Alicen Geddes

Supervisors

Professor Donna Heddle (INS, UHI), and Dr Kyle Smith (UHI)

Research Title

Lady Ermingerðr Reimagined: Orkneyinga Saga’s Stanzaic Evolution Examined

Research Abstract

Earl Rognvaldr Kali Kolsson’s life is chronicled in Orkneyinga Saga, which includes documenting his three-year pilgrimage to the Holy Land. On the journey, he and his crew overwintered at the court of Lady Ermingerðr of Narbonne, whereafter Rognvaldr and his retinue penned a hybrid of troubadour/dróttkvœtt poetry to her, forming a set of related lausavísur consisting of almost a third of Rognvaldr’s skaldic verse corpus, together with other contributing skalds: Oddi inn litli Glúmsson, Ármóðr jarlaskald, Þórðarson, and Þorbjorn Svarti. This thesis examines the relationship with poetry attributed to  Ermingerðr in Old Norse, in juxtaposition with three groundbreaking translations/interpretations from Judith Jesch, Ian Crockatt and George Mackay Brown. Jesch is at the centre of a study with her new translation of Orkneyinga Saga, due to be published in 2025. Ian Crockatt is a translator who published the entirety of Earl Rognvaldr’s verse in 2014, creating the only instance of the saga poetry published without the prosimetrum context.

In 1976, native Orcadian George Mackay Brown offered the Earl’s poetry in a once-removed method, by writing interpretations based on A.B. Taylor’s 1938 poetry translations of the saga. It is from these three diverse interpreters that this study enters into Ermingerðr’s world, an under-represented, underdeveloped figure in the saga where research to date has failed to isolate the Lady of Narbonne’s presence in its entirety, from an intertextual, translative Orkney context.

The analysis will question how six translations of skaldic verse have changed since Anderson’s 1873 publication, through the lens of the poetry devoted to Lady Ermingerðr. This thesis scrutinises and develops every word and poetic device unparalleled by other academic treatments. The objective is to gain new insight into Orkneyinga Saga’s stanzaic development, and once applied, it will illuminate Ermingerðr’s place within it. 

Biography

Alicen Geddes is a full-time PhD student at the Institute for Northern Studies, based at Scott’s House, Kirkwall. Before coming to INS Alicen studied at Orkney College UHI, where she achieved a BA (Hons) in Literature. Alicen’s undergraduate thesis, ‘To the Sea I Belong: A Four Stanza Window into Orkneyinga Saga’ was the basis for a natural progression to her Master’s thesis.

Before this research Alicen was an Artistic Theatre Director, touring internationally, and a playwright of seven plays, works being performed, for example, at The Everyman Theatre in Cheltenham, and Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts. She is a Member of the Society of Authors, having had five books published with subsequent French and Japanese translations.

Related links https://alicen-geddes.co.uk

Contact email address 19013337@uhi.ac.uk