Merrill Kaplan’s recently published book The Paganesque and The Tale of Vǫlsi (Boyder & Brewer, October 2024) will be the subject of a roundtable with the author as well as Thomas DuBois, Halls-Bascom Professor of Scandinavian Folklore, Folklore, and Religious Studies in the Department of German, Nordic and Slavic at the University of Wisconsin, and Sarah Iles Johnston, Distinguished Professor of Religion at Ohio State University.
Dr. Merrill Kaplan is an Associate Professor of English and the Director of the OSU Center for Folklore Studies. Her book challenges the concept that the notorious horse penis is key to understanding the Tale of Vǫlsi, via the concept of the "paganesque".
A family of Norwegian pagans, stubbornly resisting the new Christian religion, worship a diabolically animated preserved horse penis, intoning verses as they pass it from hand to hand until King Olaf the Saint intervenes. This is the matter of the medieval Tale of Vǫlsi. Traditionally, it has been read as evidence of a pre-Christian fertility cult - or simply dismissed as an obscene trifle. This book takes a new approach by developing the concept of the "paganesque" - the air of a religious culture older than and inimical to Christianity. It shows how the Tale of Vǫlsi deploys a range of vernacular genres, from verbal dueling and mythological poetry to folk belief about milk-stealing witches and the reanimated dead, to create the flavor of paganism for a fourteenth-century Icelandic audience: an imagined paganism that has theological stakes as well as satirical bite. Throughout, the study challenges the notion that the horse penis is the key to understanding the narrative.
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