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Jeffrey Turco

Purdue University, School of Languages & Cultures, Faculty Member

Cornell University, German Studies, Alumnus

University of Chicago, Divinity School, Faculty Member

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Books by Jeffrey Turco

New Norse Studies: Essays on the Literature and Culture of Medieval Scandinavia. Edited by Jeffrey Turco. Islandica 58. Ithaca: Cornell University Library, 2015.

by Jeffrey Turco, Joseph C Harris, Thomas D Hill, Richard L Harris, Russell Poole, Paul Acker, and Torfi Tulinius

New Norse Studies, edited by Jeffrey Turco, gathers twelve original essays engaging aspects of Ol... more New Norse Studies, edited by Jeffrey Turco, gathers twelve original essays engaging aspects of Old Norse–Icelandic literature that continue to kindle the scholarly imagination in the twenty-first century. The assembled authors examine the arrière-scène of saga literature; the nexus of skaldic poetry and saga narrative; medieval and post-medieval gender roles; and other manifestations of language, time, and place as preserved in Old Norse–Icelandic texts. This volume will be welcomed not only by the specialist and by scholars in adjacent fields but also by the avid general reader, drawn in ever-increasing number to the Icelandic sagas and their world.

Table of Contents Preface; Jeffrey Turco, volume editor: Introduction; Andy Orchard: Hereward and Grettir: Brothers from Another Mother?; Richard L. Harris: “Jafnan segir inn ríkri ráð”: Proverbial Allusion and the Implied Proverb in Fóstbrœðra saga; Torfi H. Tulinius: Seeking Death in Njáls saga; Guðrún Nordal: Skaldic Poetics and the Making of the Sagas of Icelanders; Russell Poole: Identity Poetics among the Icelandic Skalds; Jeffrey Turco: Loki, Sneglu-Halla þáttr, and the Case for a Skaldic Prosaics; Thomas D. Hill: Beer, Vomit, Blood and Poetry: Egils saga, Chapters 44-45; Shaun F. D. Hughes: The Old Norse Exempla as Arbiters of Gender Roles in Medieval Iceland; Paul Acker: Performing Gender in the Icelandic Ballads; Joseph Harris: The Rök Inscription, Line 20; Sarah Harlan-Haughey: A Landscape of Conflict: Three Stories of the Faroe Conversions; Kirsten Wolf: Non-Basic Color Terms in Old Norse-Icelandic

Articles by Jeffrey Turco

"Restaging Sin in Medieval Florence: Augustine, Brunetto Latini, and the Streetscape of Dante's Vita nuova." Italian Studies 73 (2018): 15-21.

Italian Studies, 2018

This essay considers what might first appear to be a minor theological problem in the major work ... more This essay considers what might first appear to be a minor theological problem in the major work of Dante’s mentor, and shows that it indeed poses a conundrum and a riddle to be solved. Taking up Augustine’s commentary on Christ’s three resurrection miracles – in the house, outside the gate, and in the sepulchre – I note that in his Tresor Brunetto retains the first of these locations but revises the second to “in the doorway of the house” and the third to “in the street.” Ruling out a traditional “source” for these deviations, I ask: Are these changes of scenery significant – a trivial memory lapse, subtly subversive, or ringing a change? Ultimately, I propose an underlying shift in perspective: from Augustinian biblical topography to a contemporary urban setting – an “update” from a late Classical to a medieval scene, from Hippo to Florence – an “urbanization” of the Augustinian “stages of sin” that gestures towards the streetscape of the Vita nuova.

“Nets and Snares: The Loki of Snorri’s Edda and the Christian Tradition.” History of Religions 56.2 (2016): 198-231.

History of Religions, 2016

This article re-examines the much-debated question of the indebtedness of the medieval Icelandic ... more This article re-examines the much-debated question of the indebtedness of the medieval Icelandic scholar-poet-politician Snorri Sturluson to the Christian-Latin tradition. I offer an argument for a relationship between the construction of Snorri’s mythography in the Edda and two figurative traditions stemming from the Old Testament, most notably codified in the 9th chapter of the Book of Ecclesiastes, and their subsequent reception in the medieval commentary tradition in Latin and Icelandic, the Old Norse liturgy, vernacular saints’ lives, and lives of the Icelandic bishops. My central claim is that two pervasive figures, the bird and the fish—prototypically represented as captured in Ecclesiastes 9:12 and elsewhere in the Christian literary tradition—merit consideration not as “sources” of certain myths of Loki but of Snorri’s representation of them. Previous scholarship, I suggest, has overlooked a Christian background to the Norse gods’ final fishing expedition, which leads to the binding of Loki and his captivity until Ragnarǫk, when Loki is caught in a net of his own invention: a widespread biblical topos concerning the devil and other “evil-doers.” Snorri’s treatment of the “The Matter of Loki” is hence relevant more broadly to long-standing debates concerning the intellectual debt of Snorri’s conception of Norse myth as “mythic history” to the formative influence of Christian eschatology.

