Retracing Connections |

17 Dec Love at the Borders: An Interview with Cameron Cross

Posted at 11:16h in Into the Storyworlds

This autumn semester at UU, we have the honour and pleasure to host the Associate Professor of Iranian Studies at the University of Michigan, Cameron Cross, who works on the comparative study of narrative in the Middle East during the Middle Ages, primarily in Persian but also in Arabic, Greek, Georgian and the languages of Western Europe. Cameron, who is currently focusing on epic poetry and romance narratives, presented his ongoing work under the working title “Love at the Limits: Exploring Early Persian Romances on the ‘Borders’ with Greek, Arabic, Indic and Old French Texts” in the RC seminar on 25 September.

I was very impressed with his approach to the Persian versified love-stories of the early 11th century, particularly the ones that are translated and adapted from Greek and Arabic sources. Cameron believes that one source of motivation for this rewriting and reperforming of the old stories in Persian can be traced to the concept of the ‘border’. This concept is essential for texts produced in borderlands and can serve as a heuristic device to identify selfhood and subjectivity as well as to discuss gender roles and social relations that are conveyed in the rise of the New Persian Literature. I seized the opportunity to ask him a few questions about cross-cultural and spatial aspects of intertextuality as seen through the Persian rewriting of the ancient Greek novel Metiochus and Parthenope and the Arabic tale of ‘Urwa b. Hizam.

V. T. How do universal themes (like love) get expressed differently and interpreted differently across diverse cultures? How does intertextuality in the Persian romances of the early 11th century mediate this?

C. C. Not to overgeneralize, but one of the things that first got me started on this line of inquiry was precisely how similar were the descriptions of love, beauty, heroism, virtue, and so on, across linguistic, geographical, and confessional lines. Just look at scenes of love at first sight, dissertations on the nature and effects of love (entering through the eyes, destabilizing the humours, etc.), or descriptions of a beautiful person as a graceful cypress with a moonlike face, arched bows for eyebrows, and a rosebud mouth, and you’ll see what I mean. It really belied any notion of an East-West divide that has been such a ubiquitous, and in my view misleading trope in modern discourse. Carolina Cupane puts it well, I think, when she posits a “common narrative koine” running across much of southwestern Eurasia and its adjacent regions.

Some of my earliest published work sought to explore this similarity — and the fine-grain differences that emerge from the comparison — on a purely thematic and literary level, such as the concept of divine providence between episodes in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, or the many ‘kinds’ or ‘colours’ of love between Dante’s Divine Comedy and Nezami’s Haft Paykar.

For a long time, I was content to keep my attention focused on these thematic and literary similarities: in fact, I preferred this, as I was not so interested in falling into the rabbit hole of source research, attempting to delineate lines of influence (a problematic term from many angles) or anything of that nature. Instead, I attributed these connections to large-scale and overlapping matrices of meaning-making, which I sometimes described as a kind of grammar or series of networks (“spiderwebs”) that held these literary cultures together in some loose and decentred way. This scenario would speak very well to the notion of intertextuality as theorized by Kristeva and Barthes: we’re not looking for text-to-text relationships like allusion or translation, but for how every text emerges out of a textual ‘sea,’ assembling fragments and pieces from a nearly infinite reservoir of prior significations. My first book, Love at a Crux, sought to situate the early Persian romance Vis and Ramin within this larger body, using it to show how it brings various narrative, thematic, and conceptual components together in ways that anticipate and help to establish a set of features that we moderns have come to ‘recognize’ or associate with the romance, broadly conceived. These features include re-thinkings of the code of chastity, particularly by female characters (cf. Kallirhoe or Cligès), investigations into the limits and paradoxes of masculine authority (cf. figures like Arthur or Lancelot), fragmentations and ‘doublings’ of the self (cf. the “hall of statues” in the Tristan cycle or the “twin” effect of Floire et Blancheflor), and tensions between lyrical and novelistic representations of love (cf. Aucassin et Nicolette). All this can be found in Vis and Ramin and other Persian texts.

V. T. Your take on the concept of the ‘border’ offers an interesting perspective that I would like to learn more about. What is the relationship between the Persian romances, particularly those that are translations and adaptations from Greek and Arabic sources and their geo-political context? What narrative techniques are used in these romances to make sense of the complexities of living in a borderland?

C. C. You’ve put your finger on the core questions underlying my current project, and I wish I had more developed answers to give you! My tentative idea going into this is that romances play an interesting and perhaps overlooked role in modelling encounters with difference — with the Other — that are not predicated on violence, nor necessarily destined to eradicate or domesticate that difference through the processes of marriage or conversion. For example, the Persian adaptation of Metiokhos and Parthenope seems to portray “pagan” Greek life in terms that are neither alien nor inimical to Islam; reviving this story in an environment of close contact between Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus may have promoted a kind of triangular engagement, mediated by Islamic attitudes towards ancient Greek culture. And, just as Ghaznavid coins expressed their religious commitment in both Abrahamic and Hindu cosmological language, the wide range of sources that went into this nascent literature seems to construct a kind a ‘layered’ narrative culture in which people from multiple perspectives and backgrounds might have been able to see themselves. Onsori’s versification of the local story of the Buddhas of Bamiyan suggests such a hypothesis. These stories may also play some role in the formation of historical memory, suturing various images of the past into the present: the era of antediluvian wisdom, the life of Alexander, and the career of the Prophet all come together in interesting ways in these texts. From this angle, they may be placed in productive conversation with other genres of writing such as praise poetry, anthropology, and travel literature, genres that frequently make use of the ‘border’ as part of their core conceptual apparatus. In staging these conversations, I hope to challenge myself to probe the generic ‘borders’ of romance itself with these other discursive fields. I have every expectation that those borders will prove to be far more porous and unstable than they might appear from a distant ‘literary systems’ approach.

V. T. How did the Persian adaptations of the Greek novel Metiochus and Parthenope and the tale of ‘Urwa b. Hizam incorporate existing Persian literary and cultural traditions? Were there attempts to make these stories more relevant to Persian audiences?

