Emotion among the Vikings as revealed in their literature

From The Medieval Review, Melissa Elmes reviews Rikhardsdottir, Sif. Emotion in Old Norse Literature: Translations, Voices, Contexts. Studies in Old Norse Literature. Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017. pp. 213. ISBN: 978-1-84384-470-9 (hardback).

The subject of emotion in premodern history and culture has enjoyed a rapid rise in critical interest and corresponding scholarship since at least the publication of Barbara Rosenwein's Anger's Past in 1998, although as Sif Rikhardsdottir points out in her introduction this critical attention has not to date extended enough to the subject of literary emotionality (14). [...]

In Old Norse/Icelandic studies there is, actually, a small but strong critical corpus on literary emotion; however, much of the scholarship to date on emotions in Old Norse/Icelandic (hereafter, ONI) texts has focused on the sagas and, within these studies, emphasis has been placed on the relative impassivity of saga characters--that is, the avoidance of emotion, rather than its narrative presence and function. Where emotions have been centered in such studies, they are centered in isolation and studied as individual categories--such as anger, laughter, and grief. [...]

The essential argument of this book is that the literary representation of emotion depends upon the development of an emotive script that is keyed to a particular set of societal expectations, and that that script in turn dictates through context (literary, historical, and/or cultural in nature) how the audience of a text interprets the emotions involved, both historically and in modern readership. Beginning with an Introduction that provides a brief overview of the history of emotions as a field of study, Rikhardsdottir moves into a discussion of the literary representation of emotion, identifying the traditionally-held view of fundamental difference between ONI sagas and romances as being grounded in a misunderstanding of how writers in these genres stage and express emotion. Rather, Rikhardsdottir locates in both genres a recognizable manipulation of emotional gestures for literary purpose--that is, a signposting of behavioral codes tied to literary convention, more so than actual social practice, that enables readers to infuse a given narrative space with emotional importance. This manipulation of emotional gestures constitutes emotive scripting which, in turn, readers must decode and activate in order to access the emotion in a given scene. Following this explanation of the concept of the emotional script, the rest of the book is organized into chapters spanning three categories of literature: the translated romances, the sagas, and the indigenous romances--that show precisely how the emotive scripts work in each genre, and across the ONI literary corpus overall.