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Papers by Jonathan Grove
Norse Greenland: Selected Papers of the Hvalsey Conference 2008 (Journal of the North Atlantic, Special Volume 2), pp. 30–51, 2009
This paper explores the accounts of Norse Greenland in the medieval Icelandic sagas, looking past... more This paper explores the accounts of Norse Greenland in the medieval Icelandic sagas, looking past the Vínland sagas to examine ways in which Greenlandic settings are employed in the 'post-classical' saga-tradition and other texts. The style and content of these tales varied over time, but the recurrence of certain conventional patterns indicates that stories set in Greenland retained important thematic continuities for Icelandic saga audiences. From as early as the 12th century, Icelandic writers identified Greenland as a peripheral space in the Norse world, connected with Iceland, but markedly distinct and remote. This marginalization is evident in the Vínland sagas and developed further in the post-classical tradition, which made Greenland a place of exile in which Icelandic heroes were tested by extreme adversity in the settlements and wilderness. Embodying the preoccupations of Icelandic writers and audiences, these writings tell us little about historical realities in Norse Greenland; but they do show how details of geographical and historical lore were subsumed and transformed in the Icelandic narrative tradition.
Á austrvega. Saga and East Scandinavia. Preprint Papers of the 14th International Saga Conference Uppsala, 9th–15th August 2009, I–II, ed. Agneta Ney, Henrik Williams and Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist, Papers from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences 14, vol. II, pp. 327–335 , 2009
As a source of public recognition and enrichment, as a means of making and breaking the reputatio... more As a source of public recognition and enrichment, as a means of making and breaking the reputations of others, and as a showy but highly conventional form produced and transmitted by poets whose names were perpetuated in tradition, Old Norse court poetry seems to have provided an important conduit for the performance of status rivalry and the matching of skill among its practitioners. The poetic tradition emerged from the progressive appropriation and reinvention of earlier work, as individual skalds struggled to maintain the conventions of a highly circumscribed oral form, while at the same time passing down to posterity material that might differentiate them from their predecessors, contemporaries and successors.
Here I examine how the competitive aspect of skaldic verse-making is expressed in poems attributed to two of the best known court poets of the earlier eleventh century, at the court of Óláfr Haraldsson of Norway, focussing on the indebtedness of Óttarr svarti in his Höfuðlausn to the Víkingarvísar of his kinsman Sigvatr Þórðarson. Patterns of echoes and parallel usages between the works of these court colleagues indicate that the hirðskáld actively engaged with the compositions of their contemporaries, advertising their ability to match or surpass them by referencing their work and developing new formulations from old.
Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 4, 85-131 , 2008
This article examines an exchange of skaldic verses between a number of Icelandic chieftains, lan... more This article examines an exchange of skaldic verses between a number of Icelandic chieftains, landholders and semi-professional poets, reported to have taken place in a period of political crisis in western Iceland in 1229. The surviving sequence, preserved in Sturla Þórðarson’s Íslendinga saga, constitutes an unparalleled example of extended verse-capping in medieval Icelandic narrative writing. The historical context of these verses and their narrative treatment in Íslendinga saga are considered in detail, and some new readings of the verse material and the political relationships they disclose are proposed. The verses are shown to illuminate the continuing value of skaldic performance as an instrument of social and political leverage in thirteenth-century Iceland, and the stimulatory function of competitive posturing in skaldic discourse. The analysis presented here suggests the need to revise some recent propositions concerning the supposed clerical and scholastic co-option of skaldic poetics in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Further stanzas composed in the period 1229–32 perpetuate the agonistic pattern developed in the initial sequence, and the narrative framing of these later compositions is shown to embody conspicuous ambivalence to the adversarial ethics underlying the continuing exchange.
