Mas­culin­i­ties in Old Norse Lit­er­a­ture
Com­pared to oth­er areas of medieval lit­er­a­ture, the ques­tion of mas­culin­i­ty in Old Norse-Ice­landic lit­er­a­ture has been under­stud­ied. This is a neglect which this vol­ume aims to rec­ti­fy. The essays col­lect­ed here intro­duce and analyse a spec­trum of mas­culin­i­ties, from the sagas of Ice­landers, con­tem­po­rary sagas, kings‘ sagas, leg­endary sagas, chival­ric sagas, bish­ops‘ sagas, and eddic and skaldic verse, pro­duc­ing a broad and mul­ti­fac­eted under­stand­ing of what it means to be mas­cu­line in Old Norse-Ice­landic texts. A crit­i­cal intro­duc­tion places the essays in their schol­ar­ly con­text, pro­vid­ing the read­er with a con­cise ori­en­ta­tion in gen­der stud­ies and the study of mas­culin­i­ties in Old Norse-Ice­landic lit­er­a­ture.
This book’s inves­ti­ga­tion of how mas­culin­i­ties are con­struct­ed and chal­lenged with­in a unique lit­er­a­ture is all the more vital in the cur­rent cli­mate, in which Old Norse sources are weaponised to sup­port far-right agen­das and racist ide­olo­gies are inter­twined with images of vikings as hyper­mas­cu­line. This vol­ume coun­ters these trou­bling nar­ra­tives of mas­culin­i­ty through explo­rations of Old Norse lit­er­a­ture that demon­strate how mas­culin­i­ty is formed, how it is linked to vio­lence and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, how it gov­erns men’s rela­tion­ships, and how tox­ic mod­els of mas­culin­i­ty may be chal­lenged.
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Scan­di­na­vian noir: in pur­suit of a mys­tery
For near­ly four decades, Wendy Lesser’s pri­ma­ry source of infor­ma­tion about three Scan­di­na­vian countries—Sweden, Nor­way, and Denmark—was mys­tery and crime nov­els, and the mur­ders com­mit­ted and solved in their pages. Hav­ing nev­er vis­it­ed the region, Less­er con­struct­ed a fic­tion­al Scan­di­navia of her own mak­ing, some­thing between a map, a por­trait, and a cul­tur­al his­to­ry of a place that both exists and does not exist. Lesser’s Scan­di­navia is dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly pop­u­lat­ed with police offi­cers, but also with the stuff of every­day life, the likes of which are relayed in great detail in the nov­els she read: a ful­ly real­ized world com­plete with its own tra­di­tions, cus­toms, and, of course, peo­ple.
Over the course of many years, Lesser’s fic­tion­al Scan­di­navia grew more and more solid­ly vis­i­ble to her, yet she nev­er had a strong desire to vis­it the real coun­tries that cor­re­spond­ed to the made-up ones. Until, she writes, “between one day and the next, that no longer seemed suf­fi­cient.” It was time to trav­el to Scan­di­navia.
With vivid sto­ry­telling and an aston­ish­ing com­mand of the lit­er­a­ture, Wendy Lesser’s Scan­di­na­vian Noir: In Pur­suit of a Mys­tery illu­mi­nates the vast, pecu­liar world of Scan­di­na­vian noir—first as it appears on the page, then as it grows in her mind, and final­ly, in the sum­mer of 2018, as it exists in real­i­ty. Guid­ed by sharp crit­i­cism, evoca­tive trav­el writ­ing, and a whim­si­cal need to dis­cov­er “the dif­fer­ence between exis­tence and imag­i­na­tion, real­i­ty and dream,” Scan­di­na­vian Noir is a thrilling and inven­tive lit­er­ary adven­ture from a mas­ter­ful writer and crit­ic.
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