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This thesis is about the semantic and morphological legacy of the Old Norse-descended verbs in two epic poems written in Early Scots and Early Middle Scots, the West Germanic medieval language spoken in parts of what is now Scotland and descended from Old Northumbrian. The first epic is The Brus, an original composition written in 1375 by the Archdeacon of Aberdeen, John Barbour (c. 1320-1395). The second is The Eneados which is the first translation from Latin into an English variety of The Aeneid, Virgil's poem tracing the genesis and divine ancestry of the Roman people. This translation was made in 1513 by Gavin Douglas (c. 1474-1522), Bishop of Dunkeld. The two chosen texts offer good grounds for comparison. They belong to the same genre and are patriotic. They also stand for milestones in the story of the Scots language. Barbour, often quoted as the father of Scottish poetry (Eyre-Todd 1996:v), produced the first Inglis text that Scotticists would regard as mature in form and content. As for Douglas, his epic, now written in Scottis, transcends the boundaries of Scots literature. Douglas joined the greater debate of translation when he tackled the arduous task of translating The Aeneid, a text we know was hard to come to terms with as the famous example of Dryden suggests. Douglas's attempt was courageous indeed when we consider the fact that Virgil himself, not happy with the final product, wished his Aeneid to be destroyed. Thus, how was he to go about the task and deal satisfactorily with a text that even the author remained unsatisfied with? However daunting and risky the challenge, Douglas won praise by some critics and literary individuals for the quality of his 'nature poetry' (Gray 1923) and the liveliness of his picturesque descriptions (Coldwell 1964:39-77). Such comments chime with those of Pound (1951). This doctoral dissertation relies on a self-made corpus called The Aberdeen Corpus of Older Scots [ACOS]. This database contains, in addition to The Brus and The Eneados, the remainder of Douglas's poetry along with all the poems by William Dunbar (c. 1460-c. 1520). To give an idea of its size, 351,030 word tokens have been entered, which becomes 30,773 if this first number is downsized to a word type level. It stands, to this date, as the first poetic corpus in the discipline of Older Scots studies. When the two texts are brought together, we can say that this doctoral dissertation deals with 528 Norse-derived verbs scattered within 282,972 word tokens, amounting to 22,159 word types. It should be highlighted that this last number makes up a substantial part of the overall word types. The dissertation comprises 11 chapters, including the introduction and conclusion. There are also appendices which have been assembled under separate cover. The introduction (Ch. 1) presents the research questions and lays out the structure of the thesis. Then a systemic account of Older Scots follows (Ch. 2). In Ch. 3, readers will be provided with reflections on the type of language contacts that account for the presence of Old Norse-derived verbs in Older Scots. This contrasts the English and Scottish cases and contains an investigation into bilingualism. The notion and importance of the survival of a working paradigm are also stressed at the end of this chapter. Following this idea, Ch. 4 investigates the impact contact had on the maintenance of the weak and strong verb paradigms. This chapter introduces in a parallel way the two verbal systems of the related and yet different Germanic languages that were Old English and Old Norse. The hope behind this is to find if traces of mutual understanding might be perceived through the similarities present in both systems. The discussion will be continued by analysing the after-contact results in Older Scots. Ch. 5 will present the corpus thoroughly and Ch. 6 will provide structure to the etymological method. The literature for the morphological legacy is contained in Ch. 7 and is immediately followed by the morphological chapter (Ch. 8). The literature review for the semantic legacy can be found in Ch. 9 and Ch. 10 will deal with the semantic analysis of the verbs. The conclusions will be presented in Ch. 11. In total, 512 verbs have been analysed and the attempt of this thesis has been to study them from historical, morphological and semantic perspectives.

The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate and reconceive the scholarly understanding of one of Óðinn’s aspects – Óðinn as a patron to a mortal hero figure. This theme runs through a number of Old Icelandic and continental Scandinavian texts, but it is most widely represented in the fornaldarsaga genre. To formalise the discussion as well as the choice of material, the concept of the Odinic hero complex was introduced, which encompasses narrative structures, imagery and other material associated in the sagas with a protagonist helped and betrayed by Óðinn. This Odinic hero narrative has been looked at on the example of three fornaldarsǫgur, Vǫlsunga saga, Hrólfs saga kraka and Gautreks saga, as well as learned Latin texts connected to saga literature. The analysis also relied on the evidence of saga narratives that do not explicitly demonstrate the complete Odinic hero complex, but contains significant thematic parallelism to the main sources; these secondary sources included Hálfs saga ok hálfsrekka, Ǫrvar-Odds saga and Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks. The findings support the notion that a number of historians of religion have proposed, that there is a clear structural connection between the Odinic hero paradigm, initiation sequences and the themes of berserkir and shapeshifting. On the other hand, the dissertation shows that this thematic unity is in many cases a younger phenomenon than usually proposed, which leads to the necessity to re-evaluate a number of fornaldarsǫgur as sources on Old Scandinavian mythology and read them from a different perspective.

