Call for Papers – Landscape and Myth in North-Western Europe

Institut für Nordische Philologie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, 6-8 April 2016

Keynote lectures will be presented by
Stefan Brink (Aberdeen), Terry Gunnell (Reykjavík), and Gregory Toner (Belfast)

We are delighted to announce a symposium at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich on the relationship between landscape and myth in the medieval literatures and modern folklore of Iceland, Ireland, Great Britain, and the continental Scandinavian countries.

 

The symposium will provide a venue to discuss topics such as (but not restricted to) the sematisation of space through narratives about supernatural agents, especially the ascription of religious meaning to real-world landscapes and landscape features; sacral and mythological place names; the systematisation of place-name lore and associated supernatural elements in works such as the Icelandic Landnámabók or the Irish collections of dinnshenchas material; the use of landscape in extensive fictional narratives with strong supernatural elements that are not place-name stories as such, but whose plot moves through densely charged real-world landscapes (such as Bárðar saga or Táin Bó Cúailnge); diachronic changes in and competing contemporary interpretations of the supernatural place-lore attached to specific landscapes and landscape features; the relationship between ‘folkloric’ place-lore and medieval literature; or the relationship between Christian and ‘pagan’ lore in the mythological semantisation of landscape.

Thus, the conference hopes to further research on the relationship between mythical narratives and real-world landscapes throughout the area of the medieval Norse expansion in ‘North Atlantic Europe’, including both questions about the relationship between myth, literature, and real-world landscapes, and any intercultural connections that might exist between the place-lore traditions of the Norse and Celtic countries.

Proposals of no more than 400 words should be sent by 31 December 2015 to Dr Matthias Egeler, Institut für Nordische Philologie, LMU Munich (matthias.egeler[at]lmu.de). Papers should be 20 minutes in length. The conference language will be English. The proceedings of the conference will be published as an edited volume.