Medievalists.net » Philology

Orkneyinga saga : A Work in Progress?

Medievalists.net — Mon, 20 Jan 2014 00:14:03 +0000

The reconstituted text conventionally known as Orkneyinga saga has many points of interest for Old Icelandic literary history, in addition to any intrinsic literary qualities, and its interest as a source for the history and culture of Scandinavian Scotland.

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‘Cast out into the hellish night’: Pagan Virtue and Pagan Poetics in Lorenzo Valla’s De voluptate

Medievalists.net — Fri, 19 Jul 2013 19:21:13 +0000

Valla wrote about Epicureanism before the Renaissance rediscovery of classical Epicurean texts. Poggio Bracciolini had not yet circulated his newly-discovered manuscript of first century Epicurean philosopher Lucretius’ De rerum natura, and Valla wrote without access to Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Philosophers, which discussed Epicurus’ teachings in greater detail.

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Beowulf Is Not God Cyning

Medievalists.net — Fri, 28 Jun 2013 17:55:44 +0000

By understanding the etymology of the Old English cyning, and by recognizing the poet's use of Scyld as the model for a good king, we can see that each of the three uses of the phrase 'Þæt wæs god cyning' has a different meaning...

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Chasing Krüger’s Dream: Studying the Transmission of Classical and Medieval Manuscripts Using Lattice Theory and Information Entropy

Medievalists.net — Fri, 17 May 2013 05:21:25 +0000

New computational techniques show how modern digital philology is changing the way we think of the transmission of medieval manuscripts through space and time.

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Heorot and the Plundered Hoard: A Study of Beowulf

Medievalists.net — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 21:02:11 +0000

Time and again the Beowulf poet's choice of words and details reveals that he practised his craft within a tradition in which his creativeness was bound and disciplined by the objectiveness of a particular structure of images. We perceive in all the rich variety of his work the unifying effect of the typological imagination. It is in the typological mode of Beowulf that the key to its meaning and artistry is to be found.

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Conquest, Contact, and Convention: Simulating the Norman Invasion’s Impact on Linguistic Usage

Medievalists.net — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 02:39:53 +0000

How do conventions arise? Lewis adressed this in his work Convention via signaling games, a mathematical model of communication where a sender sends a message to a receiver who then interprets it. When we say conventions, we mean by that a system of coor- dinated behavior pairing information states with actions

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The Development of Predicative Possession in Slavic Languages

Medievalists.net — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 18:32:08 +0000

As an active language, Early Proto-Indo-European (Pre-Indo-Euro- pean) had no category of syntactic transitivity (Subject-Object relation), which is the central characteristic of nominative (accusative) languages, and no verb ‘have’.

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A Christological reading of The Ruin

Medievalists.net — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 04:28:12 +0000

We should be aware that the semantic scope of each word may vary drastically and that the reader is influenced by many variables in attaching the meaning to a given word. The question becomes trickier if we take the allegorical viewpoint, because polysemy is concerned with the entire text, not with just a word. Thus, we should not consider the surface meaning of the words, but look more carefully for the covert meanings.

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Property Rights in Celtic Irish Law

Medievalists.net — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 02:32:30 +0000

Unfortunately, many historians not specializing in the study of the ancient Irish law tracts have been unaware of the textual inaccuracies of the O'Curry - O'Donovan translations and have continued to incorporate their older unscientific work, and that of their editors, into their own work.

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Language and Legend in the Fantasy Fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien

Medievalists.net — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 23:58:35 +0000

There was something so real in the languages that he created, and critics wanted to find the inspirations behind Tolkien‘s worlds. Elves, dwarves, men, hobbits, and various other creatures occupied the pages of his books, but the languages he created were complex and had real elements in them. Examples of his invented languages were those spoken by the Elves, Sindarin and Quenya.

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