Re-assembling everyday temporalities

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Keynote: Tine Damsholt (University of Copenhagen)

Chair: Sigurjón B. Hafsteinsson (University of Iceland)

Abstract: During the Covid-19 pandemic, the usual order of everyday time has been destabilized. Everyday rhythms and the quotidian here-and-now have been transformed, and the near past has surfaced as an Utopian future we wish to return to, while people have tried to re-assemble time in alternative patterns and sequences by means of new routines and mundane activities at home. However, the pandemic state of exception also gave rise to the fundamental question of how we practise time in everyday life? When the pandemic turned the everyday upside down, it revealed how the standardised clock time of modernity is accompanied by a multiplicity of rhythms, repetitions, speeds, rituals, breaks, nostalgic pasts, urgent presents, and anticipated futures. Yet, the pandemic also created a unique opportunity to investigate how time is practised in mundane activities, and to reflect on how we analyse the temporal complexity of everyday lives. As time cannot be observed directly, it must be analysed in terms of how it is anticipated, articulated, experienced, materialised, and practiced within different qualities of time – within temporalities in the plural. Using the pandemic as a prism – as well as other current destabilizations of the taken-for-granted temporality such as the environmental crisis, climate change, and the care for viable futures – the ambition is to contribute to the emerging ethnological understanding of everyday temporalities. And to analytically re-assemble the affective and material temporalities which shape our everyday lives.

Biography: Tine Damsholt is professor wso. of European Ethnology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Her primary fields of research are everyday life and political culture i.e., material-discursive practices in contemporary, 18th and 19th century Denmark. Cultural history, (auto-)ethnography, everyday practices, temporality, subjectivity, materiality, (national and patriotic) discourses, emotions, landscapes, gender, bodily and affective movement and choreographies are recurrent themes in her research and publications. Currently she is investigating the ongoing disruptions of everyday life temporalities, and in particular the question of how the hope and care for more viable futures are practiced within quotidian practices in the home.

The Art of the Ripples: The Development of Folk Tale Illustration in Northern Europe (1816-1870)

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Location: Skriða Hall (ground floor, Stakkahlíð)

Keynote: Terry Gunnell (University of Iceland)

Chair: Kristinn Schram (University of Iceland)

Abstract: This year will see the publication of Grimm Ripples: The Immediate Legacy of the Grimms’ Deutsche Sagen in Northern Europe, a collaborative work by 18 international scholars which focuses on the cultural tsunami that took place in Northern Europe largely as a result of the appearance of the Grimms’ Deutsche Sagen in 1816-1818. Among other things, this work pays close attention to the influence that the various folk tale collections which appeared in the wake of Deutsche Sagen had on each other, something that applies not least to the increasing use of illustrations in these books. Arguably the use of art to illustrate folktales in the north began with George Cruikshank (1792–1878), illustrator of Taylor’s English translation of the Grimms’ fairy tales in 1823. In this lecture, I would like to trace the way Cruickshank´s example was followed up by collectors and publishers in other countries such as Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Germany and Iceland as the “ripples” travelled northwards. Attention will be paid not only to the frontispieces of these works but also the illustrations contained within them by artists such as William Henry Brooke, Daniel Maclise, Hans Gude, Peter Nicolai Arbo, Theodore Kittelsen, Adolph Tidemand, Erik Werenskiold, Marcus Grønvold, Gustav Doré, Egron Lundgren, Wilhelm von Kaulbach and J. B. Zwecker, and in particular interaction between collectors and artists shown in the letters sent between them. If nothing else, this overview will underline the degree to which the collection of folklore in the north was closely intertwined with the creation of national culture, national art, and not least national image.

Biography: Terry Gunnell is Professor of Folkloristics at the University of Iceland and Chair of the ISFNR membership committee. He is also author of The Origins of Drama in Scandinavia (1995), editor of Masks and Mumming in the Nordic Area (2007), Legends and Landscape (2008), and the forthcoming Grimm Ripples: The Immediate Legacy of the Grimms’ Deutsche Sagen in Northern Europe, and (with Karl Aspelund) co-editor of Málarinn og menningarsköpun: Sigurður Guðmundsson og Kvöldfélagið which was nominated for the Icelandic Literature Prize in 2017. He has also written numerous articles on Nordic folk belief and legend, folk drama, performance and Old Nordic religion.