In an interview for the Sydney Film Festival in 2011, Greek director Athina Rachel Tsangari observed that audiences have a range of responses to her second feature, Attenberg (2010):

Film critics, for their part, responded positively to Tsangari’s film. Almost without exception, however, their praise came with caveats and descriptors that indicate the complex tonal experience of Attenberg and the oddly unsettling nature of Tsangari’s work. Boyd van Hoeij calls Attenberg ‘a captivating and vaguely disturbing experience’, Peter Bradshaw describes the film as ‘almost unwatchably strange’, whereas David Stratton calls Attenberg ‘funny’, ‘disturbing’ and ‘wonderfully done’. Tsangari’s follow-up short film The Capsule (2012) drew similar responses. Following its screening at the Locarno Film Festival, Eric Kohn described the short as a film of ‘lively, shocking abstractions’, whereas Rod Machen calls The Capsule a story ‘dealing with absurdity, cruelty, and sometimes joy’. Such write-ups characterise Tsangari’s work as an eccentric mix: as weird and off-beat, but also funny, compelling and original.

This tonal complexity demands closer investigation. As I have discussed throughout this book, women’s provocations can be unwatchable, beautiful and obscene. Attenberg and The Capsule demonstrate that they can also be mixed with humour. Existing critical discussions of Tsangari’s work persistently associate her with a spate of films that emerged out of Greece in the first decade of the twenty-first century named by critic Steve Rose as the Greek ‘weird wave’. These ‘brilliantly strange’ films are united by their bizarre plot scenarios, absurdist humour, unusual character behaviour, mannered performances and an estranging, non-naturalistic style.

A: REGULARISATION AND LEGAL PLURALITY

The history of law and administrative change in Norway during the central middle ages is, as in Scotland, a history of growing regularisation of royal justice and of legal plurality, both in terms of legal institutions and legal rules. Regularisation and legal plurality do, at first glance, appear to be opposing forces on the battlefield for legal unification. However, that hostility only really emerged in the seventeenth century, and crystallised in the eighteenth century. In the central middle ages, their relationship was far more complex. In short, the level of state formation made it possible for regularisation to happen alongside toleration of a certain degree of legal plurality. This pluralistic, tolerant regulation was at the core of medieval politics in Norway in the second half of the thirteenth and first half of the fourteenth century.

The most important event in Norwegian medieval legal history is the making of the Code of the Norwegian Realm in 1274. However, the regulation of law started in the second half of the twelfth century and the emerging legal order would not finally take its full shape before the first half of the fourteenth century. We are hence talking of a process that took at least 200 years, with roots stretching further back and consequences reaching further ahead in time. The process is to some extent paralleled in Scotland and Norway, taking place over the same time period and also the same time span. This is, however, a process that is taking place all over Western Europe at this time. The uniqueness lies rather in how the relationship between regulation and pluralism was settled in different parts of Christendom. A comparison between Scotland and Norway is of great interest. On one hand, the two realms had a comparable population size and economy and parallels in terms of the history of political unification. On the other hand, the Scottish feudal aristocracy, and hence military and administrative organisation, the number and, to an extent, the size of towns, and not least the vastness of the Norwegian realm, are important differences between the Scottish and Norwegian realms. In short: the similarities make a comparison possible and the differences make it interesting.

B: THE REGULATION OF LAW THROUGH LEGISLATION

(1) The legal provinces

Present-day Norway was the core of the medieval Norwegian realm.

Critics regularly name Claire Denis as amongst the most important directors working today. Matt Fagerholm calls her ‘one of the most revered auteurs in world cinema’; Marjorie Vecchio names Denis ‘a leader’ in the field; and Erika Balsom describes Denis’s films as ‘among the most compelling of contemporary cinema’. Having worked as a director for over thirty years, Denis’s story is now well known. Born in France and raised in colonial West Africa, she worked as an intern at Télé Niger and pursued filmmaking at the IDHEC after dropping her studies in economics. In the 1980s, she worked with Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch as an assistant director; she then went on to impress international audiences at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival with her debut feature, Chocolat (1988), a story of a white French family living in colonial Cameroon. Throughout her career, Denis has earned many descriptors: a subtle chronicler of contemporary France, an observer of the postcolonial condition, and a sensitive storyteller of human intimacy and relationships. She is also the creator of provocative works. In 2001, Denis’s horror film Trouble Every Day surprised audiences at the Cannes Film Festival with its melancholy story of people who murder their lovers. James Quandt included the film in his famous account of the New French Extremity alongside other provocateurs such as Bruno Dumont, Patrice Chéreau and Philippe Grandrieux. Yet Denis’s engagement with provocative themes did not end with Trouble Every Day. She returned to transgressive material in her film noir Bastards (Les salauds, 2013), a thriller centring on the rape of a teenage girl co-written with her frequent collaborator, Jean-Pol Fargeau. Five years later, Denis directed the science-fiction film High Life (2018) – also co-written with Fargeau – a space odyssey filled with instances of rape, forced impregnation and incestuous eroticism. Respected, celebrated and renowned as a sensitive and empathetic filmmaker, Denis also demonstrates a capacity to shock and disturb.

