Grace O'Duffy

I completed my undergraduate degree in English at the University of St Andrews before undertaking an MPhil in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge. I am now completing my DPhil under the supervision of Dr Gareth Lloyd Evans at the University of Oxford, where my thesis is entitled 'Sexual Violence Against Women in the Old Norse Íslendingasögur and Fornaldarsögur'.

By looking at these two saga genres, my thesis constructs a cohesive, holistic appraisal of sexual violence in these two vast corpora and forms an understanding of its presentation, identifying consistent patterns and motifs. Much of my thesis is comprised of closely reading isolated scenes and unpicking the delicate strands of literary construction. This threads my work with the specificity and intricacy of detail in the minutiae, allowing me to draw broader links and formulate overarching arguments that do not generalise, but instead reveal the remarkable complexity of the presentation of sexual violence across different sagas and different genres. The overwhelming sense of my conclusion is that –– contrary to the bulk of extant scholarship on the topic –– sexual violence is a pervasive theme in Old Norse literature, at times subtle and insidious and at times glaring and even shockingly graphic.