Variable subject matter; see departmental announcement for description. Sample topics: Scandinavian romanticism; the Modern Breakthrough; literature by and about women; the political tradition. Readings and discussion in English.

“Father of the Slain, you wished me to declare living beings’ ancient stories, those I remember from furthest back.” (Seeress’ Prophecy, stanza 1) In Old Norse poem The Seeress’ Prophecy, the female speaker recalls for the god Odin nine worlds, nine giantesses, a cosmic tree, and the creation of the world out of the void. Memory’s power to open such immense vistas fascinates, while its biological basis in the capacities of individual brains makes it a topic of universal interest, as evidenced in the long history of reflections on this mental faculty. Personal memory is only part of the story, though. How did medieval societies and cultures remember together? What functions did these shared memories have? What did they forget? In this course, we will explore the media of memory in premodern Scandinavia. Christianity and its book culture came to Scandinavia comparatively late, so memories of pre-Christian myth and religion, like those of the seeress, were relatively fresh and available for re-mediation in the new technology of writing. People still lived among older memory media—runestones, burial mounds, ritual landscapes, ancient weapons—and cultivated practices of poetry, performance and story-telling with deep roots in the pre-literate past. They also adopted new media and practices for creating and preserving memory, such as manuscript books, Christian sacred architecture, prayer and pilgrimage, giving rise to novel syntheses specific to the medieval north. We will consider the interplay between pre-Christian memory metaphors and medieval theories and techniques of memory. Using case studies (of e.g. ritual landscapes, church buildings, place-names, rune carvings, decorative arts, poetic performances, dances, genealogies, manuscript books, maps and diagrams) we will explore how media of memory and forgetting were used in the premodern North to establish cultural norms and form group identities. Memories of the Scandinavian Middle Ages have come to be politically instrumentalized in our own time, and we will also consider founder figures such as the putative Viking discoverer of North America, Leif Erikson, awarded a national day (October 9) by US President Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s, and the recent instrumentalization of a particular memory of Viking culture by white nationalists. This upper-division elective has no prerequisites and requires no prior knowledge of Old Norse. Readings will be made available on bcourses and all texts will be read in English translation. The class will consist of lecture and discussion, with a mix of synchronous and asynchronous elements

Synchronous and asynchronous lecture and discussion/participation. Time conflicts not allowed.

Prerequisites: None

Repeat Rules

Requirements class fulfills