C. C. The wonderful advantage with these particular texts — and here I should specify that I’m speaking about Onsori’s Vameq and Azra and Ayyuqi’s Varqa and Golshah — is that we have the evidence available to conduct text-to-text comparisons. In the case of Vameq and Azra, for example, one of the story’s most fascinating moments is at a symposium in which the host (in a manner quite reminiscent of Plato) invites a debate on the nature of love. One speaker, the male hero Vameq, offers an account of Eros as a young archer that Hägg and Utas have described as “completely Greek in its imagery.” But then Vameq’s lover, Azra, counters this presentation by insisting that Eros is best understood as a concept, not as a figure with a body: this strikes me as a kind of ‘teachable moment’ in which the author stages a diegetic ‘correction’ to the text in a way that maintains the Hellenistic understanding of love in its broad contours, while steering the participants in the symposium away from polytheistic models — a concept that would seem particularly relevant in a borderscape like medieval Afghanistan.

The differences between Varqa and Golshah and its Arabic antecedents are quite striking: while the core episodes of the Arabic versions are maintained, they are padded out, both front and back, with extensive scenes of warfare. These scenes are not as action-oriented as they might sound: they really act as platforms on which the characters take turns vaunting about how manly they are and then perform their manliness in hand-to-hand combat. Through these dialogues, a rich constellation of masculine virtues emerges: physical strength, honourable comportment, endurance and fortitude, control over one’s emotions, and zeal in defending the ‘right’ side. And the most manly of them all, it turns out, is Golshah, who first slays her abductor and then his son for good measure. These virtues resonate strongly with the persona of the ghazi warrior adopted by Mahmud of Ghazna (who drew inspiration from the tales of the early Islamic conquests, generically called Maghazi) and then by the Seljuqs in Anatolia, or with Greek stories of ‘bordermen’ like Digenis Akrites, and of ‘border-women’ too, like those found in the Arabic epic of Fatima Dhat al-Himma (Remke Kruk has a great book about this called The Warrior Women of Islam). It is through these resonances that I think very interesting conversations can be held between texts written in multiple languages (Greek, Arabic, Persian, Georgian, Armenian, and Turkish among others) that all investigate the ‘border’ from various angles.

V. T. I have been fascinated by your book Love at a Crux on the narrative poem Vis and Ramin and the emergence of the versified love story as a genre of New Persian Literature. Could you explain how the book positions the Persian poem in relation to the development of romance in other medieval cultures, such as Greek, Arabic, and Western European literature?

C. C. I alluded to some of this above, but to articulate my basic idea behind the book, I saw the New Persian literature — a literary language that was only starting to emerge in earnest by the tenth century — as sitting at a convergence of multiple lines of storytelling, best represented by textual traditions in Greek, Arabic, and Middle Persian (the latter only scantily accessible as literary witnesses, but abundantly available via translations and material culture); it would gather and combine these discourses in novel ways over the eleventh century, and then, with the aid of the Seljuq-propelled spread of New Persian across southwestern Asia and the hugely prestigious work of Nezami (fl. 1160–1209), disseminate this tradition across a wide geographic expanse in the twelfth century, perpetuating ever-new moments of contact and exchange with the extraordinarily diverse literary cultures of the eastern Mediterranean region. It was thinking about this X-shape of convergence and divergence that led me to the metaphor of the crux, and the Greek novel was an absolutely essential piece of the puzzle in assembling this account. Perhaps in retrospect I let it overdetermine my use of the term ‘genre,’ since it is after all only five texts that are quite internally different from each other, but still, in terms of setting up some simple baselines of ethos and mythos, going back to the similarities you first asked me about, it was an important body of work to become familiar with. I really think that without that starting base of comparanda, specialists in any literary tradition risk missing part of the broader context in which their areas of study occur, and I can at least personally attest to how useful it has been to read scholarship in fields adjacent to my own.

V. T. I would love to learn more about your ongoing research. Could you share what projects you’ll be working on and how your work connects with RC? Do you enjoy your experience at UU? What are you hoping to achieve during your visit?

C. C. Much of my time here has been devoted to thinking, reading, and discussion: I’m trying to absorb new bodies of literature and new ways of doing scholarship, to reflect on what I’ve done so far and to think ahead as to what I might do differently in the future, and to lay the groundwork for what I hope will become another book project. This includes producing a new edition and English translation of Varqa and Golshah, which has been a sheer delight: nothing generates closer intimacy with a text than translating it. It has been an incredible pleasure to have these regular meetings with the RC team, through whom I’ve been exposed to whole new vistas of texts and methods; their expertise in Greek and Arabic literature of late antiquity and the medieval periods has been especially impactful and appreciated. It has also been nice to change my internal focus from “output” to one of “input,” which I think can easily get unbalanced in academia, and yet is ultimately the key for sustained and productive research. Many seeds have been planted during my stay at UU, and the traces of Retracing Connections will be visible in my scholarship for years to come.

V. T. Which is your favourite love story among this rich corpus of epic and romance that you are looking for at your project?

C. C. Great question! Let me offer a couple suggestions, depending on your tastes and interests. Anyone who likes the Greek novel would definitely enjoy reading Tomas Hägg and Bo Utas’s book The Lover and the Virgin, which includes side-by-side translations and editions of the Greek fragments of Metiochos and Parthenope and the Persian fragments of Vameq and Azra; I can’t say exactly why, but I am reminded of Longos’s Daphnis and Chloe when I read it. For a complete text that “rhymes” extremely well with the conventions of the Greek novel — particularly Kallirhoe — I think Vis and Ramin is wonderful read, particularly in Dick Davis’s verse translation. Rereading Hysmine and Hysminias this semester reminded me of Nizami’s Layli and Majnun, which has also recently been translated by Davis, in the way both texts felt highly dialogic and conceptual: love becomes a threshold for plumbing the infinite mysteries of the self. If your jam is love and adventure, such as what we see in the Palaiologan romances, check out Samak the Ayyar, a popular medieval tale recently translated by Freydoon Rasouli and Jordan Mechner (of Prince of Persia fame): it dialogues tremendously well with Shota Rustaveli’s Man in the Panther Skin. Perhaps the work that brings these facets together — the romance and adventure, the philosophy and cosmology, the highs and lows of love in all its forms — is Nizami’s Haft Paykar (Seven Figures), translated by Julie Scott Meisami. It is something of a snow-globe of Persian romance, in all its richness and complexity.

Viktoria Tasoula and Retracing Connections thank Cameron for his contribution and wishes him best of luck. We all look forward to reading the next stage of his investigation into the development and function of the early Persian Romances.

