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Hei taasen!
Alkajaisiksi haluan kiittää kaikkia niitä aktiivisia jäseniä, jotka ovat jaksaneet toimia yhdistyksen hyväksi niin suuri- kuin pienimuotoisissakin puitteissa - järjestää tapahtumia, kirjoittaa lehteen, puolustaa yhdistyksemme etuja ja tiedottaa tapahtumista. Näkyvimpänä osoituksena tästä aktiivisuudesta ovat Helsingissä järjestetyt kuukausitapaamiset, joiden aktiiviset osanottajat ja vilkas keskustelu edustavat yliopistollista yhteisöllisyyttä parhaimmillaan. On myös hienoa havaita, että uusissa opiskelijapolvissa löytyy aina uusia keskiajasta innostuneita.
Tänä vuonna on aloiteltu järjestelmällistä yhteydenpitoa maan eri laitoksiin, joissa tutkitaan keskiaikaa. Kaikki toimenpiteet eivät ehkä heti näy uusina seminaareina tai vastaavina tapahtumina, mutta auttavat varmasti kehittämään toimintaamme parin vuoden aikavälillä. Käytän taas tilaisuutta hyväkseni ja muistutan niin vanhoja kuin uusiakin jäseniä siitä, että yhdistyksellä ei ole koskaan liikaa aktiivisia jäseniä, että ideoille ja toteuttajille löytyy aina käyttöä ja että Glossae-lehti ja glossa-list@helsinki.fi ovat hyviä tiedotusväyliä.
Glossan toiminnassa on seuraavaksi vuorossa kevätesitelmä, joka järjestetään yhteistyössä oikeushistorioitsijoiden kanssa. Esitelmää edeltävässä kevätkokouksessa käsitellään vuosikertomuksen ja tilinpäätöksen lisäksi myös sääntömuutosehdotus (ks. toisaalla tässä lehdessä), joten olkaapa valppaita.
Ei sitten tällä erää muuta kuin hyvää kevätaikaa. Toivottavasti näemme kevätkokouksessa, kuukausitapaamisissa sekä tietenkin elokuisessa Dies medievalesissa! Loppukevään ja kesän ohjelmasta päivittyvää tietoa glossa-list@helsinki.fi -listalla!
Hejsan igen!
Först och främst vill jag tacka alla våra aktiva medlemmar som har varit med i att organisera och informera - det händer mycket hela tiden även om det tar sin tid innan alla våra planer kan förverkligas till seminarier e.dyl. Månadsmötena i Helsingfors har varit en succée med sina intressanta föredrag och livlig diskussion. Det har också varit trevligt att se att nya generationer är intresserade av medeltiden.
Jag hoppas att vi träffas nästa gång i Glossa rf:s vårmöte, som arrangeras i samarbete med juridikhistoriker. Ett förslag för förändring av Glossa rf:s stadgar ska göras (se vidare i denna tidskrift).
Annars önskar jag er trevlig vårtid, glöm inte att kolla glossa-list@helsinki.fi för information om evenemang under våren och sommaren! Ceterum censeo: Det är alltid en bra idée att informera i Glossae och glossa-list@helsinki.fi om möjliga seminarier, möten mm. som arrangeras i era institutioner mm.
Aurinkoisin terveisin - Med soliga hälsningar,
Anu Lahtinen
Glossa ry:n puheenjohtaja
Ordförande för Glossa ry
Presenting this topic in Finland feels very different from in Britain (1). There, reassessing the development of English identity in the early medieval period relates directly to Britain’s renegotiation of national identity in the wake of devolution, large-scale immigration, and misgivings about its imperialist past (and present). There too, however, the idea that studying elves and monsters may be important to understanding medieval group identities is unfamiliar. Folklore as a discipline barely exists in British academia, while British historiography was founded on an (English) ideology of ‘progress’ through the steady evolution of good government and capitalism. Here my work may seem both less unusual and less relevant. All the same, I hope that it proves of interest to the readers of Glossae. I sketch some of my arguments for how we can reconstruct prehistoric, pre-Conversion Anglo-Saxon world-views by investigating the meanings of the word elf (Old English ælf, plural ælfe; Old Icelandic álfr, plural álfar). Traditionally, historians and anthropologists studying world-views focus on events, narratives and behaviour. We lack this sort of evidence for early Anglo-Saxon culture, but we do have a range of evidence for what the word elf meant. I use this material as the basis for establishing the significance of elves in early English society. This claim, of course, begs a variety of theoretical questions, which I do not tackle here. The interested reader is, however, welcome to contact me on this or other points (see note 1.)