“Gender, Violence, and the ‘Enigma’ of Gísla saga.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology [JEGP] 115.3 (2016): 277-98.

Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 2016

Gísla saga has often been described as “enigmatic,” and the riddles posed by Iceland’s best-known... more Gísla saga has often been described as “enigmatic,” and the riddles posed by Iceland’s best-known murder-mystery indeed appear irresolvable. At least equally puzzling, I suggest, is Gisli’s “confession” of his subsequent act of vengeance through an obscure bit of skaldic verse, which has not received similar attention. Setting aside the psychological and forensic approaches traditionally brought to bear on the saga’s persistent enigmas, I offer that Gisli's “confession” forms the crux of an unnoted narrative structure, made plain by the saga’s treatment of medieval Icelandic concepts of masculinity and femininity. In so doing, I identify an undetected analogue in Norse myth to the events that precipitate the saga’s “whodunit,” as well as reexamine widely-held assumptions about the view of gender enunciated in the saga, particularly as articulated in Carol Clover‘s seminal 1993 article, “Regardless of Sex.”

“Minnesang, Spruchdichtung, and Religious Discourse: Authenticity, Genre, and Allusion in Walther von der Vogelweide’s ‘Ein meister las’ (L. 122,24).” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte [DVjs] 89.2 (2015): 153-181.

Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 2015

Ein meister las has been regarded an »eigentümliches Gemisch« by scholars who have questioned its... more Ein meister las has been regarded an »eigentümliches Gemisch« by scholars who have questioned its authenticity. Those critics who have (in the opinion of the present author, rightly) rehabilitated the poem as part of Walther’s »authentic« corpus have generally overlooked the nonetheless perceptive observations that underlie this critical discomfiture. The present essay reads the poem as the locus of a uniquely Waltherian dialogue between the genres of Spruchdichtung, Minnesang, and the devotional lyric in order to account for the critics’ unanimous perception of it as a »problematic« poem.

Die Literaturwissenschaft hat die Authentizität von Ein meister las mehrfach infrage gestellt und das Gedicht sogar als »eigentümliches Gemisch« abgelehnt. Diejenigen Kritiker, die wiederum die Zuschreibung an Walther (m.E. rechtens) befürworten, sind diesem – trotzdem aufschlussreichen – kritischen Unbehagen jedoch nicht gerecht geworden. Um dieses Unbehagen sowohl zu erörtern als auch zu beheben, wird das allgemein als »problematisch« angesehene Gedicht hier als einzigartiger Waltherischer Dialog zwischen den Gattungen Spruchdichtung, Minnesang und geistlicher Lyrik interpretiert.

“Loki, Sneglu-Halla þáttr, and the Case for a Skaldic Prosaics.” In New Norse Studies: Essays on the Literature and Culture of Medieval Scandinavia, edited by Jeffrey Turco, 185-241. Islandica 58. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015.

New Norse Studies: Essays on the Literature and Culture of Medieval Scandinavia, 2015

This article proposes that the oft-dismissed Sneglu-Halla þáttr (Tale of Sarcastic Halli) is not ... more This article proposes that the oft-dismissed Sneglu-Halla þáttr (Tale of Sarcastic Halli) is not simply a series of virtuoso vituperations peppered with sexual-cum-barnyard humor, nor “a series of episodes that could have been arranged otherwise as well,” but a text that repays close attention, both for original audiences as well as for scholars of Old Norse-Icelandic literature. I argue that its eponymous hero establishes his social position at the royal Norwegian court by ensconcing himself within a sustained series of allusions to myths of the Norse god Loki, while framing his peers, and even his superiors, as the sexual deviants, low-lifes, and numbskulls of a déclassé “folktale” world. Sneglu-Halla þáttr thus presupposes considerable literary connoisseurship, detailed knowledge of the Norse mythographic tradition, and a consciousness of high and low genre that reflects concerns of shifting social classes and political powers in thirteenth and fourteenth-century Iceland. Ultimately, I leverage this reading to articulate a reappraisal of medieval Icelandic narrative prose—most often lauded for its “realism," "straightforwardness," and "objectivity”: I offer that this deceptively “simple” tale adheres to the same aesthetic principles of complexity, ambiguity, and allusiveness that characterize the Skaldic poetry that is its ostensible subject.

