Instruction in Old Norse is designed for beginners as well as for more advanced students. Students will be introduced first to a bishops’ saga, then to classical sagas in normalized editions. The objective is to provide a basic knowledge of the language for reading enjoyment. Instruction will be individualized for those with no knowledge and for those with prior exposure to the language. The texts will range in difficulty, from sagas with simple syntax and recurrent vocabulary to more sophisticated works.

The literature is vast, allowing for a broad and individualized choice of texts. They include depictions of sacrifices to the gods, power struggles, social advancement by knowledge of the law, women as strong-willed, intelligent and enterprising as any man. We will encounter, for example: Laxdoela saga’s description of a jilted woman who, outraged, placed her infant on her lover as, escaping to Norway, he lay asleep on board ship; Saint Olaf’s insight into the character and future of his young step-brothers at play (Heimskringla); unabated hatred that nullified judicial procedures to lift a sentence of outlawry 19 years after its imposition (Grettis saga); and the participation in pagan rites by the ancestress of bishops (Eríks saga rau∂a). By the end of the course, we shall have read some of the most poignant, dramatic, and psychologically insightful scenes in all of world literature.

Professor Ciklamini is a medievalist. Her specialization is in Old Norse, in particular in Icelandic sagas and folklore. She has published numerous studies. These deal with the many genres that Icelandic authors, both known and anonymous, began to cultivate in the late twelfth century and continued to do so for the next centuries.

Besides the Viking Age, her major field of interest is Middle High German literature, the interpretation of the era’s classical romance and of post-classical folkloristic and didactic works.

Her most recent article, “Hidden and Revealed: The Presence of the Virgin Mary in Bishop Guðmundr’s Life: The Construction of an Apologia” has been accepted for publication by Frühmittelalterliche Studien.  This is a study that explores the use of a hagiographic theme to cleanse the historical record of a controversial bishop who was ultimately acclaimed as a saint.  She is now working on the function of folklore in the Bishops' Sagas.