I began my PhD trajectory at the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto in September 2007, and graduated to the writing stage in June 2009. All things else being equal, I expect to defend in the summer of 2011. What follows is my dissertation proposal as submitted in 2009.
Medieval representations of the supernatural have long been a preoccupation of literary scholarship, and the natural world, too, has received considerable attention at various points in the history of literary criticism. Among the fruits of research in these fields is the recognition that the categories “natural” and “supernatural” are modern, and that medieval sources rarely make a comparable distinction (e.g. Neville 1999: 1–3). Instead, the psychological contrast between self and other surfaces as a central organising principle in various cultures, setting human society off against both natural and supernatural phenomena. In this context, however, scholars have generally treated the natural world as a static environment, despite significant seasonal patterns in the literature. Consequently, many patterns of this sort, such as the widespread use of winter imagery in Old English poetry, have yet to be explained to satisfaction. In my dissertation, I will demonstrate that the winter season stands out as a time of incursions into the human domain in medieval English and Scandinavian literature, in which outside threats enchroach upon society while magic and the supernatural come to play more prominent roles. It was only with the advent of romance literature that summer became a similarly popular context for encounters with the supernatural as well as the natural world.
The antithesis in Old English poetry between human society and the outside world is a well-documented phenomenon in which the security and social aspects of the hall are contrasted with the danger and solitude of all that is alien to human society (Magennis; Neville 1999). Equally widely-acknowledged is a seasonal imbalance in the poetry, which scholars have long observed displays a quantitative preference for winter and rough weather, leaving the warmer and calmer times of year largely untouched (Burton; Hanscom 444–7; Pearsall and Salter 41–3; Klinck 229; Neville 1998; Anderson 236–8). The winter theme is especially striking in the elegies, where it appears to connote melancholy and solitude. In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, explanations for this seasonal bias have been various. In the late nineteenth century, Burton sought to account for it with reference to the physical prominence of winter in northern Europe and the season’s aptness as a literary topos to the fatalistic outlook of early Germanic religion (477). More recently, Neville has linked the motif with Christian theological considerations and their urgency at the presumed impending end to world history (1998). However, there has as yet been no attempt to give this seasonal bias a place within the contrast of self and other, society and the outside world. Such an approach to winter would be appropriate, since this contrast stood out more distinctly in winter: people spent much of the season indoors, in close proximity to one another, while the natural world was at its most violent.
Although the corpus of Old Norse literature does not employ winter imagery for elegiac purposes in the same way as the Old English poetry, this tradition likewise shows an aptness for winter themes. Firstly, origin myths within and outside the eddic material take aspects of winter as their starting-point (cf. Meulengracht Sørensen); secondly, supernatural events in the sagas tend to concentrate in the winter halfyear (cf. Gunnell 2004; 2005). Interactions between Icelandic society and the natural world have yet to receive scholarly attention: landscape in the sagas is generally acknowledged to be important only insofar as it affects the central action of the narrative, but even in that capacity it has not been studied in detail (see Schach; Hallberg 71; Pearsall and Salter 45; O’Donoghue 59–60). However, both the landscapes and the social aspects of winter play key roles in sagas of various genres, and they deserve proportionate attention.
Seasonality may be studied within a number of disciplines, the most obvious of which are climatology, to determine the physical development of the solar year, and anthropology, to describe the time-units and time-bound customs adhered to in a given culture. The climate history and calendars of the Middle Ages have received ample attention in recent years, and the results of such research will be used as a background against which the intended work may be carried out. The study itself, however, will focus on literary representations of winter, the connotative functions of narrative winter environments, and the cultural contexts from which these appear to stem.
The dissertation will attempt to account for various winter themes in Old English and Old Norse literature with reference to the social cycle of the year. It will therefore take these two corpora as its primary materials, comparing them to traditions in Latin, Middle English, Welsh, and Irish where relevant. The final chapter, taking a diachronic approach, will study Middle English seasonal themes at greater length, thereby to trace the development of the motifs under investigation. The emphasis both here and in the Icelandic tradition will be on works composed up to about 1400.
In order to indicate the relationship of the intended study to adjacent disciplines, the dissertation will open with an analytical section addressing native calendrical customs as well as imported conceptions of the natural cycle in medieval northwestern Europe. The introduction will furthermore address questions of genre, probing differences in seasonal interest between various modes of narration, and explain how the intended work relates to previous research on society and the natural world.
