawling narrative about the making of stories. Working adeptly with varied sources including Norse sagas, Yankee poetry, and Wabenaki oral histories, Kolodny finds that the medieval Icelandic colony of Vinland inspired a millennium’s worth of memories. She shows how a tiny cluster of Europeans on the periphery of the North American continent came to stand at the center of an ongoing debate about American origins. Vinland was the westernmost in a long chain of colonies, as Norse sailors had hopped their way across the North Atlantic from Iceland to Greenland to arrive in Atlantic Canada around the year 1000 ce, in the midst of a global warming period that made these forbidding seas somewhat more navigable. Most of what we know of the Viking prescence comes from excavations of the L’Anse aux Meadows site at the tip of Newfoundland, first uncovered in 1960, though the presence of certain plant species at that site indicate that its occupants also settled at points farther south either along the coast or down the St. Lawrence Seaway. This uncertainty about the extent of the Norse presence in America is central to Kolodony’s entire analysis, which aims not so much to fix Vinland firmly on a map as trace its ever-expanding bounds in later American memories. Kolodny approaches Vinland from several angles. As a scholar long concerned with contact narratives, she adds her own close critical reading of the two key Icelandic texts: The Greenlanders’ Saga and Eirik the Red’s Saga. While combing them for clues of encounters, she points out the common features of all Norse sagas that shape these works’ structure and [End Page 780] style. The sagas’ authors blended information from nonextant manuscripts with centuries-old oral traditions laden with magical elements. Dramatic tales centered on the heroic figures of Eirik the Red and his scions Lief, Thorvald, and Thorstein, along with Thorstein’s wife, Gurdrid. Kolodony stresses that these are backward-looking sagas set on the eve of Iceland’s embrace of Christianity. These stories focus on their lead characters and their roles in shaping the Icelandic past, making them quite distinct from later accounts of exploration aimed at piquing the curiosity of European readers and raising capital for future colonial ventures. The sagas provide cryptic but tantalizing evidence of Norse-native encounters. Kolodny pays close attention to every appearance of “Skraelings” in the text, “Skraeling” being a coarse term meaning “little wretches” that the Vikings applied to all Arctic and American peoples (58). Many of the contacts described were tense or openly hostile skirmishes, though there are hints that engagements between colonists and natives could be more complex. In an arresting moment from Eirik the Red’s Saga, there is a meeting between the heroine Gudrid and a woman described as “pale” with “the largest eyes that have ever been seen in any human head,” “wearing a black, close-fitting tunic; she was rather short and had a band round her chestnut-colored hair.” The stranger asks Gudrid her name, then repeats Gudrid’s answer, saying “My name is Gudrid,” then suddenly disappears into thin air (65). Was this a spirit or a “Skraeling”? Noting that meetings between mutually incomprehensible people often include repetitions of speech, Kolodny suggests “we may have in this scene a faint trace of a brief first encounter between a Norse woman and a Native woman,” in which the details of a hazily remembered exchange were combined with elements from “the folklore of apparitions and doppelgängers” (67). Throughout her readings of these texts, Kolodny draws on impressive research into both Icelandic and Indian cultures of the time, giving her cautious but canny interpretations real heft. The bulk of the book’s...

Jónsbók. The Laws of Later Iceland. The Icelandic Text according to MS AM 351 fol. Skálholtsbók eldri. With an English Translation, Introduction and Notes by Schulman, Jana K.

Article Jónsbók. The Laws of Later Iceland. The Icelandic Text according to MS AM 351 fol. Skálholtsbók eldri. With an English Translation, Introduction and Notes by Schulman, Jana K. was published on August 1, 2011 in the journal Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte: Germanistische Abteilung (volume 128, issue 1).

The rise of Dative Substitution in the history of Icelandic: A diachronic construction grammar account

Dative Substitution, i.e. the change from accusative to dative subjects, has been explained in the generative literature as thematic case marking ousting idiosyncratic case marking (cf. Jónsson, 2003; Jónsson and Eythórsson, 2005). A major anomaly for this account is the late onset of Dative Substitution, not documented in Icelandic texts until the latter part of the 19th century. As the prerequisites for Dative Substitution existed already in Old Norse-Icelandic, the question arises as to why this change did not take place earlier. I show in the present comparative study of Old Norse-Icelandic and Modern Icelandic texts that the semantic structure of the Dative Subject Construction has changed from denoting happenstance and experience-based events equally in Old Norse-Icelandic to a situation where experience-based events are in majority in Modern Icelandic. This change in language use entails that experience-based events are now in the spotlight of the Dative Subject Construction, which in turn makes the construction considerably more coherent semantically in Modern Icelandic, a known precondition for the productivity of argument structure constructions that are low in type frequency (cf. Barðdal, 2006a, 2008). This change in the semantic structure of the Dative Subject Construction, i.e. this narrowing and focusing of its semantic scope, is the motivating factor behind the late onset of Dative Substitution in the history of Icelandic. More generally, this investigation illustrates how productivity may increase despite a reduction in the type frequency of a construction, contra claims in the literature that type frequency is the most important factor for productivity ( Bybee, 1995).

