Books by Richard L Harris
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Islandica, Vol. 64, 2022
A study of ways in which proverbs and proverbial allusion are used by the composers of the Icelan... more A study of ways in which proverbs and proverbial allusion are used by the composers of the Icelandic sagas. Of particular concern is the influence of pre-literate paroemial cognitive patterning upon the characters and narratives of this literature. I will be very grateful to learn of textual errors.
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Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies , 2020
This volume brings together examinations of pragmatic meaning and proverbs of the Medieval North.... more This volume brings together examinations of pragmatic meaning and proverbs of the Medieval North. Pragmatic meaning, which relies upon cultural and interpersonal context to go beyond the simple semantic and grammatical meaning of an utterance, has a fundamental connection with proverbs, which also communicate a deeper meaning than what is actually said. Essays in this volume explore this connection by examining the language of generosity, conversion, friendship, debate, dragon proverbs, and saints' lives. These essays are inspired by the works of Thomas A. Shippey, who has been a pioneer in the study of wisdom poetry and pragmatics in medieval literature.
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Proverbia Septentrionalia. Essays on Proverbs in Medieval Scandinavian and English Literature. Ed. Michael Cichon and Yin Liu., 2019
People commonly respond to the term "proverbs" with biblical associations, most directly with the... more People commonly respond to the term "proverbs" with biblical associations, most directly with the Book of Proverbs itself. Nevertheless, one might think about these pithy sayings and traditional sources of wisdom as having been among the building blocks of preliterate knowledge itself. Proverbs were among the very first things people wanted to write down, once they had acquired the necessary skills to express in letters concepts more complex than inventories of rulers' wealth and of kingdoms' statistics. What today has become perhaps a quaint subject of arcane study was once among the most important means humans had of knowledge and of remembering in that vast ocean of preliterate existence where most people, things, and events were simply forgotten. The discipline of paroe-miology, or the study of proverbs, recognizes their origins as often preceding the literate stage of societies. In fact, proverbs must have made up a significant element in that formulaic framework by which knowledge and wisdom were fixed and transmitted generationally in the communities of preliterate humanity. The as yet unmapped syntactic structure of the paroemial form lent itself both to mnemonic efficiency and to rhetorical persuasion-even today, there are cultures in Africa where litigation and governmental advice are expressed proverbially , and the conduct of law in our own societies still employs proverbial material occasionally, just as do our politicians. The Paroemiographer There could be no useful paroemiological discipline without the arduous and painstaking labor of the paroemiographers, who compile our collections of proverbs. The recognition of the proverb as a text in itself is seen in some of the earliest writings extant, Sumerian cuneiform inscriptions from around 2600 01_RLHarris.indd 9 5/24/18 5:13 PM
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New Norse Studies, edited by Jeffrey Turco, gathers twelve original essays engaging aspects of Ol... more New Norse Studies, edited by Jeffrey Turco, gathers twelve original essays engaging aspects of Old Norse–Icelandic literature that continue to kindle the scholarly imagination in the twenty-first century. The assembled authors examine the arrière-scène of saga literature; the nexus of skaldic poetry and saga narrative; medieval and post-medieval gender roles; and other manifestations of language, time, and place as preserved in Old Norse–Icelandic texts. This volume will be welcomed not only by the specialist and by scholars in adjacent fields but also by the avid general reader, drawn in ever-increasing number to the Icelandic sagas and their world.
Table of Contents Preface; Jeffrey Turco, volume editor: Introduction; Andy Orchard: Hereward and Grettir: Brothers from Another Mother?; Richard L. Harris: “Jafnan segir inn ríkri ráð”: Proverbial Allusion and the Implied Proverb in Fóstbrœðra saga; Torfi H. Tulinius: Seeking Death in Njáls saga; Guðrún Nordal: Skaldic Poetics and the Making of the Sagas of Icelanders; Russell Poole: Identity Poetics among the Icelandic Skalds; Jeffrey Turco: Loki, Sneglu-Halla þáttr, and the Case for a Skaldic Prosaics; Thomas D. Hill: Beer, Vomit, Blood and Poetry: Egils saga, Chapters 44-45; Shaun F. D. Hughes: The Old Norse Exempla as Arbiters of Gender Roles in Medieval Iceland; Paul Acker: Performing Gender in the Icelandic Ballads; Joseph Harris: The Rök Inscription, Line 20; Sarah Harlan-Haughey: A Landscape of Conflict: Three Stories of the Faroe Conversions; Kirsten Wolf: Non-Basic Color Terms in Old Norse-Icelandic
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Papers by Richard L Harris
ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 1983
XV-LTHOUGH JOHN FOWLES has frequently expressed dissatis-faction with the first version of what h... more XV-LTHOUGH JOHN FOWLES has frequently expressed dissatis-faction with the first version of what he once facetiously termed "this wretched book The Magus" it has so far proven to be his most popular novel.1 Begun in his late twenties when he was teaching in Greece, it ...
