Like Sun on a Troll's Back: Tales of Iceland and the New Chaucer Society Congress

View of Reykjavik from Hallgrímskirkja

This summer I had the chance to visit Iceland for the Nineteenth Biennial International Congress of the New Chaucer Society. I am still processing the experiences I had, which loom like fantastical peaks in my memory. I went a week ahead of the conference so that I would have time to explore Reykjavik and spend some time in the surrounding country as well. As the conference grew nearer, I began to run into more and more familiar faces around the city, and it was exciting to feel that sense of connectedness in this beautiful new place. The conference was fantastic. I heard excellent papers and conversed with friends old and new. The energy of the conversations I had is helping to motivate me as I work through the final period of dissertation writing/revising. The congress also included excursions, so I got to see some stunning things both in and out of the city. The landscape in Iceland is startlingly, unbelievably beautiful. I asked my Romanticist friend if the word "sublime" applied, and she said that it did. Driving through the country there feels like driving out of this world and into a world of myth. I fell in love with Iceland. I immersed myself in sagas before and during my trip, and then the landscape of the sagas vivified and challenged  and confirmed everything that I had read or wanted to read.

Black sand beach at Vik
(The sea stacks may be trolls who
were petrified by the sunrise)

An incredible feature of the landscape is that every place I visited was interwoven with stories. These stories bridge the gaps between myth and history with growing grass and trickling water and surging lava. A cliff was a troll who'd been petrified by the rising sun. A pool of water  once splashed with the bodies of women hurled there to drown for adultery or incest or infanticide. The terrain there seems indifferent to humans (though maybe not to elves). Its beauty delights and beckons, but it seems like it isn't really meant for us either. I cannot imagine how the first settlers survived. Yet the stories that surround every topographical feature manage to lend it a narrative texture. Reykjavik, for example, exists where it does because Ingólfur Arnarson threw his high seat pillars into the ocean in 874 when he saw Iceland's coastline materialize on the horizon. The pillars landed in a spot made steamy by hot springs, leading to the name Reykjavik, meaning "smoky bay."

The city, then, functions as the living answer to a question from story: where will these pillars land? And other built environments are connected to stories as well. Visiting the turf houses of Keldur was a thrill, having read about them in Njál's Saga. The host, a stoic lady who grew chatty as we showed her our enthusiasm for the location and its history, told us that the foundation was a thousand years old, but that people had lived in the house we we're standing in until 1946. We could see the layers of construction; we could feel the temporal rift as we moved between two sections of the house that had been built 600 years apart. We looked at the mixed construction -- wood and stone -- that our host explained combined building practices from Viking and Celtic cultures, a sign that the settlers from Norway often stopped off in Ireland and Scotland to pick up slaves. Not only geographical movements, but sociocultural realities of the past leave their mark.

Turf houses at Keldur

Detail from Njáls saga fragment, c. 1300

But architectural wonders are not the primary attractions in Iceland. The people who settled there built no massive castles or cathedrals. And much of what they did build has disappeared under layers of time. The remains of  a longhouse, for example, feature in the Settlement Museum. The ruins were discovered during a construction project, and the museum is carved out around them in an underground space. As incredible as this museum is, most of the impressive buildings I saw are not medieval, but modern: the Harpa concert hall, Hallgrímskirkja church. The most dazzling remains of times past in Iceland are manuscripts and the recorded sagas and laws and history and myths they contain. And those narratives are written onto the landscape as surely as any wood or stone constructions could be. 

Leif Erikisson and Hallgrímskirkja

Inside Harpa

Outside of the city, the landscape seems to swallow up built structures with its shifting and boisterous geological demeanor. In the landscape of Þingvellir, fissures and cracks in the earth proliferate and separating plates reveal a path between the continents. In such a space, who could hope to locate the famed rock where The Law Speaker stood to recite the laws to the people? Grass-covered outlines of booths are the only traces of the lively gatherings that once crowded the space. Yet the story of the law rock and of the yearly general assemblies that took place there from 930 to 1798 still brings us to Þingvellir en masse. The description of the general assembly as a place to adjudicate disputes and visit friends and relatives is vivid in texts like Njál's saga. The land is steeped in the intersected narratives of geological and historical time.

The earth splits at Þingvellir

The multiplicity of temporal narratives written onto the landscape there reminds me of medieval mappa mundi, which feature Biblical and classical and contemporary history arranged spatially over the world. Medieval travel narratives (and Icelandic sagas, for that matter) connect their stories to locations, while the maps connect the locations to stories, but in each case there remains a strong sense that narratives and places are mutually constitutive. Since I was presenting a paper on this very idea, the location of the conference and my adventures there ended up connecting to my presentation in ways that I couldn't have anticipated. In my paper, "'By Sun and by Shadow': Narrative Mapping in The Canterbury Tales," I considered the frame of the The Canterbury Tales as a travel narrative and thought about the function of the tales in relation to travel. I guess it was inevitable that my own experience of traveling would link to my paper.

