Books by Eric Bryan
D.S. Brewer , 2021
The vast and diverse corpus of Old Norse literature preserves the language spoken not only by th... more The vast and diverse corpus of Old Norse literature preserves the language spoken not only by the Vikings, kings, and heroes of medieval Scandinavia but also by outlaws, missionaries, and farmers. Scholars have long recognized that the wealth of verbal exchanges in Old Norse sagas presents the modern reader with the opportunity to speak face-to-face, as it were, with these great voices of the past. However, despite the importance of verbal exchanges in the sagas, there has been no book-length study of discourse in Old Norse literature since 1935.
This book meets the need for such a study by offering a literary analysis based on the adjacent field of pragmatic linguistics, which recognizes that speakers often rely upon cultural, situational, and interpersonal context to communicate their meaning. The resulting, context-dependent meaning often deviates from the base semantic and syntactical components ofan utterance: speakers hedge, imply, deflect to save face, or obscure meaning to damage an opponent's self-worth. Saga writers, this book argues, were masters of this type of indirectness in speech. It aims therefore to unlock the depth and subtlety of discourse in Old Norse literature and to leave readers with an understanding of how principles of pragmatics were employed throughout the sagas. A wide body of Old Norse materials is examined, including some of the best examples of Íslendingasögur (sagas of Icelanders), such as Brennu-Njáls saga, Laxdoela saga, and Gísla saga Súrssonar, while also giving due attention to Konungasögur (kings' sagas), fornaldarsögur (legendary sagas), and other literature from the medieval North.
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Arc Humanities Press, 2021
This volume traces the origins and development of five post-Reformation Icelandic folktales in an... more This volume traces the origins and development of five post-Reformation Icelandic folktales in an attempt to understand cultural memories of Christianization and Reformation in Iceland and elsewhere in the North. While the study of cultural memory has in recent years become a keen interest for scholars of the medieval North, relatively little attention has been given to the cultural memory of the post-medieval period, and even less consideration has been given to what post-medieval folk stories might contribute to memory studies. The present volume seeks to fill that gap by drawing connections between Icelandic folktales collected during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—with special attention given to Jón Árnason’s vast collection of tales published in 1862 and 1864—and their earlier counterparts in Old Norse-Icelandic sagas and Eddic poetry. The five Icelandic folktales that “anchor” the following chapters were selected because they meet criteria that set them apart as especially useful lenses through with to view the diachronic developments of cultural memory in Iceland: (1) each tale has deep and discernible roots in literary history, folkloristic development, and theological undercurrents not only in Iceland but throughout Scandinavia; (2) each displays a distinct concern for one of five fundamental aspects of religious belief (respectively, death and mourning, gender, supernatural attendance, sacred spaces, and the renewal of self); and (3) the development of each tale shows evidence of a demonstrable transformation over time of how those fundamental aspects of belief are perceived within cultural memory. Since discernible vectors can be articulated from these tales backwards into literary history and cultural memories of the past, these folktales illuminate the development of Icelandic cultural memory from the medieval period to the later age, for, as will be argued in the following pages of this book, folktales do not change without purpose; they rather transform in response to the cultural, religious, and interpersonal influences around them. These narratives can therefore reveal elements of a society’s cultural development that would otherwise go unnoticed if looking only at more traditionally conceived historical evidence.
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Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies , 2020
This volume brings together examinations of pragmatic meaning and proverbs of the Medieval North.... more This volume brings together examinations of pragmatic meaning and proverbs of the Medieval North. Pragmatic meaning, which relies upon cultural and interpersonal context to go beyond the simple semantic and grammatical meaning of an utterance, has a fundamental connection with proverbs, which also communicate a deeper meaning than what is actually said. Essays in this volume explore this connection by examining the language of generosity, conversion, friendship, debate, dragon proverbs, and saints' lives. These essays are inspired by the works of Thomas A. Shippey, who has been a pioneer in the study of wisdom poetry and pragmatics in medieval literature.