“Introduction.” In New Norse Studies: Essays on the Literature and Culture of Medieval Scandinavia, edited by Jeffrey Turco, 1-5. Islandica 58. Ithaca: Cornell University Library, 2015.

“Il laccio di scarpa di Skarpheðinn, la scena-tipo, e la tipologia cristiana [Skarpheðinn’s Shoestring, the Type-Scene, and Christian Typology].” Studi e Materiali di Storia delle Religioni [SMSR] 81.2 (2015): 414-39.

Studi e Materiali di Storia delle Religioni, 2015

Joseph Harris has described Njáls saga as «perhaps the supreme artistic realization of the idea o... more Joseph Harris has described Njáls saga as «perhaps the supreme artistic realization of the idea of Northern history as turning on the conversion and of the implications of this idea in the lives of individuals». The current paper attempts to show precisely how this general assertion – made at the macro-level of medieval Christian Geschichtsschreibung – plays out at the micro-level of saga narrative.To illustrate one such instance, I begin with the seemingly pedestrian observation that there are exactly three instances of shoelace-tying in Njáls saga. The first takes place when the Irish slave Melkólfr returns from his cheese-stealing expedition on Hallgerðr’s behalf. The second takes place when Skarpheðinn pauses to tie his shoe before gliding across the ice to kill his enemy Þráinn. Thirdly and lastly, Þorsteinn Hallsson stops to leisurely tie his shoe while his fellows are being being mown down after the battle of Clontarf and is spared by Kerþjálfaðr. I argue that what at first seems like an inconsequential detail (or at most an irreducible example of the author’s flair for the enigmatic) in fact belongs to a scheme of typological patterning that, in Njáls saga, is best understood as a hybrid-product of indigenous narrative and continental historiographic traditions.

“Dante’s fronde: Making the World Safe for Encyclopedism in Paradiso 26.” Dante Studies 132 (2014): 145-157.

Dante Studies, 2014

This article reads Dante’s dialogue with sacred authorities in Paradiso 26 as the poet’s rehabili... more This article reads Dante’s dialogue with sacred authorities in Paradiso 26 as the poet’s rehabilitation of the “failed encyclopedism” that leads both to Adam’s physical and spiritual exile as well as to the destruction of the “unaccomplishable work” (26.125) of the Towel of Babel. I present a new reading of Dante’s use of botanical imagery in Canto 26, which serves to enunciate both this larger rehabilitative project as well as Dante’s newly-acquired status, at this juncture in the poem, as encyclopedic authority.

Book Reviews by Jeffrey Turco

Nibelungenlied und Nibelungensage: Kommentierte Bibliographie 1945–2010. Edited by Florian Kragl with Elisabeth Martschini, Katharina Büsel, and Alexander Hödlmoser. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2012. Pp. xxiv + 830. In JEGP 114 (2015): 127-29.

Journal by Jeffrey Turco

NEW NORSE STUDIES: A Journal on the Literature and Culture of Medieval Scandinavia - A Call for Submissions from Islandica

by Jeffrey Turco, Richard L Harris, Russell Poole, Fjodor Uspenskij, Carla Del Zotto, Aðalheiður Guðmundsdóttir, Sæbjørg Walaker Nordeide, Egilsdóttir Ásdís, Alison Finlay, Shaun F. D. Hughes, Jonathan Hui, Philip Lavender, Christine Schott, Dirk H Steinforth, and Paul Acker

NNS, 2020

Submissions received by September 1, 2019, will be considered for publication in NNS 2 (2020). Ne... more Submissions received by September 1, 2019, will be considered for publication in NNS 2 (2020). New Norse Studies: A Journal on the Literature and Culture of Medieval Scandinavia is the annual of Islandica, a series in Icelandic and Norse studies, founded in 1908 and published in print and online by the Fiske Icelandic Collection, Cornell University Library. Devoted to all facets of the written tradition of medieval Iceland and Scandinavia, NNS seeks to bring the insights of multiple disciplines to bear upon Norse texts.

NNS welcomes contributions to scholarship relating to all aspects of Old Norse-Icelandic literature, including but not limited to: literary and textual culture; mythology, folklore, and history of religions; archaeology and material culture; language, linguistics, philology, and runology; medieval history; and comparative literary studies.

