Download or read book Eddic Skaldic and Beyond written by Martin Chase and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2014-06-02 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eddic, Skaldic, and Beyond shines light on traditional divisions of Old Norse–Icelandic poetry and awakens the reader to work that blurs these boundaries. Many of the texts and topics taken up in these enlightening essays have been difficult to categorize and have consequently been overlooked or undervalued. The boundaries between genres (Eddic and Skaldic), periods (Viking Age, medieval, early modern), or cultures (Icelandic, Scandinavian, English, Continental) may not have been as sharp in the eyes and ears of contemporary authors and audiences as they are in our own. When questions of classification are allowed to fade into the background, at least temporarily, the poetry can be appreciated on its own terms. Some of the essays in this collection present new material, while others challenge long-held assumptions. They reflect the idea that poetry with “medieval” characteristics continued to be produced in Iceland well past the fifteenth century, and even beyond the Protestant Reformation in Iceland (1550). This superb volume, rich in up-to-date scholarship, makes little-known material accessible to a wide audience.
Download or read book The Poetic Genesis of Old Icelandic Literature written by Mikael Males and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-12-16 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book assesses the importance of poetry for the Old Icelandic literary flowering of c. 1150–1350. It addresses the apparent paradox that an extremely conservative form of literature, namely skaldic poetry, was at the core of the most innovative literary and intellectual experiments in the period. The book argues that this cannot simply be explained as a result of strong local traditions, as in most previous scholarship. Thus, for instance, the author demonstrates that the mix of prose and poetry found in kings’ sagas and sagas of Icelanders is roughly contemporary to the written sagas. Similarly, he argues that treatises on poetics and mythology, including Snorri’s Edda, are new to the period, not only in their textual form, but also in their systematic mode of analysis. The book contends that what is truly new in these texts is the method of the authors, derived from Latin learning, but applied to traditional forms and motifs as encapsulated in the skaldic tradition. In this way, Christian Latin learning allowed for its perceived opposite, vernacular oral literature of pagan extraction, to reach full fruition and to largely replace the very literature which had made this process possible in the first place.
Download or read book Speaker and Authority in Old Norse Wisdom Poetry written by Brittany Erin Schorn and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-07-10 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While there is a long tradition of research into eddic poetry, including the poems classed as wisdom literature, much of this has approached the subject either as a primarily philological commentary or has addressed literary and thematic topics of individual or small groups of poems. This book offers a wide-ranging enquiry into the defining features of Old Norse wisdom, including the representation of wisdom in texts which cross traditional generic boundaries. It builds on recent advances in understanding of pre-Christian religion in Scandinavia, and calls on comparative and supporting work from several different disciplinary backgrounds (including literary theory, other medieval literatures and anthropology). Speaker and Authority interrogates important questions about the concept of knowledge, as well as its role in medieval Scandinavian society and its broader European cultural context.
Download or read book The Etiquette of Early Northern Verse written by Roberta Frank and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2022-05-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Etiquette of Early Northern Verse, Roberta Frank peers into the northern poet’s workshop, eavesdropping as Old English and Old Norse verse reveal their craft secrets. This book places two vernacular poetries of the long Viking Age into conversation, revealing their membership in a single community of taste, a traditional stylistic ecology that did serious political and historical work. Each chapter seeks the codes of a now-extinct verse technique. The first explores the underlying architecture of the two poetries, their irregularities of pace, startling formal conventions, and tight verbal detail work. The passage of time has worn away most of the circumstantial details that literary scholars in later periods take for granted, but the public relations savvy and aural and syntactic signals of early northern verse remain to some extent retrievable and relatable, an etiquette prized and presumably understood by its audiences. The second and longest chapter investigates the techniques used by early northern poets to retrieve and organize the symmetries of language. It illustrates how supererogatory alliteration and rhyme functioned as aural punctuation, marking off structural units and highlighting key moments in the texts. The third and final chapter describes the extent to which both corpora reveled in negations, litotes, indirection, and down-toners, modes that forced audiences to read between half-lines, to hear what was not said. By decluttering and stripping away excess, by drawing words through a tight mesh of meter, alliteration, and rhyme, the early northern poet filtered out dross and stitched together a poetics of stark contrasts and forebodings. Poets and lovers of poetry of all periods and places will find much to enjoy here. So will students in Old English and Old Norse courses.
Download or read book The Saints in Old Norse and early Modern Icelandic Poetry written by Kirsten Wolf and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2017-01-01 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Saints in Old Norse and Early Modern Icelandic Poetry is a complimentary volume to The Legends of the Saints in Old Norse-Icelandic Prose (UTP 2013). This volume focuses on Icelandic devotional poetry created during the early modern period.
