Bryn Athyn College Alumni Magazine Fall/Winter 2017-18 | Page 36

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Sean Lawing philosophizes with a student.
uate work through his doctoral
program and into the classrooms
where he teaches today.
In completing a master’s de-
gree in Germanic languages and
literature at UNC-Chapel Hill,
Sean specialized in medieval lit-
erature. His master’s thesis is titled
From Superman to Subhuman: The
War Cultures in Beowulf and Gret-
tis saga. He says, “Though one
is Old English and the other Old
Icelandic and separated by sev-
eral centuries, these two works are
thought by some to be analogues
(they share motifs and structural
similarities derived from a com-
mon source). In the thesis, I look
at warfare and cultural attitudes
towards it in each story to examine
how it shapes the protagonists and
their lives.”
The study of violence is the
focus of Sean’s doctoral thesis,
which he wrote under the auspic-
es of the Faculty of Icelandic and
Comparative Cultural Studies at
the University of Iceland. The dis-
sertation is a study of disfigure-
ment and disfiguring practices in
medieval Iceland as seen in Old
Norse laws and Icelandic sagas. In
36 | F A L L / W I N T E R 2 0 1 7 - 1 8
Je'la Watson (BA '17), Kara Cowley (AA '13), Matt Shockley (BA '15),
and Sydney La Bat dress up as medieval townsfolk and interact with
visitors to the annual Medieval Festival at Glencairn Museum.
the preface, Sean explains that the
topic has received “only glancing
treatment, even though its depic-
tion in source texts suggests rele-
vance for understanding medieval
Icelandic society.” He surmises
that this might be due, in part, to
the darkness of the subject mat-
ter. To avoid addressing the topic
head-on, “there has been a ten-
dency to rely on intuited meaning
rather than on careful analysis.”
However, Sean points out that
disfigurement is “an ongoing phe-
nomenon and hardly constrained
to the past.” And so we see the
relevance for its study, not only
to teach us about a particular cul-
ture in a certain time, but to learn
about ourselves in the present mo-
ment.
As a history teacher, Sean ex-
plains, “Usually when you teach
the past, you want to see if there are
connections, similarities with us,
with our own customs and rules.”
Here, we see this theme of com-
mon threads that reach beyond
time and demographic to find es-
sential qualities of humanity. Sean
says, “When studying things like
the sagas, they are speaking to us
across a millennium. We’re still
consuming narratives. History has
to speak to us now, has to be rel-
evant. It’s these case study analyses
that inform us.”
In his teaching, Sean tries to
get his students to dig beneath
textbook interpretations of the
history they learn. The basic ques-
tion is, “How do we know that?” In
forming a response, he tries to get
as many primary sources as pos-
sible into the students’ hands. Re-
ligion is a constant theme in many
of his courses, and Sean enjoys
contextualizing some of the spiri-
tual information that students
are learning in religion classes by
opening up discussions about top-
ics like the trinity or the Nicene
Creed.
In looking for the right affili-
ation for his doctoral work, he had
identified the University of Iceland
as the premier place to study Ice-
landic sagas and describes it as
“the Harvard of Old Norse.” Sean
wrote to the chair of the Icelandic
and Comparative Cultural Studies
department there, and she replied
right away. He was already arrang-
ing a trip to Iceland with a group