18 Aug From nonsense towards a meaningful story? The winding path of a Byzantine coin

Posted at 11:05h in Into the Storyworlds

Mysterious markings on an old coin take Ingela Nilsson on a journey into a storyworld full of unexpected turns.

Coins were never part of my undergraduate or even graduate studies. I was trained as a philologist and I guess coins were not considered relevant. It was Roger Scott who first taught me that coins tell stories, which – as he well knew – was an efficient way of catching my interest. A couple of years after Roger with great enthusiasm had showed me the coin collection at the British Museum, I met Cécile Morrisson, who could really tell the stories of coins, and since then I have been able to much better understand and appreciate the Uppsala University coin cabinet, directed by numismatist Ragnar Hedlund.

When the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, in collaboration with Koç University and GABAM (Stavros Niarchos Foundation Center for Late Antique and Byzantine Studies), created the online exhibition Nordic Tales, Byzantine Paths, coins had a given place as important artefacts travelling between Byzantium and the North – both as money and as money turned into jewelry.

It was because of this exhibition and my involvement in it that Ivan Marić contacted me about a year ago, in July 2024. Ivan works with the coin collection at Dumbarton Oaks and we had met in early 2024, when I spent two months at DO as invited scholar. Ivan had now come across a histamenon of Michael VII “with runic graffiti on both sides.” The coin was not at DO, but had been bought by a private collector from New York for whom Ivan was curating a collection of ancient and Byzantine coins. He had then come to think of me and the Nordic Tales exhibition: could this coin perhaps be something to consider as an addition, in order to complement the famous graffiti in Hagia Sophia?

Runes on a Byzantine coin did sound perfect for the exhibition but since I don’t know runes, I needed help and began to contact suitable colleagues. This turned out to be the beginning of a long and winding path towards possible interpretations of what first looked like a straightforward indication of Byzantine-Nordic connections.

I started with Magnus Källström, whom I know from our work with Byzantium and the Viking World and who now works at the Swedish National Heritage Board.

Magnus was helpful as always, but in this case his reply was a little disappointing because he couldn’t really find any runes: “Actually, it’s only the three characters at the top of the photo on the left that resemble the Viking Age S rune, and the last character in the photo on the right that corresponds in form to an L rune. Since the rest of the characters are not runes, I think one should rather assume a corruption of a character from some other alphabet.”

This corresponded to what one of Ivan’s colleagues had already observed: that the characters might be a combination of several alphabets, including Greek and Church Slavonic. And the other colleagues I asked very much agreed. Two rune experts – Eric T. Lander and Henrik Williams – confirmed that these, with the exception of what “could formally be an S rune from the younger futhark”, were not runes. Since Greek and Slavonic had been suggested, I also asked my colleague Alexander I. Pereswetoff-Morath, expert in Old Slavonic. He too came back with a negative reply: no Cyrillic letters, at least nothing that could be “phonotactically possible”.

But I don’t give up easily and I’m lucky enough to have many knowledgeable colleagues, so I mentioned the writing to Neil Price at the Centre for the World in the Viking Age, VIWA. Neil took at quick look and then – as often – came up with a creative suggestion: could it be a case of “nonsense runes”? He also told me I had an expert within reach at my own faculty: Marco Bianchi.

Marco offered a swift reponse to my question, now finally with an interpretation of the graffito as “a script imitation”, with “elements of runes and Latin script, but also pure fantasy characters”. It turned out that Marco had studied a group of such runic inscriptions and named them krumelurinskrifter: “they look like runestones, but the inscription contains nothing that resembles known script”.

Marco also offered references to a book written by Martin Hannes Graf, terming the phenomenon parascript, and to a summery article available open access. In addition to this important information, Fedir Androschchuk – another colleague and friend from the Byzantium in the Viking World period, former director of the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in Kyiv and currently a member of the VIWA team, too – told me that the graffiti reminded him of examples he had seen in different part of Eastern Europe, sixteenth- to seventeenth-century ‘fake runes.’

With this, I could get back to Ivan with a summary of the information I had received: fake runes, possibly mixed with fake letters from other alphabets, and perhaps rather late. We agreed that the negative result – in the sense that we didn’t have a rune inscription that could actually mean something – was not necessarily disappointing. We might have to dismiss the idea of a Northener inscribing a Byzantine coin he had gained in Constantinople with runes proper, but there might still be some kind of Nordic connection in the resemblance of runes – some kind of mixture of ‘letters’ by someone who could not read or write in any alphabet? In either case, as Ivan put it, we were still dealing with “a fascinating story embedded in an object of material culture”. I thought it would make for a nice little blog essay here on our website. I expected the quest to be over and put ‘Write up blog piece on coin’ on my to-do list.

However, it turned out the story had not come to an end just yet. In March this year (2025) I went to a conference at the École Franҫaise in Rome, “Translation and Transmission of Arabo-Byzantine Texts”, and met, among others, our advisory board members André Binggeli and Maria Mavroudi. There were many fruitful discussions about cultural transfer and multilingualism, giving me ideas for seminars and workshops to come, but the best thing was to meet people I didn’t already know. For instance, I met Gerasimos Merianos, who works on alchemy – such a fascinating topic – and we started talking about coins as artifacts and the stories they can tell. I mentioned the coin with the fake runes (the blog post still being on my to-do list), and Gerasimos said something like: “The presence of the graffiti alone does not necessarily prove a magical-religious use, but it could suggest an apotropaic or talismanic function.”

And suddenly it dawned on me: the amulets and papyri I had seen, here and there, with magical functions and the use of various strange characters. Why had I not thought of this before? Gerasimos reminded me of the article by Henry Maguire titled “Magic and Money in the Early Middle Ages”, which examines many aspects linking magico-religious beliefs with coinage and contains rich iconographic material, and also sent me in the direction of magical objects at the Met.

The timing was perfect, because after the conference in Rome I went straight to Athens for a few meetings and events, and had the privilege of visiting the Benaki Museum together with Anastasia Drandaki. Anastasia – whom I had met at DO in early 2024, when I had also met Ivan – agreed with what Gerasimos had told me and showed me a number of objects in the Benaki collections with similar magico-religious letters and functions. Such objects really complicate the idea of ‘writing’ in ways that I hadn’t really thought about before: when do letters go from mere ‘signs’ or decorations to intelligable messages? And doesn’t writing sometimes have a kind of magical dimension, even when it simply states the name of an object’s owner?

