by Rebecca Merkelbach
It has now been over a month since I held a keynote lecture at the 19th International Saga Conference in Katowice, and since the founders of this network asked me to contribute a post to this blog – a month that has been emotionally and professionally overwhelming in many ways. I was not only the youngest female keynote speaker at the Saga Conference since its inception in 1971, but also the only precariously employed person to ever have been given this honour. Both of those aspects of my personal and professional identity naturally inform my perspective on my work and on Old Norse-Icelandic studies, the field that I work in, and I brought them both to my lecture. The resonance this seems to have caused in the field has overwhelmed me: afterwards, friends and colleagues approached me with tears in their eyes, with gratitude, with solidarity. A masters’ student from Brazil said that my lecture had made the long journey to Poland worthwhile for him. A colleague called my lecture intellectually generous and politically necessary. And the former president of Iceland, Guðni Th. Jóhannesson, requested a copy.
This may sound like I’m bragging, but when situated in the context of my daily existence, the deep dissonance between the impact my work and my words seem to have had in the field and the precarity of my situation will perhaps become clearer. For the past four years, I have held a position as assistant professor (Juniorprofessorin in German) of Old Norse-Icelandic studies at the University of Tübingen. It is a non-tenure track position; my contract ends at the end of September 2027. This role was created in 2021 after attempts at closing the Department of Scandinavian Studies at Tübingen and the degree programme it offers failed. Its purpose was to stabilise the department’s situation and ideally to develop a plan for the future. But to this day, we don’t know if we will even have a future. To this day, we’re waiting for the university’s administration to decide if we deserve to be kept around, and if I deserve to continue my work in researching and teaching medieval Icelandic language, literature, and culture.
In the past four years, I have given everything I could, and more, to my work. I have tried to build up the department, to build on the successes of my predecessor Stefanie Gropper – a true legend of the field who worked at Tübingen for 25 years, and who left big shoes I could only attempt to fill. Today, the department and the degree programme are flourishing. Our seminars are packed, not only with our own students but also with people from other fields, like English or International Literatures, who are interested in what we have to offer. International guest lecturers contribute to the vibrant atmosphere and supplement our own teaching. Events like the winter school ‘Gender, Emotion and Monstrosity in the Middle Ages (GEMMA)’, that led to the founding of this very network, contribute to stimulating debates in medieval studies more widely. We are part of CRC 1391: Different Aesthetics, to which we contribute our research on saga narration in its socio-cultural context. Everything seems to be going well, and yet we still do not know whether all this will be enough. The threat of the department still being closed, of me still becoming unemployed, hangs over me like Damocles’ sword. This precarious situation, this constant fear, has taken its toll, not only on my mental and physical health, but also on my research. I always wonder how much more productive, how much more creative I would be if I could put all the energy that goes to worrying about the future into my research. The passion and enthusiasm that once drove me to not only do a PhD but then continue to try to build a career in academia are almost gone, the fire extinguished by uncertainty.[1] Yet there are those who think that it is only academic ‘flexibility’ (a euphemism for precarity) that drives productivity and innovation, and that otherwise Early Career Researchers will ‘clog the system’.[2] Viewed in this context, my personal situation is merely a symptom for wider issues that affect not only Old Norse-Icelandic studies or medieval studies, but all the humanities, even all of academia.
One of these issues is the lack of prospects for people post-PhD. Germany is a particularly bad place to try and build an academic career, and this is true for pretty much all fields. In 2022, 82% of all staff at German universities were employed on fixed-term contracts.[3] At the same time, the constant need to apply for third party funding in order to establish so called ‘research training groups’ (Graduiertenkollege) or CRCs is producing a large number of PhD graduates with no long-term prospects in academia. This is exacerbated by a specifically German law, the Wissenschaftszeitvertragsgesetz (WissZeitVG, Academic Fixed-Term Contract Act – welcome to German legalese!), which limits the time anyone can spend on a non-permanent position to a total of 12 years, 6 pre- and 6 post-PhD. In reality, however, since the only permanent positions are often professorships, and since those privileged few who make it onto one of these rare positions are usually well into their 40s by the time they attain this goal, this law acts as a built-in redundancy system since a lot of scholars simply age out of the system, leading to a true brain-drain of highly skilled experts leaving academia.
