Emotion in Old Norse Literature: Translation, Voices, Contexts by Sif Rikhardsdottir (review)

We ought to move away from our impulse to consider Old Norse literature as void of emotion, particularly when compared to other medieval literatures. This is at the core of Sif Rikhardsdottir's Emotion in Old Norse Literature: Translations, Voices, Contexts. In this book, she aims to forge news ways of reading representations of emotions in a wide array of Old Norse literature. That is, she suggests that there is in fact an emotive script present throughout the corpus, which runs counter to the long-held thought that the medieval Icelandic saga avoids emotive or subjective positioning. Rikhardsdottir mines these texts to uncover the ways in which these narratives in fact generate emotional impact or responses and to address the dearth of research done on medieval emotions in Old Norse studies.

Throughout the introduction, Rikhardsdottir goes to great lengths to orient and give context to the reader. At times, this can be quite overwhelming, though she attempts to break it down piece by piece. She takes care to note that her methodology involves a selective reading of the Old Norse corpus with attention paid particularly to secular works from Iceland, though she shifts between Iceland and Norway as needed. An example of her thoroughness comes early in the introduction as she discusses emotion itself. When it comes to the question of emotion and how to define it, Rikhardsdottir is not timid about confronting the methodological issues that arise. As she lays out her methodology for her reader, it quickly becomes evident that her approach must mix science with the humanities. She references modern neurology and psychology, and she even hints toward anthropology. Of course, Rikhardsdottir also brings in medieval medicine and its conception of the mind-body continuum. This interdisciplinary approach is key, for Rikhardsdottir notes that her goal is "not to authenticate medieval emotion, but to locate emotionality within the text produced by the medieval mind and probe how this emotionality can still resonate in a meaningful manner with the modern mind" (13). In this way, Rikhardsdottir's work negotiates between biological processes and different social contexts and how they construct emotional behavior in Old Norse literature.

In addition to her justification of interdisciplinarity in her methodology, Rikhardsdottir spends time in her introduction discussing the importance of voice in literature, which she states has been unfortunately overlooked in medieval studies. To address voice and its connection to medieval textuality, Rikhardsdottir relies upon Paul Zumthor's theories of orality, which places an emphasis on the human voice in relation to text. This in turn eschews the boundaries between orality and textuality in favor of suggesting a relationship between these elements, thereby lending itself to vocality. Rikhardsdottir writes that "it is precisely this notion of medieval 'vocality' that serves as the premise of the proposed theorizing of voice and its relation to the emotive" (21). Rikhardsdottir addresses voice and vocality, since these concepts are key to the delivery of medieval texts, which she emphasizes were often read aloud to an audience. This performative aspect and its emotive possibilities are in turn of interest to Rikhardsdottir, because the "the interplay between the emotionality of a text and the voicing of this emotionality is at the forefront" of her book (22). Thus, Rikhardsdottir approaches emotion in Old Norse vernacular literature—and its various genres—while considering voice as a means of foregrounding the aesthetic range of emotive expression.

Rikhardsdottir divides the rest of the book into various chapters that deal with different genres and themes. In the first chapter, entitled "Literary Identities and Emotive Scripts," she takes care to introduce and lay a foundation for the theorizing of "literary identities" and "emotive scripts" (25,27). Her main objects of study are the Norse translations of two texts: Chrétien de Troyes's Yvain ou le Chevalier ou lion as well as Thomas de Bretagne's Tristran. These texts are chosen to demonstrate how the Old Norse reconceptualizes emotive coding found in Old French courtly ideology. She thoroughly compares...