NORTHERN LITERATURE: The Eddas and Sagas

Class begins on Wednesday March 6th, at 5pm Pacific (8pm Eastern), and continues for EIGHT Wednesdays. NO CLASS on March 27th, due to Holy Week.

Balder the Beautiful is dead, is dead. 
And through the misty air 
Passed the mournful cry 
Of sunward sailing cranes.  

In Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis recounts his childhood introduction to northern literature through his reading of these lines of Longfellow’s Tenger’s Drapa, a poetic retelling of the death of the Norse god Balder, the fair-haired beloved son of Odin and Frigg. Lewis famously describes his reaction as one of “Northernness”: “I knew nothing about Balder; but instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of northern sky. I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale and remote) and then . . . found myself at the very same moment already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it.” Sigrid Undset experienced something similar after reading Njal’s Saga at the age of ten; Orcadian writer George Mackay Brown’s conversion to Catholicism came about primarily not only through his reading of Newman and T.S. Eliot, but through his introduction to the Orkneyinga Saga. The debt Tolkien owes to Germanic Literature can hardly be overstated. 

For Tolkien, the literature of “Northernness” conveys both “unyielding heroism” and a “sense of impending doom.” What is it about these qualities of northern literature which resonate in the imaginations of modern Christian writers? In attempting to answer such questions, this course will introduce students to a rich, influential, and varied body of literature all-too-frequently neglected in the Catholic and Great Books educational tradition.