In a later email discussion with Gerasimos, it turned out that he had discussed the coin with his numismatist friend Yiannis Stoyas, and their thoughts had turned in a direction similar to the one that my Swedish colleagues and I had been toying with a bit aimlessly – could we be dealing with Pseudo-Greek or Greek scribblings and accordingly imagine a slightly different scenario? “Perhaps a member of the Varangian Guard could have reproduced a form of ‘writing’ he had seen in Constantinople.” A speculation, of course, but one as good as any, given that we have no information but the coin itself.

Gerasimos also noted a curious detail: that there is another histamenon of Michael VII Doukas, at CoinArchives.com, labelled with the note “graffito in Greek and Arabic(?) on reverse edge”. In contrast to the description of ‘Ivan’s coin’ on the same site, which offers an imaginative little story involving a Varangian guard, there is no explanation of this graffito and the image is rather blurry. In light of the numerous Byzantine coins with graffiti on them, it is perhaps not that strange to have to of the same kind carrying curious ‘scripts.’ However, it does place our ‘runes’ in a context where coins are used for purposes that go beyond their monetary value, in combination with ‘letters’ used with no linguistic content, which is an interesting issue in itself.

This in turn made me think of the pseudo-Byzantine coins made in Scandinavia between the tenth and twelfth centuries, imitating Byzantine coins but with incorrect legends that make no sense. Such coins were obviously modeled on Byzantine coinage: the written message was lost in translation but another meaning was clearly maintained. When Rebecca Darley visited Uppsala in May this year, she reminded us that such imitations were also made in the East in the Ummayad period – much earlier than the Scandinavians discovery of Byzantine iconography.

I could go on, but I’m sure you’re wondering if there’s a point to this story? Well, there are several, but none of them is to offer an interpretation of the ‘runic graffito’ in question – I was never the right person to do that anyhow. But the little quest that I set out on, after having been asked by Ivan to see if the runes could be read, reminded me of a few important things. First, that coins indeed tell many more stories than we might think at first glance, as do the many grafitti and scribbling that have been passed down through history. Second, that ‘scripts’ and ‘texts’ are not always what they seem – sometimes they have a rather different story to tell than any actual content. Moreover, a message doesn’t necessarily exclude a little bit of magic. Third, and perhaps most importantly, that communication across disciplinary boundaries is not only crucial in order to find answers to tricky questions, but also one of the most rewarding aspects of being a scholar. The curiosity, engagement, and cheerfulness that I came across was absolutely stunning. So even if this perhaps took me nowhere as a philologist, it took me far as an academic and as a person.

With this, ‘Write up blog piece on coin’ is no longer on my to-do list, so I will end here with a heartfelt thanks to my wonderful colleagues and with an advice. When you cannot answer a question, ask a colleague, or ask many – it might take you on an unexpected path.

15 Apr Panagia the Mermaid: A partly lost Aegean storyworld

Posted at 10:42h in Into the Storyworlds

Viktoria Tasoula takes us to Panagia the Mermaid, a small, mysterious church built on top of a cliff, at the harbour off Skala Sykamineas (Sykamias) on the island of Lesvos.

A wall painting depicting the Virgin Mary with a mermaid’s tail gave the church its name, and one of the rarest descriptive titles of the Virgin Mary refers to the veneration of certain icons, departing from the Byzantine tradition. Panagia the Mermaid (Παναγιά η Γοργόνα) and her enigmatic story inspired the novelist Stratis Myrivilis, a native of the village of Sykamia, to write his novel of the same name in 1948. According to this tale, the chapel of Panagia the Mermaid, built on a rock called Rachta of Panagia by the elderly, is not as old as some of the gems of Byzantine architecture scattered all over Greece.

Four-squared and solid, it was built less than a century ago by some god-fearing craftsmen and sailors with more reverence than artistic taste. This is how Myrivilis describes Panagia’s first encounter with the seamen of the Aegean: “Together with their contractor, they [the craftsmen] were sailing in a barque on their way to a village in the north of the island, where they had been contracted to build a soap factory. Suddenly a great storm came up and they were caught up in a violent squall. The sailing boat was about to capsize not far from Cape Korakas when they suddenly saw Panagia’s Rachta. ‘Our Panagia, save us,’ the builder vowed, ‘and we will build you a chapel!’ Immediately the storm calmed down. The craftsmen and the crew were relieved to finally reach the small port of Panagia. They moored the boat and hurried to fulfil their vow. That is the reason why this chapel looks like a small olive oil store [the small church was built by humble craftsmen using their worldly skills]”.

Myrivilis then tells the story of Captain Lias, the icon-painter whose life is as strange as his creation: the story of a secular monk of unknown origin, probably from the mysterious Anatolia, who lived in the chapel of Panagia until he left the island, never to return. The icon of Panagia the Mermaid has adorned the wall of the chapel ever since. Here is the description of Panagia the Mermaid in the author’s own words: “…a strange painting which he [Captain Lias] left up on the wall of the little church. It is still there, though faded by the salt sea air, and it depicts a Panagia, the strangest in Greece and in all Christendom. Her head looked as we know it from the icons of Platytera. Olive skin, delicate features, a modest face. She has a rounded chin, almond-shaped eyes and a small mouth. A crimson red maphorion surrounds the upper part of her body, covering her head up to her eyebrows, and a golden halo is placed around her head, as in all the icons. Except for her eyes, which are green and extraordinarily wide. From the waist down, however, she is fish-like with blue scales, holding a boat in her right hand and a trident in her left, just like the one the ancient sea god Poseidon is depicted holding in pictures and schoolbooks. When the fishermen and the villagers first saw the painting, they stood in awe, but it did not seem strange to them at all. The women, who went up to worship her, fell on their knees before her, and they burned incense to her just as they do to all icons. They called her Panagia the Mermaid, as she is still called today, and from then on, she gave her name to both the church and the harbour.

And no one thought that, on that day, [when Captain Lias conceived the idea of a Panagia as a mermaid] a new Greek divinity sprang from the forehead of this secular monk’s forehead, just like from Zeus,’ and settling on this unique sea rock of our Aegean island, miraculously bridged the gap between the past and the present, creating spiritual and meaningful links in our tribe; A tribe that lives and fights with the ghosts and the storms of the world, half on the land and half at sea, with the ploughshare and with the keel, always under the protection of a warlike, female and virginal deity”.

