As many/most know at this point, I'm now blogger #5 at In The Middle! The write-up below on NCS London and Orkney kind of ballooned in the last 24 hours, so I'll be writing a *separate* post (which will appear very soon -- likely tomorrow) with details on my move to In the Middle and on the fantastic person who will be the new co-blogger here at In Romaunce. More soon, but for now, some thoughts on NCS London, Orkney, "things material," and convivial scholarship.
*****
Between the NCS London conference and a brief but fulfilling
trip to Orkney, the past few weeks have been a blur in the best of ways. The
NCS conference was absolutely spectacular. So many meetings of friends old and
new, fantastic sessions and plenaries, the joy seeing Kristi’s and my Narrative
Conduit sessions come together as beautifully as they did, and a series of
outings that ranged from a tour of the medieval Thames (more on that in a
moment!) to the rare opportunity to see the Book of Margery Kempe and the
Shewings of Julian of Norwich side by side (at an exhibit on Voice at the
Wellcome Collection) to the concluding “pilgrimage” to Canterbury. I am so
profoundly grateful to all who made this conference possible – it was, from
start to finish, a wildly generative and innervating gathering, and it did so
much to renew my energy and enthusiasm for all that I’m working on at the
moment. Between the move and the intensity of the job search, I’d been feeling
my momentum flagging in the weeks leading up to the trip, but I’ve come away
from the conference feeling, as I always do after these gatherings, a
much-needed surge of excitement for projects well underway, and for projects I
hope to embark on in the not-too-distant future.
There is so much to write about, but I think I’ll focus these
next few paragraphs on one particular, but enduring theme of the trip: the
importance of interweaving material history/materiality into what I do as a literary
scholar. Several happenings over the past two weeks brought home to me the
importance of the material – how the spaces and places that we encounter in our
studies of the Middle Ages can be made all the more vivid by bearing witness to
them in tactile ways.
The tour of Medieval London and the Thames was the first of
such happenings. Shortly after Kristi and I organized our session on
Narrative Conduits, it occurred to me that getting to
wander around together and be guided through the medieval parts of the city and
the river might help to amplify our conversations. I was directly inspired by the
glacier tour that Jeffrey J. Cohen organized for the Ice session presenters at NCS
Iceland (you can read all about it
here). That tour so beautifully informed and inflected the conversations that
developed in our sessions, and I was hopeful that organizing a tour of medieval
London might do the same for Kristi’s and my sessions this year.
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| Gustav Milne, walking us down a medieval road in Cheapside. |
We were lucky enough – through a series of fortunate events
– to have the incomparable Gustav Milne lead us on a tour of medieval London for three hours the day before the conference started. He was an extraordinary guide, and he began our tour at the Museum of London, showing us
numerous artifacts that ranged from Anglo-Saxon pottery, to a clinker-built
ship fragment (the etchings on which proved the numeric literacy of the
shipbuilders), to a series of pilgrim souvenir badges that told the story of
St. Thomas a Beckett. From there, we wandered briskly all over town, where he
showed us all manner of things: vestiges of the medieval city wall; narrow
medieval city roads; the place in Cheapside where Thomas a Beckett was likely
born; ruins of medieval parish churches; the Vintner’s Hall (roundabouts where
Chaucer would have been born); the Guild Hall – site of a medieval marketplace
and, before that, a Roman amphitheater, the location of which is now marked by
a curving black line on the ground; the site of the medieval London Bridge;
glimpses across the river of Southwark; and, in closing, the site of Chaucer’s
Custom House, where he worked as a comptroller and likely wrote the
Canterbury Tales. The tour also included
a trip to the Thames’ foreshore, where we got to hunt for shards of medieval
and Roman pottery and tile. We wandered in and around vestiges of the medieval
wharf, and Gustav was kind enough to identify and date what we found. I was
stunned by how
easy it was to find these sorts of things. There were
little bits of them everywhere you looked! This particular portion of the trip,
coupled with our stop at the site of the Custom House were especially powerful
and moving. I found myself grateful to be reminded, so palpably, of the
material reality of Chaucer’s London, especially since it can be easy to lose
sight of those sorts of details as you attend to all that he wrote. I am,
needless to say, looking forward all the more to teaching the
Canterbury Tales and
Troilus this fall, medieval pottery
shards and photos of the tour in hand!
 |
My findings, which included part of a large
medieval jug handle, part of a medieval
peg tile, and shards of glazed medieval pottery.
|
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Remnants of the medieval wharf along
the Thames' foreshore. |
 |
Near the site of the Customs House. Gustav recited the opening
lines of the General Prologue, and reminded us that Chaucer
likely wrote the Canterbury Tales while at work there.
(photo by Jeffrey J. Cohen)
|
The tour reminded me, in short, of how valuable it can be to
attend to the material reality of the culture that produces the literature we
study, and it subsequently got me thinking about future projects. At present,
I’ve got five out of six book chapters drafted, and it’s looking more and more
as though I might be able to get a complete manuscript together by the end of
next summer/early Fall. I’ve generated a few ideas for a subsequent major
project for a while now, and have found myself going back and forth in the past
several months about which one to pursue. I think I’ll always gravitate back to
the literature of crusading, and to matters of Otherness and alterity in
medieval literature, but I’m feeling a need right now to branch into other
areas once this crusades book is realized. And, I’ll confess, I’ve been looking
for an excuse to get back to work on my work on “animate books” in Chaucer’s
poetry for a while now. So! Thanks to this incredibly tour (for which I cannot thank Gustav enough!), the energy of the NCS
conference, and the much-needed validation and support of several friends, I’ve
decided to put my energies into a book project on materialism and Chaucer once
I’ve got a complete manuscript of
Crusading
Imaginary. I’ll save the details for later, but I am beyond excited about
it, and it is currently serving as a much-needed “carrot” as I make my way
through chapter revisions!