NNS does not solicit or publish reviews of individual books. Review essays concerning larger trends, topics, and bodies of scholarship are welcome.

NEW NORSE STUDIES: A Journal on the Literature and Culture of Medieval Scandinavia - A Call for Submissions from Islandica

by Jeffrey Turco, Richard L Harris, Daniel Brielmaier, Adam Oberlin, Torfi Tulinius, Carla Del Zotto, Fjodor Uspenskij, Aðalheiður Guðmundsdóttir, and Sæbjørg Walaker Nordeide

New Norse Studies: A Journal on the Literature and Culture of Medieval Scandinavia is the annual ... more New Norse Studies: A Journal on the Literature and Culture of Medieval Scandinavia is the annual of Islandica, a series in Icelandic and Norse studies, founded in 1908 and published in print and online by the Fiske Icelandic Collection, Cornell University Library. Devoted to all facets of the written tradition of medieval Iceland and Scandinavia, NNS seeks to bring the insights of multiple disciplines to bear upon Norse texts.

NNS welcomes contributions to scholarship relating to all aspects of Old Norse-Icelandic literature, including but not limited to: literary and textual culture; mythology, folklore, and history of religions; archaeology and material culture; language, linguistics, philology, and runology; medieval history; and comparative literary studies.

NNS does not solicit or publish reviews of individual books. Review essays concerning larger trends, topics, and bodies of scholarship will be considered.

New Norse Studies: A Journal on the Literature and Culture of Medieval Scandinavia - A Call for Submissions from Islandica

by Jeffrey Turco, Daniel Brielmaier, Richard L Harris, Adam Oberlin, Jessica Auz, Aðalheiður Guðmundsdóttir, Sæbjørg Walaker Nordeide, and Fjodor Uspenskij

New Norse Studies: A Journal on the Literature and Culture of Medieval Scandinavia is the new ann... more New Norse Studies: A Journal on the Literature and Culture of Medieval Scandinavia is the new annual of Islandica, a series in Icelandic and Norse studies, founded in 1908 and published by the Fiske Icelandic Collection, Cornell University Library. Devoted to all facets of the written tradition of medieval Iceland and Scandinavia, NNS seeks to bring the insights of multiple disciplines to bear upon Norse texts.

Invited Talks by Jeffrey Turco

Viking, Greco-Roman, and Native American New England ("The Cultural Moment of the Fiske Icelandic Collection")

Landsbókasafn Íslands – Háskólabókasafn, 2018

A lecture on the confluence of Viking and Native-American New England in the 19th-century America... more

“Ymir: A Cold Case,” Department of English, Harvard University, May 5, 2012 [invited]

“Gender, Violence, and the Structure of ‘Enigma’ in Gísla saga,” Department of Scandinavian Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, April 4, 2013 [invited]

'La storiografia, la tipologia, e la vita quotidiana nella Saga di Njáll," Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza,” November 8, 2013 [invited]

“The Sense of the Sagas,” Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies Colloquium, University of Saskatchewan, March 11, 2010 [invited]

“New Approaches to the Brothers Grimm,” The University of Puerto Rico, Sept. 17, 2014 [invited]

Studi e Materiali di Storia delle Religioni by Jeffrey Turco

SMSR 81-2/2015. Theme section: The Icelandic sagas in the medieval European historigraphy

by Carla Del Zotto, Alessandro Saggioro, Haki Antonsson, Jeffrey Turco, Caterina Moro, Silvia Omenetto, and Marianna Ferrara

Special issue edited by Prof. Carla Del Zotto, University of Rome La Sapienza

New Norse Studies: Essays on the Literature and Culture of Medieval Scandinavia. Edited by Jeffrey Turco. Islandica 58. Ithaca: Cornell University Library, 2015.

by Jeffrey Turco, Joseph C Harris, Thomas D Hill, Richard L Harris, Russell Poole, Paul Acker, and Torfi Tulinius

New Norse Studies, edited by Jeffrey Turco, gathers twelve original essays engaging aspects of Ol... more New Norse Studies, edited by Jeffrey Turco, gathers twelve original essays engaging aspects of Old Norse–Icelandic literature that continue to kindle the scholarly imagination in the twenty-first century. The assembled authors examine the arrière-scène of saga literature; the nexus of skaldic poetry and saga narrative; medieval and post-medieval gender roles; and other manifestations of language, time, and place as preserved in Old Norse–Icelandic texts. This volume will be welcomed not only by the specialist and by scholars in adjacent fields but also by the avid general reader, drawn in ever-increasing number to the Icelandic sagas and their world.

