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Articles by Caroline Batten

Emotions: History, Culture, Society, 2024

The Old Norse medical corpus, both manuscript and epigraphic, illuminates under- standings of the... more The Old Norse medical corpus, both manuscript and epigraphic, illuminates under- standings of the body and of the relationship between sickness, somatic emotion and the perceived integrity of the individual self in Viking and medieval Scandinavia. This essay argues that Old Norse medical texts and charms understand illness not only as an imbalance of humours but also as an invasive, anthropomorphised agent that seeks to breach the boundaries of the human body. Falling victim to illness is understood as a zero-sum power exchange, visualised through images of martial defeat and sexualised submission. Strong emotion can be rendered as physical illness in Old Norse literature because both forces threaten the integrity of the contained and individualised self. As a thematic case study, this essay examines runic healing charms, late medieval medical manuscripts and saga episodes dealing with boils and abscesses, which are attributed both to the surging of vital spirits and to the action of supernatural disease agents, to examine the way these texts understand the embodied self.

Viking and Medieval Scandinavia, 2023

This article argues that the most appropriate critical framework for interpreting the comedic asp... more This article argues that the most appropriate critical framework for interpreting the comedic aspects of the eddic poems Lokasenna and Þrymskviða – and understanding their social, cultural, and artistic functions for their medieval audiences – is Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the carnivalesque. Both poems are archetypal examples of what Bakhtin calls 'free play with the sacred': their degrading humour renews rather than negates, purposefully supplanting images of violence, social fracture, and death with images of fertility and productivity. These texts specifically address anxieties around gender performance and sexuality by offering fantasies of regenerative humiliation without lasting damage or consequence, and their structured forays into subversion invite us to re-evaluate their role in the Codex Regius's prosimetric compilation.

Review of English Studies, 2021

Winner of the Review of English Studies 2020 Essay Prize. This article argues that the unusual fo... more Winner of the Review of English Studies 2020 Essay Prize. This article argues that the unusual formal features of the Old English metrical charms are functions of their practical purpose and genre rather than errors, corruptions, or signs of poor composition.

Medium Aevum, 2021

Medium Aevum 89:1 (2021), 143-8.

Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 2021

Winner of the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship Best Article Prize 2023.

Scandinavian Studies, 2019

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/scanstud.91.3.0289?seq=1#page\_scan\_tab\_contents Brynhildr... more https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/scanstud.91.3.0289?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Brynhildr and Guðrún have been treated as valuable and contentious examples of complex female characters in scholarship on women in Old Norse literature. These examinations are broadly concerned with the question of whether female characters have personal autonomy, and, if so, what kind of power they possess, and, if not, the ways in which masculinity works to subjugate femininity, and how male-female binaries of power are established. Though Brynhildr and Guðrún have been the subjects of numerous studies discussing their agency and roles in their fictional communities, the fact that they each engage in numerous speech acts in the wake of male acts of violence has not been sufficiently explored. We can also better understand Brynhildr’s and Guðrún’s use of performatives by examining their emotional somatic manifestations: laughing, lamenting, and weeping or refusing to weep. Using emotion theory (particularly understandings of emotion as both social and performative), filtered through recent studies of the cultural meaning of emotional displays in Old Norse texts, we can reach a deeper understanding of Brynhildr’s and Guðrún’s actions, and the motivations for those actions, in response to acts of male violence. Brynhildr’s and Guðrún’s reactions to the death of Sigurðr, and Guðrún’s reactions to subsequent violence in her story line, are little discussed, aside from Guðrún’s own murders of Atli and her sons. The complexities of both women’s reactions—particularly Brynhildr’s, which are often dismissed as bewildering—reveal much about the depiction of female autonomy and gendered social dynamics in eddic heroic texts. In this article, I argue that Brynhildr and Guðrún enact numerous performatives across the eddic heroic poems, both emotives and speech acts, in a continuous attempt to self-determine. Brynhildr works to claim, and to force others to acknowledge, her identity as both a suc- cessful avenger and the rightful widow of the man she wanted dead, while Guðrún works to refuse passive, feminine-coded responses to violence and punish those who injure her. For both women, performatives prove insufficient as claims to actual social power, and so they turn to violence against themselves and others. I argue that their victories are necessarily ambivalent and partial, tempered by the refusal of their communities to legitimize their bids for self-determination. This analysis offers a new perspective on the question of female autonomy: female characters in the eddic poems do not “become” autonomous at a certain point and remain so for the entirety of their narratives, but rather must continually negotiate autonomy, asserting, losing, and gaining power by turns, engaging with or circumventing social responses to their claims. Further, a close analysis of female performatives illuminates the ways eddic poets imagined gendered social power to be asserted in heroic contexts—whose assertions are accepted, and how those assertions affect the communities in which they occur—and explores a new aspect of the poems’ ambivalent portraits of Brynhildr and Guðrún.