The larger issue of academic precarity is, of course, not limited to Germany. In the UK, where a permanent contract does not save you from unemployment, an estimated 20,000 employees in higher education have been affected by the ongoing redundancy crisis.[4] We probably don’t even need to mention the situation in the US, where universities are being blackmailed into conformity with an increasingly authoritarian government. These developments tie in with the other issue we are facing right now: the attacks against researchers and academics generally, and against scholars in the humanities and social sciences specifically. Those are the areas most severely affected by job cuts and redundancies and, as Lauren Robinson notes, the consequences of these losses will be severe:
‘Society as a whole is impacted by the loss of these disciplines, not just students and faculty. For instance, the reduction in language programs will have repercussions on cross-cultural understanding, international commerce, and diplomacy. The capacity of students to critically analyze the world around them will be restricted by the elimination of history and philosophy departments. STEM and business subjects are unquestionably significant; however, a comprehensive education necessitates more than just technical proficiency; it necessitates the humanistic and ethical perspectives that the humanities offer.’[5]
When it comes to these issues, the field of Old Norse-Icelandic studies, as a rather niche subject of the humanities, is the canary in the coal mine.[6] Small, historically oriented humanities like ours are the first to be closed when funding is cut, and this threat is heightened for all those of us who do difficult work in our research as well, focusing on gender, queerness, violence, race, dis/ability – on all those inherently political topics that have been decried as ‘woke’ and perceived as a threat to the order far-right politicians want to establish. This means that, in the current political climate, our time is running out. We have to act now.
It is within this larger context of the global situation of the humanities, the situation of Old Norse-Icelandic studies as a field, and my personal circumstances that I gave my keynote lecture at the Saga Conference. What also inspired me was a quote by Preben Meulengracht Sørensen that changed my life when I was doing my PhD, and which I always share with my students these days. It goes like this:
‘It is true of all texts that the circumstances of their interpretation influence the interpretation, the more so the further away the text is from us. The solution to this problem is not a question of either-or, for a subjective, impressionistic reading, however irrelevant to a historical viewpoint, is inevitable, while the objective analysis of a text on its own historical terms is only possible to a limited extent. […] Thus, interpretations must be seen as trial approaches, so that it is the sum of these attempts, rather than any single interpretation, which comes closest to the truth.’[7]
To me, this quote serves as a reminder of the communal nature of academic work. While we may often find ourselves sitting alone at our desks, reading and writing, what we do is always based on and always refers back to what other scholars before us have already done. Our ideas are developed in dialogue with our peers and mentors, at conferences and workshops, through formal supervision and informal conversations over coffee or drinks. When we share this work with one another in publications, when we rely on peer or book reviews for quality control and feedback, or when we teach students, we realise that our work is never done by one person alone.
I share this quote with my students not only for these reasons, but also because I think it takes a huge weight off an individual’s shoulders when we view our work like this, as tiny pieces that add to the huge puzzle of human knowledge. Suddenly, you as an individual can be content to just add your piece, and even a PhD thesis – which I thought would have to be some kind of magnum opus when I was writing mine – does not have to revolutionise the field you are working in. While I don’t think there is such a thing as an objective ‘truth’, it is through adding new pieces, through turning to new lenses, through shifting our perspectives, through listening to new voices that we will keep growing the puzzle, increasing our understanding and approaching a perhaps more complete, less fragmentary image of, in my case, medieval Icelandic literature and culture.