Walking behind Seljalandsfoss

In one memorable moment, for example, as I scrambled into a cavern behind the waterfall called Seljalandsfoss, I found myself rethinking how time is conceived in The Canterbury Tales. The power of the water was palpable, so palpable that I emerged from the experience drenched. Water rolls off of the mountain inexorably; currents and gravity converge so that the water travels forcefully in one direction, a teleological natural wonder. (Though I was later told that the wind is sometimes so strong that it can send a waterfall upward ...) Anyone who gazes into the heart of a waterfall can see that its movements are beyond human control. Harry Bailey evokes such an image in the prologue to the Man of Law’s Tale, when he laments wasted time:

Lordinges, the tyme wasteth night and day,

And steleth from us, what prively slepinge,

And what thurgh necligence in our wakinge,

As dooth the streem, that turneth never agayn,

Descending fro the montaigne in-to playn. (21-25).

The host’s description of time expresses the movement from one moment to the next in a strikingly geographical way. Time is like a stream, whose current only moves one way. The progression of time is like gravity, flowing down the mountain in a way that we mortals are powerless to fight. We are always in the flow of time; it’s not so visible or tangible as the waterfall, but its movement is just as relentless. The pilgrims’ trip to Canterbury might be meandering and, ultimately, incomplete, but time moves along as they tell their tales and we read them.

This description of time as a geographical feature connects temporal movement, often seen as linear and narrative (at least in many Western cultures), with the more spatial and visual. Since the frame of The Canterbury Tales is a travel narrative, this connection between narrative and landscape makes sense. Medieval travel narratives, all along the spectrum from real to fictional, follow a model of connecting locations to stories of things that have happened there (or may have happened there). And my travel the week before had been the same. The part of the gorge leading to Seljalandsfoss, for example, is named Troll’s Gorge for an old troll woman who tried to cross it. Other places I visited connect to people and events from the sagas, and the sagas in turn are consistently connected to topographical features that we can visit today. A hill or city or waterfall links us with things that happened there a thousand years ago. Travel narratives more generally serve to yoke stories and locations. Medieval mappae mundi take this connection even further, collapsing past and present by presenting all of their details in

Babylon and Tower of Babel from Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon
(From the British Library's Medieval Manuscripts Blog)

terms of space: here is where Lot’s wife looked back, here is where the Tower of Babel was constructed, here is where Alexander crossed the Hellespont. In Maps of Medieval Thought, Naomi Reed Kline describes the medieval world map as "a visual encyclopedia of images and disparate facts" which she contrasts with the "linear and discursive" nature of language (89). The depiction of historical narratives on these maps is spatial rather that teleological; bits of text only make sense in terms of their location on the map. Pilgrimage both relies upon this sense of narrative location and imposes a linearity to it, as pilgrims create an itinerary to a place because of the story associated with it. You go to Canterbury because that is where Thomas Becket was martyred. (And many of us, in turn, go to Canterbury because of The Canterbury Tales.) Chaucer's pilgrims perpetually travel the road to Canterbury, always moving toward it and never arriving. Yet The Canterbury Tales do not describe the journey itself, do not recreate the landscape or experience of travel in words. Rather, the text employs a kind of narrative mapping to move the characters along via stories. Tales whose subject matter spans the globe serve to paint a line between two distinct locations in England.

I argue that Chaucer's use of narrative mapping in The Canterbury Tales serves to reexamine the ways in which time and space function together in the act of traveling. Chaucer specifically calls attention to the connection between story and travel in the prologues to The Man of Law's Tale and The Parson's Tale. In each prologue, the host notes the position of the sun and the shadows it creates in order to ascertain the time and thus to decide how many tales may yet be told that day. Each tale is told as a result of these calculations, and thus each tale begins with a specific sense of correlation to the journey at hand. Unlike the bits of narrative on mappae mundi, these stories do not directly concern the location of their telling, but instead represent the movement through time and space that constitutes travel itself. To map the progress of these pilgrims, then, is only possible by engaging with acts of storytelling.

The Tabard, Urry's edition of Chaucer (1720)
(Courtesy of Visualizing Chaucer)

In the prologue to the Canterbury Tales, the narrator takes pains to give us “Th' estaat, th' array, the nombre, and eek the cause/ Why that assembled was this compaignye/ In southwerk at this gentil hostelrye/ That highte the tabard, faste by the belle” (716-19). The people on the trip are clear to us, so much so that my students came in angry with the Wife of Bath one semester. We get details about them that give context to the stories they tell, and many of the stories (such as the Wife’s) are deeply rooted in the character who tells them. The places are far less clear. My colleague Kara McShane has recently created a website called Visualizing Chaucer, and it features a constantly increasing number of images of the pilgrims and their tales. Under the heading “places,” however, only two locations are mentioned: the Tabard Inn and Canterbury Cathedral. Since the pilgrims never seem to actually make it to Canterbury, the Tabard Inn is the only place in the text well-defined enough to illustrate. And even the inn is simply placed “fast by the belle.”  Despite the frame’s implied movement, the stories could be told anywhere (though the pilgrimage gives a reason for the disparate group to be together, and starting in Southwark may increase the possibility of mixing such a cross-section of society). Once the tale-telling begins, the movement from Southwark to Canterbury recedes into near invisibility as we’re treated to tales with locations that are both specific and general but that do not in any way correspond to the landscape through which the pilgrims move.

