Standing on the aft-deck of the Tecla, a traditional 1915 Dutch herring ship, the Greenlandic ice-cap slid ominously by in the corner of my eyeline. Teaching Old Norse literature and culture to the ship’s guests as they sailed from Greenland to Iceland with the sun overhead and icebergs and fin whale spouts behind me, I wondered how I had ever gotten here.
Indeed, the road to pursuing a DPhil in Old Norse literature at the University of Oxford’s English Faculty which had allowed me to take up a position as a guest lecturer on board this sailing ship had neither been smooth nor straight. But it had been wonderful and exciting in the challenges it had brought.
Coming from a family in which neither of my parents had attended university, Oxford was a far off-dream, more of a daydream perhaps. But in 2019 I completed my undergraduate degree in English and History at UCD Dublin with a passion for all things medieval and it was with no small amount of trepidation that I applied to the MPhil in Medieval English at Oxford later that year. From that first encounter with the thrilling intellectual hum which underpins life at Oxford, I have been drawn back to its energy ever since. During my masters here, I first wrote a dissertation in Middle English palaeography, believing that perhaps one day I would be a book historian, running my fingers daily over manuscript pages created centuries ago. But after a course in Old French literature and another in Old Norse literature (both languages spoken in England in the Middle Ages), I was hooked by these vastly different literary worlds with cultures and societies fundamentally different to our own modern day.
After a break for two years, I came back to Oxford for the DPhil to continue learning about and diving into these two great literary traditions, Old French and Old Norse. Influenced by contemporary discussions on the environment and engaging with the growing field of eco-criticism, my research examines the translation of landscapes, spaces, and places from Old French romances into Old Norse. Through this work, I examine how medieval Scandinavians responded to foreign and unfamiliar landscapes through the modifications in the translations, and how this may in turn reveal how they thought and culturally engaged with the landscapes of medieval Scandinavia.
And this is how I ended up teaching onboard a sailing ship at the end of the first year of my DPhil.
I love teaching but I also love public engagement and so I decided to seek out opportunities where I could bring both of these passions as well as my research together. During my year at Oxford I taught in several outreach programmes run through the faculty, including Old Norse story-telling projects and the UNIQ summer school. This year I am delivering workshops in creative translations in modern French to secondary schools around Oxfordshire.
As much as I loved working with students, I wanted to bring my research to new audiences in new and engaging ways; which is exactly why I sought out work on ships sailing through the North Atlantic. With great good luck, I was taken onboard by a Dutch sailing ship, the Tecla as her guest lecturer as she sailed from Greenland to Iceland and later onto Scotland for a total of six weeks. Not only was this an incredible teaching opportunity and something I am deeply grateful to the training at the faculty that enabled me to deliver my teaching materials and research in this format, but it was also a deeply insightful opportunity for my research. Travelling slowly through the landscapes that the Norse themselves once sailed through over a thousand years ago, I had time to think and reflect on the way in which the environment and the encounter with landscape differed dramatically from the way in which most people now travel – by cars, plains, trains. This period of teaching and reflection has proven immensely instrumental for the direction of my research, but it has also further fuelled my love for public engagement.
Back in Oxford my life here centres around my teaching and my involvement with the academic community. I have been lucky enough to organise three conferences in the past year (chair of just one – Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference 2024) and to give back to the intellectual and cultural vibrancy that has taught me so much and given me so much.
I hope as the years go by and I continue working towards the end of my DPhil, that the sense of adventure of the Norse sagas, which I have brought with me on my travels, stays through the long and winding road, which, no doubt, lies ahead.
