Volume 53, Issue 1

Zusammenfassung The analysis of space-semantic oppositions – as developed by Jurij Lotman and extended by Karl Renner and Hans Krah – plays a much greater role in analysing prose than poetry. However, the focus on spatial and temporal oppositions, the connection of topological and semantic features of subspaces, as well as possible borders and their potential crossing can make a significant contribution to the interpretation of lyrical texts and also guide the interpretation of non-spatial text structures – such as word choice, motifs, and perspective – in appropriate poems. This is illustrated in the analysis of the poems “Indvielsen” (A. W. Schack von Staffeldt, 1804); “Borte!” (Henrik Ibsen, 1871); “Hvis jeg står” (Inger Christensen, 1962) and “Resan” (Tomas Tranströmer, 1962). The paper further makes a general point about a specific space semantics for lyrical texts.

This article examines the use of the narrative concept anagnorisis, or recognition, in two recent Norwegian novels, Morten Borgersen’s Jeg har arvet en mørk skog and Wencke Mühleisen’s Kanskje det ennå finns en åpen plass i verden . In both novels, the protagonist suddenly discovers their father’s secret history connected with their conduct during World War II. This revelation causes a new insight into their own and their family’s history and identity, and this in turn brings about feelings of shame and confusion. By using anagnorisis as a narrative device, the novels explore the gradual and ambivalent acceptance of a new identity and negotiations with social and personal expectations tied to being a descendent of a perpetrator.

In the present study, we investigate how the relationship between human and nature is rendered as Norwegian children’s book author Maria Parr’s novel Keeperen og havet [ Lena, the Sea and me ] is translated into Danish, English, French, German, and Swedish. Our focus is mainly on book cover images, and methodologically we use concepts and tools from Kress and van Leeuwen’s Grammar of visual design . Nature and landscape are prominent in Parr’s œuvre, which is set in the Western part of Norway, where mountains and the sea are always present. Results show that the French cover positions itself as the most ecocentric one, whereas the Swedish and the German covers are much more anthropocentric.

The fairy tale tradition of Cinderella in folklore (ATU 510) and the medieval Breton fabliau of a magic chastity-testing cloak, known as Le Mantel mautaillié (The Ill-fitting Cloak), and its various analogues, do not seem to have much in common at first. However, both the tale type and the medieval narrative contain an intriguing episode about an item of clothing – a delicate slipper, or a magic cloak – which perfectly fits only one particular woman. This article will show that Icelandic medieval literature and modern fairy tales sharing the image of a colourful fleeced ram are at the crossroads of Cinderella and the mantle tradition, and will help bring them into mutual illumination.

Drawing on new materialist and object-centered historical criticism, this article analyses colonial and post-colonial discourses of the Greenlandic figurines of the mythical being of ill-wishing and revenge, tupilak (plural form: tupilait). It focuses on three tupilak figures, made in 1905/1906 by a shaman Mitsivarniannga on a request of a Danish ethnographer William Thalbitzer, which today are part of the Danish National Museum collections. In the early 20th century, Greenlandic tupilait (and Inuit cultural production in general) were an object of fascination among European collectors, artists, and the general public. Asking what these objects had come to mean in (and for) Europe, this article points to marginalized Greenlandic narratives of Mitsivarniannga’s tupilat, and builds a critical narrative of these objects as material effects of the disruptions of indigenous community and sustenance by Western colonialism. Drawing on critical insights from the current post-colonial restitution debates, it problematizes the differential political-economic conditions and relations of power, under which the colonial acquisitions and procurements took place. The article argues that cultural heritage items, such as the three tupilat, are mnemonic ‘boundary objects’ that can potentially forge links between disparate memories of colonialism in Denmark and Greenland.

This paper examines the contribution of the Norwegian historian, politician, and ethnologist Ludvig Kristensen Daa (1809–1877) to the study of the Indigenous languages of North America. We focus on his accounts of sound systems, where he argued that North American languages are characterized by greater linguistic diversity, small consonant inventories and gaps in inventories, unusual sounds, and indistinct pronunciation of consonants. Daa attributed these features to the use of the languages in small and isolated communities, thus anticipating more recent discussions in which the degree of linguistic complexity is attributed to social and demographic factors. While some of his claims reflect methodological shortcomings of pre-20th-century phonetic study, the factors which according to Daa shape languages spoken in isolation are analogous to the parameters now examined by typologists, thus providing a sense of continuity across centuries in the links sought between structural diversity among languages and external factors.

The study examines gender incongruency effects during gender retrieval in L3 Swedish learners, which are due to gender misassignment in L2 German. Twenty learners of L3 Swedish who had previously acquired two gender systems; one in their L1 Polish and the other in their L2 German, completed a speeded Gender Decision Task in Swedish and an untimed Gender Assignment Task in German. All noun stimuli were congruent in gender across the three languages (neuter → neuter, masculine and feminine → uter). Learners who erroneously assigned neuter gender to feminine but not to masculine nouns in L2 German showed higher error rates and longer response latencies in their attempts to retrieve uter gender in L3 Swedish. No interference was observed for neuter nouns. The present study thus demonstrates that incorrect gender representations in L2 German compete for selection with the target gender representations in L3 Swedish and that this cross-language interference is not always successfully resolved. Based on these findings, it is suggested that in the multilingual lexicon the connection of the uter gender node to the feminine gender node is weaker than to the masculine gender node.