Thinking with Floods in Medieval Ireland
The Waters Are Rising!
Medieval Irish literature records numerous instances of bodies of water that appear to exhibit agency, exceeding or retreating from established boundaries and remaking landscapes in the process: wells pursue transgressors, forming rivers; lakes overflow, drowning prosperous kingdoms. This paper will examine a selection of texts depicting inundations, reading medieval accounts of the Noachian Deluge in Genesis alongside narratives about localized, as opposed to global, floods, drawing on ecocritical theory and research in the history of emotions to examine the affective power of flood narratives in medieval Ireland.
Kristen Mills is Associate Professor of Irish and Old Norse Philology in the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Oslo, where she is a member of the 'Eco-Emotions: Affective Response to Environmental Change in and through Literature' research project and the 'Ecolit: Ecocritical Literary and Cultural Studies' research group. She has published on Old and Middle Irish, Old Norse, and Middle Welsh texts, with a focus on grief and mourning.
Everyone is welcome to join us for this talk! The talk will last for approximately one hour and will be followed by further time for questions and discussion.