What the walrus tells us - language, translation and identity-construction in Historia Norwegie

Today, August 30, I conducted a seminar in a half-term course for first-year students that I have designed myself. The course focusses on the cult of saints and history-writing in twelfth-century Norway, and one of the main intended outcomes is that the students will have an understanding of how Norwegian clerics formulated a Christian identity through the writing of chronicles.

In today’s seminar, we were examining aspects of the chronicle Historia Norwegie, an account of Norway’s geography and history which was composed in Oslo by an unknown chronicler sometime close to 1170. The work only survives in incomplete late-medieval transmissions. A good overview of its history can be found here, while an Open Access edition with translation and critical commentary can be found here.  

For the seminar, I had selected a handful of passages that could help to demonstrate how the anonymous chronicler shaped this book so that it both served a domestic and a foreign audience, in order for Norway to both adhere to the hallmarks of a Christian country, as well as stand out as something unique. This balance of conformity and uniqueness is a key element in identity formation. This was perhaps especially true within an intellectual culture as that of medieval Latin Christendom, where there was a divinely woven pattern in history, and where that pattern could be discerned by elements in new places – such as peripheral Norway – that resembled in well-established, central places – such as the Holy Land, Italy or France.  

Perhaps my favourite passage that highlights this balance between an interior and an exterior audience can be seen in the chronicler’s overview of the dangers of the Greenland Sea in Chapter 2. Here, the chronicler includes a list of sea creatures that inhabit these waters. Among these is the ‘pistrix’, a whale-like creature, perhaps a sawfish, that can be found together with the baleen whale in the Indian Ocean, according to Pliny’s Natural History (book 9, chapter 3). Here we see, in other words, how the anonymous chronicler has used a name familiar to the exterior audience, who are likely to – or at least expected to – have read Pliny. 

Following the pistrix, the anonymous chronicler mentions the ‘hafstramb’, a creature with neither head nor tail, and which dips up and down like the trunk of a tree. This is the earliest known reference to this beast, and to this day there is no consensus about what it is meant to signify. Shortly after, the reader is also presented with two other creatures, the ‘hafguva’ and the ‘hafkitta’, and these two are likewise not identified with any certainty. It is worth noting that the name ‘hafkitta’ can be understood as ‘sea-cat’ (from ‘haf’ meaning ‘sea’ and ‘kitta’ meaning ‘cat’ or ‘she-cat’), and that this is a common Norwegian name for the wolf fish or sea-wolf. It is unclear whether the anonymous chronicler had this particular fish in mind when referring to the ‘hafkitta’, and it is possible that reports such as that in Historia Norwegie has influenced the later appellation of this name to this particular fish.

What is notable in this passage, however, is that all these three beasts are referred to by their Norse names, whereas the pistrix is referred to by its Latin name. We see here, in other words, that some beasts are common to several places, e.g., the pistrix, whereas others are unique to Norway and its maritime zone. In other words, the chronicler balanced known and unknown, domestic and foreign, local and universal, Norse and Latin, in a way that served to cement the identity of Norway as a place with unique things and typical things.  

But then there is the walrus. And the walrus shows us the borderland between the known and the unknown for readers outside of Norway, at least according to the expectations of the chronicler. The walrus is presented as ‘equinus cetus monoculus’, the one-eyed horse-whale. This is a literal translation of the Norse ‘hrosshvalr’, which is the basis for the Modern English ‘walrus’ and the Modern Norwegian ‘kvalross’. The walrus is undoubtedly a beast typical of the Northern waters and well suited to demonstrate the unique aspects of Norway and its historical identity – in this case represented by natural history. But the name is not given in the vernacular, but is instead rendered as a literal translation, just as the name of its native haunt, Greenland, or ‘Virida Terra’. 