Because of this lack of topographical detail, the moments when the host does seem to call attention to the surroundings are striking. Before introducing the Man of Law’s Tale, we are told that
           
           Our Hoste sey wel that the brighte sonne

The ark of his artificial day had ronne

The fourthe part, and half an houre, and more;

And though he were not depe expert in lore,

He wiste it was the eightetethe day

Of April, that is messager to May;

And sey wel that the shadwe of every tree

Was as in lengthe the same quantitee

That was the body erect that caused it. (1-9)

Photo from my own pilgrimage to
Canterbury in 2011

The passage continues for some time, as the host notices many things about the shadows and infers many things about the time on account of what he sees. Josie Bloomfield pointed out last year at the Plymouth Medieval and Renaissance Forum (in a talk titled "Walking with an Astrolabe: Measuring Time on Chaucer’s Pilgrimage") that his information is not particularly accurate and is more cumbersome than it needs to be. If the host wants to know the time, listening to church bells would be much easier. And yet Chaucer chooses to write it this way. The details he includes might not describe a specific location on the journey to Canterbury, but they do describe sun and tree and shadow in order to define a specific point on the journey. As Helen Cooper explains in The English Romance in Time, “A phrase such as ‘a day’s journey’ is in fact tautologous, since ‘journey’ derives from journée, how far can be covered in a day. Distance itself was hard to measure, and the conversion of space into time provided a functional and accessible approximation. The ease of the conversion is itself an indication of how one-dimensional travel appeared, like time itself. The conversion worked in the other direction too, to represent time as space. Dante famously claimed to have had his vision of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven … mid-way along the pathway of his life, in the thirty-fifth year of his allotted seventy” (68). To travel is to move through space and time simultaneously, and to pilgrimage is to ultimately to collapse the two. We go to the place where Becket was killed in the past because that location has meaning for us in the present. The host further connects location to time when he uses the waterfall metaphor I mentioned above. The conclusion of his astronomical musings is to ask the Man of Law to waste no more time and tell his tale. There is some irony in how much time the host spends in trying to move things along, but the sustained focus on scenery and time and story-telling functions to remind us of the connection between travel and narrative in the Tales.

The tale the Man of Law tells is itself full of travel, as Custance sails from east to west and back again. Kathy Lavezzo argues in Angels on the Edge of the World that "since Custance's journey begins in Syria, the cartographic territory evoked in the tale . . . suggests a map of the world" (95). Both we as readers and the pilgrims as listeners can follow Custance’s voyages while the Man of Law describes them. Stories, after all, are a kind of travel, as reading about travel to holy places sometimes functioned as virtual pilgrimage for those who

Detail from Gustaf Tenggren illustration
to the Man of Law's Tale (1961)

couldn’t make the actual journey. Yet as John F. Plummer noted the same day as my own talk in a fantastic paper called "Figures of Geo-political Spaces in the Man of Law's Tale," Custance’s journey is not as specific geographically as it is in Chaucer’s sources. The Man of Law often cannot name the castle or island on which Custance lands. At one point he explains that her boat goes "Som-tyme West, som-tyme North and South,/ And som-tyme Est, ful many a wery day" (948-949). So, basically, her boat goes in every direction. Nothing could be farther from the image of the forcefully direct waterfall. And time is no less clearly defined. Custance’s ship is carried back and forth across the ocean for "Yeres and dayes," a time that seems specific, with the addition of days, and yet is nonetheless vague (463). How many years? How many days? Later, her ship is at sea for "Fyve yeer and more" -- we do get a number of years this time, but the "and more" undoes that precision (902). The sense of movement over space and through time is almost magnified by this unspecificity, as our heroine’s movements could cover any distance we could imagine. Yet the passage of time is indelibly linked to the oceanic spaces through which she is traveling. Everything about her tale is rooted in her landscape (or rather oceanscape).

The second mention of sun and shadows comes before the Parson’s Tale, which is further removed from physical travel than the Man of Law’s choice of material. In this second instance, the geotemporal reflections in this scene come not from the host, but from the narrator Geoffrey. He begins with reference to the previous tale, which places the observations explicitly between tales:

By that the maunciple hadde his tale al ended,

The sonne fro the south lyne was descended

So lowe, that he nas nat, to my sighte,

Degreës nyne and twenty as in highte.

