Please join us for the third seminar of the Hilary Term. This week’s Speakers will be:
Chair: Lorena Becerra-Valdivia
Katherine Beard – The Complex Chair: Ritual Seats in Old Norse Mythology, Literature, and Archaeology.
Stephanie Volder – Entangled Islands: Imagining the end of slavery in Jamaica through the trope of the Haitian Revolution.
About the Speakers:
Katherine Beard is a DPhil student reading Old Norse Literature at Linacre College. She holds an MA in Old Nordic Religion from the University of Iceland where she submitted her thesis “Hamarinn Mjǫllnir: The Eitri Database and the Evolution of the Hammer Symbol in Old Norse Mythology,” and created the accompanying Eitri platform (eitridb.com). Katherine also holds an MA from New York University in Graphic Communications Management and Technology and a BA from Rowan University. Her research interests include digital humanities, pre-Christian religion and mythology, Scandinavian manuscripts, and symbolism in both literature and archaeology.
This seminar will consider the ritual seat, often a throne or chair (kubbstol), and why people may have worn or carried small chair-like amulets by considering both medieval literature and Viking Age archaeology. Óðinn’s mythological seat Hliðskjálf is referenced by name a handful of times in the extant literature and is often questionably connected to these small amulets in scholarship. Should it be? Beyond mythical seats, the high seat (hásæti) is quite a common motif in medieval Icelandic literature. The throne is often associated with kingship, power, and connections to other worlds. Hásæti relate to kingship and rulers, often bestowing powers upon people (and in one case, a dog), and is used as a literary device related to transitions of power and dynastic destruction. The chair’s amuletic status may correlate to its persistence as a significant literary theme in medieval Icelandic literature. Taken together, the Old Norse corpus and the archaeological record yield further insights about the throne as a sacred symbol to the people of the Viking Age.
Stephanie has a PhD in Comparative Literature from Aarhus University in Denmark and is currently a Carlsberg Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Linacre with her project ‘Entangled Islands’ examining the reception of the Haitian Revolution in British Romantic literature about Jamaica from 1791-1834.
In the wake of Haiti’s independence as the first black state in the Americas in January 1804, English radical William Cobbett predicted a similar revolution in the British colony of Jamaica, fearing that the black population would violently overthrow the plantocracy. Conversely, black radical Robert Wedderburn in 1824 hoped for a repeat of the Haitian Revolution in Jamaica, envisioning massacres of the ruling class. Both Cobbett’s and Wedderburn’s perspectives illustrate how Jamaica’s fate was seen as linked to Haiti’s revolutionary events, often depicted through a Gothic literary aesthetic to evoke a nightmare vision of the end of slavery. The presentation will aim to understand the significance of the Haitian Revolution in a British cultural imagination by examining how Black Atlantic literature, colonial newspapers, travel writing and epistolary novels represented these events through a Gothic (and often also Sentimental) lens, and how this portrayal influenced the abolition debate and shaped a British self-understanding and notion of freedom in the Age of Revolution (1789-1848).