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Journal Articles and Book Chapters by Eric Bryan
Neophilologus, 2019
This article borrows from the field of cognitive psychology to add nuance to Jan Assmann’s notion... more This article borrows from the field of cognitive psychology to add nuance to Jan Assmann’s notion of a prospective cultural memory of death. Whereas Assmann’s view accounts primarily for those cultures that tend to rely upon external honor and social status to formulate a sense of prospective memory of death, those cultures that tend to rely upon internal conceptions of righteousness or culpability have little representation in Assmann’s theory. For more than two decades, the field of cognitive psychology has been developing its own theory of prospective memory. There, prospective memory is the memory of (typically mundane, everyday) tasks an individual must accomplish at some point in the future (e.g., buying milk, meeting someone, or running an errand). Certain memory aids (e.g., a note in a calendar or a string tied around a finger) might assist individuals in the retrieval of prospective memories. So too might material, literary, or folkloric aids be culturally employed to assist a culture in remembering its prospects for death, dying, and the afterlife. This article explores ways that cognitive prospective memory might be useful in understanding how prospective cultural memories of death and the afterlife might have changes in Old Norse-Icelandic sources as the region’s religious landscape developed during the transitions from pre-Christian to Christian, and then from Catholic to post-Reformation worldviews.
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Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching (SMART), 2018
This article responds to a trend in American universities to exclude the earliest developments of... more This article responds to a trend in American universities to exclude the earliest developments of the English language in courses on the history of the English language. Not only are those early, and proto-, examples vital to the understanding of the development of the language, but they are also, this article argues, vital to any understanding of English in its modern form. To throw out the earliest examples of the English language is therefore to obscure our understanding of modern English. Of special interest in this article is the place that the Old Norse language plays in the early development of English. This article argues that Old Norse is too important to the development of the English language to ignore, but it also recognizes the difficulty in finding ways to include Old Norse in an already busy History of English syllabus. The article, therefore, offers several suggestions on how to explore Old Norse in an undergraduate course on the history of English without overburdening the syllabus.
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The nineteenth-century Icelandic folktale " The Deacon of Myrká " is not a love story, but neithe... more The nineteenth-century Icelandic folktale " The Deacon of Myrká " is not a love story, but neither is it right to call it a ghost story. It is a tragic, irreverent, and mysterious blend of the two. In it, a beautiful girl is courted by a well-respected young man—a deacon at the local church, in fact. They seem happy, in love, and destined for a good life together, until the young man dies in a tragic accident on his way home from visiting his beloved. Inexplicably, this young man, who was so well liked in life, will not rest easy in his grave. He returns from the dead to terrorize the one person he loved most in life: the beautiful girl whom he had once hoped to marry. One question cannot be ignored: why would such a good man in life become such a monster after death? This essay seeks to answer this question by recognizing " The Deacon of Myrká " as one of many versions of the tale throughout Europe, and as a story that has its origins in the pre-Christian past. This essay argues that, in its earliest, pre-Christian manifestations, the story was seen as one of romance and honor, whereas later versions of the story were transformed to depict the narrative events as horrific. The reasons why and how this change occurred can tell us a great deal about the relationship between Church theology and (sometimes heterodox) folk beliefs.
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Neophilologus, 2013
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Scandinavian Studies 83.2, pp. 165-90, 2011
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Heroic Age 13, 2010
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ANQ, 2006
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Recent Conference Presentations by Eric Bryan
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This conference paper (slides) examines the usage of pragmatic meaning and proverbs in verbal con... more This conference paper (slides) examines the usage of pragmatic meaning and proverbs in verbal conflicts in the Old Icelandic family saga Laxdœla saga.
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This paper considers the prospect that "The Dead Bridegroom Carries off his Bride," ATU 365, has ... more This paper considers the prospect that "The Dead Bridegroom Carries off his Bride," ATU 365, has experienced a pejoration process throughout its long development and that the pejoration of ATU 365 leaves a functional void in the folklife of cultures that support the tale type. This paper finally suggests that another tale type arose in certain communities in Iceland to fill that functional void, and that similar tale type "adjacency pairs" may be present in other communities that celebrate ATU 365.
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Other Essays and Publications by Eric Bryan
Queer- and gender-theoretical approaches to Viking Age literary and cultural production have undo... more Queer- and gender-theoretical approaches to Viking Age literary and cultural production have undoubtedly born fruit in recent years, with publications on these topics increasing exponentially each decade since 1994. This production has provided scholars with a vocabulary and framework to explore Old Norse literature and culture in ways that were not previously possible, yet some would argue that these benefits come with the risk of imposing over-theorized and anachronistic assessments of Old Norse culture and literature. This session therefore aims to explore the boundaries, limitations, and possibilities of theoretical approaches to queer and gendered cultural phenomena in the medieval North.