Foure of the clokke it was tho, as I gesse;

For eleven foot, or litel more or lesse,

My shadwe was at thilke tyme, as there,

Of swich feet as my lengthe parted were

In six feet equal of proportion. (1-9)

 My own interaction with sun and mist and
flowers at the base of Gullfloss

With the shift from host to Geoffrey, we also get a more personal interaction with the landscape, as the calculations are made not in terms of trees, but in terms of his own shadow. As before, the landscape is vague and general, and yet it is nonetheless there, and both time and tale-telling are defined by it. And the implications of sun and shadow must be clearly evident, since the host responds to them even as Geoffrey tells us about them. The narrator explains that it is because of the telling length and angle of the shadows that the host addresses the pilgrims:

                      … 'Lordings everichoon,

Now lakketh us no tales mo than oon.

Fulfild is my sentence and my decree;

I trowe that we han herd of ech degree.

Almost fulfild is al myn ordinaunce.' (15-19)

The tale-telling is meant to accompany the trip to Canterbury, so the idea that all but one pilgrim has told a tale and that the host’s ordinance is almost fulfilled gives us a clear sense of movement. If this many tales has been told while riding along, they must have been getting somewhere. And again this knowledge of movement and this request for another tale comes from observations about the play of the sun on the world, details about their surroundings so clear that the host could speak up even as the narrator muses to us about his own shadow.

The Parson’s Tale that follows is, to put it mildly, different from the Man of Law’s. In response to the host’s invitation to give the company a fable, the parson retorts “Thou getest fable noon ytoold for me” (31). And not only is it not a fable, but it’s not even really a tale at all.  It’s more of a sermon. While the Man of Law, responding to a similar request from the host, sends us around the world with his narrative, the parson wants us to instead look inward and examine our souls for a different sort of pilgrimage. As he explains,

          And jhesu, for his grace, wit me sende

          To shewe yow the wey, in this viage,
          Of thilke parfit glorious pilgrymage
          That highte jerusalem celestial. (48-51)

The parson wants to achieve the perfect pilgrimage of celestial Jerusalem, which isn’t physical but is rather spiritual in nature. Even though tales like the Man of Law’s don’t

John's vision of Christ and heavenly Jerusalem, Revelation 21: 2-8
from Yates Thompson 10 f. 36
(Courtesy of the British Library)

directly relate to the voyage at hand, they’re still part of a shared game of tale-telling that is associated with the time it takes to get from one place in England to another. The Parson, on the other hand, yanks us out of the temporal realm and leads us to a kind of pilgrimage that is related to a Canterbury pilgrimage spiritually (at least ideally speaking – some pilgrims seem to have more spiritual reasons than others), but is distinct in more practical ways. As Helen Cooper notes, “The pathway of life is also the journey of life; life as quest” (68). We’re all moving from birth to death, and many hope that death will be followed by a pleasant afterlife. As the narrator in Pearl just can’t help but try to cross the river in his vision, it’s easy to mistake geographical movement as the way to achieve that ultimate pilgrimage, but the parson insistently reminds us that we must look inward and turn our minds to higher things. It is perhaps telling that a “tale” with so little connection to either narrative or location follows an extended musing on the visual cues of the passage of time.  We might long for the eternal, but in the meantime we’re stuck in the temporal realm.

As we read these moments where time and space rise to the surface of the Canterbury Tales’ frame narrative only to be followed by tales with an increasingly vague sense of physical locatedness, the connection in narrative between time and space becomes both apparent and richly complex. It is impossible to separate the one from the other, and yet neither is fixed. Whether we read a story or travel to Iceland or just sit and wait, things change. Time passes. The earth shifts, and landscapes are built and rebuilt. The simultaneously uncertain and sure movement of those pilgrims as they wend their way and tell there tales both removes us from time and space and reminds us that we can never escape them. Except, perhaps, in the afterlife.

Layers of lava rock look heavenly to me

Calling all Northern Arthurian Enthusiasts!

The New Chaucer Society has published the CFP for its upcoming conference in Reykjavik (July 16-20), and I am already counting the days before I can hop on a plane and revisit Iceland — one of my favorite places on the planet.

This conference promises an array of exciting threads, and several of them focus on intersections between Scandinavian cultures and those of Continental and Insular medieval Europe. I'm going to be organizing and presiding over a session entitled "Northern Arthurs," and I'll provide the description here for easy reference:

This panel will explore the literary treatment of Arthur and his knights in the cultures of the North, a subject that Geraldine Barnes has identified as "ripe for further investigation within the fields of medieval translation, cross-cultural relations, and the reception of Arthurian narratives." Following the work of Marianne E. Kalinke's edited book The Arthur of the North, the panel seeks to inspire additional research in this area by addressing questions like the following: how does a study of the riddarasögur -- Scandinavian versions of Arthurian narratives -- offer up new perspectives on both the literary culture of the North and on the pervasiveness of Arthurian materials? How do such narratives reflect and adapt to their cultural surroundings? What does the transmission of such texts -- indelibly tied as they are to the traditions of continental and Insular Europe -- reveal about the intersections of Scandinavian, Continental European, and Insular traditions in the late Middle Ages?