The trip to the Orkneys brought home the significance of
material history all the more – and how helpful it can be to situate literature
in its landscape. Kristi and I galavanted around the islands for about five
days, and encountered Pictish artifacts, Neolithic stone circles and burial
cairns, Viking settlement ruins, Viking graffiti *inside* Neolithic burial
cairns, and we also had the privilege of listening to a phenomenal story-teller
tell a series of traditional Orcadian folktales – stories viscerally tied to
the landscape and traditions of these islands. I knew before going – thanks to
Leah Haught’s work on the Orkney boys in Malory -- that Orkney was a bit of a
liminal space. Because of its dual allegiance to the kings of Scotland and
Norway, it was as Norse as it was Scottish in the Middle Ages, and I was
curious to see how much of that liminality still remained. As it turns out, the
Orcadians pride themselves on their Norse ancestry, and so much of what we
encountered — the folktales, the richly layered material history of the place,
the keen attempts to preserve that history — demonstrated as much.
 |
| Maeshowe. |
The power of
material history was especially prevalent at Maeshowe, the last place we
visited before heading back to London. Following our guide, we half-crawled our
way into the 5,000 year old neolithic burial mound, and then stood as a group
in semi-darkness. Our guide told us the cairn’s story, starting
with theories of how the Neolithic people managed to drag its massive stones to
this spot. She then recounted how the mound was broken into by the Norsemen,
many of whom decided to do what so many people feel moved to do in such places:
carve their name. In this case, they carved their names in runes, and often
wrote other things about themselves as well. There are references to crusaders
(“Jerusalem-men broke this mound”), attractive women (“Ingigerth is the most
beautiful,” which is accompanied by a drooling dog to stress the point), boasts
(“Eyjolf Kolbeinson carved these runes high up”; “The man who is most skilled
in runes west of the ocean carved these runes . . .”); and the names of recognizable figures such as Ragnar Lothbrok. Aside from the references to
crusading (which both surprised and amazed me given my current work on viking
crusaders), the most striking graffiti was the drawing of the Maeshowe "dragon" and its accompanying otter and coiled serpent. Our guide made a compelling case
for the dragon not being a dragon at all, but rather a wolf, and a very
specific wolf at that: Fenrir. The presence of the other animals
supports this theory:
the otter could be
Otr, killed by Loki in one of many famous myths about the trickster God, and
the serpent could, in turn, be Jormungand – the world serpent and, like Fenrir,
Loki’s offspring.
As I'm sure you can imagine, Kristi and I gestured very excitedly to one
another the entire time, much to the amusement of the non-medievalists in our
midst, I think — but these runes were utterly fascinating to behold. They
correspond with the description of Maeshowe (or Orkahaugr) in the
Orkneyinga saga, and they have so much
to tell us – in however fragmented a way -- about the Norsemen who wrote them.
They are consistently hilarious and viscerally human, and they represent the
largest collection of runic inscriptions (read: viking graffiti) outside
Scandinavia proper.
It was nothing short
of incredible to stand in this space for as long as we did and witness up close
a vivid example of richly imbricated history, and to see first-hand one of the
major landmarks that features so prominently in
Orkneyinga saga. We had similar experiences earlier on in the trip
– our journey to Birsay for instance, a tidal island that features prominently
in
Orkneyinga saga as well, where the
ruins of a Viking settlement (with some stray Pictish ruins in the mix) can be
found; or our time spent inside the Dwarfie stane, a neolithic tomb carved out of a single, enormous glacial erratic. It too was covered in old graffiti (in this case 18th and 19th century travelers), and we spent ample time huddled inside the carved out cave, examining the inscriptions and (on the recommendation of the guide we met at Birsay), humming low notes to feel the walls reverberate and "hum back" -- among the most eery things I have ever experienced. But I think if I had to pick a single example that really brought home
the value of coming into contact with a literary landscape – in this case, that
of the
Orkneyinga saga – it would without question be the experience of standing in Maeshowe.
Needless to say, I've come away from this trip with a renewed
commitment to situating literature alongside its material history and within
its particular landscape, and I have to confess: I am sorely tempted to
create a course on the literature of the Orkneys to put this to practice in the
classroom -- it would be a perfect place to teach a class about the ways in which literature springs from a particular cultural landscape.
In closing, I came away from these two weeks incredibly grateful to be a part of
this field. Every day of the NCS conference promised an array of meetings
(however brief!) with warm and enthusiastic colleagues, with good friends old
(and new!), and an array of deeply generative conversations and presentations. So much conviviality, and so
many commitments to make our field more open and inclusive. As a result, I came away from this journey with renewed energy for my own work but also a renewed sense of optimism for where we
are headed as a community. Cheers, then, to our merry and electric band of
interswervists -- I am already counting the days to NCS Toronto!