Table of Contents Preface; Jeffrey Turco, volume editor: Introduction; Andy Orchard: Hereward and Grettir: Brothers from Another Mother?; Richard L. Harris: “Jafnan segir inn ríkri ráð”: Proverbial Allusion and the Implied Proverb in Fóstbrœðra saga; Torfi H. Tulinius: Seeking Death in Njáls saga; Guðrún Nordal: Skaldic Poetics and the Making of the Sagas of Icelanders; Russell Poole: Identity Poetics among the Icelandic Skalds; Jeffrey Turco: Loki, Sneglu-Halla þáttr, and the Case for a Skaldic Prosaics; Thomas D. Hill: Beer, Vomit, Blood and Poetry: Egils saga, Chapters 44-45; Shaun F. D. Hughes: The Old Norse Exempla as Arbiters of Gender Roles in Medieval Iceland; Paul Acker: Performing Gender in the Icelandic Ballads; Joseph Harris: The Rök Inscription, Line 20; Sarah Harlan-Haughey: A Landscape of Conflict: Three Stories of the Faroe Conversions; Kirsten Wolf: Non-Basic Color Terms in Old Norse-Icelandic

"Restaging Sin in Medieval Florence: Augustine, Brunetto Latini, and the Streetscape of Dante's Vita nuova." Italian Studies 73 (2018): 15-21.

Italian Studies, 2018

This essay considers what might first appear to be a minor theological problem in the major work ... more This essay considers what might first appear to be a minor theological problem in the major work of Dante’s mentor, and shows that it indeed poses a conundrum and a riddle to be solved. Taking up Augustine’s commentary on Christ’s three resurrection miracles – in the house, outside the gate, and in the sepulchre – I note that in his Tresor Brunetto retains the first of these locations but revises the second to “in the doorway of the house” and the third to “in the street.” Ruling out a traditional “source” for these deviations, I ask: Are these changes of scenery significant – a trivial memory lapse, subtly subversive, or ringing a change? Ultimately, I propose an underlying shift in perspective: from Augustinian biblical topography to a contemporary urban setting – an “update” from a late Classical to a medieval scene, from Hippo to Florence – an “urbanization” of the Augustinian “stages of sin” that gestures towards the streetscape of the Vita nuova.

“Nets and Snares: The Loki of Snorri’s Edda and the Christian Tradition.” History of Religions 56.2 (2016): 198-231.

History of Religions, 2016

This article re-examines the much-debated question of the indebtedness of the medieval Icelandic ... more This article re-examines the much-debated question of the indebtedness of the medieval Icelandic scholar-poet-politician Snorri Sturluson to the Christian-Latin tradition. I offer an argument for a relationship between the construction of Snorri’s mythography in the Edda and two figurative traditions stemming from the Old Testament, most notably codified in the 9th chapter of the Book of Ecclesiastes, and their subsequent reception in the medieval commentary tradition in Latin and Icelandic, the Old Norse liturgy, vernacular saints’ lives, and lives of the Icelandic bishops. My central claim is that two pervasive figures, the bird and the fish—prototypically represented as captured in Ecclesiastes 9:12 and elsewhere in the Christian literary tradition—merit consideration not as “sources” of certain myths of Loki but of Snorri’s representation of them. Previous scholarship, I suggest, has overlooked a Christian background to the Norse gods’ final fishing expedition, which leads to the binding of Loki and his captivity until Ragnarǫk, when Loki is caught in a net of his own invention: a widespread biblical topos concerning the devil and other “evil-doers.” Snorri’s treatment of the “The Matter of Loki” is hence relevant more broadly to long-standing debates concerning the intellectual debt of Snorri’s conception of Norse myth as “mythic history” to the formative influence of Christian eschatology.

“Gender, Violence, and the ‘Enigma’ of Gísla saga.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology [JEGP] 115.3 (2016): 277-98.

Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 2016

Gísla saga has often been described as “enigmatic,” and the riddles posed by Iceland’s best-known... more Gísla saga has often been described as “enigmatic,” and the riddles posed by Iceland’s best-known murder-mystery indeed appear irresolvable. At least equally puzzling, I suggest, is Gisli’s “confession” of his subsequent act of vengeance through an obscure bit of skaldic verse, which has not received similar attention. Setting aside the psychological and forensic approaches traditionally brought to bear on the saga’s persistent enigmas, I offer that Gisli's “confession” forms the crux of an unnoted narrative structure, made plain by the saga’s treatment of medieval Icelandic concepts of masculinity and femininity. In so doing, I identify an undetected analogue in Norse myth to the events that precipitate the saga’s “whodunit,” as well as reexamine widely-held assumptions about the view of gender enunciated in the saga, particularly as articulated in Carol Clover‘s seminal 1993 article, “Regardless of Sex.”

