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RMN Newsletter 5 2012 December 2012 № 5 Edited by Frog Helen F. Leslie and Joseph S. Hopkins Published by Folklore Studies / Dept. of Philosophy, History, Culture and Art Studies University of Helsinki, Helsinki ISSN/ISSN-L: 1799-4497 www.helsinki.fi/folkloristiikka/English/R1 MN/ CONTENTS Editor’s Note .................................................................................................................................... 5 COMMENTS AND COMMUNICATIONS Entering the Chimeraland of Indo-European Reconstruction .......................................................... 6 Emily Lyle The Talk of the Tits: Some Notes on the Death of Sigurðr Fáfnisbani in Norna-Gests þáttr ....... 10 Fjodor Uspenskij Kuningamäng [‘King Game’]: An Echo of a Prehistoric Ritual of Power in Estonia ................... 15 Kristo Siig On the Case of Vambarljóð Part I: Comments on Formulaicity in the sagnakvæði ........................................................... 22 Part II: Register and Mode from Skaldic Verse to sagnakvæði ............................................. 49 Frog Goddesses Unknown I: Njǫrun and the Sister-Wife of Njǫrðr ...................................................... 39 Joseph S. Hopkins Crossing the Bridge: Liminality, Group Identity and Continuity .................................................. 44 Jill Bradley Events Report – Old Norse Mythology in the Digital Age ........................................................................ 62 Luke John Murphy Report – Transcultural Contacts in the Circum-Baltic Area: 2nd Meeting of the Austmarr Network .......................................................................................................................................... 65 Mart Kuldkepp Report – VAF III: Identity and Identification and the Viking Age in Finland (with Special Emphasis on the Åland Islands) ............................................................................... 68 Sirpa Aalto Announcement – Alliterativa Causa .............................................................................................. 71 Jonathan Roper Report – Register: Intersections of Language, Context and Communication ................................ 72 Ilkka Leskelä Announcement – Register II: Emergence, Change and Obsolescence .......................................... 74 Ulla Savolainen Report – The 6th Nordic-Celtic-Baltic Folklore Symposium: “Supernatural Places” .................... 75 Kait Lubja Report – Legends are Alive: Review of the 2012 Belief Narrative Network Symposium ............ 77 Zoja Karanović and Borislava Eraković Announcement – Historical Infrastructure of the Baltic Sea: Means, Reasons and Consequences: 3rd Meeting of the Austmarr Network ................................................................... 81 Maths Bertell 2 Projects Interpreting Eddic Poetry Project and the Eddic Network ............................................................. 82 Carolyne Larrington Oral Poetry, Mythic Knowledge, and Vernacular Imagination: Interfaces of Individual Expression and Collective Traditions in Pre-modern Northeast Europe ....................................... 82 Lotte Tarkka, Frog, Karina Lukin and Eila Stepanova Miscellanea Gunnlöth’s Tale by Svava Jakobsdóttir ......................................................................................... 85 Triin Laidoner PEOPLE Research Reports Joonas Ahola The Saga Outlaw and Conceptions of the Past ...................................................................... 87 Courtney Burrell Álfar and the Early-Icelandic Settlers .................................................................................... 87 Frog Contextualizing Creativity in an Archival Corpus: The Case of Kalevala-Meter Mythology .............................................................................................................................. 88 When Thunder Is Not Thunder: Changing Intersections of Narrative and Conceptual Models .................................................................................................................................... 89 Karolina Kouvola Warriorhood and Supernatural Beings ................................................................................... 90 William Lamb The Signs of Storytelling: Register Markers in Gaelic Traditional Narrative ....................... 91 Tuomas M.S. Lehtonen Alliteration in Finnish Lutheran Hymns and Oral Kalevalaic Poetics: Religious, Cultural and Linguistic Shift during the Reformation ........................................................... 92 Ilkka Leskelä Networking, Capital Accumulation and Investment in the Periphery: Trade and Cultural Contact in the Pre-Reformation Baltic Sea Region ................................................................ 93 Jon Mackley Wayland: Smith of the Gods .................................................................................................. 93 Eila Stepanova “I Would Sue the Gods, but I Cannot”: The Creativity of Karelian Lamenters .................... 94 The Register of Karelian Laments ......................................................................................... 95 Essay Collections Frog, Anna-Leena Siikala and Eila Stepanova Mythic Discourses: Studies in Uralic Traditions ................................................................... 96 3 PhD Projects Joonas Ahola The Saga Outlaw: Polysemy of a Category of Marginality in the Sagas of the Icelanders . 100 PLACES Folklore Studies at the University of Helsinki: A Current View ................................................. 103 Pertti Anttonen JOURNALS Slověne: International Journal of Slavic Studies ......................................................................... 106 Fjodor Uspenskij CALLS FOR PAPERS Limited Sources, Boundless Possibilities: Textual Scholarship and the Challenges of Oral and Written Texts ......................................................................................................................... 107 Register II, An International Colloquium on Meaning and Human Expression: Emergence, Change and Obsolescence ............................................................................................................ 108 RMN Newsletter welcomes its readership to support its function and value as an informational resource by submitting reports, announcements and other current information of interest to the RMN. We also encourage our readership to engage in the discourse space that we have constructed here, and promote an awareness that participation will buttress, maintain and shape this emergent venue. For further information on guidelines for submission, please visit http://www.helsinki.fi/folkloristiikka/English/RMN/contributors.htm Please submit contributions to RMN Newsletter electronically in *.doc, *.docx or *.rtf formats to: Frog University of Helsinki [email protected] 4 Editor’s Note It has now been two years since the pilot issue of RMN Newsletter was launched in response to the need for a medium of contact and communication for members of the Retrospective Methods Network (RMN). In that time, this new journal has been gaining momentum and its circulation is increasing almost exponentially. Scholars around the world appreciate RMN Newsletter’s strategy and goal of constructing an emergent discourse space in which you present reports and announcements of your own current activities, where information about events, projects and institutions is made available, and where you may engage in vital cross-disciplinary dialogue through discussion-oriented articles that address current research in diverse areas. The vitality of this discourse space is attested by the number of engagements between articles in the present and previous issues, and the productive discussion that has been generated between them. The RMN itself has had a fruitful and exciting year. The RMN is an open network which can include anyone who wishes to share in its focus. It is united by an interest in the problems, approaches, strategies and limitations related to considering some aspect of culture in one period through evidence from another, later period. Such comparisons range from investigating historical relationships to the utility of analogical parallels, and from comparisons across centuries to developing working models for the more immediate traditions behind limited sources. Important international meetings, workshops and seminars were held by different branches of the RMN, including a meeting of Old Norse scholars in Aarhus, a seminar of the Austmarr Network in Helsinki and a meeting of the Old Norse Folklorists Network in Tartu only a few weeks ago. Preliminary plans for a larger meeting of the RMN are presently underway as are publications concentrated on these topics. This has truly proven a bountiful and productive year. RMN Newsletter’s vitality as a discourse space has also been seein in ongoing discussions in short articles and the success of our first special issue, Approaching Methodology (May 2012). A call for papers for our special issue Limited Sources, Boundless Possibilities will be found below. RMN Newsletter has been realized through your support and contributions as an interactive readership. We look forward to your ongoing participation in these stimulating discussions. Frog University of Helsinki 5 COMMENTS AND COMMUNICATIONS Entering the Chimeraland of Indo-European Reconstruction Emily Lyle, University of Edinburgh Photo 1. Pebble mosaic in the Rhodes archaeological museum. Photo by TobyJ, 11 August 2010.1
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