Download or read book Writing Beyond Pen and Parchment written by Ricarda Wagner and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-10-21 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What can stories of magical engraved rings or prophetic inscriptions on walls tell us about how writing was perceived before print transformed the world? Writing beyond Pen and Parchment introduces readers to a Middle Ages where writing is not confined to manuscripts but is inscribed in the broader material world, in textiles and tombs, on weapons or human skin. Drawing on the work done at the Collaborative Research Centre “Material Text Cultures,” (SFB 933) this volume presents a comparative overview of how and where text-bearing artefacts appear in medieval German, Old Norse, British, French, Italian and Iberian literary traditions, and also traces the paths inscribed objects chart across multiple linguistic and cultural traditions. The volume’s focus on the raw materials and practices that shaped artefacts both mundane or fantastical in medieval narratives offers a fresh perspective on the medieval world that takes seriously the vibrancy of matter as a vital aspect of textual culture often overlooked.
Download or read book Play Among Books written by Miro Roman and published by Birkhäuser. This book was released on 2021-12-06 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does coding change the way we think about architecture? This question opens up an important research perspective. In this book, Miro Roman and his AI Alice_ch3n81 develop a playful scenario in which they propose coding as the new literacy of information. They convey knowledge in the form of a project model that links the fields of architecture and information through two interwoven narrative strands in an “infinite flow” of real books. Focusing on the intersection of information technology and architectural formulation, the authors create an evolving intellectual reflection on digital architecture and computer science.
Download or read book Adam of Bremen s Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum written by Grzegorz Bartusik and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-07-26 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adam of Bremen’s Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum is one of the most important accounts documenting the history, geography and ethnology of Northern and Central-Eastern Europe in the period between the ninth and eleventh centuries. Its author, a canon of the archdiocese of Hamburg-Bremen, remains an almost anonymous figure but his text is an essential source for the study of the early medieval Baltic. However, despite its undisputed status, past scholarship has tended to treat Adam of Bremen’s account as, on the one hand, an historically accurate document, or, alternatively, a literary artefact containing few, if any, reliable historical facts. The studies collected in this volume investigate the origins and context of the Gesta and will enable researchers to better understand and evaluate the historical veracity of the text.
Download or read book Metaphor Riddles and the Origin of Language written by Marcel Danesi and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-10-17 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book contributes to the debate surrounding the origin of language by demonstrating that riddles and myths can be examined as evidence of the emergence of conceptual metaphors, a prerequisite for the development of a complete language.
Download or read book An Anthropology of Puzzles written by Marcel Danesi and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2018-12-13 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Anthropology of Puzzles argues that the human brain is a "puzzling organ" which allows humans to literally solve their own problems of existence through puzzle format. Noting the presence of puzzles everywhere in everyday life, Marcel Danesi looks at puzzles in society since the dawn of history, showing how their presence has guided large sections of human history, from discoveries in mathematics to disquisitions in philosophy. Danesi examines the cognitive processes that are involved in puzzle making and solving, and connects them to the actual physical manifestations of classic puzzles. Building on a concept of puzzles as based on Jungian archetypes, such as the river crossing image, the path metaphor, and the journey, Danesi suggests this could be one way to understand the public fascination with puzzles. As well as drawing on underlying mental archetypes, the act of solving puzzles also provides an outlet to move beyond biological evolution, and Danesi shows that puzzles could be the product of the same basic neural mechanism that produces language and culture. Finally, Danesi explores how understanding puzzles can be a new way of understanding our human culture.
Download or read book Saints and Their Legacies in Medieval Iceland written by Stephen Pelle and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2021 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of hagiographical traditions and their impact.
Download or read book Nordic Elites in Transformation c 1050 1250 Volume III written by Wojtek Jezierski and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the practical and symbolic resources of legitimacy which the elites of medieval Scandinavia employed to establish, justify, and reproduce their social and political standing between the end of the Viking Age and the rise of kingdoms in the thirteenth century. Geographically the chapters cover the Scandinavian realms and Free State Iceland. Thematically the authors cover a wide palette of cultural practices and historical sources: hagiography, historiography, spaces and palaces, literature, and international connections, which rulers, magnates or ecclesiastics used to compete for status and to reserve haloing glory for themselves. The volume is divided in three sections. The first looks at the sacral, legal, and acclamatory means through which privilege was conferred onto kings and ruling families. Section Two explores the spaces such as aristocratic halls, palaces, churches in which the social elevation of elites took place. Section Three explores the traditional and novel means of domestic distinction and international cultural capital which different orders of elites – knights, powerful clerics, ruling families etc. – wrought to assure their dominance and set themselves apart vis-à-vis their peers and subjects. A concluding chapter discusses how the use of symbolic capital in the North compared to wider European contexts.