As so often in Old English philology, it is easiest to begin with Old Norse. Despite the wealth of Old Icelandic mythographic writing, Norse álfar rarely appear as characters in their own right (or at least according to conventional wisdom. One probable exception is the Eddaic poem Völundarkviða). However, the word álfr does occur reasonably often in poetry, and this offers some useful information. Here I focus on the use of álfr in kennings (certain kinds of poetic metaphor) in Old Norse skaldic poetry. This is first attested in the work of our oldest skáld, Bragi inn Gamli Boddason, who composed in the ninth century, before the conversion to Christianity. In the fourth stanza of his Ragnarsdrápa, Bragi described an attack by the legendary king Jörmunrekr (2). Since Finnish is better-suited than English to translating skaldic verse, I provide a word-by-word Finnish translation (by Bethany Fox) and an interpretative English translation:
Flaut of set við sveita/Virtasi istuimien yli veren kanssa
sóknar alfs, í golfi/hyökkäyksen alfin (=soturin) lattialle
hræva dọgg, þars họggnar/ruumiiden kastetta (=verta), jolla hakattuja
hendr sem fœtr of kendu./käsiä niin kuin jalkoja he tunsivat.
This use of álfr in kennings for ‘warrior’ became common. In itself, it tells us that álfr was an appropriate base for metaphors denoting human warriors. However, only a few other words for types of supernatural being were used in this way: ás (‘pagan god’), and, rarely, goð (‘god’) and regin (‘gods’). The many words denoting monsters, such as jötun, þurs or dvergr, were not used. It would appear that álfar and æsir were considered to be similar enough to be used as metaphorical terms for men when other words for supernatural beings were not. Words for gods, elves and men formed a group which was systematically opposed to the group of words for monsters in the Norse lexicon.
This reading is supported by other Norse evidence, which I need not outline here. More importantly, it reflects a Norse world-view, identified from other sources, in which gods, men and monsters walked in the same world, gods and men residing in Miðgarðr (the ‘middle-settlement/enclosure’) and monsters in Útgarðr (the ‘outer settlement/enclosure’)(3). Æsir and álfar could pose a threat to individual members of the human in-group (as in the poems Grímnismál and Völundarkviða), but monsters threatened Miðgarðr as a whole. In this world-view, æsir and álfar were themselves like ethnic groups, different from the in-group but similar to them. Accordingly, ethnic out-groups, such as the Finnar, which we would label ‘real’, could be identified at time with álfar and at times with monsters (4). The mythology helped the in-group to define what it was and was not, and how it related to its neighbours.
Can this model also be applied to early Anglo-Saxon culture? The linguistic evidence suggests so. Our earliest evidence for the meanings of Old English ælf (the etymon of elf) comes from personal names, most of which comprised words drawn from the common lexicon—as in Ælfred, literally ‘elf-advice’(5). It is agreed that words used in names usually denoted things which were viewed positively in Anglo-Saxon society, so there was a semantic basis for the choice of name-elements. My surveys of words for types of being in Anglo-Saxon personal names have identified four main semantic groups: words denoting individual people (e.g. brego, ‘lord’; mann, ‘person’, cf. Manfred); words denoting groups of people (e.g. dene, ‘Danes’; þeod ‘people’, cf. Theodoric); words denoting animals (mainly wulf, ‘wolf’ and earn ‘eagle’, cf. Arnhild); and finally a group of words denoting supernatural beings: ælf, os, god and possibly regen (cf. Oswald, Godwin). This latter group comprises exactly the Old English cognates of the Norse words álfr, ás, goð and regin which appear distinctively in kennings for warriors. Here too, then, ælf is associated with words for pagan gods and people(s); and the numerous Old English words for monsters (e.g. þyrs, eoten, dweorg) are excluded from the system. The same pattern occurs in Old Norse personal names, and to some extent in Old German ones too. This suggests that the same world-view as I have posited for Scandinavian societies existed among the Anglo-Saxons and their ancestors.
However, it may be that Anglo-Saxon names themselves merely represent conservative naming-practices, and the inheritance of an old system. Fortunately, their evidence is corroborated by an innovation in early Old English: a reorganisation of Old English noun-endings which took place between the Anglo-Saxon settlements of Britain in the fifth century and the time of our first Old English texts in the seventh century (where the change is almost if not entirely complete)(6). Among the noun-classes of the Germanic languages was a group of long-stemmed masculine i-stems. These were grammatically masculine; their root-vowels were long or followed by two consonants, or both; and their inflexional stems originally ended in -i. Ælf (< *alβi-) was one of these, as were the monster-words þyrs (?‘magic-worker’), wyrm (‘snake, dragon, worm’) and ent (‘giant’). In Old English the declension had the distinctive nominative plural ending -e (thus ælfe). However, this declension was re-organised in Old English so that it contained only words for people and peoples, such as Seaxe, Norþhymbre, Egypte (Saxons, Northumbrians, Egyptians), ælde, leode (‘people’), Cantware (‘Kent-people’) and other words in -ware (‘inhabitants’)—and ælfe and probably the plural of os (‘pagan god’), which seems to have been ese. Words for monsters were moved into a different declension (with the plural -as, e.g. þyrsas), but ælf remained in the declension and os joined it. This is clear evidence that around the time of the Anglo-Saxon settlement, ælfe and ese were associated with each other as were the Norse álfar and æsir; that they were both associated with words for human people and peoples; and that this group as a whole was systematically opposed to monsters. The prospect is clear that ælfe played a significant role in Anglo-Saxon conceptions of group identity. The Old English poem Beowulf shows how important monsters could be in Anglo-Saxon constructions of the in-group’s identity and ideals. The present evidence suggests that gods and elves also had a part to play, presuably like that in the Norse material of supporting the human in-group as a whole, threatening individual transgressing members, and providing a model for the construction of other ethnic groups.