Editions of Skaldic Poetry by Jonathan Grove
Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages. Volume 5: Poetry in Sagas of Icelanders. Edited by Margaret Clunies Ross, Kari Ellen Gade, and Tarrin Wills. Turnhout: Brepols, 2022
A new edition of all 73 stanzas of poetry transmitted in Grettis saga, based primarily on the cop... more A new edition of all 73 stanzas of poetry transmitted in Grettis saga, based primarily on the copies of the saga in AM 551a 4to and the other principal early vellums (AM 556a 4to, AM 152 fol, DG10 and the short fragment AM 571 4to) together with Jón Eggertsson's C17th transcriptions of the verse material from a lost manuscript of the saga closely related to the text in 556a
Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages. Volume 3: Poetry from Treatises on Poetics. Edited by Kari Ellen Gade. Turnhout: Brepols, 2017
An edition of two Old Norse stanzas preserved in a C14th Icelandic learned miscellany (AM 732 b 4... more An edition of two Old Norse stanzas preserved in a C14th Icelandic learned miscellany (AM 732 b 4°): the first a scurrilous verse ridiculing the rejection of a failed suitor, written in a simple code; the second an ironic stanza apparently offering overblown praise to a leatherworker with a series of Latin honorific terms, some of which may have been culled from the Horatian Ode 'Iam satis terris nivis atque dirae'
Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages. Volume 7: Poetry on Christian Subjects. Edited by Margaret Clunies Ross. Turnhout: Brepols, 2007
Edition of a simple end-rhymed stanza on lawgiving, preserved in a C14th compendium of Norwegian ... more Edition of a simple end-rhymed stanza on lawgiving, preserved in a C14th compendium of Norwegian law-codes (GKS 3260 4°), which describes the qualities esteemed in the medieval Norse lǫgmaðr (‘legal expert, lawman’).
FOLLOW THE LINK to the relevant page at the Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages site.
https://www.abdn.ac.uk/skaldic/db.php?id=2969&if=default&table=text&val=&view=
Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages. Volume 7: Poetry on Christian Subjects. Edited by Margaret Clunies Ross,, 2007
An edition of two stanzas preserved in a C14th Icelandic learned miscellany (AM 732 b 4°), which ... more An edition of two stanzas preserved in a C14th Icelandic learned miscellany (AM 732 b 4°), which constitute the only known examples of medieval Scandinavian Latin poetry composed in Norse skaldic metres.
FOLLOW THE LINK to the relevant page at the Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages site
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/skaldic/db.php?id=2923&if=default&table=text
Book Reviews by Jonathan Grove
Publication Date: 2015 Publication Name: English Historical Review 130
Thesis by Jonathan Grove
The abstract and contents pages from the thesis are supplied in the uploaded document.
Norse Greenland: Selected Papers of the Hvalsey Conference 2008 (Journal of the North Atlantic, Special Volume 2), pp. 30–51, 2009
This paper explores the accounts of Norse Greenland in the medieval Icelandic sagas, looking past... more This paper explores the accounts of Norse Greenland in the medieval Icelandic sagas, looking past the Vínland sagas to examine ways in which Greenlandic settings are employed in the 'post-classical' saga-tradition and other texts. The style and content of these tales varied over time, but the recurrence of certain conventional patterns indicates that stories set in Greenland retained important thematic continuities for Icelandic saga audiences. From as early as the 12th century, Icelandic writers identified Greenland as a peripheral space in the Norse world, connected with Iceland, but markedly distinct and remote. This marginalization is evident in the Vínland sagas and developed further in the post-classical tradition, which made Greenland a place of exile in which Icelandic heroes were tested by extreme adversity in the settlements and wilderness. Embodying the preoccupations of Icelandic writers and audiences, these writings tell us little about historical realities in Norse Greenland; but they do show how details of geographical and historical lore were subsumed and transformed in the Icelandic narrative tradition.
Á austrvega. Saga and East Scandinavia. Preprint Papers of the 14th International Saga Conference Uppsala, 9th–15th August 2009, I–II, ed. Agneta Ney, Henrik Williams and Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist, Papers from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences 14, vol. II, pp. 327–335 , 2009
As a source of public recognition and enrichment, as a means of making and breaking the reputatio... more As a source of public recognition and enrichment, as a means of making and breaking the reputations of others, and as a showy but highly conventional form produced and transmitted by poets whose names were perpetuated in tradition, Old Norse court poetry seems to have provided an important conduit for the performance of status rivalry and the matching of skill among its practitioners. The poetic tradition emerged from the progressive appropriation and reinvention of earlier work, as individual skalds struggled to maintain the conventions of a highly circumscribed oral form, while at the same time passing down to posterity material that might differentiate them from their predecessors, contemporaries and successors.
