p.s. langeslag :: phd

PhD

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. I expect to defend in March of 2012. An abstract follows.

Seasonal Setting and the Human Domain in Early English and Early Scandinavian Literature

The contrast between the familiar and the outside world has been widely recognised as an organising principle in medieval literature, in which the natural and the supernatural alike are set off against human society as alien and hostile. In the study of this antithesis, however, the outside world has typically been treated as a static environment, despite significant seasonal patterns in the literature. In my doctoral dissertation, I demonstrate that winter stands out as a season in which the autonomy of the human domain is drawn into question in both Anglo-Saxon and early Scandinavian literature. In these traditions, winter and its landscapes connote personal affliction and supernatural activity. The latter element in particular later gained an additional association with the lush summer landscapes of Continental genres such as romance, as may be seen in Middle English and later medieval Scandinavian literature. My investigation will provide insight into shifting literary connotations of season and climate, while refining our understanding of the psychological contrast between self and other. The work follows the following outline:

  1. Season and Society: This chapter demonstrates the extent to which the cycle of the northwestern-European cultural year depends on the annual economic cycle, itself largely a response to the natural seasons. Although cultural expression should not be regarded in a fully deterministic framework, this causal chain predicts that an annual pattern of social rites find its strongest concentration in times of economic quiet and plentiful food supplies. Such a pattern is indeed discernible, particularly in medieval Iceland where the arrival of Christianity, a product of a foreign economy, had been less disruptive of local customs. Narrative sources portray a division into a festive autumn and winter contrasting with a politically active spring and summer. While this contrast could not in reality have been so absolute, it may well be a magnification of a historical social pattern.
  2. The Psychogeography of Contradistinction: In both Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse narrative, winter landscapes fulfil literary functions in which their hibernal aspect is divorced from cyclical seasonality. In both traditions, the typical literary function of such winter landscapes is the delineation of the human and the exploration of its margins. In Old English poetry, elegiac and heroic themes are evoked through the subjection of individuals, landscapes, and man-made structures to winter precipitation, thereby to express either the exile’s inversion of the social ideal or the heroism of the protagonist braving the elements. In Old Norse mythology, the superhuman categories of giant and Sami are associated with perpetual winter environments. These environments are well-defined geographical settings with a real connection to winter weather: mountains are the habitat of giants, while Lapland is home to Sami sorcerers. Beowulf establishes a comparable connection, if less overt and less widely applicable, when it associates monsters with water landscapes, whose cold nature is often remarked on in Old English poetry. Hostile social categories and permanent winter landscapes thus coincide, the latter reinforcing the hostility of the former and setting off alien environments from the human domain.
  3. Winter in Cyclical Time: When Old Norse narrative sources treat winter as a recurring season rather than a static landscape, it is a time of intense activity in the periphery of the human domain. In the Sagas of Icelanders, this is particularly clear in hauntings, which often commence in autumn, reach a first climax around Christmas, and sometimes further increase their intensity until the spring, when they eventually cease until the next autumn. Since close correspondences have been demonstrated between Beowulf and a number of Icelandic texts among which Grettis saga, the saga containing the greatest number of seasonal hauntings, it is worth asking whether Beowulf could likewise have its basis in a winter tale. Although connections between the two traditions seem undeniable, however, the evidence suggests that the seasonally-charged hall-episode of Grettis saga received its seasonality in Iceland only after its arrival from the British Isles. Old English poetry displays a different cyclical motif, that of the bonds of winter by which land or sea is annually tied up. While this image has been thought to derive directly from Latin tradition, a discussion of its numerous occurrences suggests that they are too diverse to have all been borrowed unaltered; rather, it seems that the motif, once borrowed, developed independently in the hands of Anglo-Saxon poets. Further winter motifs include the year-prognostication and, in Iceland, winter conflict.
  4. Summer Encounters: With the advent of new genres, including the imported romance, a growing number of encounters with the world outside the human domain take place in lush green settings more suggestive of summer than of winter. This development does not signal an end to winter motifs; rather, it provided authors with a new choice between rivalling seasonal associations, particularly where encounters with the supernatural are concerned. A study of this trend in Middle English and later Old Norse literature makes clear how literary perceptions of the seasons developed from the earliest extant Germanic literature of northwestern Europe to the late medieval tradition.