Big news... and Zombies

Drum roll, please (or vuvuzela if you are so inclined, but I would prefer drums. Or bagpipes)…

The big news I have is that a big medieval and renaissance studies symposium is being held later this year – and my study leader has asked if I would like to propose a paper to read there. (I did a happy dance and then, very professionally said ‘yes’.)

To top it off, the theme for this year is “Mortality and Imagination: The Life of the Dead in the Middle Ages and Renaissance”. Of course I will have to do something with all the dead, undead and ghosts you find in the Icelandic sagas! I’m leaning towards the Eyrbyggja saga (Saga of the Ere-dwellers), in which many ghosts, corpses and undead feature. The zombie apocalypse, saga style. And, like another professor once said: “Gore can also be fun”[1].

For instance, take this quote from the saga (Chapter 53):

But when two weeks of winter were worn, the shepherd came home on a night, and went straight to his bed and lay down, and in the morning when men carne to him he was dead. So he was buried at the church there.

A little after that great hauntings befell; and on a night as Thorir Wooden-leg went out for his needs,

and turned off aside from the door, when he would go in again, he saw how the shepherd was come

before the door. Then would he go in again, but the shepherd would nowise have it so; and Thorir was

fain to get away, but the shepherd went at him, and got hold of him, and cast him homeward up against the door. At this he was affrighted exceedingly; yet he got him to his bed, and he was by then grown coal-blue all over.

Now from this he fell sick and died, and was buried there at the church; but ever after were the twain,

the shepherd and Thorir Wooden-leg, seen in company, and therefrom were folk full of dread, as was

like to be.[2]

This is also big news for me because, if my paper gets chosen, it will be the first one which I give at such an academic get-together. And sometimes you just need someone to believe in you enough to ask something like this to make you believe that you can actually do it. 

So, for the next year, there will probably be a lot more mythology, sagas and folklore posts on the blog. I hope you will enjoy it as much as I do!

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[1] We were busy with Frankenstein as part of Literary Theory and one student asked why we were doing such a “gory book”. In her dry way the professor simply smiled and said “because gore can also be fun”. And then people wonder why I love my studies…

[2] Translation by William Morris. This and other Icelandic Sagas can be read and downloaded at the Icelandic Saga Database: http://sagadb.org/