This deity finds a human counterpart in Myrivilis’ protagonist, Smaragdi, a young girl with powers traditionally attributed to mermaids. Her unique beauty, her dynamic and emotional nature, her moral superiority and her exemplary character create challenges and conflicts for independent women in a male-dominated society. She resists patriarchal violence and claims her freedom, sharing her inspiring journey of personal suffering at the hands of fate. The novel incorporates elements of mythology and folklore into the narrative of Smaragdi’s life stories. With melodramatic pathos and ethnographic curiosity, Myrivilis succeeds in revealing the symbolic power and the cultural significance of Panagia the Mermaid. The life of the refugees from Asia Minor in 1922, among them Smaragdi as a baby, who settled in Skala, where Panagia the Mermaid is the main point of reference for these people, a source of help and protection, is told. As the story unfolds, the characters, deeply connected to the sea, are confronted with the poverty, desperation and violence of life there, while the uncertainty of the inter-war period increases. In this period of transition from tradition to technocracy, Panagia the Mermaid becomes a symbol of the cultural synthesis of references and beliefs, rendered timeless by the uninterrupted oral and written narrative, which plays a significant role in the creation and the development of collective memory, as exemplified by Myrivilis’ novel and its characters. Panagia the Mermaid, like its source of inspiration, has a dual nature: it is a folk tale with a lyrical style, and a piece of realist historical fiction.

Mermaids are visual metaphors that embody and represent concrete and traditional metaphysical concepts, a perfect interfusion of human and divine reality. The contemplation of nature as a source of inspiration for creativity remains a valuable aesthetic experience. In Panagia the Mermaid, created by the old hermit, the natural landscape is involved, representing an aesthetic value and a prototype; Panagia’s Rachta looks like the rocks on which the mermaids sit and comb their hair. Sailors are aware of the presence of Panagia, with her shining fishtail, who wanders the Aegean, watching over the ships and occasionally performing miracles, such as holding the boat over the stormy sea and then carefully setting it down in the harbour. Contemplation can thus be understood as an experience of transcendence or mysticism. “Contemplation is the highest expression of man’s intellectual and spiritual life. It is that life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive. It is a spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being” (Merton,1972,1-2).

The visual qualities and symbols in Panagia the Mermaid are drawn from other religions and mythologies, but mostly from the iconography of the Orthodox Christian tradition. The unknown artist managed to extract the sacred essence from the religious figure and, despite his unusual perception of Panagia, the faithful villagers exclaimed: ”No other Panagia in the whole of Christendom has such a maphorion!” The link between the material world and the transcendent reality is experienced through the icon. St Maximus the Confessor wrote: “The whole spiritual world is mystically imprinted on the sensible world, while the whole sensible world cognitively subsists in the intelligible world, and their activity and function are one.” In Eastern Orthodox Christianity, miraculous events associated with the icons of Theotokos, have shaped and sustained the faith of the community. There is a rich tradition of the intercession of Theotokos for those who pray before her as a source of continuing devotion expressed through spiritual practices and worship. Icons associated with these apparitions reflect the historical context and tell their visual stories by incorporating elements of popular imagination. Panagia the Mermaid, familiar and strange, does not only embody both human and aquatic realities, but can also be interpreted as a reflection of the mystical and incomprehensible union of humanity and divinity.

Today, Panagia the Mermaid, the most beautiful Panagia of the Aegean, is no longer on the iconographic wall-painting of the chapel of the same name in Skala Sykamias. The circumstances of her disappearance remain unclear.

Douglas, C Youvan. 2024. Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Eastern Orthodox Tradition: A Study of Miraculous Icons and Local Devotions.

Massimo Confessore (R. Cantarella ed.). 1931. La mistagogia ed altri scritti, 122-214. Florence: Testi Cristiani. (Thesaurus Linguae Graecae 2892:049:563).

Merton, Thomas. 1972. New seeds of contemplation. New York: New Directions Paperbook.

Μυριβήλης, Στρατής. 2008. Η Παναγιά η γοργόνα. Αθήνα: ΕΣΤΙΑ. [1948]

English translation: The Mermaid Madonna, 1981. Athens: Efstathiadis Group.

Swedish translation: Den heliga sjöjungfrun, 1958. Stockholm: Alb. Bonniers Boktryckeri.

03 Feb From Isabella Hammad to Theodore or Edessa: Reading for Recognition and Dialogue in Palestine

Posted at 12:28h in Into the Storyworlds

Reading a story tends to be a solitary act today. Still, engaging in a narrative remains a vital social practice. The aesthetic, affective, didactic, and political are always tightly interwoven in narrative webs. Critical storytelling is built on the idea that if we arrange those strings in the right way, narratives can indeed make us live better together. But the way to do this is not always straightforward or intuitive. I want to reflect on two ways of being social in and through narratives. Recognition and dialogue are ancient ingredients of narratives. They blur the lines between the content and the form of the story. I follow their threads through Byzantine narratives and contemporary literary theory and suggest that being passively exposed to the limits of your knowledge and actions – like when quietly reading a book – can be much more radically social than engaging in a dialogue at any price. The value of this can be appreciated especially by those for whom the right to narrate remains limited or even inaccessible.

What can a story do?

In Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative, the 2023 Edward Said memorial lecture, Isabela Hammad traces the motif of recognition. Anagnorisis made its way into literary theory through Aristotle’s reading of Greek tragedy. Aristotle defines it as “a change from ignorance to knowledge”. It is what Oedipus experiences when realizing that he is his wife’s son, his father’s killer, and the cause of the plague that gnaws on the people of Thebes. Hammad notes that anagnorisis can also take a negative form, like in Ghassan Kanafani’s novella Return to Haifa. A Palestinian couple separated from their baby during the 1948 Nakba returns to the city of Haifa after the Six-Day War in 1967. They find that a stranger living in their house has raised their son. He now carries a Hebrew name and their enemies’ uniform. The son feels angry and abandoned. He denies the significance of blood ties and refuses to be recognised.

It is just as startling to recognise that a stranger is your kin, as it is to be exposed to the fact that your kin has been a stranger all along. Hammad holds that it is not the sudden burst of knowledge that gives a punch in the gut to both the characters and the readers exposed to anagnorisis. It is rather the seeing the limits of our knowledge. This is why anagnorisis might not be just another motif in the plot. In this subtle play of who knows what and when, which includes both the characters and the readers, the sharp borders between the story and the way it is told are explicitly blurred. The recognition can affect the laws and relations of the storyworld, including focalization, sequence of events, narrative levels and narrative time. This exposure to our cognitive limitations, Hammad argues, is the best we can get from novels and other narratives. It makes us realize that we are not alone in the world and that the world exists outside of our heads. “To realise you have been wrong about something,” she writes, “is to experience the otherness of the world coming at you.” A fundamental social act.