“Minnesang, Spruchdichtung, and Religious Discourse: Authenticity, Genre, and Allusion in Walther von der Vogelweide’s ‘Ein meister las’ (L. 122,24).” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte [DVjs] 89.2 (2015): 153-181.

Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 2015

Ein meister las has been regarded an »eigentümliches Gemisch« by scholars who have questioned its... more Ein meister las has been regarded an »eigentümliches Gemisch« by scholars who have questioned its authenticity. Those critics who have (in the opinion of the present author, rightly) rehabilitated the poem as part of Walther’s »authentic« corpus have generally overlooked the nonetheless perceptive observations that underlie this critical discomfiture. The present essay reads the poem as the locus of a uniquely Waltherian dialogue between the genres of Spruchdichtung, Minnesang, and the devotional lyric in order to account for the critics’ unanimous perception of it as a »problematic« poem.

Die Literaturwissenschaft hat die Authentizität von Ein meister las mehrfach infrage gestellt und das Gedicht sogar als »eigentümliches Gemisch« abgelehnt. Diejenigen Kritiker, die wiederum die Zuschreibung an Walther (m.E. rechtens) befürworten, sind diesem – trotzdem aufschlussreichen – kritischen Unbehagen jedoch nicht gerecht geworden. Um dieses Unbehagen sowohl zu erörtern als auch zu beheben, wird das allgemein als »problematisch« angesehene Gedicht hier als einzigartiger Waltherischer Dialog zwischen den Gattungen Spruchdichtung, Minnesang und geistlicher Lyrik interpretiert.

“Loki, Sneglu-Halla þáttr, and the Case for a Skaldic Prosaics.” In New Norse Studies: Essays on the Literature and Culture of Medieval Scandinavia, edited by Jeffrey Turco, 185-241. Islandica 58. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015.

New Norse Studies: Essays on the Literature and Culture of Medieval Scandinavia, 2015

This article proposes that the oft-dismissed Sneglu-Halla þáttr (Tale of Sarcastic Halli) is not ... more This article proposes that the oft-dismissed Sneglu-Halla þáttr (Tale of Sarcastic Halli) is not simply a series of virtuoso vituperations peppered with sexual-cum-barnyard humor, nor “a series of episodes that could have been arranged otherwise as well,” but a text that repays close attention, both for original audiences as well as for scholars of Old Norse-Icelandic literature. I argue that its eponymous hero establishes his social position at the royal Norwegian court by ensconcing himself within a sustained series of allusions to myths of the Norse god Loki, while framing his peers, and even his superiors, as the sexual deviants, low-lifes, and numbskulls of a déclassé “folktale” world. Sneglu-Halla þáttr thus presupposes considerable literary connoisseurship, detailed knowledge of the Norse mythographic tradition, and a consciousness of high and low genre that reflects concerns of shifting social classes and political powers in thirteenth and fourteenth-century Iceland. Ultimately, I leverage this reading to articulate a reappraisal of medieval Icelandic narrative prose—most often lauded for its “realism," "straightforwardness," and "objectivity”: I offer that this deceptively “simple” tale adheres to the same aesthetic principles of complexity, ambiguity, and allusiveness that characterize the Skaldic poetry that is its ostensible subject.

“Introduction.” In New Norse Studies: Essays on the Literature and Culture of Medieval Scandinavia, edited by Jeffrey Turco, 1-5. Islandica 58. Ithaca: Cornell University Library, 2015.

“Il laccio di scarpa di Skarpheðinn, la scena-tipo, e la tipologia cristiana [Skarpheðinn’s Shoestring, the Type-Scene, and Christian Typology].” Studi e Materiali di Storia delle Religioni [SMSR] 81.2 (2015): 414-39.

