Karin Kukkonen
Literature can make you feel, and it gets you thinking too. But how do you move from signs on a page to thoughts and feelings? And why does fiction sometimes feel more real than the world around us? My name is Karin Kukkonen, and together with my colleagues from the Literature, Cognition and Emotions Project, LCE for short, we will discuss these and other questions in the coming weeks. Today's guest is Stefka Eriksen, Research Professor at NIKU, the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research. Welcome, Stefka. Thank you for joining us.
Stefka Eriksen
Thank you for having me.
Karin Kukkonen
Stefka, you work with medieval Scandinavian literature – or Norse literature, as I've been told it's called – and I think this is something that most of our listeners will not have encountered before. So what do you think is the most fascinating thing – for you – about this body of literature?
Stefka Eriksen
Right. So as a start, I can say a few words about what kind of literature that is, and when it is from. So, as you said, we call it Old Norse literature. So it's literature that was written in Norway and Iceland in the Middle Ages, which is after year 1000. So literacy – or text culture, book culture – came to Norway with the church. So, after Norway became Christian, the church brought books with it. And gradually, after the first centuries after the Christianization, more and more texts started to be written down. Everything from the religious texts, obviously the Mass – every single church had to have their own Mass – then histories, historiographies, and also lots of translations and local genres. In Old Norse, we have both prose and poetry. We have the well-known Eddic poems and Skaldic poetry. We have recordings of pre-Christian myths and also practices, pre-Christian practices. So, if I can get back to your question, about what is the most fascinating thing, it's something... There's lots of things. So first is the content: So, this is a corpus of literature that is very varied. It includes many kinds of topics, many kinds of genres. The different texts have very different styles. I said, some of them are very local and very unique for the Nordic context. Well, we have also many examples of pan-European texts that were translated, that exists... that were possibly originally in Greek or Latin, and they exist in any vernacular from Europe, including Old Norse. So, from that perspective, what's also fascinating about Old Norse literature, that is, it's not peripheral, even though Norway and Iceland are kind of furthest up north at the edge of civilization – we say even today, geographically. The culture, even in the Middle Ages, was not peripheral. It was very closely connected with European learned and courtly culture.
Karin Kukkonen
So books played a huge role in making that connection, I assume.
Stefka Eriksen
That's very true. Yeah. So – and also another thing that's very interesting is that even the local genres as, for example, the sagas of Icelanders, which are stories that tell about the settlement of Iceland, which happened at the end of the 800s... So, even those stories that are very local – they tell local history – they're amazing stories about, you know, interesting characters, passion and revenge, and deaths and pain and... it's emotions that anybody can relate to. So in a way, that's why we also say they're part of world literature, because even though they're super specific about a little period of time up in the north, they're very relatable.
Karin Kukkonen
Yeah, I mean, I guess you could say about the War of Troy, that it's very specific in terms of location and setting, and yet it's something that... a text that we still draw on...
Stefka Eriksen
Exactly.
Karin Kukkonen
... That that we can still relate to. How do we get access to these texts that... The sagas were written in manuscripts, I assume?
Stefka Eriksen
Yeah.
Karin Kukkonen
And... since it is exactly not printing – it's not a reproduction – there were multiple different versions available. So in that sense, of course, the sagas are quite different from our novels today, which – if you go to the bookshop, you expect that your novel is the same as your neighbor’s. What does this do for studying these texts? The fact that, yeah, the culture of production is so very different?
Stefka Eriksen
Yes. So, for me personally, that's not a reason why I find this culture fascinating. Because, as you say, so – this is manuscript culture. So, before print, every single copy of every single story we have, it was handwritten. So somebody sat and copied their text because somebody commissioned it, or because they thought it was interesting.
Karin Kukkonen
You must have thought it was really interesting, if you spent that amount of time copying it.
Stefka Eriksen
Exactly. Exactly. That's a very good point. It was a very resourceful... It demanded lots of resources to write. So, that's something – maybe we can come back to what it tells us that we have those manuscripts from that time. But a main point with manuscript culture is – the default setting in a way, when you copy, is to change the text so that it fits your own cultural horizon. So, the default was to change, and as you said, every copy varied. That's why you have... The main characteristic of manuscript culture is variance, and there are lots of elements in the text that can vary – everything from linguistics and, like, dialect, to structure. Like, a story could have... The sequence of events can be different. Some sagas can include more poetry, or less poetry. The levels of detail can vary, like, some versions can tell us the basic story, while other versions can elaborate on certain parts. Sometimes they even have different content. You would have a different ending of a saga.