Various sorts of evidence can be used to develop these conclusions, to illuminate further the world-views of early Anglo-Saxon societies. One example is evidence for how ælfe were situated in the landscape. We have few narratives to help us here, but we do have some evidence in Anglo-Saxon place-names. Like Finnish place-names, these tended to be transparently meaningful, and a number of them include words for supernatural beings. We can rarely be sure how old a name is, and I have accordingly restricted my studies to names attested by 1100, but obviously these could include names coined as late as the eleventh century. Moreover, ælf is securely attested only once.(7) However, there is a respectable collection of place-names containing the names of pagan gods—Woden, Þunor, Tig and Frig—and the monster-words þyrs, ent, puca, scinna, scucca and what is probably a monster’s name, Grendel.(8) Strikingly, the monsters are usually associated with depressions and water features: ditches, pits, pools, springs and muddy streams (e.g. þyrs pytt, enta dic). This is gratifyingly consistent with the portrayal of the haunts of the monster Grendel in Beowulf, which associates Grendel with marshes and pools. The gods, on the other hand, are associated with forest clearings, valleys and hills (e.g. Þunorslege, ‘Þunor’s grove’; Frigedene, ‘Frig’s valley’; Ælfrucge, ‘ælf-ridge’). This too is fairly well-paralleled; thus the thirteenth-century Southern English Legendary claims of the fallen angels which it identifies as Eluene (‘elves’) that ‘bi daye muche in wodes heo beoth : and bi ni3te ope hei3e dounes’ (‘by day they are mainly in woods, and by night upon high hills’)(9). The place-name evidence, then, corroborates once more the opposition between gods/elves and monsters for which I have argued. Moreover, it suggests that gods and monsters were associated with the ‘real’ world around Anglo-Saxon settlements, being used to help Anglo-Saxons give cultural meaning to their environment, and define their group identity.
In the end, we will always need narratives to interpret the culture of our medieval subjects—whether they come from indigenous or comparative sources. But narratives, first and foremost, are woven words, and it is with words that we must begin. By paying close attention to them, I suggest, we can discover more about the dark corners of medieval culture than is generally realised. And although Finns probably do not need to be told it, words for elves, gods and monsters are not bad places to start.
Alaric Hall
Notes
1. I am presently completing a Ph.D. on elves at the University of Glasgow, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board; further details, including contact details, will be found at
2. Den norsk-islandske skjaldedigtning, ed. by Finnur Jónsson, 4 vols (Copenhagen, 1912–15), B1 1.
3. e.g. Kirsten Hastrup, Culture and History in Medieval Iceland: An Anthropological Analysis of Structure and Change (Oxford, 1985), pp. 136–54.
4. cf. John Lindow, ‘Supernatural Others and Ethnic Others: A Millenium of World View’, Scandinavian Studies, 67 (1995), 8–31; Else Mundal, ‘Coexistence of Saami and Norse Culture—Reflected in and Interpreted By Old Norse Myths’, in Old Norse Myths, Literature & Society: Papers of the 11th International Saga Conference, ed. by Geraldine Barnes and Margaret Clunies Ross (Sydney, 2000), pp. 346–55 (also available at http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/departs/medieval/saga.html).
5. For a survey of Old English naming-practices see Cecily Clark, ‘Onomastics’, in The Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume 1: The Beginnings to 1066, ed. by Richard M. Hogg (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 452–89. My own survey is based on William George Searle, Onomasticon Anglo-Saxonicum: A List of Anglo-Saxon Proper Names from the Time of Beda to that of King John (Cambridge, 1897).
6. See A. Campbell, Old English Grammar (Oxford, 1959), §§599–610, esp. §610.7.
7. In charter S 877, for which text and details can be found by searching for S 877 at http://www.anglo-saxons.net/hwaet.
