Ursula Dronke

Ursula Miriam Dronke (birth name: Ursula Miriam Brown ; * 3. November 1920 in Sunderland , Tyne and Wear , † 8 March 2012 in Cambridge ) was a British voice and literary scholar who is particularly concerned with the Old Norse language and the Old Norse literature dealt and as a specialist in sagas and poetry of medieval Iceland , and in 1969 published the first volume of a comprehensive edition of the Poetic Edda , a medieval anthology of great Icelandic poems.

Life

Studies and first scientific work

Ursula Brown moved with her family to Newcastle upon Tyne in 1924 after her father became a lecturer at Newcastle University . After attending the Church High School there , she began studying French language and French literature at the University of Tours in 1939 , but had to break off her studies there after the occupation of France by the German Wehrmacht at the beginning of the Second World War .

On her return to England she completed with the assistance of a Mary Ewart- scholarship to study English literature at Somerville College of the University of Oxford from and graduated 1942nd She then became a member of the Board of Trade before returning to Somerville College in 1946, where she began a postgraduate degree in Norse sciences. Her professors included the leading British experts in Old Norse studies, Gabriel Turville-Petre and JRR Tolkien .

In 1949 she completed her studies with a Bachelor of Letters (B.Litt.), Whereby her work on the Old Norse Flóamanna saga about Þorgil became her first major literary work and quickly found international recognition after its publication in 1952.

She was then a fellow and tutor for the English language at Somerville College between 1950 and 1961 , where she met Peter Dronke (1934-2020), whom she married in 1960, at a meeting of the Society for Medieval Studies in 1959 . In 1962 they moved to Cambridge after Peter Dronke accepted a teaching position in Middle Latin at the University of Cambridge .

Publications on the Poetic Edda and teaching activities

Teaching activities in Munich and Oxford

In 1969 she published the first volume of an extensive edition of the Poetic Edda , a medieval anthology of mythological and heroic great Icelandic poems such as the Atlas song .

At the beginning of the 1970s, she was temporarily professor at the Chair of Scandinavian Studies at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich .

In 1976 she took over the Guðbrandur Vigfússon - Lecturer in Old Icelandic Literature and Antiquities at the University of Oxford, where she taught until her retirement in 1988. She was also a fellow at Linacre College there . During this time she taught numerous students who later became lecturers and professors at various universities around the world .

Translation of the poem Völuspá

In 1997 she published the second volume of Old Icelandic Literature, which contained her translation of the poem Völuspá , whose textual complexity and allusive ambiguity are incomparable.

In Völuspá there is talk of a mysterious seer who, it seems, was called by the god Odin , and who transmits against her will the arcane knowledge that she alone knows. This includes the creation of the world (and even the time before it), and then its end Ragnarök , the great Nordic apocalypse of the end of the world , which she describes in dramatic detail. In her translation, Ursula Dronke, with endless patience and years of study, succeeded in gaining a convincing understanding of the literary dynamics of the text with its interludes of media voices and its sudden changes between the past, present and future. While the Völuspá was a challenge for most Old Norse scholars , it restored the poem as a work of art.

Later publications

In addition, she and her husband wrote several other specialist publications that were shaped by their daily teaching and research activities. In 1997 a collection of her essays was published under the title Myth and Fiction in Early Norse Lands . In it she dealt with Old Norse literature in general as well as with Old Norse mythology in particular, as well as with its context to the Indo-European traditions and medieval European knowledge.

The third volume of the Poetic Edda was last published in 2000 ; the planned fourth volume will remain fragmentary due to her death . Nevertheless, the three volumes she published dominated the studies of the Edda worldwide due to the complexity of their literary analyzes and the enormous breadth of their background knowledge, which she transferred to the poetry of the work.

In order to secure the Old Norse studies at the University of Oxford, she also managed to receive financial support from the Swedish entrepreneurial family Rausing .

Publications (selection)

• Barbara et antiquissima carmina , co-author Peter Dronke, 1977
• The role of sexual themes in Nja ls Saga , 1980
• Speculum Norroenum: Norse studies in memory of Gabriel Turville-Petre , Odense 1981, ISBN 87-7492-289-0 .
• Myth and fiction in early Norse lands , 1996, ISBN 0-86078-545-9 .
• The Poetic Edda. Vol. II, The Mythological Poems , Oxford University Press 1997, ISBN 978-0-19-811181-8 .

literature

• Ursula Dronke. In: Saga-Book 36, 2012, pp. 117-120.

Web links

• Publications in Open Library
• Ursula Dronke obituary. Inspirational teacher of Old Norse literature specializing in the sagas and poetry of medieval Iceland . In: The Guardian of March 25, 2012
• Review of The Poetic Edda. Vol. II, The Mythological Poems by John McKinnell in alvíssmál 10 (2001) pp 116-28. (PDF; 204 kB)