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The Color Grey in Old Norse-Icelandic Literature
Abstract
In their seminal work, Basic Color Terms, the linguist-anthropologists Brent Berlin and Paul Kay analyzed the color terms of close to one hundred of the world's languages, belonging to a variety of linguistic families and/or groups.1 They challenged the thesis of relativism in the encoding of color and advanced an alternative hypothesis, arguing that there was a universal inventory of eleven basic color terms, located in the color space where English speakers place the most typical examples of black, white, red, orange, yellow, brown, green, blue, purple, pink, and grey. Comparing the vocabularies of languages possessing fewer than these eleven categories, they demonstrated that basic color terms do not appear at random in the diachronic development of a language, but in an invariable seven-stage sequence illustrated below:
The scheme is to be interpreted as follows: all languages possess basic terms for the black and white foci; if a language contains three terms, then it contains a term for red; if a language contains four terms, then the fourth term will be either yellow or green; if a language contains five terms, then it contains terms for both yellow and green; if a language contains six terms, then it contains a term for blue; if a language contains seven terms, then it contains a term for brown; and if a language contains eight or more terms, then it contains a term for purple, pink, orange, grey, or some combination of these. Berlin and Kay concluded that "color lexicons with few terms tend to occur in association with relatively simple cultures and simple technologies, while color lexicons with many terms tend to occur in association with complex cultures and complex technologies (to the extent that complexity of culture and technology can be assessed objectively)."2
Old Norse-Icelandic has eight basic color terms (svartr, hvítr, rauðr, grœnn, gulr, blár, brúnn, and grár (gránn), making it an early stage VII language.3 For lack of data, it is, of course, impossible to assess precisely the evolutionary sequence of these terms, but it is noteworthy that an examination of Snorri Sturluson's use of color terms in Gylfaginning reveals not only a limination of color terms to include only a handful (svartr, hvítr, rauðr, grár, and grœnn),4 but also an introduction of color terms, beginning with black (svartr) and ending with green (grœnn) that matches the evolutionary sequence proposed by Berlin and Kay with the notable exception only of grár.5 Obviously, there is no way of knowing Snorri Sturluson's reasonings behind this order, but it is tempting to speculate that in some way he tried, through his use of color terminology, to give expression to what Berlin and Kay call "a relatively simple culture" and bring his readers close to seeing the world through the eyes of his and their pagan forebears, as these pagans described it in their myths and legends.6
According to Berlin and Kay's temporal-evolutionary order, grey (grár) would have been among the last terms added to the Old Norse-Icelandic basic color lexicon. This order is contradicted by Snorri Sturluson, and, indeed, Berlin and Kay's placement of grey, the only achromatic basic color term added from stage II onwards in their stage VII of language development, has been called into question. Stanley R. Witkowski and Cecil H. Brown note that "four of their seven error cases involved the premature appearance of gray" and comment that "[e]vidence adduced since then . . . shows, many more exceptional cases, so many, in fact, that gray is now considered a 'wild card' color . . . which can be encoded at any point after the early stages."7
It is the aim of this article to demonstrate through linguistic categorization the objects about which the hue adjective grár is used and to determine on the basis of its frequency in a selection of texts whether for Old Norse-Icelandic one should place grey in the later stages or assign it to the early stages as Siegfried Wyler did for Old English.8 Wyler points out that "'[g]rey' is, in...
The word for grey has been studied in different languages as part of the definition of basic colour terms, and in historical linguistics some studies have addressed grey as their main focus. The Finnish basic colour term harmaa (‘grey’) has been addressed before in data from early to mid-twentieth century and as a basic colour term, but in contemporary language harmaa has not been analysed with corpus methods before. This study presents the semantics of harmaa in written communicational use of language, internet conversation, in the framework of Cognitive Grammar and access semantics, using qualitative corpus analysis. The study results show that the shade or set of shades that harmaa profiles in different contexts vary, and surface textures, mood, or evaluative aspects can also be profiled. However, more studies are needed to reveal the semantics of harmaa in different interactional situations.
