8. Newsletter 8 (July 2011)

1. General Editors’ meeting and skaldic symposium 2011

The General Editors met for the fifteenth time on Saturday 25 – Sunday 26 June 2011 in Sandefjord, Norway, hosted by Kari Ellen Gade. Some items discussed at the meeting are reported in more detail below. The meeting was followed by a two-day symposium on kennings at the University of Cambridge, organised by Judy Quinn, Debbie Potts and Emily Osborne; a follow-up to the kenning symposium held in Aberdeen in 2010. Papers presented by contributors to the skaldic project were: Edith Marold (Kiel; Keynote lecture), ‘Kennings and Metaphor’; Kate Heslop (Zurich), ‘Kennings and Memory’; Martin Chase (Fordham), ‘Kennings for Poetry in Late Medieval Trúarkvæði’; Margaret Clunies Ross (Sydney), ‘Why Are There Kennings in fornaldarsaga Poetry?’; Hannah Burrows (Sydney), ‘Edge-dead Men, Serving Girls and Transcended Souls? Avian Puns in Four Old Norse-Icelandic Riddles’; Rolf Stavnem (Aarhus) ‘Aesthetic Strategies in Kennings’; Russell Poole (Western Ontario), ‘Plunder in and of Kennings’; Jonathan Grove (Cambridge), ‘The Skaldic íþrótt and the Contest of Verse Making’. Full details of the programme can be found at http://www.asnc.cam.ac.uk/news/2011/01/31/166/.

2. Publication schedule

Publication of SkP I: Poetry for Scandinavian Rulers 1: From Mythological Times to c. 1035, ed. Diana Whaley, has been delayed and is now due for publication in May 2012, with the manuscript to be sent to the publishers in February-March 2012. SkP III: Poetry from Treatises on Poetics, ed. Edith Marold and Kari Ellen Gade, will be published in May-June 2013, followed by either SkP IV: Poetry on Icelandic History, ed. Guðrún Nordal, or SkP VIII: Poetry in fornaldarsögur, ed. Margaret Clunies Ross. Contributors to these volumes with material outstanding should please take special note of these deadlines and maintain contact with their Volume Editor(s).

3. Personnel changes

Lauren Goetting will end her term as Research Assistant to Kari Ellen Gade in Bloomington, Indiana, in August 2011, and be replaced by Megan Barrett. Soffía Guðny´ Guðmundsdóttir will work full-time as Research Assistant to Guðrún Nordal in Reykjavík from October 2011 until the end of 2012.

4. Reviews

Reviews listed since the last newsletter:

Of SkP VII: Poetry on Christian Subjects, ed. Margaret Clunies Ross (published November 2007):

• Haukur Þorgeirsson, Són 7 (2009)

Of SkP II: Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas 2: From c. 1035 to c. 1300, ed. Kari Ellen Gade (published June 2009):

• Rune Palm, Scripta Islandica 62 (2011)
• Ármann Jakobsson, SBVS 34 (2010)

A full list of reviews will be maintained on the project’s website, with scanned copies to be uploaded. If contributors become aware of any other reviews, please send bibliographical details to Hannah (hannah.burrows@sydney.edu.au).

5. Sales figures from Brepols

243 copies of SkP VII (182 sales plus 61 free copies) and 238 of SkP II (183 sales plus 55 free copies) have been sold. Brepols report that they are very pleased with the success of the series.

6. Electronic edition

Access to published volumes through the online database is now fully functional. Subscribers can access all material found in the editions in an interactive form, with links to additional material such as images, transcriptions, lexical concordance and kenning index. The database is also searchable. Material that is available via the database but is not in the printed edition is provided at no additional cost to the subscriber; however, it should be appreciated that such material may not be quality-controlled to the same level as the content of the printed volumes. Subscriptions are available to both individual and institutional purchasers; very few institutions have so far taken advantage of this so please encourage your library representative to contact Tarrin for access.

All Contributing Editors already have access beyond that of subscriber level via their editorial login, usernames and passwords for which remain unchanged.

7. New on the database

No major changes have been made to the database interface, but various minor improvements and fixes have been implemented. Since the last newsletter editions of more than 600 stanzas have been entered into the database (including more than 4,000 Notes and 8,000 variant readings), along with images of 2,000 manuscript pages, 400 bibliographic entries and 550 verse transcriptions. Currently 65% of the entire corpus has been entered.

The broader access to the database available to subscribers to the electronic edition has required other changes to the security setup for the web interface. For most project members this means having to log in to the database more regularly.

8. Date and place of next General Editors’ meeting

The next General Editors’ meeting will take place on 4-5 August 2012 in Aarhus, immediately before the 15th International Saga Conference.

References