This thesis analyses my attempt to make engaging English language literary translations of complex Old Norse skaldic poetry, translations which convey significant elements of the form, sound patterns and referential reach of the originals. The primary focus is on the lausavísur (loose, or single verses) of Rǫgnvaldr jarl Kali Kolsson, Earl of Orkney from 1135 until 1158. It argues that translations of poetry should find equivalents not just for the semantic sense of the originals, but for the accumulated significance of all the factors that make it poetry. In developing this argument I suggest that the word 'meaning' when applied to poetry is reductive, and introduce a new terminology based on the terms 'sense', 'contextual sense', 'significance' and 'accumulated significance'. Because the thesis is an amalgam of my work with both Creative Writing and Old Norse Studies, Old Norse terms and names are used whenever possible, reinforcing my understanding that translation is a meeting of two voices, personalities and cultures. The aim is to make visible, and audible, the voices drawn on and I therefore focus in Chapter three on my own poetic voice as well as Rǫgnvaldr's. Chapter Two discusses the origins, structure and development of Old Norse verse, and analysis of the dróttkvætt [court poetry] verse-form is continued in greater detail in Chapter Four. There is also discussion in Chapter Four of kennings and of Conceptual Metaphor Theory. Chapter Five focuses on historical understandings of the theory and practice of translation. This includes a comparative analysis of translations of skaldic poetry into English from the eighteenth century to the present day, and culminates in the development of a classification of translation types as applied to skaldic poetry. Chapter Six considers the history of the translation of Rǫgnvaldr's lausavísur, and analyses some of the assumptions and practice issues underlying my own translations of his work as set out in Chapter Seven.

by A. J. Laub and F. N. Bailey. / Bibliography: leaves 26-27. / NSF Grant GS-2955.

This thesis explores male and female identity in Old Norse and British iterations of the Völsung legend, focusing on the Poetic Edda and Völsunga saga, William Morris's The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, and Melvin Burgess’s Bloodtide and Bloodsong. Using poststructuralist theories of gender and posthumanism to analyse representations of gender in these texts, it argues that, in the Old Norse versions of this legend, female identity is closely connected to the control of representations of narrative events, whereas male identity is subject to this control but becomes more overtly fluid in the depiction of shape-shifting. The thesis goes beyond previous critical analyses of gender in these texts which observe an active/ passive binary, or focus on female monstrosity and lament, and male heroism. Unlike most examinations of adaptations of this legend which focus on the medieval or Victorian material, this thesis provides a detailed exploration of The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs in conjunction with its Old Norse sources. In doing so, it establishes the silencing of female characters by Morris's rewriting, and the foregrounding of male identity through a focus on the body, performance and the built environment. This thesis also considers both the Old Norse texts and Morris's poem alongside later, critically neglected, British versions of the legend to explore the ways in which narrative form influences the representation of the multiplicity of gender in The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, and the importance of a posthuman conception of identity in Bloodtide and Bloodsong. The thesis argues that the Old Norse sources do not stand aside from their later interpretations as something complete and originary, but are themselves supplemented by the rewritings of Morris, Tolkien and Burgess; it is, therefore, necessary to foreground our knowledge of all these iterations of the narrative to offer a fuller understanding of gender in the Old Norse Völsung legend and its British rewritings.

This thesis examines the vernacular psychology presented in Old Norse-Icelandic texts. It focuses on the concept 'hugr', generally rendered in English as ‘mind, soul, spirit’, and explores the conceptual relationships between emotion, cognition and the body. It argues that despite broad similarities, Old Norse-Icelandic and Old English vernacular psychology differ more than has previously been acknowledged. Furthermore, it shows that the psychology of Old Norse-Icelandic has less in common with its circumpolar neighbours than proposed by advocates of Old Norse-Icelandic shamanism. The thesis offers a fresh interpretation of Old Norse-Icelandic psychology which does not rely on cross-cultural evidence from other Germanic or circumpolar traditions. In particular, I demonstrate that emotion and cognition were not conceived of ‘hydraulically’ as was the case in Old English, and that 'hugr' was not thought to leave the body either in animal form or as a person’s breath. I show that Old Norse-Icelandic psychology differs from the Old English tradition, and argue that the Old English psychological model is a specific elaboration of the shared psychological inheritance of Germanic whose origins require further study. These differences between the two languages have implications for the study of psychological concepts in Proto-Germanic, as I argue that there are fewer semantic components which can be reliably reconstructed for the common ancestor of the North and West Germanic languages. As a whole, the thesis applies insights from cross-cultural linguistics and psychology in order to show how Old Norse-Icelandic psychological concepts differ not only from contemporary Germanic and circumpolar traditions but also from the Present Day English concepts used to describe them. The thesis comprises four chapters and conclusion. Chapter 1 introduces the field of study and presents the methodologies and sources used. It introduces the range of cross-cultural variety in psychological concepts, and places Old Norse-Icelandic 'hugr' and its Old English analogue 'mōd' in a typological perspective. Chapter 2 reviews previous approaches to early Germanic psychology and introduces the major strand of research that forms the background to this study: Lockett’s (2011) proposal that Old English vernacular psychology operated in terms of a ‘hydraulic model’, where the 'mōd' would literally boil and seethe within a person’s chest in response to strong emotions. Chapter 3 outlines the native Old Norse-Icelandic psychological model by examining indigenously produced vernacular texts. It looks first at the claims that 'hugr' could leave the body in animal form or as a person’s breath. It then describes the relationship between emotion, cognition and the body in Old Norse-Icelandic texts and contrasts this with the Old English system. Chapter 4 examines the foreign influences which could potentially account for the differences between the Old English and Old Norse-Icelandic systems. It looks first at the imported medical traditions which were known in medieval Scandinavia at the time Old Norse-Icelandic texts were being committed to writing. Next it considers the psychology of Christian tradition from the early Old Icelandic Homily Book to late-fourteenth-century devotional poetry. Finally, it examines the representation of emotion and the body in the translated Anglo-Norman and Old French texts produced at the court of Hákon Hákonarson and explores how this was transposed to native romances composed in Old Norse-Icelandic. The conclusion summarises the findings of the thesis and presents a proposal for the methodology of studying medieval psychological concepts with directions for further research.