Between and Against

Hammad is a Palestinian. She regularly witnesses moments when strangers recognise the violent acts of occupation and apartheid in Palestine. Israeli citizens, Hammad notes in her lecture, are much less likely to experience such recognition in comparison to other foreigners. It would mean not only witnessing an inhumane treatment of their neighbours but also recognising Palestinians as being equally human. It could make them question their own humanity, as being complicit in systems of oppression or benefiting from them.

Here lies the crucial difference between recognition and dialogue. Certainly, as a theatre piece, Oedipus the King is almost entirely made of dialogues. So, why does Oedipus not avoid all the bloodshed – including of the people much more innocent than him – by simply engaging in a proper conversation with any of his families, or at least some of his servants? Isn’t dialogue an easier and shorter route from ignorance to knowledge? Recognition comes with a trauma. Would it not be better to avoid it by just having people discuss their opposing positions in face-to-face encounters? For some reason, this question might seem much more naïve and absurd when asked about fiction.

In her book The Past Can’t Heal Us, Lea David analyses the practice of reconciliation dialogues between Israeli and Palestinian civilians. These meetings that started taking place in the 1980s under the auspice of NGOs and educational institutions, were an attempt to bridge the conflict through shared memory culture. David argues that the inter-communal dialogues indeed fostered a sense of solidarity among the participants. But that solidarity easily dissipated once they went back to the entrenched ethnic groups and to the structures of domination and inequality. The dialogical setting was flawed, since “from the very beginning it was not ‘people’ who came to embrace differences among group members, but Jews and Palestinians who came to establish clear ethnic boundaries.”

Similarly to the way in which anagnorisis slides between the content of the narrative and its form, so has the dialogue form served as a basis to interpret narratives beyond their formal characteristics. Soviet narratologist Mikhail Bakhtin wrote about dialogism. He believed that all social and discursive interactions occur not inside humans but in the borderlands between subjects. He started from analysing the form of dialogue in Dostoyevsky’s novels. He ended up concluding that novelistic storytelling is often dialogical beyond its form, since it reflects this intersubjective foundation of our social lives.

Hana Meretoja takes inspiration from Bakhtin to show how storytelling can be ethical and foster emancipation. In her Ethics of Storytelling, she argues for the possibility of non-subsumptive storytelling, that is, telling stories that do not dissolve the individual human characters into general laws or principles of a dominant worldview, that do not swallow and subject them to other humans in the story. Still, the limits of dialogical storytelling become clear in her interpretation of David Grossman’s anti-war novel To the End of the Land. She notices how the conflicted and complex Israeli characters of Grossman’s novel manage to make and unmake each other in a “dialogical space of possibilities.” At the same time and despite their best efforts, the Israeli protagonist and her Palestinian employee remain stuck in “a culturally inherited choreography” and the “narrative unconscious” that keeps them irreconcilably apart.

Not every dialogue is ‘dialogical’. When the topic of a dialogue is the participants’ right to exist and speak for themselves, its oppressive form is revealed. The outcomes of such dialogues are set beforehand and limited. It can only end in the conversion or annihilation of one side.

Unlike the anagnorisis, there seems to be an agonistic element in both the dialogue form and dialogical storytelling. They seem to enforce the boundaries between individuals or communities that precede the interaction. In contrast, despite being potentially traumatic, the recognition allows the boundaries to shift and pass over the characters’ bodies, erasing the established communities and revealing the possibility of a common humanity. The consequences can be both salvific and devastating. There is no community, family or city that Oedipus can go back to. Truly, recognition is not only about knowledge. Aristotle frames it as having emotional, relational, vital, and narrative consequences, since it is “a change from ignorance to knowledge, producing love [friendship] or hate between the persons destined by the poet for good or bad fortune”.

Byzantine literature offers plenty of examples of both recognitions and dialogues. On the one hand, we read of tokens of recognition that bring separated families and romantic couples back together in medieval Greek novels.

We meet transmasculine monks and hermits whose female body parts are revealed posthumously in hagiography, making their communities reconsider the boundaries of gender, piety, and sanctity. On the other hand, as noted by Averil Cameron in her Arguing it Out, self-standing dialogues in Byzantium were both very popular and very monological. The ‘opponent’ would be allowed to enter the dialogue, only to be defeated. This, again, is not a contradiction in terms, since ‘dia-’ in ‘dialogue’ does not refer to the number of participants or positions represented but to the fact that the interaction is conducted ‘through’ discourse. Byzantine dialogues can revolve around the purity of Orthodoxy, the ‘faults’ of heretics, Catholics, Jews, and Muslims, or social issues like poverty. Whatever the topic, they are more often framed as being against someone than as being between people. The same is the case with dialogues embedded in larger treatises or narratives.

Conversion, Annihilation, Recognition

The central text of the Retracing Connections programme, the Life of Saint Theodore of Edessa, contains interesting cases of both dialogues and recognition. This text was written by Euthymios the Athonite/Iberian (ca. 955-1028), a former child hostage in Constantinople, a prolific translator, and a Georgian immigrant abbot of a prosperous monastery on Mount Athos. The text was composed as a collage of original passages and chunks of text from Euthymios’ earlier Greek translations. It was translated into Georgian and Arabic soon after its writing, and it became widely popular in its Old Slavonic translation. It is a life story of a fictional Christian monk and abbot called Theodore. Theodore lived in Palestine and Syria, under the sovereignty of Umayyad caliphs, in a mix of seventh- to ninth-century contexts, but without strong attachments to precise chronologies. Theodore spent most of his life as a monk in the Monastery of Saint Sabas, in today’s Bethlehem Governorate in Palestine, and as the bishop of the city of Edessa, near today’s Şanlıurfa in Turkey. Here I want to look at two dialogues and one recognition scene from this hagiography.