Masks and Mumming in the Nordic Area (review)

Reviewed by: Masks and Mumming in the Nordic Area Carl Lindahl (bio) Masks and Mumming in the Nordic Area. Ed. Terry Gunnell. Acta academiae regiae Gustavi Adolphi 98. (Uppsala, Sweden: Kungl. Gustav Adolfs Akademien för svensk folkkultur, 2007. Pp. 840, 45 maps, 168 figures, bibliography, index, notes on contributors.) At 840 pages, Masks and Mumming in the Nordic Areais a great and sprawling book. Yet given the goals it sets for itself and the voids that it fills, it is remarkably concise. At the very least, here are two books in one: an encyclopedic catalog of masked festive traditions and a collection of essays exploring specific traditions from a variety of angles. Together, these two sections comprise both a summa of the early descriptive techniques of Nordic folklorists and a cross-section of current contextual and theoretical interests. Two introductory statements outline the book's orientation and scholarly development. First, the editor's dedication ("in memory of Herbert Halpert and George M. Story") testifies to an inspiration from the outskirts of the Nordic area. Halpert and Story's edited collection Christmas Mumming in Newfoundland(University of Toronto Press, 1969) combined historic-geographic methodology with close contextual focus to change the direction of folkloric festival studies. Second, a two-page foreword by Bengt af Klintberg outlines how Danish scholar Carsten Bregenhøj's Helligtrekongersløb på Agersø(Akademisk Forlag, 1974) extended the Halpert-Story methodology to the study of Danish Epiphany mummings, how Terry Gunnell's The Origins of Drama in Scandinavia(Boydell and Brewer, 1995) worked to connect the earliest records of Scandinavian masking traditions with modern observations of their practice, and how Bregen-høj and Gunnell began a collaboration, in 1999, resulting in the present book. Editor Terry Gunnell thickens the description with an introduction outlining the history, convictions, and orientations underlying the present volume (pp. 27-43). Crucially, Gunnell cites ways in which Scandinavian folklorists, following Carl von Sydow, revolutionized the historic-geographic approach by abandoning the effort to level diverse texts into some posited universal pattern and by insisting, on the contrary, that inferences regarding the background and meaning of customary practices "be based wholly on firm localevidence rather than international comparisons" (p. 38). This is an important qualification for North American readers, many of whom have summarily dismissed historic-geographic methods on the false understanding that they serve only to articulate the abstract patterning of preconceived notions. Part 1 of the book, which runs to 447 pages, honors local knowledge through its close attention to the individual traditions surveyed, as well as by incorporating and building upon the archival work and published scholarship of generations of local experts. Leading specialists provide detailed surveys of seven Nordic regions: Christine Eike takes on Norway; Eva Knuts, Sweden; Carsten Bregenhøj and Hanne Pico Larsen, Denmark; Terry Gunnell, the "North Atlantic" (encompassing Orkney, Shetland, the Faroes, and Iceland); Urpo Vento, Finland and Karelia; Ülo Tedre, Estonia; and Adriënne Heijnen, Greenland. Each survey covers seven topics in the following order: a brief description of the region; early historical references to masking traditions; a characterization of the documentary sources for the survey; a précis of the "general features" of the festive activities surveyed; an overview of the region's calendrical masking traditions; a summary of noncalendrical traditions; and a conclusion. The contributors vary significantly in the ways in which they flesh out this seven-part outline, and a brief review of some of the details [End Page 352]of the discussions illustrates the range, sources, and scope of the national surveys. For example, the most detailed description of a region is the section on Denmark, which devotes seven pages to geographic and cultural variations, as well as to historical influences on variation. The most detailed section on historical references to masking traditions is the seventeen-page section on the North Atlantic, which draws most extensively on medieval Icelandic texts. For its documentary sources, the section on Finland and Karelia brings together 1,900 records, principally archival resources based on fieldwork conducted in the 1930s, questionnaires administered in the 1960s, and audio interviews and video documentation undertaken in the 1970s. The Greenland section, in its pr...

Tagging Icelandic text: A linguistic rule-based approach

The Icelandic language is a morphologically complex language, for which a large tagset has been created. This paper describes the design of a linguistic rule-based system for part-of-speech tagging Icelandic text. The system contains two main components: a disambiguator, IceTagger, and an unknown word guesser, IceMorphy. IceTagger uses a small number of local elimination rules along with a global heuristics component. The heuristics guess the functional roles of the words in a sentence, mark prepositional phrases, and use the acquired knowledge to force feature agreement where appropriate. IceMorphy is used for guessing the tag profile for unknown words and for automatically filling tag profile gaps in the lexicon. Evaluation shows that IceTagger achieves 91.54% accuracy, a substantial improvement on the highest accuracy, 90.44%, obtained using three state-of-the-art data-driven taggers. Furthermore, the accuracy increases to 92.95% by using IceTagger along with two data-driven taggers in a simple voting scheme. The development time of the tagging system was only seven man-months, which can be considered a short development period for a linguistic rule-based system.