Given her career as a leading female auteur in global cinema, exactly how Denis’s films provoke negative emotional responses warrants further exploration.

Nonhuman animals, both written and pictorial, form one of the many beastly connections between two singular modernists, Djuna Barnes and James Joyce. Joyce had moved to Paris from Zurich in July 1920, and in early 1922 Barnes was also visiting Paris, continuing her career as a journalist and working on the collection that would be published as A Book the following year. As a Greenwich Village expatriate, Barnes had a network of connections in Paris, and her first-hand knowledge of Ulysses (1922) and the recent Little Review obscenity trial gave her an entry to conversations with Joyce: she collated her early encounters with him into a piece entitled ‘A Portrait of a Man Who Is, At Present, One of the More Significant Figures in Literature’ and published in Vanity Fair in April 1922. Recalling their first meeting ‘Sitting in the cafe of the Deux Magots, that faces the little church of St. Germain des Pres’, Barnes’s gaze alights on Joyce’s waistcoat:

This hunting waistcoat was a family heirloom – originally belonging to his great-grandfather, James Joyce – and, in ‘The Dead’, Joyce attires Gabriel in a version of it, ‘a waistcoat of purple tabinet, with little foxes’ heads upon it, lined with brown satin and having round mulberry buttons’ (Joyce 1993: 347). Joyce inherited the waistcoat from his father and wore it for special occasions (Jackson and Costello 1998: 17); it was presented to the James Joyce Museum at Sandycove by Samuel Beckett in the 1960s (Nicholson 2001: 295).

French film director Maurice Tourneur wrote this in Kinematograph Weekly in January 1924. It is one of many articles published in the British trade and daily papers in the early 1920s that addressed the question of whether cinema could be considered an art form or would only ever be an entertainment medium. In its earliest days the moving picture was primarily a working-class diversion usually exhibited in insalubrious surroundings, but by the First World War it had begun to attract a better class of patron as films became more sophisticated and cinemas and theatres took over as the principal venues to watch them in. This gradual movement upmarket was accompanied by calls for British cinema to develop along more artistic lines, though there were differing views about what that actually meant.

Voices were heard both from within the industry and from outside but the trade press took particular interest in the opinions of those who worked in the American film industry, presumably believing that they held the key to box office success. As a top-rung director in Hollywood since 1914, Tourneur's contribution to the debate was of particular interest to Kinematograph Weekly's readers, which almost certainly included Adrian Brunel.

Tourneur's views appeared just weeks before the release of Brunel's first feature but were in sharp contrast to his own. ‘Ours is an art before it is a business,’ Brunel had told Motion Picture Studio in 1922, adding, ‘look after the art and the pounds will look after themselves, for in the kinema, art pays’ (26 August 1922: 6). But while Brunel's theory was as yet untested, Tourneur's realisation that commercial imperatives excluded film from the arts had emerged through bitter experience. He had set up his own production company in 1918 to take his directing into a more artistic realm than the studios would permit. Under its auspices he made some lyrical features, among which The Blue Bird and Prunella (both 1918) stand out as heavily stylised, fairy-tale-like theatrical adaptations.

The unsigned reader report for Djuna Barnes’s three-act play, Biography of Julie van Bartmann, strikes a note of hesitant praise that would become all too familiar to the author when dealing with publishers and editors in the coming decades:

An ‘eloquent and revealing commentary on the more passionate zone of life’ (Barnes 1924: n.p.), the play presents the narrative of a world-famous opera singer, Julie van Bartmann, paying a visit to a small American farmstead run by an eccentric and visionary farmer named Basil Born, along with his children Gart, Gustava and Costa. Despite the mixture of admiration and ambivalence in the reader’s report, the play was neither published nor performed in Barnes’s lifetime. Her first novel, Ryder (1928), also set on a farm under the rule of an unconventional patriarch, Wendell Ryder, recycled material from Biography of Julie van Bartmann and garnered a similar mixed reception. When her editor at Boni and Liveright, Donald S. Friede, read it, he complained that he ‘did not like it half as much as [he had] expected to’, voicing his disapproval of its collage of literary ‘effects’ and fearing that it might be ‘the type of book whose sale is purely problematical’ (Friede 1927: n.p.). And when, in the 1950s, Barnes once again mined material from her childhood to be reimagined within her drama The Antiphon, T. S. Eliot continued the trend. On receiving a typescript of the play in 1954, he explained that he was struggling to comprehend both its language and its plot, and felt it to be extremely obscure.

A: INTRODUCTION

Relations between Norway and Scotland in the early modern period enjoy a long-established historiography that very often centres on a few key specific themes, whether commerce, migration or war. This can revolve around particular incidents, such as the Scottish-Hanse fracas in Bergen in the 1520s (the “Scottish Incident”) or the infamous “Kringen Massacre” (Skottetoget) of 1612. Quite often, the focus lies on an incredibly influential individual in Norway, such as the Scottish lensmann of Finnmark, John Cunningham til Gjerdrup, or the ethnic Scot, priest and poet, Petter Dass (whose father came from Dundee). Moreover, scholarship commonly centres on the study of the Scottish-Norwegian timber trade, Skottehandelen, which certainly began in the sixteenth century and continued well into the eighteenth. This was, however, neither the starting period of Scottish interaction with Norway, nor its end. Indeed, dendrochronological evidence reveals the appetite for Norwegian timber for use in shipbuilding and Scottish buildings of all sizes from an earlier period. Thus a single chapter does not afford enough space to cover the wealth of material to consider. The focus of the present paper will therefore be to review key moments of Scotto-Norwegian interaction, particularly during periods of escalated tension. We can then test the impact of these events against commercial and migratory patterns to see how, or even if, they impacted in any meaningful way upon relations between the two kingdoms.