Please submit a title and abstract of no more than 300 words through the International Congress on Medieval Studies submission portal by September 15th (for papers up to 20 minutes). Click here to submit abstracts directly to the ICMS Confex system. Please feel free to reach out to Eric Bryan with any questions at bryane@mst.edu.
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This session will address the function of discourse in medieval northern world as evident in Old ... more This session will address the function of discourse in medieval northern world as evident in Old Norse-Icelandic, Germanic, Old English, and related Latin texts. Past studies of verbal exchanges in these corpora have prompted some of the most enduring questions about medieval life and literature-questions about flyting, gender identity, religious conversion, political upheaval, and social status, to name a few. The application of the linguistic studies of pragmatics and speech act theory to these longstanding topics promises to bring fresh insights due to the methodologies' systematic approach to the relationship between intended speaker-meaning and cultural and speech-situational context. Pragmatics and speech act theory recognize that the intended meaning of an utterance (illocution) must be understood as a function of the relationship between what is said (locution) and the cultural and speech-situational context in which a discourse occurs. This fundamental connection between intended meaning and context has prompted a wide range of methodological applications to both modern and pre-modern representations of discourse, including frameworks for the study of performativity, gender, (im)politeness, indirectness in speech, felicity conditions, and more.
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Much has been made in recent Arthurian scholarship (for instance, Malory Aloud sessions at the IC... more Much has been made in recent Arthurian scholarship (for instance, Malory Aloud sessions at the ICMS) of the importance of the oral and aural qualities of Arthurian texts, such as Malory's Morte D'Arthur, and the value of reading these texts aloud. This session will include papers exploring the significance of speech in Arthurian texts from the methodological perspective of pragmatics and speech act theory, for which an adjacent sort of performativity has played a central role, to elucidate the function of Arthurian discourse to perform as well as interrogate medieval value systems such as chivalry and courtly love. Performativity has long been of interest to students of pragmatics and speech act theory, both of which recognize that certain utterances (performatives) have the power to change the state of things. This concept in the hands of cultural theorists such as Judith Butler has fostered a broader understanding of how language might establish or change the state of cultural constructions such as gender, power dynamics, honor and shame, and interpersonal relationships. All these constructions feature prominently in Arthurian literature and are therefore amenable to the application of methodologies grounded in pragmatics and speech act theory.
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Much has been made in recent Arthurian scholarship (for instance, Malory Aloud sessions at the IC... more Much has been made in recent Arthurian scholarship (for instance, Malory Aloud sessions at the ICMS) of the importance of the oral and aural qualities of Arthurian texts, such as Malory's Morte D'Arthur, and the value of reading these texts aloud. This session will include papers exploring the significance of speech in Arthurian texts from the methodological perspective of pragmatics and speech act theory, for which an adjacent sort of performativity has played a central role, to elucidate the function of Arthurian discourse to perform as well as interrogate medieval value systems such as chivalry and courtly love. Performativity has long been of interest to students of pragmatics and speech act theory, both of which recognize that certain utterances (performatives) have the power to change the state of things. This concept in the hands of cultural theorists such as Judith Butler has fostered a broader understanding of how language might establish or change the state of cultural constructions such as gender, power dynamics, honor and shame, and interpersonal relationships. All these constructions feature prominently in Arthurian literature and are therefore amenable to the application of methodologies grounded in pragmatics and speech act theory.
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Discourse and Diversity share a deeply reciprocal relationship. Differences in our personal, cult... more Discourse and Diversity share a deeply reciprocal relationship. Differences in our personal, cultural, and situational identities influence how and why we communicate with one another. Discourse correspondingly reveals those diversities across the many boundaries that differentiate us as individuals and groups of people-boundaries of language and culture; of gender, relationship, status, and age; and of religious, political, and social conviction. Discourse thus becomes a kind of roadmap that may be followed to explore the subtleties of diversity across time and place. This volume aims therefore to understand diversity in global medieval texts through the lens of discourse.
The editors of this volume welcome assessments of discourse in sources from cultures coeval with texts produced in medieval Europe—for example, from the Islamic world, Central and East Asia, Africa, and beyond. Of equal importance are examinations of discourse and diversity in European sources along the axes of culture, language, socio-economics, gender and other identities, nationality, and religion.
