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

In her lengthy Introduction, Sif Rikhardsdottir describes the contents and aims of the book:

This volume considers the representation of emotion in Old Norse literature as a means of exploring the modes of emotive staging and the potentially associated generic, gendered, linguistic or cultural parameters. . . . It considers the transformations of the intrinsic emotive code of the continental romance once refashioned into Norse as well as the reformulation of the generic (and signifying) functionality of romance as an indigenous genre in the fourteenth century. Moreover, it considers the ambivalence of emotive scripting evident in the borders between prose and poetic language, and in the articulation of gendered behavioural codes.

(p. 1)

Sif acknowledges that the study is not comprehensive, and that due to the enormous size of the corpus of Old Norse–Icelandic literature, she has had to limit her examination to a selection of key vernacular texts representative of a number of literary genres, that is, eddic poetry, Sagas of Icelanders, and translated and indigenous romances. Not included in the study, then, are skaldic poems (though there is a discussion of Sonatorrek), hagiographical texts, learned texts, kings' sagas, contemporary sagas, mythical-heroic sagas, rímur, psalms, and folktales. She explains her choice of genres and texts as follows: "While contemporary historiography, skaldic poetry and hagiographical material do provide ample material in terms of emotional portrayal . . . the focus of this study is on the literary staging of emotional behaviour and so the emphasis remains on those genres (or forms) whose presumed objectives lean more heavily towards a literary objective than an explicit historiographic one" (p. 4). The remainder of the Introduction is concerned with a definition of emotion in literature in general and in medieval literature in particular. In the process, Sif surveys previous studies of literary emotionality especially in Old Norse–Icelandic literature, the concept of "voice" in medieval literature, and then poses the questions that she seeks to answer in the book's five chapters:

How can one relate to emotions that are culturally contingent and hence marked by both the time and the place of their conception? What does the emotive instance in a text tell us about the reading community which created and preserved it? How can the voice of a text evoke feelings that are ultimately never real or actual, but a figment of a text, a fictive reality created out of words? How does one reconcile interiority—a presumed modern conceptualisation—with medieval emotionality?

(p. 23)

Chapter 1, "Literary Identities and Emotive Scripts: Ívens saga and Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar," focuses on the Old Norse–Icelandic translations of Chrétien de Troyes's Yvain ou le Chevalier ou lion and Thomas de Bretagne's Tristan. Sif introduces the concept of what she calls "emotive literary identities," which are what "dictate the framework of emotional values and behavioural codes that guide the reader in the interpretation of a character's emotional behaviour or in deciphering the emotive subject" (p. 25). In her analysis of the two texts, she examines how they have been adapted or adjusted to a Norwegian/Icelandic readership/audience in terms of modifications in the description of emotional behavior possibly or even likely in an attempt to bring them in line with pre-existing or current norms. Using the term emotive script to explain "a shift in emphasis from real human emotions . . . to discursive or textual representation of emotional behaviour" (p. 28), she demonstrates among other things that in comparison with the French original, there is a reduction in Ívens saga not only in words expressing emotion but also in the variety of such words, and that in general the saga pays less attention to the emotional life of the characters. The picture that emerges from the examination of Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar is quite similar, and Sif notes, for example, that "the emotive script underlying Tristan's passionate love . . . is...