Studi e Materiali di Storia delle Religioni, 2015

Joseph Harris has described Njáls saga as «perhaps the supreme artistic realization of the idea o... more Joseph Harris has described Njáls saga as «perhaps the supreme artistic realization of the idea of Northern history as turning on the conversion and of the implications of this idea in the lives of individuals». The current paper attempts to show precisely how this general assertion – made at the macro-level of medieval Christian Geschichtsschreibung – plays out at the micro-level of saga narrative.To illustrate one such instance, I begin with the seemingly pedestrian observation that there are exactly three instances of shoelace-tying in Njáls saga. The first takes place when the Irish slave Melkólfr returns from his cheese-stealing expedition on Hallgerðr’s behalf. The second takes place when Skarpheðinn pauses to tie his shoe before gliding across the ice to kill his enemy Þráinn. Thirdly and lastly, Þorsteinn Hallsson stops to leisurely tie his shoe while his fellows are being being mown down after the battle of Clontarf and is spared by Kerþjálfaðr. I argue that what at first seems like an inconsequential detail (or at most an irreducible example of the author’s flair for the enigmatic) in fact belongs to a scheme of typological patterning that, in Njáls saga, is best understood as a hybrid-product of indigenous narrative and continental historiographic traditions.

“Dante’s fronde: Making the World Safe for Encyclopedism in Paradiso 26.” Dante Studies 132 (2014): 145-157.

Dante Studies, 2014

This article reads Dante’s dialogue with sacred authorities in Paradiso 26 as the poet’s rehabili... more This article reads Dante’s dialogue with sacred authorities in Paradiso 26 as the poet’s rehabilitation of the “failed encyclopedism” that leads both to Adam’s physical and spiritual exile as well as to the destruction of the “unaccomplishable work” (26.125) of the Towel of Babel. I present a new reading of Dante’s use of botanical imagery in Canto 26, which serves to enunciate both this larger rehabilitative project as well as Dante’s newly-acquired status, at this juncture in the poem, as encyclopedic authority.

Nibelungenlied und Nibelungensage: Kommentierte Bibliographie 1945–2010. Edited by Florian Kragl with Elisabeth Martschini, Katharina Büsel, and Alexander Hödlmoser. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2012. Pp. xxiv + 830. In JEGP 114 (2015): 127-29.

NEW NORSE STUDIES: A Journal on the Literature and Culture of Medieval Scandinavia - A Call for Submissions from Islandica

by Jeffrey Turco, Richard L Harris, Russell Poole, Fjodor Uspenskij, Carla Del Zotto, Aðalheiður Guðmundsdóttir, Sæbjørg Walaker Nordeide, Egilsdóttir Ásdís, Alison Finlay, Shaun F. D. Hughes, Jonathan Hui, Philip Lavender, Christine Schott, Dirk H Steinforth, and Paul Acker

NNS, 2020

Submissions received by September 1, 2019, will be considered for publication in NNS 2 (2020). Ne... more Submissions received by September 1, 2019, will be considered for publication in NNS 2 (2020). New Norse Studies: A Journal on the Literature and Culture of Medieval Scandinavia is the annual of Islandica, a series in Icelandic and Norse studies, founded in 1908 and published in print and online by the Fiske Icelandic Collection, Cornell University Library. Devoted to all facets of the written tradition of medieval Iceland and Scandinavia, NNS seeks to bring the insights of multiple disciplines to bear upon Norse texts.

NNS welcomes contributions to scholarship relating to all aspects of Old Norse-Icelandic literature, including but not limited to: literary and textual culture; mythology, folklore, and history of religions; archaeology and material culture; language, linguistics, philology, and runology; medieval history; and comparative literary studies.

NNS does not solicit or publish reviews of individual books. Review essays concerning larger trends, topics, and bodies of scholarship are welcome.

NEW NORSE STUDIES: A Journal on the Literature and Culture of Medieval Scandinavia - A Call for Submissions from Islandica

by Jeffrey Turco, Richard L Harris, Daniel Brielmaier, Adam Oberlin, Torfi Tulinius, Carla Del Zotto, Fjodor Uspenskij, Aðalheiður Guðmundsdóttir, and Sæbjørg Walaker Nordeide

New Norse Studies: A Journal on the Literature and Culture of Medieval Scandinavia is the annual ... more New Norse Studies: A Journal on the Literature and Culture of Medieval Scandinavia is the annual of Islandica, a series in Icelandic and Norse studies, founded in 1908 and published in print and online by the Fiske Icelandic Collection, Cornell University Library. Devoted to all facets of the written tradition of medieval Iceland and Scandinavia, NNS seeks to bring the insights of multiple disciplines to bear upon Norse texts.

NNS welcomes contributions to scholarship relating to all aspects of Old Norse-Icelandic literature, including but not limited to: literary and textual culture; mythology, folklore, and history of religions; archaeology and material culture; language, linguistics, philology, and runology; medieval history; and comparative literary studies.

