antonina harbus and russell poole (edd.). Verbal Encounters: Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse Studies for Roberta Frank. Pp. xii+298 (Toronto Old English Series 13). Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. £48.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Verbal Encounters is a Festschrift for Roberta Frank; its contents are intended to reflect her academic interests, and its contributors are all her former doctoral students at Toronto; but however generous in its conception, this is a project that is flawed in its execution. Some of the essays are careful pieces of work. Pauline Head, ‘Cennan, “to cause to be born”/“to cause to know”: Incarnation as Revelation in Old English Literature’, explores how Old English authors use the polysemy of cennan to convey the mystery of the Incarnation. In ‘Desipere in loco: Style, Memory and the Teachable Moment’, Carin Ruff looks at grammarians’ occasional verbal playfulness as a didactic device. Dorothy Haines, ‘Courtroom Drama and the Homiletic Monologues of the Vercelli Book’, examines the metaphor of the court of law for the Last Judgement. Karin Olsen, ‘“Him þæs grim lean becom”: The Theme of Infertility in Genesis A ’, is a workmanlike account, but to claim that Noah's drunkenness ‘illustrates that even the virtuous can submit to luxuria’ (p. 135 n. 27) is to confuse the Old English text with patristic tradition: the poet is faithful to the biblical account (ll. 1555–97), as he is again in his treatment of the story of Lot and his daughters (ll. 2600–9), where he appears simply to accept that the daughters’ motive is fear of dying without issue. Intriguingly, the poet describes Lot, a middle-aged man, as blondenfeax: is this a disturbing suggestion of youthful vigour? Robert diNapoli, ‘Odd Characters: Runes in Old English Poetry’, discusses the artistic and cultural implications of Anglo-Saxon poets’ use of runes. In ‘Beardless Wonders: “Gaman vas Sqxu” (The Sex was Great)’ Oren Falk expends much learning and ingenuity to find sexual innuendo of an alarmingly violent and misogynist nature in the exchange of skaldic verses between Gísli and Skeggi in Gísla Saga; if he is right, I have to concede that a squeamish, short-sighted woman working in her study in Oxford is not Gísla Saga's ideal reader. Bernadine McCreesh, ‘Prophetic Dreams and Visions in the Sagas of the Early Icelandic Saints’ shows how the visions and dreams in hagiography are adapted in Icelandic literature. Russell Poole, ‘Claiming Kin Skaldic-Style’, shows how two skalds of the Conversion period, Hallfreðr Óttarsson vandræðaskáld and Sigvatr þórðarson, utilize the parallels between the Christian relationship of godfather to godson or goddaughter and the ancient Scandinavian connection of foster-father and foster-son.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.041 | 0.021 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".