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Books by Eric Bryan
This book meets the need for such a study by offering a literary analysis based on the adjacent field of pragmatic linguistics, which recognizes that speakers often rely upon cultural, situational, and interpersonal context to communicate their meaning. The resulting, context-dependent meaning often deviates from the base semantic and syntactical components ofan utterance: speakers hedge, imply, deflect to save face, or obscure meaning to damage an opponent's self-worth. Saga writers, this book argues, were masters of this type of indirectness in speech. It aims therefore to unlock the depth and subtlety of discourse in Old Norse literature and to leave readers with an understanding of how principles of pragmatics were employed throughout the sagas. A wide body of Old Norse materials is examined, including some of the best examples of Íslendingasögur (sagas of Icelanders), such as Brennu-Njáls saga, Laxdoela saga, and Gísla saga Súrssonar, while also giving due attention to Konungasögur (kings' sagas), fornaldarsögur (legendary sagas), and other literature from the medieval North.
Journal Articles and Book Chapters by Eric Bryan
For An updated and improved version of this article, see chapter two of my recent book Discourse in Old Norse Literature, available in print and digital form on Amazon and through the publisher, Boydell & Brewer.
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Discourse-Old-Norse-Literature-Studies/dp/1843845970/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3THG7CF2A8QTQ&keywords=discourse+in+old+norse&qid=1646413314&sprefix=discourse+in+old+norse%2Caps%2C75&sr=8-1
B&B: https://boydellandbrewer.com/9781843845973/discourse-in-old-norse-literature/
Recent Conference Presentations by Eric Bryan
Other Essays and Publications by Eric Bryan
Please submit a title and abstract of no more than 300 words through the International Congress on Medieval Studies submission portal by September 15th (for papers up to 20 minutes). Click here to submit abstracts directly to the ICMS Confex system. Please feel free to reach out to Eric Bryan with any questions at bryane@mst.edu.
The editors of this volume welcome assessments of discourse in sources from cultures coeval with texts produced in medieval Europe—for example, from the Islamic world, Central and East Asia, Africa, and beyond. Of equal importance are examinations of discourse and diversity in European sources along the axes of culture, language, socio-economics, gender and other identities, nationality, and religion.
This book meets the need for such a study by offering a literary analysis based on the adjacent field of pragmatic linguistics, which recognizes that speakers often rely upon cultural, situational, and interpersonal context to communicate their meaning. The resulting, context-dependent meaning often deviates from the base semantic and syntactical components ofan utterance: speakers hedge, imply, deflect to save face, or obscure meaning to damage an opponent's self-worth. Saga writers, this book argues, were masters of this type of indirectness in speech. It aims therefore to unlock the depth and subtlety of discourse in Old Norse literature and to leave readers with an understanding of how principles of pragmatics were employed throughout the sagas. A wide body of Old Norse materials is examined, including some of the best examples of Íslendingasögur (sagas of Icelanders), such as Brennu-Njáls saga, Laxdoela saga, and Gísla saga Súrssonar, while also giving due attention to Konungasögur (kings' sagas), fornaldarsögur (legendary sagas), and other literature from the medieval North.
For An updated and improved version of this article, see chapter two of my recent book Discourse in Old Norse Literature, available in print and digital form on Amazon and through the publisher, Boydell & Brewer.
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Discourse-Old-Norse-Literature-Studies/dp/1843845970/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3THG7CF2A8QTQ&keywords=discourse+in+old+norse&qid=1646413314&sprefix=discourse+in+old+norse%2Caps%2C75&sr=8-1
B&B: https://boydellandbrewer.com/9781843845973/discourse-in-old-norse-literature/
Please submit a title and abstract of no more than 300 words through the International Congress on Medieval Studies submission portal by September 15th (for papers up to 20 minutes). Click here to submit abstracts directly to the ICMS Confex system. Please feel free to reach out to Eric Bryan with any questions at bryane@mst.edu.
The editors of this volume welcome assessments of discourse in sources from cultures coeval with texts produced in medieval Europe—for example, from the Islamic world, Central and East Asia, Africa, and beyond. Of equal importance are examinations of discourse and diversity in European sources along the axes of culture, language, socio-economics, gender and other identities, nationality, and religion.