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Edited for Poetry in Fornaldarsögur, ed. Margaret Clunies Ross (Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavia... more Edited for Poetry in Fornaldarsögur, ed. Margaret Clunies Ross (Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 8), vol. ii., pp. 489-539, 2017.
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The biography of a single hero, and thus falling in with a small group of such works as Grettla a... more The biography of a single hero, and thus falling in with a small group of such works as Grettla and Egla among the Íslendingasögur, Víga-Glúms saga is also the story of an extended and rather complexly developed feud between its eponymous hero and a branch of his family associated with Espihóll, at a short distance from his own farm, at Þverá, with the two separated by the Eyjafjarðará. In a thematic sense, the saga studies the unwholesome relationship between Glúmr Eyjólfsson and the world of the gods, a relationship reflective of a devotional ambivalence of neutral value in his family background but which in his case seems to be associated with the cause of his life's misfortunes. His paternal grandfather, Helgi the Lean, who according to Landnámabók honored both Þórr and Christ, was unexpectedly disappointed when, like many other immigrants, he put to the former deity the question of where to settle in Iceland. " The oracle guided him north of the island, " and his son asked him if he intended " to sail as far as the Arctic Ocean if Thor told him to go there. " Whenever his guidance, Helgi spent the first winter on the west side of Eyjafjǫrðr, near its mouth, where he found the weather severe. Noticing that all was less white at the head of the fjord in spring, he moved southwards, releasing a boar and a sow at Galtarhamarr, where three years later their number had grown to 70. The dependence of this experiment upon Freyr is obvious, though implicit in the settlement story. Taking possession of the whole of Eyjafjǫrðr, Helgi is said to have believed in Christ, called his home Kristness after him, and yet gave several of his children names whose elements are associated with the god Freyr. The ancestrally supported theme of devotional ambivalence thus seems well established in the background of Víga-Glúmr, whose saga has been thought to have been written at the monastery of Munkaþverá,
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It is still true today, as when observed by Sigurður Nordal in his commentary to the 1938 Íslenzk... more It is still true today, as when observed by Sigurður Nordal in his commentary to the 1938 Íslenzk fornrit edition of Bandamanna saga, that little attention has been given specifically to this work and its place among the Íslendingasögur from a literary critical point of view. Aside from Magerøy's 1957 Studiar and a few essays on its humor and approaches to its conflicts by students of socioeconomic theory, most discussion occurs in introductions to, and accompanying commmentaries upon, its editions and translations. Nordal pointed out episodes in it which seem derived from passages in Ljósvetninga saga and Vatnsdoela saga, and subsequent editors and translators have noticed its narrative affinities with Hoensa-Þóris saga and Hrafnkels saga. As well, the bias of editorial selection has placed it, with these latter two works, among the Sagas of Wealth and Power in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, along with Eyrbyggja saga, Hávarðar saga and some þaettir. Bandamanna, Hrafnkatla and Hoensa-Þórir are treated together by Theodore M. Andersson in his Growth of the Medieval Icelandic Saga under the chapter heading " Pondering Justice, " and although the settings of all three are some centuries earlier than their composition, they are viewed here and elsewhere as owing their inspiration to contemporary conflicts over power between the traditional leaders of the Commonwealth days and those who succeeded them as Iceland came under Norwegian rule. These three sagas pursue agendas variously critical of the old and decadent chieftain class, its heedless aristocratic arrogance on the one hand, and on the other, its unscrupulous greed, exacerbated by the gradual erosion of its traditional sources of power and wealth. While there is little doubt of such common ideological interests in the origins of all three [of these sagas], they differentiate themselves from one another respectively regarding the ethics of survival amidst the local tyranny and lethal hubris that each studies in pursuing its narrative purpose. Hrafnkatla, as I have shown elsewhere, warns of associations with foolish men, and Hoensa-Þóris saga, with men who are bad. Both these sagas thus consider kinds of people with whom it is disadvantageous to have dealings. Both sorts of people are tainted by ógaefa, a trait of lucklessness recognized in the Saga World as harmful to its possessors and to those who take up with them. Bandamanna saga, no less than the former two, shares such concerns but, in particular with Hrafnkatla, considers the dangers of the goðorð when held by those who are naïve, politically inexperienced or otherwise unskilled.