Karin Kukkonen
Wow.
Stefka Eriksen
But that depends on what genre is it. And also, another thing that varies is the very materiality of the books. Because, you can have one of the same texts written in a big, illustrated folio manuscript, which is kind of bigger than A4, our formats. And you can have the same text in a tiny little pocket format kind of manuscript. And the materiality would also influence how the text was experienced. So there's lots of things that could vary. And this culture, this manuscript culture, continued in Iceland all the way up to the 1800s. They would still continue copying by hand. And if I'm to say something about the history of the manuscripts, just very shortly, they started to be collected in the 15-1600s, and many of the Old Norse manuscripts from Norway and Iceland then ended up in Copenhagen and Stockholm and Uppsala, the big university libraries, because Norway didn't have their own university.
Karin Kukkonen
So, it was the people who founded the universities that commissioned someone to go to Iceland and fetch those manuscripts.
Stefka Eriksen
Exactly. Exactly. And they started being interested in the history of Iceland and started collecting them. And basically, we have stories about how those people worked and traveled around Iceland, for example, and found old books and fetched them and shipped them to the center of the state then – to Copenhagen. And yeah, it's a very interesting story in itself, how the manuscripts were collected, and... some of the manuscripts are also returned back to Iceland. Some are returned back to Norway. But there are many still in Denmark. So how do we study these texts? Philologists have worked with those manuscripts from very many different perspectives. And the two main groups of scholars, if I can say so, are the traditional philologists – they are interested in who wrote the text the first time, who is the author? What is the best version? What is the oldest version? Those traditional questions that are very fascinating – they're important. But then, since the eighties, about the eighties, we have the so-called new philology, or material archaeology. And we – I say we, because I have grown up academically in this tradition – we're more interested in... Every single version of the story is interesting in itself. So it doesn't have to be the oldest, it doesn't have to be the longest. Every single representation is just as interesting. And the fact that it was copied, like we talked about, the fact that somebody took the time and the resources to copy it, says something about the people who did it. So they're different questions, basically.
Karin Kukkonen
And of course, that new philological approach, as you describe it, that basically explodes the number of possible questions that you can have for a manuscript.
Stefka Eriksen
Exactly.
Karin Kukkonen
So you combine this new material philology with cognitive approaches?
Stefka Eriksen
That's right.
Karin Kukkonen
How do cognitive approaches help you to focus – from a potentially endless number of questions for these manuscripts?
Stefka Eriksen
Yeah. Yeah, I'm very inspired by the cognitive perspective. And in my work, for me, what the cognitive perspective gives me is that... From contemporary cognitive studies we know how our brains, how our minds work. We know all the terminology – we are embedded and embodied and extended. We are social human beings. We are endlessly creative. We know how this happens based on modern...
Karin Kukkonen
Or we think we have an idea.
Stefka Eriksen
We – yeah – we're working with finding out, but we can study it empirically, so we can learn a lot more – we can know a lot more about how the brain works and functions. So, I use what we know from cognitive studies as a premise, in a way, when I study Old Norse culture. So, because we know that our brains, our cognitive capacity, is basically the same today as in the Middle Ages. So, we say that – I basically study how we have used our capacities in different ways. Yeah. So when we know what we know from cognitive studies, I combine it with our Old Norse, very specific, very unique culture, because we know also that – from cognitive studies – that culture expressions are local, because we are always influenced by our surroundings, our cultural surroundings. So, culture expressions are both there because of the culture they're created in, but also, the tools, the cognitive tools we work with, they're the same. So, combining these two perspectives gives even more questions about what we can see in those texts, and it basically allows us to look at them from a different perspective.
Karin Kukkonen
Can you give an example?
