Download or read book The Development of Flateyjarb k written by Elizabeth Ashman Rowe and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the history, origins, meanings, and criticism of the medieval Icelandic manuscript, named Flateyjarbók.
Download or read book Norse Mythology A to Z written by Facts On File, Incorporated and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alphabetically listed entries identify and explain the characters, events, important places, and other aspects of Norse mythology.
Download or read book Medieval Scandinavia written by Phillip Pulsiano and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 1993 with total page 838 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With full-page maps and supplementary photos, this encyclopedia covers every aspect of Scandinavia during the Middle Ages, including rulers and saints, overviews of the countries, religion, education, politics and law, culture and material life, history, literature, and art.
Download or read book The Paganesque and the Tale of V lsi written by PROFESSOR MERRILL. KAPLAN and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2024-10-22 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenges the concept that the notorious horse penis is key to understanding the Tale of Vǫlsi, via the concept of the "paganesque". A family of Norwegian pagans, stubbornly resisting the new Christian religion, worship a diabolically animated preserved horse penis, intoning verses as they pass it from hand to hand until King Olaf the Saint intervenes. This is the matter of the medieval Tale of Vǫlsi. Traditionally, it has been read as evidence of a pre-Christian fertility cult - or simply dismissed as an obscene trifle. This book takes a new approach by developing the concept of the "paganesque" - the air of a religious culture older than and inimical to Christianity. It shows how the Tale of Vǫlsi deploys a range of vernacular genres, from verbal dueling and mythological poetry to folk belief about milk-stealing witches and the reanimated dead, to create the flavor of paganism for a fourteenth-century Icelandic audience: an imagined paganism that has theological stakes as well as satirical bite. Throughout, the study challenges the notion that the horse penis is the key to understanding the narrative. Once the object is removed from the center of interpretation, the artistry and wit of the tale's "Paganesque" come fully into view.
Download or read book The Medieval Saga written by Carol J. Clover and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-15 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written in the thirteenth century, the Icelandic prose sagas, chronicling the lives of kings and commoners, give a dramatic account of the first century after the settlement of Iceland—the period from about 930 to 1050. To some extent these elaborate tales are written versions of traditional sagas passed down by word of mouth. How did they become the long and polished literary works that are still read today? The evolution of the written sagas is commonly regarded as an anomalous phenomenon, distinct from contemporary developments in European literature. In this groundbreaking study, Carol J. Clover challenges this view and relates the rise of imaginative prose in Iceland directly to the rise of imaginative prose on the Continent. Analyzing the narrative structure and composition of the sagas and comparing them with other medieval works, Clover shows that the Icelandic authors, using Continental models, owe the prose form of their writings, as well as some basic narrative strategies, to Latin historiography and to French romance.
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 474 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 The Early Cultures of North West Europe written by Hector Munro Chadwick and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-21 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This 1950 book, produced as a memorial for Cambridge historian H. M. Chadwick, contains contributions on aspects of early culture in Northwestern Europe.
Download or read book The Church in Fourteenth Century Iceland written by Erika Sigurdson and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-08-09 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Church in Fourteenth-Century Iceland, Erika Sigurdson provides a history of the fourteenth-century Icelandic Church with a focus on the the social status of elite clerics following the introduction of benefices to Iceland. In this period, the elite clergy developed a shared identity based in part on universal clerical values, but also on a shared sense of interdependence, personal networks and connections within the framework of the Church. The Church in Fourteenth-Century Iceland examines the development of this social group through an analysis of bishops’ sagas, annals, and documents. In the process, it chronicles major developments in the Icelandic Church after the reforms of the late thirteenth century, including its emphasis on property and land ownership, and the growth of ecclesiastical bureaucracy.
Download or read book The Saga of the J msvikings written by and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-10-08 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unique among the Icelandic sagas, part-history, part-fiction, the Saga of the Jomsvikings tells of a legendary band of vikings, originally Danish, who established an island fortress of the Baltic coast, launched and ultimately lost their heroic attack on the pagan ruler of Norway in the late tenth century. The saga’s account of their stringent warrior code, fatalistic adherence to their own reckless vows and declarations of extreme courage as they face execution articulates a remarkable account of what it meant to be a viking. This translation presents the longest and earliest text of the saga, never before published in English, with a full literary and historical introduction to this remarkable work.
Download or read book Old Norse Icelandic Studies written by Hans Bekker-Nielsen and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 1967-12-15 with total page 93 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An annotated bibliography of Old Norse-Icelandic studies for the years 1981-83, offering a quick guide to recent work.