Women and Medieval Epic: Gender, Genre, and the Limits of Epic Masculinity by Sara S. Poor, Jana K. Schulman

REVIEWS Women andMedieval Epic: Gender, Genre, and theLimits ofEpic Masculinity. Ed. by SARA S. POOR and JANA K. SCHULMAN. (The New Middle Ages) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2007. Xii+299pp. ?45. ISBN 978-I-4039-6602-5. 'Epic' isdefined ratherbroadly in thisnew collection of essays, which ranges in scope frommedieval Persia to Iceland, unsettling expectations about the roleswomen ha bitually play in epic. The women who are the focus of these studies certainly can be construed as victims or as prizes forheroic achievement, sidelined by the aggres sively honour-oriented practices of epic masculinity, but the rereadings are highly productive. The textsunder consideration are largely vernacular, thoughHrotsvit's treatments ofOtto I and the foundation of her own monastery ofGandersheim were composed inLatin. Kate Olson makes a convincing case thatHrotsvit regarded her twoworks as epic; they engage with foundation stories, and celebrate the immediate national past. Hrotsvit notes that it isnot theplace of a frail woman (fragilismulieris) tonarrate stories ofwar: thus she redefines thegenre forher own purposes. Hrotsvit is the only female author under consideration; the other essays examine women as characters. Some of themost interesting essays are, perhaps unexpectedly, on little-known texts.This raises the problem of how much plot paraphrase is required for the ana lysis tomake sense; differentauthors solve the problem indifferentways. Confining plot summaries to footnotes is rather unsuccessful; Thomas Caldin's discussion of Poema deMio Cid and Mocedades de Rodrigo becomes confusing for the non-expert reader.Dick Davis's account ofwomen in thePersian Shahnameh integratesplot sum mary and discussion much more clearly and holds the reader's interest.One or two essays are heavily inflected by theoretical approaches: William Burgwinkle offers an engrossing account of Berthe inGirart de Roussillon, despite substantial summaries of Lacan, as interpreted by Zizek, and finally it is the brief deployment of Judith Butler which persuades. Lisabeth Bucholt makes use ofMary Carruthers's work on memory to structure her discussion ofEve inJunius II; her livelyargument gestures towards a longer piece which would set out the case for regarding themanuscript as a single four-chapter narrative more clearly. The contributors aremostly assiduous ingiving theoriginal textaswell as transla tion; the exception, oddly, is an essay by one of the editors. Jana Schulman cites only translations of the sagas of Icelanders and of thePoetic Edda, making no reference at all to the Icelandic text, though the Icelandic laws appear inunnormalized citation. Schulman's article ispart of a group of essays at the end of the volume dealing with Germanic material. The case for regarding the sagas, whether fornaldarsogur (sagas of ancient times) or Islendingsogur (sagas of Icelanders), as epic, since they are prose works, only loosely dealing with the subjects typical of classical epic, remains to be made. However, this flexibilityof definition permits a thoughtful close reading of two rarelydiscussed sagas in William Layher's essay, a rather too introductory but never theless useful account of feasts in the sagas of Icelanders, a structuralist comparison of Brynhildr and Kriemhilt across theMiddle High German and Norse traditions, and an intriguing account of the significance of the ruler's smile in theNibelungenlied inwhich the combination of close reading and awareness of recentwork in the psy chology of emotion pays dividends forKathryn Starkey. Christine Chism compares the depiction of Olympias, Alexander's mother, and the formidable queen Candace across the Middle English Alexander romances, while Sarah-Grace Heller argues that the romances of theOld French Crusade Cycle evi dence the actual historical experience of the thousands ofwomen who journeyed with theCrusaders to theHoly Land. MLR, I03.2, 2oo8 49 I The introduction by Poor and Schulman largely signals the essays to follow, rather than offering a theoretical overview, but given the book's ambition and scope, it is clear that, whatever models ofvernacular epicmight have been elaborated, they would swiftlybe dismantled by the individual contributions. The variety of literatures, texts, and approaches which this collection embraces certainly puts paid to unconsidered generalizations about women in epic. It is awelcome and imaginative treatment of a too-little investigated topic. ST JOHN'S COLLEGE, OXFORD CAROLYNE LARRINGTON Lancelot: Der mittelhochdeutscheRoman imeuropdischenKontext. Ed. by KLAUS RID DER and CHRISTOPH HUBER. Tiibingen: Niemeyer. 2007. vi + 3I7 pp. ?86. ISBN 978-3...

Gesetzmäßigkeiten Der Lautdauer

The purpose of this paper is to present some further evidence for the hypothesis that the duration of sounds in speech abides by laws, too. To this end we test some data on the duration of sounds in Hungarian and Icelandic texts presented by Laziczius (1939) and Bergsveinsson (1941).