The central aim of this thesis is to explore the complexities of human-bird coexistence in Scandinavia and the Norse North Atlantic from 600-1500 AD, primarily focusing on the period c. 800-1400 within this time period. In particular, this thesis explores if and how literary representations of birds correlated in any way with zooarchaeological sources concerning human-bird interactions. To explore this central question, I employ an interdisciplinary methodology that combines literary analysis of textual sources with interpretation of archaeological reports that include bird bones. I also employ the theoretical lens of Human-Animal Studies, as it centres the lives of animals and the interactions of humans and animals, rather than considering animals a ‘blank canvas’ for human desires, needs, and meanings. There are three key sections of this thesis. The first section is in a chapter on folk taxonomies, which explores one possible methodology for studying how medieval Icelanders understood and categorised the entities they referred to as fugl (‘bird’). The second section is a series of case studies concerning humans’ coexistence with specific kinds of birds: domesticated birds, wild waterfowl and songbirds, hawks and falcons, eagles, ravens, and swans. These case studies analyse literary sources, documentary sources, and archaeological reports to build a multifaceted look at these birds and how they were understood, interacted with, and thought about. In many cases, the imaginative uses of these birds appear to have been at a remove from human-bird interactions, but in some cases there was a significant overlap. For instance, ravens appear to have been held in relatively low esteem despite their mythological and literary significance, whereas the literary uses and real-life treatment of hawks and falcons appear to have been more closely related. The final section consists of a chapter on human-bird transformation and communication in Old Norse literature. This chapter considers the wider questions regarding how human and animal were defined. While pre-Christian concepts of human and animal are briefly considered, the majority of this chapter considers how Old Norse peoples reconciled Christian theological perspectives on what defines a human with their own pre-existing narrative traditions concerning human-animal transformation and interaction. This thesis is also accompanied by a list of Old Norse bird names and, where possible, their Modern English translations, etymologies, Modern Icelandic equivalents, and notes on their uses and attestation. This not only functions as a companion piece to the thesis, but is aimed to aid future research on birds in Old Norse textual sources by providing a collected vocabulary of bird names, a project that has not yet been done in Old Norse.
The rich medieval Icelandic literary record, comprised of mythology, sagas, poetry, law codes and post-medieval folklore, has provided invaluable source material for previous generations of scholars attempting to reconstruct a pagan Scandinavian Viking Age worldview. In modern Icelandic archaeology, however, the Icelandic literary record, apart from official documents such as censuses, has not been considered a viable source for interpretation since the early 20th century. Although the Icelandic corpus is problematic in several ways, it is a source that should be used in Icelandic archaeological interpretation, if used properly with source criticism.
This dissertation aims to advance Icelandic archaeological theory by reintegrating the medieval and post-medieval Icelandic literary corpus back into archaeological interpretation. The literature can help archaeologists working in Iceland to find pagan religious themes that span time and place. Utilizing source criticism as well as interdisciplinary methods, such as animal aDNA, this work presents two case studies of often ignored grave goods. These grave goods are found in both Icelandic pagan graves as well as in the graves of the pagan Scandinavian homelands, spanning from the Stone Age up until the Middle Ages.
This essay focuses on an understudied Old Icelandic saga, Kjalnesinga Saga (c.1310–1320), to examine medieval Icelanders’ discursive construction of race following the collapse of the independent Icelandic commonwealth. Employing postcolonial and critical-race theories from K. Anthony Appiah, Homi Bhabha, Achille Mbembe, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, this essay posits post-Commonwealth Iceland conceived of race as a spectrum of comprehensibility. The saga affords narrative agency to the assimilated and culturally comprehensible Irish hero, Búi, and casts him as a surrogate for Iceland’s colonial struggle. No such agency is granted to the blámaðr (black-man), a monster sent against Búi by the Norwegian King, Haraldr Fair-Haired (c.850–932). The blámaðr is subaltern: inaccessible outside Iceland’s subordinating narrative, bestializing rhetoric, or Búi’s interpretation. Kjalnesinga Saga’s racial discourse challenges modern conceptualizations of Scandinavia’s homogeneity and offers medieval Iceland as another space to explore constructions of race.
The article examines the use of the color brown in Old Norse-Icelandic literature, which is encoded by brúnn and jarpr . More specifically, it seeks to determine through linguistic categorization the objects about which brown is used and to determine on the basis of its frequency whether for Old Norse-Icelandic brown should be placed in the earlier stages of the evolution of color terms or if it should be assigned to the later stages. The data show that brúnn is the more frequently used term, though the earliest texts suggest that both brúnn and jarpr were contextually restricted. Gradually, brúnn came to be applied to a wider range of objects, whereas jarpr remained a secondary color term. As a basic color term, brúnn should be assigned a fairly late stage in the temporal-evolutionary order of basic color terms.
This article considers how we can discuss emotions (a human phenomenon) within literature (a discursive construction). The article poses the question of where we can locate this perceived literary emotionality in medieval works and considers the role of the reader in constructing the emotive interiority of the feeling subject in medieval literature. The focus of the essay is thus on the modern reader's engagement with the medieval textual object d'art and the unique representation of medieval literary creativity as both a physical artefact (the manuscript) and an act of vocal performance in the past. It therefore addresses material textuality as well as the implications of aural performativity for generating and sustaining empathetic connection between text and reader, or between the text and an audience of listeners.
Les sagas légendaires et les sagas des chevaliers mentionnent régulièrement l’emploi dans les armées scandinaves du « bouclier de guerre » (herskjöldr) et du « bouclier de paix » (friðskjöldr), le premier symbolisant leurs intentions belliqueuses, le second étant à l’inverse un indicateur de leur volonté d’interrompre les affrontements. Ces objets peuvent ainsi être rapprochés des boucliers rouges et blancs mentionnés dans ces mêmes sources. Il est toutefois difficile de déterminer s’il s’agit de pratiques réelles, car ces œuvres de fiction tardives mettent en scène des représentations fantaisistes de l’antiquité nordique. Cependant, nous verrons que des témoignages similaires dans les sources russes et franques confirmeraient l’existence d’une utilisation des boucliers comme outils de communication.