If you, or anyone you know, are interested in submitting a paper proposal on this topic, you can reach me at lknorako@gmail.com. I'll be accepting proposals through June 1st and would be delighted to hear from you. One of the many wonderful aspects of NCS is its active inclusion of graduate students, and I am hoping very much to include at least one grad student (if not more) in the session.

On a related (and important!) note, I also want to mention an upcoming conference in Oslo (23-25 May, 2013) entitled "The Arthur of the North." Paper proposals are due to the organizers by March 1st, and you can find all of the relevant details here. Marianne Kalinke — who has played a consistent and pivotal role in this emerging sub-field of Arthurian studies — will be one of the plenary speakers, as will David Wallace and Raluca Radulescu. All in all, it promises to be an exciting gathering, and I am looking forward to hearing all of the new ideas and conversations that will doubtless emerge.

One foot in the sea and the other on land

What it looks like between coasts when I fly

As I transition from one coast to another, one school year to another, and one season to another, I think a lot about thresholds. I try hard to think of each phase or moment or experience in my life as a thing unto itself instead of a place between. Graduate school, for example, could be a liminal space between college and career, but it seems a shame to think of such an extended period of my life as simply a means to an end (especially in this uncertain market). Sometimes I sit in a coffee shop, reading or writing, and I really reflect on how privileged I am to be able to spend some years of my life learning and thinking and growing as a person and a scholar. How amazing it is to sit in the afternoon sunlight, reading a book and learning even more about the things I love. How incredible it is to work with students and to see them really think about literature and the world around them. Even the struggle to come up with new ideas, the intensity of teaching, the insecurities which come with grad school -- those are a part of my life, a part of all that's good in it and all that makes it worthwhile to me. These years, I must remind myself, are valuable unto themselves.

An overflowing border

As a medievalist, the struggle against the idea of middles is constant. Though the term "Middle Ages" is certainly less pejorative than "Dark Ages," it still gives a sense of a period between the glory of Rome and the Renaissance. A placeholder in history. It seems doubtful to me that people woke up on New Year's Day of 1500 (or 1495 or 1450 or 1350 or 1300 …) and felt suddenly reborn. Even midnight on New Year's, which seems to be a crystal-clear liminal point, shatters when we consider all of the time zones of the world. Watching through a television set in the United States as the ball drops in Australia, I can't help but feel a bit unsettled about our privileging of that particular moment. Nor can I fail to notice when I reach the new year in New York before my friends in California do. And this is not to mention the fact that there are different calendars in the world that have different New Year's, and the fact that even our Gregorian calendar has been used with different New Year's in mind. In the Middle Ages there seem to have been several possible dates, and people in the Early Modern period celebrated on March 25th. How are we to find the point of transition if it keeps moving? And what do we do with a transition period, a middle, that takes up a thousand years? It's interesting that we often think of middle as center, as central. We often see those things on the periphery as less important. Yet in history as in our lives it's easy to see moments or years or centuries as simply between the real thing. Not only does this kind of thinking ignore realities of connection and continuity, but it denies the importance of the individual dots on the timeline.

Fleeting traces of our threshold presence

On my trip home I spent some nice afternoons at the beach, visiting my much-missed Pacific Ocean, and I thought about how hard it often is to pinpoint a precise spot where one time or space ends and another begins. I walked through that tricky line on the shore where dry feet and wet feet are only moments apart, and I examined that strip of sand. What was above water one moment was below it the next, and even the extent to which the water reached was always different. The curved border between dry sand and wet sand (and even wetter sand) shifts constantly, and must be slightly different each day. Indeed, it must change throughout the day as well, and in more subtle ways than just the changing tides. As I rolled up my jeans and moved closer to the water, I noticed that the way the water moves over the sand is new each time, that the ripples of water are ever-changing and that they leave an imprint both of their shape and their substance on the sand behind them. As I tried to discern the line between the realms of ocean and sea, I found that there really is no simple answer. There is no line and there's always a line and there are a million different lines. I spoke in my paper at the recent NCS conference on the Man of Law's Tale about how the realms of land and sea are never as separate as they appear on the map, and it was good to actually look at the space between and in those realms. So often I find myself getting caught up in the theoretical. Of course I am a literature person -- examining texts is what I do. And I'm a medievalist -- thinking about things long ago is my job. But after writing so much about concepts of time and space and the ocean, it's good to get reacquainted with the ocean itself. To get my feet wet again, as it were.