Book Chapters by Caroline Batten

Forthcoming in Medicine in the Medieval North Atlantic World: Vernacular Texts and Traditions, ed... more Forthcoming in Medicine in the Medieval North Atlantic World: Vernacular Texts and Traditions, edited by Sarah Baccianti and Deborah Hayden. Turnhout: Brepols.

Memory and Medievalism in George R. R. Martin and Game of Thrones, 2022

Ed. Carolyne Larrington and Anna Czarnowus (London: Bloomsbury, 2022).

Tradition and Innovation in Old English Metre, 2022

Ed. Rafael Pascual and Rachel Burns. This book chapter examines instances of anaphora in the Old ... more Ed. Rafael Pascual and Rachel Burns. This book chapter examines instances of anaphora in the Old English metrical charms to argue that the charms' unusual metrical features are repeatedly employed to accommodate this kind of exhaustive, plurilinear repetition to generate incantatory effect. Particular attention is paid to the use of single half-lines in anaphoric clusters with an odd number of elements.

In Early Medieval Life Courses: Cultural-Historical Perspectives, ed. Thijs Porck and Harriet Sop... more In Early Medieval Life Courses: Cultural-Historical Perspectives, ed. Thijs Porck and Harriet Soper (Leiden: Brill, 2021).

Papers by Caroline Batten

Translation and Literature, 2021

Co-authored with Charles Tolkien-Gillett.

Emotions: History, Culture, Society, 2024

The Old Norse medical corpus, both manuscript and epigraphic, illuminates under- standings of the... more The Old Norse medical corpus, both manuscript and epigraphic, illuminates under- standings of the body and of the relationship between sickness, somatic emotion and the perceived integrity of the individual self in Viking and medieval Scandinavia. This essay argues that Old Norse medical texts and charms understand illness not only as an imbalance of humours but also as an invasive, anthropomorphised agent that seeks to breach the boundaries of the human body. Falling victim to illness is understood as a zero-sum power exchange, visualised through images of martial defeat and sexualised submission. Strong emotion can be rendered as physical illness in Old Norse literature because both forces threaten the integrity of the contained and individualised self. As a thematic case study, this essay examines runic healing charms, late medieval medical manuscripts and saga episodes dealing with boils and abscesses, which are attributed both to the surging of vital spirits and to the action of supernatural disease agents, to examine the way these texts understand the embodied self.

Viking and Medieval Scandinavia, 2023

This article argues that the most appropriate critical framework for interpreting the comedic asp... more This article argues that the most appropriate critical framework for interpreting the comedic aspects of the eddic poems Lokasenna and Þrymskviða – and understanding their social, cultural, and artistic functions for their medieval audiences – is Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the carnivalesque. Both poems are archetypal examples of what Bakhtin calls 'free play with the sacred': their degrading humour renews rather than negates, purposefully supplanting images of violence, social fracture, and death with images of fertility and productivity. These texts specifically address anxieties around gender performance and sexuality by offering fantasies of regenerative humiliation without lasting damage or consequence, and their structured forays into subversion invite us to re-evaluate their role in the Codex Regius's prosimetric compilation.

Review of English Studies, 2021

Winner of the Review of English Studies 2020 Essay Prize. This article argues that the unusual fo... more Winner of the Review of English Studies 2020 Essay Prize. This article argues that the unusual formal features of the Old English metrical charms are functions of their practical purpose and genre rather than errors, corruptions, or signs of poor composition.

