IMC 2026: Sessions

Two of the most productive thematic clusters in the Old Norse field during recent years have been emotion-studies, on the one hand side, and ecocritical approaches, on the other. However, these two themes are most often studied independently from each other, and few have harvested the potential for synergies between them: while Old Norse emotions studies focus on various aspects of emotions, such as their somatic and embodied nature; the representation of emotions in different genres; or the modalities through which emotions may be expressed, among others, few studies investigate the emotions triggered by or directed towards the environment. Similarly, Old Norse ecocritical studies have mostly focused on the meaning of various environmental/natural features, such as plants, trees, animals, the landscape, the weather or even the urban vs the rural, etc., but few of them address the entanglement between humans and nature on emotional and cognitive level, as represented in literature. The papers in these sessions will seek to fill this gap by discussing how Old Norse literature, seen in comparison to Old English and Old Irish texts, describes people’s affective responses to various elements of the environment, such as landscapes, trees, animals, air/water/earth/fire, and not least time.