Theodore’s beautiful, young, and pious disciple Michael is the protagonist of the first dialogue in the text. Michael came to Jerusalem to sell baskets during the visit of the Persian king Adramelech (Abd al-Malik?). The evil queen Seis tried and failed to seduce Michael, only to accuse him of rape in front of her husband. The king knows the accusation is false. Instead of a trial, he initiates a debate on true faith between Michael, a Jewish intellectual, and himself. The king and the scholar fail to defend Islam and Judaism in words. Michael tells the king that he can either let him go, kill him, or convert to Christianity. The king puts him to torture. Michael miraculously survives standing on hot coals and drinking poison. The Christians at the court are encouraged by the miracles, but the majority of the king’s Muslim subjects furiously request “with shouts to the king, that either the monk dies or all the Christians be slaughtered.” Michael is taken outside of the city walls and beheaded.

The second dialogue takes place at the court of the Saracen Persian king Mauias (Mu’awiya?). Theodore travels to Babylon, with an explicit divine mission of converting the king. He miraculously heals Mauias and preaches the Christian faith to him. The king secretly becomes Christian, while Theodore’s influence grows among the population of Babylon. The leading Jewish intellectual and religious figure is displeased by this. He bribes the main judge, who organizes another tri-religious debate. Believing that the king would be on his side, the unnamed Jewish leader does not even attempt to present an argument. He showers Theodore with “blasphemies and rumors” against Christians. In return, Theodore refuses to defend himself from smears, and used his saintly power to afflict the Jewish speaker with mutism. After being muted and imprisoned for three days, Theodore’s opponent choses to convert to Christianity. His power of speech is restored. In his turn, king Muaias, renamed John at baptism, decides to come out as Christian in front of his Muslim subjects. The enraged Muslim mob tears him and his three Christian servants into pieces in a public square.

Both episodes and their characters abound in stereotypes aimed at fortifying the existing boundaries between religious and ethnic communities. Despite multiple debates incorporated into the story, these positions reflected and produced violent acts over the centuries. Another embedded episode in the story can be interpreted as breaking this pattern by allowing the separation lines between characters to disappear, while making the storyworld big enough to fit their differences. It goes as follows.

Theodore’s spiritual father, the hermit Theodosios, lives on a column close to the city of Edessa. This old man tells Theodore a series of educational and pious tales. One of his stories is about the rich man Ader and his family. Ader abandoned his family and became a monk at the Saint Sabas monastery. His wife felt abandoned and furious at him for neglecting his parental duties. Ader then appeared in two visions: he revealed the future to the hermit Theodosios and he told his wife that he would take his children with him, so she could join a monastery and save her soul, too. He miraculously killed his two older sons and made the youngest fall severely ill. The desperate mother ran around with the dying toddler in her arms asking for help from passersby. The person who stopped to help her was a prostitute. Despite her sins and the lack of faith in herself, she took the child in her arms and uttered a prayer, both humble and defiant. Not asking mercy for herself, she challenged God to show clemency towards her helpless neighbor. The child was miraculously healed. The mother and the merciful woman spent the rest of their lives together in a nearby monastery. The healed child was raised there and went on to become the patriarch of Jerusalem.

This story is complex, and has a clear religious message in its uni-religious setting. Still, there is moment of anagnorisis at the heart of it. The family is dismembered and reassembled, as the father kills two sons and a stranger saves the third one. Transcending the boundaries of piety, respectability, and social class, one marginalized and one helpless character recognize each other’s humanity. They make space for a more livable life on earth through mutual faith and care. At the same time, the hermit watches carefully from his column and goes on to tell the story.

This resonates strongly with Isabel Hammad’s arguments in Recognising the Stranger. When we find ourselves trapped in a triangle of the oppressors, the oppressed, and the bystanders, she invites us to follow Yasmin El-Rifae’s advice. Rather than trying to persuade or convert the oppressor, we should try “breaking into the awareness of other people by talking candidly among ourselves.” We should try to think together, resist together, and support one another openly.

This is not an invitation to create segregated, monological societies or narratives. On the contrary, it is a call to question the dialogues that make us choose between conversion and annihilation. It also an invitation for people who are used to telling stories to quietly listen, lest they miss the chance to recognize the limits of their knowledge and to perceive the stranger in themselves. It is a call to stay attentive to elements of common humanity when faced with foreign narratives and epistemologies. This lies firmly within the domain of storytelling. According to Hannah Arendt, storytelling “reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it” and “brings about the consent and the reconciliation with things as they are.” Such an approach might reveal that “things as they are” may offer a space of non-oppressive coexistence. If not, it can at least inspire us to tell a better story, a story of resistance, and keep telling it until the end of the loveless world.

Milan Vukašinović
Researcher in Greek and Bzyantine Studies, Uppsala University

Isabella Hammad, Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative, New York 2024.
Aristotle, Poetics. ed. S. Halliwell Cambridge, Mass 1995.
Lea David, The Past Can’t Heal Us: The Dangers of Mandating Memory in the Name of Human Rights, Cambridge 2020.
Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Austin, Tex 1981.
Hanna Meretoja, The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible, Oxford 2018.
Averil Cameron, Arguing it Out. Discussion in Twelfth-Century Byzantium, Budapest – New York 2016.
Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times, New York – London 1955.

16 Jan Awe and Envy: Byzantine motifs in Scandinavian Saga literature

Posted at 12:24h in Into the Storyworlds

“The cool breeze forced the black prow of the ship forward along the coast, and the armoured ships proudly bore their tackle. The eminent king saw iron-thatched Miklagard before the bow; many fair prowed ships advanced toward the tall arm of the city”- translation of Morkinskinna by Theodore M. Andersson and Kari Ellen Gade.

A great city in the distance approached by armoured ships, a soon to be famous king aboard makes his way to adventure and glory in Byzantium, the first challenge to his own royal character by a civilization greater than he. So begins the adventure of arguably the single most famous Varangian mercenary in history, the Saga of Harald “Hardrada” Sigurdarson. One of the most famous Nordic accounts of Byzantium, his story shows a characteristic view of the Byzantine empire that is prevalent in the Scandinavian 13^th-century sagas. The greatness of the Greek kingdom is contrasted by the great deeds and character of the Norse hero.

Various similar motifs show up in several different sagas from the 13th century. The Morkinskinna, a 13^th-century royal saga authored in the monasteries of Iceland, the Heimskringla, a royal saga authored by the famed Snorri Sturlason, and the manuscript 64b Holmiensis, popularly known as Guta Saga, all paint a vivid picture of how the Northerners viewed the Byzantine empire.