Medium Aevum, 2021

Medium Aevum 89:1 (2021), 143-8.

Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 2021

Winner of the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship Best Article Prize 2023.

Scandinavian Studies, 2019

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/scanstud.91.3.0289?seq=1#page\_scan\_tab\_contents Brynhildr... more https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/scanstud.91.3.0289?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Brynhildr and Guðrún have been treated as valuable and contentious examples of complex female characters in scholarship on women in Old Norse literature. These examinations are broadly concerned with the question of whether female characters have personal autonomy, and, if so, what kind of power they possess, and, if not, the ways in which masculinity works to subjugate femininity, and how male-female binaries of power are established. Though Brynhildr and Guðrún have been the subjects of numerous studies discussing their agency and roles in their fictional communities, the fact that they each engage in numerous speech acts in the wake of male acts of violence has not been sufficiently explored. We can also better understand Brynhildr’s and Guðrún’s use of performatives by examining their emotional somatic manifestations: laughing, lamenting, and weeping or refusing to weep. Using emotion theory (particularly understandings of emotion as both social and performative), filtered through recent studies of the cultural meaning of emotional displays in Old Norse texts, we can reach a deeper understanding of Brynhildr’s and Guðrún’s actions, and the motivations for those actions, in response to acts of male violence. Brynhildr’s and Guðrún’s reactions to the death of Sigurðr, and Guðrún’s reactions to subsequent violence in her story line, are little discussed, aside from Guðrún’s own murders of Atli and her sons. The complexities of both women’s reactions—particularly Brynhildr’s, which are often dismissed as bewildering—reveal much about the depiction of female autonomy and gendered social dynamics in eddic heroic texts. In this article, I argue that Brynhildr and Guðrún enact numerous performatives across the eddic heroic poems, both emotives and speech acts, in a continuous attempt to self-determine. Brynhildr works to claim, and to force others to acknowledge, her identity as both a suc- cessful avenger and the rightful widow of the man she wanted dead, while Guðrún works to refuse passive, feminine-coded responses to violence and punish those who injure her. For both women, performatives prove insufficient as claims to actual social power, and so they turn to violence against themselves and others. I argue that their victories are necessarily ambivalent and partial, tempered by the refusal of their communities to legitimize their bids for self-determination. This analysis offers a new perspective on the question of female autonomy: female characters in the eddic poems do not “become” autonomous at a certain point and remain so for the entirety of their narratives, but rather must continually negotiate autonomy, asserting, losing, and gaining power by turns, engaging with or circumventing social responses to their claims. Further, a close analysis of female performatives illuminates the ways eddic poets imagined gendered social power to be asserted in heroic contexts—whose assertions are accepted, and how those assertions affect the communities in which they occur—and explores a new aspect of the poems’ ambivalent portraits of Brynhildr and Guðrún.

Forthcoming in Medicine in the Medieval North Atlantic World: Vernacular Texts and Traditions, ed... more Forthcoming in Medicine in the Medieval North Atlantic World: Vernacular Texts and Traditions, edited by Sarah Baccianti and Deborah Hayden. Turnhout: Brepols.

Memory and Medievalism in George R. R. Martin and Game of Thrones, 2022

Ed. Carolyne Larrington and Anna Czarnowus (London: Bloomsbury, 2022).

Tradition and Innovation in Old English Metre, 2022

Ed. Rafael Pascual and Rachel Burns. This book chapter examines instances of anaphora in the Old ... more Ed. Rafael Pascual and Rachel Burns. This book chapter examines instances of anaphora in the Old English metrical charms to argue that the charms' unusual metrical features are repeatedly employed to accommodate this kind of exhaustive, plurilinear repetition to generate incantatory effect. Particular attention is paid to the use of single half-lines in anaphoric clusters with an odd number of elements.

In Early Medieval Life Courses: Cultural-Historical Perspectives, ed. Thijs Porck and Harriet Sop... more In Early Medieval Life Courses: Cultural-Historical Perspectives, ed. Thijs Porck and Harriet Soper (Leiden: Brill, 2021).

Translation and Literature, 2021

Co-authored with Charles Tolkien-Gillett.