Scandinavian Studies Commons^™

Twenty-First-Century African And Asian Migration To Europe And The Rise Of The Ethno-Topographic Narrative, Nelson González Ortega, Olga Michael

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The first two decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed a rise in the publication of narratives concerning contemporary African and Asian migration to Europe, written individually or collectively, by Asian, African and/or European authors. While scholarly attention has increasingly turned to these texts, our purpose is to further investigate them from a pan-European perspective and to propose a model for their analysis as a distinct literary genre. We therefore introduce the "ethno-topographic narrative" to define, classify and systematically analyze twenty-first-century migration narratives published in Europe in relation to theory, method, corpus, generic type, individual or collective authorship, border ...

Across The West And Toward The North: Norwegian And American Landscape Photography, Shannon Egan, Marthe Tolnes Fjellestad

Schmucker Art Catalogs

Across the West and Toward the North: Norwegian and American Landscape Photography examines images from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a historical moment when once remote wildernesses were first surveyed, catalogued, photographed, and developed on both sides of the Atlantic. The exhibition demonstrates how photographers in the two countries provided new ways of seeing the effects of mapping and exploration: infrastructure changes, the exploitation of natural resources, and the influx of tourism. As tourists and immigrants entered “new” lands—seemingly unsettled areas that had long been inhabited and utilized by Indigenous people in both countries—they “discovered” beautifully ...

Handbook For The Deceased: Re-Evaluating Literature And Folklore In Icelandic Archaeology, Brenda Nicole Prehal

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The rich medieval Icelandic literary record, comprised of mythology, sagas, poetry, law codes and post-medieval folklore, has provided invaluable source material for previous generations of scholars attempting to reconstruct a pagan Scandinavian Viking Age worldview. In modern Icelandic archaeology, however, the Icelandic literary record, apart from official documents such as censuses, has not been considered a viable source for interpretation since the early 20th century. Although the Icelandic corpus is problematic in several ways, it is a source that should be used in Icelandic archaeological interpretation, if used properly with source criticism.

This dissertation aims to advance Icelandic archaeological theory ...

Landscape Theology: Exploring The Outfields Of The Telemarkian Dream Song, Thomas Arentzen

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

The article explores the Norwegian ‘national ballad’ Draumkvæde (the Dream Song) in Maren Ramskeid’s version. This work has traditionally been interpreted as a folklore adaptation of medieval visionary literature such as the Vision of Tundale, related to Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. The ballad, however, lacks demons and devils and infernal torture – it is even almost completely devoid of human beings. Instead it tells of a corporeal encounter with an imagined natural landscape. This dreamscape of the song is intimately intertwined with the local terrain of the singer. Maren Ramskeid engaged her own landscape in Telemark, the article argues ...

A Home For Whom? Contested Identities And The Politics Of The Welfare State In Sweden, Lukas Fognell Webster

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

A Literary Analysis Of Magic: A Dissection Of Medieval Icelandic Literature, Jordan T. Williams

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The goal of this project is to understand the realities of how magic was perceived during a Christianized Iceland, specifically during the medieval era when sagas and poems were recorded in Iceland. I accomplish this through literary analysis in conjunction with previous research on runic inscriptions and Old Norse mythology. I reveal that there is much more to be uncovered about the realities of paganism in medieval Iceland, and that the authors of Icelandic sagas had a large misunderstanding of pre-Christian paganism and magic. This argument is manifested through close readings of major Icelandic works, such as Hávamál, Volsunga saga ...

No Nazis In Valhalla: Understanding The Use (And Misuse) Of Nordic Cultural Markers In Third Reich Era Germany, Lena Nighswander

International ResearchScape Journal

While medieval concepts are frequently used as a means for the general public to understand emerging global political institutions around the world, they also have immense capability to be purposely misused by political groups due to the generally vague and misguided understanding of these concepts by the masses. At one core of these movements is the legacy of Vikings and the misrepresentation of their history by far-right political groups, especially in mid-20^th century Europe, in order to push a fictitious agenda of a prosperous, all-white race of seafaring warriors. Through the appropriation of medieval Old Norse imagery and mythology ...

Tinderbox: Danish-Russian Relations, 1989-2019, Maddy Ghose

Master's Theses

This thesis documents and analyzes the major trends of the military, political, economic, and cultural relationships between Denmark and Russia from 1989 to 2019. I document the relationship from the Danish perspective, using primary sources, with the aim to conduct analysis of Danish politicians’ speeches and activities during this period. The outcome is a comprehensive image of the Danish-Russian bilateral relationship at the present time. This relationship has fluctuated widely during the time period under study. Shared economic development interests in the 1990s contributed to a positive relationship; controversy surrounding the war in Chechnya and an assertive Danish prime minister ...

The Aesthetics Of Storytelling And Literary Criticism As Mythological Ritual: The Myth Of The Human Tragic Hero, Intertextual Comparisons Between The Heroes And Monsters Of Beowulf And The Anglo-Saxon Exodus, Daniel Stoll

Undergraduate Honors Theses

For thousands of years, people have been hearing, reading, and interpreting stories and myths in light of their own experience. To read a work by a different author living in a different era and setting, people tend to imagine works of literature to be something they are not. To avoid this fateful tendency, I hope to elucidate what it means to read a work of literature and interpret it: love it to the point of wanting to foremost discuss its excellence of being a piece of art. Rather than this being a defense, I would rather call it a musing ...