The Varangian-Byzantine relationship in the sagas is one partly based on exoticism, prevalent for lands in the periphery of the known world, and partly on a reverence bordering on envy for the might of the Byzantine Empire. Byzantium’s narrative function thus becomes twofold: to serve as an exotic setting for Norse heroes to prove themselves against dragons and Saracens and the emperor, but also as a narrative contrast to show off the heroic qualities of the protagonists.

Harald Hardrada’s story is emblematic in this respect. In both Heimskringla and Morkinskinna he begins his journey after the battle of Sticklestad, from which point he makes his way to the court of prince Jaroslav and asks to marry his daughter Elizabeth. Jaroslav however will not marry his daughter to a man of no renown, regardless how impressive his lineage is. With a quest at hand and a reputation to earn, the young lord leaves for adventure in Miklagard the golden.

Byzantium was at the time of Haralds arrival ruled by the empress Zoe and her husband Michael. Zoe is contrasted with Harald at once by being given the title “En rika,” the powerful. In a confrontation with the Empress in Morkinskinna, she asks him for a lock of his hair, to which Harald responds with a request for the empress’ pubic hairs. This insult forms the initial antagonism between Harald and the empire.

Harald then enters service in the Varangian guard under the pseudonym Nordbricht and quickly becomes leader of the Varangians after slaying a dragon and helping the Varangian Erlender’s wife through his ingenuity, thus proving his wisdom. The young prince goes on various campaigns with Jarl Gyrgir, a Byzantine admiral whose incompetence is compared to Harald’s spectacular achievements in battle and in wits. During this time, the disagreements about the distribution of loot causes a big conflict between the two men. While Gyrgir was a part of the imperial salaried system, Harald the Scandinavian was used to the system of his homeland where a warrior would keep the loot he earned.

After many such campaigns in which this charade is repeated, Harald is “unfairly” accused of stealing the loot of the empire and of seducing the niece of the emperor. The sense of injustice rings hypocritically here, since the same sagas admit that Harald was guilty of both crimes. Harald is arrested and thrown in the dungeons where he slays another dragon, escapes and ends his adventure by blinding the emperor and kidnapping princess Maria. He later releases Maria with a message to Zoe, challenging the empress by asking if she could have done anything to stop him. Having thus proved his superiority, wisdom and martial might, Harald departs with his reputation and treasure to Norwegian dynastic squabbles and English arrows.

In Morkinskinna, a descendent of Harald and king of Norway, Sigurd the Jerusalem-farer, rides the waves of conquest and glory on his crusade to the holy land, upon the end of which he arrives before the Golden Gate of Constantinople. The majesty of the city is described by the author of Morkinskinna to be on full display for the king’s arrival.

The young king is given great gifts and tests alike as he parties with the emperor Kirjalax (Alexios I Komnenos). The king refuses to keep these gifts himself and instead distributes them among his men, proving his generosity and showing himself equal to the emperor and in no need of his gifts.

The trials included the gifts: by rejecting them and thanking the emperor for his generosity in Greek, Sigurd earns an equal spot next to the emperor at the hippodrome, which is itself praised by the saga author. The empress lays out a trial to test his ingenuity: to make a fire without any wood. Sigurd responds by using walnuts, proving his wisdom a final time. Through the completion of these trials, the king proves his final worthiness as an equal of the Byzantine emperor before going home to Norway. The emperor and the empress function as his final challengers on a long adventure.

On the island of Gotland, the text 64 B Holmiensis popularly called Guta Saga, written as part of a lawbook “Gutalag” told the story of how a third of the Gotlanders left the island to travel through the East to the Byzantine empire. Once they had arrived the Gotlanders asked the emperor to let them stay for the “waxing and waning” of the moon. While the emperor of the Greeks agreed, believing this to mean no longer than a month, what Gotlanders had in mind was “forever and ever”. The empress interjected on behalf of the Gotlanders, settling the dispute in the migrants’ favour. The Gotlanders thus having tricked the greatest Christian king, were rewarded with a home in the kingdom of the Greeks where, according to the author of the text, they stayed to the day into the present day. In this episode, a special emphasis is placed on the role of trickery and riddles: the Gotlanders’ ways to best the emperor, who once again serves as the story’s antagonist.

The role of the empire as antagonist for the Norse heroes is not always a villainous one. In the cases of Harald Hardrada and the Gotlanders, the Empire can be described as the victim of the protagonists’ ambitions. The only crime that the Empire commits in order to deserve this antagonism is simply interpreted incompetence, unfitting for the supposed importance of their status, and the cultural clash resulting from the Norse rejection of Byzantine army centralisation. Gyrgir, Zoe, the blinded emperor, and the emperor of ’64 B Holmiensis’ all take on the role of the ruler defeated by the great Norwegian king and crafty Gotlanders. While Kirjalax and Sigurd have a much more positive relationship, that episode follows the same pattern as the other sagas since Kirjalax gives Sigurd the final trials on his journey – once and for all proving why Sigurd should be the king of Norway. The actions of the Scandinavian heroes in relation to Byzantium reflect a desire to establish legitimacy and status comparable to that enjoyed by the Byzantine Empire.

The view the Norse had of the Byzantine Empire evident in the sagas – from the physical descriptions of Constantinople’s greatness through words as golden, high-walled, iron-thatched, to the Norse heroes’ rejection of gifts that are offered instead of earned, to the antagonism towards the Byzantine state and the exoticism associated with the area – reveal a picture of Byzantium defined by Scandinavian monarchic ideals and the challenge that the existence of an admittedly greater kingdom poses to them. The antagonism with which the Byzantines are portrayed serves an important function, then, to exemplify and contrast the Scandinavian ‘underdog heroes’ as being equals or even superiors to the greatest Christian state they knew.

The sagas, which were composed across a wide geographical area in the Scandinavian cultural region, all share a set of motifs in relation to the Byzantine empire, evident across different episodes and works. The impression the sagas give of this distant land speaks of a great admiration for Byzantium, which paradoxically makes the inhabitants of that state ideal rivals to whom Scandinavian heroes can compare themselves. This relationship can then be said to be based on Scandinavian impressions and ideals clashing with those of a society which they did not entirely understand, yet whose success and even approval they desperately desired to emulate through shows of worthiness and superiority.

Aron Johansson, BA student of history at Stockholm University and intern in Retracing Connections in the winter of 2024-25