Stig Sjödin och minnets politik

The aim of this article is to analyse the attitudes to history and memory expressed in the working-class poetry of Stig Sjödin (1917–1993) – both in Sotfratgment (Fragments of Soot) from 1949, which marked his breakthrough as a poet, and in the poetry he wrote for the labour movement (mainly poems published in tradeunion membership magazines or read at meetings and congresses) – and to discuss how he and his poetry are today viewed as reminders of political ideals and experiences threatened by oblivion. There are certain differences between how memory and remembering is treated in Sotfragment and in Sjödin’s labour-movement poetry respectively. In Sotfragment, focus is more often on individual memories and existential problems, whereas in the labour-movement poetry, Sjödin is sometimes more explicitly political and writes about collective memories from a proletarian perspective. These differences are conditioned by differences between the spheres to which the poems belong: that of literature and that of the labour movement. In connection with the rise of left-wing radicalism in Sweden during the 1960s and 1970s, Sjödin argued that older working-class literature contained important political experiences and perspectives. This is also how his works are sometimes viewed today, both by working-class writers and by political commentators. Thereby, it is emphasized that literature is not a passive medium for the preservation of memories, but that it can also transform them and make them politically relevant

IASS’ historie: En personlig fortelling

As the official historian of the International Association for Scandinavian Studies, and one of the two authors of The History of the International Association of Scandinavian Studies 1956–2006, I have been asked to tell the story of the almost 70 years of our association’s existence. The whole thing began in Cambridge in July 1956, as an informal meeting of 65 academics, most of them from the Nordic countries or the United Kingdom; on that occasion there was a grand total of 13 lectures. Since that time there has been a conference every other summer – until the summer of 2020, when it had to be postponed for a year due to the pandemic. It was agreed from the very earliest days that the meetings would be held in a Nordic country and a non-Nordic country alternately, although it was not until 1962, in Aarhus, that IASS was given its official name, and supplied with a constitution and a committee (president, secretary, treasurer etc.) For the early conferences the theme was exclusively literary, but in more recent times it has been expanded to take in other disciplines, such as history, sociology, film studies etc. In 1986 Elias Bredsdorff published a slim volume about the first thirty years of IASS, which I supplemented in 2006 with an account of the following twenty years. I have attended every single conference since 1970, so my talk will provide an extremely personal account of how IASS has become a part of my own history

Norse Kings’ Sagas Spread to the World

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On the Old Icelandic Riddle Collection Heiðreksgátur

In this article, the language of the Old Icelandic riddle collection Heiðreksgátur is studied, paying attention to its tropes (kennings and heiti), humour, and narration techniques. In addition to this, also literary links with other poems of the Poetic Edda are discussed

Precious Play in Morten Søndergaard’s Ordapotek

After touching upon some theoretical aspects of play/game – text analogy, the article focuses on the manifestations of play in the project Wordpharmacy by the Danish author Morten Søndergaard, including its not problem-free relation to the image of the curious child at play

Högt och lågt i skandinaviska dialekter

The typology of Scandinavian dialects is based on prosodic features, namely tone and intonation. We look at three variables that account for the variation between the large dialect groups: 1. The value of the lexical tone in accent 2, 2. Whether there is one or two association points for the tonal contour in compounds, and 3. Whether there is spreading or interpolation between the lexical tone and the prominence tone in compounds. The relevance of these variables is illustrated by comparisons of real pronunciations from several dialects, including Olso (East Norwegian), Göteborg (West Swedish), Stockholm (Central Swedish), Norberg (Dala Swedish), Skåne (South Swedish), and Luleå (North Swedish)

Sámi and Scandinavians in the Viking Age

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That Rune Will Unlock Time’s Labyrinth…: Old Norse Themes and Motifs in George Mackay Brown’s Poetry

George Mackay Brown (1921–1996), an Orcadian poet, author and dramatist, was undoubtedly one of the finest Scottish creative voices of the twentieth century. He was greatly influenced by Old Norse literature, and this is reflected in his writings in many ways. The present article aims to trace and discuss Old Norse themes and motifs in Brown’s poetry. His rune poems, translations of the twelfthcentury skaldic verse, experimentation with skaldic kennings, as well as choosing saga personalities, such as Saint Magnus, Earl Rognvald of Orkney and others, as protagonists of the poems show the poet’s in-depth interest in the historical and literary legacy of his native Orkney and Old Norse culture in general

Från nationalhjälte till rikstyrann: Karl XII i det svenska 1800-talets litterära minneskultur

The overall aim of the article is to investigate the structure and dynamics of the Swedish cultural memory in the nineteenth century. According to the micrological methodology, recommended by leading theorists of cultural memory, the article focuses on five representative texts: three Romantic poems written to the 1818 centenary of Charles XII’s death (Bernhard von Beskow’s “Carl den Tolfte,” Erik Gustaf Geijer’s “Ord till Karl XII:s marsch vid Narva,” and Esaias Tegnér’s “Carl XII”), and two short stories, written in the last decade of the nineteenth century, both depicting the events immediately after the death of Charles XII and thus thematising the cultural memory of the king as communicative memory (Verner von Heidenstam’s “En hjältes likfärd” and August Strindberg’s “Vid Likvakan i Tistedalen”). Analysing the three poems, the article makes an attempt to reconstruct the degree zero structure of the Swedish cultural memory in the nineteenth century. It is argued that the poems’ cultural memory has an eclectic character and requires a kind of archaeological approach. In the first step, the article identifies a tissue of elements, belonging to the pre-industrial cultural memory: cult of the death, burial scenery, relic, fame, ritualization, militarization. The poems subordinate this archaic memory system to the structures which are the products of the nineteenth century and originate from one single social process: industrialization. In the second step, the main part of the article, these industrial components of the poems’ cultural memory are analysed: subjectification, temporalization, historicization, productivization, nationalization, and finally mythicization – the final component is investigated using both Barthesian and Jungian conceptual apparatus. In the third and last step, the article studies the development of this degree zero memory structure during the nineteenth century. Two main evolutionary trends, rooted in two different modifications of the Kantian notion of the Self, are distinguished. The first trend, exemplified by the short story of Heidenstam, implies an existential psychologization of the industrial cultural memory. The second trend, represented by the short story of Strindberg, is based on a naturalistic correction of the Kantian Self and executes a subversive demythicization of the Romantic Charles XII-myth

Norwegian Modal Verbs and Attitudinal Modality

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