Old Norse

While Old Norse studies may seem vastly different to my PhD research in musico-literary studies, the aspect that fascinates me both about music in literature and Old Norse literature is the attempt to translate a seemingly untranslatable concept. In musico-literary studies, this is the translation of music into the soundless text; in Old Norse studies, this is the attempt to translate the Old Norse language into English while maintaining the cultural sense of the 'original'.

Publications

2018 | 'The Mediation and Re-creation of Guðrún Gjúkadóttir in English Translations of the Poetic Edda in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries', PG English, 37 (2018), 1-33

In 2018 I published my MA research on Guðrún Gjúkadóttir in the Poetic Edda, in which I compare twentieth- and twenty-first-century English translations of the poems alongside the Old Norse text, revealing new understandings to Guðrún's ambiguous character. An open-access PDF of this publication can be found here.

Teaching & Reading Groups

I keep up my Old Norse skills by attending the regular Durham Old Norse Reading Group, contributing and helping with fellow scholars' translations. For this group I have co-produced a glossed version of Guðrúnarkviða I ('The First Lay of Gudrun') with William Raybould. I keep my Old Norse research and skills up-to-date through my teaching on the Durham English Studies Department module 'Epic and Literature of Legend', covering Old Norse, Old English, and Old French literature.