But this idea of trial approaches only works when communal work and communal puzzle-making are possible, when there are still enough of us to add new pieces, and when precarity and political pressure do not filter out those voices that are most needed to increase our understanding, to grow our knowledge. This is what I said in my keynote, which was situated in the ‘methodological diversity’ strand of the conference; I can’t phrase it better now, so please allow me to just quote myself:
‘Even more diverse than the worlds of the sagas is our entire field with its varieties of saga literature, poetry and prosimetrum, mythology, runes, material culture, religious, cultural and social history, and all the other aspects too numerous to mention. We must be equally diverse so that our trial approaches to each one of these aspects, each one of these artefacts, can contribute kaleidoscopically to the sum of our understanding of the culture, history and literature of Viking Age and medieval Scandinavia in its totality. But how can we ensure this in the world that we live in, this year 2025, in which not only Old Norse-Icelandic studies but the humanities as a whole, even academia and scientific research as a whole are under threat? How can we make sure that there are enough of us left to keep up the work, to add trial approaches derived from different backgrounds and assumptions and theoretical and methodological angles?
Where the alternate histories of the sagas always open up realms of possibility to explore alternatives to the present in the past, we have to do the same to explore such alternatives in the future – where they work retrospectively to explore the concerns of the present, we have to work prospectively to anticipate the concerns of the future. We need a plan for the field. That doesn’t mean a plan for what exactly we will work on, 5 or 10 or 20 years from now, but a plan for the kind of field we want to keep alive. Because it’s dying, and we all know that it is, even though there are so many amazing young scholars entering the field, doing important work. Jobs are being cut, departments are being closed, expertise is lost every day, making a future for our field more and more unlikely. If we can’t train future generations by teaching students, how will we keep going? If we’re haemorrhaging knowledge, how will we expand our understanding of the totality of the field? So far we have been reactive. Every time another department is threatened with closure, we write letters begging universities and governments to reconsider. Every time someone’s job is lost, we make do with the resources we are left with. But where does that lead us, in the end? We have to become proactive instead of reactive, we have to come together and develop a vision and a plan. What do we have to offer? What makes Old Norse-Icelandic literature and culture meaningful? Projects to show exactly that are already underway, and I want to just mention the brilliant Kvennaspor project led by Emily Lethbridge and Sarah Woods, that explores not only the traces of saga women in the landscape of medieval Iceland, or the traces left by female travellers to Iceland in the 19th and 20th centuries, but also the traces of all of these women in today’s society, in Iceland as it is now, showcasing the continued relevance of the stories of women like Þorgerðr Brák, or Melkorka, or Helga jarlsdóttir, the way their stories resonate with women today.[8] This project is also an excellent example of methodological diversity, by the way. It showcases the diversity that we need – and the diversity we already have in the field. We are many, still. We speak with many voices, coming from different national and cultural backgrounds, from different genders and classes, different worlds of experience which we bring to our reading of the sagas, to our understanding of their worlds in the co-creation that is worldbuilding. We need all of these voices, as it is this diversity that gives us our strength. We have to capitalise on it by coming together and actively shaping our future. This may not always be easy. But, as Judith Butler writes in their most recent book, ‘Coalitions do not require mutual love; they require only a shared insight that oppressive forces can be defeated by acting together and moving forward with difficult differences without insisting on their ultimate resolution.’[9] We too have to form a coalition, unified in the fight for a future of our field, and to do so we have to make space for the voices of those who have long been marginalised so that our field will be all the stronger in the plurality of the trial approaches added to the sum total of our knowledge. This conference has surely shown how important and impactful this coalition, this sharing of spaces and voices is.