Stefka Eriksen
Yeah, I can give many examples. But maybe, for example, one example is from one of the Icelandic family sagas, from Njál's Saga. There we have a, you can say, very classic story. We have Njál's sons who killed their foster brother. So that's a very, one of those tragic, dramatic, tragic stories. So how can you... of course, a main question in all Norse studies has been, why do they do this? And it's like in Greek tragedy, how can something like this happen? And from a cultural point of view, you can explain it with, well, the foster brother, he was the chieftain. So from a pre-Christian point of view, he was the responsible one. So, he had to be killed because something else had happened – he has to be punished. He's the responsible one – he gets killed. From Christian perspective, this foster brother is... the killing can symbolize the sacrifice of Jesus, so it can be explained in this way. But from cognitive perspective, then we are allowed to get in touch with something very humanly common about strong feelings, like jealousy, and like a feeling of being left out from the family, a feeling of rejection. So then, the cognitive perspective gives us a completely different starting point for discussing why something happens in the saga. Another example, if I may give one more, is again from the Icelandic family sagas, because they are so unique in their style. But I want to read a little excerpt from Egil's Saga. So, Egil's Saga is one of the best known of the saga, and Egil is this character who has very conflicting characteristics. He is an amazing poet, very creative, but he's also a very violent warrior. So at some point in the story, he's at the court of the English king, and his brother gets killed. So, just by saying something like this, we know that somebody people would be sad. But then the question is, how does the saga – this genre of saga – address or describe something like this? So then, the saga doesn't tell us directly 'he was sad' or 'he was mourning', it says – and now I'll read – "Egil had very distinctive features, with a wide forehead, bushy brows and a nose that was not long but extremely broad. His upper jaw was broad and long, and his chin and jawbones were exceptionally wide. With his thick neck and stout shoulders, he stood out from other men. When he was angry, his face grew harsh and fierce. He was well built and taller than other men, with thick wolf-grey hair, although he had gone bald at an early age. When he was sitting in this particular scene, he wrinkled one eyebrow right down on to his cheek and raised the other up to the roots of his hair. Egil had dark eyes and was swarthy. He refused to drink even when served, but just raised and lowered his eyebrows in turn." [editors' note: from Egil's Saga, trans. Bernard Scudder, ed. Svanhildur Óskarsdóttir, Penguin Books 2004, 100]. So this is, I think, a very typical example of embodied cognition, because the saga doesn't tell us anything about his inner thoughts or feelings. The saga describes how he looks in his... We see this big man who sits there with his eyebrows, and this is the only tiny little way of expressing his emotion.
Karin Kukkonen
So it allows you to look at this text, which I mean, on the face of it, if you compare it with a sort of typical 19th century realist novel, where you could get half a page of 'in the turmoil', there are just these two eyebrows going up and down. And yet, I guess, one does get a sense of just how excruciating an experience it must be.
Stefka Eriksen
Yeah, and it's an extremely powerful way to describe the feelings of a person, because even though we, as readers, get very few cues about what this person is going through, our imagination goes wild. And we can imagine what he must be going through. So again, from a cognitive perspective, the triggers we get in a text are very powerful, and they really directly invite us to mentalize, to think about what to lose a brother is, and to imagine how to relate to our own lives.
Karin Kukkonen
And I mean, that is a way, I think, in which we relate to literature today in quite general terms, isn't it? That it's a way of understanding how other people experience things. Is that the way in which the Middle Ages would have thought about these sagas as well?
Stefka Eriksen
That's a very good question, because in scholarship, this is not how Old Norse literature has been discussed. Most oftenly, scholars have discussed whether the literature was aimed to educate or to entertain. You have this dichotomy between these two, which in recent scholarship, we know that, yes, it did both – at least it both was there to entertain and also to give a story, to give a history. So we have this dichotomy, or a scale between history and fiction. But recently, and in my own work, I really try to study literature – exactly like you say – the way we study literature today. This was something that people wrote – found it relevant and interesting enough to write again and again, and to read again and again – and it must have been relevant. It must have allowed them to both be entertained and learn something, but also to relate to their own experience. It must have allowed for mind wandering and self-identifying yourself, and becoming more aware of what group you belong to, what history you had, who were the others, all those things. So I am really – in my work, I'm trying to work with those concepts of mentalizing and theory of mind and see, how are they realized in Old Norse literature.
Karin Kukkonen
And how, I mean, from what you describe, it seems to me that it's sort of literature on the ground, isn't it? What it might have been like to experience, listening to a saga or reading it, which makes it, I guess, a lot more relatable. In recent years, at least the things that I've come across, there is another way in which the Middle Ages have been, sort of, made more relatable to our present day perspective. And that seems to be this idea, that in the Vikings or the Norsemen – or you will tell me what is the correct terminology here – they were actually part of a massively networked, international culture. So they were not just sitting up somewhere in Norway or in Iceland, but they were trading and traveling down the Volga, and all the way to Constantinople and Jerusalem. You spoke a little bit about the manuscripts that travel across Europe, but is that fact – or what seems to be this new view of the Middle Ages, that everyone was connected with everyone else – is that something you see in the texts themselves?
