Rate My Professor Carl Phelpstead

Phelpstead’s research focuses on medieval literature especially Old Norse-Icelandic and Old English literature, twentieth-century British medievalism, ecocritical and environmental approaches, literature and the global Middle Ages, hagiography, and medieval gender and sexuality. His current projects encompass a book-length study of early medieval England in twentieth-century literature, film, and culture, and co-editing essays on ecocriticism and Old Norse-Icelandic literature with Timothy Bourns. Major publications include An Introduction to the Sagas of Icelanders (University Press of Florida, 2020), Tolkien and Wales: Language, Literature and Identity (University of Wales Press, 2011; winner of the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies, 2012), Holy Vikings: Saints’ Lives in the Old Icelandic Kings’ Sagas (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2007), The Medieval North and Its Afterlife: Essays in Honor of Heather O'Donoghue (De Gruyter, 2024; co-edited with Sian Gronlie), and Old Norse Made New: Essays on the Post-Medieval Reception of Old Norse Literature and Culture (Viking Society for Northern Research, 2007; co-edited with David Clark). Selected articles comprise ‘Kringla heimsins’: Old Norse sagas, world literature and the global turn in medieval studies (Saga-Book, 2022), Ecocriticism and Eyrbyggja saga (Leeds Studies in English, 2014), and Companions, conflicts, and concubines: clerical masculinities in Lárentíus saga biskups (D.S. Brewer, 2020). He served as Guest of Honour at the Tolkien Society Annual Dinner in 2025.