The body of the dissertation will have its basis in the following outline:
Winter frequently involved a heightened contrast between society and the natural world in both the reality and the literatures of northwestern Europe. Festive occasions in Iceland concentrated at the start of the winter halfyear and around midwinter, while early and high summer were reserved for political gatherings. This division is suggestive of the particular intensity in winter of the antithesis between outside, where weather was at its roughest, and inside, where greater leisure and ready provisions provided the necessary conditions for feasting. Although the indigenous ritual calendar of Anglo-Saxon England is sparsely documented, there is some evidence both internally and in analogues with neighbouring societies that it followed a similar pattern. The Christian liturgical cycle that came to dominate this part of Europe likewise emphasised the winter halfyear, so that it could with little difficulty supersede the local calendars while incorporating some of their traditions. Accordingly, the heightened social mode of winter is found in (Old and Middle) English as well as Icelandic literature across the centuries. This recognition of the social implications of winter is a crucial step towards an understanding of the season’s functions across several genres of Old English and Old Norse literature.
In Old English poetry, winter landscapes carry specific literary connotations. In the elegies, for instance, they connote solitude and hardship, as these are typically the conditions in which landscape features are evoked. However, a number of Old English poems of diverse genres also characterise water landscapes by cold and other features of winter. Once such an association was in place, passages involving water landscapes could be made to evoke the connotations of the winter season regardless of the narrative time of year. That this association between sea and winter constitutes a grouping of hostile domains is confirmed, especially in Beowulf, by the recognition that water landscapes are also commonly the abodes of hostile supernatural creatures, who tend to be associated with dangerous environments. In Scandinavia, myth and legend closely associated two ethnic categories with winter, namely the Sami of the far north and the races of giants who dwelt in the mountains. These connections again represent a grouping of hostile categories, as both groups are characteristically at odds with the human society central to the narrative. Their connection with winter landscapes is one further pointer to their character as perceived by Scandinavian authors. In this way, the literary traditions of both England and Scandinavia describe a landscape peripheral to the human horizon where properties of winter reside throughout the year. For both these corpora, the hostility and supernatural connotations of winter become apparent in the triad it forms with a peripheral landscape and its hostile superhuman inhabitants. These associations help explain several of the literary roles of winter, while providing necessary background information for the chapter that follows.
Certain genres of northwestern-European literature associate the coming of winter with an increase in supernatural activity. Throughout this part of Europe, for instance, winter is the time most closely associated with prognostics. In the sagas, moreover, supernatural phenomena such as hauntings concentrate in the winter season. In view of close correspondences between Beowulf and the Sagas of Icelanders, and the winter episodes of Grettis saga in particular, it will be asked whether parts of Beowulf may likewise have developed from a narrative with such an association, though no seasonal sequence survives in the main narrative of the extant work. This chapter will examine literary associations between winter and the supernatural as one explanation of the prevalence of winter themes in Old English and Old Norse literature.
Both the hostile and the supernatural associations of winter discussed in the previous two chapters are exploited for various purposes in a range of literary sources. Zooming out to an overview of the corpora, this chapter will categorise and discuss the various ways in which this is done, including winter typology as employed in theological writings; prognostics; the influencing of meteorological phenomena through sorcery or saintly mediation; mythology; and nonliteral connotations of winter characteristics. This discussion will illustrate the extent to which the hostile and supernatural associations of the winter season are used in various genres of Anglo-Saxon and early Scandinavian literature. The thematic organisation of this chapter also facilitates point-by-point comparison with other literary traditions, notably biblical, patristic, Middle English, Irish, and Welsh.
As was outlined above, the first four chapters of the dissertation will demonstrate that winter is represented as a time of tension between human society and the outside world in the literatures of Anglo-Saxon England and medieval Scandinavia. In later medieval literature, however, encounters with the supernatural as well as the natural world came to be associated with summer as much as winter. This trend may be witnessed in Middle English romance, lyric, and vision literature, but also in the Icelandic riddarasögur and the later fornaldarsögur. In neither the English nor the Scandinavian tradition did winter lose its supernatural and hostile connotations, however. Among other things, the stability of this tradition may find explanations in the relative continuity in the make-up of the social year as well as the prophetic associations of the turn of the year. In Iceland in particular, the romance development did not greatly affect other genres, so that winter traditions have continued to emphasise supernatural elements well into the modern era. Taking a diachronic approach, this chapter will investigate both the rise of summer motifs and the continuity of winter traditions. It will attempt to explain the former with reference to foreign influences and changing literary fashions, though key changes in climate, technology, and social space will likewise be taken into account. This investigation will make clear how literary perceptions of winter changed from the earliest extant Germanic literature of northwestern Europe to the later medieval tradition. At the same time, it will draw attention to continuities that demonstrate a Middle English affinity with the social patterns of winter set out in preceding chapters.
The proposed study aims to provide a better understanding of medieval approaches to the natural world and the powers associated with it. It will add new depth to the accepted dichotomy between society and the outside world by demonstrating that seasonality was a potent factor in the equation. It will seek to explain the prevalence of winter motifs in early English and Scandinavian literature with reference to this contrast, thereby improving the modern understanding of seasonal patterns in medieval literature. Finally, by highlighting developments in literary tradition, it will illuminate change and continuity between literary genres and periods that are often studied in isolation.
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