Arthur of the North: Histories, Emotions, and Imaginations: Introduction

The articles in this special issue are based on papers presented at the First International Conference of the Nordic Branch of the International Arthurian Society, which took place at the University of Oslo in May 2013. The aim of the conference was to mark the establishment and thus inaugurate the newly formed branch. Its primary goals were (1) to map the state of the field of Arthurian studies in the North, and thus lay the groundwork for future activities and collaboration among the members of the network, and (2) to introduce the Nordic branch to the International Arthurian Society as a whole by inviting to the conference prominent scholars representing other linguistic and cultural communities of the society, such as Latin, French, German, English, Dutch, and Welsh. The objective of the conference was therefore to promote international collaboration and comparative research, and to foreground the nature and potential of the studies of the transmission of Arthurian literature in medieval Scandinavia.

The main goals of this special issue are closely related to the main objectives of the conference, that is, to present current innovative scholarly work on the Nordic Arthurian material and thereby emphasize the relevance of this material for Arthurian studies in general. The conference, as well as this publication, may certainly be seen as a part of a recent trend that promotes the value of cross-cultural research of Arthurian material and that seeks to highlight the significance of Nordic Arthurian literary material for gaining a better understanding of the development of indigenous literary traditions.¹

The papers presented at the conference covered a wide variety of topics, including literary transmission, cultural adaptations and social contexts, feelings and cognition, senses and the psyche, and identity and the self. The conference concluded with a roundtable discussion with invited scholars representing the various literary traditions. The roundtable discussions addressed the relevance of cross-cultural research for Arthurian studies. To paraphrase some of the scholars’ ideas: Frank Brandsma emphasized the nature of texts as agents of cultural transmission, and the dynamics and continuity of this transmission process across the artificial borders created by modern languages and cultural and historical contexts. Keith Busby focused on the role of manuscripts when studying the transmission process, and touched upon some of the problematic issues related to varying editorial practices. Cora Dietl argued that by focusing on the process of translatio, our research contributes to an increased sense of European political, cultural, and didactic history. Siân Echard emphasized the dual nature of all individual literary traditions, including Latin: that is, their centrality in certain contexts and simultaneous invisibility and peripherality with regard to others. It is therefore crucial to combine detailed knowledge of the specific with comparative and collaborative endeavors in order to reach a better understanding of how the various traditions feed into each other.

While the conference papers reflected a wide array of topics, revealing a vibrant research community in Nordic Arthurian studies, the present issue focuses on three thematic strands that seemed to stand out as overarching themes. The editors furthermore consider these themes to represent fertile, new, and innovative approaches to Nordic Arthurian literature, which moreover have significant theoretical or critical relevance beyond the borders of Nordic studies. Unfortunately, many very promising papers and topics therefore had to be excluded to maintain thematic coherence of the special issue. The thematic strands are conveyed in the title of this special issue, and of this introduction, and focus on the making and transmission of histories, emotions, and imaginations. The concept of history here conveys the yet unexplored territory of the reception history of medieval Nordic Arthurian literature, the representation of history in the extant stories, and finally the history of the manuscript variants and textual representation. Emotion and imagination are interlinked in their foci on the internal senses and cognition, while the approaches adopted here by the authors are very varied and range from linguistic analysis of emotive representation to landscape studies from a cognitive (or emotive) perspective.

In the first article, Marianne Kalinke, in her plenary address, directs...