It’s uncommon for academics to transition from STEM fields into the humanities, and rarer still for a chemist to become a scholar in ancient Germanic studies. It’s a rare and no doubt difficult path to pursue, but certainly not impossible, as Ann Sheffield’s academic career demonstrates.

And it comes with benefits: A diverse background allows for the potential of interdisciplinary approaches and perspectives that may otherwise not arise. This is evident in Sheffield’s academic work, where one can find an article titled “Accelerator mass spectrometric determination of carbon-14 in the low-polarity organic fraction of atmospheric particles” (1989) beside a piece focused on narratives about the Christianization of the North Germanic peoples, and work that is relevant to both spheres, such as analyses of wool production methods (“Uptake of Copper(II) by Wool”, 2005).

In our latest entry in Mimisbrunnr.info’s Six Questions column, Sheffield discusses her background and how she become an academic in ancient Germanic studies, including the influence major figures in the field have had on her work. Finally, Sheffield discusses her in-progress research—such as her work on the topic of brewing in Northern Europe—in the early medieval period.

1. Where did you grow up?

Here and there. I was born in England, but my family immigrated to the U.S. when I was a toddler. We moved every couple of years for a while. When I was eight, we finally settled in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., so that’s where I did most of my growing up.

It was an unusual environment compared to most of the country—most of my friends were from immigrant families, or had spent some of their lives abroad, and a plurality of the people I knew were Jewish. My own parents were atheists, and I didn’t realize until after I finished college how pervasive the influence of Protestant Christianity is in the United States.

2. Can you remember when you first encountered Norse mythology or, more generally, Germanic mythology? What was the context?

It’s all Tolkien’s fault. I read The Lord of the Rings when I was about eleven, and I somehow learned that the Riders of Rohan were based on the Anglo-Saxons (as we still called them at the time). I don’t know how I managed to stumble across that fact in the pre-internet age, but it inspired me to read Beowulf.

Shortly afterwards, my grandparents happened to send us a copy of the old Dasent translation of The Saga of Burnt Njal. Somewhere I still have an essay I wrote for a high-school English class that compares the lofty ideals of heroism in Beowulf to the more pragmatic ethos of Njals saga. So, I got hooked on this stuff early.

3. What is your academic background in Germanic studies? What courses do you teach on the topic of ancient Germanic studies?

Despite my lifelong interest in ancient Germanic literature, the only formal training I had in it until recently was a year of Old English in college. I spent most of my career as a chemistry professor at a small college (with a detour into administration for a while). In my mid-50’s, I took a year’s sabbatical leave and travelled to Britain to earn an MA in Medieval and Renaissance Literary Studies at Durham University. Once I returned to work, I taught a couple of classes on Viking-Age and early English history, but then the college decided to reduce the size of the faculty and offered those of us over 55 a hefty financial incentive to retire early. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse, so now I continue my scholarly work on my own time and my own dime.

4. What was your earliest work on the topic of Germanic mythology?

As an amateur? Doubtless something I wrote for one of the early Heathen magazines in the U.S., probably Asatru Today or Idunna. As a professional, my first peer-reviewed publication was an article that applies postcolonial theory to the Christianization of Iceland and treats the conversion process as a kind of ideological colonization (“The Heathen Subaltern Speaks: Tenth-Century Poetry in Thirteenth-Century Narratives of Iceland’s Conversion to Christianity.” Imitation and Innovation: Use of the Past in the Medieval and Early Modern World. Proceedings of the 2017 MEMSA Student Conference. Ed. Dom Birch, Kelly Clarke, and Katie Haworth. Durham: Medieval and Early Modern Student Association, 2018, pp. 76–93).

5. Which scholars had the greatest influence on your work? Why?

In the early days, Hilda Ellis Davidson—there wasn’t much else on Norse mythology that was accessible at the time. D.H. Green, for showing me how much could be learned from linguistics. Alaric Hall, for the counterbalancing insistence that words mean what the people who use them think they mean. R.I. Page, for his non-nonsense approach to the runes. More recently, Margaret Clunies Ross, a towering figure in the field of Norse literature, has been an inspiration—the clarity and insightfulness of her work leave me in awe. Pernille Hermann has been instrumental in bringing the perspective of Memory Studies into the field, and her work has helped me realize the fruitlessness of searching for “original” and “authentic” versions of ancient texts. Finally, it seems that, every time I take up a new line of research, Judy Quinn has been there before me and created a solid foundation on which to build.

6. What research are you currently conducting that relates to ancient Germanic studies? What do you hope to work on related to the field in the future?

The main project I’m working on at the moment looks at brewing as a magical practice in Norse literature. This investigation builds on a lot of work by a number of scholars who have connected women’s production of textiles (spinning, weaving, etc.) with magic in general and seiðr in particular.

For the most part, brewing was also “women’s work” in the early medieval period, but the evidence is much less clear-cut than it is for textiles. Brewing does not produce diagnostic artifacts like spindle-whorls or loom-weights, and explicit mentions of brewing in texts are comparatively rare. Even when making ale or mead is mentioned, the people who did the actual work are often effaced by constructions such as “ale was brewed.”

I have discovered several instances where the English translation of a saga states that a man brewed ale, but the original text indicates instead that he “had ale brewed” by unnamed others. This project has me reading everything from queer theory, to literary analyses of the myth of the mead of poetry, to archaeological reports that discuss physical evidence of brewing. I am basically trying to pull together multiple threads that I hope will be enough to weave a coherent argument.

As for the future, I have recently become intrigued with how polysemous snakes/serpents/dragons are in Norse art and literature. My initial impression is that multiple traditions—the Christian identification of serpents with the devil, the old Proto-European myth about a hero who slays a dragon, and indigenous/local traditions that associate snakes with women, healing, and wisdom—are all superimposed and entangled in ways that could be very interesting to look at. For now, though, I’m just making a list of things to look at later, or the brewing project will never get done!

Joseph S. Hopkins thanks Ann Sheffield for her participation.