Happiest of Holidays!!! I hadn’t intended for this to be a sort of scholarly Christmas card, but that’s what’s happened. It seems that, upon heading to Denmark for archival work back in the Summer of 2017, I fell off the blog-bandwagon. It’s actually a refrain I see often on academic blogs: the obligatory “wowza I haven’t updated this in ages” post. So I add my own voice to that chorus now.
I’ll briefly say that Copenhagen made for a truly amazing Summer, and I’m deeply grateful to the American Scandinavian Foundation, whose generous grant made the whole trip possible. The same goes for the fine folks at the Arnamagnæan Institute on the Univ. of Copenhagen’s campus, who not only taught me a great deal about their collection (and manuscript work in general), but also about work/life balance. I made some really terrific lifelong scholar-friends there! Their kindness made the Institute a welcoming home away from home, and they have a number of daily rhythms that made a full day of reading and writing in the archives much more enjoyable (and less draining) than what I’m used to in my home institution’s library. Don’t get me wrong, IU’s Wells library is a good one, but I usually work on the windowless tenth floor without breaks, solitary as an oyster. Count yourself lucky if you ever find yourself working in the Arnamagnæan’s sunny reading room instead!
Two examples of their sustainable work practices spring to mind: daily lunch breaks (which sometimes spill over into ice-cream breaks, depending on who you hang out with), and the all-important daily tea time (‘al-important’ for my Old Norse dorks). Every day at precisely 3pm, a loud and vigorous ringing echoes through the corridors– this is the tea-summons. Although technically optional, I can’t imagine why one would miss it. Everyone gathers in a library at the end of the building for at least 20-30 minutes of tea, cookies, and conversation. After a grueling day of research, it’s a great sanity break, and a thing that I’ve missed ever since!
Getting to work with the manuscripts of Niðrstigningar saga (and loads of other religious texts) was a dream come true.
However, I learned one particularly important thing from them– flexibility! It turns out that when Árni Magnússon (God rest him)
collected all these Icelandic manuscripts at the start of the 18th century, he had a habit of unbinding them and re-binding them in groupings of thematically similar texts. This was, to draw upon technical vocabulary, a “bummer,” since one thing I had hoped to study was the manuscript groupings of Old Norse apocrypha and their associated textual networks. [sigh] Still, thanks to some fantastic conversations with colleagues there, I was able to address other questions that had not occurred to me before. You can read about it in my dissertation after I defend it this spring!
There was, of course, plenty of time for fun after the workday. Copenhagen has so much to do– I enjoyed walking to the beach to read, going to Tivoli amusement park with archive friends, soaking in the city’s museums, hitting up antique markets on the weekends, making new friends at the city-wide jazz festival (and partaking in the food-truck heaven of PapirØen). I also, of course, rifled through every secondhand bookstore I could find.
At the end of the trip, I even got to visit Prague and meet some long lost family for the first time! I grew up listening, mesmerized, to stories from my grandmother about the old country and our relatives (she hailed from the central Texas-Czech enclave, but visited Czechia fairly often), so this was a lifelong dream come true. I was also sure to pay homage to our family genius, Alphonse Mucha (my… Great Grandmother’s first cousin, I think. No idea what the kinship term for that is– my Anthropology degree is rusting!), who has a fantastic little museum just south of Old Town (Staré Město).
Since then, life has been an unremitting storm of productive chaos. Upon returning from Denmark, we house-sat for my adviser for a school year, which was great– not least because I suddenly had access to a massive top-notch research library and micro-fiche cache! (yes, even in this brave digital age, microfiche is still a thing! A really important one, too! I know, I know… I belong in a museum.)
Out of all that, I’m pleased to announce a series of publications: my first article, “Snared by the Beasts of Battle: Fear as Hermeneutic Guide in the Old English Exodus” appeared this past spring in Philological Quarterly 97.1, and I really enjoyed working with them and their editorial staff. I can’t recommend them highly enough if you have a literary essay to publish. After that, I presented at the Harvard Celtic Colloquium on a Welsh translation of a little known apocryphal “Legend of the Holy Rood.” The article version is due out from Harvard UP in Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 37 sometime next month.
Related to that, Tony Burke (http://www.apocryphicity.ca/) gave me the opportunity to translate the Latin version of that same Holy Rood text for the second volume of the New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures series, due out sometime late next year from William B. Eerdmans. This excellent series aims to expand the corpus of apocrypha beyond what’s found in the go-to collections of Elliott (The Apocryphal New Testament, OUP) and the like. Between the two of them, these volumes present critical introductions and translations of scores of texts that have seldom (if ever!) been translated into English. For a preview of my contribution, check out the entry I wrote on the Legend of the Holy Rood for NASSCAL’s e-Clavis project: https://www.nasscal.com/e-clavis-christian-apocrypha/legend-of-the-holy-rood-tree/. There are other things I’m cooking up, but I don’t want to be even more tedious than I already have been. Highlights include a review and study of Oral-Formulaic studies in Old English, a note on an overlooked Old English apocryphal fragment, a slew of entries for the Manuscripta Apocryphorum project (https://www.nasscal.com/manuscripta-apocryphorum/), and exciting new contributions to the Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture project.
Most delightful of all, I found out last March that I was awarded a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship (https://www.acls.org/research/fellow.aspx?cid=b09e7b4b-162e-e811-80d3-000c299476de). Basically, this is a year-long grant that frees up 60-some scholars like myself from teaching and other obligations, so that we can focus single-mindedly on finishing the dissertation. FINISHING THE DISSERTATION. Man, I can’t wait until that’s true! Needless to say, I’m honored and extremely grateful. Now it’s just a matter of cranking out my dissertation from/on hell. 🙂
[Sidebar: It’s been a delightful privilege to be on fellowship, but the funding doesn’t come from nowhere. Organizations like ACLS are funded by generosity to extend generosity. If you’re reading this and have a little spare change, I’d urge you to consider contributing to them (or other humanities organizations like them), especially because they’re in a more precarious situation than ever, because dumb politics. Feel free to email me if you want to know more!]
And that brings me to the present school year. Daily I dissertate. And play fetch with my cat. And nap with said cat. And then dissertate more. I’m also applying for academic jobs, but that’s its own full-time process that you can either ask me about or read about elsewhere.
Stephen C. E. Hopkins 