This thesis examines the representation and historical significance of the legendary Scandinavian past in the Icelandic manuscripts AM 589a–f 4to and, to a lesser extent, AM 586 4to, both of which were produced by the same two scribes in the late fifteenth century. I begin in §1 by outlining the scholarly context, my methodology, and the sources. I...
The increasing influence of continental chivalric romances on medieval Icelandic and Norwegian literature had a profound effect on discourses of gender in Norse texts, reflected in the wave of romance translations and original romances created over the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. This thesis looks at how these questions of appropriate gender...
This article examines current practices of normalization of names in Norse philology and computational linguistics that to a large extent build on deductive reasoning and external authoritative sources such as grammars, dictionaries and gazetteers. Instead, a survey of manuscript evidence and quantification of name forms at several levels of abstra...
The orthography of Östergötland’s 11th century runic inscriptions varies widely, in part due to the lack of spelling norms at the time. This thesis seeks to identify other causes for the observed variation, based on the frequency and distribution of aspects of inscription orthography. The Old Norse words ræisa and stæin in the phrase “raised the st...
Published in Folia Linguistica
While the study of Norse-derived terms in medieval English has benefitted from recent etymological advances (e.g. the Gersum project), the exploration of their process of integration lags behind. The latter requires the analysis of the dialectal and semantic distribution of the terms, as well as their interactions with other members of their lexico...
The central aim of this thesis is to explore the complexities of human-bird coexistence in Scandinavia and the Norse North Atlantic from 600-1500 AD, primarily focusing on the period c. 800-1400 within this time period. In particular, this thesis explores if and how literary representations of birds correlated in any way with zooarchaeological sour...
Published in European Journal of Scandinavian Studies
A casual examination of the skaldic corpus suggests that a very large proportion of kennings are unique, that is, the nouns that form a kenning are very unlikely to appear elsewhere as a kenning, even when grammatical variation is taken into account. This enormous productivity is due to the principle of variability and substitution in kennings. The...
The present study explores the role of interlingual identification in contact between speakers of Old Norse and Old English. The study focuses on the word get as it occurred throughout a selection of texts in the Middle English period. The Old English and Old Norse words for get were cognate, which meant that some phonological and morphological cha...
In an attempt to discern the prevalence of British place-names with a Scandinavian origin this paper is a small linguistic study on place-names in Herefordshire, Cumbria and the areas along rivers Trent and Ouse. Based on modern maps place-names were included in the study. Older forms of the place-names were retrieved, and these old forms were anal...
