How do we become spatially intimate with Beowulf? Where do we feel closest to this poem? This essay locates the essential space of Beowulf not in Beowulf’s indistinct Scandinavian homeland, nor under the bright lights of the ‘historical’ Heorot at Lejre in Denmark, but in the fens of East Anglia. Drawing on the author’s own experiences of living in or near the fens, this essay discusses how the poem’s first descriptions of Grendel conjure up a fenland that still rings true to East Anglians in the twenty-first century and how the fenland environment is essential to the poem’s ‘psychology of terror’. Turning to the perspective of indigeneity within the poem, the essay then argues that intimacy of this sort fosters, and is fostered by, a sense of Grendel and his mother as tragic protagonists rather than demonic antagonists, forced into acts of resistance by Hrothgar’s imperialist aggression. Comparing this process to the historical draining of the fens from the sixteenth century onwards, the essay considers the poem’s complex explorations of the nature of ‘home’ and the violence of ecocide.

The tongue is given unusual prominence in Einarr Skúlason's Geisli, a verse panegyric composed for the occasion of St Óláfr's translation to the new cathedral at Trondheim around 1153. This article identifies several traditions that underlie Einarr's emphasis on the tongue in his poem: skaldic poetics, which gave the tongue agency as the instigator and medium of oral composition; the Christian-Latin Unsagbarkeitstopos ('inexpressibility topos'), in which the ineffable glory of God is inexpressible by any number of human tongues; and legends describing St Óláfr healing facial injuries that are widespread in Old Norse-Icelandic prose hagiographies. Óláfr's biographers note that, on more than one occasion in his life, the king was involved in merciless mutilation of people's tongues or other body parts. The emphasis that the narratives place on his post-mortem healing miracles can be read as a posthumous attempt to expiate the living king's less than saintly actions.

Research Article| October 01 2017 Bee-Wolf and the Hand of Victory: Identifying the Heroes of Beowulf and Vǫlsunga saga Christopher Abram Christopher Abram University of Notre Dame Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Journal of English and Germanic Philology (2017) 116 (4): 387–414. https://doi.org/10.5406/jenglgermphil.116.4.0387 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Christopher Abram; Bee-Wolf and the Hand of Victory: Identifying the Heroes of Beowulf and Vǫlsunga saga. The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 1 October 2017; 116 (4): 387–414. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jenglgermphil.116.4.0387 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressThe Journal of English and Germanic Philology Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2017 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: ARTICLES You do not currently have access to this content.

The Icelander Hallfreðr Óttarsson, known as vandræðaskáld (the "troublesome poet"), converted from the religion of his ancestors to Christianity in 996, when he accepted baptism under the sponsorship of the missionary king of Norway, Óláfr Tryggvason (reigned 995–1000). Óláfr was, strictly speaking, a convert himself, before he became a renowned converter of others; he had been baptized only three years before Hallfreðr. These two figures were both participants in two types of conversion. In different ways, each was involved in what we might call the "macroconversion" of Norway, part of an ongoing process of national Christianization that was only fully accomplished during the rule of Tryggvason's distinguished successor, Saint Óláfr Haraldsson (reigned 1015/16–1030). But both men must also have experienced conversion as a transformative personal process that occasioned a radical reconfiguration of their beliefs and worldview. This article is concerned with this aspect of conversion from paganism to Christianity: rather than looking at the macrocosm of conversion-era Scandinavian society, I wish here to take a more microscopic view—to look at conversion as a phenomenon that affects one person at a time.

This volume presents a state-of-the-art collection of essays on the socio-cultural aspects of the conversion to Christianity in Viking-Age Scandinavia and the Scandinavian colonies of the North Atlantic. The nine scholars, drawn from the disciplines of history, archaeology, and literary studies, have been brought together to address the overarching topic of how conversion affected peoples’ identities - both as individuals, and as members of broader religious, political, and social groups - on either side of the ‘divide’ between paganism and Christianity. Central to this exploration is the question of how existing and changing identities shaped the progress of conversion as a process of societal, and more specifically cultural, change.