NNS does not solicit or publish reviews of individual books. Review essays concerning larger trends, topics, and bodies of scholarship will be considered.

New Norse Studies: A Journal on the Literature and Culture of Medieval Scandinavia - A Call for Submissions from Islandica

by Jeffrey Turco, Daniel Brielmaier, Richard L Harris, Adam Oberlin, Jessica Auz, Aðalheiður Guðmundsdóttir, Sæbjørg Walaker Nordeide, and Fjodor Uspenskij

New Norse Studies: A Journal on the Literature and Culture of Medieval Scandinavia is the new ann... more New Norse Studies: A Journal on the Literature and Culture of Medieval Scandinavia is the new annual of Islandica, a series in Icelandic and Norse studies, founded in 1908 and published by the Fiske Icelandic Collection, Cornell University Library. Devoted to all facets of the written tradition of medieval Iceland and Scandinavia, NNS seeks to bring the insights of multiple disciplines to bear upon Norse texts.

Viking, Greco-Roman, and Native American New England ("The Cultural Moment of the Fiske Icelandic Collection")

Landsbókasafn Íslands – Háskólabókasafn, 2018

A lecture on the confluence of Viking and Native-American New England in the 19th-century America... more

“Ymir: A Cold Case,” Department of English, Harvard University, May 5, 2012 [invited]

“Gender, Violence, and the Structure of ‘Enigma’ in Gísla saga,” Department of Scandinavian Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, April 4, 2013 [invited]

'La storiografia, la tipologia, e la vita quotidiana nella Saga di Njáll," Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza,” November 8, 2013 [invited]

“The Sense of the Sagas,” Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies Colloquium, University of Saskatchewan, March 11, 2010 [invited]

“New Approaches to the Brothers Grimm,” The University of Puerto Rico, Sept. 17, 2014 [invited]

SMSR 81-2/2015. Theme section: The Icelandic sagas in the medieval European historigraphy

by Carla Del Zotto, Alessandro Saggioro, Haki Antonsson, Jeffrey Turco, Caterina Moro, Silvia Omenetto, and Marianna Ferrara

Special issue edited by Prof. Carla Del Zotto, University of Rome La Sapienza

Call for Papers in Old Norse-Icelandic Studies, Fiske Icelandic Collection Sponsored Session, 55th ICMS, Kalamazoo, 7-10 May 2020

Call for Papers in Old Norse-Icelandic Studies, Fiske Icelandic Collection Sponsored Session, 53rd ICMS, Kalamazoo, 10-13 May 2018

The Fiske Icelandic Collection of the Cornell University Library invites submissions for a sponso... more The Fiske Icelandic Collection of the Cornell University Library invites submissions for a sponsored session on Old Norse-Icelandic Studies at the 53rd International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University, 10-13 May 2018. Relevant submissions in the field, as reflected in the published volumes of the Islandica series, will receive fullest consideration.

Please send an abstract (one page maximum, single-spaced) and a completed participant information form to Jeffrey Turco (jturco@purdue.edu) by 15 September 2017. The form, as well as guidelines for paper proposals, can be found on the Congress submissions page. Access to the official call for papers is on the home page of the Congress.

Fiske Icelandic Collection Sponsored Session on Old Norse-Icelandic Studies, Friday, May 11, 2018, 53rd International Congress on Medieval Studies

by Jeffrey Turco and Haraldur Bernharðsson

Old Norse-Icelandic Studies Sponsor: Fiske Icelandic Collection, Cornell Univ. Library Organizer:... more Old Norse-Icelandic Studies
Sponsor: Fiske Icelandic Collection, Cornell Univ. Library
Organizer: Jeffrey Turco, Purdue Univ.
Presider: Richard L. Harris, Univ. of Saskatchewan
The Learning of Ingunn and Guðrún: Women in Medieval Icelandic Education
Ryder Patzuk-Russell, Independent Scholar
Reading Medieval Literature in Early Modern Iceland
Sheryl McDonald Werronen, Københavns Univ.
The Dialects of Njáls saga: Linguistic Variation in Six Fourteenth-Century Manuscripts
Haraldur Bernharðsson, Háskóli Íslands
Why Are the Sagas Anonymous?
Anatoly Liberman, Univ. of Minnesota–Twin Cities

Nibelungenlied und Nibelungensage

Nibelungenlied und Nibelungensage, 2012

Encyclopedic Aesthetics: Science, Salvation, And Storytelling In The Thirteenth Century