Stefka Eriksen
Yeah, the short answer is yes, definitely. The longer answer is – just to put things straight: So, we use the term 'The Vikings' for the Viking period, which is, in a way, from 800 to year 1000. So it's before the Middle Ages. But many of the texts that were written in the Middle Ages – so as I said, 1100s, 1200s – they are about the Vikings. So they tell us all those stories, where they traveled, and what they did –and they traveled, they traded, they raided. We know all the horrible images of how violent the Vikings were. And they got power. They travelled far. But from this period, from the Viking period, we don't have any written sources from the north. So there, we collaborate with our colleagues, the archaeologists, because they find objects that can tell us about this far reaching international trade and their travels.
Karin Kukkonen
What changes in the year 1000 is not a millennium bug, but it's the fact that Christianity gets introduced, isn't it?
Stefka Eriksen
That's correct. That's correct. So Christianity becomes the formal religion in Norway around here, 1000. And we know about Olav Haraldsson, who becomes the national saint, Saint Olav, who dies in 1030 – in 1030 at Stiklestad – and he becomes the national saint in 1031. And after that...
Karin Kukkonen
That's fast work.
Stefka Eriksen
Yeah. And then after that, Christianity is the formal religion in Norway. And yes, so with the church and with the Christianization, we have introduction of book culture. And then, as I mentioned briefly in the beginning, the texts we have – there are lots of translations. So, this is another way of witnessing, basically, how international medieval culture was. Not only did it tell us about how far reaching the Vikings traveled and traded, but also the texts themselves come from very many different places. So we have translations of Latin texts, of old French texts, of German texts. So, there are lots of medieval bestsellers, if I can use this modern term, that were translated to Old Norse, that were also read in Norway.
Karin Kukkonen
So medieval Norwegians would read about King Arthur, or something like that.
Stefka Eriksen
That's a very good example. We have translations of the Chrétien de Troyes' romances about King Arthur, but we have also translations of Geoffrey of Monmouth Historia, even Britannia, which is the history of the British Kings. And we have lots of other historiographies that were translated, the history of the Roman people, the history of the Jew people, world history – and all those were translated to Old Norse. But yeah, and other genres are the secular literature, like Chrétien de Troyes. We have translations of Marie de France, who was a nun working in England in the 1100s, and she wrote short stories based on oral Celtic tradition, like the stories about Arthur also are. And those were also translated to Old Norse. So that's an interesting example of female authorship, already then.
Karin Kukkonen
Were there any female Old Norse authors that we know of?
Stefka Eriksen
Not that we know of so early – later on, you have Birgitta in Sweden, but that's later on. So in that period that... this is also considered East-Norse, and she wrote in Latin... It's a little bit different context, than the Westerners that I'm talking about.
Karin Kukkonen
But Marie de France would be available.
Stefka Eriksen
Marie de France would be translated to Old Norse, and well – today we know it was Marie de France. Then they didn't really bother to write her name. So, it's a very interesting detail about translations, that very often actually the names of the original authors are omitted. So the text really becomes kind of appropriated to the Norse culture. And the names we have are the names of the commissioner of the translation, who was King Håkon Håkonsson in the mid-1200s. He had a big translation program that translated European texts to Old Norse. And we have the name of a translator, Brother Robert, who translated both Tristram Saga...
Karin Kukkonen
But they were aware that this is not an originally Norwegian text, or was that completely erased?
Stefka Eriksen
You know, that's a very interesting debate. And the fact is, that the name of the original author was not there. So, in the context of translation, they must have known, because they sat with two language versions. And in the beginning of this translation program, so in the 1200s, we have manuscripts that include just translations. Later on, with younger copies, the translations would be mixed up with local romances – and without any mentioning, that this is a translation or the name of original author. You wonder, what would an Icelander reading Tristram saga in the 16th century... Would they know that this is in translation or not? It's not... We don't know.
Karin Kukkonen
We'll have to guess. But what we apparently do know something about – you mentioned the histories, that they also translated... Well, first of all, they wrote their own histories – the book culture, as you said – and also they translated these other historians, like Geoffrey of Monmouth and others. And, of course, they had their own momentous historical events, that were recorded. So, one of the things that you've written about is the so-called Little Ice Age...
Stefka Eriksen
Right. Right.
Karin Kukkonen
Yeah. Can you tell us something more about that, and what the manuscripts tell you?
