Volume 51, Issue 2

Montecore. En unik tiger (2006) stages its own making through the joint authorship of Kadir, a friend of Abbas’, and Jonas, a young writer and Abbas’ son. Their collaboration aims at a novel about Abbas, who migrated from Tunisia to Sweden, now a missing person. The interpretation of his life proves to be a conflicting ground for the co-authors because of their generational differences. This article proposes an analysis of Montecore building upon the notion of collaborative or multiple authorship (Stillinger 1991; Love 2002), and upon the discussion in Scandinavia and in Germany on contemporary migration and postmigration literature. Through a metafictional collaborative authorship – a so far neglected dimension in the study of Montecore – Jonas Hassen Khemiri depicts a young author’s ambivalent feelings towards his father and his story. Abbas has vanished from the family, but his special gift to Jonas, through Kadir’s mediation, deals with a linguistic talent that defies the rules of Swedish, showing the power of language to invent, and to imagine a different and less oppressive order.

The term Anthropocene is often tied to an anxious awareness of the incalculable complexity of anthropogenic environmental changes. As a concept transferred from geology, the term Anthropocene, for humanities scholars such as Timothy Morton (Morton 2013) and Timothy Clark (Clark 2015), installs a crisis in thinking that is bound to scales of mundane and embodied experiences. Instead, they demand thinking about the impact of human life on the whole planet in much broader scales of space and time than is customary. This article examines how contemporary Nordic ecopoetry responds to these environmental changes and challenges in the epoch of the Anthropocene. The point of departure for this work is Silja E. K. Henderson’s 1,7 tipping point (Henderson, Silja E. K. 2018. 1,7 tipping point. København) and Jonas Gren’s Antropocen: dikt för en ny epok (Gren, Jonas 2016: Antropocen: dikt för en ny epok. Stockholm). The article argues that Henderson’s and Gren’s ecopoetry zooms in on micro-levels and out on larger global macro-levels to represent the scale-dynamics of the Anthropocene. Overall, the article argues that this kind of ecopoetry can affect and transform the reader’s ecological imagination.

The so-called Torgersen case is one of the most famous murder cases and criminal proceedings in modern Norwegian history, as it started in the late 1950s and still figures in the judicial system, even after the convict’s death. Among the multitude of medial occurrences in the wake of the case we find three dramas, including Finn Iunker’s Det skjendige drapet i skippergata . In this article Iunker’s play is studied in a media archeological perspective, informed by German materialist media theory, focusing on media technology, communication systems, transmission, noise, and meta mediality. A key assertion is that Iunker’s play not only can be studied through the lens of media archeology, but to a certain extent can be read as media archeological excavation of the past, focusing on hypermedial aspects such as noise. Finally, the media archeological approach allows for a brief discussion on drama form and modern media culture.

Although Cecilie Løveid is one of Norway’s most important contemporary dramatists, she is not generally considered part of mainstream theater. In fact, she has positioned herself against it by her writing of feminist and performative theater texts since her debut in the 1980s. In her play Østerrike , which is inspired by Henrik Ibsen’s Brand and by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s diary of his stay in Norway, the audience is introduced to a love triangle. Ludwig, his fiancée Agnes and his former boyfriend David are entangeled in a queer love drama causing constant gender trouble. In this article, I will analyze how Løveid combines this gender discourse with a metatextual genre discourse. The play ends with a “beautiful scene”, which disrupts all existing categories of gender and genre. This scene in particular illustrates that Østerrike can be interpreted as a critical commentary on the Ibsen-tradition that determines Løveid’s outsider position.

Thomas Vinterberg is one of Scandinavia’s well-respected contemporary directors. His career is best noted for his involvement in the launch of the Dogma 95 Manifesto and it was his acclaimed Festen (DK 1998) that started the prolific film movement that followed. Yet, as this article shows, Vinterberg repeatedly tried to reinvent himself as an artist, taking on different genres, themes and aesthetic approaches. When his all-star science fiction film It’s All about Love (2003) and his pan-European co-productions met with the disapproval of critics and audiences alike, he returned to realist films. The subsequent success of his dramas – including Submarino (2010), Jagten (2012) and Druk (2020) – reinstated his status of an auteur filmmaker. The three films share a number of continuities, including a penchant for themes of homecoming, dysfunctional family relations and everyday socio-cultural conflicts within the limits of close-knit communities or circles of friends.

During the Second World War, a few well-educated Greenlanders from the Danish colonies of Godthåb and Holsteinsborg expressed their sympathy for Nazi Germany. However, the background of the political turmoil within the Greenlandic elite remains largely unknown. This article presents the state of research and previously unknown sources on the Nazi riots in Greenland. In a subsequent step, potential motives for the movement will be discussed. So far, researchers have ruled out that Greenlanders were aware of the true nature of National Socialism. Instead, the scattered pro-German activities along Greenland’s West coast have been played down as spontaneous acts of provocation and mere political calculus. In fact, the Nazis’ ideology and war crimes were well known to the Greenlanders. In addition, German polar researchers made friends with Greenlandic journalists, teachers and catechists after the Nazi seizure of power. Last not least, the article will examine how Danish discrimination against Greenlanders contributed to the Greenlandic chauvinism displayed by a few members of the Inuit elite.

The church of Tådene in Västergötland is home to a series of painted panels dating from the early 1700s. Before their restitution to the church in the 1960s, the panels were stored in a mausoleum, putting them beyond the scrutiny of scholars. This obscurity helped conceal the fact that the panels constitute the most sophisticated surviving programme of emblems to be found in any church in Sweden, remarkable in scale, scope, and invention. This article presents for the first time the source of the emblems at Tådene, and argues that a factor in the programme’s success is the role played in the composition of the poetic texts added to the emblems, and that, moreover, the author of these interventions was one of Sweden’s leading literary figures of the Baroque, Johan Runius. Not only was Runius resident in the parish of Tådene at the time when these panels took form, but his literary production in these years mark his only known attempts at the emblem genre. Through the confluence of date, place, and style, the article suggests that the texts of Tådene’s emblems merit investigation as lost poems dating from an early stage of Runius’s short career.

This article investigates the usage of Old Nordic supernatural concepts in the Old Norse translations of Old French and Anglo-Norman chivalric romances and courtly lais from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. This paper focuses on the usage of the term dvergr as a translation for the Old French nain , reflecting not only the narrative purposes involved in the choice of this word as a translation, but also the possible consequences it could have had on Icelandic folk belief when these works were read out loud alongside other works that formed part of Icelandic literature and Icelandic oral tradition.