Aisling Byrne began her discussion of 'Otherworlds in the Atlantic' by explaining how medieval otherworlds, some of the most memorable and troubling aspects of medieval literature, work: they can be accessed in various geographical ways and they often have complicated or even funny relationships to real world geography. Sir Orfeo is a king of Winchester! St. Brendan's voyage to marvelous islands is still located in the Atlantic Ocean; the Island of Avalon is neither part of the human world nor entirely removed from it.
Dr. Byrne also noted that the 'otherworlds' are not often as 'other' as they seem: otherworlds often provide commentary on serious topics and contemporary political situations rather than escapism, providing a fictional backdrop for the exploration of historical realities. Locations in the real world can also be reimagined as part of an otherworld. Scotland, Wales, and Ireland are often the most popular candidates, but the British Isles were referred to as 'alter orbis', the other world, in Latin texts, and most classical commentary on the British Isles discusses how severed from the world they are. Their otherness becomes inherent in their geography, and the European northwest ends up cramped up on the edges of classical world maps, colored differently, or locating Ireland and Iceland outside the world circle entirely as in St Johns College MS 17.
Dr. Byrne noted that the 'remoteness' of the British Isles inspired reflections on the forms of alterity that might be linked to remoteness – an exceptional location might create exceptional qualities in its people. Ireland was seen as a site for the production of marvels, prodigies, and peculiarities. In Gerald's account of Ireland, the 'wonders of the east' become the 'wonders of the west', and the peripheries of the world are filled with strange things. This translates, unfortunately, into an account of the Irish people's 'barbarism' from Gerald: they have too much of this strangeness and too many marvels.
Dr. Eleanor Barraclough picked up on this thread to discuss the imaginative world of the medieval Norse. Pointing out the Arctic North, Greenland, Vinland, Russia, Constantinople and North Africa as the physical peripheries of the Norse world, Dr. Barraclough reminded us that we no longer bave blank spaces in our world maps where we can say there are men with their faces in their chests and lynxes who pass gems instead of urine – but even our maps and world knowledge and are not objective, but open to reinterpretation and reclassification. She noted that when the sagas were being composed, the 'edges' of the map were much closer to home, and they contained a weird host of marvelous creatures, pointing to the Hereford mappamundi – which gets less geographically detailed and features more explanatory text and drawings of exotic animals.
In the blank spaces and at the edges of the world, monsters crowd in; the limits of the map become the limits of humanity itself. In the fourteenth-century Icelandic manuscript GkS 1812 IV, dealing with world knowledge, Africa is written as a series of columns, large chunks of information without indication as to how items are connected or should be arranged. Information dwindles the further away the locations discussed by the manuscript become, ending with 'here are wastes and deserts.' Hauksbók includes numerous lists of fantastic creatures – learning and imagination trump experience on the edges of the map.
Dr. Barraclough then turned to the sagas, in which protagonists venture to all sorts of places, including areas, like sub-Saharan Africa, that the Norse never actually traveled to. These early armchair anthropologists relied on classical learning and European accounts of monstrosities. Dr. Barraclough pointed out that saga protagonists explore the world 'like video game avatars', as if they've been dropped down into fantastic locations with all the necessary knowledge they need to beat the monsters that live there. The elements used can be cut-and-paste pastiches of other accounts, or use semantically loaded Norse words, as in the fictional Bláland (blá meaning black or blue, and being the color of the cloaks of murderers and the skin of revenants in the Íslendingasögur). The sagas, unlike maps, don't have literal blank spaces, but semantic and literary ones, which their authors filled with borrowed scholarship and imagination.
Next up? Our Hilary Term Meeting, on Exploring Medical Humanities! We'll be meeting in Week 4 instead of our usual Week 5, but our speakers will be as exciting, and the preceding dinner as delicious, as ever! Send a message to your friendly Communications Officer at caroline.batten@new.ox.ac.uk to sign up by the end of Week 3.
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