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Barraclough, Dr Eleanor Rosamund
Job Title: Leverhulme Post-doctoral Fellow
College: Queen's
Period/ Subject: Medieval
Email address: eleanor.barraclough@ell.ox.ac.uk, eleanor.barraclough@queens.ox.ac.uk
Research Interests: My research focuses on the culture and history of northwest medieval Europe, and Old Norse literature in particular. Past work has focused on areas such as genre hybridity in post-classical sagas, medieval Icelandic outlaws and the conceptual place of Greenland and Vinland in the Norse world. Most recently, I have been working on the role of landscape in the sagas, exploring the links between the literary design of the sagas and the various cultural, historical, socio-political and geographical conditions underpinning the society that produced them. In addition to close literary analysis of these texts, my research engages with a variety of disciplines including the palaeographical evidence and manuscript preservation of the saga texts, medieval geographical tracts, historical research and scientific data with additional angles provided by fields such as archaeology, anthropology and onomastics. My research interests in medieval Scandinavian history are concerned with the spread of the Norse diaspora across the North Atlantic and further afield. Beyond the arctic chill of the Norse world, Old English literature is a particular interest; I am currently looking at the thematic and cultural links between depictions of the landscape in Old English and Old Norse texts.
Teaching Areas: Old Norse language and literature, Old English language and literature, Medieval Scandinavian History, Middle English
Recent Publications:
'Inside Outlawry in Grettis saga Asmundarsonar and Gisla saga Surssonar. Landscape in the Outlaw Sagas', Scandinavian Studies (2010), 365--388
'Transforming the Trolls: The Metamorphosis of the Troll-Woman in Bardar saga Snaefellsass', Quaestio Insularis 9 (2009), 52--62
'The World West of Iceland in Medieval Icelandic Oral Tradition', in Pre-Prints of Saga and East Scandinavia: Fourteenth International Saga Conference, Uppsala, 8th--15th August 2009, I, ed. A. Ney, H. Williams and F. Charpentier (Gavle, 2009), pp. 99--105
'Following the Trollish Baton Sinister: Ludic Design in Bardar saga Snaefellsass', Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 4 (2008), 15--43
Other Information:
The working title of my current research project is 'Mapping the Viking World: Conceptualising Geography and Constructing Identity in Saga Literature'. This is an exploration of how the medieval Icelanders conceptualised the geography of the world and their place within it through the sagas.