Conceptualizing the Enemy in Early Northwest Europe: Metaphors of Conflict and Alterity in Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, and Early Irish Poetry by Karin E. Olsen (review)

In this volume, Karin E. Olsen offers a welcome contribution to scholarship on conceptual metaphor within medieval literature. She extends the accomplishments of Margaret Clunies Ross’s “The Cognitive Approach to Scaldic Poetics, from Snorri to Vigfússon and Beyond” (1989), Britt Mize’s “The Representation of the Mind as Enclosure in Old English Poetry” (2006), Peter Orton’s “Spouting Poetry: Cognitive Metaphor and Conceptual Blending in the Old Norse Myth of The Poetic Mead” (2007), and Antonina Harbus’s Cognitive Approaches to Old English Poetry (2012), and she joins Harbus in offering one of the few book-length treatments on conceptual metaphor in the poetry of the medieval north. This particular offering explores Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, and Early Irish metaphorical poetic expressions to determine how these texts stigmatized “the other.” To this end, Olsen limits the scope of her inquiry to terms that describe the “enemy” and asks two questions that guide her inquiry: 1) “[H]ow does such a comparative study enrich our understanding of the cultures in which they were produced?” and 2) “[W]hat kind of cultural information can such a comparative study provide?” (p. 3).

The scope of Olsen’s book is impressive. Such a wide-ranging study presents some challenges, which Olsen acknowledges early on. For instance, she remarks that one must be careful to analyze comparable material, both culturally and historically. In the case of the Old English and Old Irish material, Olsen limits admissible content to heroic texts scholars believe were composed prior to the twelfth century, whereas the Old Norse material included is sometimes dated after this marker. Olsen is, however, careful to keep the reader apprised of the dating of her sources throughout her analysis, and she reassures the reader that such inclusions will still retain diction similar to the earlier texts. While Olsen recognizes that the cultures from which the poetic corpora issue are far from homogenous, her analysis is remarkably cohesive given the vast array of primary materials under investigation.

In a brief but well-researched introduction, Olsen sketches the terrain of conceptual metaphor with facility. Here the reader acquires the framework through which to view the numerous examples of poetic depictions of conflict that follow. Olsen turns to the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By (1980) as well as Zoltán Kövecses’s Metaphor in Culture (2005) to lay the groundwork. As Olsen summarizes, conceptual metaphors “enable us to conceive of abstract concepts in terms of concrete experiences: a target domain is understood in terms of a source domain on the basis of correspondences . . . between the two domains” (p. 6). Olsen focuses on the blended metaphor, which “allows for additional [metaphor] input spaces and . . . newly created blended space(s)” (p. 16). These metaphor types occur when the initial input spaces, the source and target domains, precipitate a third input space that arises from blending the first two. For instance, Olsen presents the description of Cú Roí’s foes in Amrae Chon Roí in which the term síabrai serves as a first input space and for which the target domain, the enemies being described, serves as the second input. The result is a metaphorical blend in which Cú Roí’s enemies are understood as being both human and spectral (p. 17). Taking cues from Marina Münkler and Werner Röcke, Olsen articulates three models of alterity that serve as organizational categories for the subsequent chapters: interpersonal, intracultural, and intercultural. Each of these categories can then be evaluated for gradations of intensity, either minor, moderate, or radical.

The remaining chapters are organized thematically according to the kinds of alterity Olsen considers...