The human face has the capacity to generate expressions associated with a wide range of affective states. Despite the fact that there are few words to describe human facial behaviors, the facial muscles allow for more than a thousand different facial appearances. Some examples of feelings that can be expressed are anger, concentration, contempt, excitement, nervousness, and surprise. Regardless of culture or language, the same expressions are associated with the same emotions and vary only in intensity. Using modern psychological analyses as a point of departure, this essay examines descriptions of human facial expressions as well as such bodily “symptoms” as flushing, turning pale, and weeping in Old Norse-Icelandic literature. The aim is to analyze the manner in which facial signs are used as a means of non-verbal communication to convey the impression of an individual's internal state to observers. More specifically, this essay seeks to determine when and why characters in these works are described as expressing particular facial emotions and, especially, the range of emotions expressed. The Sagas and þættir of Icelanders are in the forefront of the analysis and yield well over one hundred references to human facial expression and color. The examples show that through gaze, smiling, weeping, brows that are raised or knitted, and coloration, the Sagas and þættir of Icelanders tell of happiness or amusement, pleasant and unpleasant surprise, fear, anger, rage, sadness, interest, concern, and even mixed emotions for which language has no words. The Sagas and þættir of Icelanders may be reticent in talking about emotions and poor in emotional vocabulary, but this poverty is compensated for by making facial expressions signifiers of emotion. This essay makes clear that the works are less emotionally barren than often supposed. It also shows that our understanding of Old Norse-Icelandic “somatic semiotics” may well depend on the universality of facial expressions and that culture-specific “display rules” or “elicitors” are virtually nonexistent.
In this article I present an analysis of color words in Old Norse, with the goal of elucidating how the language classifies and organizes its expressions for the visual experience of color, on the basis of the theory of basic color terms (which I have translated into Norwegian as grunnleggjande fargeord), first presented by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay in Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (1969), but much modified and developed since by them and other scholars. After comparing the color words of Old Norse with the criteria for basic color terms, I conclude by suggesting that Old Norse has seven basic color terms: blár, bleikr, grar, grønn, hvítr, rauor, and svartr.
Gender is one of the most fraught topics in Old Norse-Icelandic literature, and medieval authors made productive use of laughter and humor, inviting the audience to laugh with, or at, their characters, based on how good or unsuccessful they are at fulfilling ideal male or female roles.1 Sagas and eddic poetry are noted for brave heroes who die with a sarcastic remark on their lips, and formidable women who coldly laugh as they demand that someone be killed. These characters are likely to ref lect a society preoccupied by honor and the heroic ethic. In sagas inspired by romance, where women’s independence is the central theme, laughter becomes a weapon in the battle of the sexes, and instead of men laughing at other men, they join ranks to laugh at women. This article examines how the employment of laughter and humor, not only its comical but also its ludicrous and incongruous aspects, plays a fundamental role in the construction and representation of gender in Old Norse-Icelandic texts, and reinforces or interrogates existing models of masculinity and femininity.
Evolutionary game theory is used to form a finite partition of a continuous hue circle in which perceptually similar hues are each represented by an icon chip and the circle by a finite but game dynamically determined number of icon chips. On the basis of such icon chip structures, a color categorization for both an individual learner and a population of learners is then evolved. These results remove limitations of some particular previous color categorization simulation work which assumed a fixed number of color stimuli and a maximal number of predefined color categories. These simulations are extended to demonstrate that learners need neither to share the same icon chip structures, nor do these structures have to be fully developed for a population of learners to produce a stable color categorization system. Additionally, when a naïve learner is introduced into a population with a stable color categorization, the game dynamics result in the learner's adopting the existing categorization. All results are shown to hold while the underlying icon chip structures evolve continuously in response to novel stimuli. The usefulness of the approach as well as some of the potential implications of the results for human learning of color categories are discussed.
The present research sought to extend the nascent literature on color and psychological functioning by examining whether perception of the color green facilitates creativity. In four experiments, we demonstrated that a brief glimpse of green prior to a creativity task enhances creative performance. This green effect was observed using both achromatic (white, gray) and chromatic (red, blue) contrast colors that were carefully matched on nonhue properties, and using both picture-based and word-based assessments of creativity. Participants were not aware of the purpose of the experiment, and null effects were obtained on participants' self-reported mood and positive activation. These findings indicate that green has implications beyond aesthetics and suggest the need for sustained empirical work on the functional meaning of green.
Specific physiological perception mechanisms account for some of the regularities associated with the lexical encoding of basic color terms described by Berlin and Kay (1969). This paper, however, focuses upon those regularities explained through reference to certain general principles of naming-behavior which are also pertinent to domains other than color. [cognitive anthropology, folk classification, language change, language universale, naming-behavior]