The things I get myself into! I had an appointment with my Medieval Lit professor after class Thursday, during which I asked if I could join the research paper assignment. Totally NOT required of an auditor in my program! She was gracious and said that I could submit one and that she would read and comment on it.
Am I crazy?
Well, that is actually a rhetorical question: we all know that I am crazy. In the nicest possible of ways, we hope! 🙂
Yesterday evening I completed and submitted a five-page double-spaced bibliography of books and scholarly journal articles about Icelandic Sagas that I’m consulting for my paper. While I won’t end up citing all of them, I do have to actually read them all more closely than the way I skimmed them in order to pick them out in the first place. I will have to find pinpoint cites that support my arguments.
Oh, plus the paper and all its citations must adhere to the MLA Style Guide, Eighth Edition:
Just figuring out the style for the citations in my bibliography, which in my paper must now be termed “Works Cited,” took a couple of hours.
And what are my arguments, you may ask? (Here I imagine that you are all literature scholars, which just shows how very fertile my imagination is!)
I am arguing that two “dangerous women” in the sagas share several characteristics that make them femme fatales. The women are Hallgerd Hoskuldsdottir in Njal’s Saga and Gudrun Osvifsdottir in The Saga of the People of Laxardal (Laxdaela saga).
But if you want to find out the characteristics they share, you will have to wait until I have written the paper. 🙂 For now, I must re-read both Sagas, no mean feat, for they are each quite long, and then read all these critical works I have included in my bibliography.
Yikes!
Luckily, though, my friend Laurie Ashline, who moved out of state last year, is coming through town this weekend and staying with me starting later today. So I am granted a bit of a reprieve. 🙂
Let Us Live Like We Mean It! 
You are positively amazing!:) Hope the portrait is coming along and big hugs for Ophelia. Janet:)
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Thank you, Janet. You are so kind! 🙂
I am thinking seriously about the portrait. After doing a handmade Christmas card for a special person (a one-off) in colored pencil, I’m thinking about going with that. But I need to play a bit with the Neocolor II first before I get into the portrait in earnest. Once I decide on my medium and make a satisfactory sketch or two, the actual rendering of the portrait should only take a day or two. I now have my firm deadline: December 27th. Not that far away!
Your hugs for Ophelia were given and appreciated. She talks, you know. She is very vocal, like a Siamese (but not as loud), even though she is a plump tortie. And she said, “Thank you, Janet.” 🙂
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The subject for your paper sounds very interesting. Are they dangerous in a magical, witchlike way, or in a wielding a sword way or in a seductive way or in a political way? I’m never quite sure what people mean when they talk about femmes fatales, because it seems to change according to whoever’s using the term.
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April, they are largely dangerous in the sense that they cause the deaths of people around them, especially husbands or former lovers, but also since they lived in a feuding culture, the deaths they directly caused by goading men to avenge them on their chosen person, due to perceived or real insults and offenses, led to later revenge killings until whole families were decimated. However, the more I read Hallgerd Hoskuldsdottir’s story in Njal’s Saga, the more I’m startiing to think that she had possibly magical powers–seidr–and was a kind of monster of a person, perhaps in the sense of the worst kind of troll or giantess in the Norse mythological system. It is otherwise really hard to understand how she got so many people to do her evil bidding.
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Ah, that kind of dangerous. Happy reading and thinking. It sounds like a lot of fun.
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Thank you, April!
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