The waves leave behind remnants of sea, land, and air

On my trip I was reading Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us, and was struck by a passage from the preface to the 1961 edition describing how the floor of the deep sea "receives[s] sediments from the margins of the continents" such as "bits of wood and leaves, and … sands containing nuts, twigs, and the bark of trees" (x).The abyssal plains, therefore, include tangible pieces of the coast. And it is also the waters of the world that have carved out valleys and canyons now well above ground. Water has in many ways shaped our landscapes, just as the land provides the floor of our oceans and rivers. Carson explains of the ocean's formation that water wore away the land to create the ocean, while the minerals from these worn-away continents gave the sea its saltiness in "an endless, inexorable process that has never stopped" (7). In other words, the water continually shapes the land, while the land ceaselessly gives the ocean its salty form. Over the long history of the earth, land and sea have merged, shifted, and forged one another. Geological time, it seems, has its own ideas about topographical and temporal boundaries. To try to think of any particular space or time as its own separate entity really only works in a single instant. Even in that instant the lines are fraught, but only in that instant are lines really visible. Boundaries and borders are shifting, fleeting, intersecting. I played with this notion by snapping pictures of the space where ocean meets shore in order to try to capture some of those threshold moments. And even in my photographs, I cannot really tell for sure where water ends and sand begins. Can you?

Where does the sea end and the land begin?

NCS: A Belated Retrospectve

It’s been a long, long while since I contributed to this blog, and as a result I'm a bit backlogged with things I want to post! Since my last substantial entry, I finished my dissertation, defended in April, and moved to California just two days after graduation in May. Between all of that, continuing to teach online, and wrist surgery (Part the First took place in early July, and Part the Second just two days ago), life has definitely been at its busiest! I have, at regular intervals, kind of felt like this guy:

Since May, I’ve been laboring away on the first of a few retrospectives on my time in Rochester, a task that is proving more challenging than I’d anticipated. I will post it eventually, but in the meantime, I’m going to start contributing again with entries that behave themselves more immediately!

Excited as I was to make the move out to California, leaving Rochester was incredibly hard. I went to college in the same town where I attended high school, and so the move to graduate school was the first one that I made completely on my own terms. Rochester was the place where I met many of my closest friends, where I got engaged, and where, in many respects, I really began to come into my own.  California has certainly treated me very well so far -- and I cannot express how grateful I am to be living in the same house with my husband again! -- but the magnitude of everything I left behind has had me feeling more than a little displaced these past few months.  It’s a feeling I know and understand having grown up in a military family, but I found myself nevertheless needing something to boost my spirits -– something to help me reconnect with the things I love in the midst of newness and uncertainty. 

The NCS conference proved to be just that.  I arrived in Portland very worn out from the transitioning, the surgery, a variety of other stressors, and – I’ll admit it –the mad rush to write a conference paper that made sense to someone outside of my own head.  As soon as the conference began, however, I started to feel a bit more like my old self. Reuniting with friends and making new ones, wandering around an unfamiliar city of impossibly friendly people, eating excellent food (good lord, Voodoo Donuts!!) and enjoying an array of deeply meaningful conversations certainly buoyed my spirits. And the sessions themselves were truly innervating -– I don’t know when I’ve been to a conference so rich and alive with ideas and collaborative spirit.

One of the many things I love about NCS is its structure.  The thematic threads were new to me back in Siena (my first NCS conference, and what a conference it was!!), and I do love their effect –- the way in which they organically encourage extended explorations and conversations. I found the threads this year especially cohesive and in alignment with one another. Papers spoke to each other across sessions in the most serendipitous of ways, and on more than one occasion I found myself so innervated by the energy of a session that I couldn’t wait to get back to writing and to research -– a feeling I had truly begun to miss. The transcendently insane pre-dissertation-filing extravaganza had burned that fire down to a fairly decrepit pile of embers (20 hours a day of editing, as well as deciding, in a fit of madness, to read your entire dissertation out loud to yourself in order to catch all of your typos will certainly do that!).  I was so relieved, as a result, to feel my old enthusiasms returning.

I attended a number of compelling sessions and could very easily devote an entire post to each of them! I will, in the meantime, touch  on some of the highlights. My conferencing began with the Gender and Race panel, and I was absolutely fascinated by Chris Chism’s paper on Mandeville.  She focused on two particular episodes -- one involving a king's dragon-daughter and another involving a sparrow hawk –- to point out the alternative and more peaceable modes of Othering that the Mandeville-author puts forward. Listening to her careful interpretation and contextualization of these episodes really brought home to me the importance of balancing what I like to call 'expansive and contractive reading.' It’s actually an extension of a lesson I learned in Shotokan karate –- the idea being that there are times in one’s training where you have to focus carefully on a single area of your karate in order to improve it (i.e. contractive), and other times where you need to paint with broader brush strokes, taking in large swathes of kinesthetic information all at once(i.e. expansive).  It’s the difference between correcting your foot positioning in back-stance, for instance, versus memorizing all of the movements of a kata so that you can begin to work on it at a deeper level.  To tie this back to Mandeville, what struck me so much about Chism's paper was how it offered a reading of conversion and conquest in Mandeville that was both aligned but vibrantly distinct from my own argument that I made in my dissertation. I focused on the matter of conversion in the text as well, but by focusing squarely on the objects of potential conversion (Jews, Saracens, and Mongols as they appear in the text), I overlooked the anecdotes that she explored in such marvelous detail; and as she revealed in her paper, those portions of Mandeville actually had much to say about the very topics and issues I saw explored in other sections of the text. I was so grateful for her paper as a result, because it reminded me, among many other things, to widen the lens as I work on Mandeville in the future.