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Concordance to the Proverbs and Proverbial Materials in the Old Icelandic Sagas http://www.usask.... more Concordance to the Proverbs and Proverbial Materials in the Old Icelandic Sagas http://www.usask.ca/english/icelanders/ " Many peoples, " writes C.M.Bowra, " cherish the legend of an age which, in the splendour and the scope of its achievements and in the prodigious qualities of the men who took part in them, is thought to eclipse all that comes after it. " [ " Meaning " , 63] Now, it is commonly accepted that several of the Íslendingasögur indicate an awareness of what we call the Germanic Heroic Age, a concept inspired by a period of migration and extensive martial conflict among the continental tribes in the early Christian era memorialized over a very long time through oral transmission in narrative and lyric entertainment. Volsunga saga and the legendary poems of the Elder Edda, for instance, bear witness to this long tradition, and it is to the figures of these stories that 13th-century sagamen sometimes allude or explicitly refer, seeming to imbue their plots and characters with ideologically informed associative value that has been reconsidered in recent decades. My purpose here is to begin discussion of the possibilities and literary critical implications of another, much later heroic age in the minds of medieval Icelanders. We could call this Iceland's Heroic Age, and it would be comprised of traditonal memories of the dispersal of those farmers, ejected from their lands in southwest Norway by the depredations of Harald Fairhair in the latter decades of the 9th century. Homeless, they made their way around the North Atlantic, seeking a replacement for that heritage of which they had felt deprived by his forceful centralization of power. Within the resultant diaspora flourished those robust figures who eventually decided to make Iceland their new home. Directly witnessed moments in this chaotic period of migration might be sought in passages in the sagas of early Norwegian kings, in skaldic verse, in Landnámabók. And, more importantly for my own purposes, its distant memories, its indirect yet more powerful witness, may be found, as a literary construct, describing an idea of an earlier heroic world, fancifully recorded in the preludic material of some of the Family Sagas and reflected in some episodes and scenes and specific characters in the main narratives of that genre. Today we are well beyond considering any Heroic Age as a real and distinct, definable period in history. Rather, it might be said that a Heroic Age, whatever else might be true of the semi-historical figures with which it is peopled, is in the first place a construct of the human mind, an archetypal complex, its narrative witness
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New Norse Studies: A Journal on the Literature and Culture of Medieval Scandinavia is the new ann... more New Norse Studies: A Journal on the Literature and Culture of Medieval Scandinavia is the new annual of Islandica, a series in Icelandic and Norse studies, founded in 1908 and published by the Fiske Icelandic Collection, Cornell University Library. Devoted to all facets of the written tradition of medieval Iceland and Scandinavia, NNS seeks to bring the insights of multiple disciplines to bear upon Norse texts.
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Books by Richard L Harris
Table of Contents Preface; Jeffrey Turco, volume editor: Introduction; Andy Orchard: Hereward and Grettir: Brothers from Another Mother?; Richard L. Harris: “Jafnan segir inn ríkri ráð”: Proverbial Allusion and the Implied Proverb in Fóstbrœðra saga; Torfi H. Tulinius: Seeking Death in Njáls saga; Guðrún Nordal: Skaldic Poetics and the Making of the Sagas of Icelanders; Russell Poole: Identity Poetics among the Icelandic Skalds; Jeffrey Turco: Loki, Sneglu-Halla þáttr, and the Case for a Skaldic Prosaics; Thomas D. Hill: Beer, Vomit, Blood and Poetry: Egils saga, Chapters 44-45; Shaun F. D. Hughes: The Old Norse Exempla as Arbiters of Gender Roles in Medieval Iceland; Paul Acker: Performing Gender in the Icelandic Ballads; Joseph Harris: The Rök Inscription, Line 20; Sarah Harlan-Haughey: A Landscape of Conflict: Three Stories of the Faroe Conversions; Kirsten Wolf: Non-Basic Color Terms in Old Norse-Icelandic
Papers by Richard L Harris
Table of Contents Preface; Jeffrey Turco, volume editor: Introduction; Andy Orchard: Hereward and Grettir: Brothers from Another Mother?; Richard L. Harris: “Jafnan segir inn ríkri ráð”: Proverbial Allusion and the Implied Proverb in Fóstbrœðra saga; Torfi H. Tulinius: Seeking Death in Njáls saga; Guðrún Nordal: Skaldic Poetics and the Making of the Sagas of Icelanders; Russell Poole: Identity Poetics among the Icelandic Skalds; Jeffrey Turco: Loki, Sneglu-Halla þáttr, and the Case for a Skaldic Prosaics; Thomas D. Hill: Beer, Vomit, Blood and Poetry: Egils saga, Chapters 44-45; Shaun F. D. Hughes: The Old Norse Exempla as Arbiters of Gender Roles in Medieval Iceland; Paul Acker: Performing Gender in the Icelandic Ballads; Joseph Harris: The Rök Inscription, Line 20; Sarah Harlan-Haughey: A Landscape of Conflict: Three Stories of the Faroe Conversions; Kirsten Wolf: Non-Basic Color Terms in Old Norse-Icelandic
NNS welcomes contributions to scholarship relating to all aspects of Old Norse-Icelandic literature, including but not limited to: literary and textual culture; mythology, folklore, and history of religions; archaeology and material culture; language, linguistics, philology, and runology; medieval history; and comparative literary studies.
NNS does not solicit or publish reviews of individual books. Review essays concerning larger trends, topics, and bodies of scholarship are welcome.
NNS welcomes contributions to scholarship relating to all aspects of Old Norse-Icelandic literature, including but not limited to: literary and textual culture; mythology, folklore, and history of religions; archaeology and material culture; language, linguistics, philology, and runology; medieval history; and comparative literary studies.
NNS does not solicit or publish reviews of individual books. Review essays concerning larger trends, topics, and bodies of scholarship will be considered.