Volume 47, Issue 2 - Special issue: Nordischer Klang

The Danish National Archives in Copenhagen houses several thousand manuscript fragments, the remains of numerous works that were cut up and used in the bindings of later books. The majority of these fragments are written in Latin, Middle Low German, or Danish, although a few in Old Swedish also survive. Five of these Old Swedish fragments are published and discussed in this article. They contain parts of two of St Birgitta’s Revelations ( Liber Caelestis and Revelationes Extravagantes ) and of St Bernard’s A Rule of Good Life ( Ad sororem modus bene vivendi in christianam religionem ). The Birgittine texts are from an early stage of the retranslation process when compared to other extant versions and include several unique wordings that demonstrate the specific use of the original manuscript in a monastic environment. The Bernard fragments are one of just two extant versions and may predate the version in Stockholm, Royal Library, A 9; as such, they are an important witness to the propagation of the saint’s writings in Sweden.

A newly surfaced copy of Norwegian poet Dorothe Engelbretsdatter’s work in The United States is evidence of the seventeenth-century’s author’s enduring hold on nineteenth-century readers. This article places the book in the context of the poet’s Scandinavian reception since her own time and today. The travelling book forms an appropriate illustration of the spread of women’s writing, as studied by the EU-funded project HERA Travelling TexTs 1790–1914 . As one of the recent efforts to use digital methods to map women’s contributions to past culture, it marks present concerns in feminist and reception research.

In the 1880s, the Norwegian linguist Amund Bredesen Larsen (1849–1928) discovered a special socio-psychological mechanism in linguistic change which is today referred to in the literature as hyperdialectism . Larsen named the mechanism naboopposition [neighbour opposition, in modern Norwegian: naboopposisjon ]. This paper gives an account of Larsen’s discovery, and shows that this mechanism was rediscovered an entire century later and then integrated into sociolinguistic theory. It describes how Larsen presented his theory in 1886, and went on to provide more detail in a fundamental paper in 1917. It then accounts for Peter Trudgill’s rediscovery of the mechanism in the early 1980s, and shows that Trudgill coined the term hyperdialectism in the years between 1981 and 1985. The paper also includes a short biography of Amund B. Larsen.

Old Norse literature offers a rich variety of interesting examples when it comes to clothes and costumes. As with medieval literature in general, it is not uncommon that descriptions of dress or outward appearance can give an insight into the character of the wearer, together with his status in society. This article will focus on costumes worn by medieval trolls, as described in the fornaldarsögur . These are usually very simple, probably as simple as they come, and not much of a contribution to the history of clothes and costumes in Scandinavia when it comes to design, textiles, and handiwork. On the other hand, they can tell us something about the Icelandic medieval community and people’s ideas about remote and unknown nations, specifically as regards notions about civilization and the superiority of certain communities. Accordingly, the article will focus on the symbolic nature of the clothes by taking a closer look at the trolls themselves, their community and social status as described in the literature. Last, but not least, it will look for a further meaning behind the literary texts from the perspective of medieval ideology, as represented in the symbolism of literature and the visual arts.

Zusammenfassung Starting from Karen Blixen’s personal interest in fashion and from basic ideas in current fashion-theory, the article wants to explore how clothes and fashion figure in Blixen´s narratives. Examples from her various collections of stories show that clothes are used as a complex sign-system, not only to convey cultural-historical settings or to portray individual fictional characters. The depiction of fashion stages and questions the dichotomies of gender and class, of “Schein und “Sein”, seeming and being, and of constraints and freedom. Most importantly, clothes can function as a cultural code for self-fashioning and an adequate self-expression.

In Norwegian film comedies in the 1950s, clothes and underwear are used to map out different attitudes to and effects of modernity. In this essay, the film Dust on the Brain is used as a way to discuss the meaning of black lingerie, identity, and the female body in post-war Norwegian cinema, but also to discuss gender roles and structures of laughter in the comedy genre.

Today’s explosion of Swedish films made by and about transgender people is sometimes considered in a vacuum. This article explores the long history of cross-gender performance in Swedish cinema and the relationship of these new films to older traditions. In this article, I will outline the contours of cross-gender performance in Swedish films from the 1908 to today, using some exemplary films to display the variety of styles, genres, and meanings that can be found: the short dance film Dances Through the Ages ( Skilda tiders danser , Walfrid Bergström, 1909); the swashbuckler Lasse-Maja (Gunnar Olsson, 1941); the romantic comedy Up With Little Märta ( Fram för Lilla Märta , Hasse Ekman, 1945); the dramatic art film The Magician ( Ansiktet , Ingmar Bergman, 1958); the recent romantic comedy Cockpit (Mårten Klingberg, 2012); and the trans art film Everything Falls Apart ( Nånting måste gå sönder , Ester Martin Bergsmark, 2016). I will show that the two main shifts in Swedish cinema’s representation of cross-gender performance occurred in the mid-1950s and in the 1990s, due to social changes and changes in the structure of the Swedish film industry. In Swedish cinema, as elsewhere, cross-dressing has never meant any one thing, so we must attend to the specific contexts of its expression in order to understand what it meant.