When the chronicler found it useful to employ vernacular terms for beasts typical of the Greenland Sea, why did he not do so in the case of the walrus? Or, for that matter, why did he translate Greenland? The answer is, most likely, that unlike the three other beasts, the walrus was not an unknown entity to exterior readers. By 1170, the walrus was the main source of ivory for the craftspeople of Northern Europe, and although the animal itself had not been observed by men and women who never ventured into the Arctic waters, they knew very well where the ivory came from. Consequently, the walrus was a point of reference that would register in the minds of the foreign readers of Historia Norwegie, and it would be something familiar, unlike the obscure and terrifying beasts such as the ‘hafstramb’. Through the walrus, in other words, the chronicler managed to showcase a unique aspect of Norwegian natural history that could resonate with readers who did not speak Norse. It was therefore useful to render the name of this beast in Latin. In this way, the walrus aided the chronicler in shaping a Norwegian identity.     

Sculptor - a poem by Sylvia Plath

Sculptor 

For Leonard Baskin 

To his house the bodiless 
Come to barter endlessly 
Vision, wisdom, for bodies 
Palpable as his, and weighty. 

Hands moving move priestlier 
Than priest's hands, invoke no vain 
Images of light and air 
But sure stations in bronze, wood, stone. 

Obdurate, in dense-grained wood,  
A bald angel blocks and shapes 
The flimsy light; arms folded 
Watches his cumbrous world eclipse 

Inane worlds of wind and cloud. 
Bronze dead dominate the floor, 
Resistive, ruddy-bodied, 
Dwarfing us. Our bodies flicker 

Toward extinction in those eyes 
Which, without him, were beggared 
Of place, time, and their bodies. 
Emulous spirits make discord, 

Try entry, enter nightmares 
Until his chisel bequeaths 
Them life livelier than ours, 
A solider repose than death's. 


(From The Colossus, 1967 edition)

 

Finding nuggets - the rewards of reading widely

 

When conversing about books and reading, a recurring topic tends to be how to balance the amount of available material with the limited time of a human lifespan. There always has to be some kind of balance for purely practical reasons, and how that balance is achieved depends entirely on each individual reader. For me, the decision-making process is largely guided by lists, as I have written about in previous blogposts (here, here, and here).

In my case, there are numerous books that I want to read, many of which I keep putting off for various reasons. It might be that I feel like I do not have the time needed to really delve into the book in the way I want to, which is why I still have not started The Count of Monte Christo, even though I do have an unabridged translation at home in the fjords. Another reason is that I still want to have something to look forward to from that particular author, which is why I have still only read two of the novels by Erik Fosnes Hansen, one of my absolute favourite authors. Or it might be that I simply feel too tired to engage with the book in the way I feel it should be engaged with, which is why I still have not started Hanna Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem.  

Then there are the books that I do not particularly want to read, but that I feel some obligation to read in order to fulfill some kind of personal ambition. In my case, such books are typically found among the Nobel laureates in literature, and there are many of those books I feel no urge to read. But every once in a while, I come to that pleasant place between readings, when the euphoria of having finished a good book and being able to select from the plethora of available options that I feel drawn towards a book that I normally would not prioritise, either because it is not on any of my lists, or because it seems uninteresting or trite (this is sometimes the case for books that are on one my lists as well).  

Two weeks ago, I found myself in this pleasant in-between space that often fuels the mind with a kind of reading-hubris, which leads to choices that would not have been made in sobriety. I was leaving for Oslo after the summer vacation, and I had had a couple of very good reading weeks. And I believe that since I was about to embark on a nine-hour bus ride, my choice fell on a book that I had not paid much attention to in the past years, namely the Norwegian translation of Le Procès-Verbal, the debut novel of J. M. G. Le Clézio, the Nobel laureate in literature of 2008.  

The novel - Rapport om Adam in Norwegian and The Interrogation in English - is not one I would recommend. I found it boring and pretentious, and even by 1963 the stock character of the quasi-intellectual male misfit who shuns societal norms in often violent hypocrisy had outplayed its usefulness. To follow the pathetic complaints of an ungrateful rapist penned by a young ambitious male author is at times gruelling and downright unpleasant. This is a case where even the occasional beauty of the prose is insufficient to make me come away from the experience and look back on it as an overall pleasant experience. 