I also enjoyed the Ocean Translations session tremendously, in no small part because my inimitable co-blogger (who has, I’d like to add, done an impossibly amazing job at keeping this blog alive while I’ve been digging myself out of the insanity of the past several months!) gave a fantastic paper on The Man of Law’s Tale. I honestly cannot think about MoL, Custance, or, even more broadly,“women who float in boats” (her words) without thinking immediately of Kristi. I’ve heard her present on Custance many times, and I was especially struck this time around by her observation that oceans function as “containers of history” in MoL. She explored the wide array of allusions to Biblical narrative that appear in the passages describing Custance’s rudderless boat rides, and argued convincingly that these ocean passages and the analogies within them serve as a human attempt to connect the land (the containable) with the ocean (the uncontainable). 

The rest of the papers in this session, including one by our fellow UofR compatriot Sharon Rhodes, were wonderfully strong and interconnected as well.  I absolutely loved the fact that the papers were split evenly between Old and Middle English texts and yet remained strongly conversant with one another.  Sharon's uncannily apt evocation of The Knight's Tale at the end of her paper, in fact, served as a perfect transition from Old to Middle English in the session. A question arose, however, in the Q&A over the panelists’ lack of high theory in their work.  It was certainly true that none of the panelists referred to theorists by name or imposed stark and visible theoretical frameworks around their arguments. I honestly didn’t find any of their papers lacking because of this, but rather saw each panelist explore in nuanced and implicit ways how the texts they focused upon grappled with the ideas of liminality, with the limits of human control (cognitive and otherwise), and with a variety of ontological cruxes about the ocean.  I’m not saying that the question was illegitimate by any stretch, but at the same time, I wondered whether it was entirely fair to imply that these papers were potentially lacking because they didn’t feel the need to evoke high theory directly. The speakers, however, did a more than thorough job of gracefully defending their approaches, and that in and of itself was a pleasure to see. By the end of the exchange, in fact, I had the sneaking suspicion that those responses were exactly what the questioner wished to elicit, because he seemed –- at least as far as I could tell – rather satisfied with their responses.

The following day found me at the session entitled “Legal and Literary Forests in Late-Medieval Britain.” My good friend Valerie Johnson presented on The Manciple’s Tale and argued persuasively for a reading of the forest as an ecological threshold — as “a signal to read  the text as a political tale.” Also on the panel was Karl Steel, who gave a lively presentation on deer carcasses and their legal and symbolic implications (you can find a full version of his paper here).     As I listened to his paper, I was particularly struck by his statement that “inanimate objects are forceful entities,”  because it resonated with my argument about books in Chaucer’s poetry, and would also anticipate many of the arguments made throughout the sessions devoted to animate ecologies. Moreover, the conversation that developed in the Q&A period following these papers was especially inspiring.  I appreciated, in particular, the brief discussion on semantics that arose out of Karl's paper.  Is short, one audience member asked about Karl's use of the word “intention.” What resulted was a lively and encouraging offering up of alternatives (agency, direction, propulsion), with additional comments on the implications of each option made along the way.  I found this moment absolutely delightful, because it highlighted the devotion that we all share for words  -- the fact that we all, by becoming literary scholars, become poets as well, treating each word that we include in a given paper with incredible care. 

Being on its sister panel, I all too happily attended the roundtable devoted to animate objects and ecologies, and I found myself thrilled by the energy (dare I say animation?) of both the presenters and the audience. It was the last session of the day, but the room was filled to the brim.  The panelists spoke on all manner of “things”: divine and secular objects, books, straw, eel traps, color, and stained glass, to name but a few.  Jeffrey Jerome Cohen kicked things off by discussing “prismatic ecologies,” posing the question of whether color "possesses an agency that's useful to think with.” He presented the audience with three images that were at once distinct and convergent.  The first was a c. 1375 image of an artist preparing colors with which to paint.  The image, as Cohen observed, highlights the fact that color is a “thing made of other things.” The second image was a 2012 art installation dated by John Ryan. It is, to put it most simply (and to do it no real justice), a large glob of paint on a white canvas. Cohen observed, however, that by being as minimalistic and “hands off” with the paint as it is, this piece allows color to possess a dignity of its own.  As a result, color is allowed to become something autonomous. Finally, Cohen showed us an image of the River Thames and presented it a kind of sculptor. Through this brief survey of images, Cohen advocated for a multi-hued avenue by which we might begin to approach and consider inanimate objects on their own terms. As always, I was struck by Cohen’s ability to take seemingly disparate objects and concepts and demonstrate their synchronicity, a talent that allowed his paper to become prismatic in and of itself.

