After an extended break, I am back with some exciting news: I have not one, not two, but four talks now planned as part of the project.
The most accessible of these will be a talk to the Scottish Society for Northern Studies on 7 March, 7pm GMT: "(The) Animal Matters: exploring multidisciplinary approaches to animal-human relationships in the medieval north". This will be a talk exploring how I approach animal-human relationships in my research, and how to take this further into looking at human relationships with wild animals.
Also on 7th March (it's going to be a crazy day!) I will be co-delivering a talk to the Nordic TAG conference (with Dr Keith Ruiter, University of Suffolk) in the session: Session: Who’s in? Who’s out? Interrogating the limits of inclusivity and exclusivity in the study of the Viking Age".
Our paper, currently titled: "How to make an animal: Post-humanism, para-animals, and predatory relationships" aims to develop our thinking on animals and their relationships with humans into the realm of the wild:
Recent theoretical work has helpfully clarified and provided new ways to consider the depth and breadth of relationships in the Viking Age. From multiple-person burial, to the animacy of objects, to post-human approaches to expanded categories of persons, the question of who and what is included in the study of this period and its peoples is increasingly open. But for all these shades of grey, lines are drawn, both in the period itself and in scholarship, over actions, persons, and animals that are seemingly unacceptable for inclusion in even expansive models of society. Wolves and bears are ‘outlawed’ in some early Scandinavian laws and the most transgressive criminals are likened to the vargr – a seemingly monstrous wolf.
Drawing on medieval textual sources and material evidence, this paper takes a post-humanist approach, informed by recent studies of human-animal relationships of domestic animals, to consider these predators and their relationships with other animals from alternate perspectives, asking new questions about how far post-human approaches can and should be pushed, if regional distinctions can be detected and what they might mean, and what happens to humanity when we start thinking about animality from a theoretically-engaged position.
Further ahead I have a talk planned to the Viking Studies Research Group at the University of York (3 May), as well as a paper at the Leeds International Medieval Congress in July (in Session 148: Animal-Like: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly).
In this Leeds IMC paper: "Being Bear: Bearskins, Warmth, and Protection in Medieval Iceland and Scandinavia", I will be offering a synthesis and discussion of the Bears in the North project, hopefully in light of submission of the article currently in the works!
Drawing on the results of the project: “Bears and bearskins in the medieval North”, my IMC paper will examine the various heroes in Old Norse sagas who are attributed bearlike qualities, often through physical encounters with bears. It will consider the role of the bearskin in these texts, and especially the skin cloak in this association (where appropriate drawing on the bearskin in archaeological contexts from the medieval North). Moving beyond ideas of the violent berserker in saga descriptions, this paper will consider the bear associations to be much broader, rooted in experience of living alongside bears, drawing inspiration from the seasonal cycle of the bear’s life, and traditions exchanged in cultural contact between the Sami and the Norse in northern Scandinavia.
Rather than a marker of a solely violent, warrior identity, this paper will show that being bear-like could be a positive, protective force in society.
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