Of course, the fact that for the majority of the period under consideration, both Scotland and Norway were part of multiple monarchies cannot be ignored. As such, Denmark and England are mentioned where relevant to the argument. Omitting these nations would distort the context of Scottish-Norwegian interaction during this, sometimes tempestuous, period.

B: SCOTLAND AND NORWAY: THE LEGAL AND POLITICAL BACKGROUND

Roots to the early modern relations between Scotland and Norway can be traced right back to the Scottish-Norwegian “Treaty of Perth” (1266). This treaty was subsequently reratified twice, in 1312 and again in 1426, the latter occasion following the formation of the Scandinavian Kalmar Union in 1397. Scotto-Norwegian ties were reinforced when Margaret, daughter of Christian I of the Kalmar Union, became queen to James III of Scotland in July 1469. As well as improved trade relations, the marriage led to specific diplomatic and military opportunities for individual Scots in Scandinavia.

A: INTRODUCTION

The history of law and administrative change in Scotland during the central middle ages has, by and large, been understood as a narrative of state formation along what might well be called “the English model”. That is, a single authority (in this case, the king) assumes basic responsibility for and thus capacity to control the mechanisms for dispute settlement that otherwise would have occurred through other means, invoking other forms of power and authority to do so. Institutional development is a necessary corollary of this process: a more standardised system of courts develops in the process of realising and enforcing this responsibility. In central medieval Scotland, the royal judicial system – as opposed to the law upheld and developed within its courts – has (again by and large) traditionally been limited to considering the justice offered in local sheriffdom courts, the touring “ayre” of the justiciar, and the burgh courts, whose profits were collected by the chamberlain in his ayre. These courts and ayres were introduced and developed over the thirteenth century and, for civil pleas, offered litigants the opportunity to initiate their claims in courts by purchasing a “brieve” (Latin: breve, a short formulaic command) from the royal chapel that would then be sent to the official presiding over the court instructing them to open the case on the points and articles of the particular claim as set out in the brieve. Over twenty-five years ago, Hector MacQueen described this development as the “growing regularisation of royal justice”. In this short paper, I will briefly summarise what can be known about law and administration in the medieval kingdom of the Scots. This complicates – even if does not completely challenge – the narrative of the regularisation of justice over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and raises some issues, particularly about the trajectory of fourteenth-century legal development, which require further discussion and consideration.

B: THE “ENGLISH MODEL”, THE SCOTTISH COMMON LAW AND NORWEGIAN COMPARISONS

Two things are meant by the rather provocative phrase “English model”. First is the long-standing preoccupation of Anglophone historians and historians of England to examine state formation as a process realised through institutional development and bureaucratisation.

Given the importance of folklore in Italian nation-building processes, as well as the variety of regional cultures in Italy and the predominance of small towns and underdeveloped areas, it is no surprise that Italian Gothic is so often imbued with elements of folk horror. Folk horror pays attention to landscape and establishes a structural opposition between modernity and the past (which is an aspect of the inherently Gothic opposition between civilisation and barbarism), making it an important mode for reflecting on ecological issues that should be considered alongside the ecogothic. As the ecogothic and folk horror are modes rather than genres, discussing them in relation to certain texts or films does not necessarily imply that these products are Gothic, but rather that they contain Gothic elements (Hillard, ‘Gothic Nature’).

‘Folk horror’ is a recently coined label that was initially employed by British director Piers Haggard to describe a ‘trilogy’ of (unrelated) movies produced in Great Britain in the late 1960s and 1970s: Michael Reeves's Witchfinder General (1968), Haggard's The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971) and Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man (1973). The term was later popularised by Mark Gatiss's BBC series A History of Horror (2010) and has been used to describe a variety of cultural products, from video games to TV series to movies to literature, and extended both chronologically and spatially (Keetley and Heholt). Folk horror is usually defined as insisting on four key elements: landscape (‘where elements within its topography have adverse effects on the social and moral identity of its inhabitants’), isolation (‘the landscape must in some way isolate a key-body of characters, whether it be just a handful of individuals or a small-scale community’), skewed belief systems and morality (that is, folklore, superstition, twisted forms of religiosity) and a happening/summoning in which the plot culminates (Scovell 17–18).

Although it is just as recent as folk horror, the concept of the ecogothic has already been the subject of a vast series of academic publications (Hillard, ‘Deep Into That Darkness Peering’; Yi-Fu Tuan; Smith and Hughes; Keetley and Tenga; Keetley and Sivils; Parker; Heholt and Edmundson).