Download or read book In Search of the Culprit written by Lukas Rösli and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-12-06 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite various poststructuralist rejections of the idea of a singular author-genius, the question of a textual archetype that can be assigned to a named author is still a common scholarly phantasm. The Romantic idea that an author created a text or even a work autonomously is transferred even to pre-modern literature today. This ignores the fact that the transmission of medieval and early modern literature creates variances that could not be justified by means of singular authorships. The present volume offers new theoretical approaches from English, German, and Scandinavian studies to provide a historically more adequate approach to the question of authorship in premodern literary cultures. Authorship is no longer equated with an extra-textual entity, but is instead considered a narratological, inner- and intertextual function that can be recognized in the retrospectively established beginnings of literature as well as in the medial transformation of texts during the early days of printing. The volume is aimed at interested scholars of all philologies, especially those dealing with the Middle Ages or Early Modern Period.
Download or read book Old Norse Myths Literature and Society written by Margaret Clunies Ross and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is a collection of thirteen essays by leading scholars from diverse fields. Most of the essays were presented in an earlier form at the 11th. International Saga Conference in Sydney in July 2000. It examines some of the most complex and perplexing questions that arise when modern scholars approach the rich but often puzzling evidence for belief in and use of myths in early Scandinavia. The essays illustrate the advantages of bringing approaches that use a range of methodologies, from literary studies to archeology, and from history to the history of religions, to bear upon the evidence that has survived.
Download or read book Origin Legends in Early Medieval Western Europe written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-07-25 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains work by scholars actively publishing on origin legends across early medieval western Europe, from the fall of Rome to the high Middle Ages. Its thematic structure creates dialogue between texts and regions traditionally studied in isolation.
Download or read book Between History and Myth written by Bruce Lincoln and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-09 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medieval accounts of how Norway was unified by its first king provide a lively, revealing, and wonderfully entertaining example of this process. Taking the story of how Harald Fairhair unified Norway in the ninth century as its central example, Bruce Lincoln illuminates the way a state's foundation story blurs the distinction between history and myth and how variant tellings of origin stories provide opportunities for dissidence and subversion as subtle - or not so subtle - modifications are introduced through details of character, incident, and plot structure.
Download or read book An Introduction to the Sagas of Icelanders written by Carl Phelpstead and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2020-06-17 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining an accessible approach with innovative scholarship, An Introduction to the Sagas of Icelanders provides up-to-date perspectives on a unique medieval literary genre that has fascinated the English-speaking world for more than two centuries. Carl Phelpstead draws on historical context, contemporary theory, and close reading to deepen our understanding of Icelandic saga narratives about the island’s early history. Phelpstead explores the origins and cultural setting of the genre, demonstrating the rich variety of oral and written source traditions that writers drew on to produce the sagas. He provides fresh, theoretically informed discussions of major themes such as national identity, gender and sexuality, and nature and the supernatural, relating the Old Norse-Icelandic texts to questions addressed by postcolonial studies, feminist and queer theory, and ecocriticism. He then presents readings of select individual sagas, pointing out how the genre’s various source traditions and thematic concerns interact. Including an overview of the history of English translations that shows how they have been stimulated and shaped by ideas about identity, and featuring a glossary of critical terms, this book is an essential resource for students of the literary form. A volume in the series New Perspectives on Medieval Literature: Authors and Traditions, edited by R. Barton Palmer and Tison Pugh
Download or read book Odin s Ways written by Annette Lassen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-24 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about the Old Norse god Odin. It includes references to all occurrences of Odin in the Old Norse/Icelandic texts, including Saxo’s Gesta Danorum, the eddic poems, Snorri’s Edda, and Ynglinga saga and analyses the high medieval reception and literary representations of Odin rather than the religious character of the god. This is the only existing study of Odin in all the Old Norse/Icelandic texts and applies a contextual method: the different guises of Odin are studied on the basis of the various textual contexts and on their background in the literary and Christian intellectual milieu of the time. Contrary to existing studies, this method is non-reductive in that it does not aim at providing a synthesis about Odin’s original nature on the basis of the differing textual uses of Odin in the Middle Ages. The book argues that the perceived complexity of Odin, often highlighted in research, is first and foremost a function of the complex textual material spanning a wide variety of genres each with its particular literary conventions and of the reception of Odin in early modern and modern mythological studies.
Download or read book Sagas of Imagination A Medieval Icelandic Reader written by Ben Waggoner and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2017-12-15 with total page 479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Norse men and women who sailed to Iceland brought stories with them-stories of their lives and their ancestors, passed down for centuries, going back in time to great Vikings, legendary heroes, and even the ancient gods and goddesses. A new wave of stories entered with Christianity-stories of exotic lands and beasts, of saints and holy men facing demons and monsters. A third wave of stories came to Iceland via Norway, whose king had commissioned translations of tales of chivalry-of the courtly love of gallant knights and beautiful ladies. And all of these blended together in Iceland, creating swashbuckling sagas unlike any other medieval literature. This book presents eleven sagas and six shorter texts tracing the growth of these sagas of adventure, from Norse legends of King Half and Asmund Champion's Bane, to the life of the Apostle Bartholomew, to tales of Parceval and King Arthur, to the sagas of heroes like Vilmund the Outsider and Yngvar the Far-Traveler and Samson the Fair.