The conversation continued with Rebecca Davis and Laura Farina both discussing aspects of The House of Fame.  Davis explored how the text describes objects that contain other objects; she used the terminology of hoarding in an incredibly useful way to explain how this poem presents a kind of conservation that “depends on ceaseless movement and recombination.”  Farina took a different approach by exploring “impersonal affect” in The House of Fame. Like Davis, she observed that the poem is full of “stuff made of other stuff,” but she approached the over-stimulation that the narrator experiences through, in part, the lens of autism, drawing on Temple Grandin’s concept of the squeezebox to explain the narrator’s sensations and experiences in the dream vision.  In the end, both of these papers offered up ways of engaging the so-called “vibrant matter” in the poem, and I was fascinated by how they both spoke so directly to one another while also taking such markedly different approaches.

The other papers in this roundtable were equally enervating – from Alexandra Gillespie's lively exploration of straw (bookmarks?) in medieval manuscripts, to Anne Harris’s examination of stained glass and its multihued implications, to Myra Seaman’s exploration of how we “reckon” with objects deemed divine.  The entire roundtable, ultimately, revolved around that question the lies at the heart of object oriented ontology -- namely, what happens when we make ourselves willing to deprioritize human agency? What happens, in other words, when we allow objects an opportunity to misbehave? This idea arose with Mary Kate Hurley's observation that each of the papers dealt in some way with the idea of objects as mediators and with the idea of mediation itself.  Her comment, and Cohen’s response -- that these panels on objects are in some ways designed to figure out what the objects want, and that we have begun to ask why objects do not always “mediate so compliantly” -- would in many ways anticipate the conversation that would continue in the second animate ecology session the following day, one that I felt very fortunate to be a part of.

To that end, I approached my own session with a nervousness that surprised me at first – that is, until I reminded myself that I was speaking on a topic that was incredibly new to me, a topic that couldn't be further away from the material I'd spent the last several years developing into my dissertation. I viewed the paper as an opportunity and as a challenge to myself -- as a way of remembering, among other things, that I could (and should!) talk about things aside from the Crusades from time to time.  I'll confess that when I arrived in Portland the day before the conference, I was still rather uncertain about the merits of what I was saying in my paper.  I felt dangerously far out in left field.  I also worried about having to wait until the last day to present. Truthfully, however, presenting on that final day was the best thing that could have possibly happened. It gave me an opportunity to listen carefully to the conversations that were going on all around me throughout the week, and I even found ways of incorporating and responding to some of them in my paper -- something I had never had the opportunity to do before this conference.  Watching the array of excellent presentations throughout the week, moreover, both inspired me and reminded me of a very simple fact: that we gather together in these places to share ideas both fresh and mature, both established and speculative -- that all are welcome.

I’ll save the details of the session I was a part of for part two of this post (which will be up and running by Saturday, I think).  I'll close for now by expressing my profound gratitude for the many wonderful encounters I had at this conference. Highlights included being introduced to the fantastic fantasy section of Powell’s (and to the Prester John series by Catherynne M. Valente) by a scholar whose generosity and kindness know no bounds, pretending – with some fellow mischief-makers -- to ignite one anti-medieval tome by way of another (see the adjacent photo), getting encouraging feedback on my book project, and, most of all, enjoying the many opportunities I had to reconnect with so many of my old friends from Rochester.  We had a large contingency at the conference this year, and I was fortunate enough to be able to spend some quality time with each of the folks who attended.  One of my favorite and most vivid images of the conference, moreover, was of the banquet. The hum of enthused voices created a din that you had to shout over, and seeing so many people reconnecting with one another – catching glimpses of friendships that must be on their third or fourth decade in some cases – made me so very grateful. I realized, as I looked up from my table where all of my dear friends sat to the numerous other tables filled with similar reunions, that we will always find ways back into each other's lives, and that we have many more adventures to come.  

To be sure, an outsider could look at this conference, or any other that we frequent, and see only a place for "making contacts" and/or for demonstrating one’s worth in the field. For me and for so many others, however, these conferences are opportunities to forge meaningful connections with people who are as crazily passionate as we are about certain aspects of the world.  Conferences as electric as this one, in other words, invite us to commune with one another -- to recognize that we are all, however different our methodologies, striving to read the world, the creatures that populate it, and the texts we encounter along the way in fresh and innovative lights. 

So, here’s to a delightful week in Portland (I raise a glass with my non-gimpy hand)! I am already looking forward with enthusiasm to our reunion in 2014  -- in elf-inhabited Iceland, no less!