We invite you to the midway evaluation of the PhD project of Josh Burgoyne, Eco-Emotions doctoral research fellow.
"Paradise Found?: Landscape and Assemblage in the Vínland sagas, Eiríks saga rauða and Grœnlendinga saga"
This thesis investigates human–nonhuman relationality in the Old Norse-Icelandic Vínland sagas, Eiríks saga rauða and Grœnlendinga saga, through an ecocritical analysis of their surviving manuscript witnesses. Written down in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries but recounting Norse expeditions to Vínland (North America) around 1000 CE, these sagas are uniquely concerned with questions of settlement, resource use, and environmental change across Iceland, Greenland, and Vínland. Using a close reading-contextualizing methodology based in material ecocriticism and New Philology, I ask how human–nonhuman interactions are represented linguistically and narratively in these three landscapes; how these representations differ between the two versions of Eiríks saga and one surviving version of Grœnlendinga saga; and how the environmental situation at the time of each manuscript’s production shapes each version's meaning. The thesis argues that the Vínland sagas present human–nonhuman relations as deeply entangled yet place-specific, offering moral and spiritual frameworks for medieval Icelanders confronting environmental crisis as the climate worsened and plague ravaged.
Josh Burgoyne’s external reader is Dr. Dale Kedwards, Assistant Professor in Old Norse-Icelandic, University of Cambridge. Kedwards will also give a lecture the same day. See more here.
Burgoyne’s supervisors are Stefka G. Eriksen (Professor in Old Norse Philology, UiO) and Emily Lethbridge (Associate Professor, Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies).
Program
Open session, PAM 14
9.15–9.30: Josh Burgoyne, presentation of PhD-project and submitted work.
9.30–11.00: Dr. Dale Kedwards, comments and discussion.
Closed session, PAM 14
11.15–12.00: Josh Burgoyne, Dale Kedwards, Stefka G. Eriksen, and Emily Lethbridge (online): Discussion of further work.