Epics, Sagas and Cycles of the Medieval North Sea

Catalog description

Northern Europe produced a number of long-form literary pieces during the Middle Ages, such as the Old English Beowulf, the early Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge and its associated tales, the Middle Welsh Mabinogion and the Old Norse sagas. This course will explore these tales and others and question the definition of this genre (or genres) of literature, examining connections between the different types of tales and what we can know about their composition. Students will investigate the connections between these tales and earlier examples of epic literature, such as Virgil's The Aeneid, and examine what we know regarding the transmission of earlier forms of heroic tales from Late Antiquity and the ancient world to medieval Western Europe. Major themes such as violence, heroism and the role of women in these stories will be discussed throughout the course and students will be expected to engage with both questions presented by the individual examples of these forms of literature as well as to compare across cultural and literary boundaries. The reception of these tales in both the medieval and modern worlds will be discussed in the conclusion to the course. This class will give students a grounding in critical thinking and an appreciation of different approaches to literary texts and the environments in which they were created. By engaging with some of the foremost medieval literary productions of the European Middle Ages, this course will chart a journey through some of the greatest written achievements of the cultures of the Celts, Vikings and early English and question students' understanding of literature as well as the cultural construction and portrayal of the heroic past.