Terra Nullius And The Svalbard Question: Exploring An Anomaly In International Law, Luke H. Campopiano

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This honors thesis explores the usage of terra nullius in the context of the negotiations concerning sovereignty over the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard. Previous scholarship has emphasized the Svalbard Commission’s solution of Norwegian sovereignty, while largely ignoring the many intriguing suggestions at the time for divided or limited sovereignty in the archipelago. Intimately linked to these legal roads-not-taken is terra nullius, a Latin legal term that means “no man’s land.” This thesis will focus on the differing uses of terra nullius by legal scholars, diplomats, explorers, scientists, and corporate lobbyists with the aim of providing a comprehensive understanding ...

Passing Down The Rolling Pin: Lefse, Memory, And A Norwegian-American Identity, Rebecca Garbe

Scandinavian Studies Student Award

This paper explores the intersections between memory and food-making and how they inform a Norwegian-American cultural identity. Based on fieldwork done in June and July of 2019 in Fosston, Minnesota, I use lefse, a Norwegian potato-based flatbread, as a focal point, for analysis. I argue that lefse-making in Fosston acts as a medium through which residents engage with a collective memory of an immigrant heritage. This traditional food-making, I assert, relies on knowledge passed down through and across family lines allowing food-makers and eaters to experience an embodied connection to their cultural past. Investigating my own Norwegian heritage, I draw ...

Marching Straight In Sweden: The Parade Of A Queer Swedish Utopia Or False Hope?, Ainslie Lounsbury

Scandinavian Studies Student Award

Sweden is considered to be one of the most open, welcoming countries in the world. Often, the country is viewed as a shining example of inclusion, especially in regards to their support of the LGBTQ+ community. When analyzing various media from the country, however, many questions arise. Are the groups creating these advertisements doing so for the benefit of the LGBTQ+ community? Or are they for boosting sales, tourism, and recruitment? What if these advertisements actually harm the LGBTQ+ community through stereotyping? Through the analysis of Swedish military and corporate images supporting the LGBTQ+ community, Lounsbury explores possible ideas about ...

The Dead Actually Tell Many Tales: How Archaeologists Have Used Scientific Analysis To Study Scandinavian Burials, Claire F. Benstead

Student Publications

Archaeologists often employ techniques from scientific fields to better analyze historical and prehistorical sites. Here we explore how developments in scientific analysis have changed and improved our understanding of past societies. With a specific focus on the study of Scandinavian burials, we review the history of Scandinavian archaeology and how the field is constantly changing as a result of new and more nuanced analysis. From the Bronze Age to the Viking Age, we analyze how new information challenges previous assumptions about Scandinavian societies.

Paranormal Encounters In Iceland 1150-1400, Ármann Jakobsson, Miriam Mayburd

Northern Medieval World

This anthology of international scholarship offers new critical approaches to the study of the many manifestations of the paranormal in the Middle Ages. The guiding principle of the collection is to depart from symbolic or reductionist readings of the subject matter in favor of focusing on the paranormal as human experience and, essentially, on how these experiences are defined by the sources. The authors work with a variety of medieval Icelandic textual sources, including family sagas, legendary sagas, romances, poetry, hagiography and miracles, exploring the diversity of paranormal activity in the medieval North. This volume questions all previous definitions of ...

The Musical Poetics Of Witness: Two Anthropocene Journeys, Heidi Hart

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Kerstin Ekman’s The Forest of Hours (first published in Swedish in 1988) and Jenny Erpenbeck’s Visitation(published in German as Heimsuchung in 2008) span two decades and two countries, but both novels reach across far larger epochs, in their respective journeys from Europe’s glacial prehistory through the Dark Ages and the Thirty Years War, and through the twentieth century’s collective trauma. Though disagreement persists on when the Anthropocene began to leave its mark in stone, contemporary fiction often registers its traces through a marginally human witness who somehow survives generation after generation, recording in word or ...

The Echo Of Odin: Norse Mythology And Human Consciousness By Edward W.L. Smith, Emily E. E. Auger

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

This review briefly describes and assesses the chapter by chapter content of the book and the author's argument regarding the content of Norse mythology as representing a map of human consciousness.

Play It Again, Ole!, Amy M. Shaw

Amy M. Shaw

Children Of A One-Eyed God: Impairment In The Myth And Memory Of Medieval Scandinavia, Michael David Lawson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Using the lives of impaired individuals catalogued in the Íslendingasögur as a narrative framework, this study examines medieval Scandinavian social views regarding impairment from the ninth to the thirteenth century. Beginning with the myths and legends of the eddic poetry and prose of Iceland, it investigates impairment in Norse pre-Christian belief; demonstrating how myth and memory informed medieval conceptualizations of the body. This thesis counters scholarly assumptions that the impaired were universally marginalized across medieval Europe. It argues that bodily difference, in the Norse world, was only viewed as a limitation when it prevented an individual from fulfilling roles that ...

Gregerson, Uggla, And Wyllers' "Reformation Theology For A Post-Secular Age: Logstrup, Prenta, Wingren, And The Future Of Scandinavian Creation Theology" (Book Review), Samuel S. Richardson

The Christian Librarian

No abstract provided.

Ballads Of The North, Medieval To Modern: Essays Inspired By Larry Syndergaard, Sandra Ballif Straubhaar, Richard Firth Green

Festschriften, Occasional Papers, and Lectures

This volume is intended as a belated but heartfelt thank-you and Gedenkschrift to the late Larry Syndergaard (1936-2015), long-time professor of English at Western Michigan University and Fellow of the Kommission für Volksdichtung (International Ballad Commission). Larry’s contributions down the decades to ballad studies--particularly Scandinavian and Anglophone--included dozens of papers and articles, as well as his supremely useful book, English Translations of the Scandinavian Medieval Ballads. As David Atkinson and Thomas A. McKean of the Kommission have written (May 2015): “Larry... was a sound scholar with a penetrating mind which he used to support, encourage and befriend others, rather ...