Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Sprach- und literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät - Nordeuropa-Institut

The workshop explores the different functions of architecture – houses, halls, booths, churches, castles – in Old Norse literary tradition. Many texts in the Old Norse tradition – among them Gylfaginning – tell their stories in a framework of architectural spaces. Following previous theoretical approaches to space-time in narratives, the house can be identified as one of the central chronotopes in Old Norse literature, as insular, aggregate space in and around which the stories unfold. At the same time, the narrativization of houses can also be approached as memory spaces, as mediators of cultural memory. As in the case of the stave-church homily, buildings are also prominent structural spaces in the Old Norse tradition. Finally, these texts were performed and perceived within buildings, thus, following Michail Bachtin’s terminology, the house – in the widest sense of the meaning – forms the usual ‘real-life chronotope’ of Old Norse literature. These multi-layered facets and the interrelations among them will be taken up in this workshop from an interdisciplinary perspective.

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The workshop explores the different functions of architecture – houses, halls, booths, churches, castles – in Old Norse literary tradition. Many texts in the Old Norse tradition – among them Gylfaginning – tell their stories in a framework of architectural spaces. Following previous theoretical approaches to space-time in narratives, the house can be identified as one of the central chronotopes in Old Norse literature, as insular, aggregate space in and around which the stories unfold. At the same time, the narrativization of houses can also be approached as memory spaces, as mediators of cultural memory. As in the case of the stave-church homily, buildings are also prominent structural spaces in the Old Norse tradition. Finally, these texts were performed and perceived within buildings, thus, following Michail Bachtin’s terminology, the house – in the widest sense of the meaning – forms the usual ‘real-life chronotope’ of Old Norse literature. These multi-layered facets and the interrelations among them will be taken up in this workshop from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Questions that will be addressed in the workshop are: What texts make use of architectural spaces to narrate their stories? How does the presence of (different types) of architectural chronotopes square with the established generic subdivision of Old Norse literature? What spaces are constructed and deconstructed? What are the characteristics of the narrated spaces and how do they relate to theoretical approaches to space? How do explorations of narrative and of memory, each in respect of architectural spaces, relate to each other?

We aim to bring together scholars from different disciplines who have worked on or are interested in approaches to medieval architectural space in the Old Norse literary tradition and beyond.

Der Workshop ist offen für alle Interessierten gegen eine Teilnahmegebühr von 5 €.
Um Anmeldung wird bis zum 01.03. gebeten bei Inger Banse.

Studentische Mitarbeiter:innen