As many problems as I have with this book, and as much as it has put me off Le Clézio's books for the foreseeable future, reading the novel was also a reminder that even in the most unexpected and unpleasant places, there will be nuggets that make the effort worthwhile. In this sense, The Interrogation also proved ultimately to be worthwhile, because here and there - in-between all the myopic self-centredness and moaning - there were some formulations, some sentences that were remarkably well put, and which I have marked for future use. For instance, for someone like me who researches legends of saints and how the stories of saints are multiplied in the course of the history of a given cult, some reflections about the validity of thousand versions of the same legend - even if this was not about saints' legend - is an excellent starting point for discussing authority and complexity in hagiography, whether that discussion is done in an article, a blogpost, or in the classroom. In short, reading a novel that I found objectionable in many different ways, nonetheless yielded some nuggets that might prove useful, and I was again reminded of the rewards of reading widely - even so widely that it goes beyond pleasure.   

Born from old ideas - or, Archive everything

 
archive everything 

- Karl Steel, in a tweet that I forgot to archive by screenshot 


When I started my PhD in 2014, I had learned a few important things from my MA degree. For instance, I had learned the value of keeping an archive of notes and drafts and half-baked ideas. And, perhaps more importantly, I had learned to do so more logically and well-structured than I had done during my MA - a period in which my method was mingled with some madness, or perhaps it is more accurate to call it mess. From an early point in my PhD, I began to keep neatly organised folders on my computer, as well as a less neatly organised and extensive archive of handwritten notes, print-outs, and ephemera that lost its tenuous organisational solidity when I moved my things from Denmark to Norway at the end of my Danish sojourn in 2019. It was this practice that made the tweet by the medievalist Karl Steel - quoted in the epigraph - resonate very strongly with me when I first read it sometime in 2015 or 2016, if memory serves. The tweet, which I quote from memory, came at a very poignant time, as I remember digging through my notes for the kernel of an idea that I had finally found a way to turn into something substantial. Although I forget exactly which of my ideas it was, the feeling of triumph as I was justified in keeping even the most insignificant-seeming of notes, stays with me to this day. 

A few years after, or last week to be somewhat more precise, this sensation was rekindled in me, as I was scrambling to finish drafts for two articles that may or may not be printed, but which are at least out of my hands for the time being. The articles had begun some months apart, and in my mind the only thing they had in common was that they needed to be done within the same week, and that I was the one who had to finish them, or at least hammer them into a shape that warranted sending them off to the respective editors. However, once I had shipped them off and let them out of my immediate care, I came to realise that these two texts had something else in common, namely that they were both born out of old ideas. 

Like all scholars, I often get ideas for articles that I would like to do, or things I would like to include in articles at some point. Like many scholars, I imagine, I eventually come to the realisation that several of those ideas are not substantial enough for an entire article, or too small or insignificant to warrant the time required to do the necessary research, or too big to be done within the constraints of time and other obligations that always direct how I prioritise my work. And, like some scholars, I keep my ideas in a computer document, which has now grown in length to the point that I would need several lifetimes - and some very careless editors - to be allowed to publish all of them. Luckily, however, I also find that some of these ideas can be developed, either as an article of its own or as part of another article. 

The whole point of my document with ideas of various complexity has always been a conviction that those ideas might some day result in something concrete, although when that someday would come was not for me to know. The articles I submitted last week, however, both came from that document, and both started as ideas formulated in a rather confused, brief and incomplete way - more as a cryptic note rather than a fully-fledged idea. However, as ideas mature, they often get mixed in with other ideas, or they get transplanted into a framework where they can develop further. These are trajectories that usually depend on a mixture of time, accrued learning and experience, and chance. Of these three, perhaps chance is the most important, and it was absolutely chance that threw me into situations where I was invited to submit something to publications whose themes and subjects made me recall those ideas for which I thought I would never find a suitable outlet. Even though I might still have to do a lot with these texts to get them into shape, and even though I might still get rejected, these text have enabled me to develop my fledgling ideas into something material, and that is a crucial step. The compulsion to archive everything has, indeed, paid off.