8. For gods see Margaret Gelling, ‘Further Thoughts on Pagan Place-Names’, in Otium et Negotium: Studies in Onomatology and Library Science Presented to Olof von Feilitzen, ed. by Folke Sandgren (Stockholm, 1973), pp. 109–28 (esp. pp. 120–27); cf. Scherr, Jennifer, ‘Are there any “Holy Wells” Associated with the Scandinavian Goddess Freyja?’, Living Spring Journal, 2 (2002), http://www.bath.ac.uk/lispring/journal/home.htm; and S 712a. For monsters there is no comprehensive published list, but for those in charters see S 138, 387/1387 (scucca); 108, 508 (puca); 222 (þyrs); 255, 416, 579 (Grendel); 962 (ent).
9. The Early South-English Legendary or Lives of Saints I: MS. Laud, 108, in the Bodleian Library, ed. by Carl Horstmann, Early English Text Society, 87 (London, 1887), pp. 306–7.
Åboforskarnas verk, som utgavs under Heliga Birgittas jubileumsår ifjol, omfattar resultaten av de senaste årens arkeologiska undersökningar såväl i Nådendals klosterområde och stad. Boken är utgiven i populär form, och anges av docent Kari Uotila i förordet vara utgiven för allmänhetens bruk, t.ex. för turister i staden. Boken består av en samling artiklar på finska, som i slutändan finns översatta till svenska. Enligt en undersökning gjord av Nådendals stad är staden Finlands bästa resmål och boken är ämnad även för historieintresserade turister, påpekar Uotila. Här kan man ju fråga sig varför boken inte även utges på engelska inför de kommande somrarna?
Bokens avgränsning i tid innefattar tiden för klostergrundandet fram till förnyelsen av stadsplanen år 1648. Artiklarna är passligt korta och koncisa, presenterar såväl arkeologisk metod som vardagligt liv i staden på basen av de erhållna resultaten. Artiklarna verkar tack vare sin utformning väl lämpade för t.ex. gymnasieundervisning. Illustrationerna är delvis i färg, delvis i svartvitt, och presenterar en del bilder t.ex. ur Nådendals museums samlingar vilka inte så ofta lyfts fram tidigare. De byggnadsarkeologiska kartorna är rediga och upplysande och kan t.ex. brukas vid ett besök i kyrkan, eftersom själva boken till formatet är lätt att bära med sig. Längst bak i boken finns även nothänvisningar och källförteckning för den mer intresserade läsaren. Tyvärr har en del smärre fel uppkommit i noterna, t.ex. stavfel och utelämnandet av redaktörer, varför man kan fråga sig huruvida nothänvisningar alls är nödvändiga i en dylik, till den breda allmänheten ämnad skrift.
Artiklarnas ämnen varierar från fallstudier av föremålsgrupper till allmänna utläggningar om stadens möjliga utbredning, ex. docent Terttu Lempiäinens artikel om makrofossil och arkeofyter, magister Carita Tulkkis artiklar om föremål och magister Markus Kivistös välskrivna artikel om numismatiska fynd. I Hannele Lehtonens artikel om träbyggnader kunde mer specialiserade etnologiska verk i ämnet än Ilmari Talves Suomen kansankulttuuri ha använts för hänvisning, fastän artikeln endast ämnar berätta allmänt om ämnet.
Boken verkar dock sluta ganska abrupt i en kort artikel om ett rekonstruktionsförsök av ett smycke, vars gjutform hittats vid utgrävningarna. Kanske en avrundande epilog på en sida skulle ha knutit ihop helheten bättre? Uotila presenterar sina resultat av forskningar i klosterkyrkan och fogar dem till forskningstraditionen på ett kreativt sätt. I skriften skiner även en stark lokal identitet igenom, vilket kan ses i en del konstateranden samt i en del av de färggranna kartprojektionerna: på bakpärmen har en snedvinklad projektion söderifrån på Fennoskandien använts, varför det förefaller som om Nådendal är en stor ort nästan i centrum av Östersjöområdet. Sydvästra Finland verkar även lika stort som hela Mellansverige. Hembygdsvurmen hos forskargruppen kan även ses exempelvis angående förändringar i stadsplanen på 1600-talet, varvid Uotila konstaterar följande: ”Åtgärderna i Nådendal var rätt ringa jämfört med åtgärderna i Åbo men framkallade säkert motstånd mot förändringarna hos den lokala befolkningen” (s. 41, 101). Här undrar man försynt vilken källa som kunde ha använts till ett dylikt konstaterande? En del frågor tycks förbli öppna, men detta kanske leder till fler liknande, inom arkeologin i Finland idag så viktiga populariserande verk. Efterfrågan på populariserade forskningsresultat är stor och intresset för arkeologi i allmänheten visar inga tecken på att avta. Denna skrift är därför ännu ett viktigt tillskott i synen på medeltidsarkeologi i Finland i början av 2000-talet.
Eva Ahl
