Learning to Feel in the Old Norse Camelot?

Abstract

Learning to Feel in the Old Norse Camelot? Carolyne Larrington "What were the consequences, for instance, of having Middle English feelings, as distinct from Anglo- Norman, Welsh, French, or Latin ones?" asks Sarah McNamer (2007, 248). Or, indeed, Old Norse feelings? These surely existed, even if we can map neither the modern nor the Middle English word onto an Old Norse equivalent. If, as McNamer suggests, language-specific emotional systems exist, then that of Old Norse can seem hard to locate, for the famously objective narrators of the Íslendingasögur are reluctant to speak directly about love, anger, fear, or disgust, and other saga genres are equally reticent.1 The translated Arthurian romances do, however, depict a range of emotional situations that are often intensely experienced by their protagonists. Here, then, we can begin both to map Old Norse emotional lexis and to probe its cultural uniqueness. In my chapter on the translated lais in The Arthur of the North (Larrington 2011), I briefly examined the language of feeling in the two thirteenth-century Strengleikar translations, Geitarlauf and Januals ljóð, and explored how Marie de France's subtle emotional calibrations were mediated from verse into prose and from Anglo-Norman into Norse. The recent work of Suzanne Marti (2012, 2013), Stefka Eriksen [End Page 74] (Johansson and Eriksen 2012; Eriksen 2013), and Sif Rikhardsdottir (2008, 2012, forthcoming) has highlighted the importance of recognizing how translation must always involve the adaptation of the source text's signifying systems, in order to signify for the target audience a move that often lays bare the ideological processes at work in both texts. As Sif Rikhardsdottir observes, "the negotiation of the separate semiotic systems of the French text and its Norse translation, evident in the diverse behavioural patterns that manifest the innate ideological principles, underscores elements that define the cultural conceptualising of self and social environment" (2012, 74). What is true of ideological systems is also true of emotional systems. In the terminology of psychologists such as Keith Oatley (1994, 1999; see also Mar et al. 2011) and Ed Tan (1994), literary texts provide models of "emotion simulation," which, if effectively implemented in terms of characters, behavior, and situation, will elicit both empathy and aesthetic appreciation in the listening audience. As the listening audience runs the "simulation," appropriate and congruent emotional reactions should be produced.2 Norse audiences for the translated texts would thus be required to process the different "emotion scripts" (individual components of the text's simulation) contained in the emotion- episodes narrated to them, if they were to engage and empathize with the plot and its characters. Translation requires the adaptation of source "emotion scripts" in order to arouse the emotions of the target culture. The changes between source texts and translations illuminate cultural differences in "emotion simulations" and also, crucially, over time will come to affect the development of emotion simulations and scripts in the target culture's signifying system. In this article, I focus on some key emotional episodes in Parcevals saga, the Norse translation of the French poet Chrétien de Troyes's romance Le Conte de Graal (ca. 1180), in order to investigate how the Norse translator depicts both basic emotions (such as anger, fear, joy, sorrow) and complex emotions (such as resentment), adapting his emotion scripts for his audience.3 Cognition, performativity, behavior, and [End Page 75] somatic effects are verbalized in ways that differ from the source that the Norse translator had before him; these scripts open up comparisons with similar emotion episodes in native Norse texts, primarily sagas. This analysis will in turn illuminate the extent to which the "emotion simulations" of Parcevals saga cohere with the simulations intended to evoke audience empathy in other genres. Finally, a brief comparison with the lexis of emotion in representative examples of texts from other Norse genres will explore how Old Icelandic literary language already had a well-developed emotional range before the transmission of the translated Arthurian sagas to Iceland. As Sif Rikhardsdottir (forthcoming) has noted, in saga, "interiority must be masked and projected into action," while in romance, emotionality "propels the action," and thus I conclude by asking whether the translated sagas have any significant...

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