Here I examine how the competitive aspect of skaldic verse-making is expressed in poems attributed to two of the best known court poets of the earlier eleventh century, at the court of Óláfr Haraldsson of Norway, focussing on the indebtedness of Óttarr svarti in his Höfuðlausn to the Víkingarvísar of his kinsman Sigvatr Þórðarson. Patterns of echoes and parallel usages between the works of these court colleagues indicate that the hirðskáld actively engaged with the compositions of their contemporaries, advertising their ability to match or surpass them by referencing their work and developing new formulations from old.
Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 4, 85-131 , 2008
This article examines an exchange of skaldic verses between a number of Icelandic chieftains, lan... more This article examines an exchange of skaldic verses between a number of Icelandic chieftains, landholders and semi-professional poets, reported to have taken place in a period of political crisis in western Iceland in 1229. The surviving sequence, preserved in Sturla Þórðarson’s Íslendinga saga, constitutes an unparalleled example of extended verse-capping in medieval Icelandic narrative writing. The historical context of these verses and their narrative treatment in Íslendinga saga are considered in detail, and some new readings of the verse material and the political relationships they disclose are proposed. The verses are shown to illuminate the continuing value of skaldic performance as an instrument of social and political leverage in thirteenth-century Iceland, and the stimulatory function of competitive posturing in skaldic discourse. The analysis presented here suggests the need to revise some recent propositions concerning the supposed clerical and scholastic co-option of skaldic poetics in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Further stanzas composed in the period 1229–32 perpetuate the agonistic pattern developed in the initial sequence, and the narrative framing of these later compositions is shown to embody conspicuous ambivalence to the adversarial ethics underlying the continuing exchange.
Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages. Volume 5: Poetry in Sagas of Icelanders. Edited by Margaret Clunies Ross, Kari Ellen Gade, and Tarrin Wills. Turnhout: Brepols, 2022
A new edition of all 73 stanzas of poetry transmitted in Grettis saga, based primarily on the cop... more A new edition of all 73 stanzas of poetry transmitted in Grettis saga, based primarily on the copies of the saga in AM 551a 4to and the other principal early vellums (AM 556a 4to, AM 152 fol, DG10 and the short fragment AM 571 4to) together with Jón Eggertsson's C17th transcriptions of the verse material from a lost manuscript of the saga closely related to the text in 556a
Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages. Volume 3: Poetry from Treatises on Poetics. Edited by Kari Ellen Gade. Turnhout: Brepols, 2017
An edition of two Old Norse stanzas preserved in a C14th Icelandic learned miscellany (AM 732 b 4... more An edition of two Old Norse stanzas preserved in a C14th Icelandic learned miscellany (AM 732 b 4°): the first a scurrilous verse ridiculing the rejection of a failed suitor, written in a simple code; the second an ironic stanza apparently offering overblown praise to a leatherworker with a series of Latin honorific terms, some of which may have been culled from the Horatian Ode 'Iam satis terris nivis atque dirae'
Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages. Volume 7: Poetry on Christian Subjects. Edited by Margaret Clunies Ross. Turnhout: Brepols, 2007
Edition of a simple end-rhymed stanza on lawgiving, preserved in a C14th compendium of Norwegian ... more Edition of a simple end-rhymed stanza on lawgiving, preserved in a C14th compendium of Norwegian law-codes (GKS 3260 4°), which describes the qualities esteemed in the medieval Norse lǫgmaðr (‘legal expert, lawman’).
FOLLOW THE LINK to the relevant page at the Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages site.
https://www.abdn.ac.uk/skaldic/db.php?id=2969&if=default&table=text&val=&view=
Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages. Volume 7: Poetry on Christian Subjects. Edited by Margaret Clunies Ross,, 2007
An edition of two stanzas preserved in a C14th Icelandic learned miscellany (AM 732 b 4°), which ... more An edition of two stanzas preserved in a C14th Icelandic learned miscellany (AM 732 b 4°), which constitute the only known examples of medieval Scandinavian Latin poetry composed in Norse skaldic metres.
FOLLOW THE LINK to the relevant page at the Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages site
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/skaldic/db.php?id=2923&if=default&table=text
Publication Date: 2015 Publication Name: English Historical Review 130
The abstract and contents pages from the thesis are supplied in the uploaded document.