Research
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Working papers (any comments about these are welcome!):
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My research focuses on the cultural history of Britain, Scandinavia, and the Arabic-speaking world in the early Middle Ages, and on Icelandic literary culture from the Middle Ages to the present. Since 2007, I have published all my research open-access. Correspondingly, editing Wikimedia projects (particularly Wikipedia) has become an integral part of my research process: for example, my self-education in medieval Arabic literature has largely been conducted by writing and editing Wikipedia and Wiktionary articles in that area.
In the decade to about 2010, my work focused on the relationship between health, healing, and supernatural beings in traditional belief-systems of medieval and early modern north-west Europe. This included my Ph.D. thesis and a book on elves. I also published several articles on multilingualism and language-contact in medieval Britain and Scandinavia.
In the 2010s, I paid a lot of attention to contemporary Icelandic literature, especially the role of Iceland's post-colonial anxiety, and within that the role of medievalism and orientalism in twenty-first-century Icelandic culture. This led to my second book, one of the main book-length studies of contemporary Icelandic literature.
From around 2020 I've begun doing comparative research looking further south and east, studying Arabic (and some Greek and Hebrew) to investigate early medieval riddles across western Eurasia.
Since about 2010, I have been translating medieval Icelandic romance-sagas, helping make this important corpus of Icelandic texts available to a wider audience: Sigurðar saga fóts, Sigurgarðs saga frækna, Jarlmanns saga og Hermanns, and Tíodels saga (working paper). I also spent a lot of time using computer-assisted stemmatology to reconstruct the transmission of several romance-sagas across a large number of manuscripts; and off the back of all this, studying a few sagas in depth from literary and cultural perspectives. This is painstaking work and has been reaching publication slowly, but I'm keeping at it here in the 2020s. I aspire to understand how the full corpus of romance-sagas were transmitted through the mulitfarious manuscripts in which they are found, and thus how Icelandic scribes went about anthologising sagas in this genre, and what social networks they drew on to achieve this.
Very occasionally I also manage to do research on traditional Finnish poetry, though little of this work has seen publication. One day, I hope!