Download or read book A Companion to Job in the Middle Ages written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-11-14 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to Job in the Middle Ages provides a thorough introduction to the wide range of interpretations of Job produced in the medieval Christian West, from those in exegetical and theological works to those in poetry and art.
Download or read book Ecclesiastical Knights written by Sam Zeno Conedera and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2015-05-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Warrior monks”—the misnomer for the Iberian military orders that emerged on the frontiers of Europe in the twelfth century—have long fascinated general readers and professional historians alike. Proposing “ecclesiastical knights” as a more accurate name and conceptual model—warriors animated by ideals and spiritual currents endorsed by the church hierarchy—author Sam Zeno Conedera presents a groundbreaking study of how these orders brought the seemingly incongruous combination of monastic devotion and the practice of warfare into a single way of life. Providing a detailed study of the military-religious vocation as it was lived out in the Orders of Santiago, Calatrava, and Alcantara in Leon-Castile during the first century, Ecclesiastical Knights provides a valuable window into medieval Iberia. Filling a gap in the historiography of the medieval military orders, Conedera defines, categorizes, and explains these orders, from their foundations until their spiritual decline in the early fourteenth century, arguing that that the best way to understand their spirituality is as a particular kind of consecrated knighthood. Because these Iberian military orders were belligerents in the Reconquest, Ecclesiastical Knights informs important discussions about the relations between Western Christianity and Islam in the Middle Ages. Conedera examines how the military orders fit into the religious landscape of medieval Europe through the prism of knighthood, and how their unique conceptual character informed the orders and spiritual self-perception. The religious observances of all three orders were remarkably alike, except that the Cistercian-affiliated orders were more demanding and their members could not marry. Santiago, Calatrava, and Alcantara shared the same essential mission and purpose: the defense and expansion of Christendom understood as an act of charity, expressed primarily through fighting and secondarily through the care of the sick and the ransoming of captives. Their prayers were simple and their penances were aimed at knightly vices and the preservation of military discipline. Above all, the orders valued obedience. They never drank from the deep wellsprings of monasticism, nor were they ever meant to. Offering an entirely fresh perspective on two difficult and closely related problems concerning the military orders—namely, definition and spirituality—author Sam Zeno Conedera illuminates the religious life of the orders, previously eclipsed by their military activities.
Download or read book King Alfonso VIII of Castile written by Miguel Gómez and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-02 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: King Alfonso VIII of Castile: Government, Family and War brings together a diverse group of scholars whose work concerns the reign of Alfonso VIII (1158–1215). This was a critical period in the history of the Iberian peninsula, when the conflict between the Christian north and the Moroccan empire of the Almohads was at its most intense, while the political divisions between the five Christian kingdoms reached their high-water mark. From his troubled ascension as a child to his victory at Las Navas de Tolosa near the end of his fifty-seven-year reign, Alfonso VIII and his kingdom were at the epicenter of many of the most dramatic events of the era. Contributors: Martin Alvira Cabrer, Janna Bianchini, Sam Zeno Conedera, S.J., Miguel Dolan Gómez, Carlos de Ayala Martínez, Kyle C. Lincoln, Joseph O’Callaghan, Teofi lo F. Ruiz, Miriam Shadis, Damian J. Smith, James J. Todesca
Download or read book Gods and Humans in Medieval Scandinavia written by Jonas Wellendorf and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-12 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study shows some of the ways in which medieval Scandinavians received and re-interpreted pre-Christian religion.
Download or read book The French of Outremer written by Laura K. Morreale and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2018-04-10 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The establishment of feudal principalities in the Levant in the wake of the First Crusade (1095-1099) saw the beginning of a centuries-long process of conquest and colonization of lands in the eastern Mediterranean by French-speaking Europeans. This book examines different aspects of the life and literary culture associated with this French-speaking society. It is the first study of the crusades to bring questions of language and culture so intimately into conversation. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the crusader settlements in the Levant, this book emphasizes hybridity and innovation, the movement of words and people across boundaries, seas and continents, and the negotiation of identity in a world tied partly to Europe but thoroughly embedded in the Mediterranean and Levantine context.