Previous articleNext article ReviewsTerry Gunnell and Annette Lassen, eds., The Nordic Apocalypse: Approaches to “Vǫluspá” and Nordic Days of Judgement. (Acta Scandinavica 2.) Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. Pp. xvii, 238; 3 black-and-white and 6 color figures, and 1 map. €75. ISBN: 978-2-503-54182-2.Christopher AbramChristopher Abram University of Notre Dame Search for more articles by this author University of Notre Dame PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 89, Number 4October 2014 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1017/S0038713414001997 Views: 135Total views on this site Copyright © The Medieval Academy of America 2014 PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Christopher Abram examines the relationship of Snorri Sturluson’s Edda to the earlier skalds he cites. Viking-Age skaldic poetry contains many references to pagan gods, but the poetry of the eleventh century, following Iceland’s conversion to Christianity, avoids them. Then, in the twelfth century, the pagan allusions reappear, notably in the poetry of Einarr Skúlason, raising the need for Snorri to explain them in the thirteenth. It is easy to understand why references to traditional religion would be taboo in the period following the official shift to Christianity, but why did they return? Were they now the object of antiquarian interest, or had they been there beneath the surface all along, waiting to re-emerge once they no longer were regarded as a threat to the new religion? Abram analyzes in detail the use of pagan references in three successive texts: Einarr’s Øxarflokkr, the anonymous Ásynjur-heiti þulur, and Snorri’s Skáldskaparmál. He finds evidence of an inter-textual relationship that shows the development of a common interest in collecting and preserving verbal artifacts from an earlier tradition. This helps to explain the reappearance of the gods in skaldic poetry and has wider implications for our understanding of the myths Snorri relates.

New Light on the Illumination of Grendel's Mere Christopher Abram Beowulf is an intertexual poem, and our understanding and appreciation of it depends to a great extent upon our engagement with texts beyond its physical boundaries in Cotton Vittelius A.xv. As Joseph Harris has asserted, an important part of the process by which we come to terms with Beowulf is the identification and interpretation of intertexts from its potentially limitless tradition—the "vast network of discourses behind the poem and ultimately constituting it."1 Conventionally, these intertexts have been labelled as either "sources" or "analogues" of the poem, although this terminology is vexed.2 Lacking direct access to the traditions that were available to the poet, a modern audience must construct for itself, on the basis of other texts presently available, a new network of discourses to take the place of the lost network of traditional narratives out of which Beowulf weaves its narrative. Identifying and accounting for the resonances we perceive between Beowulf and its intertexts, wherever we find them, therefore remains an important task for critics. In this article, I will suggest that an intertext that casts a new light on the episode of Beowulf's descent into Grendel's mere can be found in Old Norse–Icelandic skaldic poetry, and I shall demonstrate how incorporating this intertext into our reading of the episode might enrich our interpretation of the poem as a whole. Before Beowulf descends into the mere to fight Grendel's mother, Hrothgar provides the hero with information about the nature of the monsters' home: Hie dygel londwarigeað wulfhleoþu, windige næssas,frecne fengelad, ðær fyrgenstreamunder næssa genipu niþer gewiteð,flod under foldan. Nis þæt feor heononmilgemearces, þæt se mere standeð; [End Page 198] ofer þæm hongiað hrinde bearwas,wudu wyrtum fæst wæter oferhelmað.Þær mæg nihta gehwæm niðwundor seon,fyr on flode. No þæs frod leofaðgumena bearna, þæt þone grund wite. (1357b–67)3 (They occupy a secret land, wolf-inhabited slopes, windy headlands, a perilous fen-path, where a mountain stream goes down in mist underneath the crags, a torrent under the earth. It is not far from here, measured in miles, that the mere lies; above it hang frost-bound groves: the wood, fixed by its roots, overshadows the water. There each night a fearful wonder may be seen: fire in the water. There is no one alive among the children of men so wise as to know the bottom.) The niðwundor (1365b: "terrible" or "fearful wonder") that Hrothgar describes, the strikingly unnatural fyr on flode (1366a: "fire in [or on] the water"), is now usually explained as part of a motif-complex that represents the mere as being not merely otherworldly, but actually hellish. Klaeber stated that "manifestly conceptions of the Christian hell have entered into the picture as drawn by the poet," while Kemp Malone called the presentation of the mere throughout the poem a "consistent and carefully wrought picture of a hell on earth."4 Subsequent research has elaborated upon this interpretation.5 Geoffrey Russom has recently argued that Grendel and his mother live in hell itself, and that the mere is a watery portal into the Christian inferno. For Russom, who prefers to gloss the phrase as "fire in the flood," fyr on flode describes the flickers of infernal light glimmering through the waters at the mouth of hell: as Russom notes, this interpretation accounts for the fact that the fire is only visible at night. If it had been on the water, it would also be seen in daylight.6 Other scholars have seen in this half-line an allusion to the fiery river of the apocryphal Visio Pauli, the influence of which upon the description of Grendel's mere has often been assumed: this influence may have been direct or mediated in the vernacular through the sixteenth Blickling Homily.7 In the tradition [End Page 199] of the Visio Pauli, a flumen igneum ("fiery river") is a feature central to hell's topography; this motif is part of a long and established tradition, stretching back to Scripture.8 (An equivalent to...