Stefka Eriksen
Yeah. So recently, as we know, there has been a generous increase in the so-called environmental humanities. So, we are all concerned with our current environmental situation, and we – as humanity scholars – are going back to our sources and saying, what can we learn about this, and how can we learn from history and from culture, from previous times? And one way of doing it is to go back to the Middle Ages, because, as you said, there was the so-called Little Ice Age. It's a very general term – it didn't happen overnight, and it didn't stop overnight. But around the last quarter of the 1200s, temperatures started to drop. The weather was much more unstable. Crops started to decrease. There was famine. Yeah, it was a terrible... it was an environmental crisis, basically. And one approach, to this little ice age, is to go to the sources and see, what do they tell us about this period? What do the written sources tell about darkness and cold and disaster, and all these phenomena? The archaeologists, of course, studied the little ice age in a completely different way, because they can dig and discover how changed climates impacted both settlements and crops and everything. My approach to it is that during this little ice age – as I said, it started, say, 1275, just to put a date on it. It was not overnight. So 1275 – then, the 1300s was a time of crisis. Like, things were not going well. Despite that, it's a very interesting fact that of our preserved Old Norse manuscripts, about 60% of those manuscripts, they are from the 14th century. So they are from this period when we know there was a crisis. So, I find this very fascinating. And, going back to how resource demanding it was to write, I wonder why did they do this? Why did they prioritize their resources, their time, to sit and write stories, when the world was collapsing around them? And I don't have the answer to that – just to say it – but this is... I find this very fascinating. And my hypothesis is, in a way, that maybe literature, and the histories they wrote didn't... they didn't write it, to scribble down how they were dealing with the crisis, but it was a way to cope with the crisis. It was, in a way, a response to difficult times. Then, one way of dealing with them is to remember who we are and why are we there, and what group do we belong to.
Karin Kukkonen
And how do we experience this? I mean, from what you said earlier on about Egil's Saga, it's actually full of descriptions of experience as well.
Stefka Eriksen
Exactly. Exactly. And just, how... Just to remember, we read texts that remind us why our existence is meaningful, basically. And of course, they also find – maybe – direct parallels, or... So, in Iceland, there are many of those sagas of Icelanders that were copied then, which tell us about why people settled in Iceland in the first place. So that would be very meaningful, I think, if you're living in the middle of a crisis. You need to read, why are we here? Why did our forefathers come here, and why did they settle? And so, I read the literature... My argument is that this was not directly a response, but it was a way of coping with, dealing with it on a more spiritual human level than the practical level.
Karin Kukkonen
It sounds quite existential.
Stefka Eriksen
Yeah. Yeah. I like to think that, of course, they had to deal with their practical issues, too. But we humans have different levels to operate on – and the existential level.
Karin Kukkonen
And of course, I mean, that obviously resonates with our situation today. And the question is, when will people start writing manuscripts again? Or, I mean, more generally, it seems to me – from talking to you about Old Norse manuscripts – that there is actually a lot that, sort of, resonates across the centuries, with the way in which the climate crisis, climate emergency, echoes across. You also speak of page turners in manuscripts, and that kind of thing. And yet, I guess it's quite clear that, I mean, the Viking or the Norseman of the Middle Ages live in a very different society and culture from how we live today. How do you see that historical distance and, yeah, how do you navigate it?
Stefka Eriksen
Well, that's a main question in history. How can we at all study history? Can we at all know anything about the past, when people lived in so different cultures? And those cultures are gone, the people are dead. We have the texts they copied, and the objects they made, the art they made, maybe, but we cannot talk to them. We can never know, how was it actually to live then? So, some historians would say, 'No, we cannot do history', in a way, because of this difference, this distance. Well, others would claim that we humans are the same, we had the same need to relate, and we were just social... Our species was the same then. And this is expressed very well by Sigrid Undset, with her very famous quote about, yeah, human thoughts and fate can change, but human hearts, they stay the same. But the way I approach this dichotomy, in a way, is again – with the help of the cognitive perspective – it's not a dichotomy anymore. Because, as I said, we know that the cognitive premises for cultural production are exactly the same today, as in the Middle Ages. So there, we have the sameness. And at the same time, we know that cognitively... also today, we don't need the historical distance. Also today, we misunderstand each other. It's not easy to... communication is not easy. So just knowing this, and being aware of this difference, allows us to actually reach out and try to understand – knowingly, that we maybe can misunderstand. So it's this doubleness of the cognitive perspective, the cognitive premises being the same, and just being aware of the cultural differences – we can slowly but surely maybe understand more, gain insight about the past.
Karin Kukkonen
And especially by reading some of the sagas, I guess...?
Stefka Eriksen
Especially by reading some of the sagas – that are great entertainment.
Karin Kukkonen
Thank you so much for this excellent conversation, on the question of history, Vikings, Norsemen, manuscripts, big feelings and little Ice Ages. Thank you very much for joining us today, Stefka.
Stefka Eriksen
Thank you for having me, Karin.
Karin Kukkonen
And thanks to everyone listening to the LCE podcast.