Afterwards, some (established) scholars responded with optimism and encouragement, saying that the field will survive. I truly hope that they will be right. Others came to me for answers, for strategies, for a concrete plan on how to save the field. I had to disappoint them. But I do think that we will have to prepare to work together, to fight together, in order to save what we as scholars, as medievalists, stand for. As Sirpa Aalto demonstrated in her keynote, our expertise is needed now more than ever, so our fields won’t be co-opted by the far-right, as they have been before, or distorted beyond recognition by AI and the slop it produces. Our fight will be hampered by the fact that we are an international field and so we have to respond to different university and funding systems, different political circumstances, different legal frameworks. There will be many challenges to face. For now, I hope that having brought this conversation to a larger scale, by being – as Basil Price noted after the lecture, drawing on Sara Ahmed’s idea[10] – an ‘affect alien’ in the convivial atmosphere of a conference where we all just want to talk about the good and fun parts of our work, our research, I have been able to increase awareness and helped prepare us for these challenges ahead. I hope that people will continue having the difficult conversation, and that out of these, plans will emerge, answers will form, and a future can be constructed, despite it all. I hope that, even though we are facing hard times in a world on fire, we can save and build and work together. I hope that every one of the brilliant young scholars currently working towards a future in academia will be able to decide for themselves if that is truly what they want to do with their lives, rather than having the decision made for them. To return to the final words of my lecture:
‘In 2014, Ursula K. Le Guin said in her National Book Awards acceptance speech:
‘I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of Being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom, poets, visionaries — the realists of a larger reality.’[11]
I say today that we are those writers too. Perhaps not always poets, but visionaries in our scholarship. Let us come together to see alternatives to the destruction of our field, to imagine real grounds for hope, to shape the future. Infinite diversity in infinite combinations.’
Notes
[1] Clearly, I’m not the only one who feels this way; see Amrei Bahr, ‘The Thrill Is Gone: Wie prekäre Beschäftigung die Liebe zur Wissenschaft zerstört’, https://arbeitinderwissenschaft.substack.com/p/the-thrill-is-gone-wie-prekare-beschaftigung, accessed 9 September 2025. Amrei Bahr is one of the people behind #IchBinHanna, a nation-wide initiative to not only raise awareness of the untenable situation of university employment in Germany, but also bring about change, particularly when it comes to amending the WissZeitVG discussed below.
[2] A reference to the infamous video originally posted by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF), see Amrei Bahr, Kristin Eichhorn und Sebastian Kubon, ‘Es war einmal #IchBinHanna: ein Rückblick nach vorn’, Ordnung der Wissenschaft 3 (2025), 193–200, at p. 195.
[3] Freya Gassmann, Christian Mielczarek and Sarah Schlicher, ‘Befristungsquoten an deutschen Hochschulen. Untersuchung der Einflussfaktoren’, GEW 2025, p. 23.
[4] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/uk-university-job-cuts-put-20000-after-full-impact-hidden, accessed 9 September 2025.
[5] Lauren Robinson, The Dismantling of UK Higher Education: The Threat to Academia, Job Cuts, and Funding Crises, https://edutimes.com/news/2025/03/20250318410, accessed 9 September 2025.
[6] On the situation of the field in Germany specifically, see Roland Scheel, ‘Scandinavian Studies in Germany’, Humanities 11 (2022): 84. https://doi.org/10.3390/h11040084.
[7] Preben Meulengracht Sørensen, ‘Murder in Marital Bed: An Attempt at Understanding a Crucial Scene in Gísla saga’, in Structure and Meaning in Old Norse Literature, ed. by John Lindow, Lars Lönnroth and Gerd Wolfgang Weber (Odense: Odense University Press, 1986), pp. 235–63, at pp. 238–39.
[8] https://kvennaspor.is/, accessed 29 September 2025.
[9] Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender? (New York: Penguin, 2025), p. 28.
[10] See Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), p. 57.
[11] https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/ursulakleguinnationalboo
© Joanne Shortt Butler
Rebecca Merkelbach is assistant professor of Old Norse-Icelandic studies at the University of Tübingen, Germany. She studied in Tübingen, Dublin, Reykjavík and Cambridge, where she completed her PhD in 2017. She has published on monsters and the paranormal, late medieval saga literature, emotion, narratology, and the construction of saga worlds.
Select publications:
Storyworlds and Worldbuilding in Old Norse-Icelandic Literature, edited by Rebecca Merkelbach (Turnhout: Brepols, 2025).
Rogue Sagas: Story, World, and Character in the Late Medieval Íslendingasögur. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2024.
Monsters in Society: Alterity, Transgression, and the Use of the Past in Medieval Iceland. Kalamazoo/Berlin: Medieval Institute Publications/De Gruyter, 2019
A.D.A.M. 