Myth to History in Saxo

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morten Warmind
Keyword(s):  
The Sacrifice

Saxo Grammaticus composed his Gesta Danorum as a written monument to the ancient greatness of the Danes. To write his rather tedious work he used a varied mass of materials, including sagas and chronicles as well as mythological tales, which he historicizes. Georges Dumézil in Du mythe au roman demonstrated in his study of Saxo’s tale of Haddingus how the elements of the story could be related in detail to the story of Njord as recounted by Snorri Sturluson, Saxo’s younger Icelandic contemporary. This is only one of such instances. In my chapter I treat the visit to Geirrod and the sacrifice of King Vikar in order to demonstrate how Saxo used and historicized these materials of which he is sometimes our oldest source.

After Alice After Cats in Derrida's L'animal que donc je suis

Derrida Today ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 180-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Polish
Keyword(s):  
Human Development ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Human World ◽  
Philosophical Texts ◽  
The Sacrifice

In this essay, I argue that Derrida cannot pursue the question of being/following unless he thinks through the question of sexual difference posed by figures of little girls in philosophical texts and in literature, specifically as posed by Lewis Carroll's Alice whom Derrida references in L'animal que donc je suis. At stake in thinking being after animals after Alice is the thought of an other than fraternal following, a way of being-with and inheriting from (other than human) others that calls for an account of development that is not dictated by a normative autotelic and sacrificial logic. I argue that Derrida's dissociation of himself and his cat from Alice and her cat(s) in L'animal que donc je suis causes him to risk repeating the closed, teleological gestures philosophers like Kant and Hegel perpetuate in their accounts of human development. The more sweeping conclusion towards which this essay points is the claim that the domestication of girls and their subjection to familial fates in narratives and the reduction of development to teleology more generally, require the sacrifice and forgetting of ‘nature’, including animals, so that the fates of girls and ‘nature’ are intertwined in the context of projects of human world-building and home-making.

Queer Seductions of the Maternal in Dorothy Macardle's Earth-bound

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 287-308
Author(s):  
Abigail L. Palko
Keyword(s):  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Irish Nationalism ◽  
Maternal Attitudes ◽  
Female Autonomy ◽  
National Autonomy ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Sacrifice

During her lifetime, Dorothy Macardle was a prominent public intellectual in both her native Ireland and post-war Europe. Her passionate engagement in Irish nationalism found expression in her writing; in her only collection of short stories, Earth-bound: Nine Stories of Ireland, published early in her writing career, she protests Irish women's socially restricted status and offers literary models of female solidarity to her audience (her fellow prisoners in Kilmainham Gaol, where she was imprisoned during the Civil War). Complex and ambiguous messages regarding maternal attitudes and female sexuality are encoded within the collection, particularly in the two Maeve stories (as I have labelled them because of their shared narrator), ‘The Return of Niav’ and ‘The Portrait of Roisin Dhu’, in which she offers coded expressions of the realities of women's lives in early twentieth-century Ireland that the larger public would have preferred remain unspoken, particularly with regard to expressions of maternal inclinations and female sexuality. Earth-bound, driven by her reactions to the many ways that the Irish struggle for national autonomy was purchased by the sacrifice of female autonomy, becomes a vehicle through which she explores socially taboo issues, most notably mothering practices and both heterosexual and homosexual expressions of female sexuality.

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