Marianne E Kalinke
CAS Professor Emerita of Germanic Languages and Literatures

Professor Kalinke is an international authority on cultural and literary
relations between Scandinavia and the continent in the medieval and
early modern period. In her books and articles she has addressed the
transmission of continental literature to Scandinavia, the nature of
translation in the Middle Ages, and the impact of medieval French
romance on the development of Old Icelandic literature. Her
groundbreaking study of the transmission of the Arthurian legend to
Norway and Iceland, King Arthur, North-by-Northwest (1981), led to a
reconsideration of the impact of continental romance on the development
of indigenous Icelandic saga genres. Subsequently, Bridal-Quest Romance
in Medieval Iceland (1990), which dealt with the introduction and
development of new types of fiction in Iceland, initiated a revision of
the received classification of some Icelandic literary genres. With The
Book of Reykjahólar: The Last of the Great Medieval Legendaries (1996)
her study of romance broadened to include sacred romance and the role
played by Iceland in preserving medieval German literature that has
otherwise been lost. The rise of vernacular fiction in the medieval
German-language area from Latin historiographical and hagiographical
models is traced in her book, St. Oswald of Northumbria: Continental
Metamorphoses (2005). In 2011 the University of Wales Press published her book The Arthur of the North: Arthurian Literature in the Norse and Rus' Realms
in the series Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages.



 In addition to her books and more than 60 articles on literary history,
she has edited and translated medieval Icelandic sagas; her
three-volume edition and translation of medieval Icelandic, Norwegian,
and Swedish Arthurian literature was published in 1999. 

She has served
as president of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study
(1995-97) and has served on and chaired the grants and fellowships board
of the American-Scandinavian Foundation (1999-2004). She has been an
ACLS Fellow (1978), Snorri Sturluson Fellow (1994), and Fulbright Fellow
(1985-86). In 1987 she was Visiting Professor of German and of
Scandinavian Studies at the Georg-August Universität in Göttingen,
Germany. From 1981 to 2012 she was managing editor for German and
Scandinavian of the Journal of English and Germanic Philology. She
served on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Nordic Centre of
Excellence in Medieval Studies at the University of Bergen, Norway, in the years 2005-2010.  In
2005, she was appointed Trowbridge Chair in Literary Studies.  The University of Iceland awarded her an honorary doctorate in 2011.

  

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